Well, my 1st activation (hopefully) will be this weekend and I’m already a lid (hi hi). I tried to post it on SOTA Goat and made two mistakes but finally got it on there correctly. I will be SSB on 14.325 (cw is not strong enough as of yet) and vhf 146.52 on W9/WI-10 a 6pt’er. 1500 UTC. Y’all have a good weekend.
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Best of luck with your first activation. As this is not till next Saturday, you may want to pack your SOTA bag and wander off to your local park etc. Then unpack you bag and setup your station. Write down on a piece of paper all the pieces of equipment you forgot to pack. On another piece write down everything you didn’t need that was in the bag.
Then you can ensure you do have what you need when you do the activation and you can reviewing everything on the “didn’t need” list with a view to deleting them in the future.
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Try not to mix them up and carry 2 lucky anvils to the top 
Good luck Gordie and enjoy
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Andy’s suggestion is right on (however sometimes you just need both of your lucky anvils 
). I am still changing and getting my favorite pieces and parts worked out, and being very deliberate and conscious about it helps a lot. Plus a practice run to the park can also help to know how you are going to manage all of the gear and how you will sit and operate with it all, etc. The concept is simple enough, but sometimes the actual implementation takes a few runs to get smoothed out.
Other tips/suggestions from my hard lessons learned:
-Make sure you spot yourself
-spend some time up there (if you can) a couple of hours or so is not too much
-If you are doing HF, still bring 2m
-sunscreen
-bring a small piece of plastic or tyvec or similar to sit on and put gear on. Keeps them clean and helps not lose small parts.
Have fun and good luck.
73 W2SA
-Steve