In the past couple of weeks I have received a few emails querying why Park to Park (P2P) contacts are not showing up on WWFF Logsearch for the World Wide Flora Fauna (WWFF) program.

The answer is simple.  Some activators are not recording their Park to Park contacts in their log.

This post is a follow up to a previous post on P2P contacts which can be found at…..

https://vk5pas.org/2016/02/12/the-wwff-park-to-park-award/

Please note, that P2P contacts need to be recorded in your activator log, which in turn must be uploaded to WWFF Log Search.  Log Search looks for a match between the two P2P activator logs, with the following information:

• the two dates
• the two bands
• the two modes

To see your Park to Park stats, conduct a search on your callsign in WWFF Logsearch.  This will bring up your Summary Statistics.  You will be able to view your Unique Park to Park combinations confirmed, and also your Total Park to Park QSOs.

If we first look at ‘Unique References Confirmed’, you will also see 2 figures, e.g. 112/158.  The second figure indicates the number of unique P2P contacts.  The first figure indicates the number of those P2P contacts which have been confirmed in Log Search.

The same principle applied for your Total P2P stats.  The second figure indicates your total P2P contacts, while the first figure indicates the number of park to park contacts that have been confirmed in Log Search.

In my case (as per the screen shot below), I have a total of 158 Unique Park to Park combinations, but only 112 of those are confirmed.  I have a total of 186 Park to Park contacts, but only 129 are confirmed.

When completing the CSV template, please ensure that you complete the ‘hunterRef’ column (see below).  Remember to use the correct format, e.g. VKFF-0029.  Many people are leaving out the hyphen in the reference.

If you are using Fast Log Entry (FLE) version 2.6, please ensure that you are accurately recording Park to Park contacts by using the keyword of WWFF and then recording the appropriate VKFF reference number.

Once you convert the information over to the data field, the Park to Park contact should show up in the column titled ‘His WWFF Ref.

Have you ever wanted to create a KML file for use with Google Earth and/or Google My Maps?  Here are some instructions which I hope you find useful.

What is a KML file?  KML stands for ‘Keyhole Markup Language’.  It is an XML based file format which is used to display geographic data in an Earth browser such as Google Earth.  There are serveral ways to create a KML file, but this is the way I was shown some time ago (courtesy of Ian VK1DI).

Lets create a KML file of the VK1 Parks for the VKFF program.

To start, head to parksnpeaks and click on ‘Parks’.

Then scroll down to WWFF VK1 List.

Highlight all of the entries/data in the WWFF VK1 List and then copy those contents.

Next up, open Excel and paste the copied content into a new workbook.  It should show up in Excel as follows, after pasting.

There are some portions of the spreadsheet that we need to delete and some changes that need to be made.  First up, you need to delete columns that are not required.  They are:-

• Type
• State
• Region
• District
• Area
• Info
• Count
• Last

If you included lines 1 & 2 as I did above (including the WWFF VK1 List) title, you will need to delete that as well.

You also need to change the column headings to match what our KML creator (which is GPS Visualizer) requires.  The columns required are:-

• Name (was originally ID on the spreadhseet)
• desc (was originally Name)
• latitude (was Lat)
• longitude (Was Long)

You should end up with the following….

To convert this excel spreadsheet into a kml file, next open up GPS Visualizer.

http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/

From the home page, click on Google Earth KML.  See below…

The screen below will appear.  Where it says ‘Or paste your data here’, do exactly that.  Paste the copied info from the spreadsheet.  Under the heading ‘General map parameters, change the  Output file type to .kml (compressed).  Then in the ‘Google Eath doc name’ area, name the file as you choose.  In the Waypoint options area, change from small square to Paddle, and then set the Icon colour that you would like.

Then press the ‘Create KML file’ button.

After pressing the create button, you should see a link to your kml file.  Save the link as whatever you like and then open up the file in Google Earth or My Google Maps.  You should end up with something like this….

Fast Log Entry version 2.6 now has some excellent features for the World Wide Flora Fauna (WWFF) program.  Here is a short video I’ve put together describing how to put a log together and some of FLE’s features.