Jessica Johnson

haha yep first QSO jitters are real. dont worry about stumbling, everybody does it. what radio you running?

so i've been putting off trying satellite work for way too long and last weekend i finally just did it. had my ft-991a and a cheap arrow antenna, no rotator, just holding the antenna by hand and tracking with gpredict on the laptop next to me. managed to get a couple QSOs on AO-73 which honestly felt like a miracle given how chaotic it was. the doppler thing is what's messing with me though. i kind of understood it in theory but actually dealing with it in real time while also trying to hold the antenna pointed roughly right and log contacts... it's a lot. i was manually tuning the downlink as the pass went on but i kept losing my own signal and then finding it again. is there a way to set up gpredict to do the rig control automatically through CAT or is that something that requires extra hardware? i have the USB cable for CAT control already for contests so i assume it's possible. also just wondering if the arrow antenna is actually enough for most LEO birds or should i be thinking about a yagi setup. the pass was only maybe 8 minutes and the antenna handoff from one hand to the other was awkward but i made it work.

Yeah the UDP logging between WSJT-X and Log4OM works but you have to make sure youre not also logging to the WSJT-X internal log at the same time, or at least not importing that ADIF later, otherwise you will absolutely get doubles. In Log4OM go into settings and find the UDP server config, set it to the same port WSJT-X is broadcasting on (2237 by default i think) and it should just start populating in real time. Took me a few tries to get it stable but it does work. As for contests, i personally still use N1MM. Log4OM has improved a lot but for serious contest operating N1MM is just faster, the bandmap integration is better, dupe checking is instant, and most contest sponsors have N1MM Cabrillo output tested and working. Log4OM contest mode feels bolted on compared to everything else in that program. If youre only doing a handful of contests a year the two-log headache might just be the price you pay unless someone knows a cleaner way to sync them.

the diplexer thing might be worth looking at but honestly i dont think thats your main issue. on AO-73 specifically the passband is pretty narrow and finding yourself is genuinely tricky at first because your downlink is shifted from your uplink by the transponder inversion. so if youre tuning the downlink to the same frequency youre transmitting on youre going to be way off. the transponder is inverting, meaning LSB up and the signal comes out flipped in the passband. you really have to find the beacon first as a reference point and then work relative to that. also 1.5w with an arrow should be plenty if your elevation is decent, ive worked AO-73 with less on a good 30 degree pass. the main thing is patience and slow tuning on the downlink while youre transmitting a continuous tone or just saying your callsign slowly. once you find yourself once it clicks and you wont lose it again

the receive side honestly might matter more than the transmit side, at least up to a point. a low noise preamp right at the feedpoint is not optional for EME, its basically table stakes. you want something in the 0.3-0.5 dB noise figure range minimum, guys like SSB Electronics and Kuhne make good stuff for 2m. mounting it at the antenna and not in the shack is the difference between copying a signal and not even knowing its there. as for the antenna question, single yagi EME is a thing but youre pretty much limited to working the big guns, stations with massive arrays or dishes. with a 2x2 and 600w youre in what i'd call the small pistol category but youre absolutely workable. plenty of guys are running similar setups on JT65 and making contacts, just not going to be calling CQ and having a pile up. more like calling CQ for a while and eventually somebody big hears you. the key thing beyond the antenna and power is honestly the coax loss between the array and the amp, keep that as short and low loss as you possibly can because every tenth of a dB counts at this level.

congrats on the build, that's awesome. im working on something similar but keep getting distracted by other projects. the efficiency question is something i wondered about too when i was reading up on QRP finals. from what i understand class C is more efficient but apparently its not really usable for SSB, only CW and even then there are tradeoffs? i might be wrong on that, someone correct me if so. anyway your Ohio contact sounds great, i havent even gotten my rig off the bench yet so you're way ahead of me

so ive been licensed for about three months now and i kept putting off actually getting on a net because honestly it felt intimidating, like everyone would know i was new and i'd fumble the whole thing. anyway my elmer finally just told me to stop overthinking it and just do it so last tuesday i checked into the local 2m weekly net and it actually went fine. the net control was super patient, i gave my callsign and signal report and that was basically it for my first time. the thing is now im kind of hooked? i looked up a bunch of other nets running on HF and theres a lot more going on than i expected. found a schedule on a few different sites but they dont always match and some of the listed nets seem to be dead or on hiatus or something. anyone know a good place to find reliable net schedules? also curious if any of you run the same nets regularly, like is there value in checking into the same one every week versus jumping around

