so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state wildlife management area near me, KFF-something, i had to look up the reference number on the wwff.us site beforehand. been meaning to try this for ages after watching some youtube videos about it and figured it couldnt be much harder than SOTA except no hill climbing involved which my knees appreciate.

ran about 3 hours with my kx3 and a random wire up in a tree, got maybe 65 contacts which felt pretty good for a first time. mostly 40m with a bit of 20m thrown in when 40 got weird in the afternoon. spotted myself on the wwff spotter page and that definitely helped, contacts started coming in pretty steady after that.

couple things im not sure about though — do you have to submit your log to the wwff database separately or does it go through lotw somehow? i exported an adif from my logging app but wasnt totally sure where to send it. also is there a minimum contact requirement like SOTA has with the 4 contact thing? i saw 44 mentioned somewhere but wasnt sure if thats for a full activation credit or just for hunters to get a point or whatever. any help appreciated, planning to do another one next month if i can find a reference near my cabin up north

congrats on the first one, 65 contacts is a solid debut honestly. for the log submission you go to wwff.us and there's a log upload section in your account, it's separate from lotw but you can upload the same adif file to both. just make sure your adif has the right fields filled in, the wwff one needs the reference in there (WWFF-ref or whatever your logging software calls it) otherwise the upload gets weird.

the 44 contacts thing — yeah thats the threshold for a full activation to count toward your own awards. hunters just need to have a qso with you at the reference to get credit, doesnt matter how many you make. so your 65 definitely counts as a full activation. some refs have what they call a "5 star" thing where you need like 250 or 500 contacts but dont worry about that for now, most people never chase that anyway

nice work getting out there. i did my first one a couple years ago and totally blanked on the log submission too, ended up emailing someone on the wwff facebook group lol. one thing i'd add is when you do your northern cabin trip, double check the reference boundaries before you set up, i once drove out to what i thought was a protected area reference only to find my operating spot was like 50 feet outside the boundary on some private land. had to relocate everything which was annoying. the maps on the wwff site are decent but sometimes zooming in on google maps with the coordinates helps too