Sarah Wilson

was in the same boat not that long ago tbh. one thing that helped me was just keeping a little cheat sheet open on my second monitor while i was listening. after a while you just kinda absorb them. QRN drove me nuts for like two weeks because i kept thinking it meant the same as QRM but they really are different things once you start noticing it. also 88 means love and kisses which you mostly hear people say to their wives or whatever on the radio, kind of funny the first time you hear it. oh and de just means from in CW, like W1ABC de K5XYZ means youre hearing K5XYZ calling W1ABC. once you get a few of them down the rest start making more sense i think

so ive been on HF for about 8 years and done a fair bit of weak signal VHF stuff, mostly 2m meteor scatter and some tropo when conditions cooperate, but EME has always been this thing in the back of my head that i keep telling myself ill get around to eventually. well im finally doing it. problem is every time i start researching the antenna requirements i kind of spiral and dont know where to land. ive been looking at 4x yagi arrays on 2m as kind of the minimum viable setup for single-polarization work, and i know guys have done it with a single big yagi using JT65B or Q65 but the link budget just seems brutal with one antenna. my lot isnt huge but i could probably fit a 2x2 array of like 10-11 element yagis with decent stacking distances if i plan it right. is that actually workable for making EME contacts or am i still going to be frustrated most of the time? also the feedline situation is stressing me out. i know you want the losses as low as possible obviously but running hardline out to an array thats going to be maybe 80 feet from the shack adds up fast on cost. is 7/8 heliax overkill for this, would LDF4-50A be reasonable for that run? im running a 500w amp, an IC-9700 as the radio, and i have a fairly low noise preamp i pulled off a surplus tower a couple years ago but honestly i dont even know the noise figure on it anymore i need to actually measure it. any pointers from people who actually do EME regularly would be huge. i feel like im close to having the pieces but i need someone to sanity check this before i start spending money on phasing harnesses and mast hardware.

so ive been messing with RemoteHams for about three weeks now trying to get my IC-7300 set up as a proper remote station and honestly the RF side of things went smoother than i expected but the audio is just killing me. im getting somewhere between 400-600ms of delay on the receive side which makes SSB basically unusable, CW is tolerable but still annoying. running the RCForb client on a windows 10 machine at the remote end, server is sitting on a raspberry pi 4 at the shack. my upload at the shack is only about 12Mbps which i know isnt great but it should be enough right? ive tried dropping the audio sample rate down to 8kHz and messing with the buffer settings in the server config but nothing seems to move the needle much. the SDR part of it actually works decent, the waterfall updates are reasonably snappy, its just the audio pipeline that seems to be the bottleneck or maybe its the pi struggling with the codec? not sure. anyone else run into this with the pi specifically

went through the exact same thing when i upgraded. one thing that helped me was just pulling up the arrl website and looking at the band plan chart they have, its a PDF i think. you can see at a glance where everything is supposed to go. doesnt answer every question but at least you get a visual of it the band edge thing honestly i just err on the side of caution and stay well inside. had a guy on the air once get pretty snippy with me when i was on 7.298 and he said i was too close to the edge lol. i mean he wasnt totally wrong i guess

had something similar happen to me last year, turned out the GPS antenna connection on the back had worked itself a little loose and it was getting just enough signal to think it had a lock but the position was garbage. not saying thats your issue but worth checking the physical connection if yours has an external antenna port. the internal patch antenna on those radios isnt always great depending on where you have the head unit mounted.

so i finally got fed up with manually logging everything during contests and started messing around with a raspberry pi zero w i had sitting in a drawer. been about three weeks now and honestly i dont know how i went this long without doing something like this. the basic idea was to have it pull the frequency and mode data from my ic-7300 over USB using the CI-V interface, then auto-populate fields in my logging software. sounds simple enough but getting the serial stuff to play nice on the pi took me way longer than i expected. turns out there were some baud rate issues i kept overlooking — the 7300 defaults to 9600 and i kept setting the script to 115200 like an idiot, spent probably two evenings on that before i noticed. anyway once that was sorted i started adding stuff. got a small 2.8 inch TFT display showing band, mode, and a running contact counter. added a little python script that queries the DX cluster via telnet and flags when a callsign i work matches a new entity on my DXCC list. its not polished at all, the code is kind of a mess, but it actually works most of the time. thinking about adding an arduino nano to handle some button inputs for things like switching antenna ports on my manual switch without getting up — maybe run it over I2C to the pi. has anyone done anything like that, mixing the pi and arduino together in a station project? curious if thats the right approach or if im overcomplicating it

so i was just doing my usual evening thing, checking 50.313 out of habit mostly because 6m has been pretty dead here in the midwest for weeks, and suddenly the waterfall just lit up. like completely filled with signals. i was working stations in florida, georgia, a couple in texas, even got a weak one from somewhere in new england which honestly surprised me given my setup is just a 5 element yagi at about 25 feet. looked it up and apparently theres been some kind of sporadic-e opening running most of the week. i missed the first couple days of it but caught some good runs thursday and friday evening. logged about 40 new grids in two sessions which for me is kind of a big deal since im still chasing WAS on 6m and this knocked out a few states i was missing. also saw some chatter about the new IC-705 firmware update that supposedly tweaked the FT8 receive sensitivity a little, anyone actually tested that or is it just placebo? i havent updated mine yet, little nervous to mess with something thats been working fine.

I'm about two weeks into studying for my Technician exam and feeling a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of questions (400+ in the pool). I've been using HamStudy flashcards but I keep second-guessing myself on the technical questions. Any suggestions for breaking this down into manageable chunks? Also, which topics should I focus on most - I hear the electronics sections are challenging for new folks.

yeah what he said about zones, definitely look that up ahead of time so youre not fumbling around for it mid-qso. one thing i'd add is just spend an hour or two before the contest starts listening to how people are running stations and what the exchange sounds like. you'll pick it up fast also SOTA and contesting are kind of a fun crossover if you havent thought about it — there are SOTA specific events and some people do SOTA activations during contests to get the portable multiplier or whatever. not sure how that works exactly for CQ WW but worth looking into for Field Day for sure since portable operation scores bonus points

For emergency communications or passing critical messages, the NATO phonetic alphabet can mean the difference between efficient message passing, or not getting the message through at all. This is particularly important in emergency communications and when checking into radio nets. Always stick to ITU standard during EmComm operations.