Emily Brown

yeah the tab juggling is real, i went through the same thing when i started chasing DX seriously. what helped me a lot was just sticking with one tool and learning it properly before adding more to the mix. for me that ended up being DXKeeper with the cluster feed piped in directly, but thats a whole setup if you arent already using that suite. for just browser stuff honestly DXwatch lets you filter by band and mode if you poke around in the settings a bit, took me a while to find it. and yeah with 100w and a dipole you can still work a surprising amount of DX depending on band conditions, dont sell yourself short. just maybe ignore the 10m spots when the band is dead lol. the QRZ alert system is decent for rare entities but i wouldnt rely on it as your primary spotter, theres usually a delay

so ive been chasing 3Y0 and some of the other rare ones for a while now and last weekend there was a pretty decent pileup on a VK9 operation that i finally managed to break after about 45 minutes of trying. figured id share what ended up working because i feel like a lot of guys just keep throwing their call over and over at the same time as everyone else and wonder why they never get through. what finally did it for me was listening for maybe 10 minutes first before even keying up. i noticed the DX operator was working split and trending slightly up in freq over time, like he'd work someone at 5 up, then drift to 7, then back to 5. once i saw the pattern i just planted myself at 6 and waited for the moment when he was swinging back through. also i was only sending my call once, maybe twice, not the 15-second tail-ending machine gun thing a lot of people do. the other thing that helped honestly was running a bit more power than usual. im normally pretty conservative but i bumped up closer to the legal limit and that seemed to matter. not sure if its the S/N ratio at his end or just getting above the noise floor of the pileup but it worked. curious if others have had luck with specific timing tricks or if you think power really makes that much difference in a competitive pileup.

i went through the exact same confusion a few months ago lol. what helped me was just pulling up the actual arrl band plan chart and the part 97 table side by side and kind of mapping them against each other. its tedious but once you do it for like 40 and 20 it kind of clicks for the other bands too. 40 in particular gets complicated because of all the DX window stuff around 7.000 to 7.025 where US stations are supposed to kind of stay out of the way of dx stations working each other, thats not law either but its one of those things where if you ignore it people notice

congrats on the first build, Rockmites are great little rigs. on the tuner question — honestly it depends. if youre just working one band and you have the wire cut close to resonant you can usually get away without one. but once you start wanting flexibility, like maybe 40 and 20 on the same outing, a tuner really does open things up. i built a small L-network tuner years ago that fits in an altoids tin and it goes everywhere with me now. the ZM-2 is solid if you want something more capable but for casual portable ops the simple stuff works fine. the real magic with QRP portable is keeping the whole kit light enough that you actually want to take it out, and tuners add weight and fiddling. id say try a few more outings without one first and see if you feel like youre missing anything.

yeah 3Y0J was a zoo, i gave up on SSB entirely and just worked them on FT8 after two days of getting nowhere in the pile. probably controversial to say that but im not ashamed lol. my antenna situation isnt great right now and FT8 let me actually put them in the log which is the whole point. one thing i'll add about pileup technique that nobody talks about enough is listening to where the DX is NOT tuning. like if you hear the op keep coming back between say 3 and 5 up from their transmit frequency, the whole pile migrates there and then the smart move is to jump up to 8 or 10 up because the op will often sweep through looking for fresh calls. worked for me more than once on big DXpeditions. basically you're trying to be the loudest signal in a slice of spectrum where there's less competition rather than the 50th guy all stacked on the same frequency.

yeah that click moment is real, it took me probably 6 months before i felt it happening. the thing that made the biggest difference for me wasnt more practice time, it was changing what i was practicing with. LCWO is great for characters but at some point you gotta start copying actual QSOs, even if you can only get every third word. i started recording stuff off the Morse Code Ninja youtube channel, he has word lists at different speeds and that helped a ton. also and this is going to sound weird but copying by hand was slowing me down. switching to typing what i heard sped things up noticeably, i think because writing is slower and i'd fall behind and then panic. maybe try that if you havent. 20 minutes a day is probably fine but consistency matters more than duration, missing days is what kills progress in my experience.

