Rebecca Turner

yeah get there early, like embarrassingly early. im talking gates open and you're already walking around with a flashlight early. the good rigs disappear fast, seen guys practically running to tables they scoped out the day before. i went two years back and missed a nice drake by maybe 10 minutes, still bothers me. the indoor vendor hall is fine but the flea market is where its at if you want deals on older gear

so ive been messing around with AO-7 and a couple of the other linear birds for a few weeks now and im still not totally clear on the doppler correction thing. i get the basic concept — satellite is moving so frequency shifts — but when people say to tune the downlink to keep it constant and let the uplink drift... is that actually what most people do? or do you tune both? my setup right now is an FT-847 with a pair of crossed yagis, az/el rotator running off hamlib and gpredict. the tracking part seems to work fine, i can hear signals on the downlink no problem. but when i transmit i feel like im always slightly off and contacts are hit or miss. ive read the wiki stuff but some of it feels like it was written in 2003 and im not sure how much still applies also curious if anyone has run into issues with gpredict and the doppler plugin being slightly laggy — sometimes it feels like theres a half second delay between where the sat actually is and what the software thinks

New to HF and hearing lots of different phonetic words - some guys say 'America' for A or 'Germany' for G. I thought we were supposed to use NATO phonetics (Alpha, Golf) for consistency? When do experienced ops deviate from the standard and why? Also hearing contest stations switch between different sets - is there some advantage I'm missing?

so ive been wanting to do this for ages and finally pulled the trigger on a QCX mini kit a few months back. took me about two evenings to build it, one alignment session where i nearly gave up because the BPF adjustment was driving me nuts, and then it just... worked. like actually worked first time on the smoke test which honestly surprised me. took it out to a local park last weekend with a wire antenna i threw together — just a random wire up about 25 feet into a tree with a 9:1 unun and a little manual tuner — and spent maybe 3 hours just calling CQ on 40m. running 5 watts. made 11 contacts including one guy in Germany which still kind of blows my mind when i think about it. 5 watts and a wire in a tree. anyway the whole thing fits in a small pelican case with room for the tuner, some coax, and my log book. battery was just a little lipo pack i had from a RC hobby thing, lasted the whole session no problem. the efficiency of these little rigs is genuinely impressive, i had no idea how far 5 watts could go when conditions are decent. anyone else doing portable QRP stuff regularly? curious what antennas people are using and whether its worth building vs just buying something like a KX2 or whatever. the building experience was really fun but im not sure i could handle a more complex scratch build yet.

congrats on the first one, 44 in a session is solid especially on just 40 and 20. for the log submission you upload your ADIF directly to the wwff.cc site, theres a log submission section in your account area once you register your callsign. it usually gets processed within a day or two and youll see your activation show up on the stats page. the validation isnt really a manual review thing in my experience, as long as your log has the 44 minimum and the reference number is right it goes through fine. for the park boundaries question — i usually cross reference with the official government website for whatever agency manages the land, like if its a state forest i look it up on the state forestry dept site and they usually have a PDF map or sometimes even a GIS layer. some of the WWFF references also have a notes field on the wwff.cc listing that mentions the managing agency. honestly for most activations if youre clearly inside the named forest youre fine, they arent going to come after you for being 50 meters off on a boundary line.

so ive been building this double sideband transmitter for 40 meters off and on for about three months now, mostly following the basic balanced modulator design from EMRFD with a couple of changes i made because i couldnt source the exact diodes they specified. ended up using 1N4148s matched with a DMM on the diode test setting, got four of them within about 1mV of each other which i thought would be good enough. anyway the thing actually transmits and my buddy down the road can hear me, but when i key up without audio the carrier is still pretty audible on his end. he says its maybe 20dB down from when im talking which honestly doesnt seem great. ive got the trimmer pot trying to null it out and i can get it a bit better if i fiddle for a while but it drifts around as it warms up and never really stays null for long. not sure if its the diodes not being matched well enough or something else in the circuit. the carrier source is a 7.2MHz colpitts oscillator that i built on a separate board. anyone dealt with this kind of drift issue before, is there something im missing about keeping these things stable once they warm up

yeah i went down exactly this hole about 18 months ago and never really came back out lol. I2C between the pi and arduino works fine but honestly for relay switching you probably dont need it unless you want the arduino handling timing-critical stuff independently. if its just switching antenna relays based on a band command from the pi, just wire up a relay board directly to the GPIO and write a simple python function that maps band to relay state. way less complexity. where the arduino actually earns its keep in my setup is handling the rotator interface — i needed faster loop timing than the pi could reliably give me with linux getting in the way, and the arduino handles that no problem while the pi just sends it target azimuth commands over serial. that separation of concerns made everything way more stable. the pi is terrible at anything that needs real-time response, just keep that in mind before you trust it with anything timing sensitive

So I finally got my general license back in the spring and ive been listening to a lot of contest activity on the weekends, mostly just watching the waterfall and trying to figure out whats going on. A buddy at the local club keeps telling me I should just jump in and try CQ WW this october and stop overthinking it. Thing is I dont really know how serious people get about this. Like is it okay to just casually call CQ and collect a few contacts or is everyone on there so competitive that a low power station with a dipole is just gonna get buried and ignored? I run about 100 watts into a wire antenna in the attic so not exactly a superstation situation here. Also curious if anyone has tips for logging software because right now I just have a notepad file which is probably not gonna cut it for a real contest. Also somewhat unrelatedly — has anyone been doing SOTA activations lately? Ive been eyeing a few summits in my area and it sort of seems like a different world from contesting but I dunno, both seem like a good way to actually use the radio instead of just listening.