Rebecca Turner

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?

lol im glad im not the only one who does this. my wife thinks im actually talking to people but half the time im just lurking. 40 and 80 both get weird and interesting after dark

might also be worth checking your power supply if you havent already. i know it sounds obvious but i chased a low power issue on a different rig for two weeks before realizing my supply was sagging under load. not saying thats definitely it but 28w is a pretty specific kind of low that can also come from the radio throttling itself if it sees voltage drop. what are you running it off of?

oh this is exactly what im trying to figure out right now actually. just got my general last month and ive been lurking on 40m trying to figure out the nets. i heard about the traffic nets but honestly the procedure sounds intimidating, like i dont want to mess up someone's radiogram or whatever. do the casual nets have any kind of formal check-in thing or can you just say your callsign and thats it

80mw into a random wire and you worked ZL?? what band was that on, curious what the propagation was doing. ive been trying to figure out if my efhw is actually as bad as i think it is or if i just have bad luck with paths to the pacific.
on the JS8Call thing i cant really help much ive only fired it up once and got confused by the interface and gave up honestly. might try again after reading this thread

okay so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to use the local 2m repeater but i cant seem to get into it. i programmed the frequency in my baofeng (i know i know, everyone has opinions about baofengs) and i can hear people talking on it just fine but when i key up nobody responds and i dont see my signal making it through.
someone at the club meeting mentioned i probably need a CTCSS tone but i guess i dont really understand what that is or how to find out which one to use. like is there a database for this stuff? and also do i set the tone on transmit only or on both transmit and receive? i saw something about DCS too and now im even more confused than when i started.
also on a slightly different topic — i heard some guys on the repeater talking about linked systems and it sounded like they were suddenly talking to people in a totally different city. is that through the internet or is it RF the whole way? just curious how that works

yeah this is exactly how it hooks you, man. i remember my first portable QRP contact like it was last month and it was probably 2019. there's just something about the whole thing — the minimal gear, figuring out the antenna situation on the fly, the satisfaction when someone actually hears you running milliwatts essentially.
for efficiency on a budget build, couple things that helped me a lot: first, really pay attention to your final transistor biasing if you havent already. a lot of kit builds are a little conservative there and you can sometimes squeeze out another half watt or so with some careful adjustment, though obviously watch your heat. second thing is the antenna is doing way more work than most people realize at QRP levels. ive seen guys obsess over squeezing one more watt out of their PA when if they just got their wire up another 10 feet theyd do way better. your end-fed setup sounds solid but experiment with the height and orientation when you can, makes a real difference. glad you finally got out there and did it.

so i finally got activated for a real event last weekend, not just a drill. county OEM called up ARES because there was a pretty bad flooding situation in the eastern part of the county and they needed some extra communication support for the shelter coordination. i've been through maybe four or five tabletop exercises and a couple of SET events but this was the first time it was actually real and people were actually depending on us.
honestly i was nervous going in. i kept second-guessing my go bag setup and wondering if i had everything. ended up on a net control position at the shelter and just worked traffic for about 6 hours straight. nothing glamorous, mostly relaying headcounts and supply requests but it felt like it actually mattered which is kind of the whole point right?
one thing that caught me off guard was how much of the job is just waiting and staying ready rather than actually transmitting. i probably made maybe 30-40 contacts over those 6 hours but spent way more time just monitoring and keeping a log. my EC had told me this but i guess you dont really understand it until you're sitting there.
anyway for anyone on the fence about joining ARES or RACES or whatever your local group runs — just do it. the training is worth it even if you never get activated. and the people in our group are genuinely some of the best hams ive met.

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 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

yeah that ragged peak thing is pretty normal for class C especially with bipolars, the conduction angle being what it is means you're never gonna get a textbook sine before the filter. the LPF is doing the heavy lifting there. the real question is how steep your filter cutoff is and whether it's actually tuned right for 40m. a lot of homebrew LPFs get built to a standard design but the toroids dont always match their rated inductance especially if you wound them yourself on mixed cores.
if you can borrow a spectrum analyzer or even just check against a nearby receiver with an attenuator you can get a rough idea of how much second and third harmonic you're putting out. regs require at least 43dB down on harmonics for that power level so as long as youre in the ballpark you're fine. the waveform before the filter really isnt the thing to obsess over for class C, that's expected.