Patricia Davis

honestly the 50ft tribander might be part of the problem too, not blaming the antenna but on 20m that's not a lot of height and you might be losing runs because your signal isnt as strong as you think it is on the east or west coast. i noticed a huge difference in my run rate when i got my beam up higher, fewer people had to ask for repeats which kept the rhythm intact. not really an SO2R answer i know but if the fundamentals are working against you the second radio stuff gets harder to diagnose. also what keyer are you using for the SO2R switching, i'm trying to figure out if the microHAM stuff is worth the price for a first SO2R setup

nice work getting it built, i remember finishing my first kit and just staring at it for a while before i trusted myself to power it up lol. i'm still pretty new to QRP myself but ive been doing portable stuff with a little 5w rig for about a year now and the end fed halfwave thing is real, i made contacts into europe from a hill in vermont with 5 watts and a piece of wire in a tree so they definitely work. just make sure your 9:1 or 49:1 unun is decent quality if you build one, the cheap ferrite cores can be lossy and at QRP levels every db matters more than you'd think

I did my first contest last year and it was a blast! Don't stress about being competitive - just work whoever you can hear and log everything correctly. You'll be surprised how much you learn in just one weekend.

the modeling is roughly right in my experience. flat top at the same apex height does give you a cleaner pattern and a bit more oomph toward the horizon compared to the inverted V, but honestly at 35 feet on 40m youre not exactly working miracles either way. the inverted V compresses the pattern more toward straight up which isnt terrible for domestic stuff and regional contacts but yeah if you want to work europe from the states on 40 the flat top will help. the foundation thing on 40m is probably not a huge deal if youre talking a few feet of separation. id worry more about it on 80 or if you were building something with a very low impedance feedpoint. the ground losses on 40 at those frequencies tend to average out over a bigger area anyway. if you can get even a temporary second support — even a painters pole zip tied to a fence post or something — it might be worth trying the flat top just to hear the difference yourself. thats really the only way youre gonna know for your specific location.

so ive been playing around with a few different tools lately trying to figure out the best workflow for chasing DX and i honestly feel like im doing it the hard way. right now i have DXwatch open in a browser tab and then separately im running DX Toolkit on my phone and they dont always agree on whats being spotted which is kind of confusing when youre trying to work fast. like the other day there was a spot for a 3B9 on 17m and it showed up on DXwatch maybe 2 minutes before it appeared in the app, so by the time i saw it on the phone and went to the rig the pile was already massive. is that just latency in the aggregation or is one of them pulling from different cluster nodes? i honestly dont fully understand how the spotting networks feed into these tools. also been looking at DX Summit and QRZ's logbook DX spots and they seem to have yet another slightly different picture. does anyone have a setup they actually like for this or is it just kind of messy for everyone

so ive been trying to get more serious about CW for the past few months and overall its going pretty well, im up to maybe 12-13 wpm copying and can send a bit faster than that but here's the thing thats been driving me crazy — my keyer just randomly starts sending like the dits and dahs are squished together or the spacing goes off and i cant figure out if its me or the keyer itself. im using a cheap paddle i picked up at a hamfest, not sure of the brand honestly it didnt have any markings on it, plugged into an old MFJ keyer my elmer gave me. the contacts seem clean, i adjusted the gap a couple times. sometimes ill be sending along fine and then a whole word just comes out as garbage. my elmer said maybe its a contact tension thing but i dunno. also separate question kind of — any tips for building up speed? im working through the LCWO site which i like but feel like im plateauing a bit around 12-13. read somewhere that you should just jump up to a higher speed and kind of let your brain catch up, does that actually work or is it just one of those things people say

so we finally got our county ARES group together for a full scale simulated disaster exercise last saturday. the scenario was a major ice storm knocking out power across three counties and we were supposed to coordinate with the county EOC and a couple of the Red Cross shelters. on paper it looked pretty solid, we had the net control station set up at the EOC, we had operators at two shelters and a couple of mobile units roaming around acting as relay points because the terrain here is rough and simplex coverage is just not great. what i was not prepared for was how fast everything fell apart once we introduced the first inject -- which was basically a message saying one of the shelter operators had to leave because of a family emergency and we needed to find a replacement. that one little thing cascaded into like 45 minutes of confusion because nobody had a clear backup list and the net control operator (who has been doing this for years, solid guy) started trying to manage it all himself instead of delegating and the whole net just kind of stalled out. also turns out our ICS message handling forms were printed on someones home printer and the ink smeared when they got a little damp, which is a dumb thing to not have thought about. and two of our HTs lost battery before noon which meant those operators were basically spectators. debrief was really eye opening though. nobody got defensive which was great, everyone pretty much agreed we had identified some real gaps. the EC wants to do another drill in about 60 days to see if we fixed anything. has anyone else run into this kind of thing where the exercise reveals more problems than you expected? curious what other groups do for their after action reviews because ours was kind of loose and informal.

