so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me, KFF-something, i had to look it up on the wwff.us site and register beforehand which took me a bit to figure out but wasnt too bad once i read through it. set up my little linked dipole between two trees and ran about 40 watts on 40m mostly, got 44 QSOs in about 2.5 hours which i was pretty happy with for a first time out

my question is about the logging side of things — do i need to submit the log to both the WWFF database AND to adif.wwff.us or whatever it is, or is it just one place? i uploaded to LOTW already out of habit but i know thats separate. also i spotted myself on the POTA app by mistake lol, habit again, had to go find the wwff spotter. someone still came back to me who musta seen it on pota so whatever it worked out

also wondering if anyone has tips for finding good references that havent been activated much, im looking at some of the less popular state game lands around me and a few nature preserves but im not sure how to filter for ones with low activation counts on the directory

congrats on the first one, 44 QSOs is a solid debut especially on 40m in the afternoon. for the log submission you just upload once to the WWFF logbook of the world basically — go to wwff.us and there should be a log submission link in your account area, it takes an adif file. that feeds into the main database and hunters who are confirmed in that log get their credits automatically. you dont need to do anything separate beyond that, LOTW is just a bonus for people who want it there too.

for finding lightly activated refs, honestly just browse the directory and sort or filter by activation count, references with zero or one activation are usually shown differently. theres also a telegram group and a facebook group where people post activation plans and sometimes you can coordinate or find out which refs nearby havent been touched in years. some of those old state game lands are sitting there with zero activations and its genuinely fun to be the first one in the log for a place

yeah the pota/wwff crossover confusion is real, i do both and i mix up the spotters constantly. some refs are actually in both databases which makes it even more confusing but double counting the QSOs is fine as long as you log them right for each program. glad it worked out anyway, sometiems a pota hunter will work you even on a wwff spot if the bands are good haha