W5RJD Summit on the Air (SOTA) Activations

I haven't bought any portable radio gear yet, and I've never activated a summit before, so I figured for my first attempt I would pick something easy and borrow some gear.  I look out my back yard and can see Mount Umanhum, a peak nearly 4000 feet up overlooking Almaden Valley.  I have been up there only once in my life during a VIP tour before they cleaned up and developed the peak.  Since then, it's been turned into a public viewing area and you can almost drive all the way.  There's just about 150 stairs from the parking lot to the summit. For radio gear, I turned to my friend Ray, N6DZK, who had an Elecraft KX3 and an AX1 antenna.  I've been looking at the KX2 as the best option for this - and I was very skeptical that the small AX1 would do any kind of a decent job.  Ray had never used the antenna before and was anxious to try it out, so we set the date. I started learning about how alerts and spots work, what the rules were, and downloaded things like...

Covid-19.  It's awful being cooped up and not being able to hang out with friends.  But one nice outcome of the pandemic is I've had lots of time to resurrect an old hobby, Ham Radio.  I've owned my house since 1995 and never really took the time to put HF antennas on the roof until now.  Wow things have changed. So I stumbled across a new part of the hobby recently, called SOTA or Summit on the Air.  This is where a ham operator goes to the top of a summit of a mountain (in some states they might be called "hills") and "activates" the peak by making contacts with a portable radio setup.  Other radio operators, called "chasers", sit in the comfort of their home and try to make contact with you.  Then, activators of other peaks throughout the world try to communicate with you in a "Summit to Summit" conversation. I used to love to hike (I say "used to" because I haven't done any for quite some time), and I love ham radio,...