that first qso feeling is something else isnt it. i still remember mine, i was so nervous i forgot to say my callsign twice and the other op had to ask me to repeat it. welcome to the hobby man, the 2m repeaters are a great place to just hang out and learn how people actually talk on the air before you dive into hf and all the craziness that comes with that

yeah the bandwidth thing bites everyone who tries this. the IQ stream from even a basic SDR is like 2-4 Mbps if you want decent bandwidth coverage and that just stomps on the RemoteHams audio path which really wants low latency more than raw throughput. what i ended up doing is running two completely separate connections — the RRC handles the rig control and codec audio on one QoS lane on my router, and the SDRplay RSP1A runs its own SDR-Console server instance on a different port. you can tell SDR-Console to compress the IQ or drop the sample rate way down and it becomes way more manageable, like sub-1 Mbps if you're okay with a narrower window on the panadapter the virtual audio cable mess is real though, i wont lie. i use VB-Cable and just accept that it takes 20 minutes to figure out again every time Windows decides to rearrange my audio devices after an update. the routing is RRC audio goes into one VAC input, SDR-Console handles its own demod separately, you just use it as a visual reference not as your receive audio. once i accepted that it clicked on the echolink thing — i tried that as a fallback once and honestly it introduced more variables than it solved. if your internet goes down at the shack the echolink node is down too so it doesn't really help unless you have a totally separate RF path back to the node

had almost the exact same thing happen to me last spring. turned out one of the digipeaters i thought was active had been off the air for months and nobody updated the map. so my packets were getting out but only reaching one digi instead of two hops like i expected. dropped back to just WIDE2-2 instead of WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 and it actually got more consistent because i wasnt relying on a digi that wasnt there. also worth double checking your SSID isnt conflicting with something else on the channel near you, probably not the issue but ive seen weird stuff happen.

omg yes i just got my tech ticket like two months ago and upgraded to general last week specifically because i wanted to try HF and my elmer told me to watch 10m. got on yesterday for the first time and worked Australia on FT8 and i literally sat there staring at the screen for a second because i couldnt beleive it worked. using a borrowed IC-7300 at his shack but im saving up for my own radio now. this hobby is something else.

Started with IZ2UUF app on Android for commute practice, then moved to LCWO at home. App is great because I can put in earbuds and practice anywhere. The combo approach worked well - maybe 4 months to solid 15wpm?

for a 12 hour sustained op honestly id just run both — use the lithiums as your primary and keep the honda staged and ready but dont fire it up unless you need to. that way you get the quiet clean power most of the day and the genny is there if clouds roll in or you just drain faster than expected. i did basically this setup at a 2-day public service event last summer and the generator only ran maybe 90 minutes total. the trick is knowing your actual current draw ahead of time — run everything at home on the shack meter for a few hours and get realistic numbers, not the nameplate ratings. on the antenna question though i would not rely on a compromise vertical like the CHA-250 for a section net 200 miles out on 40m, especially if the net is voice. you'll get into it but the signal reports will be mediocre compared to even a mediocre dipole at 25-30 feet. the spiderpole linked dipole is more work to set up but it's the right call for reliable comms. if setup speed is the issue practice it a few times before the exercise, you can get a two-element linked dipole up in under 10 minutes once you know what youre doing.

yeah the buddipole tuning on 40 is real, thats just kind of what that antenna is. its not a quick deploy antenna its a precision portable antenna if that makes sense. people love them but they take practice especially on the lower bands where the adjustments are more sensitive. one thing ive started doing for exercises is pre-measuring and marking all my antenna elements with tape at the settings i know work for my most used bands, saves a ton of fumbling around. doesnt help if conditions mean you need to move but for a fixed exercise site its fine. also on the power question — what are you running the laptop for? if its just logging you might be able to swap to a tablet or even paper logs and cut your draw down pretty significantly. the 7300 by itself isnt that bad if youre not always at full power

congrats man, i just got my general like two weeks ago so im not that far ahead of you. the baofeng is fine to start out on just dont let people talk you out of upgrading eventually, made a huge difference when i got a proper mobile rig. welcome to the hobby

yeah the wire hanging situation is always the adventure isnt it. ive started carrying a cheap fishing pole style mast just like a 6m fiberglass thing, takes up no space and you can just stick it in a crack in the rocks. changed everything for me on exposed summits. KX2 is such a good radio for this stuff, i keep telling myself i dont need one and then i do another activation with my old FT-817 and i think about it the whole way back down

