Just recently I’ve been getting into Worked All Britain (WAB) and so logging a lot more UK stations rather than those further afield. While keeping an eye out for POTA calls (I am now up to the dizzy heights of double figures as a hunter – 11!) I believe I have made contact with sufficient UK stations for a couple of the WAB basic awards.
WAB (there’s loads of information on the website) uses map squares for points, with contacts in each square adding to your score. Large 100x100km and small 10x10km squares are used and three mapping systems – National Grid Reference for Great Britain, Ordnance Survey of Ireland for Northern Ireland and the Universal Transverse Mercator Grid for the Channel Islands. This is all far better defined at http://wab.intermip.net/Definitions.php
Points are also available for each Book Number – basically when one joins WAB you get a WAB Record Book which has a number which is allocated to you. You can have multiple books and working someone with, say 5 books gains 5 points provided those books were issued before the QSO took place. Again, the WAB website has all the info. My square is SE23 and book is 24586. (Funny thing there, I’ve been reading maps since I was a kid plus having to read them accurately in my motorsport years. My home QTH is in square SE23 and yet having checked than twice I managed to use SE26 when I signed up to WAB!)
I updated my logging software to include WAB details and it seems to be working things out correctly.