Helen Anderson

Yeah mag mounts can be tricky at highway speeds especially with longer antennas like that. The NR770 has quite a bit of wind load. You might want to try a lip mount or through-hole mount instead - much more secure. I had the same issue with my old setup until I bit the bullet and drilled a hole for a proper NMO mount. Works great now and no more worrying about losing my antenna on I-95

we do a lot of these longer activations for our ARES group and honestly the thing that helped us most was just getting the generator physically farther away than feels necessary. like 20 feet sounds fine but 50 feet with a longer extension cord made a bigger difference than any ferrite i tried. terrain helps too if theres any kind of berm or even your vehicle between the gen and the antenna feedpoint. your inverted vee on the jackite setup sounds solid for 40, thats basically what we run. one thing i'll mention — if the exercise goes overnight and temps drop make sure your feedline connectors are not the ones with that plasticky center insulator that gets loose when it cools down, had a connection go intermittent at like 2am once and spent an embarassing amount of time troubleshooting the radio before i found it.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff trips up people who've been at it for years honestly. the short version is that SFI (solar flux index) above 120 or so is when 20m really starts to come alive for transatlantic, though you can still get good openings in the 100-110 range especially during the gray line periods — that's sunrise and sunset when the ionosphere does interesting things. below 100 it gets spotty and patience becomes your main tool. the K index is kind of a separate thing — that's geomagnetic activity and yeah high K (above 4 or 5) will wreck HF propagation, especially the higher bands, not just VHF. so ideally you want high SFI AND low K. there are days where the flux looks great but K shoots up from a CME and it all goes sideways. i use the DXheat bandscope and also just check the NOAA space weather site when i'm feeling nerdy about it. the random thursday you described sounds like a classic evening gray line opening — those can be spectacular and then totally gone the next day. that's not you doing anything wrong, that's just how it works

yeah i was terrified my first few nets too lol. i actually kept a notepad next to the radio with like a little cheat sheet of what to say just so i wouldnt freeze up. the doubling thing is just kind of part of it, no big deal. welcome to actually getting on the air though, way better than just listening forever

Real world experience with the FT-5DR: about 10-12 hours with moderate repeater use, APRS tracking, and occasional digital contacts. The rugged design includes waterproofing and large color touchscreen, but that screen definitely impacts battery life compared to simpler displays.

the drift thing is super common with those colpitts designs, thermal stabilization takes forever especially if you didnt use NP0 caps in the tank circuit. that's usually the first thing to check. swapping in NP0 or C0G ceramics for the timing caps made a huge difference on mine, almost no drift after warmup. as for PLL, its doable but honestly for a first DC rx a good VXO with a quality toroid and some temperature compensation is a lot less headache. si5351 breakout boards are like 5 bucks now and people are doing great stuff with those for the LO, pairs nice with an arduino if you dont mind a little microcontroller stuff mixed into your RF. congrats on getting it working though, that first time you hear a real QSO on something you built yourself is a pretty good feeling

I did both systems when I started. eQSL integrates with most logging software and sends cards automatically, which is nice for casual contacts. But for serious DX work, LoTW is essential since LoTW QSLs count towards ARRL awards like DXCC.

so of course the one day i dont have my radio set up properly is the day everyone's saying 10 meters was absolutely cooking. saw a few spots on the cluster around midday and by the time i got home and got everything sorted out it was basically dead again. typical. anyway been trying to keep up with the solar flux numbers and it really does seem like we're getting some decent openings lately, cycle 25 is apparently doing better than a lot of folks predicted. i remember when 10m was basically a wasteland for like three or four years and now im hearing stories about guys working europe on a handheld with a wire antenna or whatever. little exaggerated probably but still. also saw that icom announced something new, the IC-7760 i think? havent had a chance to dig into the specs yet but someone at the club meeting was going on about it. anyone know much about it or is it just kind of a refresh of existing stuff? always skeptical of these things until i actually see one in the flesh at a hamfest or something.

