This won't be a long post, as I have to hit the road again. It was an easy one, from the van, had the time to wait for conditions.

While sleeping at a hidden place near a river, in the great regional park of Monts d'Ardèche, I was wondering why finding WWFF was so complicated for me. I am mostly all the time in regional or national parks, green areas, but everytime I look on the map, I'm always far away from a valid location.

I always liked the american POTA program since it's simple. Regional and national parks. That's quite it. I was wondering why there were no FFF for regional parks, and just had to make a text search instead of a map search for find out they are valid Flaura Fauna refs. It's just that maps are not so good for this since the park is huge and there is plenty of other valid refs inside this park.

That's when I decided to activate the whole regional park (FFF-0064) and also valid as a POTA (F-2172).

I just raised the antenna and waited for good conditions. First night was hard to find a place during a contest saturday. But the next day was way easier to find chasers on 20m and 40m. 50 QSO's before wrapping up.

Weekend pros/cons

I thought activating on week-ends is not such a great idea because some contests might take place and use a lot of bandwidth, but it was a better opportunity to make P2P contacts.

Recurrent chasers

I promised myself to take better care of people who chase me everytime I'm on the air. I didn't had the names and all, but I programmed on my log software a feature to show me previous callsigns on other logs, and it works. I could more easily identify some of the calls (I'm not yet so good with it) and welcome them again in my log.

I think I would do some reasearch or asks next time the names for even better welcoming.

Lesson learned

• When looking for a WWFF, try to search it textually first
• Asks names to recurrent chasers

Thanks everyone. 73 & 44 DE F4IXL/P