Helen Anderson

don't worry, everyone goes through this exact moment of "wait what are all these awards" haha. so the short version is you can absolutely upload your existing log to LoTW right now and get credit for anything where the other station has also uploaded their log - it matches up automatically. so no, you dont need to start over, just get TQSL set up and import your adif file and let it do its thing. as for which award to chase first, honestly WAS is probably the most satisfying early goal for a US ham because working all 50 states feels very achievable and you'll rack up a bunch of them without even trying during contest weekends. DXCC is more of a long game but 200 contacts in you might already have 30 or 40 entities without realizing it if youve been on 20m. just look at your log and see where people were coming from. WAZ is fun but some of those zones are genuinely hard to find on the air so id save that for later when youre more comfortable chasing specific stations. the mixed vs phone vs digital thing just means you can get endorsed for working the requirement entirely on one mode, or a mix of all of them. most people start with mixed because it counts everything together.

congrats on the activation, 22 contacts is solid especially running 10 watts. the pile thing gets easier I promise. what helped me most was just slowing down and working one call at a time, even if it feels like you're leaving people waiting. call for partial calls too like "station ending in romeo go ahead" and that cuts through the chaos a bit. on the spotting question -- yeah most folks spot on POTA.app as soon as they're on frequency and ready to transmit, not necessarily before. some people spot a little early with an ETA in the comments but that can cause hunters to camp the freq before youre ready. id say spot when your ready to transmit your first CQ. also make sure your logging something, even paper works fine, you can transfer to the POTA app later. dont stress the two missed contacts, honestly happens to everyone especially when a pileup hits out of nowhere.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about chasing DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly i didnt really understand any of it until recently when i started actually looking into it. i think i get the basics now — DXCC is working 100 entities, WAS is all 50 states, WAZ is all 40 CQ zones — but what i dont get is the order people usually tackle these in, or if it even matters. my antenna situation is not great, just a G5RV in the attic because HOA, so DX is hit or miss for me. ive worked maybe 30 states already just kind of casually and i wasnt even trying for WAS at the time so i didnt get everything confirmed on LoTW which i guess i should have been doing from day one. is there any way to get those contacts credited retroactively if the other station uploaded their logs? or am i just out of luck on those. anyway i guess my main question is which award makes the most sense to pursue given my antenna situation, and also how strict is the confirmation process for each one. i heard DXCC is pretty serious about it compared to the others.

yeah what he said about the edge is important, i learned that the hard way when i first got on HF. also worth knowing that 7.125 to 7.175 is the general CW/digital segment so dont wander down there with phone. and around 7.200 you'll run into the atlantic hurricane net and a few others that kind of informally own certain frequencies, nobody can actually own a frequency but good luck telling them that lol. just listen around first and you'll figure out the patterns pretty quick

14 contacts on a compromised antenna with improvised rigging is honestly a solid first activation, dont be too hard on yourself. my first one i only got 11 and i had to count a couple sketchy contacts that i wasnt even sure copied my callsign correctly. for logging i switched to the POTA app on android and it works pretty well for me now, uploads directly when you get signal. some guys use Wavelog or just a paper log and do the ADIF conversion later which is fine too. the main thing is getting the reference number right on every contact, ive seen activations get flagged because the operator forgot to log the park ref and then the hunter credits dont match up. for your next one try to get the antenna higher if you can, even a cheap throw line makes a huge difference. and maybe spot yourself on the POTA spotting network early, the hunters will find you fast and you can rack up contacts way quicker than just calling CQ blind into the void.

I went through almost the exact same thing after Field Day two years ago. Totally burned out. What actually helped me weirdly was just listening for a while without transmitting, kind of like when I was first getting into the hobby before I even had my ticket. Just had the radio on in the background while I was doing other stuff around the house and slowly started getting interested again. Took maybe a month but it came back on its own.

yeah the fan mod is only really worth it if you run high duty cycle modes like FT8 for long stretches, otherwise youre right it prob isnt worth opening it back up. the audio stuff you mentioned is legit though. i did similar adjustments on mine and combined with a decent compressor setting it really cleaned things up on SSB. what mic are you running? i found the stock hand mic was kind of fighting against any EQ i tried to do, switched to an SM58 with the right impedence matching and suddenly everything just sat better in the passband. the 7300 is super tweakable if you know where to look in the menus, half the stuff icom buried in there doesnt even get mentioned in the manual properly.

