Catherine O'Brien

so ive been chasing 3Y0J for a while now obviously that didnt pan out but it got me thinking a lot about pileup technique and i actually had a decent run this past weekend working into some rare stuff from the pacific, VK9 and a ZL7 that was sitting pretty rare on 17m. what i've noticed after years of frustration is that timing is honestly more important than power. like i run an IC-7610 into a 3el yagi at about 35ft, nothing crazy, running maybe 400w to keep the amp from cooking in this heat, and i was getting through pileups that guys with way more iron were clearly losing. the trick i keep coming back to is listening to where the DX is actually pulling from. split operations especially, you gotta watch where theyre coming back and then just... slightly anticipate. not tail-end so hard you stomp someone but just be in that zone right as the last station wraps up. also zero-beating the DX when theyre working split is such a rookie mistake and i still see it constantly on the cluster spots. if they say up 5, dont call on their freq. sounds obvious but man the QRM on the DX freq during a good pileup is unbelievable sometimes. anyone else have techniques that actually work? im curious if split listening, like actually using the dual watch on the 7610 to monitor the DX while transmitting up in the pileup, is worth the mental overhead or if its just too much to track at the same time

so ive been chasing this problem for about three weeks now and im starting to lose my mind a little. my 7300 started showing elevated noise floor on 40m and 80m, like S2-S3 consistently even with the antenna disconnected. at first i thought it was RFI from something in the house so i went around unplugging stuff one by one, the usual routine. didnt change anything. then i noticed it's worse when the shack computer is on but even with the computer completely off and unplugged it's still sitting there. the bands above 40m seem mostly fine, 20m maybe has a tiny bit more noise than usual but nothing dramatic. just 40 and 80 that are bad. i've done a factory reset twice, updated the firmware, tried a different antenna feedline, even borrowed a buddies dummy load to rule out the antenna entirely. noise is still there with the dummy load connected. at this point im wondering if something inside the radio itself has gone south. maybe a filter cap somewhere or something in the front end? the radio is about 4 years old and has been running pretty much every day. any ideas before i ship it off to icom?

so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now, mostly just tracking with a Kenwood D72 and it works great, i can see myself on the map, digipeaters are picking me up, all that stuff is fine. but im trying to use the messaging side of things and its hit or miss at best. like ill send a message to another station and sometimes they get it, sometimes they dont, and i never get the ACK back so my radio just keeps retrying until it gives up. the other station says they see the message eventually on their end but its delayed by like several minutes sometimes. my path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. running about 5 watts. is this a path issue or is messaging just kind of unreliable by design? ive read conflicting stuff about whether you need IGate coverage for messaging to work properly vs just RF path to the other station. also not sure if this matters but im in a somewhat rural area, theres one digipeater i can hit consistently maybe 30 miles away but i dont know if theres a good IGate nearby

same thing happened to me last week, worked a couple ZL stations on 17m out of nowhere after days of nothing. I think we might be catching the tail end of some sporadic-E mixed in with regular F2 propagation? not totally sure tbh. DXmaps is pretty useful if you havent tried it, shows real time spots and you can kind of see where openings are happening before you even call CQ.

had almost this exact drift problem with my first homebrew rig lol. turned out one of my bypass caps near the oscillator was a ceramic disc type and those have terrible temp coefficients. swapped it for an NP0/C0G cap and it made a noticeable difference. maybe not your whole problem but worth checking what caps you used in that stage

hamrs works fine once you get used to it but i do tap the wrong thing constantly lol. i started using a small bluetooth keyboard with my phone and that helped a ton actually, just sits on my leg while im operating

our local repeater group asked if i wanted to try being net control for the thursday night tech net next week and i said sure without really thinking about it. now im kinda freaking out a little bit because ive never done this before and dont want to sound like an idiot on the air. i know the basic format from listening but what are some things i should know beforehand? like what if nobody checks in or what if someone has an emergency or something

What about adding a third 100Ah battery? Your setup seems underpowered for 72 hours continuous. With 300Ah total you'd have better flexibility and could potentially run solar-only with good weather. The Victron SmartSolar 100/30 would handle up to 440W panels if you want to expand the array later.

