so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general class) and i keep hearing people talk about nets but i honestly have no idea how to find out when and where they are. like i know there are local repeater nets and then there's HF nets too but i dont really know how to track them down. i tried googling a couple times and got some outdated looking pages from like 2015.

also someone at my club mentioned a special event station that was happening on a weekend but i missed it because i didnt know how to look those up either. is there a central place people go to find all this stuff or is it more word of mouth? i have a decent HF setup now and a mobile rig for the repeaters so i should be able to actually participate once i figure out where everything is

welcome to the addiction ha. okay so for HF nets the best resource ive found is the ARRL net directory, its on their website and you can filter by band and mode and whatnot. not perfect but pretty comprehensive. there's also a site called HFLink for some of the ALE nets if you get into that stuff later.

for local repeater nets honestly the best thing is just to find your regional repeater directory, the arrl has one of those too, and then just listen on the repeaters that show up nearby. a lot of clubs announce their nets on their own repeaters so if you just hang out on the local machine for a few evenings youll hear it. my local 2m net has been running thursdays at 8pm for like 20 years and they announce it every single week even though everyone already knows lol.

for special event stations, the ARRL website has a special event station listing that updates pretty regularly, and there's also a page on QRZ where people post them. i usually check it on friday afternoon to see if anything fun is happening that weekend. the hamcation ones and stuff around holidays are worth looking for specifically

yeah same boat here a few months ago, it felt like everyone knew this secret schedule and i was just missing it. what really helped me was just asking on my club's email list — someone replied within like an hour with a whole list of local nets, times, frequencies, everything. clubs are pretty good about that kind of thing if you just ask directly.

also once you check into a few nets regularly the net control operators usually announce other upcoming events during the net itself so it sort of snowballs naturally