There are a lot of different types of SOTA operators out there. Some like to bring a lot of equipment, some like to bring very little. For most, it depends on the type of activation they’re doing, or perhaps what equipment they have. Personally, I like to do a little bit of everything, including lightweight minimal equipment.
I’ve conversed with Fred Maas, KT5X, a number of times on some of the incredible things he’s doing to minimize his SOTA setup. He has a great trapped end-fed half-wave (EFHW) setup he’s come up with for an antenna. It uses two small traps to get multi-band function out of a single wire. Traps certainly aren’t a new thing in the ham world, but tiny traps like his are certainly an original concept. After getting info on how to build my own, I collaborated with him to design tiny PCBs for the traps. After feedback from him and a couple of revisions, we had a functional WS0TA trap PCB. And this thing is tiny!