Steve Wilson

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for about 6 weeks now using that LCWO site the other guy probably mentioned. its slow going honestly. i can copy maybe 8-10 characters okay but then i panic when i miss one and lose the next three trying to figure out what i missed lol. someone on here told me to just let it go when you miss something and keep listening, easier said than done theres also a podcast called Codex or something? where they play actual QSO recordings slowed down. havent tried it yet but heard good things. mostly i just do the LCWO lessons every morning before work

Building my first serious go-kit for ARES deployments and looking for input on what's actually essential vs nice-to-have. A go kit is a portable, self-contained communication system designed for rapid deployment during emergencies, disasters, or field operations. When power is lost, cellular networks fail, or communication systems become overloaded, a properly prepared go kit allows you to establish reliable radio contact immediately. So far I've got a Yaesu FT-891, LiFePO4 battery pack, and basic hand tools. What am I missing that could bite me in a real deployment?

so anyway i finally dug out my old rig from the garage last month, an IC-735 that i havent touched since like 2018 maybe, dusted it off, replaced the finals (well had a tech friend do it), strung up a random wire out to the back fence and just... started talking again on 40m. forgot how much i missed it honestly. the bands have been decent lately with the solar cycle doing its thing and ive been making contacts i never wouldve dreamed of with that wire. jumped on a net last tuesday night for the first time in years and the net control actually remembered me which was kind of wild. anyway no real point to this post just felt like sharing cause my wife definitely doesnt care lol

first thing id do is get everything uploaded to lotw and get your account sorted out. you might be closer to 100 than you think, especially if youve worked any DXpeditions over the years and they uploaded too. i was surprised when i finally did this — had like 87 confirmed without really trying. as for chasing WAS and WAZ at the same time, honestly i wouldnt stress about it. a lot of the operating you do for DXCC will naturally tick boxes for WAZ since the zones overlap with a ton of popular DX countries. WAS is a slightly different animal because you need all 50 states which sounds easy but alaska and hawaii can be annoying to catch if youre not paying attention. i say just work everything, log everything, upload regularly, and let the credits sort themselves out. the arrl award system is actually pretty straightforward once you get used to the interface. with a 7300 and a decent vertical you can absolutely get to 100 mixed, probably faster than you expect. just get on when the bands are open and learn to recognize which DX clusters spots are worth jumping on.

I came at this from the opposite direction — started on JS8Call because a friend got me into it before I ever really did FT8 seriously. Then I got into FT8 for contesting and chasing DX. Honestly I keep both in rotation but for totally different reasons. JS8Call is almost more like a slow chat mode than a traditional weak signal mode if that makes sense, the weak signal capability is there but most people arent running crazy low power on it, theyre just using it because they want more than a grid exchange. The store-forward relay is real and it does work but you need enough active nodes in the path which on a slow day can be hit or miss. Dont give up on it if the first few sessions are quiet, theres definitely a community there its just smaller and more spread out than the FT8 crowd.

so ive been chasing DX seriously for about three years now and for the longest time i just could not break pileups to save my life. i'd hear a rare one come up, throw my call in, and just get buried. didnt matter if it was a 100w station or when i briefly ran a friend's amp, same result basically. what finally clicked for me was listening way longer before transmitting. like embarrassingly longer. i used to just hear the DX station and jump in after maybe 30 seconds of listening. now i'll sit there for 5-10 minutes just mapping out where the DX is listening, what their rhythm is, how far up or down they're splitting, whether they favor certain parts of the pileup more than others. once i started doing that consistently i started getting through way more often. the other thing that helped a lot was tail-ending. if the DX just finished working somebody and came back with their call, i'd throw mine in right at the tail end of their QRZ or after they send the report. timing it to land right as the pileup is taking a breath. feels almost rude at first but it works. anyway curious what techniques other people use. especially on like 40m where the pileup noise floor is just insane sometimes. running an IC-7300 with a 3-ele yagi at about 40ft if that matters.

hey welcome to the hobby, good questions and dont worry youre definitely not the only new ham who's been confused by this stuff. so the CTCSS tone -- you only need it on transmit in most cases. the tone tells the repeater to open up its squelch and let your signal through. on the receive side your radio can use a tone to filter out transmissions that dont have the matching tone but on most repeaters thats not how its set up, the machine just opens for anyone hitting it with the right tone. so yeah just TX tone and youre good. as for the courtesy beep, if youre not hearing it at all it might mean your signal isnt quite making it into the machine cleanly, could be you're a bit low power or there's some terrain in the way. try bumping up to high power if you havent already and see if that changes anything. the baofeng high power setting isnt amazing but it can help at the edges of coverage. and the linked network thing -- thats probably something like EchoLink or maybe IRLP or even Allstar. some clubs connect their repeater to other repeaters or internet gateways on scheduled nights, usually you'd hear an announcement tone or something different when it connects. worth asking at your next club meeting which system they use, pretty cool once you figure it out because you can talk to guys hundreds of miles away through your HT.

