Jennifer Liu

So ive been reading about WWFF for a few weeks now and it looks really fun, theres a state park about 20 minutes from my house that has a KFF reference and im thinking of doing my first activation next weekend. But honestly the more i read the more confused I get about the actual mechanics of it.
Like i understand you need 44 QSOs to get a full activation counted, and you have to be physically inside the boundary of the park or nature reference area, but beyond that im kind of fuzzy. Do i need to upload my log anywhere specific? Is WWFF separate from POTA or do they share the same log system? I know some parks are in both programs which makes it extra confusing.
Also just practically speaking - im running an ic-705 and a random wire up in a tree, that should be fine right? Never done any kind of portable operation before so im a bit nervous about the whole thing. Any tips from people whove done activations before would be really helpful, even just like what to expect on the air.

yeah same thing tripped me up when i was going for my first DXCC. i had like 120 confirmed on paper and then realized half of them werent uploaded anywhere and i had to actually mail in a whole stack of cards to the checkpoint. kind of a pain honestly. now i just check LoTW first before i even bother with a card request, saves a lot of time and postage money adds up fast when youre sending stuff overseas.
one thing i'll add — if you're close to hitting a threshold like 100 or 200 for an endorsement, sometimes its worth double checking your LoTW account to see whats actually matched vs just uploaded. i thought i had something confirmed once and it turned out the other guy's log had a slightly different time and it didnt match. easy fix but you gotta catch it.

yeah what he said about the speaker mic is real, that was a thing i learned the hard way at a bike race a few years back lol. also bring snacks and water for yourself, i always forget and end up standing there for 3 hours running on fumes. the served agency folks sometimes have food but dont count on it
and just a heads up, sometimes these events run long or the schedule shifts and you end up staying an extra hour or so. not saying it will happen but worth having a plan for

honest answer: the first contest i tried SO2R i was probably 15% worse than just running S&P on one radio because i kept fumbling the footswitch timing and missing exchanges on both radios at once. it took me maybe 3 contests before it started feeling natural and probably a full year before i was actually extracting rate from it consistently.
the filtering thing is real and you cant really cut corners on it. i tried running with just the internal ATU doing some of the work and a single bandpass filter and yeah it was a mess. eventually got a full set of 6m-10m ICE filters and did the proper station ground buss and it cleaned up almost completely. the antenna isolation actually matters a lot too — if your two antennas are physically close and on adjacent bands you're going to fight intermod no matter what you do in the shack.
for sweepstakes specifically the SO2R advantage is really about using the second radio to find a run frequency on the next band while you're still running on the first one. the mult hunting angle is a little less dramatic in SS since everybody works everybody but the band transition timing gets way smoother once you have that second radio listening ahead for you. worth doing IMO but set your expectations for the learning curve.

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about two years now doing mostly wideband monitoring, some ATIS decoding, poking around on the aircraft bands, occasional HF with the direct sampling hack. its been fine honestly, like way better than i expected for a $30 piece of hardware. but ive been eyeing the SDRplay RSP1B for a while and cant decide if its actually worth the jump or if im just GASing.
the thing that gets me is the noise floor on the RTL below like 50 MHz is pretty rough even with the bias tee and a decent preamp inline. and the direct sampling mode works but its not exactly clean, you can tell its a workaround. the RSP1B is what, 12 bit ADC vs the 8 bit on the RTL so that should make a real difference on dynamic range right? at least thats what i keep reading.
anybody actually made this switch and noticed a real improvement in day to day use? im running SDR++ mostly now because SDRsharp got annoying with the plugin stuff and SDR++ just works. does the RSP1B play nice with it or do you have to fight drivers

I've used both extensively. The TNC4's high-quality demodulator is based on javAX25 and requires modern processing power to operate, but it's very reliable. Direwolf actually decodes slightly better in marginal conditions, but the TNC4 wins on portability and power consumption.

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about two years now doing mostly wideband monitoring, some ATIS decoding, poking around on the aircraft bands, occasional HF with the direct sampling hack. its been fine honestly, like way better than i expected for a $30 piece of hardware. but ive been eyeing the SDRplay RSP1B for a while and cant decide if its actually worth the jump or if im just GASing.
the thing that gets me is the noise floor on the RTL below like 50 MHz is pretty rough even with the bias tee and a decent preamp inline. and the direct sampling mode works but its not exactly clean, you can tell its a workaround. the RSP1B is what, 12 bit ADC vs the 8 bit on the RTL so that should make a real difference on dynamic range right? at least thats what i keep reading.
anybody actually made this switch and noticed a real improvement in day to day use? im running SDR++ mostly now because SDRsharp got annoying with the plugin stuff and SDR++ just works. does the RSP1B play nice with it or do you have to fight drivers

hey welcome to the hobby, dont stress about the tone thing it confuses everybody at first. the 100.0 you see on repeaterbook is almost certainly the tone you need to transmit to access the repeater — so in your radio that goes in as the encode tone, sometimes called CTCSS TX tone depending on the radio. you dont usually need to worry about the decode side unless you want to squelch out noise when the repeater isnt active.
on the kerchunking thing, yeah its generally considered a bit rude to just key up and drop carrier over and over without identifying yourself, especially on a busy repeater. if youre testing just say your callsign and something like "testing" and most people are totally fine with that. nobody's gonna yell at you for it but it is one of those unwritten etiquette things that old timers notice. once you get the tone sorted you should be good to go, what radio are you using exactly?

yeah the voltage thing is pretty real with those kits. most of the simple single-band designs are running a class E or class C PA stage and the output drops pretty noticeably below about 10.5v in my experience. not a cliff edge exactly but you'll probably lose a watt or more by the time the battery sags to 9v under load. i'd keep an eye on voltage while transmitting, not just at rest, because lipo packs can dip more than you expect when you're drawing current for a key-down.
on the antenna question — end fed halfwaves are genuinely good for portable work, its not just youtube hype. the main practical thing is you only need one support point if you're doing a sloper which makes it way easier to throw up in the field. a random wire works fine too but you'll want a decent ATU and a good counterpoise situation or you end up with rf on your coax braid and all kinds of weirdness. for QRP id honestly say the antenna matters more than it does with higher power stuff because you dont have the extra watts to compensate for a mediocre setup.

cant speak to the prop pitch specifically but i built a raspberry pi based logger and rig control box a while back and ran into the same noise issues trying to read an analog input — ended up just bit-banging to an ADS1115 over i2c which is a 16 bit ADC and that thing is rock solid even in the shack. obviously thats an i2c device so on the arduino side you can use the same chip no problem, its like 2 bucks on aliexpress. might be overkill for a rotator but once you stop fighting the noise problem you can actually focus on the fun part of the project

Z-Match tuners became very popular in the QRP community thanks to articles by W6JJZ and kits like the Emtech ZM-2 and NorCal BLT. For your POTA work, I'd go Z-match - the efficiency gain is worth the slightly trickier tuning.

Just finished a systematic comparison between my ground-mounted quarter-wave vertical with 6 radials and a horizontal 20m dipole at 5m height. Signal reports on TX consistently showed 2 S points down on the vertical compared to the horizontal dipole, with similar receive performance. The vertical only showed advantage when both antennas were at identical maximum heights - noise issues really matter for verticals or the lower angle benefits get obliterated by poor SNR. Using RG58 feedline for the vertical vs 90-ohm balanced line for the dipole, both with comparable losses. Anyone else done similar comparisons with different height configurations?