so I finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest about 40 minutes from my house. ive been on the air for about two years now and kept seeing people talk about it on the clusters and in the newsletter but never really looked into it properly until a buddy of mine dragged me along on one of his activations back in the spring.

we used his gear that time so last weekend was my first solo run. brought my FT-891 and an end fed strung up between two trees, ran about 25 watts because honestly the battery I brought wasnt huge and I wanted to play it safe. the reference I activated was KFF-2847 or something like that — its a national wildlife refuge and its absolutely gorgeous, there were herons everywhere while I was setting up which felt appropriate given the whole flora and fauna theme lol

anyway I needed 44 contacts to qualify the reference and I was a little nervous because I only had about 3 hours before I had to pack up. ended up with 67 contacts in about 2 hours on 40m mostly with a few on 20m when 40 got a bit noisy. people are SO enthusiastic about hunting WWFF references, like genuinely seemed happy to be in the log which made it really enjoyable. couple guys called back just to say thanks which you dont really get in a typical pileup

honestly wondering why I waited so long. anyone else here active in WWFF? im trying to figure out how the logging and uploading to the wwff.world site works, the documentation is a bit scattered and I got confused about whether I need to upload separately or if it goes through adif or what

congrats on the first one, it really is addictive isnt it. I've done probably 30 or so activations now across a mix of state parks, national forests and a couple wildlife refuges and every single one has been a good time even when the conditions werent cooperating.

for the logging side of things — what I do is just use HAMRS in the field on my tablet, its free and has WWFF built in so you can tag the reference right there in the log. then when you get home you export the ADIF and upload it directly to wwff.world under your account. you set up a free account on the site and there should be an upload portal, its pretty straightforward once you find it but yeah the documentation is a bit all over the place you're right about that. make sure you put the reference number in the correct field in your ADIF or the system might not credit it properly, learned that the hard way on my third activation and had to email the admin to get it fixed.

also if you want to alert chasers ahead of time before your next one, post on the WWFF Facebook group or use the POTA spotting network — a lot of WWFF hunters watch both. you'll get a much bigger pileup if people know you're coming.

that wildlife refuge sounds amazing, I keep meaning to check what WWFF references are near me but havent gotten around to it yet. I do POTA pretty regularly and from what I understand theres a fair amount of overlap with references? like some parks count for both programs at the same time which is nice

67 contacts in 2 hours on an end fed at 25w is solid work, nice job