Nicole Larsen

ok so i got my tech license a couple months ago and ive been on 2m mostly just doing local repeater stuff. my question is about phonetics — like i know the NATO ones, Alpha Bravo Charlie etc, but when is it actually required vs just saying the letter normally. like if someone asks for my callsign do i always spell it out phonetically or only sometimes i feel like ive heard people on the repeater just say their letters normally when the signal is good and then other times they go full phonetic. is there a rule or is it just kind of a feel thing. also i noticed some of the older guys use different words than the NATO standard, like i heard someone say "sugar" instead of Sierra and "king" instead of Kilo. is that a regional thing or just old habit

man this is exactly what i needed to read too, been having the same confusion. i made my first ever DX contact last week, a station in Brazil on 17m, and i had no idea if i just got lucky or if conditions were actually good. turns out the solar flux was up around 160-something that day according to my buddy who's been doing this forever. he says write down the conditions every time you make a notable contact and after a few months you'll start to see patterns. i've been trying to do that but honestly i forget half the time lol

Interesting observation. The RTL2832U has dedicated hardware DSP blocks that handle some of the initial filtering and decimation, whereas HackRF pushes more processing to the host CPU. Try running volk_profile on both systems - the RTL-SDR benefits significantly from SIMD optimizations.

just jump to 15wpm and accept that you'll miss stuff. thats pretty much what my elmer told me and i thought he was crazy but it worked. after like two weeks of suffering through it my copy got way better. the suffering part is important i think lol

For emergency communications, DIY is the only way. RemoteRig works well through firewalls and NAT - critical when operating through various internet connections during deployments. You need gear you can troubleshoot and repair yourself.

so ive been using N1MM for basically everything for the last few years, contests obviously but also just day to day HF logging. it works fine and i know it pretty well at this point but honestly the UI feels like its frozen in like 2005 and some of the non-contest stuff is kind of clunky to set up. a buddy at the club keeps telling me to try Log4OM and i finally downloaded it last week but havent had time to dig in. my main thing is i run WSJT-X for FT8 and FT4 a fair amount, mostly for DXCC chasing, and i need whatever i use to talk to WSJT-X cleanly so the QSOs get logged automatically without me having to do anything manual. N1MM does this fine with the UDP thing. does Log4OM handle that just as well or is there weirdness with it? also does Log4OM even make sense to use during a contest or do people just switch back to N1MM for that not trying to completely overhaul my setup if theres no real reason to, just wondering if anyone has actually run both for a while and has an opinion

Start simple but think about power redundancy. LiFePO4 batteries offer long life and stable performance with sufficient capacity for extended operations. A small solar panel for recharging during long deployments is worth the investment too.

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

oh man i went through this exact thing not that long ago. for me it turned out i was gripping the paddle too tight when i got nervous or concentrated too hard, which sounds dumb but it was totally wrecking my timing. someone here told me to practice sending at a speed that felt almost too slow and just focus on relaxing my hand and it genuinely helped a lot more than tweaking settings did. like settings matter but if your hand is tense the keyer cant really save you lol

Been using my Baofeng UV-82 for about 6 months now and really enjoying getting into the hobby, but I'm running into some limitations. Battery seems to drain pretty quickly on higher power settings, and I'm wondering if upgrading the antenna would give me better performance than just cranking up the watts. I've read about putting an antenna on the roof of your house or in the attic should net you triple the range on simplex and give you access to most repeaters in a 40-50 mile radius. Has anyone tried this setup? Also curious about those Nagoya replacement antennas - worth the upgrade over the stock rubber duck?

so i finally finished my first scratch built QRP rig, its a 40m CW transceiver based loosely on the Wilderness Radio SST design but i made a few changes along the way because i couldnt source a couple of the original parts. took me about 3 weekends spread over a month and a half to get it done. the thing that surprised me most is how well 5 watts actually works. ive been licensed for about 4 years but always ran 100w into a dipole and kind of assumed QRP was for people who just wanted a challenge for its own sake. went out to a park last saturday with a wire antenna thrown up in a tree and worked 6 stations in like 2 hours, including one in ontario which felt pretty crazy for what is essentially a mint tin with a few toroids in it. efficiency wise i was getting maybe 60-65% from the PA stage which i know isnt great, the IRF510 gets warm but not hot. wondering if anyone has played around with different transistors for the final or if its worth messing with the bias to squeeze a bit more out. also curious what antennas people are using for portable operation, i just used a random wire with a tuner but im thinking about winding my own EFHW transformer.

I switched from HRD to SatPC32 last year and haven't looked back. The learning curve is steeper but the precision is worth it. Make sure you get the rotator interface cable - the automated tracking makes working linear birds much more enjoyable.

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

oh man i remember being exactly where you are, it feels overwhelming at first but once you start breaking it down it gets a lot more manageable. the storm activation thing is actually a really common push that gets people to finally do it so good on you for taking it seriously. for power, the way i think about it is plan for at least 12 hours of operation without any external source, and if you can do 24 thats even better. a 30-40Ah LiFePO4 battery will get you pretty far depending on your transmit duty cycle — the 891 draws maybe 20A on transmit but you're not transmitting constantly so real world consumption is way lower than the rated draw. i run a 50Ah battery in my kit and i've gone through full weekend exercises without needing to touch my solar panel. speaking of which, even a small 50-100W panel is worth having just to top things off if you're deployed somewhere with sun, you don't have to run everything off it. the other thing i'd say — and this is maybe more important than the exact gear — is write down your frequencies, your local nets, any tactical frequencies your ARES group uses, and put that sheet laminated inside the bag. sounds obvious but when you're tired and stressed you'll be glad you don't have to remember it. also make sure whoever runs your ARES group knows you want to get activated, sometimes they just don't know who's available and ready.

so ive been building a direct conversion receiver for 40m, pretty basic stuff, NE602 mixer feeding an LM386 audio amp and it mostly works but the audio is just... weird. like i get signals fine, SSB is intelligible if i crank the volume but theres this constant low frequency hum underneath everything and when strong signals come in the whole thing kind of motorboats for a second before settling down. ive bypassed everything i can think of, put a 10uf cap across the 386 supply pins, tried different values on the gain pins (pins 1 and 8), even wrapped the thing in foil which helped a tiny bit with the hum but not much. the oscillator is running off a separate little 78L05 regulator so i dont think its bleeding into the audio stage from there. board is ugly point to point on perfboard but ive kept the RF and audio sections on opposite ends. anyone built one of these and dealt with this kind of thing? im wondering if the 386 is just a bad choice here and i should go with an op-amp audio stage instead, or if theres something obvious im missing. its my first homebrew receiver so probably something dumb

yeah it took me probably three or four serious contest weekends before it stopped being a net negative. the thing nobody tells you is that SO2R isn't really about doing two things at once, it's about knowing when NOT to touch the second radio. early on i was trying to spin the second dial constantly and missing S&P calls left and right. now i basically only go to the mult radio when my run rate drops below a certain threshold or i hear something specific on the second receiver that catches my ear. the audio management is honestly the hardest part. i use headphones with stereo split so run is in left ear and mult radio is lower in the right, but it took forever to train my brain to parse two QSOs simultaneously without losing the thread on the run station. some guys use completely separate audio and just swap focus back and forth but i never got comfortable with that. also your bandpass filters — what are you running exactly, are they the W3NQN style or the Array Solutions ones? that matters a lot for how much bleed you're dealing with on receive.

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 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.