David Wilson

so our ARES group finally got around to doing a full scale exercise last saturday and honestly it was a lot more humbling than i expected. we've been doing tabletop stuff for a couple years now but this was the first time we actually had people deployed at simulated EOC locations, a couple of us running portable HF, and a net control station that was supposed to coordinate everything. the first thing that fell apart was message traffic. we were using ICS-213 forms and someone had printed the wrong version so the fields didnt match what net control was expecting. took like 20 minutes to sort out and in a real event that could matter. second thing was our simplex fallback plan — we'd agreed on a frequency but nobody had programmed it into their handhelds ahead of time so there was a lot of fumbling around. the good stuff though: our HF link on 40m actually held up really well considering conditions, and one of the newer guys who'd never done anything like this before just kind of stepped up and became a really solid relay station. those moments are why we do this i think. curious if other groups have done similar exercises and what lessons came out of them. especially interested in how people handle the message traffic piece because that seems to be where we keep falling down.

oh man you're gonna love this rabbit hole haha. QRZ just means "who is calling" by the way. There's tons of em but honestly you only need to know maybe 20 or so for normal operating. QSL means confirmed/acknowledged, QRT means stopping transmission, QRX means wait/standby. QTH is location. The ARRL has a big list but dont try to memorize it all at once, you'll go crazy

High SWR with correct resonant frequency typically indicates impedance mismatch, not element length issues. Start by checking your matching section - that 300Ω ladder line length is critical. Try adjusting it in small increments first before touching the radiating elements.

okay so the big thing everyone who actually stuck with it will tell you is dont learn the dots and dashes as visual patterns, like dont make a chart and stare at it. your brain ends up counting and you'll never get fast enough to actually use it. what you want is to hear the letters as sounds, like the whole letter as one thing not dit-dit-dah or whatever. the Koch method is basically starting with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm or whatever your target is, and you only add a new character when you can copy the current ones at like 90% accuracy. LCWO.net is free and does exactly this, thats where most people start these days. there's also the Morse Toad app which some people swear by. just do like 10-15 minutes a day consistently, that matters more than doing an hour once a week. it took me probably 4 or 5 months before i felt comfortable enough to actually try calling CQ and even then my copying was pretty rough for a while

Welcome to HF! Generally propagation conditions are OK when the A index is 10 or lower, and the K index is 3 or lower and the SFI above 90. Your current numbers sound great actually - K index of 0 or 1 is best, 2 is OK, 3 or more not so good. SFI in the 130s will give you solid 20m conditions during the day.

been running my 7300 for about 3 years and the only mod i ever did was add an external ref input hack i found on eham — its not officially supported but you can get a 10mhz gpsdo locked into it with some careful soldering. whole different level of stability if you care about that kind of thing, mainly useful for weak signal vhf contests in my case but still cool to have honestly though for most hf operating stock is totally fine and id agree with whoever said better antenna first. ive seen guys dump money into rig mods while running a compromised dipole and its kind of backwards

the ft-950 and 7300 combo is actually not bad for this, ive seen worse. one thing people dont talk about enough is the logging software side — N1MM+ has SO2R support built in and getting that configured right before the contest is honestly half the battle. the radio focus switching, the audio routing, knowing which rig is transmitting at any given moment, that stuff will mess you up if you havent practiced it outside of a real contest also worth mentioning that even if you dont do true SO2R you can get some of the benefit by just using the second radio for passive monitoring, like let it sit on 40 while youre running 20 and just keep an eye on the bandmap. not as efficient but way less stressful and no transmit intermod issues to deal with

it does NOT calm down, just so you know. i did my first CQ WW back in like 2009 and i still get that same stupid grin when the rate meter spikes. 380 contacts on a wire dipole for your first time is honestly really solid, a lot of people quit after a couple hours when they cant figure out why nobody is answering their CQ. the trick you probably already figured out is finding a clear frequency and holding it rather than just search and pouncing the whole time, you get way more multipliers that way once the rate drops. ARRL DX in february is a great next step, the exchange is simpler too just signal report and your state or power level depending which side of the border you are on. and yeah try the CW side even if youre slow, people are generally patient during contests more than you might expect, especially at lower rates on sunday afternoon. Field Day in june is a completely different vibe too if you havent done that with a club yet, more of a social thing but still a good time.

