Kevin Park

honestly the studying was worth more to me than the actual license upgrade. i had been doing things kind of by feel for years, like i knew enough to get on the air and work stations but i didnt really understand why certain things worked or didnt. going through the extra material especially the stuff on Smith charts and transmission line behavior and filter topologies actually filled in a lot of gaps for me. i wouldnt say i use that knowledge every single day but when something is acting weird with my antenna system now i have more of a framework to think through it instead of just guessing. the extra HF segments are a nice bonus too. 40m and 80m in particular, the extra portions tend to be a bit less crowded during contests which is genuinely useful. but yeah the main value for me was the learning. just take your time with the theory sections and dont try to just memorize answers, actually work through the math a few times and it sticks better than you'd think

i did the mod on mine too but honestly be careful if you ever need warranty work or send it in for repair, some service centers get weird about it even years after purchase. mine had a PA issue last year and the shop i used noticed it right away. they still fixed it but there was a whole conversation about it i didnt really want to have lol. just something to keep in mind. aside from that yeah its a simple mod and doesnt hurt anything.

bring more water than you think you need, i always forget this part and end up miserable halfway through lol. also make sure you know ahead of time if the park requires you to stay on designated trails or if you can set up anywhere — some state rec areas are picky about that and the last thing you want is a ranger making you tear down your antenna after you just got spotted. oh and write your park reference number on a piece of paper and keep it next to you. sounds dumb but when youre in the middle of a pileup and someone asks for the park number its way easier than trying to remember it or fumble with your phone

so we ran a county-wide simulated emergency exercise last saturday and i have to say it did not go the way anyone expected. we had maybe 18 operators spread across 4 shelter sites plus a net control station at the EOC and within the first 20 minutes we already had people transmitting out of turn, message traffic getting garbled on the way to net control, and one of the sites completely lost comms because the guy running it forgot to bring a backup power source and his HT battery died. the scenario was a flood event, roads cut off, primary infrastructure down, shelters filling up, all that. on paper it sounded manageable but once you're actually trying to pass formal traffic and coordinate resource requests at the same time as keeping a net running it gets chaotic fast. i've been doing ARES stuff for like 6 years and even i felt the stress of it. biggest takeaway for me personally was that we dont practice formal message handling nearly enough. people know how to key up and talk but the moment you ask them to pass an ICS-213 message accurately over voice they start paraphrasing and that's where things fall apart. also nobody had their go-bag really dialed in, like people showed up without printed frequency lists or without knowing the backup simplex freqs if the repeater went down. curious if other groups have found good ways to work this stuff into regular training without it feeling like homework. we want people to actually show up to practice sessions

i run both and tbh on 40 i cant tell a huge difference on receive, maybe slight edge to the dipole on noise but that could be placebo. the efhw is just way easier for me to throw up in the backyard without arguing with my wife about where the stakes go lol. common mode can be annoying with the end fed if you dont sort out the feedline, had some rfi getting back into the shack before i added a 1:1 choke near the rig end.

honest question — does any of this apply when youre talking about a genuinely rare entity with like a thousand people in the pile? i tried working that FT5 operation a while back and it felt completely random, didnt matter what i did. 500w into a yagi and i couldnt get a sniff for the first two days. eventually got through on 17m but i think that was just luck more than anything i did differently. the offset frequency thing makes sense in a smaller pile but when you have ops specifically announcing their working range like "listening 5 to 10" does it still help to go outside that window or does that just annoy them

yeah the low K index is a big part of it, you got lucky with the timing on that one. when the K index spikes above 3 or 4 things can get pretty rough especially on the higher HF bands so a quiet day geomagnetically combined with decent flux is kind of the sweet spot. for predicting it i mostly use the wwv solar data — you can actually just tune to 10.000 MHz and they broadcast the flux and K index every hour at 18 minutes past if i remember right. theres also a few apps, i use one called HamSphere just to glance at conditions but honestly a lot of it is pattern recognition you build up over time. this part of the solar cycle we're in now, 10 and 12 meters can pop open really fast especially late morning into early afternoon your local time for EU paths if you're in north america. just worth having the radio on even if you're not actively calling CQ. the JA opening is interesting, those tend to happen on a slightly different window, more like early morning on the west coast or late afternoon on the east coast depending on the season. you might have caught a long path opening or just a particularly well-illuminated path that day.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and honestly just been doing random QSOs here and there on 40m mostly, but a few guys at my club keep telling me i need to try a contest. one of them mentioned CQ WW is coming up and that it's one of the big ones? i looked it up and it does seem massive, like people from everywhere are on at once which sounds kind of overwhelming if im being honest i dont really understand the exchange format yet or how logging works during a contest. i've been using WSJT-X for FT8 stuff but i get the impression contest ops are mostly on SSB and CW which... i can do SSB but CW im still learning. is CQ WW beginner friendly at all or should i maybe start with something smaller? someone also mentioned ARRL Field Day which sounds more casual but i think that already happened this year also been seeing a lot of SOTA activity on 2m when im out hiking which looks super fun, not sure if SOTA counts as a contest or more of an award program thing. anyway just trying to figure out where to jump in without making a fool of myself on the air

