so i finally did my first POTA activation last weekend at a state park about 45 mins from home. brought my KX2 and a random wire up in a tree, figured id be done in 20 minutes with 10 contacts no problem. yeah that didnt happen. spent the first half hour just trying to get the antenna tuned up because i forgot the counterpoise at home sitting on my workbench. rookie mistake. ended up using the car as a ground plane kind of sorta and it worked okay i guess but SWR was still pretty ugly on 40m. eventually scraped together 11 contacts so i validated but man it was way harder than i expected. i think i need to practice setting up at home first before i go back out. anyone else have a disaster first activation story or is it just me

haha yeah my first activation i drove an hour to the park and realized my paddle wasnt plugged in all the way and kept getting double dits on every press. spent like 20 minutes thinking my KX3 was broken before i figured it out. its always something. the counterpoise thing is real though, i literally zip tie mine to the feedline now so i cant forget it. once you do a few of these the setup gets way faster, now i can be on air in under 10 minutes if the trees cooperate

11 contacts still counts man, activation is an activation. i had one where i only got like 12 and the last two were basically me begging on the frequency lol. also 40m can be rough depending on time of day, have you tried 20m for POTA? usually way more hunters on there during the day at least in my experience