oh man i went through the exact same thing when i first started checking spots. what helped me was also downloading the HamAlert app on my phone — you set up triggers like a specific callsign or DXCC entity and it pings you when something shows up in the cluster. saved me from missing a few rare ones while i was doing other stuff around the house. its free and works pretty well, only thing is you gotta make sure your notification settings are right or it just silently does nothing which took me an embarassingly long time to figure out

yeah the Q codes go back to like pre-WWII maritime and telegraph days so theres a ton of them but honestly you only really need maybe a dozen or so for everyday ham use. the ones youll hear constantly on HF phone are QRM which is interference from other stations, QRN is natural noise like static from storms, QSB is when your signal is fading in and out, QSY just means change frequency, QTH is your location, and QSL means acknowledged or confirmed which is also why we send those cards. QRZ is asking whos calling or sometimes people use it wrong to mean calling CQ which drives some folks crazy. on CW and digital modes you get way more of them because its faster to send three letters than a whole word. the abbreviations like OM just means old man which is honestly just how hams refer to any other male operator regardless of age, YL is young lady but again any female operator, DE is from in the sense of this is such-and-such station calling. 73 means best regards and 88 is love and kisses which you mostly hear between ops who know each other. you pick most of it up just by listening, honestly a few weeks of casual monitoring and it starts clicking. there are reference pages online too, ARRL has one i think

the mars mod is pretty standard stuff, been doing that on various radios for years. what i'd actually look at on the 7300 if you want a real performance upgrade is the receive antenna port — running a separate rx antenna through there for HF can make a noticeable difference depending on your noise floor situation. not a hardware mod exactly but it changes how the radio performs quite a bit. worth experimenting with if youre on a noisy lot like most of us are anymore.

the second receiver thing is actually way more useful than it sounds once you do it. i just run a cheap SDR dongle on a separate antenna a few feet away and use SDR# or HDSDR to watch my own waterfall and listen back. you can clearly see if youre clipping, see your bandwidth, hear exactly what youre putting out with maybe a half second delay which is much more tolerable than the rig's own monitor. took me an afternoon to set up and i havent second guessed my audio since on the PR-40 specifically — yeah proximity effect is real with that mic, most people end up sitting further back than feels natural, like 8-10 inches. and honestly the 7300 parametric is decent enough that you dont really need an outboard preamp unless you have a specific reason. adding more gain stages usually adds more noise and more chances to overdrive something. id try removing the preamp and seeing if your reports change, might simplify things considerably

oh man i had the same confusion when i started, the cluster stuff seems simple but theres actually a lot going on behind the scenes. one thing i found really helpful was the Ham Radio Deluxe cluster window when i was still using that software, just because it was all in one place with my logging. switched to WSJT-X for digital stuff mostly now so my workflow is totally different these days. also if youre on your phone a lot, HamAlert is worth looking at — you can set up triggers so it actually notifies you when a specific entity or band shows up in the spots instead of you having to watch a screen constantly. that was kind of a game changer for me when i was working toward my first DXCC, i could just be doing other stuff and my phone would buzz when something i actually wanted showed up

so ive been studying for like two months and passed my tech exam last week and i finally just keyed up on the local 2m repeater yesterday afternoon and said my callsign and asked if anyone was around and this guy came back to me immediately and we chatted for like 20 minutes about nothing really, just weather and how long ive had my license and stuff i know its just a local repeater contact and nothing crazy but man it felt like a huge deal. my hands were literally shaking when i picked up the mic. the guy on the other end was super patient with me, i fumbled my callsign twice lol. anyway just wanted to post somewhere because my wife thinks im a nerd and doesnt really get why this is exciting

The FT-991 gets dirty fast with heavy ALC, while the IC-7300 handles it much better. Each radio has different IMD characteristics. Monitor yourself on a second receiver - there's a sweet spot where increasing gain doesn't make you any louder, just dirtier.

Your 7300 will work great for general class, no worries there. As for bands, yeah 20m is popular for good reason - it's open during the day and you can work DX pretty easily. But dont ignore 40m and 80m either, especially 40m which is good both day and night. 15m can be amazing when the solar cycle cooperates but its been pretty quiet lately. I'd say start with 20m and 40m, then branch out from there once you get comfortable.

Faraday rotation on 432 is brutal - more than one complete rotation possible on lower bands. Many successful 70cm EME stations use switched linear polarization (H/V) rather than going circular. Monitor your signals and flip polarity when they fade. It's more work but cheaper than rebuilding for circular.

