Thomas Wilson

honestly yeah you're overthinking it a bit but that's fine, we all do it. a dipole at 35 feet on 40m is gonna be a pretty high angle radiator mostly, which isnt ideal for real dx work, but here's the thing — it'll still work. people forget how much the bands do the heavy lifting. ive worked JA and VK on a dipole at 25 feet during good conditions on 40 without trying that hard. the vertical argument is real if you can do a proper radial field underneath it. that's the part everyone glosses over. a vertical with 4 or 8 radials is not the same animal as one with 32 or 64 and if you're just gonna throw down 4 radials and call it done you might find the dipole outperforms it on the paths you care about anyway. if you have room and the anchor points, id just throw up the dipole first, actually get on the air, and see what you can work. you can always add a vertical later and actually do an a/b comparison instead of guessing like the rest of us do on the internet.

So i finally got off my butt and did a WWFF activation at a state forest about 45 minutes from my house. Ive been meaning to do one for probably two years now and just never pulled the trigger. Anyway i set up my KX3 with a random wire antenna strung between two trees, got my 44 contacts in about 90 minutes and the whole thing was honestly just really enjoyable. Way more relaxed than a POTA activation ive done before, fewer people calling in but the ones that did were super chill. A couple things im not totally clear on though. Do i need to submit the log somewhere specific for WWFF or does it just go through the same ADIF upload process? I looked at the wwff.eu site and it honestly confused me a bit. Also is there a difference between a WWFF reference and a KFF reference when im activating in the US? I saw both mentioned on different pages and cant tell if its the same thing or if i need to log under one vs the other. And one more thing — someone on the air told me i should have spotted myself on the WWFF spotter but i didnt even know that was a thing until after i was already packed up. Does not spotting yourself hurt your activation count or is it just to attract chasers?

so we finally got around to doing a proper SET with our local ARES group and honestly it was pretty eye opening. we had about 14 operators show up which is way more than i expected, but then things kind of fell apart in ways i didnt anticipate. the biggest issue was that nobody agreed on which net frequency to use when we lost contact with the EOC. we had a backup written down somewhere but half the operators had old copies of the plan and the other half had the updated one and yeah that was a mess. spent probably 20 minutes just sorting that out which in a real disaster would be really bad. the other thing that got me was how fast battery reserves got eaten up. a couple guys had their HTs running full power the whole time and by hour three they were basically useless. we talked after about power discipline but i feel like that needs to be drilled into people more during the exercise itself, not just in the debrief. anyone else done these and have thoughts on how to make the scenarios more realistic without it becoming this giant logistical headache? we want to do another one in the fall and id love to hear what other groups have built into their exercises that actually made people learn something.