Karen Johnson

okay so i finally got my technician license last month and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but nobody ever seems to hear me. i programmed the repeater output and input frequencies correctly i think, and i can hear other people talking just fine, but when i key up nobody responds and i dont get the courtesy beep or whatever its called. someone at the club meeting mentioned CTCSS tones and i kind of nodded like i understood but honestly i have no idea what that is or how to set it up on my radio. i have a baofeng uv-5r which i know people have opinions about but its what i have right now. is CTCSS the thing that makes the repeater actually open up? like do i need a specific tone for each repeater? where do i even find out what tone the local one uses? sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to figure out why nobody can hear me when im pretty sure im hitting the machine

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i know there are band edges and i know you're supposed to stay away from them but i keep reading different things. like the FCC allocation says one thing and then the ARRL band plan says something slightly different and i dont know which one actually matters legally. also someone at my club told me to never operate within like 3 khz of the band edge because of frequency drift or something? im running an ft-891 so i dont think drift is really an issue but maybe im wrong. just want to make sure im not accidentally transmitting out of band or stepping on phone portions when im doing digital or whatever

yeah what he said about the baofeng is spot on, those things save settings in weird ways. i spent like an hour once wondering why my tone wasnt working and it turned out i had it set in the VFO but my channel memory had no tone saved at all. re-program the whole channel from scratch and make sure the T-CTCS is set to 100.0 when you save it. one more thing on repeater etiquette since you mentioned just wanting to say hello — when you want to join or call someone up, just key up briefly and say your callsign and that you're monitoring, something like "[callsign] listening" and then let go. dont just start talking, give people a chance to come back to you. and if theres already a conversation going, wait for a break and throw your callsign in during the pause between transmissions. people are generally pretty welcoming especially to new hams so dont stress it too much

honestly the fact that you showed up at all puts you ahead of a lot of people, dont be too hard on yourself. but yeah getting organized makes a huge difference when things get real. for what its worth, the way i think about it is plan for 72 hours minimum without being able to recharge anything. thats kind of the standard emergency management thinking — 3 days self sufficient. your 30Ah battery is a decent start but you gotta actually measure your radio's draw at typical operating power. the 857 is not exactly known for being efficient on receive so i'd run some numbers before assuming you're set. i usually keep a small folding solar panel in my kit too just in case, even a 50 watt panel gives you something to work with. on antennas — i keep a few options because you honestly dont know what environment you'll be in. a simple linked dipole rolled up, a magmount for the vehicle, and a small yagi for 2m if i need to hit a specific repeater that's marginal from where im at. pre-program everything you can think of, all the local repeaters, simplex calling freqs, NOAA, all of it. in a real event your brain is doing a thousand other things and muscle memory on the radio matters. and i'd say get the one kit really solid before adding a second radio. redundancy is great but a half-finished kit with two radios is worse than one complete kit.

i went through the exact same thing with borrowing a rig for a while and then finally getting my own and yeah the spectrum scope changes everything. i find myself actually understanding propagation now in a way i never did just tuning by ear. 17m has been really good lately btw if you havent tried it yet, lots of DX in the mornings.

Morse at 5 WPM and 15-20 WPM are completely different animals - you're essentially learning two different skills. I'd restart with Koch method at 20 WPM character speed. At 18 WPM character speed, most people can still count patterns but the mind starts focusing on entire character sounds. 73!

so i was just messing around on 10 meters yesterday afternoon, not really expecting much because conditions have been kinda meh lately, and all of a sudden the band just opened up like crazy. i was pulling in stations from south america, some european stuff, even heard what sounded like a japanese station but couldnt quite make it out through the noise. ran maybe 50 watts into a simple wire dipole in the attic and was still making contacts. its been a while since ive seen 10m behave like that. also on a totally separate note, did anyone see that Yaesu apparently has something new coming? i saw a post on one of the facebook groups but couldnt find anything solid. somebody mentioned a new HF rig but it was all pretty vague. if thats true that would be interesting timing with the hamvention stuff coming up. always seems like thats when the big announcements happen anyway. just figured id check in here and see if anyone else was on during that opening or knows anything more about the Yaesu thing

so i finally decided to give satellite operation a shot after years of telling myself i'd get around to it. been licensed for about 8 years, mostly HF but figured why not. got gpredict set up and pointed it at AO-73 since everyone seems to say thats a good starting point for linear transponder work. my problem is the doppler correction. i understand the concept, the frequency shifts as the bird moves toward you then away, fine. but in practice i cant figure out if im supposed to be manually tuning both the uplink and downlink in real time or if theres a way to automate it, or if i should just set a fixed offset and chase it by ear. ive been using an ic-9700 so in theory it should be able to handle this but the gpredict to radio CAT interface is giving me fits and half the time it just loses connection. also not sure if im even hearing the transponder correctly. i heard what might have been a few ssb signals on a pass yesterday around 145.950 ish on the downlink but they faded real fast and i couldnt tell if that was the pass geometry or just me doing something wrong with the antenna. running a simple arrow antenna handheld for now, no az/el rotators or anything fancy.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for logging contacts and chasing DX but honestly after a while it starts feeling like youre just exchanging signal reports with robots. like there's no actual communication happening, just macros firing back and forth until you get a 73 and move on. started messing around with JS8Call a few months back because i wanted something that could actually let me type a real sentence to somebody. the weak signal performance is still pretty solid — not quite FT8 territory but way better than PSK31 on a bad band day. my issue is that activity levels are pretty thin, especially on 40m during the day where i used to find a lot of FT8 traffic. i found a handful of regulars on the JS8Call nets but it's definitely more work to find someone to ragchew with. curious if anyone here has done a serious comparison of the two in terms of actual on-air time. like do you find js8call worthwhile enough to keep the rig dedicated to it or do you just fire it up occasionally. also wondering how it stacks up against the old PSK31 crowd — i know PSK is basically dead in some parts of the band but there's still some activity on 20m around 14.070 if you know where to look. not trying to start a whole FT8 is ruining ham radio debate, i actually like FT8 for what it is, just wondering if the js8call experiment is worth sticking with

