Michael Anderson

self spotting is totally fine, practically expected these days especially if you're on a summit that doesn't have a lot of regular traffic. Most activators use the SOTA Spotter app or just text a spot in through the web, nobody thinks twice about it. The chasers WANT you to spot yourself so they can find you, thats kind of the whole point of the alerting system. On the time zone thing — yeah UTC on sotawatch and if you got the conversion wrong by an hour thats not the end of the world, the chasers will hang around a bit if they see an alert posted. Just throw a self-spot up as soon as you're set up and on frequency and you'll have a pileup going inside of 3 minutes, these summit chasers are FAST. Seriously faster than any dx pileup ive worked, they're always listening. Have a great time up there, first activation is something you dont forget. Make sure you log your summit reference correctly on the sota database when you submit, its the one thing people mess up and then wonder why the points didnt post.

I've built several beams and found EZNEC predictions track closer to real-world measurements, especially for F/B ratio. The gain difference between programs often disappears once you factor in real-world losses. Focus on the pattern shape rather than absolute numbers.

congrats on the upgrade, the jump from the 706 series to the 7300 is pretty significant just in terms of the receiver alone. i ran a 706MK2 for a while too and yeah the front end is just nowhere near as clean. for NR on ssb i usually keep it around 3-4, anything higher and voices start sounding kinda hollow and processed. NB i leave pretty low unless i'm getting hit with power line noise which is a whole other problem at my QTH. the twin passband tuning is probably the thing i use most honestly, once you get used to dialing out interference with it you wont want to go back to a rig without it. give yourself a few weeks with the menus and it becomes second nature, the touch screen stuff is actually pretty intuitive once you stop trying to do it the old way

honestly the best thing i ever did for pileup work was get a decent bandscope so i can actually see where the pileup energy is concentrated and find the holes. before that i was just guessing. now i can see there's a dead spot at +4.7 and i'll park there instead of fighting in the thick of it. also worth mentioning — on CW specifically, sending your call once, clearly, and then waiting is WAY more effective than hammering it three times in a row. the DX op is trying to pull partials and if you send KW9XXX twice in a row he might only copy the last one cleanly. one clean send and shut up. hardest discipline in the hobby for me honestly.

yeah the first one always gets you, i remember mine i was so worried about the radio i forgot to bring enough water. S2S contacts are addicting once you start chasing them. for the 40m swr thing it might just be your counterpoise length, i had the same issue and adding a few feet sorted it right out. welcome to the addiction

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest about 45 minutes from my house, KFF reference, been meaning to do this for months and just kept putting it off. ended up making 43 contacts in about 2 hours on 40m and a little bit on 20m before the band went weird on me. logged the minimum no problem which i was honestly a bit worried about going in. my setup was just an end fed halfwave with a 9:1 unun thrown up in a tree, ran it off my KX2 at 10 watts, nothing fancy but it worked fine. had a few hunters call in from europe which was cool, didnt expect that at all on 40m. anyway my questions are — do i need to do anything special to submit the log for WWFF vs just uploading to LoTW? i know there's the WWFF logbook thing but im not totally clear on whether that's separate from everything else or if it links somehow. also is spotting yourself on the WWFF cluster basically required or do hunters actually find activations without it? i spotted once at the start and then kind of forgot to re-spot and wonder if that cost me contacts. overall it was a great time honestly, way more relaxed than POTA somehow even though its basically the same idea. probably has to do with fewer people doing it i guess

yeah 4 contacts absolutely counts, you just need the minimum which i think is 4 for most programs so you nailed it. the frozen hands thing is real, i do a lot of winter POTA and honestly i started keeping a pair of those thin liner gloves just for operating because you cant really work a paddle with ski gloves on. also the RF power thing happens to everyone at least once, i did almost the exact same thing on my second activation except mine was the antenna connector wasnt seated all the way

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. i went through this exact same thing last year. one thing that helped me a lot was slowing WAY down and just doing individual letters over and over until they felt automatic, like i wasnt thinking about the pattern just my hand knew what to do. also i found that the Bencher paddles sometimes need a little adjustment out of the box, the spring tension on mine was way too loose when i got it secondhand. there's a screw on the side for that. took me forever to figure that out. anyway stick with it, first CW contact is pretty special even if its just a quick 5nn exchange in a contest or whatever

I used both HamStudy.org and the ARRL manual when I upgraded last year. HamStudy is great for drilling the question pool and identifying weak areas, but the ARRL manual really helped me understand the why behind the answers. I'd recommend doing both - read a chapter in the manual, then hit HamStudy for that topic. Took me about 25 hours total study time.