so i just got my technician license about 3 weeks ago and ive been listening on a few repeaters and also some HF with my dad's radio and honestly half the time i have no idea what people are saying. like they'll say QSY or QRM or whatever and i kind of nod along but i dont actually know what it means. also saw someone write 73 at the end of a message and had to google it. is there like a standard list or do you just kind of pick it up over time? also what does QRZ mean because i hear that one a lot on HF and sometimes it sounds like the person is asking something but i cant tell what

I grabbed one of the cheap 2 lead PC condenser elements at a local Radio Shack and found that they actually sounded pretty decent. The biggest drawback was that they seemed to have a very boomy low end that made them difficult to work with. The solution to that was to use a pre-emphasis RC network to flatten response. Sometimes budget solutions work great with proper matching circuits.

Applications typically take 18 days to process so be patient! As General class you can apply for Group C or D format calls. I'd focus on calls that mean something to you - initials, hobby references, etc. The $35 is a small price for having YOUR call instead of what they assigned you.

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly just scanning the local repeaters, poking around on aircraft band, that kind of thing. works fine honestly but im starting to get curious about whether stepping up to something like an SDRplay RSP1B or even a HackRF would actually make a noticeable difference for what i do or if its just gear acquisition syndrome kicking in again the main thing bugging me with the rtl is the noise floor, especially down in the lower HF bands even with the direct sampling mod enabled. i can hear stuff but its kinda rough and i feel like im missing weaker signals. been running SDR# and tried SDRangel for a bit but went back because i couldnt figure out the plugin situation. also tried gqrx on a raspberry pi 4 which was actually pretty decent so anyway the RSP1B is what like 120 bucks, is that actually worth it over just getting a better LNA and a filtered preamp for the rtl setup? or am i thinking about this wrong

oh man the 213 form thing is so real. we had the exact same problem at our county exercise two years ago and honestly it came down to not enough pre-exercise training rather than anything wrong with how the nets were run. what helped us was doing a separate mini-session a few weeks before the main exercise specifically just on passing formal traffic — like we practiced until it was muscle memory. boring but it made a huge difference when the actual sim happened. for NCS when things are piling up, something our EC taught me was to not be afraid to just hold traffic and tell stations to standby. people get anxious about dead air during exercises but its actually better to slow down and stay organized than to let the net turn into a free-for-all. easier said than done in the moment though, i get it. the first time i ran NCS during a busy exercise my log was a disaster. the unprogrammed frequency thing is a rite of passage honestly. now our group sends out a radio check list two days before any exercise and people have to confirm they have all the freqs loaded. we still get one or two who miss something but its much better than it was.

honestly the just memorize the pool approach works fine for passing the test, i wont lie to you. but i get what you mean about wanting to actually understand it. what worked for me was using HamStudy or the ARRL practice exams online and when i got a question wrong i would go look it up in the manual instead of just reading the whole thing front to back. that way you're spending time on the stuff that's actually tripping you up instead of reading sections you already kind of get intuitively. the electrical stuff like ohms law and the basic formulas, those are worth understanding for real because they come up in weird ways and if you just memorized the answer without knowing why, a slightly differently worded question can throw you off. the regulatory stuff though, band privileges, the part 97 rules, a lot of people just straight memorize those and thats fine, theres not really a deeper conceptual thing to understand there its just rules. six weeks is plenty of time dont stress about it

Look into the National Presenters Panel - they connect clubs with speakers from across the country. We had a great digital modes presentation last month via Zoom. Beats the same local voices every meeting.

HackRF is worth mentioning too if you ever want to transmit — it does 1MHz to 6GHz and you can do some fun stuff with it. the receive performance isnt as good as SDRplay for just listening though, its more of a do-everything tool than a best-in-class receiver. i use mine for exploring stuff above 2GHz mostly.

yeah hamfests are definitely worth it, especially if you go in with realistic expectations. the flea market tables are usually the best part honestly, thats where you find the weird old gear and sometimes people just want to get rid of stuff and will basically give it away. seen guys walk out with a whole station for like 200 bucks. go early tho, like right when it opens. the good stuff disappears fast and by noon its mostly just random coax and old magazines

I had the exact same problem with my BY-1 when I started! Check your paddle spacing - too tight and you'll get accidental contacts. Also make sure you're not squeezing too hard between your thumb and finger.

