Frank Nakamura

the rate optimization thing is real but i think people underestimate how much just having a good run frequency matters before any SO2R stuff comes into play. i spent way too long in my first few sweepstakes trying to find a clear spot instead of just planting myself somewhere slightly busy and holding it. once i got more aggressive about that my SO1R scores went up more than i expected not saying dont do SO2R, just that if there's any sloppiness in the basic operating the second radio sometimes just doubles the chaos lol. but if you're already clean and comfortable then yeah its definitely a multiplier on your effort

so ive been on 10 meters pretty much every evening this week and i dont know if its just me but the band has been open way longer than usual, like i was working stations in europe at almost 10pm local time last tuesday which almost never happens around here. picked up a few new entities too which was a nice surprise. also wanted to mention for anyone who hasnt heard, looks like Icom finally confirmed the IC-905 is actually shipping to dealers now, not just the early review units. few guys in my local club got theirs and the reports sound pretty promising, especially for the microwave bands if youre into that sort of thing. i havent played with one personally but from what i saw at the last hamfest it seems like a serious piece of kit. anyway just curious if others are seeing the same propagation or if im just getting lucky with timing. feels like the solar cycle is really starting to cook now.

3 watts is fine honestly, i work the linear birds with 5w most of the time and have no issues. the transponder on AO-73 isnt that power hungry and you really dont need much with a decent antenna. the guys running high power are usually the ones with bad antennas trying to compensate or they just dont know better. keep it low and you'll be a good neighbor on the passband. for the doppler thing — yeah its a lot to juggle at first. what i did early on was just focus on the downlink doppler and let the uplink drift a bit. your signal will still get in, it just wanders around the passband a little. once i got a feel for the pass i started correcting both but it took maybe 10-15 passes before it felt natural. some guys use SDR# or gpredict with CAT control to automate the doppler but doing it manually is a good learning exercise first so you understand whats happening. fixed antenna at low elevation does work for catching passes, ive done it from hotel rooms with a handheld yagi out a window. you lose the beginning and end of the pass but the middle 4-5 minutes near max elevation are usually the best anyway so its not terrible. wont be as productive as tracking but for casual contacts its workable.

the 7610 is a completely diffrent conversation from the 7300 imo, dual watch alone makes it worth it if you do any serious contesting or DXing. but if your antenna is an inverted V at 35 feet the bottleneck isnt your radio lol. not saying that to be mean just... thats where id put the money first if i were you

not a dumb question at all, totally normal to be anxious about this. the FCC usually takes anywhere from a few days to about 10 business days after your CSCE gets submitted, so 5 days is well within normal range. you should get an email from them once the license is granted, and then it'll show up in ULS. just be patient, it'll come through. as for the callsign thing — when you first get licensed you get what's called a sequential callsign, basically the FCC just assigns you the next available call in your district based on your address. so if you live in the 4th district you might get something like KQ4XYZ or whatever is next in the queue. you dont get to choose it, it just gets assigned automatically. the vanity call system is separate — after you have your license you can apply to request a specific callsign that's available, like if you want something shorter or with your initials or whatever. there are rules about what you can request though, for example as a tech you can only request a 2x3 format call (two letters before the number, three after). those shorter 1x2 or 1x3 calls your buddy might have are usually for extra class or in some cases general, depending on the format. so yeah you might have to upgrade your license first if you want something really short. but get your sequential call first, get on the air, and then worry about vanity stuff later — plenty of time for that

oh man i went through this exact thing when i first installed my radio lol. mine was so bad i thought something was broken. turned out my power leads were running too close to some of the truck's wiring harness and that was coupling noise into everything. i rerouted them and it got way better. also the door frame thing with the coax — i eventually moved mine to go through the firewall instead and that helped with a little bit of noise i was still getting. not saying thats definitely your issue but might be worth looking at once you sort the power side out.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, K-4857 if anyone knows it. been meaning to do this for like a year and just kept putting it off. anyway i threw my kx2 in a backpack with a 40m end fed and a little tripod mast and hiked out to a picnic table near the trailhead. got my 10 contacts which was great, took maybe 25 minutes once i found a clear frequency on 40, but i had a couple things happen that i wasnt sure about. first one -- i spotted myself on the POTA app but then a guy came back to me and i could barely hear him, like 53 at best, but he was logging me as a contact. does that count for both of us? i logged him but i wasnt confident we actually completed the QSO. second thing is i had a couple hunters show up on frequency calling other calls, not mine, which was confusing. are they just hunting multiple activators at once or did they stumble onto my freq by accident? also is there a trick to uploading the log, i used the adif from my kx2 but the POTA site kept giving me an error about field formats or something. ended up just manually entering them which took forever.

