Sarah Kim

yeah the doppler thing trips up basically everyone at first. what most people do when starting out is set the downlink on your receiver and just tune to keep the beacon or a signal centered, then adjust the uplink to match. once you hear yourself in the passband you kind of get a feel for it. for a linear transponder like on AO-73 the doppler shift at max approach is something like plus or minus 10 kHz on 2m so its not massive but its definitely noticeable over a full pass the high elevation passes are definitely easier to start with, not because of doppler really but just because you have more time and the geometry is more forgiving with your handheld antenna. low elevation passes you might only have like a 4 or 5 minute window and half of it is fighting through trees or buildings. i'd say anything above 20 degrees is worth attempting when you're learning also you might look at whether your 818 can do split VFO with a foot controller or something, some people rig up an interface to let Gpredict actually control the radio tuning automatically which takes the whole manual doppler problem off your plate. not necessary but nice once you get serious about it

Watch out for similar-sounding words like 'Mike' (M) and 'November' (N), or 'Tango' (T) and 'Sierra' (S). Make sure you pronounce the words slowly and clearly. I learned by practicing with online pronunciation guides and listening to how experienced ops say them during nets.

im in kind of the same boat tbh, been trying to get sat ops going and the doppler correction is confusing me too. one thing i read somewhere is that for low earth orbit birds the doppler shift can be like plus or minus 10 khz on 435 mhz and even more shift rate near AOS and LOS so if your rig isnt tracking fast enough you'll drift out of the passband pretty quick at high elevation parts of the pass. dunno if thats your issue or not but worth thinking about. good luck with it, i havent managed to make a sat qso yet myself so curious how it goes for you.

Stations that want to participate in the net check in at the direction of the NCS. Just listen for when net control calls for check-ins and give your call sign clearly followed by your first name and location. Don't overthink it - most nets are very welcoming to new hams!

ok so i passed my tech exam about three weeks ago and ive been lurking here ever since trying to figure out what handheld to get. i thought it would be a simple decision but now im more confused than when i started lol. everyone seems to have a strong opinion and half the threads i read contradict the other half. right now im looking at the Yaesu FT-65 because someone at my club mentioned it, and also the Baofeng UV-5R keeps coming up everywhere but i also keep seeing people say to avoid it, though i cant tell if thats just brand snobbery or if there are real reasons. my main use case would be hitting the local 2m and 70cm repeaters, maybe some simplex with a buddy who also just got licensed. nothing fancy. is there a meaningful difference in receive quality between like a $30 Baofeng and a $100 Yaesu for just basic repeater work? or am i overthinking this whole thing. also does the chirp software work with both of them because programming manually sounds like a nightmare from what ive read.

the gateway thing trips up a lot of people at first. basically the RMS list in Winlink Express is sorted by distance by default but that doesnt mean the closest one is the best connection — propagation on HF doesnt care about distance the same way. what i usually do is pull up the channel selector in VARA and let it scan for a few seconds, it'll show you signal strength on the active RMS freqs and that gives you a much better idea of what's actually workable right now vs what just looks good on paper. on your other question yeah a non-ham recipient just gets a regular email to whatever address you put in the To field. they reply to it like any email and it queues up on the Winlink servers. next time you connect to any RMS gateway — RF or telnet — your client pulls it down. so yeah the message just sits on the server until you initiate another session. it doesnt push to you, you always have to go get it. that's kind of the whole design, works great for situations where you're operating intermittently or in the field. one thing i'd add — try 20m during the day and 40m after dark if you're doing domestic stuff in the US, makes a big difference in what gateways you can hit consistently

That's exactly the direction we need to go for EmComm. Starlink has proven itself in real disasters - FEMA deployed over 40 terminals after Hurricane Helene when 74% of cell towers failed. How's the G106 performing on 30/40m for NVIS coverage?

I'm a Tech planning to upgrade to General next month and feeling overwhelmed by all the HF frequency privileges I need to memorize. The exam is 35 questions and I keep getting confused about which bands General class operators can use fully vs. partially. Any study tips for tackling the frequency privilege questions without just memorizing everything?

yeah this is basically the same situation i was in about two years ago. what i ended up doing is running Log4OM as my main everyday logger and only firing up N1MM when im actually in a contest. the trick is you have to be disciplined about exporting your ADIF out of N1MM after the contest and importing it into Log4OM before you do anything else, otherwise you will absolutely end up with missing contacts or dupes when you go to upload to LoTW or whatever. its a little annoying but honestly once you do it a couple times it becomes second nature and takes like 3 minutes. the WSJT-X integration with Log4OM is pretty solid, you just point WSJT-X at the UDP port Log4OM is listening on and contacts log automatically. only issue ive had is occasionally it misses one if WSJT-X is being weird but that doesnt happen often. N1MM for contests though, i wouldnt trade it, the bandmap and the way it handles multipliers once you get used to it is just faster than anything else ive tried for that purpose.

