so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest about 45 minutes from my house, KFF reference, been meaning to do this for months and just kept putting it off. ended up making 43 contacts in about 2 hours on 40m and a little bit on 20m before the band went weird on me. logged the minimum no problem which i was honestly a bit worried about going in.

my setup was just an end fed halfwave with a 9:1 unun thrown up in a tree, ran it off my KX2 at 10 watts, nothing fancy but it worked fine. had a few hunters call in from europe which was cool, didnt expect that at all on 40m.

anyway my questions are — do i need to do anything special to submit the log for WWFF vs just uploading to LoTW? i know there's the WWFF logbook thing but im not totally clear on whether that's separate from everything else or if it links somehow. also is spotting yourself on the WWFF cluster basically required or do hunters actually find activations without it? i spotted once at the start and then kind of forgot to re-spot and wonder if that cost me contacts.

overall it was a great time honestly, way more relaxed than POTA somehow even though its basically the same idea. probably has to do with fewer people doing it i guess

congrats on the first activation, 43 contacts is a solid outing especially if you werent sure what to expect. for the log submission you do want to upload to the WWFF logbook separately at wwff.co, its not automatic from LoTW or anything like that. you just export your ADIF and upload it through the system, pretty painless once you do it once. LoTW is still worth uploading to separately for general confirmed contacts but the WWFF credit comes from their own database.

and yes re-spotting absolutely matters, a lot of the hunters are watching the cluster and if you drop off they genuinely may not know youre still out there. i try to re-spot every 20-30 minutes or if i switch bands. some guys set a timer on their phone so they dont forget. the WWFF Spotter app on android makes it pretty quick to do from your phone without breaking your operating rhythm too much.

europe on 40m during a daytime activation here in north america usually means late afternoon their time, so youre probably catching the gray line or close to it, that path can be surprisingly good. anyway sounds like you caught the bug, welcome to the program

oh man i did the same thing on my second activation, forgot to re-spot and my rate just died, sat there for like 20 minutes calling CQ with nothing. checked the cluster and sure enough i had fallen off. lesson learned haha. the hunters really do depend on it more than i expected going in.