Michael Brown

honest answer -- SO2R has a pretty steep learning curve and if youre still working on your single radio operating fundamentals it can actually hurt your score before it helps. the guys making SO2R work well have their S&P and running rhythm so dialed in they can do it almost on autopilot, which frees up mental bandwidth for managing the second radio. if youre still thinking consciously about exchange timing and dupe checking youre probably not ready for it to help you yet that said the mid-contest rate slump you're describing is real and SO2R is exactly the solution for it. what i'd suggest is start by just getting a second receiver going, even just a cheap SDR or an old HF rig you can listen on, and practice keeping ears on a second band without transmitting on it. just get used to monitoring two places at once. that alone changed how i think about band transitions and it costs almost nothing if you already have any kind of spare radio laying around the filter situation is serious though, dont underestimate it. i tried running SO2R on the cheap with just a couple of relays and a homebrew setup and i either had desense issues or was so conservative with the setup that i wasnt actually getting any benefit. the Array Solutions or Dunestar stuff isnt cheap but its not optional if you want to actually transmit on both radios simultaneously

oh man i remember this feeling exactly. i was stuck around 6-7wpm for what felt like forever and thought the same thing, like maybe my brain just doesnt work this way. what finally cracked it open for me was two things. first i stopped worrying about copying every single character and just let myself miss some. like actively told myself its okay to miss a letter, just keep listening. before that i was basically panicking every time i missed something and then id miss the next three characters too while i was still stressed about the first one. second thing was i started listening to actual qsos on the air instead of just practice files. even if i couldnt copy it all, just hearing the rhythm of real contacts doing real exchanges helped a lot. w1aw broadcasts are good for this too. the characters in practice files can sound a little sterile compared to real sending. anyway stick with it, 4 months isnt that long honestly, some people take a year or more to get comfortable and thats fine

yeah SOTA is totally its own thing, i got into it this summer and its kind of addicting in a different way than contesting. you basically earn points for activating summits and there are chasers logging contacts with you from home. the exchanges are short, people are patient, and the biggest stress is honestly just whether your battery holds out and if you can find a tree to throw an end fed over. for actual contests i'd say try the ARRL Sweepstakes when it comes around, its a bit slower paced than CQ WW in my experience and working all the sections in the US and Canada feels more achievable than trying to work all the zones in the world on your first go. just my two cents anyway

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals honestly. so the FCC Part 97 is the actual law and that says as a general you get phone privileges on 40m from 7.175 to 7.300 MHz. thats it, thats your chunk. the ARRL band plan is more like a gentlemans agreement on top of that, like where DX tends to hang out or where nets operate, but it doesnt change what youre legally allowed to use. the band edge thing is a real concern and its not just courtesy. your transmitted signal has a certain bandwidth to it, and if you set your dial to say 7.299 on USB, your actual signal is going up from there and could technically extend outside the 7.300 limit. the FCC says your emission has to stay within your allocated band, not just your carrier frequency. so most people give themselves at least 3 kHz of breathing room, some say more depending on how well their rig filters the signal. old tube rigs especially can splatter more than modern stuff. so theres a legal reason to stay away from the edge, not just a politeness thing.

yeah what he said about the preamp is spot on. i made the mistake of running my preamp in the shack for the first few months and i was wondering why i could barely decode anything even when wsjt was showing traces. moved it to the mast and it was like a completely different hobby, seriously night and day. one thing i'd add is dont underestimate how much time you spend just learning when the moon is at a usable elevation for your location and which direction you need to point. sounds obvious but there's a learning curve to just the scheduling and geometry side before you ever even get to the rf stuff. keplerian elements and moon tracking software is your friend, i use MoonSked and it works fine. also the EME2 reflector is where most of the serious activity gets coordinated still, worth subscribing even just to lurk for a while before you start calling

the bioenno 100ah should honestly get you pretty far if you manage the duty cycle. i ran a 7300 off a 50ah lifepo4 for almost 8 hours at a field day type event and it was fine because actual transmit time is way less than you think when you add up all the listening and typing and whatever. winlink especially isnt continuous tx so your average draw is probably lower than you're estimating. i'd bring the honda as backup and just not stress about it. worst case you fire it up for an hour or two. also totally off topic but what mast stakes are you using for the jackite in soft ground? mine keeps wanting to tip in anything that isnt packed dirt and ive gone through like three different stake setups trying to fix it

I had the same exact problem when I started lol. the repeaterbook listing sometimes has the tone listed under PL tone or just CTCSS and it's the same thing, just different names. make sure you're entering it as a frequency like 100.0 or 127.3 or whatever, not just a number. I accidentally entered mine wrong the first time and wondered why nothing worked for like two days before someone on the repeater walked me through it.

