Rajesh Patel

Just got my General class license and want to join our local ARES group. I'm seeing mentions of 5 online courses including FEMA ICS-100, IS-200, IS-700 and IS-800, plus the ARRL EC-001-S course. Is this really mandatory for all new members, or does it vary by area? I know training may be required or desired but want to know what to expect at the local level. Also wondering if there's a grace period to complete these while you're getting started with nets and exercises?

so i've been a tech for about a year and i finally upgraded to general last month and i keep seeing people talk about CW and how they love it and i got curious. i tried looking stuff up online and theres like a million different methods and apps and websites and i dont really know where to start or which way is even worth doing. like do people still learn the whole dit dah chart thing or is there some better way now. i downloaded one app but it felt like i was just memorizing patterns for each letter which someone told me is wrong but i dont totally understand why. anyway just wondering how people here actually did it when they were learning, what worked, what didnt

yeah what he said. i was terrified my first ARES activation (it was just a severe weather watch thing, nothing crazy) and i basically just did check-ins on the county net and relayed a couple messages. super low stakes but i felt like i actually contributed something. that feeling is kind of addictive honestly. one thing i'd say is look up whether your area uses AUXCOMM or has any connection to RACES too, some counties run both or they overlap in weird ways depending on how the local emergency management office is set up. my county the EC can explain all that better than i ever could but its worth asking about early so you understand the structure.

yeah the hybrid approach you're describing is actually something i tried for a while — SDR receiver running through one path just so i could have a wideband view of whats going on, and then the actual transceiver control going through a separate RRC-1258 link. it kinda works but honestly the sync between what youre hearing on the SDR feed versus whats actually happening on the rig gets annoying fast. theres enough delay difference between the two streams that you end up confused more than helped. i eventually just ditched the SDR monitor and stuck with the native audio from the RemoteHams link and it was fine for what i was doing which is mostly casual HF, ragchews and a little bit of digital.

congrats on getting it working, that first moment when you hear an actual voice come out of something you built from parts is hard to describe. the NE602 is a great starting chip for this kind of thing even if the purists hate on its dynamic range. for the audio filtering, a state variable active filter centered around 700hz or so makes a huge difference on SSB intelligibility. you can build one with a TL072 and a handful of resistors and caps, and being able to tune the Q a bit helps a lot. i added one to a similar receiver i built a couple years back and it basically transformed the thing from novelty to actually usable. the image rejection thing you mentioned is just the nature of DC designs, some people add a phasing network to get proper single sideband reception but thats a whole other rabbit hole involving matched RC networks and getting phase shifts right to maybe 1 or 2 degrees which is tedious. might be more fun to just enjoy what you have and then build a superhet next time.

so our club is doing a table at the Tri-County fest on the 14th and i was wondering if anyone else from around here is planning to show up. last year was pretty decent, got a barely used MFJ tuner for like 20 bucks and talked to a few guys i hadnt seen since the one in 2019. the swap meet tables have been getting smaller every year though which is kind of a bummer. still worth the drive i think if you need random coax adapters or want to dig through a bin of mystery knobs

I've been running LiFePO4 for three years now and love them, but honestly my first kit had a basic deep-cycle marine battery from Walmart. Conduct regular drills to practice setting up your Ham Radio Go-Kit. Familiarity with your equipment ensures you can deploy quickly during an actual emergency.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for logging contacts and chasing DX but honestly it feels more like a video game than actual radio sometimes. you just click a callsign and the software does everything. started looking at JS8Call because a few guys in my club keep talking about it and it seems like it actually lets you have a real exchange instead of just signal report and 73. my question is whether its worth setting up a whole separate profile in WSJT or whatever — i think JS8Call is its own thing right? i run an IC-7300 into a windows laptop with a SignaLink USB and the FT8 side of things took me forever to get the audio levels right so im a little gun shy about messing with a working setup. does JS8Call use the same audio routing or do you have to reconfigure everything? also curious how active the bands actually are on JS8 because i dont want to call CQ for an hour and get nothing. not trying to abandon FT8 entirely just want something where i can actually type a sentence to someone

that ohio contact on 400mw from virginia is genuinely solid, good propagation or not. 40m was being weird all last week so you picked a decent day if you got through at all. for a next build i'd honestly look at the ubitx if you want something more capable but still a project. it's not as elegant as some of the single band stuff but you get a lot of bands and the community around it is huge so when something goes wrong (and something always goes wrong) theres usually someone who had the exact same issue. alternatively if you liked the simplicity of the rockmite style, the 4state qrp group stuff is really well documented and the kits are reasonably priced. i built their 1watter a few years back and it was a good weekend project. the kx2 is nice but yeah its a different thing entirely. theres something about dragging out a rig you built yourself that a commercial radio just cant replicate, at least for me.