so i heard the tri-county fest is back this year after they skipped it last time, pretty sure its at the fairgrounds again. anybody know if theres gonna be a decent swap meet this time around or is it just gonna be a bunch of vendors selling new stuff at retail prices again lol. last year was kind of a letdown honestly, i picked up one decent dummy load and that was about it. hoping this year is better, my wife already said i have two hours max before she wants to leave so ill need to move fast if theres anything worth grabbing

so ive been dabbling in CW for about 6 months now and i passed my general last spring, been practicing with the G4FON trainer and honestly my receiving is getting pretty decent at like 15-18 wpm but my sending is where i keep running into trouble. i have a set of Vibroplex paddles that i picked up used and they feel pretty nice but the timing on my keyer just feels off somehow. like the dits and dahs dont feel evenly weighted if that makes sense. i'm using the internal keyer on my IC-7300. ive messed with the weight adjustment a little but im not sure if thats actually what i should be tweaking or if its something with my paddle tension or maybe just my technique. when i listen back to recordings of myself sending it sounds a little choppy in places and some of my letters are blending together. anyone dealt with this before? is there a good starting point for keyer settings i should be working from before i start chasing individual adjustments

yeah this is pretty much exactly what we found when we did ours a few years back. the radio part is almost never the problem — its everything around it. who has what authority, how does traffic flow up to the served agency, does the EC actually have a working relationship with the emergency manager or did they just exchange emails once in 2019. the ICS forms thing is real. we made everyone practice filling out a 213 during a net and people who'd been licensed for 20 years were fumbling around. now we try to incorporate it into every exercise even if its just one or two forms so it becomes muscle memory. also worth doing a go-kit audit during the exercise — have people actually open their kits and confirm they have what they think they have. you'd be amazed what gets borrowed and not returned or what batteries went dead sitting in a bag. full activation versus tabletop is a big jump. the tabletop is great for finding the procedural gaps like you found, but nothing really prepares you for the fatigue and the noise and the weird interpersonal stuff that happens when people are stressed and tired. if you can do an overnight exercise even just six or eight hours you'll learn a ton more. we did one at an actual shelter a couple winters ago and it was eye opening in ways that are hard to describe.

The startup messages are hilarious! Mixed in with legitimate-looking system messages are humorous references to flux capacitors, warp drives, and other playful items meant to entertain the user. But seriously, it's solid software and completely free.

yeah the band plan stuff can be a little confusing at first, dont worry. for 10 meters as a tech you get CW privileges from 28.000 to 28.300 and then phone from 28.300 up to 28.500, something like that — double check the ARRL band chart because i always second guess the exact edges. the thing about operating on higher license bands with a control op is a real thing, it's covered somewhere in 97.105 i think, basically you can transmit on frequencies you're not licensed for as long as a licensed control operator with those privileges is with you and responsible for the contact. a lot of people use that to let new techs get a taste of HF before they upgrade. anyway just grab the ARRL band plan PDF and keep it handy, saves a lot of headache

so ive been doing single op for a few years now, mostly phone contests but starting to get more into CW, and i keep reading about SO2R and how it can dramatically improve your rate but honestly every time i try to understand the setup it makes my head spin a little. like i get the basic concept, two radios, run on one while S&P on the other, but the actual implementation seems like a rabbit hole. right now i have an IC-7300 as my main rig and i picked up a used TS-590SG a few months ago thinking id eventually try this. the antenna situation is what im most worried about honestly — i have a yagi up for 20/15/10 and a trapped vertical for 40/80 and i dont really have a second set of antennas. does anyone actually run SO2R with just one antenna per band, like sharing? or do you need completely separate antenna systems to avoid blowing up your front ends also wondering how people handle the audio when youre running SO2R, do you just do one radio per ear or is there some smarter way to manage that. i tried headphone switching manually during a sprint once and it was a disaster

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think im finally getting somewhere but wanted to see if anyone else has gone down this rabbit hole. basically i have an old prop pitch rotator that a buddy gave me and the original controller is toast, like completely dead, so i figured instead of buying a replacement controller i'd just build one around an arduino mega since i had one sitting in a drawer. the motor is a dc brush type so i wired up an H-bridge module, one of those cheap L298N boards, and im feeding position feedback from a 10k pot i coupled to the rotator shaft with some 3d printed gears. the analog read from the pot goes into one of the arduino's ADC pins and i'm mapping the voltage to degrees which seems to work pretty well on the bench. the part im stuck on is the software side — i want it to accept AZ/EL commands over serial so it plays nice with logging software, specifically i want to hook it into ham radio deluxe eventually but honestly even just being able to send a heading from a terminal would be enough for now. has anyone written anything like this or know of a library that handles the rotator protocol stuff? i looked at the EA4TX interface but thats a whole separate thing i'd rather not buy if the arduino can just do it natively. also wondering if a pi would be better for this since then i could run a web interface from it and not need a pc at all to control it.