Linda Chen

yeah basically that simple for the most part, you see a spot, you go to the frequency, you listen first to make sure the spot is still valid and the dx is still there, then you call. the 20-30 minute old spots thing is annoying but pretty normal, some clusters are slow to update or the spot just sat there. DXwatch and the QRZ logbook spot feed both pull from the same underlying DX cluster network more or less, theres a few big ones like dxsummit and the ARRL cluster but they all share data with each other eventually. i mostly just use one browser tab with DXwatch and sort by band since i usually only have one rig and cant be everywhere at once anyway. one thing that helped me a lot early on was using the band filter so youre not getting flooded with 160m spots when youre running a 40m dipole or whatever. also if you havent already, look into setting up WSJT-X because the FT8 spotting kind of operates a little differently and integrates into pskreporter which is its own thing entirely. but for ssb and cw DX hunting, yeah DXwatch is solid, just learn to read how fresh the spots are.

eu2200i is what i bring too, thing is a workhorse. one thing i'd mention — if you're running the genny to charge the lithium AND power the radio at the same time, make sure whatever charge controller or DC-DC converter you're using doesn't cause any RFI. had a cheap converter a while back that put garbage all over 40m, took me like an hour to figure out what was causing the hash. switched to a better isolated unit and it went away. not saying yours will do that but worth checking on a test run before the actual exercise.

yeah the chasing thing is brutal i still do it sometimes and im up around 18wpm now lol. one thing i didnt see mentioned -- are you practicing at your target speed or a little above it? i was practicing at 5wpm trying to be comfortable and my buddy told me to set it to 8 or 9 and just get destroyed for a while. felt terrible but after like two weeks something shifted. also word recognition for common words like CQ DE RST 73 etc really helps, your brain starts to hear those as chunks instead of individual letters.

im pretty new too but one thing that helped me was the ARRL has a page with common abbreviations and Q codes that isnt as overwhelming as the full ITU list. also a lot of the shorthand you hear isnt even Q codes, like OM means old man which is just how guys refer to each other, and YL is young lady which they call any female operator regardless of age lol. TU means thank you, ur means your, and pse means please. those show up constantly especially in CW but people say them out loud on phone too sometimes. once you get the hang of it it kind of becomes automatic

same boat as you a few months ago lol. what helped me was just listening to a lot of different types of operation and you start to get a feel for it. contest ops almost never do full phonetics for every exchange, they're going way too fast. but when they give their own call they usually do. emcomm stuff and formal nets are almost always strict phonetics, like they'll actually correct you if you deviate. one thing nobody told me that i figured out eventually — if the other station asks you to repeat something or says 'say again your callsign' that's your cue to slow down and go full phonetics even if you weren't before. kind of obvious in hindsight but i used to just repeat myself the exact same way which... didnt help

so ive been a general for about two years now and people keep telling me to just go ahead and get my extra but honestly every time i look at the question pool i kind of freeze up. like the theory stuff especially. the stuff about filter design and transmission lines and all the impedance matching stuff, i took some electronics in school like 15 years ago so its not totally foreign but its not exactly fresh either. my main question i guess is whether the privileges you actually get are worth grinding through all that theory, because from what i can tell its mostly just some extra HF spectrum on the low ends of the bands? i do some DX chasing and i know the extra portions can be less crowded but i dunno. also is the theory on the exam actually useful or is it more like memorize this formula and forget it kind of stuff. just curious what people who have done it think

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me and honestly i was not expecting much, figured i'd throw up my end fed and maybe work a dozen people if i was lucky. ended up with 47 contacts in about 3 hours which i think qualifies it right? you need 44 for a valid activation if i remember correctly. anyway the whole thing was way more fun than i thought it would be. had a bunch of hunters calling me which i wasnt really prepared for, some of them wanted specific info about the reference number and i kept fumbling around trying to find it in my notes. i was running 25 watts into a linked dipole from my kx2 and signals were solid all afternoon, 40 meters was the money band for sure. my main question is about logging — i used HAMRS in the field and then exported to ADIF but when i went to upload to the WWFF logbook i got some kind of error about the reference not being recognized. the reference i used was KFF-2847 which i pulled from the wwff.world site. anyone had this issue before? wondering if theres a step im missing or if i just fat fingered something in the log. also is there a good spot to self-spot on wwff? i was using parksnpeaks but wasnt sure if thats the right tool for this or if wwff has its own spotting system