so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend, went out to a state forest near me (KFF reference, took me forever to figure out how to find the right one on the database) and honestly it was way more fun than i expected. set up my KX2 with a random wire thrown over a tree branch, ran about 5 watts and managed to get 44 QSOs in like 2.5 hours which i think qualifies it? i was running 40m mostly with a few on 20m when the band seemed better in the afternoon.

my questions are mostly about logging — do i need to submit to both WWFF and POTA or are they totally separate things? i know some parks overlap but this one doesnt seem to have a POTA reference so i think its just WWFF. also someone spotted me on the WWFF cluster and i started getting a lot of calls, is there a way to self-spot or do you just rely on other people to do that for you

also one guy called in and said something about a hunter award and i didnt really understand what he meant, do hunters need a certain number of QSOs with a specific reference or is it more like total references worked? he seemed excited so i felt bad that i didnt know more about it

congrats on the first activation, 44 QSOs on 5 watts with a random wire is a solid outing honestly. to answer your questions — yeah WWFF and POTA are completely separate programs, different logs, different submissions, different awards structures. if your forest doesnt have a POTA reference then you just submit to WWFF and youre done. the website has a log submission portal and they accept ADIF which makes life easier if your logging software exports that.

for spotting, yes you can absolutely self-spot on the WWFF spotter, theres a link on the main wwff.club site. a lot of activators do it right when they get set up, just put your callsign, the KFF reference, frequency and mode and youll start getting callers pretty quick. some people also use the POTA spotting app even for WWFF just to get more eyeballs but the dedicated WWFF spotter works fine.

the hunter award is for people chasing activations, they accumulate QSOs with different WWFF references and once they hit certain thresholds they can apply for awards. so that guy was probably excited because your reference was one he hadnt worked before, or maybe it pushed him over a threshold. its a nice part of the program honestly, you realize the contacts you make actually mean something to the other end too

oh nice, which state forest was it if you dont mind me asking? im always looking for new KFF references in the northeast that havent been activated much. some of those smaller state forests barely ever show up in the logs and hunters go nuts for a rare one