the hum in those LM386 builds is almost always the power supply, or RF rectifying somewhere in the audio path. 100uf is probably fine but are you also bypassing right at the IC pins? like a small ceramic, 0.1uf or so right at pin 6 to ground, not just a big cap somewhere on the board. that little cap does more than the big one in my experience. also check your layout, if the audio return path shares any ground with the LO or RF ground you'll get all kinds of weird coupling. the 200-300hz drift on a colpitts isn't terrible honestly, i built one for 20m that drifted way worse until i stuck it in a small metal enclosure and that alone cut the drift in half. thermal stuff. also NP0 caps in the tank circuit if you aren't already using them, makes a big difference on stability.

yeah the 7300 at 50w is pulling maybe 10-11 amps on transmit peaks, idle is way less obviously. with a 100ah lithium you should be totally fine for a full day of moderate activity, those bioenno packs are solid ive had mine for 3 years no complaints. just make sure whatever you're using to charge the laptop doesn't have a crappy inverter or switching noise that gets into your audio — had that problem once with a cheap inverter and it took me forever to track down the buzz on receive. one thing i would do is bring the generator anyway just in case, even if you dont plan to run it. three weeks out is not a lot of time to discover your batteries wont hold charge like they used to.

so ive been going back and forth on whether to make the trip out to dayton this year, its like a 6 hour drive for me and last time i went in 2019 i honestly spent way more than i planned on just random junk i didnt need. found a great deal on a kenwood ts-430s though so i guess it evened out. anyway my local club is doing a carpool thing and a few guys are splitting a hotel room if anyone wants in. just wondering if people think its worth it these days or if its gotten too crowded and overpriced. feel like the flea market side has gotten smaller but maybe thats just me

so ive been trying to get Winlink Express working for about two weeks now and im just about ready to throw the laptop out the window. background: i have a Signalink USB feeding into an IC-7300, running on 40m mostly because thats what my club recommended for emcomm purposes. got my callsign registered on winlink.org, downloaded the latest Winlink Express, set up a Vara HF session and it just... sits there. says connecting to RMS then times out. i can hear activity on the waterfall so the audio path seems fine, but nothing is actually happening. checked the RMS list and theres a couple gateways within what should be reasonable range. tried the telnet session just to confirm my account works and that goes through fine so its not an account issue. i think its either my audio levels being wrong or maybe the dial frequency is off, i dont really know. anyone dealt with this before? also slightly confused about the difference between the RMS relay and a direct peer to peer session, feel like i might be confusing myself there too.

yeah the pi zero USB implementation is a bit janky honestly, ive had similar headaches with it and serial devices. one thing that helped me was adding a keepalive poll in my script — just query the rig ID or something every 30 seconds so the connection doesnt go idle. some radios and some USB-serial chips really dont like long silences and the 7300's virtual COM port can be a bit moody. also worth checking if you have a udev rule set up to lock the device to a specific path like /dev/ic7300 or whatever, sometimes the port name shifts between restarts and the script is actually talking to nothing without realizing it. that one bit me for a solid week before i figured it out.

yeah you got the contact count right, WWFF requires 44 QSOs to validate an activation which is definitely more than POTA's 10. some people find that intimidating at first but honestly once you get on a decent reference and spot yourself on the WWFF spotter network the pile comes in pretty fast, especially if you're on 40m during a weekend morning like you were for the log upload you want to go to wwff.net not wwff.us, easy to mix them up. you'll need to create an account if you havent already and then submit an ADIF file. just make sure your reference number is in there and the log software exports it correctly, some of them dont automatically include the WWFF ref in the comment field and you have to add it manually. i use HAMRS in the field and it handles it ok but i always double check before uploading congrats on the first one, 47 in 2 hours on 25 watts with a random wire is genuinely solid

yeah what he said about the multi-op is good advice. i remember my first CQ WW watching from a corner of the room thinking i would never be able to do that and then someone handed me the mic during a slow moment and i worked like 6 countries in 20 minutes and was completely hooked after that. theres something about the pileups that just gets into your blood. one thing i'd add — if you get into contesting at all, N1MM+ is pretty much what everyone uses for logging and it handles the exchange templates and dupe checking automatically so you dont have to keep track of everything in your head. worth downloading and just poking around before the event so it doesnt feel totally foreign when youre at the station.