omg yes i was on 10m yesterday too, first time ive ever actually made a DX contact and it was just pure accident, i was scanning around practicing and suddenly this guy from Germany was like 5-9 into my little 100w setup with a dipole. i didnt even know what to do at first lol. logged it and everything. is this what solar cycle 25 being good actually feels like because if so im very into this hobby now

so i was just sitting there messing around on 28.400 yesterday afternoon and all of a sudden europe was just pouring in, had a solid hour of contacts into spain and portugal and even caught a station in italy before it faded out. havent seen 10m that alive since maybe 2012 or 2013 honestly. solar cycle 25 is really starting to deliver and i feel like a lot of people slept on how good this peak was gonna be. anyway that got me thinking about upgrading my HF rig and ive been looking hard at the Yaesu FT-710. anyone actually using one of these day to day? the AESS thing sounds interesting but i cant tell if its genuinely useful or just a marketing feature that sounds cooler than it is. my current setup is an old IC-718 which still works fine but the receive on it is starting to feel pretty dated compared to what im hearing from people with newer rigs. would love to hear from anyone whos made the jump

storms rolling in while your on a summit is no joke, good call packing up when you did. ive seen people push it and it gets sketchy fast. congrats on the activation though

the fan mod is worth it on its own, i did that about a year into owning mine and honestly the stock fan sounds like a cheap box fan on high. i used a noctua 40mm, had to adapt the connector but its basically silent now. if you're thinking about the mic preamp thing, theres a mod floating around that adds a small electret bias circuit and it does make a noticeable difference if you use the internal mic connector a lot. i run an SM-50 so i never bothered but a buddy of mine did it for his shack mic setup and said it cleaned up some of the low end. one thing i'd also look at is the AGC mod, there's a cap swap that gives you a bit more control over AGC behavior on crowded bands. not a huge deal but on 40m during a contest it can help. i forget which cap it is off the top of my head but its in the N4PY writeup i think, or maybe the k0bg page. one of those.

yeah that sounds pretty much exactly right honestly. the ICS coursework is important and i dont want to knock it but there's always this translation layer between the textbook version and how things actually run in the field, especially with served agencies that are used to doing things their own way. shadowing someone experienced is genuinely the best thing you can do early on. some of our best operators learned more in two real activations than in years of nets and tabletops. the standing around thing is also just real. a lot of emergency comms work is hurry up and wait. you get staged, the situation is evolving, nobody has perfect information yet. learning to be comfortable in that ambiguity without wandering off or getting in the way is actually kind of a skill. sounds like you handled it well. the fact that you showed up with charged batteries and a notebook already puts you ahead of some folks i've seen roll in totally unprepared.

ok so ive been listening on HF for a few weeks now and everyone is throwing around all these short codes and i cant figure out half of what people are saying. like QSL, QRM, QTH, 73 -- i get that 73 means goodbye basically but what about everything else. also saw someone type "OM" in a forum post and wasnt sure if that was a name or something. is there like a master list somewhere or do you just kind of pick it up over time. i feel like im missing half the conversation honestly

yeah our club just posted on facebook that the summer picnic/swap thing is july 13th at the same park as last time. its not a huge deal but usually 20-30 people show up and theres always somebody selling random coax and old handhelds for basically nothing. worth checking if your in the area

so ive been chasing summits for about 8 months now and finally decided to just go do an activation myself. picked out W6/NC-445 for my first one, its not super high but its a reasonable hike and i figured better to start easy than bite off more than i can chew on a first attempt. my plan is to bring the KX2 with the AX1 antenna but im second guessing that combo for 40m, the AX1 is really more of a compromise on a good day. was thinking maybe just bring a wire dipole cut for 40 and throw it up between two trees. the summit has decent tree coverage so that should work. anybody done this particular summit or have thoughts on the antenna question? also i know you need 4 contacts to get the activation points but do they all have to be on different bands or can they all just be on 40m ssb? i read through the rules on the SOTA website but sometimes those things are written in a way that makes me read it three times and still not sure posting my alert on SOTAwatch tonight either way, just wanted to see if anyone had advice before i head out saturday morning

yeah the flux has been all over the place, welcome to the fun part of the solar cycle haha. what youre seeing is pretty normal actually — the SFI tracks with solar activity but it doesnt move in a straight line, you get these bursts from active regions rotating across the sun and then quieter periods in between. when a particularly active region comes around the limb it can jack the flux up for several days then tail off as it rotates away. thats probably what you saw. the 17m sunrise thing is almost certainly greyline. that terminator enhancement is real and its shorter than people expect, sometimes just 15-20 minutes depending on the path geometry and time of year. JA from the east coast US is a classic greyline path, ive worked it many times and it can be stunning and then gone before you even realize what happened. the trick is to be on frequency and ready before it opens because by the time you notice the signals coming up it might already be half over. i keep a greyline clock running on my second monitor during the active season just for this reason. the day to day swing you described where it just collapses even with low K is interesting though — did you check if there was a proton event or any X-ray flux? sometimes a flare will cause a shortwave fadeout on the sunlit side that has nothing to do with geomagnetic conditions, its a different mechanism entirely. worth checking the NOAA SWPC data after the fact to see if anything correlates.