yeah I went through the same thing when i upgraded. what helped me was just downloading the actual ARRL band plan chart and printing it out and taping it next to my radio. sounds old fashioned but i still reference it. also worth knowing that the band plan is slightly different from the actual FCC rules — the band plan has like gentlemans agreements about where CW vs phone goes but only the FCC allocations are legally binding per part 97. so like nobody is going to cite you for doing phone at 7.200 even though some people get grumpy about it

same situation here when i started lol. what helped me was just thinking about it like -- would a person who had never heard my callsign before be able to write it down correctly on the first try. if the answer is maybe not, use phonetics. my callsign has a Q and a Z in it so i basically always go full phonetic or people think im saying something completely different. Quebec Zulu sounds way less ambiguous than just the letters especially with any static at all

honestly the technician exam is way more approachable than people think. i was in the same boat a couple years ago, had zero background in electronics or anything. what i did was just use HamStudy.org, just go through the question pool on there every day for maybe 20-30 minutes and it tracks your progress. the whole thing is like 400-something questions and the actual test pulls from that same pool so nothing on the exam should surprise you. took me about 3 weeks of casual studying and i passed no problem. you dont need a class at all unless you want one, some people like the structure but its definitely not required. the ARRL has study guides too if you want an actual book but honestly the free online stuff is pretty solid. just look up a local club and they usually hold testing sessions pretty regularly, some of them are free or just a small fee now i think

so ive been using Log4OM for about two years now as my everyday logger and i really like it for general stuff, qsl tracking, the DXCC counter, all that. but every time contest season rolls around i end up switching back to N1MM and it feels like im managing two separate shack lives. someone at the club mentioned theres a way to get Log4OM and N1MM to play nice together or at least sync logs after the fact but honestly i couldnt get it to work without duplicates showing up everywhere. the other wrinkle is WSJT-X. i run FT8 pretty regularly and right now WSJT-X is logging to Log4OM via UDP which works fine day to day, but during a contest i want those FT8 QSOs going into N1MM. every time i try to redirect the UDP port i either break one or the other or both. feels like there should be a cleaner workflow here and maybe im just overthinking it but i dunno. anyone figured out a setup that doesnt require you to basically reconfigure everything when a contest weekend comes up? or do most contesters just accept that N1MM is its own thing and do a manual ADIF import after?

the tension thing actually matters more than people admit when they're starting out. if the contacts close too easy you end up with accidental closures just from resting your fingers on the paddle, which creates all that mush you're describing. try tightening them up a bit and give yourself a little more resistance to work against, at least until your touch gets more deliberate. it'll feel weird at first but most people find cleaner sends after. also on the Winkeyer, make sure your weight setting isnt cranked too high. somewhere around 50 is usually a good starting point and then nudge it from there. and honestly just practice sending single letters over and over instead of whole words, like really slow down to where every element is clean before you speed back up. Koch method is great for receive but for sending people dont talk about slow deliberate practice enough.

just gonna throw this out there — lcwo.net if you havent tried it already. i switched from G4FON to that and something about the interface kept me more consistent with daily practice. i set a timer for just 15 minutes every morning before work and that regularity ended up mattering more than anything else i tried. the numbers thing is real by the way, i drilled those separately for like two weeks and it helped a lot.

so ive been sitting on this mod for probably 8 months now and finally pulled the trigger last weekend. been running the IC-7300 for about two years and generally love it but the rx on the lower HF bands always felt a little soft to me compared to my old TS-590 which i still keep around. anyway i found a few threads over on eham and one over at radioreference pointing to a pretty simple front end mod — basically swapping out one of the input attenuator resistors and tweaking the preamp bias slightly. nothing crazy invasive but you do have to pull the top cover and get in there with a decent soldering iron. results are honestly better than i expected on 160 and 80m. weak signal stuff that was getting lost in the noise floor is noticeably cleaner now. havent done any proper before/after measurements with the spectrum analyzer yet just going by ear and by what im hearing on the bandscope which isnt exactly scientific i know. did notice it gets a little more susceptible to strong signals nearby so if you live near any AM broadcast towers probably want to think twice or add some filtering upstream. anyway curious if anyone else has dug into their 7300 or similar SDR-based radios and what mods actually made a real difference vs just being placebo. the AGC tweak mods i see mentioned a lot seem kinda marginal to me but maybe im doing something wrong

