Nicole Larsen

might be worth just logging the temp readout from the menu while you're transmitting and watching if it climbs faster than it should. the rig does have internal temp sensing and if something is off in how its reading it you'd see it reflected there. i think its in the set menu somewhere, radio temp display. also dont rule out the power supply side either, if its a switching supply with some age on it and the voltage is sagging slightly under load that can do weird things. i chased a fault like this on an older TS-590 for two weeks before i noticed my astron was putting out 13.2 instead of 13.8 under load, not enough to cause obvious issues but enough to mess with the power output stability.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i mostly do HF on 40m and sometimes 20m and i keep going back and forth on when im supposed to use the nato phonetic alphabet vs just saying the letter. like if someone asks me to confirm my callsign do i always spell it out with phonetics or is it just when conditions are bad or the other op asks for it also i noticed some guys just say their call once and move on and others do it phonetically every single time and i dont really know what the actual standard is. my elmer told me to just always use phonetics but then i hear plenty of people on the air who clearly dont bother half the time and nobody seems to care is there like an actual rule for this or is it just whatever the situation calls for

im pretty new too but one thing that helped me was just listening to the net a few times before i ever checked in. like just sat there with a notepad and wrote down what people said and how net control responded. after two or three weeks i had a pretty good feel for the rhythm of it. still nervous every time i key up though haha

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and its getting somewhere but im hitting a wall with the relay timing. basic setup is an arduino mega controlling a bank of 8 relays to switch between antennas depending on which band the radio is on. im pulling the band data off the CI-V bus from my IC-7300 which honestly was the easier part than i expected. the problem is when i switch bands quickly like during a contest or just tuning around, sometimes the relay fires before the CI-V data is fully settled and i get this weird half-second where the radio is basically connected to nothing or the wrong antenna. ive tried adding a delay() but that feels hacky and if i make it too long it just makes the whole thing sluggish. wondering if anyone has done something similar and how they handled the debounce or timing on the relay side. also considered moving to a raspberry pi for this since i could run a proper python script with threading but not sure if thats overkill for what is honestly a pretty simple task current code is just basically polling the CI-V every 100ms and comparing to the last known band, then triggering the relay bank. nothing fancy. just feels like theres a timing problem somewhere i cant quite nail down

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into a local 2m net last tuesday, been licensed about 4 months now and honestly i was nervous as heck. the net control called for check-ins and i waited for a pause and gave my callsign phonetically like ive seen suggested everywhere. but then the net control came back and asked me to repeat and i got all flustered and kind of stumbled through it again. afterwards one of the guys on the net messaged me on the club reflector and said i checked in at the wrong time, like there's a specific order you're supposed to wait for? something about mobiles first then portables then fixed stations? i honestly had no idea that was a thing. is this standard across all nets or does each net have its own rules for this kind of stuff. i dont want to step on anyone or come across as rude, just trying to learn the ropes here.

the freezing up on message format is so real, i did that my first drill and felt terrible about it even though everyone was nice. what helped me was just printing out a few sample ICS-213 forms and keeping one in my go bag so i could kind of follow along if i blanked. its not cheating its just being prepared i think. also honestly watching some of the ARRL training videos on winlink and formal traffic helped me understand why the format matters not just what the format is, that made it stick better for me

had a similar thing going on with my remote setup last year, turned out the router at the remote QTH was doing something weird with QoS and basically throttling UDP packets intermittently. swapped it out for a plain dumb switch on that leg and the jitter dropped a lot. probably not your issue but worth checking if theres any consumer router in the path that might be doing traffic shaping you dont know about. cant really help on the Allstar linking stuff, never gone down that road myself.

this is really interesting to read, im still pretty new to the whole ARES side of things and just joined my local group a few months ago. havent been through a full SET yet but we have one coming up in the fall and im a little nervous about it honestly. mostly worried ill freeze up or do something wrong on the air when there's actual traffic to pass. does your group do any kind of training before the big exercise or is it kind of just thrown in the deep end? i've been practicing ICS 213 forms on my own but passing formal traffic on a net is still something i need more reps on