Check your network path first - run continuous ping tests to your remote site. I found my ISP was routing through an extra hop that added 80ms. Called them and got it fixed. With proper compression you should see about 100x reduction in bandwidth requirements so a 20Mbps uplink should be plenty. Also consider a dedicated Raspberry Pi running SimpleHRR - it's headless and optimized for low latency.

JS8Call's message store-and-forward capability is game-changing for emergency communications. During our last ARES exercise, we could maintain contact even when direct paths weren't possible. PSK31 is great for chatting, but JS8Call brings actual emergency utility to HF digital.

yeah JS8Call is legit if you actually want to have a conversation at weak signal levels, i ran it for about six months mostly on 40m around 7.078 and there was decent activity in the evenings, not as busy as FT8 obviously but enough that you could usually find somebody to chat with. the software handles rig control pretty much the same way, uses hamlib just like wsjt-x so if your radio already works with that you're mostly good to go, you might need to tweak the audio levels a bit but nothing major. the thing that got me back on PSK31 honestly was just missing proper back and forth conversation. JS8Call scratches that itch a little but the timing feels weird at first, like you have to get used to the fact that messages come through in chunks and theres always this slight delay. once you adjust to it though its actually pretty nice for what it is. i keep both running on different bands when conditions are decent.

so i had literally the same confusion when i first started and what helped me was just asking the net control directly after the net closed down for the night. most of them are super happy to walk you through the format they prefer. the guy who runs our wednesday net spent like 20 minutes explaining the whole thing to me one time and now i feel way more comfortable. dont be shy about asking, nobody expects new hams to just magically know all this stuff

Just upgraded from RTL-SDR v3 to the new RTL-SDR v4 and I'm seeing some persistent DC offset issues when using GQRX. The RTL-SDR is recommended for beginners and those on a budget, but this DC spike right at the center frequency is making certain bands unusable. Has anyone found effective workarounds for the RTL2832U DC offset beyond the built-in correction? Running latest GQRX 2.17.5 on Ubuntu 22.04. Wondering if switching to CubicSDR or SDR# might handle this better, or if there's a filter setting I'm missing.

congrats on the first one, that feeling when the pile starts calling you is pretty great isnt it. to answer your question — yeah WWFF is 44 QSOs to validate a reference, no points system like SOTA, just the flat 44 minimum. you had 34 so that one wont count as validated but it still gets uploaded and logged and the hunters who worked you still get credit for the contact toward their own awards. so not a wasted trip at all, just go back and finish it off sometime. the two day delay on the profile updating is totally normal by the way. the WWFF Logsearch system doesnt update in real time, takes a bit for everything to process and the volunteers who manage it are doing it in their spare time so sometimes it takes a little longer on busy weekends. as long as your ADIF uploaded without an error message youre fine. 40m is the workhorse for these activations, you made the right call. i usually spot myself on the WWFF spotting page before i start calling which helps the hunters find you faster, did you do that? makes a big difference for building a quick pile.

yeah the TQSL thing tripped me up too when i first started, i think i had to watch a youtube video twice before it clicked. the part that confused me was that you have to create a separate callsign certificate for each location if you ever operate portable or from a different address, which nobody really explains upfront. one thing worth doing is going back and uploading your logs from contacts you already made, you can set the date range in TQSL and it'll handle it. i waited almost six months before i started uploading and still got a bunch of confirmations come through retroactively which was a nice surprise

timing is everything honestly. i spent years just randomly calling and wondering why i couldnt break anything with 100w. what changed for me was really learning to listen to the DX station's cadence — like how fast they're moving through the pile, whether they're completing contacts quickly or struggling. if they're struggling and you hear them say "again?" a lot, conditions are rough and pounding away doesn't help. better to wait for a moment when signals are peaking. one thing i havent seen mentioned much is how your signal sounds on the other end. got on the air with a friend in a different region once and had him just listen while i called into a pile. turns out my audio was way too wide and i was splattering all over the place which makes it harder to pull your call out. cleaned that up and things improved noticeably. worth checking if you havent already.

I've been running my IC-7300 with an Ameritron AL-80B for two years without issues. Set the radio to about 80-90W and let the amp do the work. The brief overshoot isn't enough to damage modern solid-state amps if you're not already pushing them to their limits.