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, took about 2 hours to hike up W4T/SU-017 with my KX2 and a random wire i threw together the night before. wasnt sure i was gonna get 4 contacts but ended up with 11 including a S2S with some guy in Colorado which was pretty cool. ran into some issues with my counterpoise flopping around in the wind but just held it down with a rock lol. the summit wasnt even that high but man carrying all that gear plus water made it feel like everest. anyway if anyones on the fence about trying it just go do it, whole thing cost me maybe 15 bucks in gas

so ive been listening on 40m a lot lately and people keep throwing around all these weird codes like QRM and QSB and QTH and i kind of get some of them from context but not really. is there like a master list somewhere or do people just memorize them over time? also some guys on the repeater use abbreviations too like 73 and 88 and someone said something about OM and YL and i had no clue what they were talking about. i feel like everyone just assumes you already know this stuff when youre new

honest answer — the first contest is a wash, maybe the first two. i tried it for the first time in CQWW CW a few years ago and my rate was actually lower than my previous single radio effort because i was so fixated on managing the second VFO that i was making mistakes on the run frequency. like actual busted calls because my brain was split. that said by the second or third outing something clicked and i started seeing real gains, especially in the S&P to run transition. being able to park on a multiplier frequency while you're running is genuinely huge for SS where you need all 80 sections. the 590SG is actually not bad as a second radio, i used one for about a year in that role. the main thing you need to sort out is the audio — a lot of guys use the microHAM or similar for the switching logic but honestly even a basic headphone mixer setup gets you further than you'd think before you go full integrated. the antenna situation matters more than the radio pairing imo. if you're both radios trying to share that 40m yagi you're going to have a bad time without some serious filtering. 2el on 40 is a real asset, don't blow it up with RF getting into the second receiver.

so i just got my technician license a few months ago and ive been listening a lot before actually transmitting much. i notice some people use the NATO phonetic alphabet like alpha bravo charlie etc and some people just... say their callsign normally? like just say the letters? im confused about when youre supposed to use one vs the other. is there a rule about it or is it just preference. my callsign has some letters that sound alike so maybe thats relevant but i dont really know when to bother spelling it out phonetically vs just saying it fast

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new hams. the ID thing is every 10 minutes during a contact AND at the end of the contact — so your club person might have been trying to clarify that second part. if you have a short QSO thats only 3 minutes you still ID at the end. the 10 minute rule kicks in for longer conversations. as for the business thing, mentioning your job in casual conversation is totally fine, basically everyone does that. what Part 97 is actually trying to prevent is using the radio to like conduct commerce — so calling your employee on 2m to tell them to clock in, or coordinating deliveries or whatever. theres some grey area but casual mention of where you work is nowhere near that line. the FCC isnt sitting there listening to your ragchews waiting for you to say the word "invoice." honestly just read through 97.113 when you get a chance, its the prohibited transmissions section and its actually not that long. the language is a bit dry but once you read it a couple times it starts making sense. and welcome to the hobby, 10m can be a lot of fun when the band cooperates

the smith chart question pool is like 4 or 5 questions out of the whole exam so dont let that scare you off. i just memorized the specific answers for those and moved on, never fully understood what i was looking at honestly and i still passed. the rest of the advanced theory like filter poles and transistor biasing is actually kind of interesting once you get into it, at least i thought so. one thing i will say is if you do any contesting the extra subbands are worth having just to not deal with the pile of generals parked right at the edge of the band during a contest weekend. that alone sold me on it.

This is actually my second year helping with our GOTA station and it's been so rewarding! Last year we had several Technician licensees make their first HF contacts. You can find nearby Field Day sites with the Field Day Site Locator at the ARRL website if you want to see how other clubs are doing it.

the waiting is real lol. been in ARES for like 3 years and done probably a dozen activations and drills and the ratio is definitely like 80% sitting around monitoring the frequency to 20% actually doing anything. bring snacks and a good book basically. but yeah when it matters it really does matter so you gotta stay sharp the whole time even when its boring.

Just participated in my first Simulated Emergency Test last Saturday and wow, what a learning experience! The purpose is to find out the strengths and weaknesses of ARES, NTS, RACES and other groups in providing emergency communications, and I certainly learned where my own weaknesses are. My biggest takeaway was how quickly things can go sideways when you're trying to handle traffic under pressure. I fumbled through my first few messages on the NTS net, but the net control was super patient. Also discovered my backup power solution isn't as robust as I thought - my battery died after just 3 hours of operation. For those who haven't done SET yet, I highly recommend it. It helps radio amateurs gain experience in communications using standard procedures and a variety of modes under simulated-emergency conditions. Even if you think you're prepared, you'll find gaps in your setup that are better discovered during an exercise than a real emergency.