so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 mins from my house. been wanting to do this for months and just kept putting it off. anyway i set up my kx2 with a random wire antenna strung between two trees and got on 40m around 10am local time. took me maybe 15 minutes to get my first contact and then it kind of snowballed from there, ended up with 23 qso's before i had to pack up.

couple things i wasnt sure about though. when i was logging do i need to write down the park reference for every single contact or just once for the whole activation? i was using a paper log out there and then planned to transfer to adif later. also i noticed some people calling themselves hunters, is there a seperate thing they do or do they just call stations like me who are activating?

honestly the whole thing was way more fun than just sitting in the shack. something about being out there with a wire in a tree and making contacts on battery power that just feels different. probably going to do another one next month if the weather holds.

congrats on the first one, 23 qso's is a solid activation especially if you were new to it. to answer your question about the park reference, you only need one per log upload -- the park reference goes in the header basically when you submit through the POTA website, you dont have to put it on every line. when you convert your paper log to adif just make sure your callsign, date, time, frequency and mode are all there for each contact and the upload tool handles the rest.

hunters are just the other side of the equation. they sit home or wherever and look for activators on the spots page at pota.app and then call you. that's why after your first few contacts you probably started getting a pileup -- someone spotted you and all the hunters came running. they get credit for hunting the park reference you're at, so every unique park they hunt counts toward their totals. some people are really into chasing rare or hard to activate parks.

definitely keep going, it gets addictive fast. i've done over 200 activations at this point and i still get that same feeling setting up a wire in the woods.

yeah the spotting thing is huge, i was so confused my first time too. i spotted myself on pota.app once i had signal and literally within two minutes i had people calling me. felt kind of surreal honestly. one tip -- if you can get on 20m even briefly it really opens up the hunter pool since 40m can be kind of regional depending on time of day. i run both and usually get a good mix.