QRP Guy

not super experienced with homebrew transmitters but i built a 40m receiver last year and had drift issues that turned out to be my voltage regulator getting warm and causing the supply rail to sag just slightly - like not enough to see on a meter but enough to pull the oscillator. probably not your issue since you said the bench supply is flat but just throwing it out there in case

i just passed mine like six weeks ago so this is pretty fresh for me. the phase angle and filter stuff was definitely the part that took the longest to get comfortble with, i wont lie. but the way i looked at it was im not gonna be designing circuits, im just learning enough to recognize whats going on and pick the right answer on a multiple choice test. kinda cold blooded way to think about it but it worked lol. took me maybe 6 weeks studying maybe 30-45 min a night and i passed with room to spare. go for it

honestly the General exam is not as bad as the question pool makes it look. i had zero electronics background when i upgraded and i just used the HamStudy website and did like 20-30 minutes a day for maybe three weeks. the propagation questions are actually kind of interesting once you start to get it, like it starts to click why 40m works great at night and 10m is all over the place depending on the solar cycle. as for privileges, the big ones youre going to care about are 40m, 20m, and 17m for starters. 20m especially is where a ton of DX action happens and as a General you get a solid chunk of it. 40 meters is great for domestic stuff and ragchewing, you can hit most of the country pretty reliably. youll still have some parts of the bands that are Extra only but honestly as a new HF operator you wont even notice for a while, theres plenty of room. just do it, it opens up a whole other side of the hobby

so ive been chasing summits for about six months now and finally decided to just go do an activation myself. picked out W6/NS-267 which is a pretty easy hike near me, nothing crazy, just wanted to start somewhere manageable before i try anything with real elevation gain. my question is about logging the summit reference properly. when i self-spot on SOTAwatch do i just type the reference exactly as it appears on the database, like W6/NS-267, and then list my frequency and mode? ive seen some activators put extra notes in the spot and some dont bother. also not sure if i need to pre-announce on the reflector or if just showing up on the air and spotting myself is fine. planning to run my KX2 with a linked dipole, maybe 10 watts into a thrown-up wire. did a few POTA activations so im not totally green but SOTA feels a bit more... i dont know, official somehow? like people are actually watching SOTAwatch and will call in right away which is both exciting and kind of terrifying any tips from people whove done a bunch of these would be great

congrats on the first one. im still just chasing for now but reading stuff like this makes me want to actually get out and try an activation. been nervous about the whole self-spotting thing and not knowing if anyone will even hear me but sounds like the system works pretty well if you just get on and call.

yeah you do have to get General before Extra, theres no skipping it. but honestly dont overthink the electrical theory, its not as bad as it looks on paper. most of it is like, you see the same question stems over and over and after a while your brain just knows the answer even if you dont fully understand the math behind it. i used the hamstudy.org flashcard thing for maybe 3 weeks and passed with room to spare. the propagation questions tripped me up a little at first, stuff about which bands open at what times of day and why, but once you kind of get the basic idea of how the ionosphere works it starts to click. 20 meters is a great first HF band to mess with btw, especially if you just want to make contacts without a huge antenna setup. good luck, its totally worth doing

that's pretty much exactly how my first activation went too, a lot of hurry up and wait and then suddenly everything happening at once. the ICS courses help but yeah until you're actually sitting in an EOC with served agency people walking around and real (well, simulated) stress in the room it's hard to get the feel for it. the thing that helped me most was just doing more nets honestly. our group runs a weekly directed net specifically for training and the EC lets people take turns doing net control even if they mess up, which is how you learn. if your group doesnt do something like that it might be worth suggesting. after maybe a dozen times running net control for a low-stakes weekly net I felt way more ready when it counted. also the ARRL emcomm level 1 course online is worth doing if you havent already, goes a bit deeper than just the ICS stuff

so its been raining all week and ive basically just been spinning the dial on 40m listening to nothing in particular. caught a few guys ragchewing about their antennas down in georgia somewhere, didnt bother jumping in. sometimes its just nice to listen i guess. anyway what are you all up to lately, anything interesting happening on the bands or is it as dead as it seems from here

