Congrats Steve - be careful SOTA is addictive! Although 2 meters can be effective on summits I believe you experienced the challenges of VHF from the hills! Nice job taking advantage of SOTAwatch ALERT and self-spotting - it almost sounds like cheating but you need to do whatever you can to make contacts after lugging equipment to the summit! This may be the motivation you need to get that General upgrade - 20 meters is the most useful band both SSB and CW and propagation is usually good unless there is a significant solar event. Typically I make the required contacts to activate the hill within 5 minutes of calling CQ then it becomes a challenge to see how many contacts you can make and how many different bands you can use!
Thanks! I am currently studying for my upgrade to General. Once that has happened, I’ll start considering SSB. This first summit is located in a fairly heavily-populated area, with line of site to a several cities; I’m inclined to think that, in this instance at least, it was more an issue of people not being on the air than VHF itself. I can definitely see how that would be a challenge deeper into the mountains, though.
I’ve set a some goals for myself to try and make at least a few contacts in some of the lesser-used bands, such as 6-meter and 70-cm FM.