the go-kit demo is always the best part of those meetings lol. i went down a huge rabbit hole building mine after my first meeting and ended up way overcomplicating it at first. if you do put one together id say start simple, just something that works reliably, before you start adding solar panels and fancy logging software and all that. and yeah do the FEMA courses sooner rather than later, they're kind of tedious but you only have to do it once. i think i did mine over a couple evenings just knocking out one module at a time.

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years now and after the storms we had last month i finally got serious about it. our ARES group has been nudging me to get a proper go-kit together but honestly i wasnt sure where to start and every time i googled it i got these massive checklists that felt overwhelming. right now i have a Yaesu FT-857D that i use as my main HF rig and a couple handhelds, one is a Baofeng UV-5R and the other is a TYT MD-380 for DMR. i was thinking of just throwing those in a pelican case with some cables and calling it a kit but obviously thats not really a complete thing. what do you guys actually bring when you deploy? like power, antennas, logging stuff, all that. im especially fuzzy on the portable power side, do most people use LiFePO4 batteries now or still SLA? also curious how you keep it all organized because i feel like id show up somewhere and just have a tangled mess of cables and adaptors and forget half of what i need anyway

I prefer my Fluke 77 DMM for most work, but there's something to be said for analog meters when troubleshooting RF issues. Most consumer grade digital multi-meters (DMMs) can only measure up to 500 volts then display an error, or stop working altogether. If you work on tube gear, consider a VTVM too.

not a dumb question at all, special event stations and nets are pretty different things though they can overlap occasionally. special event stations are usually one-time or annual activations tied to some kind of event — lighthouse weekends, museum ships, that kind of thing — and you can find them listed on the ARRL special event page which actually updates pretty regularly. some of them hand out QSL cards or certificates which is a nice bonus if youre into that. for nets, honestly the best thing i ever did was just ask around at my local club. the printed schedules online are fine but half the really good nets i check into i heard about from somebody at a hamfest or just chatting on the repeater. RepeaterBook also lists a lot of nets tied to specific repeaters if you dig into the details on each listing. and yeah most clubs do run a weekly net, sometimes more than one — a lot of them have both a 2m voice net and a separate digital or HF net depending on the club membership. once you find a few you like, just showing up consistently makes a huge difference. net controls start to recognize your callsign and it just feels more like a community after a few weeks.

the RSP1B is a pretty solid jump from the rtl-sdr honestly, especially if you care about HF. the tuner in those cheap dongles just wasnt designed for serious work below 30 MHz and the direct sampling hack is exactly that — a hack. the RSPdx is even better if you want to go all in on HF with its HDR mode but costs more obviously that said if youre mostly doing VHF/UHF scanning the improvement is gonna be less dramatic. the dynamic range and sensitivity bump is real but whether you'd notice it on a busy local repeater, probably not. where you really feel it is trying to copy a weak SSB signal on 40m at night with all the QRM flying around, the RSP handles that way better in my experience. SDRuno is their software and its... fine. kinda clunky UI but stable. most people end up running it through SDR# with the SDRplay plugin anyway the HackRF is a different beast — its transmit capable so its in a different category, and the noise floor is actually worse than the RSP for pure receive. its a great tool but for monitoring id skip it unless you specifically need to TX or cover the weird frequency gaps

I went for the first time last year and honestly had no idea what to expect. It was kind of overwhelming but in a good way I think. Didn't buy anything because I didn't really know what I was looking at half the time but I talked to a bunch of people and got some ideas for antennas I want to build. Might try to go again this year if I can get the time off work.

im running almost the same stack actually, pi 4 with hamlib rotctld and an arduino handling the low level stuff. works great for my yagi on 2m. one thing i did was add a small cap across the wiper and ground on the feedback pot, like 100nF or so, helped clean up the ADC readings noticeably. probably not your whole problem but worth trying before you spend money on external ADC hardware.