so ive been using an rtl-sdr dongle for a while now and thinking about upgrading to something better. narrowed it down to hackrf one or sdrplay rsp1a but cant decide which way to go. mainly interested in HF listening, some VHF/UHF stuff, maybe mess around with gqrx or sdr# when i get time. hackrf seems more hackable but sdrplay has better specs on paper. anyone use both and have opinions?

yeah the doppler on the linear birds is the thing that gets everyone at first. the trick i use is to just park the uplink a bit above center passband at AOS and work it down slowly throughout the pass, and then the downlink you tune to find yourself. you kind of get a feel for the rate after a few passes. AO-73 in inverting mode means as you tune up on 70cm uplink your downlink on 2m actually goes down so that throws people off too if they haven't intenalized that yet. honestly i resisted CAT control for ages and then finally set it up with gpredict and an interface cable and it's just... so much nicer. you can actually focus on the actual operating instead of chasing your own tail the whole pass. still do it manually sometimes just to stay sharp but for actually making contacts the automation is worth it

4 contacts is all you need man, activation is an activation. i've done summits where i barely got the required contacts and others where i was up there for 2 hours working a pile. 40m is usually more reliable for shorter distances, especially if you self spot on sotawatch and people know you're up there. also worth posting an alert the day before if you can, makes a huge difference how fast the contacts come in.

That's actually expected behavior with the HackRF - the internal PA has pretty significant gain rolloff above 1 GHz. You'll see maybe 6-8 dB less output at 2.4 GHz compared to UHF. Check the RFFC5071 datasheet if you want the gory details on the frequency response.

so ive been working on this 40m superhet for about three months now and i finally got something resembling a working receiver last weekend. using a NE602 for the mixer/osc, standard 455khz IF with a couple of those ceramic filters from the junk box, and an LM386 at the end for audio. the thing actually works — i can hear stations — but the sensitivity seems way off and theres this weird low frequency rumble that comes and goes. not 60hz hum, its lower than that, almost like a motorboating kind of thing. ive already added more bypass caps around the LM386 because that chip is notorious for oscillating if you look at it wrong, and the rumble got a little better but not gone. gain staging is probably the issue but im not totally sure where to start poking around with the scope. the front end just has a simple tuned input with a MPF102 JFET preamp, nothing fancy. IF strip is two stages of amplification between the ceramic filters. anyone dealt with this kind of thing before? feel free to tell me if my whole approach is wrong too, this is basically my first real scratch build so im definitely learning as i go.

just wanted to chime in because i have the same radio in a different vehicle but the alternator noise thing hit me hard when i first installed it. took me forever to figure out it wasnt the radio at all, it was a ground loop from the way i had the power run. once i went directly to the battery with proper gauge wire and a dedicated chassis ground point it got way quieter. still get a tiny bit of whine on 70cm if i crank the audio but 2m is totally clean now.

Been watching the numbers climb back up over the past few weeks and solar flux hit 158 today with healthy sunspot count keeping the upper bands active. 20m through 10m are offering good daytime conditions with low geomagnetic activity (K-index at 1) meaning stable propagation and minimal disruptions. Working JA and VK on 15m this morning with just 100W and a dipole! Anyone else making the most of these conditions? No major space weather events are forecast so looks like we should have reliable DX opportunities for at least the next few days.

oh man yeah the Q codes thing is a whole rabbit hole haha. the ones you absolutely need to know starting out are QSL (confirmed / do you confirm), QTH (location), QRM (interference from other stations, man-made), QRN (static and natural noise), QSB (signal fading), QRZ (who is calling me), and QSY (change frequency). those come up constantly. the others you kinda pick up over time. 73 is best regards, basically a warm sign-off, everyone uses it. 88 means love and kisses which is why you mostly hear guys say it to their wives or girlfriends on the radio lol. some people get real uptight about 88 being used casually but whatever. there's also stuff like OM (old man, meaning any male ham), YL (young lady, any female ham regardless of age), XYL (ex-young lady meaning wife), and es which just means 'and'. like you'd say 'ur 59 es nice to meet u' in a cw exchange honestly the best thing is to just keep listening and it clicks pretty fast. ARRL has a decent reference page too if you want something printed out.

