so i finally did my first park activation yesterday at a state park about 45 min from me, been meaning to do it for months and kept putting it off. anyway i get out there, set up my end fed with the 9:1 unun against a tree, fired up the kx2 and... nothing. couldnt figure out why i wasnt getting spotted on the map for like 20 minutes before i realized i had the wrong park number entered in my logging app. classic. ended up getting 12 qso's once i sorted it out which i hear is enough to count but it felt like a lot of trouble for not that many contacts. not sure if i was doing something wrong with spotting myself or if the band conditions were just garbage, 40m felt really noisy where i was set up near the parking lot. gonna try again next weekend maybe somewhere more remote

12 counts just fine, you only need 10 to validate so youre good. the spotting thing trips everybody up at first honestly. i use the POTA app to self spot and its pretty straightforward once you get used to it. 40m near parking lots is rough too, all that noise from car electronics and whatever else. try getting further from the lot if you can, even 50 feet makes a difference sometimes. keep at it, it gets way more fun once you nail down your setup routine

yeah band conditions were pretty rough yesterday i noticed that too, was chasing some activations from home and a lot of them were hard to pull out. dont sweat the first one, mine was a disaster, forgot my coax adapter and had to improvise with some wire i had in the car. you figure it out as you go