From the 9th March 2026 to the 15th March 2026, the Young Ladies World Wide Award (WWA) 2026 event was held. It was the first international radio project aimed at bringing together the largest number of Young Ladies (YL) worldwide in a single event.

Over the 7 day period a total of 234 YLs from around the world took part. A total of 300,509 QSOs were made with 203 countries taking part.

My wife Marija VK5MAZ took part as an Activator and did most of the operating from our shack during the event. I took part as a Hunter.

I made contacts with the YLs around the world on SSB, FT8, & FT4. The’Mixed’ Hunter award was issued at three levels: Bronze 100 points, Silver 250 points, and Gold 500 points. Each SSB contact was worth 5 points, while a digital contact was worth 2 points. I managed to get to the Bronze level with 130 points.

Marija made a total of 798 contacts. Marija received four different award certificates for the event. She came in 87th place in the Mixed category, 126th in the SSB category, and 53rd in the Digital category.

The first certificate for Marija was ‘Activator as Hunter’, with 108 points.

The other three certificates for Marija were:

• Bronze SSB Activator – 200 QSOs
• Gold Digi Activator – 598 QSOs
• Mixed Activator – 798 QSOs

Sadly, there did not seem to be a lot of Australian YL’s taking part in the event. Dianne VK4DI was very active and made it into Marija’s log a few times on 40m & 20m SSB.

Marija worked 79 DXCC entities during the event. She worked 38 of the 50 USA States and 30 of the 40 zones.

On Saturday, 20m SSB, Marija had a very significant pileup on the long path to Europe and the UK. I came out into the shack in the middle of the madness, and I was very proud of how she was handling the pileup (with some poor behaviour at times on the other end).

Below is a map showing Marija’s QSOs during the event.

Thank you to the organisers. And of course, thank you to everyone who called us during the event. Both Marija and I had a lot of fun.