So ive been watching the 6m band pretty closely the past couple weeks and honestly the activity levels have been something else. Caught a decent Es opening yesterday afternoon, worked a handful of stations up in the northeast and even snagged one guy in Manitoba which was unexpected. The PSKreporter map was absolutely lit up. Also saw something about Icom supposedly dropping a new HF/VHF combo rig sometime this quarter, cant remember where I read that, maybe on one of the Facebook groups or maybe eHam. Anyone heard anything more concrete about that? Im in the market for something to replace my aging 7300 setup and if theres something new coming id rather wait than pull the trigger now. Also side note — if you havent checked out the ARRL's updated band plan stuff from earlier this year its worth a look, they quietly tweaked a few things that might matter depending on how you operate. Nothing earth shattering but still.

i was in almost the exact same spot about a year ago and ended up with the Yaesu FT-4XR which was like 55 bucks at the time. its been solid, no complaints, programming it with chirp was a little bit of a learning curve but once i got that sorted it was easy. battery life is good too which i wasnt expecting for the price. one thing nobody told me that i wish someone had - get a better antenna for whatever you buy. the rubber duck antennas that come in the box are pretty mediocre and swapping to even a cheap aftermarket one makes a noticeable difference if your nearest repeater isnt super close. just something to keep in mind when budgeting.

I had almost the exact same setup in my Tacoma last year, mag mount and everything. For me the whine turned out to be because the mag mount coax was running across the door seal and i guess it was picking up something from there, moved it to come in through the back window gap and it got a lot quieter. probably not your problem but worth checking the coax routing too just in case. hope you get it sorted, that 7900 is a solid radio for mobile use

yeah the baofeng menu for CTCSS is honestly terrible, i spent like an hour on mine before i figured it out. theres a youtube video specifically for the UV-5R CHIRP programming that might be easier — just program it through the computer and it takes a lot of the guesswork out. way less frustrating than fighting the keypad menus also dont get discouraged if the repeater is quiet even when its working, some of the local machines around here can go hours with nothing on them and its totally normal

yeah the phaser sound is almost certainly image rejection, or lack of it. direct conversion receivers pickup both the upper and lower sideband simultaneously and they mix together in the audio stage. if the two signals are close in frequency you get that weird comb/flange effect. its not a filter problem downstream, its just how DC receivers work unless you go quadrature and do phasing or use a Weaver method to cancel one sideband. some guys just live with it for CW since CW is symmetric anyway, but for SSB its pretty rough. the LM386 thing probably isnt helping either, those things oscillate if you look at them wrong. the standard 10 ohm resistor in series with a 0.047uF cap from pin 7 to ground helps a lot, also bypass pin 6 to ground right at the chip. but honestly fix the image issue first or the audio filtering wont matter much.

Having trouble with N1MM+ and WSJT-X integration during contests. The integration of WSJT-X with N1MM+ is a great tool and makes changing modes on the fly pretty painless, but I'm getting inconsistent QSO logging behavior. To enable logging from WSJT-X to N1MM+, configure per the following settings on the Configurer's > WSJT/JTDX Setup page, specifically using IP address 127.0.0.1 and the port number must match between WSJT-X and N1MM+ (the recommended default port number is 2237). Anyone else experiencing similar issues with the UDP connection dropping mid-contest?