yeah you'll pick most of them up just from being on the air honestly. the ones you really need to know starting out are QSY (change frequency), QRM (interference from other stations), QRN (static/natural noise), QRP (low power, like 5 watts or less), QSB (signal fading), and QRZ (who is calling me). QSL you know already which is basically acknowledge or confirm. people also say QRX which means standby or wait a minute. as for 73 thats a great question actually. it goes way back to landline telegraph days, there was a list of numeric codes and 73 was assigned to mean best regards or something similar. hams just kept using it when radio came along. you'll also hear 88 which means love and kisses, usually said to a spouse or close friend. some old timers use 55 for good luck. most of the numeric ones have fallen out of regular use though.

congrats on the first activation, those are always memorable. to answer your question — 44 QSOs is the threshold to qualify the reference as a full activation (what they call a valid activation for the hunters to count), but 10 is enough for what some programs consider a participation credit. depends a bit on which program you're logging it toward, WWFF international vs the domestic POTA-style tracking. for WWFF specifically i'd aim for 44 if you can. for the log upload, yeah you do need to upload separately to the wwff logbook at wwff.link or wherever your region is handled — LotW doesnt talk to them at all. the sig and sig_info fields are pretty important, sig should be WWFF and sig_info is the reference number like KFF-1234 or whatever yours was. if you dont have those in your adif some log managers let you do a bulk edit before export, ADIF Master is decent for that kind of thing. worst case email the wwff log manager for your region, they're usually pretty helpful about sorting out first-timer uploads.

I'm in the same boat returning to CW! Started with a single-lever and found it much more forgiving while rebuilding muscle memory. The timing is less critical and I make fewer sending errors.

so i finally pulled the trigger and built a simple 40m dipole out of some 14 gauge stranded wire i had laying around in the garage. cut each leg to roughly 33.5 feet, soldered them to a SO-239 chassis connector i had from an old project, and hung the whole thing up in an inverted-V configuration with the center about 25 feet off the ground using my push-up mast. fed it with about 50 feet of RG-8X coax. got it on the analyzer and the resonant point came in around 6.9 MHz which is lower than i wanted, so i trimmed about 4 inches off each leg and now im sitting right at 7.150 which is pretty much where i was aiming. SWR at resonance is like 1.3:1 which i thought was decent for a first attempt. works fine with the internal tuner on the radio anyway. my question is really about the feedline situation. i ran the coax directly from the center connector down to the shack with no choke or balun. should i be worrying about that? i keep reading conflicting stuff about whether you really need a choke balun on a dipole or if its just one of those things people argue about forever. also wondering if the inverted-V angle is hurting me much compared to a flat top — the legs are drooping down to about 10 feet at the ends. is that a meaningful difference or not really worth losing sleep over?

I started with exactly your setup last year. The IC-7610's native ethernet capability makes this much easier than older rigs. The wfview audio configuration page has details, and while they suggest VBAN for Windows, you can use it with Linux too. Start simple with just wfview, then add complexity once you have the basics working.

so i finally got my truck sorted out and im planning to make the drive up to the Tri-County hamfest Saturday morning. been maybe two years since i went to one of these and honestly forgot how much stuff piles up that i want to unload. got a couple old HTs, some coax i'll never use, and a power supply that works fine but ive already got three of them somehow. figured the swap meet tables are worth it just for that. anybody else from around here going? would be nice to maybe meetup at the swap tables or whatever, i'll probably be the guy with too much junk and not enough table space

Taking my first VE exam next week and getting nervous! I already have my FRN from the FCC CORES system and registered for the session. What should I bring and expect on test day? I know it's 35 multiple choice questions with a 74% passing score, but are there any test-taking strategies that help? Can I really retake it the same day if I fail?

I'm a new General trying to nail down proper phonetic usage. I know you're encouraged but not required to use NATO phonetics, and many operators use informal alternatives like America, Germany, Sugar, etc. My question: Are there specific situations where NATO phonetics are absolutely necessary vs. where alternatives are acceptable? For example, should I always use NATO when working DX? What about during contests or emergency communications? I want to develop good habits from the start.

honestly same experience here. i tried JS8Call for a few weeks and liked it but the activity in my region was just really sparse, kept calling CQ and getting nothing back for like an hour at a time. might depend a lot on where you are. i drifted back to FT8 mostly because at least something always happens when you turn it on. still have JS8Call installed though, might fire it back up and give it another shot on 40m like you mentioned