Sarah Wilson

honestly the technician exam isnt that bad, i was pretty nervous going in but ended up passing first try. i used hamstudy.org mostly, it breaks down the question pool by section so you actually understand the concepts instead of just memorizing answers. the questions about electrical theory tripped me up at first but once you understand ohms law and a few basics it all starts to click. most people study a few weeks, some people cram it in a weekend if they really focus. find out when your local club is running an exam session, the ARRL website has a tool for that. the examiners are usually pretty laid back and helpful, its not like a DMV situation at all

oh man i remember my first activation i forgot a pen to log contacts with lol. went paper because my phone died in the cold. ended up scratching callsigns into the dirt with a stick which obviously didnt work. bring a pen, maybe two pens, spare batteries for anything that takes them, and honestly snacks because once you start working a pile-up you forget to eat and then the hike back is miserable. good luck, hope you get your 4 and then some. S2S contacts are so satisfying, theres something about knowing the other person is also freezing on a mountaintop that makes it feel real.

our club is doing a group drive up friday evening if you want to tag along, we usually grab dinner somewhere and then hit the grounds first thing saturday. dm me if thats something you'd be interested in, more people the better honestly and we can split gas

I did my first 2m EME QSO about two years ago with a pair of M2 2M9SSB yagis and a 500w amp, so it is doable without a massive array but honestly the other station was running serious hardware and that's kind of the dirty secret of small station EME, you're leaning on the big guns to pull you out of the noise. still counts though lol. the doppler shift thing caught me off guard at first, you have to let wsjt handle it but just be aware it's a thing. also point your antenna at where the moon will be not where it is, propagation delay is real when you're talking about bouncing off something 384,000 km away

theres a decent reference on the ARRL site and also just google qcode list and youll find charts. i printed one out when i was starting and kept it next to my radio for a while. also QRP means low power operation which you hear a lot if people are running like 5 watts or less, and QRO is the opposite, high power. oh and CQ is not technically a Q code i think but its how you call for any station, like youre just putting out a general call. 88 is another one which means love and kisses, usually used when signing off with a YL operator, some people find it a bit old fashioned now but you still hear it occasionally

so im finally making the trip out to dayton this year after missing it like 3 years in a row, mostly just want to hit the flea market tables honestly. last time i went i picked up a barely used ts-430 for way less than it was worth and ive been chasing that feeling ever since lol. anybody else going? maybe we can meet up or something, i know our local club is sending a group but i dont think they have anything formally organized, just kind of showing up friday morning.

the ic-9700 is actually a solid starting point, better than what most of us had when we started messing with EME. the real bottleneck is gonna be your antenna gain and your preamp situation. for JT65 or Q65 on 2m you can realistically make contacts with something in the 11-13 dBd range if conditions are decent and the other station is running serious power, but youre gonna have a lot more fun and a lot less frustration with at least a pair of long yagis, something like a pair of M2 or Cushcraft 17 or 18 element beams stacked horizontally. the preamp placement is critical, like really critical, you want a good low noise figure preamp right at the feedpoint, we're talking 0.3-0.5 dB NF if you can swing it. SSB Electronics and Kuhne both make good stuff but there are some decent homebrewed options too if youre into that. coax loss between the antenna and preamp is just killing your receive, even a few feet of LMR-400 adds up at 144 MHz. for scheduling yeah ping jockey is still the main spot a lot of people use, and the moon net email reflector has been around forever. N0UK has a good EME logger page that shows whos active. Q65 has kind of taken over from JT65 for EME in the last couple years, better performance on the weaker paths. just get on 144.120 and listen around moonrise, youll start to get a feel for it pretty quick.

yeah 180 is solid, that'll get 10m going for sure. basically anything above 150 and you start seeing real DX on 10, though ive worked some surprisingly long paths when it was in the 130s too depending on the season and where the other station is. the K index matters a lot too — if the K is above 4 or so the ionosphere gets disturbed and stuff just falls apart even if the SFI looks great. so you want high SFI and low K, thats the short version. time of day absolutely matters. around here 10m tends to open up to Europe in the morning and shifts toward South America in the afternoon, though that varies by your location. the opening you caught sounds like a classic late afternoon SA path. DXmaps.com is worth bookmarking, you can watch spots in real time and get a feel for when paths are forming before you even key up. once you start connecting the dots between the numbers and what you actually hear it gets kind of addictive, fair warning