IC-9700 is a solid starting point for this, i use one myself. one thing nobody told me when i started was how important it is to get your rover or azimuth/elevation rotor situation sorted before you worry too much about yagi count. i wasted like two months with a decent antenna that i couldnt actually point accurately enough and kept missing contacts because i was a few degrees off when the moon was low on the horizon and moving fast. theres a guy in my region who did first light with literally one 9el yagi and a preamp, worked a couple stations in europe. took him weeks of trying but it happened. so yeah its possible. just set your expectations right, you're not going to be racking up contacts like on FT8 on 40m, each one is kind of an event

so i heard the Tri-County ARC is doing their annual hamfest again sometime in october, i think its the 14th but dont quote me on that. been a couple years since i went and last time i picked up a barely used 706 for like 200 bucks so im definitely trying to make it out there again. anyone else planning to go? also does anyone know if they still do the tailgate swap or did they move everything inside after covid

okay so i just got my technician license like three weeks ago and ive been trying to use the local 2m repeater listed in the repeater directory. the frequency and offset are right i think, i can hear other people talking on it just fine, but when i key up nobody seems to hear me. my radio is a baofeng uv-5r and i programmed it myself from scratch. someone at the club mentioned something about CTCSS tones and i looked it up but im still a little fuzzy on how it all works. the directory listing shows a tone of 100.0 Hz for the repeater but i dont know if thats what i transmit or what i have to receive, or both? i set the radio to transmit that tone but still nothing. also someone mentioned something about a linking system and that the repeater connects to other repeaters somewhere but i have no idea what that means practically speaking for me trying to just say hello on the thing. sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to figure out if its my radio or if im missing something about how these work

lip mounts get a bad rap but honestly for VHF/UHF they work fine in most cases. you're not trying to work DX on 40m here, the wavelengths are short enough that a decent lip mount with good contact will get you on the local repeaters no problem. i ran one for years on my Tacoma before i finally drilled a hole and the difference was pretty minimal on 2m. the main thing is making sure the mount itself has solid metal-to-metal contact and isn't sitting on any paint or rubber gasket material. the hiss thing — if its there with squelch closed that does sound a bit odd. first thing id check is whether it changes when you rev the engine or turn accessories on and off. alternator whine usually shows up as a pitch that changes with RPM, a ground loop can be more of a constant hum or hiss. try running a separate ground wire from the radio chassis to a good bare metal point on the truck body if you havent already, sometimes the chassis ground through the power leads isnt enough. the FTM-400 is a good radio, i dont think its the radio itself.

Consider the Chameleon CHA P-Loop 2.0 for portable vertical. Only 6 feet tall when deployed, handles 20W beautifully, and the tuning is fast. I've used mine with similar battery setups for POTA activations. Weight penalty is worth it when space is really tight.

the inverted V angle is probably why youre seeing 1.8 instead of lower, when the legs drop below about 120 degrees between them the feedpoint impedance starts moving away from that 50 ohm sweet spot. 25 feet at the apex isnt bad but if your ends are at 15 you might be at a pretty steep angle. nothing wrong with 1.8 though honestly, most tuners will handle that no problem and youre not losing much power to the mismatch. the twisted connection thing, yeah i wouldnt leave that long term. tape lets moisture in eventually and corrosion on the center conductor will creep up inside the coax before you even notice the SWR climbing. if you can get a PL-259 on there and use a barrel connector at the feedpoint thats cleaner, or even just solder it and use self-amalgamating tape rather than electrical tape. self-amalgamating stuff is actually waterproof and holds up way better outside.

dude 35 minutes for 10 contacts on your first activation is solid, i struggled for almost an hour on mine because i forgot to self-spot and just sat there calling CQ into the void lol. download the POTA app if you havent already, the spotting network is basically essential now. hunters are watching it constantly.

one thing that got me when i first did this -- the Signalink default jumper config might not match what the TM-V71A expects on the data port. theres a couple different ACC jack pinouts depending on what mode you're using. i spent like two days thinking my audio was fine because PTT was working but the actual TX audio path through the data port was wrong. the radio was keying but transmitting silence basically. pulled up a waterfall on another receiver and confirmed it. so yeah id rule that out before assuming the gateway is the problem.