ok so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i keep hearing about all these different ways to confirm contacts and im honestly a little lost. like my elmer told me to sign up for LoTW which i did, and then someone in my club mentioned eQSL is also a thing, and then there are actual physical QSL cards which i understand the concept of but have no idea how the mailing actually works — do you just send them directly to the other operator? through a bureau? what even is a bureau lol i made contact with a station in Japan last week (super excited about that, my first DX outside north america) and he mentioned he'd send me a card. does that mean i should send him one back? i dont even have cards printed yet. is it rude not to send one back? basically i guess im asking — what do most people actually use these days and do i need to be on all of them to be taken seriously or get any awards eventually. sorry if this is a super basic question

yeah the 40m situation trips a lot of people up when they first upgrade. so basically as a general you get phone privileges starting at 7.175 MHz and going up to 7.300. below that from 7.025 to 7.125 is where you can do CW and some digital modes. the chunk from 7.125 to 7.175 is actually extra class only for phone, so thats probably why someone said something to you if you were trying to do ssb around 7.125. the band edge thing is a separate issue — people just mean dont tune up RIGHT on 7.300 because if your rig drifts even a little or your sideband signal is wide you could be transmitting outside the allocation and thats a no-no. staying a few kHz inside is just good practice. honestly just bookmark the arrl privilege chart, the one that shows the colored bars, thats way easier to read than the footnote version

yeah same boat as you, been licensed about a year and still figuring this stuff out. i downloaded an app called DXToolbox that shows the solar data in real time and it helped me a lot just for understanding what the numbers actually mean in practice. seeing the flux and K index side by side while you're actually on the radio kind of connects the dots faster than just reading about it. also i read somewhere that 10m openings can happen even before the SFI is super high if there's a good gray line path lined up, which i thought was interesting. havent really confirmed that myself yet but something to look into maybe

So i've been running a little handheld clipped to my visor for like two years now and finally decided to do a proper mobile install in my F-150. Got a Yaesu FTM-400XDR and a Tram 1185 dual band lip mount antenna on the hatch. Ran the power cable direct to the battery with a fuse holder right at the positive terminal, about 18 feet of 12 gauge wire which was kind of a pain to route through the firewall but i found a grommet on the passenger side that worked out fine. The noise floor is so much better than i expected honestly. Was worried about alternator whine but i think doing the direct battery run helped a lot. I did have a weird issue where the radio would reset when i started the truck but that turned out to be my ground wire being loose at the chassis. Like really loose, embarrassingly loose. Tightened it up and haven't had the problem since. Only thing i'm still figuring out is antenna placement. The lip mount puts it on the rear hatch which opens obviously so the coax has to loop a bit. Works fine but wondering if anyone has dealt with coax wear over time with a hatch like that. Using the factory coax that came with the antenna for now.

yeah theres a lot of them honestly and most hams probably only use maybe 20-30 regularly. the ones youll hear constantly are QSL which just means confirmed or acknowledged, QRZ is whos calling or sometimes used as like a who is that on the frequency, QRM is interference from other stations, QSB is signal fading, QTH is your location, and QRP means low power operation. QSY means change frequency which is handy. you dont need to memorize the whole ITU Q code list, its huge and a lot of them are maritime or aviation stuff that nobody in ham radio ever uses. as for QNI specifically thats a net thing, it means net check-in, so like you say your callsign and QNI to let the net control know youre joining. different nets have their own little conventions too so it can vary a bit. honestly the best thing is just keep a cheat sheet handy for a while, i did that for probably my first year and nobody cares if you have to look something up

Yeah I've seen this before with certain gateways, they seem to have different patience levels if you know what i mean. The one I use on 40m will sit there all day but the local VHF one gets cranky with anything substantial. You might also want to check if your TNC settings are doing any kind of compression or if pat is trying to be too aggressive with the packet size. Sometimes backing everything down to the most basic settings helps even if it seems like it should work fine at higher speeds.