i was in the exact same boat when i upgraded lol. honestly what helped me was just using the arrl's frequency allocation page rather than trying to parse the actual part 97 text because that thing reads like stereo instructions translated from another language. the data sub-bands for general on 40 are a bit lower than where you'd do phone, so you wont be stepping on extra class territory as long as you're doing digital up around 7.080 or so. i think. someone correct me if im off on that. anyway dont stress too much about the power thing, running a kilowatt or whatever is way down the road for most people, just get on the air and dont transmit below 7.175 for phone and youll be fine

i was in the same boat about a year ago and just picked WAS to start becuase it felt more achievable and i could actually track progress. ended up submitting for it about 4 months after i got serious about uploading to LoTW. the feeling when it came through was pretty great ngl. DXCC is where it gets addictive though. once you hit 100 you start looking at the list thinking ok what am i missing and then you're staying up until 2am trying to work some rare entity that only has one active station every few years. my wife thinks im losing my mind but here we are at 187 confirmed and counting

im pretty new to chasing DX seriously, only been licensed about 18 months, and pileups still kind of intimidate me. i tried getting into a pile for FT5ZM a while back (i know, old one, was listening to recordings) and even just watching it was overwhelming. how do you even know when to call? like do you just wait for a gap in the noise or is there some actual timing to it im missing

Field Day did already happen back in June yeah, but dont worry there's plenty coming up. CQ WW is actually a great first contest even if it sounds big — the exchange is dead simple, just your signal report and your CQ zone number, that's it. you'll get the hang of it after like 20 contacts. honestly the hardest part is just jumping in and calling CQ or answering someone for the first time without freezing up, but everyone does that the first time for logging during a contest most people use N1MM+ which is free and handles pretty much everything, does the dupe checking and sends your log in the right format after. there's a learning curve but you dont need to have it perfect before the contest, just get it basically running and yeah SOTA is more of an award and activation program rather than a strict contest, though there are SOTA specific events that get pretty busy. completely different vibe from CQ WW, much more relaxed. both are worth doing honestly

so ive been sitting on doing the mars/cap mod on my 857D for probably two years now, always felt a little sketchy about opening it up even though i know its just a couple jumpers. finally pulled the trigger last weekend and honestly it went fine, took maybe 20 minutes including finding my glasses. the thing i actually wanted to talk about though isnt really the mod itself — its what i did after. once you have the extended TX range unlocked i went ahead and did the cooling fan mod at the same time since the board was already out. the stock fan on these runs way too conservative in my opinion, kicks in too late and i was getting thermal shutdowns running digital modes for any length of time. theres a couple different approaches people post about but i just wired the fan direct to a 12v rail through a small resistor to run it continuously at a lower speed. no more shutdowns and honestly not that much louder than before. might do the CAT control timeout fix next, anyone done that one? i keep losing connection to fldigi after the radio sits idle for a bit and im pretty sure theres a menu setting or possibly a hardware thing i can do about it.

oh man this is exactly where i was about a year and a half ago and i almost quit honestly. the plateau around 8-10wpm is super common and i think its because thats where you stop being able to spell out letters one by one and you have to start hearing whole words as sounds. its a mental shift more than a speed thing if that makes sense. what finally broke it for me was switching from random character groups to actual words and common phrases. like once i started hearing CQ and 73 and QTH as single sounds instead of a string of dots and dashes it clicked. also i bumped my Farnsworth character speed up to like 18wpm even though my effective copy speed was way lower, that forces your brain to stop thinking dit-dah-dit and just recognize the whole sound pattern. and the 20 minutes a day thing, thats fine but consistency matters way more than duration in my experience. id rather do 15 minutes every single day than 45 minutes three times a week. took me about 8 months to get to 20wpm solid enough to pass the extra exam back when that was still a thing, so 6 months is possible but dont beat yourself up if it takes longer

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and people keep telling me I should try a contest but honestly the whole thing is kind of intimidating. like I get the basic idea, you make as many contacts as possible and log them, but theres so much I dont understand about exchange formats and multipliers and all that stuff. I was looking at the CQ WW coming up and it seems massive — like the whole world is on the air at once which sounds amazing but also terrifying if youre not sure what youre doing. someone at my club mentioned ARRL Field Day too but I thought that was more of a club/camping thing? and then theres SOTA which i think is different, not really a contest per se but people talk about it in the same breath sometimes. anyway im not really sure what the best first contest would be for someone still figuring things out. my setup is pretty modest, IC-7300 and a wire dipole up about 25 feet, so im not going to be running a kilowatt or anything. just want to actually participate and not make a fool of myself on the air.