so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me, been meaning to do one for like a year and a half and just kept putting it off. took my KX2 and a end-fed halfwave strung up between some trees, ran about 5 watts and honestly it was way better than i expected. got 44 contacts in about 2.5 hours which i know isnt huge but for my first time out i was pretty happy with it.

what i didnt realize going in was how many hunters there are listening for activations. like i spotted myself on the WWFF net and within maybe 3 minutes the calls started piling in. it felt nothing like just calling CQ randomly on a normal day. i was running contacts faster than i could write them down for a bit there, had to slow people down a couple times.

anyway if anyones been on the fence about doing one i'd say just do it. the logging afterward on the wwff.to site was a little confusing at first but i figured it out. curious if anyone has tips for picking references that are good for activating vs ones that might be more trouble than theyre worth antenna-wise

congrats on the first one, it kind of gets addictive from there fair warning lol. the pile-ups are real, i remember being surprised the first time too. for picking references i usually look at satellite imagery first before committing to anything, you want to know if theres actually room to get a decent antenna up and whether its going to be a nightmare hike just to get to a usable spot. some of the smaller nature preserves around here are technically valid references but the tree coverage is so thick youre fighting everything just to get 20 feet of wire in the air.

also worth checking if the reference has been activated recently or at all, the hunters really do get excited about rare or unactivated references, you'll get way more calls. 44 contacts first time out on 5 watts QRP is solid, dont let anyone tell you otherwise.

nice one. i did my first activation maybe 6 months ago and had a similar experience, the spotting makes such a difference. one thing i wish someone had told me beforehand was to have your reference number ready to say in your callout every single time cause people need it to log the contact for their hunter awards. i kept forgetting to say it early on and had people asking me to repeat it constantly which slowed everything down a bit.