yeah 10m is tricky because the flux index alone doesnt tell the whole story — you also gotta watch the K index and A index. if the K index is above like 3 or 4 youre probably gonna have a rough time even with decent solar flux, geomagnetic disturbances just kill HF propagation especially on the higher bands. the thing about 10m is it really opens in specific windows, not all day. late morning into early afternoon your local time is usually the sweet spot for transequatorial stuff, and sometimes theres a nice long path opening in the evenings that catches people off guard. i've worked southern africa on 10m at times i wouldve bet money the band was dead. honestly just leave a receiver on with the squelch off while you do other stuff and you'll start to get a feel for when it wakes up. dxmaps and pskreporter are your friends, filter to 10m and watch the spots roll in before you even pick up the mic.

so ive been meaning to ask if anyone here is planning on hitting the Tri-County hamfest, i think its the 14th? or maybe the 15th, i always mix up the dates. been going for the past 3 years and picked up some decent stuff in the swap meet area, last time i got an old Kenwood for like 40 bucks that just needed a new belt. anyway curious if any of the local club guys are doing a table this year, i might try to unload some of the stuff thats been sitting in my shack taking up space

so its been raining all day here and i ended up just spinning the dial on 40m for like two hours not really working anyone just listening. caught some guys having a roundtable down around 7.250 talking about their antennas and it just reminded me why i got into this in the first place. no agenda, no contest, just dudes talking radio. been a while since ive done that honestly. anyone else have days like this where you dont even really want to make contacts you just want to be around the hobby if that makes sense

yeah what he said about LoTW being the one for DXCC is right. i'll just add that eQSL does have its own awards system if you want to mess around with that, some people really get into it. and the cards on there can look pretty cool actually, some operators make really nice designs. oh also make sure youre uploading your own log to LoTW, sounds obvious but i forgot to do that for like two months when i started and wondered why nothing was matching lol. you both have to upload for a confirmation to show up.

Congrats on the first one, 23 QSOs is a solid activation especially on your first go. The time of day thing depends a lot on the bands you're using and honestly just what else is going on that day. Mid morning saturday is actually pretty good because youve got hunters in Europe still up on 20m and domestic hunters are awake and watching the spots. I tend to avoid activating late afternoon on weekdays just because the bands get weird and there arent as many hunters active. Early morning can be magic sometimes though if you catch the right propagation. The two reference number thing - yes you can absolutely count both with the same contacts as long as you're physically in the overlap area. You log both park references in your log and upload them as separate activations on the POTA website, but the actual QSOs can be the same ones. So those 23 contacts could count toward activating both parks simultaneously. Just make sure you're clear you were actually in the overlap, some parks are adjacent but not actually overlapping and that matters. Worth double checking on the POTA website for those specific references, they have maps now that help a lot.

this is really helpful im about to do almost the exact same install in my jeep with an FTM-500 and i was planning to just use a mag mount for now. didnt realize the power routing was such a big deal, i was just gonna tap into a fuse in the fuse box lol. maybe ill do it right from the start and save myself the headache

so i got my TM-D710G set up in the truck about three weeks ago and have been running APRS pretty much full time on 144.390. been loving it, watching myself move around on aprs.fi, messaging a buddy across town, all that stuff. really cool to see the digipeaters picking me up. anyway ran into a guy at the club meeting last night who said i was 'flooding the channel' because my beacon interval is set to 30 seconds. i honestly didnt know that was considered rude? i thought SmartBeaconing was supposed to handle that dynamically but im not 100% sure i have it configured right on the radio. the manual is kind of confusing about it. is 30 seconds fixed interval actually that bad when youre driving around? i figured moving stations need more frequent updates but maybe im wrong here. what do you guys run for intervals

ok so ive been listening to HF a lot lately on my new radio and i keep hearing people say things like QSL and QTH and QRM and honestly i have no idea what most of them mean. i found a list online but there are like hundreds of them and i dont know which ones actually get used vs which ones are just historical or whatever. like do people really use all of those or is it just the common ones? also i noticed on some of the digital modes people use even more abbreviations that arent Q codes, like 73 and stuff. is there like a standard reference for all of this or do you just kind of pick it up over time. feels like learning a whole other language on top of already learning radio