congrats on the first one, that feeling when the pileup hits early is pretty great isnt it. i've done probably 30 or 40 WWFF activations at this point and yeah the 44 contact requirement trips people up sometimes especially on days when the bands just dont cooperate. i usually try to get on 40 and 20 both if i can, running a linked dipole, just because if one band goes dead you have somewhere to go. for spotting i actually just text a buddy who's at home and he spots me on the network, works way better than fighting with my phone in a field. not everyone has that option i know but if you have a regular shack partner or even just someone in your club who's home on weekends it's worth setting up. also parksnpeaks app has gotten pretty decent for self spotting if you havent tried it, seems to work on weaker cell signals better than the browser. battery wise i run a 4ah lipo for most activations and its usually enough for 3-4 hours at 10 watts, never really had an issue unless its really cold out which kills it fast.

congrats on getting a real radio in there, big difference from running an HT off the visor lol. i had almost the exact same whine issue in my jeep and what fixed it for me was one of those cheap noise filters inline on the power feed — i think i paid like 8 bucks for it on amazon. not the most elegant solution but it works. some guys swear by just finding the real cause but i never had the patience for that. as for the 70cm swr honestly i wouldnt lose sleep over 2.2 especially if youre mostly on 2m. but if it bugs you try reseating the antenna on the mount, sometimes they dont make perfect contact right away especially if you used any kind of thread locking compound or the mount wasnt totally clean when you drilled it.

I struggled with this as a new Tech! The breakthrough was practicing with QSO logging software that has phonetic displays. Also, using "Sierra" for 'S' and "Foxtrot" for 'F' help distinguish between similar-sounding letters. Don't be embarrassed to go slow at first.

yeah the flux dropping like that will definitely mess with your higher bands, 17m especially seems sensitive to it in my experience. but honestly the geomagnetic stuff is what really kills DX for me more than solar flux alone. when the Kp index spikes above like 4 or 5 i pretty much just give up on anything polar path and sometimes even mid-latitude paths get weird and choppy. what i usually do now is check both the flux number and the Kp together before deciding where to spend my evening. there are a few websites that show the band condition estimates in near real time, DXMaps and the propagation tools on hamqsl are what i use most. you can actually see spots coming in and get a feel for whether a path is open before you even key up. sounds like you caught one of those short sporadic openings on the JA path, those can happen even when overall conditions are mediocre, just gotta be in the right place at the right time basically.

few things to check -- first, make sure your Vara HF is actually registered if you're trying to use anything above the free speed tier, but even unregistered Vara should connect for basic stuff so that probably isnt it. the timeout issue sounds more like your audio levels or the ALC on the 590 is pumping. Kenwood rigs can be a little touchy with the Signalink, the TX level on the Signalink itself needs to be dialed way back, like sometimes embarrassingly low, otherwise you're overdriving the front end and the modulation comes out garbage even if it doesnt look clipped on the meter. also double check that you have the 590's DATA mode set correctly -- you want to be in USB-D or DATA mode not just regular USB, otherwise the mic EQ processing might be messing with your tones. the other thing i'd do is just try Telnet first in Winlink Express just to confirm your account is set up and the software itself is working before blaming the RF path. if Telnet connects fine then you know the issue is definitely on the radio/audio chain side and not some account or config problem.

