Steve Anderson

so I finally did my first parks on the air activation last weekend at a state park about 40 minutes from me (K-4577 for anyone curious) and wow there is a lot more to it than I expected. I spent way too long trying to find a decent spot with tree cover but also not so much tree cover that my signal was getting eaten up, ended up just setting up near a picnic table which felt a little boring but whatever it worked. ran 10 watts with my KX2 and a random wire up in a tree, got on 40 meters around 2pm local and started calling. first like 10 minutes nothing, i was starting to think i'd done something wrong. then boom all of a sudden i had a pileup going which was kind of overwhelming honestly. forgot to log two contacts because i was flustered and trying to keep up. ended up with 22 qsos which i guess counts for the activation but i felt bad about the ones I missed. anyway does anyone have tips for staying organized when you suddenly get a pile of hunters calling at once? im used to pretty relaxed ragchew stuff and this felt like a whole different mode. also should i have spotted myself earlier? i waited until i had my antenna up and was ready but saw some people spot themselves before they're even fully set up?

yeah same question bugged me when i started. what i was told is that technically the FCC doesnt require you to use phonetics at all, you just have to ID with your callsign. so theres no rule saying you have to. but practically speaking if you give your call on a noisy HF contact and dont use phonetics you might end up saying it three times anyway while the other station tries to copy it. so phonetics end up being faster even though they feel slower at first. one thing i still mess up sometimes is reverting to non-NATO phonetics under pressure, like saying "sugar" instead of Sierra or whatever my brain just defaults to. working on it

welcome welcome, your first qso is something you dont really forget. i still remember mine and that was like 15 years ago, i was shaking a little which is embarrassing to admit now lol. dont worry about the baofeng thing, everyone starts somewhere and honestly for local repeater work it does the job fine. once you get the itch to work HF you'll end up down a whole rabbit hole of antennas and radios but theres no rush. stick around the repeater and see if theres a local club doing anything, meeting elmers in person makes a huge difference when youre just getting started

yeah the suffix-only thing is huge and people underestimate it. when the dx op is pulling fragments out of the noise the last thing he needs is you sending your full callsign twice at 28wpm. just the suffix, clean, maybe once. and timing is everything honestly, listening to his rhythm before you even key up is worth more than any amount of extra watts. i ran a dx station during a small dxpedition to a pacific island a few years back and the stations that got through cleanest were almost never the loudest ones, they were the ones that were disciplined about when they transmitted. the guys running full legal limit with a 5el were sometimes harder to work because they were just on top of everything including each other and it turned into mush. one thing i'd add is if you can figure out the dx op is using a pattern like going by callsign district or region, just wait your turn. bucking the pattern is a waste of everyone's time and it annoys the op enough that some of them will specifically skip you.

yeah that workflow is pretty much exactly what most people do when theyre starting out, nothing wrong with it. the cluster spot to qrz lookup dance is pretty standard. once you get logging software set up though — like log4om or even just HAMRS if you want something simple — a lot of that cross referencing happens automatically because the log is right there and flags dupes for you. saves a ton of tab switching. for phone apps, i use HamSphere but honestly for just cluster spots i usually just pull up dxwatch in mobile chrome, it renders fine on a phone. there's also an app called DX Alarm that some guys swear by, lets you set up alerts for specific callsigns or DXCC entities so your phone buzzes when something you need gets spotted. that ones been pretty useful when im not sitting at the radio but want to know if a rare one pops up. sounds like youre on the right track honestly, 8 months in and already chasing DX is great. the wire antenna will surprise you.

man this brings back memories, i did almost the exact same thing about 8 years ago with a 4state QRP group kit out at a county park. there is really nothing like it. one thing i found that helped a lot was spending some time on the antenna rather than worrying about the rig — even a few more feet of height made a noticeable difference for me. also if youre not already using the reverse beacon network to see if youre getting out, that thing is addictive when youre running QRP, you can spot your own signal and see exactly who is hearing you even if they dont respond. ohio at 400 miles on 500mw is solid for 40m in the afternoon. wait till you try it at night, the band opens up and you can work guys way further east or into the plains states without much trouble. definitely try 20m too when propagation is decent, i worked a station in spain once running 2 watts from a hillside and nearly fell off the log i was sitting on.

welcome to the hobby, you did fine honestly. most informal nets around here are pretty relaxed and net control will guide you if they need anything specific. some nets want you to give your call, name and location when you check in, others just want the call. best thing to do is listen to a few cycles before jumping in like you did, which sounds like you already did that, so you're ahead of most new folks. the doubling situation, that's just part of life on a repeater. net control usually has a way of handling it, sometimes they'll ask for the partial call they heard first, sometimes they just ask everyone who doubled to try again. there's no magic rule, just wait a beat and try again. it gets easier once you know the voices on the net and can kind of anticipate the rhythm of things. stick with it, nets are a great way to actually get comfortable talking on the air.

yeah the band edge thing trips up a lot of new generals. basically your signal isnt a perfect single frequency, especially on SSB — your voice audio kind of spreads out a few kHz depending on how wide your filter is and how your radio is set up. so if you tune to exactly 7.175 your transmitted audio could actually be bleeding below that into the extra/advanced only portion. most people say stay at least 3 kHz inside the band edge to be safe, so something like 7.178 and up is a more comfortable starting point for phone. as for the ITU region stuff dont worry too much about that for domestic operating, its mainly relevant if youre trying to work DX stations in europe or africa where their 40m allocations are different and sometimes narrower. you might hear stuff below 7.100 from DX stations that you cant legally transmit on yourself. just listen down there and work them when they call CQ up in your segment.