okay so i've been licensed for about 3 years now and honestly 10 meters has been basically dead for most of that time, or at least that's been my experience. i had kind of written it off and just left it parked on 40 and 20 most nights. but yesterday afternoon i spun the dial over to 28.something just out of curiosity and holy cow it was wall to wall signals. worked a handful of stations in South America, a couple in Europe, even caught what sounded like a JA station though i couldn't pull him out of the pile well enough to log him confidently. so my question is, is this a new thing or have i just been asleep at the wheel? i've been watching the solar flux index on that one website but i never really knew what numbers to look for. like what SFI should i be watching for before bothering to check 10m? and is there a better resource for knowing when to expect these openings or do you just have to stumble into them

i just got my general last month so ive been learning about all this. whats sporadic e exactly, is that different from regular skip? i keep seeing people mention it but im not totally sure i understand the difference from regular ionospheric propagation

I learned this lesson the hard way too during Field Day a few years back! Now I practice quarterly and do monthly checks. I conduct periodic drills that simulate various emergency scenarios - this practice helps familiarize operators with procedures and equipment. Also keep a simple checklist taped inside my go-box lid.

yeah the mag mount adapter situation is definitely costing you something, probably not catastrophic but its not ideal. ive done NMO through-hole installs on a couple vehicles and honestly if you take your time its not that bad. the roof is the best spot electrically but theres a reason a lot of guys go with the lip mount on the rain gutter edge — its a solid ground plane connection and you dont have to touch the roof sheet metal at all. the Proxel lip mounts and the Larsen ones are both decent, ive used the Larsen NMO-K lip mount on a silverado and it held fine even at highway speeds for over a year. you do lose a little compared to center-of-roof but for everyday repeater and linked stuff you wont notice. the real enemy is the coax run — if youre routing through a door seal or window gap and its getting pinched thats gonna hurt you more than the mount location. if the lease is the concern i'd go lip mount, no question. put it back when you turn the truck in, nobody knows it was there.

yeah the generator vs battery thing is one of those debates that never really ends lol. personally i brought a honda eu2200i to a field day a couple years back thinking id be the hero and the thing vibrated loose on the truck ride and by the time we got there it wouldnt start. so now i'm firmly in the battery camp for anything under like 8-10 hours of heavy use. one thing i'd add is bring a clamp meter if you have one, just clip it on your positive lead and you can watch your actual consumption in real time. way better than guessing. helped me figure out my tuner was drawing way more than i thought when it was hunting around, turned out the motor was starting to go.

so ive been on HF for about two years now mostly doing SSB on 40 and 20 and i keep getting reports that range from 'sounds great' to 'a little muffled' depending on who im talking to and honestly i cant figure out what the variable is. my setup is a 7300 with the stock mic and i know i know everybody says get a better mic but before i drop money on that i want to understand what actually matters here. ive been reading about proper mic gain settings and the ALC behavior and i think i had my mic gain cranked too high for a long time which was probably causing the ALC to slam and make me sound compressed and harsh. backed it off and things seem better but im not 100% sure. also been experimenting with the TX bandwidth setting — had it on narrow for a while thinking that was 'correct' for HF SSB but somebody told me wide actually sounds better for voice quality, just takes up more spectrum. is that right? any tips from people who have dialed this stuff in would be appreciated. not looking to sound like a broadcast station just want consistent clean audio that people dont have to ask me to repeat

yeah the farnsworth thing takes longer than people think to kick in. i was doing the same setup on LCWO and my instructor told me to just leave it alone for a full month without changing anything and trust the process. felt like torture but he was right, somewhere around week 3 it started clicking faster. also are you writing everything down or just listening? i found that switching to head copy, even badly, helped me more than writing at that speed range. writing kind of slows your brain down when the code starts getting faster. just a thought, might not work for everyone