so im finally doing a proper field activation this weekend, been planning this for about two months now and i think ive got most of it figured out but the power side is still giving me fits. running a IC-7300 and a small amp, not a big amp just the LDG and maybe 100w so nothing crazy, but i want to have reliable power for like 8-10 hours straight without having to baby sit the battery situation the whole time. my current plan is a 30ah lifepo4 feeding the rig directly and then a small honda eu2200i as backup or to run a charger if things get low. the problem is placement. the site im using has decent tree cover which is great for my linked dipole but that also means i cant really get the generator far enough away from the operating position without running a really long extension cord. last time i tried something similar the rf got into everything and i had this horrible buzzing on 40m that i couldnt track down for like an hour. anyone dealt with generator noise on hf in the field? im thinking maybe a ferrite clamp on the power cord going to the charger might help but i honestly dont know if thats enough. also curious what people use for antenna support out in the field, my linked dipole is on a 31ft spiderpole right now but im wondering if a different center height or a different feedline run would help with the ground situation at this site which is pretty rocky.

the EA8 stations on 2m EME are pretty active, theres a few of them with serious arrays so decoding them on a single yagi sounds about right. completing is tougher because they need to hear you back i ran a similar setup for about a year before i added a second yagi and honestly the difference in completed QSOs was pretty dramatic, not just marginal. went from a handful of partials to actually finishing contacts consistently. still not running big power either, just the legal limit here. its not just about your receive side, the other station has to pull you out too and more antenna helps both ways obviously dont overlook the coax situation either if you havent already. anything lossy between the radio and the yagi is just killing you twice, once on tx and once on rx. a lot of guys underestimate that part

yeah honestly the dual power source thing is smart. one thing i'll add — watch your RFI situation if you do run the generator at the same time as receiving. my eu2000 (older model) was putting garbage all over 40m when it was under light load, something about the inverter frequency I think. had to run it harder or just switch to battery for actual comms. the 2200i might be better i dunno but worth checking before the exercise not during it lol

yeah the no-tree summit thing is a real issue, ive done a bunch of activations above treeline and what works for me is just a telescoping fiberglass mast, mine is a 7m sotabeams one and it fits in my pack no problem. you can guy it out with some thin paracord and tent stakes and it holds up in most wind, not all wind but most. the end fed just hangs vertical or you do a slight sloper and it works fine. honestly once you switch to the mast you wont go back to screwing around with trees also on the battery thing, what were you running for capacity? i switched to a 3ah lipo and even at 10w on the kx2 i can do a full activation easy. might be worth checking if your battery is actually at full charge before you head out, mine had a bad cell and i didnt know for a while

87 confirmed in a year is actually pretty solid, don't sell yourself short. i was maybe around 70 at that point and i thought i was doing ok lol. the jump from 87 to 100 can go fast if conditions cooperate, especially if you haven't worked much on 10m yet because that band has been really good lately with the solar cycle where it is. one thing i'd add is look into Club Log if you havent already — a lot of DXpeditions use it for their online log and you can check if your call shows up before the cards even go out. saved me a lot of anxiety waiting to find out if a contact was actually in the log or not

so i finally got activated for a real ARES deployment last weekend, county EOC needed radio support during the flooding situation we had. ive been in the local ARES group for about 8 months but this was my first actual activation not just a drill. honestly i felt pretty underprepared even though i thought i was ready. the net control stuff was fine, i know my way around that, but there were a few moments where i wasnt sure of the ICS protocol stuff and kind of had to wing it a little. the served agency coordinator kept asking me things i didnt totally have answers to which was a bit awkward. anyway it went ok overall i think. traffic moved, nobody got hurt lol. but im curious how other people felt after their first real one vs a drill. like is it always that different or did i just have bad luck with the EOC coordinator being kind of demanding. also wondering if the ICS 100 and 200 courses are really enough prep or should i be doing more. i did both of those online last year.

congrats on your first one, that summit is no joke depending on the trail you took. to answer your question yeah the activation zone is typically defined as within 25 vertical meters of the true summit, so as long as you were within that elevation band youre good to go. it doesnt matter if you were slightly off to the side or sheltered behind some rocks, staying out of the wind is just smart operating honestly. for confirming the activation — once you upload your log to the SOTA database it usually shows up within a day or so on your activator page. you can check sota.org.uk and look at your callsign under the activator section. if the 4 contacts are there and at least one of them was on an HF band (or 2m if thats what you used) it should count. sometimes if a chaser also logs the contact it shows as a confirmed QSO which is a nice little checkmark. sounds like you did everything right to me, 4 contacts on a homebrew antenna on your first time out is a solid start