Emily Thomas74

this is making me want to actually finish my ubitx that's been sitting on the bench for like 8 months. life keeps getting in the way but reading stuff like this reminds me why i got into this hobby. good on you for actually taking it outside, i feel like a lot of people build things and they never leave the shack.

i just did this like two months ago lol, upgraded from tech after being one for almost a year. honestly i studied for maybe 10 days just using hamstudy and passed fine. the questions about like, impedance matching and stuff i just kind of memorized the answers for and figured id learn what it actually means later once i had a radio.
the HF thing is kind of overwhelming at first tho ngl, i got a used IC-7300 off QRZ classifieds and spent the first week just figuring out the menus. but making my first 20m contact was pretty cool, worked a station in florida from ohio which felt like nothing but still

yeah what he said about the NE602 dynamic range is real, i gave up on using it as the first RF stage on anything near a broadcast band and just use it downstream after a proper filter and sometimes a JFET preamp if the band is dead. sounds backwards but the 602 as a product detector after a proper front end works way better in my experience.
also curious what your VFO looks like physically — is it in a separate enclosure from the rest of the board or just sitting on the same ugly construction ground plane? ive found that even just a small piece of PCB material bent into a wall between the oscillator section and everything else helps a lot more than you'd think.

Congrats on the first activation, 60 contacts on your first time out is really solid especially if you were self-spotting without much of a following yet. To answer your log question -- yes you upload directly to the WWFF website, woodsnwater.net is where most of the global program is coordinated but if you're in the US the KFF references are managed through the WWFF-USA program and they have their own upload portal. The format is just a standard ADIF file same as you'd export from any logging software. Make sure your reference number is in there correctly and it usually processes pretty quickly.
As for virgin references, yeah it's kind of bragging rights but there is a first activator award and some hunters specifically look for unactivated references so you do tend to get a small pile when you're the first one there. Worth checking the database before you go out honestly, you might have one closer to home than you think that nobody has hit yet. And yeah the hunters logging contacts with you are working toward their own awards on the flora fauna side, different tiers based on how many unique references they've worked. Pretty fun system overall.

oh man dont feel bad at all, seriously everyone does something like that their first few times on a net. I remember my first check in i gave my call sign and then just went completely silent and the net control had to prompt me twice. its a little nerve wracking when you know other people are listening.
traffic in the net sense usually means formal radiogram traffic — like messages following the NTS format that need to be passed to someone. most casual local nets you can just say "no traffic" or sometimes they'll ask if you have any comments or announcements and thats where you can say hey im new or whatever. but honestly every net runs a little differently so after a few weeks of listening you kind of pick up on how that specific one flows. the fact that you checked in at all is the main thing, nobody expects perfection from a first timer.