congrats on the first one, that feeling when you hit 10 never really gets old honestly. on the QSO question -- yeah if you both logged it, it counts, even if the signal was rough. a completed exchange is a completed exchange. POTA isnt super strict about signal reports, as long as you got the callsign right and they got yours. if you were unsure about a specific contact just mark it as questionable in your notes but honestly 53 is workable, people make contacts through way worse. the hunters calling other calls on your frequency happens all the time. sometimes guys are running POTA skimmer or just watching the spots and they'll land near you while you're between QSOs and start calling whoever they're after. kind of annoying but its not really anything you did wrong, just the nature of a busy POTA pileup day. if it gets bad just say QRZ and your callsign again and usually the frequency sorts itself out. for the adif upload thing -- the kx2 sometimes spits out an adif where the date format or the frequency field isnt exactly what the POTA site wants. i just run mine through ADIF Master (free utility) to clean it up before uploading and havent had a problem since. or you can export directly from Log4OM if you use that. manually entering 10 contacts isnt terrible but yeah definitely fix that before your next one.

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech class) and ive just been using the club's radios at meetings and the occasional net but i think its time to actually get my own handheld. problem is every time i start looking i end up with 47 browser tabs open and no clearer than when i started mostly i want to hit the local repeaters, maybe eventually get into APRS if thats not too complicated, and i live in a decent sized city so theres actually a lot of activity around here. budget is probably around 100-150 bucks but i could stretch a bit if there was actually a good reason to ive seen people mention the Baofeng UV-5R like a million times and also the Yaesu FT-65 and some people swear by the wouxun stuff. honestly i dont even know what features matter vs what's just marketing fluff. like does dual band actually matter day to day or is that just nice to have any help appreciated, trying not to overthink this but clearly failing at that

honestly it took me about 3 weeks of casual studying, maybe 30-40 minutes a night. the electrical formulas tripped me up at first but once you get ohms law down and understand how it scales the rest kind of clicks. propagation was actually the most interesting part for me because it started making real world sense once i could hear the bands actually doing what the books described. dont stress too much about memorizing everything perfectly, a lot of it sticks when you start actually operating. hamstudy is fine, i also used the gordon west book which some people think is old fashioned but i liked having something physical to flip through. the jump from tech to general isnt as scary as it looks, the question pool is bigger but a lot of it overlaps conceptually with what you already know. for HF gear to start out, plenty of people swear by a used icom 718 or a yaesu ft-450, you can find them in decent shape for a few hundred bucks. wire antennas are cheap and work great so dont feel like you need a big tower setup to have fun on 40m or 20m right away

the Sweepstakes in November might actually be a better intro than CQ WW if you want something more domestic and a little less chaotic. the exchange is more complicated but everyone on is North American so the pace feels a bit more manageable to me at least. I did my first one last year and managed like 80 contacts which felt pretty good for a random Saturday afternoon. also N1MM logger is free and worth setting up before any contest, makes logging so much easier and it handles all the exchange stuff so you dont have to remember everything yourself.

yeah you basically got it right. the CTCSS tone (some people call it PL tone, that was motorola's old trademark name for it) is a continuous sub-audible tone that rides along under your voice when you transmit. the repeater's receiver has a tone squelch set to only open for that specific frequency, so without it the repeater literally never activates even if youre coming in full quieting. its not ignoring you personally, it just cant hear you in the way that matters. for finding the tone, definitely check repeaterbook dot com — just search your area and it should list the input/output frequencies, offset, and the required CTCSS tone for most active repeaters. a lot of club websites also have their repeater info listed. once you find it, on the uv-5r you go into the menu and look for R-CTCS (thats receive) and T-CTCS (thats transmit) — for most cases you only need to set the transmit one to get the repeater to respond to you. the receive CTCSS is optional, that just filters what you hear on your end. as for jumping into a conversation, the standard thing is to just wait for a pause between exchanges and then say your callsign. like just your callsign, nothing else, during the gap. whoever is talking will usually acknowledge you and you can introduce yourself. dont just start talking over people mid-QSO, that drives some folks crazy. most repeater regulars are pretty welcoming to new hams though so dont stress about it too much.

im in basically the same boat as you, started about 3 months ago. one thing that helped me a ton was slowing way down on lcwo and turning on the word spacing option so i had more time to think. i was trying to go too fast and just frustrating myself. i dont have a great paddle either, mine came with my kit radio and its kind of terrible honestly. been eyeing a Begali or even just a decent Vibroplex but they're kind of expensive for someone whos not sure they'll stick with it. have you looked at the Czech made paddles, there's a brand called Palm I think that are supposed to be pretty decent for the price. anyway good luck, CW is really satisfying once it starts clicking

same thing happened to me last week, i was just doing some antenna work and had the radio on in the background and suddenly 10m was full of signals. managed to work like 6 new countries in an hour which is more DX than id gotten in the previous month combined lol. i think im going to start actually monitoring the solar flux numbers more regulary because clearly im missing openings by not paying attention