our club usually does a table there if anyone wants to coordinate, i know W8something (blanking on the callsign right now) was organizing it. check the reflector i think someone posted about it last week

the snowball thing you described is totally normal, almost everyone hits that wall. the trick that actually worked for me after years of stalling was to stop worrying about copying every single letter and just let the ones you miss go. sounds counterintuitive but your brain needs to learn to stay in the present instead of panicking about what just went by. also 20 minutes a day is fine but consistency matters more than duration. i did 15 minutes every single morning for about 8 months before i really felt comfortable around 15wpm. the jump from 15 to 20 came faster than i expected once i got there. and honestly the guy at your club isnt wrong about jumping on the air, but maybe start by just listening to the qso partners calling cq on 40m without trying to respond. just copy practice with real signals. you'll be surprised how much easier it gets when theres a purpose to it. the 7.050 to 7.060 range in the evenings usually has some slower stuff going on.

ok so i passed my general a few months back and ive been trying to figure out the 40m band but honestly the more i read the more confused i get. like theres the FCC allocation and then theres the ARRL band plan and they dont seem to be the same thing? and then people online keep saying stuff like dont operate too close to the band edge which i sort of get but not really so my specific question is if my license says i can use 7.175 to 7.300 for phone, does that mean i can literally transmit anywhere in there or are there like unwritten rules i should know about. someone at my club mentioned something about leaving 10khz from the edge but i didnt totally understand why. is that a legal thing or just a courtesy thing also is 40m different in other countries because i heard something about the band being different in europe or somewhere

cant really help with the rotator specific stuff but i will say the Pi 4 in the drawer thing resonates deeply with me, i have three of them doing nothing and keep telling myself ill make them into something useful. one of them is technically running a WSJT-X remote setup but the other two are just sitting there judging me. the arduino plus pi combo is actually a really solid architecture for this kind of thing from what ive seen. arduino handles anything that needs to be real time or PWM or whatever and the pi handles the network stuff and the UI. i built a little automated antenna switch with that setup for my HF station and its been running for like eight months without me touching it which is either a good sign or means ive completely forgotten how it works.

yeah the silence thing is probably just net control making sure they got your call right, happens to everyone. they're usually copying a lot of callsigns fast and sometimes they'll echo it back just to confirm. probably wasnt a you problem honestly

Focus on the HF-specific stuff first - propagation, band plans, and antenna theory. The General Class exam consists of 35 multiple-choice questions covering topics such as operating practices, regulations, and electronics theory. You'll encounter questions about frequency allocations, station setup, signal propagation, antennas, safety, and more. The math gets a bit deeper than Tech level, especially with RMS calculations and reactance.

20 meters alone is worth the upgrade - The 20-meter band is arguably the best band for "working DX," that is to say making contacts with stations in foreign countries. I work Europe daily on 20m SSB around 1400Z. Also get access to FT8 and other digital modes on HF which are incredibly popular now.

yeah first exercises are rough, don't beat yourself up. i remember showing up to a simulated shelter deployment a few years back thinking i had my go-bag dialed in and then realizing i'd forgotten a power cable for my HF rig. had to borrow one from somebody. now i have a laminated checklist taped inside the lid of my kit bag which feels dorky but honestly has saved me from being that guy again. the tribal knowledge thing you mentioned is real and its kind of a problem in emcomm circles honestly. a lot of groups do the exercise, debrief for like 20 minutes, and then nobody writes anything down and the same mistakes show up again next year with the new people. the groups that actually improve are the ones that do a real after action review and keep records of what went wrong. our group started keeping a shared doc of lessons learned from every exercise and activation and it made a noticeable difference. not trying to make it sound like we have it all figured out because we definitely dont, but that one change helped.

The secure authentication using cryptographic keys is what makes LoTW so reliable for awards. Once you're set up, your logging software can upload automatically. I've confirmed over 2,000 QSOs this way - beats mailing paper cards!

Got my first HT last month (Anytone DMR) and loving it! The codeplug was confusing at first but now I can hit repeaters three states away with 5 watts. Pretty amazing compared to my dad's old Kenwood.