Amanda Wright

so ive been a General for about three years now and honestly i get by just fine with what i have. but lately ive been reading about the Extra class and the question pool and some of that theory stuff is pretty intimidating. like the stuff about filter design and transmission line theory and all the math behind it. i did okay in school but that was a long time ago and i dont really remember a lot of the trig and stuff. my main question i guess is whether people actually use any of that knowledge in day to day operating or is it mostly just memorize the pool and forget it. also curious what the actual benefit is beyond the extra HF segments. i know you get the full privileges but realistically how often are those parts of the bands actually less crowded or whatever. is it worth a few months of study or am i overthinking this

Congrats on the first DX contact! That first time working another continent is something special. 20 meters has been wide open to South America lately - perfect time to be getting on HF.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a local nature reserve, KFF-2341 or something like that, i had to look it up on the wwff.us site to find the reference number. brought my KX2 and a linked dipole and just set up near the trailhead parking lot since the ranger was cool about it. managed about 34 QSOs in maybe 2 hours which i was pretty happy with for a first attempt, got spotted on pota.app even though WWFF has its own spotting system i think? im still confused about whether i should be logging on both systems or just one. like does a WWFF activation also count for POTA if the park is in both databases? i submitted my log to wwff but wasnt sure about the pota side of things. also one thing i didnt expect was how many chasers there are for this. like i put myself on the wwff spotter and within maybe 5 minutes i had a small pileup going which was kind of wild for just sitting in a parking lot with a wire antenna. anyway just wanted to share and ask about the dual logging thing cause i cant find a clear answer anywhere

so i finally got activated for real last weekend, not just a drill. there was flooding in the county over to the east and the EOC called up our ARES group to staff the shelter at the fairgrounds and provide backup comms for the health dept people who were coordinating medical transport. i've been doing the monthly nets and the simulated emergency tests for about two years now and honestly i kind of wondered sometimes if it was all just going through the motions you know? like would any of it actually matter when something real happened. turns out yes, it absolutely does. the ICS stuff they made us do the training on — i was kind of rolling my eyes at that at first — but when the EOC net control was running position reports and resource requests in that structured format it all just made sense. nobody was talking over each other, information was actually getting where it needed to go. i ran a simplex frequency between the shelter and a relay point for most of the afternoon because the terrain was blocking the repeater coverage. wasnt glamorous but it worked. anyway just wanted to share because if any of you are on the fence about joining your local ARES group or you've been showing up to the nets but not sure if its worth the time, it really is. at least that was my experience.