so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a local nature reserve about 45 minutes from home. ive been eyeing it for a while since it popped up on the WWFF directory as an unactivated reference here in my country. took my FT-891 and a linked dipole up a little hill inside the reserve and set up near the trailhead where i had decent clearance.

managed to get 47 QSOs over about 3 hours which i was pretty happy with for a first go, mostly 40m with a bit of 20m near the end when the band opened up nicely. spotted myself on the WWFF cluster and that definitely helped the pile get going. logged everything in HAMRS which i know some people have issues with but worked fine for me.

my question is about submitting the log afterwards. i uploaded to WWFF Logsearch but im not sure if i did it right because it says the reference is still showing as unactivated? i waited like 3 days. do i need to do something else or just wait longer? also wondering if theres anything special about the ADIF tags i should be checking before i upload.

congrats on the first activation, 47 QSOs is a solid start especially if you were mostly on 40m. the unactivated status thing can take a while to update, i think WWFF Logsearch processes things in batches and sometimes it takes up to a week or even a bit longer depending on who's doing the admin for your national program. did you get a confirmation email after the upload? if you did you're probably fine and just need to wait it out.

the one thing i'd double check is whether the WWFF reference number is correctly embedded in your ADIF file. HAMRS should handle it but i've heard of cases where the SIG and SIG_INFO fields dont get populated properly which means the system doesnt know which reference to credit the activation to. if you open the ADIF in a text editor you should see something like SIG:WWFF and SIG_INFO:your reference number on each QSO record. if those are missing that might be why its not showing up.

oh nice, which reserve was it if you dont mind me asking? im always looking for new unactivated refs in this region. and yeah the logsearch thing confused me too when i started, i think i messaged the national coordinator and they sorted it out pretty quick. might be worth dropping them an email just to double check everything came through ok on their end.