so i passed my technician back in march and ive been mostly doing 2m and 70cm stuff but honestly its getting a little boring and i keep hearing people talk about HF and working DX and all that and i want in on it. been looking at the general class question pool and some of it looks pretty intimidating especially the electrical stuff and the propagation questions. my question is basically how long did it take you guys to feel ready for the general exam, i studied for tech for maybe 2 weeks using ham study dot org and passed no problem but general feels like a bigger jump. also is there stuff i actually need to understand or can i just memorize my way through it like i kind of did with tech. and once i pass what should i expect on HF, like do i need completely different equipment or can i use something relatively cheap to get started

yeah 10m has been crazy good lately, i noticed the same thing a few weeks ago and now i basically have it on in the background whenever im in the shack. worked japan on it last week which honestly still feels surreal to me, im used to needing 20m for that kind of distance. the solar numbers have been really cooperating. on the ic-905 — i saw one at hamvention and yeah the build quality looked impressive but the price point is just not something i can justify. if you're into weak signal vhf and up work i imagine its incredible though. the guys doing EME and stuff are pretty excited about it from what ive read.

went last year and honestly the flea market tables were kind of thin, lot of the usual junk you see at every hamfest. but there was one guy selling a stack of old QST magazines from the 70s for almost nothing so i grabbed a bunch. the club auction in the afternoon is usually worth sticking around for if you have time

congrats on the first one, always a good feeling when you qualify. to answer your spotting question — you dont have to pre-announce but it really does help a lot. if you self-spot on the POTA website or the app right when you start operating, hunters will see you almost immediately and you'll get a pileup going pretty quick. some folks also post to the POTA activators Facebook group the night before or morning of with their planned frequency and time window, which helps especially if you're going to a park that doesnt get activated very often. without a spot it can take a while for people to find you, which sounds like what happened to you on 40m at first. the two-fer thing is actually pretty straightforward once you look at it. when you submit your log on the POTA website you can add multiple park references to the same activation if the location genuinely overlaps, like if youre sitting inside a state park that also falls within a national forest boundary. you'd enter both K-numbers in your log upload. the park references are all on the POTA website and there's a map layer you can turn on that shows overlapping boundaries. worth poking around in there before your next trip, you might find parks near you that have overlap you didn't know about.

yeah totally normal dont even worry about it. i checked into my first net maybe 6 months ago and did basically the same thing. the NCS on ours actually told me afterwards on a separate QSO that he appreciates when new hams jump in even if they dont know the format perfectly, said its way better than people just listening forever and never participating. one thing that helped me was just listening to the net for a couple sessions before checking in so i could hear how people were doing it. probably should have mentioned that before but anyway its a bit late for that advice now haha

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the storms last month i finally got serious about it. put together a basic go-kit in one of those apache cases from harbor freight. right now i have my ft-857d, a roll of coax, some PL-259s, a spare mic, and my log book. also threw in a cheap swr meter i had laying around. power is where im not sure what im doing. i have a 20ah lifepo4 battery i got off amazon and a little fused distribution block. been thinking about adding a small solar panel for longer deployments but not sure what size makes sense for running the 857 on like 50 watts for a few hours a day. anyone gone down this road? also wondering if im overthinking the antenna situation. right now im planning to just use a buddipole but i feel like for actual emergencies maybe i should have something simpler that can go up fast. like maybe just a linked dipole or a end fed or something. what do you guys actually use when you're deployed for real

yeah the audio on those rigs out of the internal speaker is just what it is, not much you can do at the radio itself. i run mine into a small external speaker with a little matchbox amp between them and its a completely different experience. some guys tap off the external speaker jack and feed it into something with a bit of EQ too. one thing nobody mentioned -- if you havent already, the TX audio mods are probably the highest return on investment thing you can do to that radio. there's a pretty well known mod where you bypass a high-pass filter cap in the mic input path and it opens up the low end considerably. on 40m ssb people actually commented that my audio sounded better before i even told them i changed anything so that was kind of validating

went through this same thing about a year ago when I upgraded to extra and finally grabbed a 2x1 call I'd had my eye on for a while. the AE7Q site the other guy mentioned is seriously the tool you want, I spent like an hour on there just browsing available calls before I found one I liked. the FCC ULS process itself is pretty straightforward once you've done it once but the first time it feels weirdly confusing for something that should be simple. oh also — if you apply for a vanity call and it gets granted, your old sequential call just goes away so make sure you actually want the new one before you submit, haha. you can apply for another vanity later if you change your mind but that's another $35 so