so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me and honestly i was not expecting much, figured i'd throw up my end fed and maybe work a dozen people if i was lucky. ended up with 47 contacts in about 3 hours which i think qualifies it right? you need 44 for a valid activation if i remember correctly.

anyway the whole thing was way more fun than i thought it would be. had a bunch of hunters calling me which i wasnt really prepared for, some of them wanted specific info about the reference number and i kept fumbling around trying to find it in my notes. i was running 25 watts into a linked dipole from my kx2 and signals were solid all afternoon, 40 meters was the money band for sure.

my main question is about logging — i used HAMRS in the field and then exported to ADIF but when i went to upload to the WWFF logbook i got some kind of error about the reference not being recognized. the reference i used was KFF-2847 which i pulled from the wwff.world site. anyone had this issue before? wondering if theres a step im missing or if i just fat fingered something in the log.

also is there a good spot to self-spot on wwff? i was using parksnpeaks but wasnt sure if thats the right tool for this or if wwff has its own spotting system

congrats on the first activation, 47 contacts is a solid first outing. the reference error in the logbook uploader is usually because the KFF prefix needs to be entered a specific way depending on which country log you're submitting to — if you're in the US you want to make sure you're submitting through the WWFF USA affiliate (wwff.us i think) rather than the global one, or at least thats been my experience. they have slightly different upload portals and it confused me for a while too.

for spotting, parksnpeaks works fine and a lot of WWFF operators use it. there's also the WWFF online logger that has a spot function built in. honestly just pick one and stick with it, hunters will find you either way as long as you're on a common watering hole frequency like 14.244 or 7.244. some people post to the facebook groups too which i know isnt everyones thing but it does pull in extra hunters.

yeah the logbook thing tripped me up on my second activation, i think i had the wrong format for the date or something stupid like that. worth double checking your ADIF fields, HAMRS sometimes exports the date in a format that doesnt play nice with certain upload tools. i just manually fix it in a text editor which sounds painful but its only like one line to change.

also 47 contacts is great, i think my first one i barely scraped 44 and was sitting there refreshing the pile up hoping someone else would call lol. the hunters are really enthusiastic once they hear you're on a new reference, i had a guy call me like 6 times because he thought his signal wasnt getting through even though i'd already logged him