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a decent amount of HF DX but a buddy of mine at the club just worked his first EME contact on 2m last month and now im completely obsessed with the idea. ive been reading everything i can find but honestly the more i read the more confused i get about where the realistic entry point is these days. like i understand the basic concept, you bounce your signal off the moon, path loss is insane, you need a lot of antenna gain and usually some serious power. but what im not clear on is whether a single yagi setup is actually viable anymore or if you basically need a yagi array to work anything. ive got a decent sized lot and could probably put up a 4-yagi array on an az-el mount if i had to but that feels like a huge commitment before ive even made a single contact. also the whole JT65B vs Q65 thing, is Q65 pretty much where everyone is now? i was running JT65 for meteor scatter a while back so im somewhat familiar with the modes but EME seems like a whole different animal in terms of timing and how you structure a QSO. any thoughts from people who have actually done this would be really appreciated, im in the midwest so not sure how that affects things either.

so anyway i was in the same boat when i started and what finally made it click for me was just thinking of them as three totally separate systems that happen to overlap. LoTW is the one that "counts" for the big ARRL stuff, eQSL is its own thing with its own awards community, and paper cards are kind of... the original and still meaningful to a lot of people even if they dont count anywhere official unless you mail them to the ARRL desk with your application. dont stress too much about the 200 contacts in eQSL. once you get LoTW going you can upload your whole log history and a bunch of those same stations will probably already be in there and your confirmations will just appear. happened to me, it was kind of satisfying actually seeing all those confirmations pop up at once.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from home, K-4689 if anyone knows it. i had been hunting parks for a few months and thought i understood how it went but man actually being the one running the pile was a completely different experience. i brought my KX2 and a random wire i threw up between two trees and it actually worked pretty well, got signal reports ranging all over the place but most people seemed to copy me fine. the part that got me was just managing the flow of contacts. i kept forgetting to send the park reference in my exchanges and a couple hunters were asking me to repeat it. also had one guy who just would not stop transmitting over everyone else to get his contact in, not sure if thats normal or if i just attracted that one guy. ended up with 22 QSOs which i know isnt a lot but i was happy with it for a first time out. definitely going back to try for a higher count next time. anyone have tips for staying organized when the pile gets going?

yeah message handling is almost always the thing that falls apart, at least in every exercise ive been part of. everyone practices the radio part, getting signal reports, making contact, whatever — but the actual information management side gets treated like an afterthought until suddenly youre in the middle of a real activation and someone hands you a handwritten note on a napkin and says relay this to the EOC. we had a similar situation a couple years back during a Skywarn activation that turned into more than just weather spotting. a bad storm rolled through and actually caused some infrastructure damage and suddenly we were getting requests for real welfare check relays. we werent ready for the volume and had two people trying to log everything in a notebook while also operating, it was a mess. after that we started dedicating at least one person at every deployment specifically to logging and message handling, not touching the radio at all. made a huge difference. also started doing monthly traffic nets just to keep the ICS form muscle memory alive. its boring but it works. the 9-year licensee thing doesnt surprise me at all by the way. a lot of folks get their ticket to do DX or satellites or whatever and the traffic handling stuff just never comes up in their normal operating. drills are really the only way to find those gaps before it matters.

so i finally got around to trying my first summit activation yesterday. picked a local 2 pointer that looked easy on the map but man was i wrong about that hike. anyway got to the top after about 2 hours of scrambling through brush and rocks with my ft-817 and a 20m dipole setup went ok i guess but i could only manage 3 contacts in about 45 minutes before my battery started dying. is this normal for a first timer or did i mess something up? heard plenty of people calling but couldnt seem to get through the pileups. one guy told me my signal was pretty weak but readable thinking maybe i need a better antenna or more power but dont want to carry too much weight up these mountains. any tips from the sota folks here?

Building a homebrew 3-element 20m Yagi based on the W6QHS design, but running into matching challenges. The natural impedance appears to be around 30-35 ohms, which should be easily matched with a hairpin, but lower impedance Yagis offer better performance. Currently seeing 2.8:1 SWR across the band with direct 50-ohm feed. There are multiple ways to design a 3-element Yagi - equal spacing between all elements is the 'middle of the road' approach, but you can adjust spacing for wider bandwidth or higher gain. Boom length is 14 feet with 0.1λ spacing. Should I redesign element spacing or proceed with hairpin matching? Lower SWR is critical since even small misalignments can cause significant signal losses.

Looking for advice on a puzzling issue with my TS-590S. The rig produces full 100W on 6 meters but reduced output on all HF bands. All other functions work normally, and the radio passes self-test. I've verified my dummy load and power meter are accurate with another transceiver. This seems consistent with voltage drop issues under TX load from poor power connections, as HF bands typically draw more current than 6m. Has anyone encountered this specific failure mode? Planning to check DC voltage at the finals during transmission next. Any other troubleshooting suggestions before I tear into the RF deck?