Is chasing that first contact from a mountaintop the best way to get hooked, or does it set bad habits?

I went the other way around, shack first. Spent my first year as a Tech on a 2m mobile in the car and a cheap mag-mount on the roof, wondering why half my local repeaters were scratchy. Turned out the antenna was sitting at bumper height behind a big steel roof. Moving it up to a proper mount made more difference than any radio upgrade ever has.

So no, I don't think summit operating spoiled you. It taught you the single most important lesson in this hobby, wich is that height beats horsepower. Every watt you add at home is fighting physics that a 5-watt handheld on a mountaintop gets for free. That said, the valley silence is a good teacher too. When I finally wanted reliable coverage from my basement shack, I learned about feedline loss, antenna pattern, and why my fiberglass vertical in the side yard heard everything on one bearing and nothing on the other. None of that clicked til I had a problem to solve. As for the why, mine settled after a few seasons. I chase the contacts, my wife hikes for the view, and we both pretend the other reason is the real one. Keep doing both and you'll figure out your own split soon enought.

I did the reverse of the mountain thing, sort of. Got my ticket and spent the first summer frustrated because my handheld would barely reach the machine on the ridge behind my house, even sitting in the yard with a clear view of the sky. I kept thinking I was doing something wrong, that I hadn't learned enough yet. Then a guy on the local net pointed out I was expecting a 5 watt radio with a stubby antenna to punch through 30 miles of terrain, and that no amount of knowledge fixes that. It's physics, not skill.

That grin on the hike down never really goes away, fair warning. I got hooked the same way a few years back and now I plan hikes around which ridge has line of sight to what. One thing that helped me in the valleys: I replaced the stock rubber duck with a longer whip and made a point of holding the radio up and away from my body instead of talking into my chest. Cheap fix, huge difference on the flat stuff. Do you carry a paper log out there or just remember who you talked to? I started writing them down and it turned into the best part of the whole thing.

I'm barely a month past my exam so this thread is kind of intimidating in a good way. My situation is flatter than flat, I live where the tallest thing in town is a grain elevator, so I've been trying to figure out if portable operating is even an option for me. Was thinking maybe a park bench with a roll-up wire in a tree counts as my version of this? Also low key worried I'll get spoiled the same way, one good afternoon outside and then never want to sit at a desk radio again. Is that a real thing or am I overthinking it?

Reading this makes me want to try the high spot thing. My only contacts so far happened by accident, I was walking the dog on a small hill behind the school and someone answered me plain as day, but the same radio at my kitchen table does nothing. So aparently my whole neighborhood is a dead zone and one grassy slope is my new shack. Question though, does cold or wind up on a summit mess with the little rubber antenna at all, or does the radio not care?