so ive been licensed about 14 months now and been doing mostly local stuff and some casual HF but a buddy at the club last week was showing me his DXCC certificate and i kind of got the bug. i had no idea how deep this rabbit hole goes honestly. i started looking at my log and apparently i already have like 34 entities confirmed on LoTW which i didnt even realize counted toward it. so thats a nice surprise. but i have some basic questions that i cant seem to find a straight answer to just from reading the ARRL site which is kind of overwhelming if youre new to this. first - does WAS and DXCC share any of the same confirmed contacts or are they totally separate things? like if i work all 50 states does that do anything for DXCC or are they just two different award systems with no overlap. second question is about WAZ - the zone thing confuses me a bit, like i get that the world is divided into 40 CQ zones but some entities seem to span multiple zones? is that right or am i misreading the maps. also is there a good logging program that people use that kinda tracks all this stuff automatically and shows you whats missing. right now im on Log4OM but i dont know if im using it right for this purpose

congrats on the first one, always a good feeling when it comes together. yes 44 QSOs is still the magic number to have it count as a valid activation for the program, though you can still upload anything under that it just wont count toward your activator score. for the uploads -- you want to upload your adif to the wwff logbook directly at wwff.us, that handles everything on the WWFF side for both you and the hunters automatically. lotw and eqsl are separate and honestly up to you, plenty of hunters want the lotw confirmation too so its worth doing if you can. i usually just upload the same adif to all three, takes maybe 10 minutes total. the dual designation thing with state parks is a good question and it depends. if the park is listed as both a POTA reference and a WWFF reference they are technically separate programs with separate logbooks, so you upload to each program's system. for the actual operating you only do it once obviously but both can count simultaneously which is why a lot of people try to find references that qualify for multiple programs, gets you more bang for your effort. some of the bigger state parks here are KFF, K- pota, and even a SOTA summit nearby so you can really stack things up if you plan it right.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF DX but lately ive been reading more and more about EME and honestly it sounds like the most insane thing you can do on VHF. bouncing signals off the moon. like thats just wild to me. the problem is every time i start reading about the equipment requirements i get kind of overwhelmed. i understand you need a lot of antenna gain and a clean low noise receive setup but i dont really know where the thresholds are. like can you realistically do 2m EME with a pair of long yagis or do you basically need a dish? ive seen guys on the JT65 clusters working EME with what looks like modest stations but then other posts talk about needing arrays with serious eirp and i cant tell if those are the guys doing the initiating or if everyone needs that level. also the timing thing with the moon windows confuses me a bit, i know the geometry has to be right for both stations but how often realistically can you get a shot at it, like weekly, a few times a month? my QTH has decent horizons to the east and south but there are some trees to the west that might cause issues depending on where the moon is rising or setting. not expecting to work the world overnight just curious if a modest 2m setup with maybe 4 yagis and a good preamp is even worth trying or if im going to be frustrated the whole time

the buzz you're describing is almost certainly alternator noise, super common with mobile installs. what you want to try first is making sure your ground for the radio is as short as possible and going directly to the chassis, not through some long roundabout path. sometimes people ground at the fuse box and that adds noise. also check if your power leads are running near any ignition wires because that can induce noise too. if you've already got good short grounds and its still doing it, a ferrite choke on the power leads near the radio sometimes cleans it right up. you can also try an inline noise filter on the power feed, they're only a few bucks on amazon. i had the same issue in my jeep for months before i realized my ground wire was like 18 inches longer than it needed to be, shortened it up and most of the noise went away. for the antenna the lip mount is honestly a pretty good compromise if you dont want to drill. you lose maybe a little bit vs a proper ground plane mount through the roof but for everyday VHF/UHF work you probably wont notice much difference. the diamond K400 lip mount is what i use on my wife's car and its held up fine for a couple years.

good question and honestly more new hams should ask this before just winging it. the rule is at least once every ten minutes during a conversation AND at the end of your last transmission before you go silent. so if youre ragchewing for 20 minutes straight you technically need to drop your call in there somewhere around the 10 minute mark even mid-conversation, but most people just work it in naturally like saying "this is W4XYZ, yeah i agree with what you said about..." and that counts. at a net its a little different in practice. net control already acknowledged you by call so most NCS operators i know are fine with you just jumping in and responding, but its good habit to at least give your call once in your response anyway. some nets are more formal about it than others, like traffic nets and ARES nets tend to be stricter than a casual social net. as for phonetics -- use them when conditions are rough or the call is getting stepped on, otherwise its totally fine to just say your call straight. nobody thinks youre weird either way, its just a tool for clarity not a requirement every time.