If you are using an IC-7300, use the ACC/USB IF Output level (default is 50) to control the audio level sent to your computer. Keep WSJT-X power slider at 100% and adjust the radio's ACC level until ALC just doesn't activate.

yeah this is one of those questions that never really has a clean answer because it depends so much on your specific ground conductivity and how many radials you can actually lay down. i went through basically the same thing a few years back. had a dipole at 30 feet and put up a vertical with 32 radials and on 40m the vertical was noticeably better for the long path stuff, like JA and VK, but the dipole actually held its own for europe, probably because the takeoff angle difference wasnt as dramatic at that distance from here. the noise thing is real though. my vertical picks up a lot more local garbage than the dipole did. if youre in a suburban area with switching power supplies and LED dimmers everywhere you might find the SNR actually gets worse even if the signal is theoretically stronger. more radials help, 60+ is where it starts to really flatten out the ground losses. if you cant do that many dont bother pulling down the dipole is my honest take

hey everyone, got my general a few months ago and im still figuring out where i can transmit on 20m. i know phone starts at 14.150 but ive been hearing people on 14.230 doing phone and some digital stuff too. is this legal for general class or am i missing something about the band edges? my radio lets me transmit there but that doesn't mean i should right

Both have merits, but don't underestimate what you can accomplish with your current setup. I've worked over 100 DXCC entities on 432 EME with just 400W and a modest array. Focus on optimizing your receive system first - install a low noise preamplifier with 0.5-0.8 dB NF at the antenna input point if you haven't already. The moon doesn't care about your amplifier brand!

yeah i had similar issue with mine last winter, turned out water got into the coax connector somehow even though it looked fine from outside. took it apart and there was green crud all over the center conductor. cleaned it up good and sealed it better with some good quality self amalgamating tape and been solid ever since

yeah the TeamViewer thing burned a lot of people, same thing happened to me with my previous setup. I ended up going with RustDesk as a fallback but honestly for rig control specifically I'd rather not be pushing a whole desktop over the wire anyway, too much bandwidth and any hiccup and the whole thing freezes mid-transmission which is not great don't have RemoteHams experience specifically but I've messed around with SDR-Radio server and WebSDR for the receive side and the multi-user SDR thing is really nice once you're used to it. your 7300 should do fine as the backbone, lots of people use that remotely. just make sure your audio routing on the Pi end is solid before you add more complexity on top of it

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the windstorm last month that knocked out power for three days I finally got serious about it. got a pelican case, my ft-891, a couple of Anderson powerpole cables, and I ordered one of those bioenno 20ah lifepo4 batteries. threw in some coax and a roll of wire for a field antenna. my question is more about the stuff thats easy to forget — like I know the radio stuff pretty well but what about the non-radio stuff. logging sheets, headphones, do I need a copy of my license in there or does the FCC digital copy thing cover it. also not sure if I should put a small notebook in there for frequencies because I rely on my phone for that usually and obviously cant count on cell service in an emergency. anyway figured id ask here before I declared victory and put the case in the closet for another year

yeah i was in the same boat when i started checking into our local ARES net, felt like everyone was speaking a slightly different language at first lol. one thing that helped me was actually asking the net control operator after the net was done and the frequency was clear. most NCS folks are more than happy to explain stuff, thats kind of part of the gig for them. dont be shy about it.

oh man been there. my first couple activations were rough too and i think most peoples are honestly. the spotting thing is huge — what i do now is spot myself on the reflector like 15-20 minutes before i expect to reach the summit, then chasers are already tuned in waiting when you start calling. you can also preload an SMS spot through SOTAwatch if your carrier supports it, i use a shortcut on my phone so its like 3 taps. the dipole thing is probably fine, linked dipoles are pretty forgiving and a bit of mismatch isnt gonna kill you especially with the KX2's tuner. i'd bet the no-spot situation was most of your problem. 40 meters in the afternoon can be tough too depending on where you are, 20 was probably your better bet. dont get discouraged though, once you qualify your first one its kind of addictive

Welcome to linear transponders! I struggled with this concept too initially. AMSAT's book "Getting Started with Amateur Satellites" has excellent depth on finding yourself on transponders. The IC-9700 satellite mode handles the inversion automatically once configured properly.