Jennifer Liu

ok so i just got my technician license about two months ago and ive been making contacts here and there mostly on 2m and some HF with my uncle's rig when i visit him. someone at the club meeting last week told me i should be uploading my logs to LoTW and also sign up for eQSL and i guess also send physical cards through the bureau? i honestly have no idea where to start or if i even need all three of these things. like i understand the basic concept, you confirm the contact happened with the other person, but i dont really get the difference between LoTW and eQSL — are they competing things? does one count more than the other for awards? and the physical card thing, is that just for nostalgia or do you actually need those for certain awards. sorry if this is a really basic question but nobody at the club explained it very well and i dont want to just start uploading stuff without knowing what im doing

so im putting together a portable field comms setup for a county ARES exercise this weekend and im going back and forth on power. ive been running a 100ah lifepo4 with a 40w solar panel for most of my portable work but this exercise is supposed to run 12+ hours and theres a good chance we'll be under tree cover most of the day so solar might be useless. the question is whether to haul my honda eu2200i or just bring a second battery. the genny is loud and kind of a pain to deal with but obviously it solves the problem. were running an IC-7300 at around 50w most of the time, maybe occasional 100w bursts, plus a laptop and some accessories so call it 25-30A draw averaged out. the math says one battery probably gets me 3-4 hours of real runtime before i'd want to stop pulling it down and a second gets me through the day but thats a lot of weight to haul. also have to decide on antennas - i have a buddistick and a linked dipole on a 31ft jackite pole. leaning toward the dipole for HF and maybe a vertical whip for VHF/UHF APRS. anyone dealt with similar setups for extended emcomm ops? curious what tradeoffs youve run into with the generator noise and RFI especially

Welcome to the hobby! The nervousness goes away quickly once you make that first contact. Generally, we should use the minimum amount of power required to guarantee a good contact. Don't worry about being perfect - most hams are very patient with new operators and happy to help. You'll be ragchewing like an old timer in no time!

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and mostly do HF stuff, some 2m SSB when conditions are decent, but ive always been kind of obsessed with the idea of bouncing a signal off the moon and actually getting a contact. like just the concept of it is wild to me. anyway i finally decided to stop just reading about it and actually look into what it would take to get on 2m EME seriously. the problem is every time i start researching i get completely overwhelmed. some guys say you need a massive yagi array, others are saying a single long boom yagi and JT65 is fine to start. my lot is not huge, maybe 80x120 feet, and theres HOA stuff so a 4 yagi array probably isnt happening. i have a IC-9700 already so the radio side is mostly sorted i think, but i have no idea about the preamp situation, whether i need a dedicated PA, what coax really matters at 144 mhz for a run of maybe 60 feet. just kind of want to know what a realistic single yagi setup looks like and whether contacts are actually makeable or if im just going to sit there calling CQ into the void.

Bigger and faster FFT display than almost any radio available, HDSDR in fullscreen. The RTL-SDR can match the performance of the raw audio output, even producing less signal splatter on strong signals due to pure numerical mixing strategies. The visual advantage is significant for digital modes and pile-ups.

so i finally sat down and actually participated in CQ WW SSB last month instead of just listening to all the chaos like i have the past couple years. been licensed about 3 years now and always kinda avoided contests because honestly they seemed overwhelming and a little rude sounding to me lol, everyone just yelling their callsign at each other with no real conversation happening but man once i got into it i totally get it now. worked like 40 countries in a weekend which is more than i had in my log from the previous two years combined. running barefoot into a dipole at about 35 feet which isnt amazing but it was enough to get heard by a surprising number of stations. had a eu pile up calling me at one point which was completely surreal anyway it got me thinking about what other contests i should try. i know ARRL Field Day is coming up and ive heard great things but thats more of a club thing right? also been seeing a lot about SOTA activations and wondering if any of those tie into contest weekends or if thats just a totally separate thing. and is there a good calendar somewhere that shows all the upcoming major ones because i keep finding out about stuff after it already happened

Just finished a systematic comparison between my ground-mounted quarter-wave vertical with 6 radials and a horizontal 20m dipole at 5m height. Signal reports on TX consistently showed 2 S points down on the vertical compared to the horizontal dipole, with similar receive performance. The vertical only showed advantage when both antennas were at identical maximum heights - noise issues really matter for verticals or the lower angle benefits get obliterated by poor SNR. Using RG58 feedline for the vertical vs 90-ohm balanced line for the dipole, both with comparable losses. Anyone else done similar comparisons with different height configurations?

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about two years now doing mostly wideband monitoring, some ATIS decoding, poking around on the aircraft bands, occasional HF with the direct sampling hack. its been fine honestly, like way better than i expected for a $30 piece of hardware. but ive been eyeing the SDRplay RSP1B for a while and cant decide if its actually worth the jump or if im just GASing. the thing that gets me is the noise floor on the RTL below like 50 MHz is pretty rough even with the bias tee and a decent preamp inline. and the direct sampling mode works but its not exactly clean, you can tell its a workaround. the RSP1B is what, 12 bit ADC vs the 8 bit on the RTL so that should make a real difference on dynamic range right? at least thats what i keep reading. anybody actually made this switch and noticed a real improvement in day to day use? im running SDR++ mostly now because SDRsharp got annoying with the plugin stuff and SDR++ just works. does the RSP1B play nice with it or do you have to fight drivers

so ive been trying to figure out if the Clarksburg hamfest is still happening, i heard they almost cancelled it last year and wasnt sure if the club was still putting it together. usually go every year and pick up random coax and connectors for cheap but havent seen anything posted on their website in a while. anybody have info on this or know someone in that club

I still use HAMRS but might give PoLo a try. The automatic spotting to multiple networks sounds convenient for those quick lunch-break activations where every minute counts.

As someone who operates mostly digital modes, the Extra privileges have been fantastic. The exclusive segments on 20m and 40m are noticeably less crowded, especially during contests. The HF bands can be awfully crowded, particularly at the top of the solar cycle. Once one earns HF privileges, one may quickly yearn for more room.

i just got my license a few months ago and QRP stuff is what drew me to ham radio in the first place — the idea that you can talk across the country with less power than an LED bulb is just wild to me. im still saving up for either a KX2 or maybe trying one of the uSDX kits which are cheaper but i hear mixed things about them. did you consider any other rigs before going with the MTR? and how hard was CW to learn, thats the part im most nervous about

I've used both extensively. The TNC4's high-quality demodulator is based on javAX25 and requires modern processing power to operate, but it's very reliable. Direwolf actually decodes slightly better in marginal conditions, but the TNC4 wins on portability and power consumption.

honest answer: the first contest i tried SO2R i was probably 15% worse than just running S&P on one radio because i kept fumbling the footswitch timing and missing exchanges on both radios at once. it took me maybe 3 contests before it started feeling natural and probably a full year before i was actually extracting rate from it consistently. the filtering thing is real and you cant really cut corners on it. i tried running with just the internal ATU doing some of the work and a single bandpass filter and yeah it was a mess. eventually got a full set of 6m-10m ICE filters and did the proper station ground buss and it cleaned up almost completely. the antenna isolation actually matters a lot too — if your two antennas are physically close and on adjacent bands you're going to fight intermod no matter what you do in the shack. for sweepstakes specifically the SO2R advantage is really about using the second radio to find a run frequency on the next band while you're still running on the first one. the mult hunting angle is a little less dramatic in SS since everybody works everybody but the band transition timing gets way smoother once you have that second radio listening ahead for you. worth doing IMO but set your expectations for the learning curve.