James Rodriguez

im in the same boat you are actually, been putting off the Extra for like a year lol. from what i understand a chunk of the question pool is stuff you'll probably never use on the air but its still kinda cool to actually understand how a superheterodyne receiver works or why certain feedline lengths matter. or at least thats what people tell me. i keep meaning to just register for an exam session and force myself to do it

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF stuff, some weak signal VHF on 2m and 70cm, but ive always had this thing in the back of my head about moonbounce. like the whole concept of bouncing a signal off the moon and having someone on the other side of the planet pick it up is just insane to me still. anyway i finally started looking into what it would actually take to get on EME and honestly the equipment requirements are kind of all over the place depending on who you ask. from what i understand you basically need a big dish or yagi array, a low noise preamp right at the feed, and a decent amount of power. but how much is enough? ive been reading about guys running single yagi setups on 2m with like 400w and making JT65 contacts and then other people saying you need a 10 meter dish to do anything useful. im on a suburban lot so a giant dish is probably out but i have room for maybe a 4 yagi array if i get creative with the neighbors. also the moon tracking thing seems complicated - do most people build their own az/el rotators or buy something. the commercial stuff looks expensive. and whats the deal with the EME2 software everyone keeps mentioning, is that still what people use or has something replaced it

congrats on the first one, the first activation is always a bit of a head scratcher with all the admin stuff afterward. the 44 QSO thing — yeah thats the threshold for a full activation credit, so you're good with 47. some references are easier than others for pileups, depends on how many hunters are actively looking that day. for the log upload, the main thing that trips people up is making sure the WWFF reference is in the right field in your ADIF, i think it goes in the MY_SIG and MY_SIG_INFO fields, something like MY_SIG = WWFF and MY_SIG_INFO = KFF-XXXX. if you exported from something like Log4OM or HAMRS it might already handle that but manual ADIF edits are sometimes needed. the WWFF Logsearch site has a validator that'll tell you what's missing before you actually submit which is handy. for spotting, the WWFF Activators group on Facebook is active but honestly POTA spots get more eyeballs in the US since theres so much overlap between hunters doing both programs. some people post to both. parksnpeaks.net also has a map a lot of the european hunters watch. selfspotting is totally normal and expected, dont feel weird about it