Emily Moore

paper logging is totally fine if youre just dabbling, i did my first few contests that way. but yeah N1MM is worth learning even if it feels like a lot at first. also Field Day in June is maybe a friendlier starting point if you want something more relaxed and community oriented — lots of clubs set up and welcome newcomers to sit in. CQ WW is great but it is pretty intense compared to Field Day where theres usually someone around to explain whats happening

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think i might be going down a rabbit hole that doesnt need to be this deep. basically i have 4 antennas — a 40m dipole, a vertical for 20/15/10, a 6m yagi, and a random wire i use for 80m and sometimes 160. right now i just have a manual coax switch and i get up and physically turn it every time i want to change bands which honestly isnt the end of the world but its getting annoying.
so i started looking at using an arduino mega to drive some relay modules and read band data from my radio (i have an IC-7300 so it puts out CI-V). the idea is it would just automatically switch to whatever antenna makes sense for the band im on. ive got the CI-V parsing mostly working, it reads the frequency fine. the relay board i got off amazon is one of those 8 channel 5v ones and it seems to trigger fine from the arduino outputs.
my question is whether its worth putting a raspberry pi in there too so i can have like a web interface to see whats going on and manually override from my phone. or is that just way too much complexity for something that should be simple. ive built a few arduino projects before so im comfortable there but ive never really done much with pi. anyone done something like this, curious how far down the path you went before you said enough.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me, KFF-1234 or whatever the reference number is. had been meaning to do it for months and just never got around to it. anyway i threw the end-fed in a tree, ran 25 watts on the KX3 and just started calling CQ WWFF on 40m. honestly didnt expect much but i ended up with like 47 QSOs in about 2.5 hours which felt pretty good for a first attempt
couple things im not sure about though. first, the minimum is 44 QSOs to count as an activation right? i kept seeing different numbers mentioned on different sites and got confused. also do all those contacts need to be with different callsigns or can you work the same person on multiple bands and count them separately
also noticed there were a few people calling me that had WWFF in their exchange which i think means they were activating another reference at the same time? i logged them but wasnt sure how that works exactly. feels like theres a lot of little rules i dont fully understand yet but the actual operating part was really fun, way more enjoyable than i expected sitting in the woods with a thermos of coffee