Just passed my Tech last month and picked up an Icom IC-2730A dual-band mobile. Planning to install it in my 2022 F-150 and want to do it right the first time. I've read conflicting advice about power connections - some say run direct to the battery, others say the fuse box is okay. What's the proper way to wire power for a 50-watt mobile? Also thinking about antenna placement - roof center vs hood lip mount? Don't really want to drill holes if I can avoid it. Any advice would be appreciated!

congrats on passing general! so yeah the short answer is you need to wait until your license actually appears in the FCC ULS database before you can file for a vanity. the CSCE gets you on the air legally but the FCC system won't even let you submit the vanity application until there's an actual license record to modify. usually takes a few days after your VE session submits everything. and yes there is a fee now — it was $35 last i checked but you'd want to verify that on the FCC site because they adjusted it not too long ago. the whole process after you apply takes ten business days i think, and if someone else applies for the same call in that window it goes to a tiebreaker which is basically whoever has been licensed the longest. just something to be aware of if youre going after a popular call. good luck with it, vanity hunting can be kind of addictive once you start looking at what's available

hamstudy.org is genuinely all you need for the technician exam, i passed with just that and maybe like two weeks of doing practice questions on my lunch break. the way it tracks which questions you're getting wrong and keeps drilling those is really useful. the question pool isnt as intimidating as it looks once you just start going through it, a lot of the answers are kind of obvious if you read them carefully and some of the technical stuff like ohms law shows up enough times that it sticks pretty quick. the test itself is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass, so theres a decent margin for error. find a local club that does testing sessions, most of them are pretty relaxed and the VEs are usually really friendly to first timers. i was nervous for nothing honestly.

Just hit my first 100 confirmed entities and ready to apply for basic DXCC! I have about 60 confirmations via LoTW and another 50+ paper QSL cards. Since I understand the applications are separate now and all get combined in your personal DXCC account, should I submit my LoTW confirmations first or send in the paper cards? I keep hearing LoTW is faster but want to make sure I'm doing this right for my first application.

so we've got a county-wide exercise coming up in about 6 weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before we start hauling stuff out to the park. last year we just ran everything off a big marine battery and it was fine for a few hours but the event coordinator wants us to be able to sustain 12+ hours this time which is a whole different animal. right now im looking at either bringing my honda eu2200i or just stacking a couple of 100ah lithium batteries with a decent solar panel if the weather cooperates. the genny is obviously more reliable but man it gets annoying after hour 3, the noise, the fuel runs, having to keep it away from the tent far enough to not CO everyone. the lithium setup is cleaner but im not confident enough in the solar to count on it as anything more than a top-off. also on the antenna side — were planning to run HF on 40 and maybe 80 at night, plus VHF/UHF for the nets. im thinking a linked dipole hung between two spiderpoles but the field we're using is pretty flat and open so i might be able to do a ground-mounted vertical instead which would be way easier to set up and tear down. anybody run the comet cHA-250 or something similar for this kind of mixed-mode field work? curious how it actually performs vs a resonant dipole when youre trying to hit a section net 200 miles out.

so ive been thinking about making the trip to dayton this year, never been and been doing this hobby for like 6 years now which is kind of embarrassing honestly. my buddy W4RKT went a few years back and said it was overwhelming in a good way. just wondering if anyone here is planning on going or if theres any regional swapfests worth hitting first to kind of get a feel for that whole scene before spending the money on dayton also our local club is supposedly doing a tailgate sale next month but nobody has posted anything official yet and the club website looks like it hasnt been updated since 2019 so who knows if thats actually happening

Great test! If you raised that dipole to half wavelength (10m), the far field advantage increases dramatically - even at 5 degrees the dipole would win by 3dB, and at one wavelength height that advantage jumps to over 6dB. The key takeaway is antenna height trumps polarization for most HF work.