so i finally did my first proper WWFF activation last weekend, been meaning to do one for a while but kept putting it off because it seemed complicated with all the logging and spotting stuff. ended up going out to a state forest reference near me, KFF-something, i have the number written down somewhere.

honestly it was way more fun than i expected. i brought my KX2 and a random wire up in a tree, ran about 5 watts and had zero trouble getting the 44 contacts needed for a valid activation. people actually hunt these things which i did not realize, had a small pileup going at one point which was pretty surreal sitting on a rock in the middle of the woods.

the spotting thing is pretty easy once you figure out the wwff.net portal, you can self-spot from your phone if you have signal which i did. i also saw some people use sotamat or something similar but i didnt mess with that this time.

one thing i wasnt sure about was whether i needed to log the park reference for each contact or just note it in my own log. turns out you log the reference you're activating and submit the log afterward. the hunters log it on their end too. someone correct me if im wrong on any of this, im still learning the rules.

anyway if anyone is on the fence about trying a WWFF activation i would say just go do it. pick a reference near you, check the wwff.net database, and go spend a morning outside with a radio. pretty hard to beat that.

yeah the 44 contacts thing trips people up at first but honestly for most references if you get spotted you'll have a pileup within minutes. i've done maybe 30 or 40 activations now and i think i only struggled to reach 44 once and that was a really remote spot with terrible conditions.

on the logging question you got it right, you just need your own reference in the log for each contact, the hunters handle their side. when you submit to wwff.net it processes everything. just make sure your times are in UTC and the callsigns are clean, i had one submission kick back because i had some messy entries early on.

also worth knowing there are different award levels based on how many unique references you activate and how many you hunt, so there's a lot to keep chasing if you get hooked on it. which you probably will.

this is really cool to read, i had no idea WWFF was even a thing until like two months ago. i'm still studying for my general so i can't do HF yet but i've been looking into it and bookmarking stuff for when i upgrade. does it work on VHF at all or is it mostly an HF thing? i see a lot of people talking about 40m and 20m for these activations but wasnt sure if there were hunters on VHF too