Helen Anderson

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

I only did my first one like 6 months ago so I remember this feeling lol. one thing nobody told me was to bring way more water than you think and also the summit can be way windier than at the trailhead, my paper log was basically useless by the end. also double check the summit reference on the SOTA database, make sure the actual peak you're hiking to matches the reference, I had a moment of panic on my first one because I wasn't sure I was on the right summit. the sotamaps site is helpful for that. you'll do great though, 4 contacts on HF with any kind of wire antenna is pretty easy to get once people see your spot

the HF propagation vs equipment issue thing is such a real problem. we had almost the exact same scenario play out during a SET a few years back except it wasn't the mic gain, our net control had his antenna connector come loose and nobody could figure out why his signal was so weak. cost us like half the exercise trying to diagnose it remotely which is obviously not something you can really do
i think that's one of the best lessons from any drill honestly, redundancy in everything. not just equipment but people too. we now make a point of having at least two people at every critical node who both know how to operate everything at that station

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.

not weird at all lol. i do it on 80m too when the noise floor isnt too bad. good way to just decompress after work without having to actually think about what youre gonna say to someone

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.

I just finished almost the exact same install in my Tacoma last week, weird timing. I went with the FTM-500DR instead because I wanted the APRS without needing an external TNC and the color screen is really nice in daylight. My only complaint so far is routing the power cable was a total pain on the Tacoma because of how tight everything is around the firewall grommet. Ended up using the existing grommet on the driver side and just barely squeezed the cable through. Direct to battery is definitely the right call, I tried running off the fuse box first and had all kinds of weirdness with the voltage dropping on transmit.

also worth knowing that 40m gets weird because of international allocations — in ITU region 1 (europe, africa) the band only goes up to 7.200 so if you're working DX on SSB up around 7.250-7.280 you might hear them but they literally cannot transmit back to you there legally. just something that confused me for a while when i first got on HF and kept wondering why europeans would go quiet after i'd call them back