The UV-5R is a great starter radio! They're perfectly adequate for the task and inexpensive enough for beginners. I'd suggest getting the programming cable and learning CHIRP software now while you have time. Also pack a paper copy of local repeater info - the purpose of emergency kit is to help when you can't access the cell network.

EchoLink is definitely the easiest to get running and has great smartphone integration for travelers. Echolink (http://echolink.org) Radio/Smartphone/PC to Radio/Smartphone/PC Good (but not great) voice quality Easiest Smartphone option If you want something up quickly, start there. You can always add AllStar later.

general isnt bad at all, honestly probably easier than tech in some ways because a lot of the tech stuff front-loads you on regulations and you already know that going in. the extra math stuff like calculating impedance or whatever tripped a few people up in our club but if you just drill the question pool on hamstudy it all kind of clicks after a while. i think i studied maybe 3 weeks pretty casually before i felt ready, maybe an hour here and there in the evenings. hamstudy is still what most people use and its genuinely good, it'll tell you when your weak areas are and focus you on those. there's also the ARRL general class book if you actually want to understand the why behind everything instead of just memorizing answers, which i'd reccommend if you have the time. on your FCC question - yeah you do need to wait for your license to show up in the ULS database before you can operate on the new privileges. used to be you had to wait for the physical license but they changed that a while back so as soon as the database reflects your upgrade youre good to go. usually just a day or two after the session results get submitted, sometimes faster.

Most study aids focus on memorizing answers to pass the test, but the question pools are public domain so there's no secret. I used HamStudy for drilling questions and ARRL manual for deeper understanding. The instant feedback with explanations for wrong answers really helps cement the concepts.

Both indices measure geomagnetic activity, but from different time perspectives. Both these indices give indications of the severity of magnetic fluctuations, and hence the level of disturbance to the ionosphere. Your numbers look great - I'd definitely go for that activation! Watch for any sudden K-index spikes during geomagnetic storms, those can kill HF propagation quickly.

Built a coil-loaded 20M dipole using 1.5L water bottles as forms, similar to what M3UKD documented. Started with 6m wire per element, wound 15 turns on each bottle then trimmed until analyzer showed resonance at 14.1MHz. The bottles worked perfectly as coil formers - cheap and effective. After testing with my IC-7300, first contact was OK2AOP in Czech Republic at 808 miles running only 10W! SWR stayed flat around 1.5:1 across the entire 20M band. Anyone else experimented with different coil formers or turn ratios for loading coils?

yeah what he said. i remember my first one, spent like 45 minutes convinced i was going to mess something up and then the whole thing was honestly kind of uneventful in the best way. the training exercises are actually pretty good prep. one thing i will mention — find out before you show up if they want you to log on paper or if they're using something like ICS 309 forms digitally, because some groups have shifted to winlink or even just shared google docs for the exercise and it helps to know ahead of time so you're not scrambling with unfamiliar software while also trying to listen to the net.

the bandpass filters are non negotiable if your antennas are anywhere near each other. i learned that the expensive way. even with good isolation on the feedlines the rf gets in through the ground path and just causes all kinds of weird behavior — audio artifacts, the S meter going nuts, one radio resetting on big transmit pulses, all of it. Array Solutions makes decent stuff and the Dunestar filters get recommended a lot too. if budget is the issue some guys build the W3NQN filters from scratch which are supposed to be excellent but thats a project in itself. anyway dont cheap out on that part of the build or youll spend the whole contest troubleshooting instead of operating which kind of defeats the whole point

Been noticing some patterns on the local repeaters that make me cringe. Don't cough, sneeze, or clear your throat on-the-air. Also seeing folks who Do not monopolize the repeater. If others turn off their radios because they can hardly talk to someone except you, something is wrong. What other mic habits should we all avoid? It's bad practice to kerchunk a repeater. If you want to see if you're hitting the repeater, simply say your call: "KX9X testing." If you hear the courtesy tone when you let off your mic, you're making it into the repeater. And by giving your call, you may spark a conversation with another Ham!