so i finally did my first activation last weekend, took the KX2 and a end-fed halfwave up to a local W4 summit and managed to get my 4 contacts which i know isnt a lot but hey it counts right. the summit was only like 1200 feet so nothing crazy but still felt pretty good to be up there working stations on 20m.

anyway my main question is about the summit references - when i look on sotadata i can see some summits have a lot of activations and some have almost none. is there any reason to go for the lesser activated ones or does it matter at all for the award side of things? also i noticed some summits are marked as expired or something, does that mean you just cant use them anymore?

and one more thing, i had a couple chasers come back to me really fast, like within a minute of me posting the spot. do people just sit and watch the sotawatch page all day or is there an alert system i'm missing out on, cause they found me way quicker than i expected

congrats on the first activation, that feeling doesnt really go away honestly. regarding the summit references - expired ones yeah you cant count those anymore, the program updates the summit lists periodically and some get removed if the prominence recalculation changes. you'll see them greyed out on sotadata. totally normal, just stick to the valid ones and youll be fine.

for the rarer summits, they dont count for more points than the elevation band dictates but the chasers absolutely love unique ones. if a summit hasnt been activated in years you'll get a pile up faster than you expect. some chasers are specifically hunting uniques or trying to complete associations so they'll pounce on anything unusual.

and yeah the sotawatch alerts are huge, a lot of experienced chasers have the page open or use apps like SOTAmat or the SOTA Spotter app that pushes notifications straight to their phone. some guys are retired and literally have it running in the background all day, no shame in it lol. post your alert the night before and again 30 mins out and youll always have a crowd waiting

oh man the chasers are fast, i was shocked too when i did mine. theres a whole community of people who basically treat chasing like a full time hobby, they rack up thousands of chaser points. i use the sotawatch3 site and just leave it open on a tab, it refreshes automatically and makes a little sound when new spots come in. took me a while to figure that out actually.

also 4 contacts is totally valid, dont let anyone make you feel like you need to do more. i mean sure some people do massive pile ups but the point is just to get up there and operate portable, thats what i love about it anyway