Antennas are always the thing people underestimate in a go-kit, you're not wrong to think about it. Personally I run a linked dipole for HF, takes maybe 10 minutes to string up between two trees or a mast and a fence post and it covers 40 and 20 which is honestly most of what matters in an emergency. There are some decent commercial versions but I made mine for like 15 bucks in wire and some dogbone insulators. One thing I'd add to your list that a lot of people skip — a small spiral notebook is fine but also have some kind of ICS-213 general message forms printed out, like a stack of them. When you're actually deployed at a served agency they sometimes expect proper documentation and fumbling around trying to remember the format under stress is no fun. Ask me how I know. Oh and zip ties. Just... a lot of zip ties. And a headlamp that's not the one you use hiking so it stays in the kit. That one sounds obvious and I still forgot it the first time I actually needed to go somewhere at 2am.

yeah the jump is noticeable, not gonna lie. i ran an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year before picking up an RSP1A and the difference on HF is real — the noise floor is lower, the dynamic range handling is way better when youre near strong signals, and the 12-bit ADC vs the 8-bit in the RTL stuff actually matters more than i expected. that said your antenna situation matters a ton too so both things are true at once. i had a crappy wire strung through my attic and even with the RSPdx i was still fighting noise until i got the antenna outside and away from the house wiring. for WSJT-X integration the SDRplay works fine with the virtual audio cable approach, some people use SDR-Console with it which has pretty decent CAT integration if you want to tie it to logging software. SDRangel is powerful but yeah the learning curve is steep, i gave up on it twice before it finally clicked. if your primary goal is HF digital modes and general shortwave the RSP1A is probably the right call at that price point.

i had almost the exact same setup before i moved to an RSPdx and yeah the difference on 80m especially was pretty obvious. less garbage in the waterfall, pulling out weaker signals that just got buried before. SDRuno took me a bit to get used to coming from SDR# but its fine now. dont bother with hackrf for pure receive its not what its designed for

yeah the linear transponder doppler thing trips up pretty much everyone at first. so the deal with inverted linear transponders like AO-73 is that your uplink and downlink doppler corrections actually work in opposite directions through the passband -- if you tune up on the uplink your signal appears lower on the downlink, so manually chasing your own signal kind of fights itself if you dont have that relationship set correctly in gpredict. check your gpredict rig config, theres a setting for inverting the downlink tracking that you need to enable for inverting transponders. once thats set right gpredict should keep your signal roughly in the same spot in the passband throughout the pass. you'll still need to do small manual tweaks especially near AOS and LOS when doppler rate is highest, but it shouldnt be drifting way off on you. also make sure your CAT control polling rate isnt too slow, ive seen people set it at like 5 seconds and then wonder why their frequency is always a bit behind.

so ive been trying to figure out if its worth the drive this year, last time i went i picked up a pretty decent old kenwood for like 40 bucks but that was a few years back and honestly the swap tables have been looking thinner every time. my buddy says its still worth going just for the people but idk, its a long haul from where i am. anyone planning on heading out that way? also is the club breakfast thing still happening saturday morning or did they drop that

QRP operators will soon find out that their CQ calls are often overheard, and that it makes sense to watch out for CQ calls themselves. When a QRP op hears a CQ call a reasonable work hypothesis is that the calling station is using about 80W. Listen for the stronger stations calling CQ first!

this is a great writeup, thanks for sharing. the hurry up and wait thing is SO real and i dont think anyone ever really talks about it in training. i've been through probably a dozen activations over the years and every single one has that quality. the key is staying mentally sharp during the slow periods so when things do pick up youre not caught flat footed the served agency communication thing is also a constant challenge. a lot of emergency managers have rotated through and only have a vague idea what ARES even is or what we can realistically do in terms of throughput and reliability. some ECs put together little one-page briefing sheets for the EOC staff which helps. might be worth suggesting to your EC if he's open to it sounds like you handled the HF piece well honestly. Winlink on a noisy 40m path during winter conditions with a cold laptop and stress is not trivial. good on ya

haha yeah the Q code thing trips up a lot of new hams, dont worry about it. they actually go back to like the early telegraph days before voice radio was even a thing, so theres a ton of them and most active ops only use maybe a dozen regularly anyway. the ones youll hear most on HF phone are QRM which is man-made interference, like if someones transmitting on your frequency or close to it. QRN is natural static and noise, like lightning crashes. QSB is when your signal is fading in and out, which happens a lot on HF with propagation changes. QRP means low power, youll hear people say theyre running QRP when theyre on 5 watts or less. QRZ is basically asking whos calling, youll hear people say QRZ at the end of a CQ when theyre listening for replies. the ARRL website has a full list and so does the back of most log books. but honestly you just pick most of them up from listening. after a few months of HF time they start to feel pretty natural. 73 by the way just means best regards, its the most common one you'll hear at the end of any contact