so ive been running N1MM for contests for a few years now and it does what it does really well, no complaints there. but for everyday logging i always felt like it was kind of overkill and the interface is just... a lot. ive been messing around with Log4OM lately and honestly kind of like it for general shack use, the awards tracking and QSL management stuff is way better than anything ive tried before. the thing i cant figure out is a clean workflow when i also want to run WSJT-X on the side. right now i have WSJT-X logging to Log4OM over UDP which mostly works, but then when i switch over to a contest weekend i fire up N1MM and everything kind of falls apart because im basically maintaining two logs and manually merging stuff after the fact which is a nightmare. i know you can pipe WSJT-X to N1MM directly too but then my Log4OM is out of sync. has anyone actually solved this or is the answer just pick one and live with it. feels like there should be a cleaner way to handle the UDP broadcasts to multiple apps at the same time but i havent dug into that deeply yet.

yeah the first one is always a little rough, i remember mine felt like i was setting up camp in a hurricane while also trying to remember how to operate a radio lol. it gets way more relaxed once the setup routine becomes muscle memory. one thing that helped me a lot was self-spotting earlier — like as soon as im on the trail honestly, just put an alert up the night before on SOTAwatch so chasers can plan around it. experienced chasers watch the alerts and some of them will literally be sitting by their radio at the time you said you'd be on. makes a huge difference compared to just popping up with a cold spot.

Voltage drop under TX load from poor power cables, corroded fuse holders, or loose connections - the rig needs ~13.8V at the finals and even a 1-2V drop limits HF output (6m often draws less current). Measure voltage at the rig's DC jack during full-power TX into dummy load - that'll tell you if it's the feed or internal to the rig.

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the storms we had last month i finally got off my butt and started building a real go-kit. right now i have my ft-891 in a pelican case with a 40ah lifepo4 battery, a SignaLink for digital, and im throwing in a copy of my license and some basic paperwork stuff. also got a roll of coax and a couple connectors. the antenna situation is where im not sure. i have an EFHW that i like but its kind of a pain to deploy fast and i was thinking maybe a vertical like a Chameleon or something would be quicker. anyone done side by side comparisons of those for field use? mostly thinking HF for ARES stuff but i want some VHF capability too so im trying to figure out how to keep it all manageable without hauling a truck full of gear. also is there stuff people always forget that they wish they had included? im sure im missing something obvious

the listening thing is huge and honestly most people skip it entirely. ive worked a lot of rare ones and the operators running the DXpedition will tell you themselves — the pileup is basically chaos and theyre just fishing in it. if you can figure out their pattern youre already ahead of 90% of the callers. one thing i do that helps is watch the RBN spots and see if theres any consistency in where theyre coming back. some ops drift slightly in where theyre listening, some are very methodical about it. the methodical ones are easier to crack once you see the pattern. the ones who just grab whoever they hear first are honestly harder — more luck involved there. timing does matter but maybe not in the way people think. its less about calling at exactly the right millisecond and more about not calling when everyone else is calling. the DX op cant pull a single call out of a wall of noise. wait for the pileup to thin out slightly — sometimes just half a second after the main rush — and your signal has a much better chance of standing out. ive broken some pretty nasty pileups that way with 100w and a wire.

so ive been trying to get Winlink Express working for the past couple weekends and im almost there but not quite. background: i have an IC-7300 connected via USB, running Winlink Express on windows 10, using VARA HF for the modem side. i can get VARA to connect and i can see the waterfall doing its thing but when i actually try to connect to an RMS gateway it either times out or i get a partial session and then it drops. im selecting gateways from the list based on proximity and signal reports but honestly not sure if im picking the right ones or if its a timing thing. the message handling part is what i really want to get right — the whole point for me is being able to send and receive email during a deployment where we dont have internet. i get the concept, the gateway acts as a relay to the winlink servers, but im not clear on what happens if the gateway is busy or unreachable. does it just queue the messages and retry or do i have to manually kick it off again. also should i be looking at telnet sessions just to test the message flow end to end before i stress about the RF side of things. or is that cheating somehow, i know some emcomm folks have opinions about that