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, sitting around 12wpm right now so watching this thread. one thing i heard at our club meeting was that some guys swear by just making actual contacts even when its uncomfortable, because the pressure of a real QSO makes your brain work differently than software. havent tried it yet myself but the old timer who said it has been doing CW for like 40 years so probably knows what hes talking about lol

yeah the net control handoff thing is something a lot of groups struggle with, we had the exact same issue during a Skywarn activation a couple years back. what helped us a lot was designating a secondary net control before the exercise even starts, someone who is already on freq and monitoring, so the transition is literally just one announcement and everyone already knows who it is. sounds simple but it made a huge difference. the battery thing is real too. i now put a reminder in my phone every 3 months to do a proper load test on all my field batteries. lost count of how many times ive shown up to something with a battery that looked fine sitting on the shelf but couldnt hold voltage under a real load. a good battery analyzer is worth every penny if you do a lot of emcomm work. sounds like your group ran a solid exercise though, the messy ones are honestly where you learn the most. a drill that goes perfectly usually just means you didnt push hard enough on the scenario.

the timeout thing is almost definitely your audio levels being slightly off even if VARA says green. what i found is the VARA calibration screen is kind of optimistic about what it considers acceptable. try dropping your TX drive by like 10-15% from whatever you have it set to and see if that helps — overdriving the input on the gateway side can cause weird mid-session drops because the gateway ALE system gets confused or the SNR tanks on their end due to your signal being too wide. also check that your ICC-7300 isn't in any kind of ALC compression mode that might be squishing the VARA tones. on the 7300 you want to go into the connectors menu and make sure the USB audio output level is set manually, not auto. its a thing people miss all the time. as for message expiry, i believe the default Winlink message lifetime is 30 days but you can set it differently when composing. the 4 day thing you saw was probably just normal — the message was sitting on the CMS waiting for your client to poll for it, which only happens when you connect. its not push delivery, its store and forward, so if you dont connect it just waits.

honestly i just use N1MM for everything contest related and dont bother syncing it back to Log4OM most of the time. probably bad practice but i've been doing it for three years and havent died yet. the LOTW upload from N1MM is fine so confirmations still happen, i just have a slightly fragmented overall log which bugs me sometimes when i go looking for a specific contact.

so i've been licensed for about 8 months now and i still get kind of nervous about this. i was on 40m last night and found what seemed like a clear frequency, did my "is this frequency in use" thing and got nothing back so i started calling CQ. about 3 minutes later this guy comes back really annoyed saying he was in a QSO and i was stomping all over him. i genuinely couldn't hear anyone else on that freq. i felt terrible about it and just QSYed right away and apologized but it got me thinking — is there a proper way to handle this? like what's the actual etiquette when you honestly can't hear the other station? i know about skip and everything but it still felt bad. also does this happen a lot on nets or is it more of a random operating thing? i've been meaning to check into the local 2m net more but honestly stuff like this makes me second guess myself

the latency thing people worry about is kinda overstated in my experience. did a pileup on 17m last winter from my work laptop using my home station running RCForb and honestly worked like 8 or 9 stations no problem. the bigger issue for me was my upload speed at the remote end being kind of mediocre, had some audio dropout issues until i dropped the codec bitrate a bit in the settings. one thing nobody mentions is the security side — you really want to think about who has access to your transmitter sitting at somebodys house, make sure the RemoteHams server config has proper authentication set up and dont just leave it on the default port if you can help it. had a weird situation where someone was apparently trying to brute force my server login, nothing got in but still annoying

not a dumb question at all, this stuff is genuinely confusing when you first get into it. you've basically got it right — DXCC is 100 entities (and yeah entity vs country trips everyone up at first, things like the Canary Islands count separately from mainland Spain, stuff like that), WAS is confirmed contacts with all 50 states, and WAZ is all 40 CQ zones. they're all separate awards with separate applications. the good news is LoTW absolutely counts for all of them and honestly its way easier than chasing paper QSLs. the ARRL manages both DXCC and WAS through LoTW so if the other station is also on LoTW and uploads their log, boom, you've got a confirmed credit without mailing anything. not everyone uses it though so sometimes you still end up needing a card for certain rare ones. for those past contacts — if you logged them even in a basic log it might be worth uploading to LoTW now and seeing what shakes out. some of those ops may have already uploaded and you'd get the credits automatically. definitely start logging properly going forward though, 40-50 entities in 8 months on a wire dipole is actually a solid start

yeah Q65 is worth looking at too if you havent already, its a bit newer than JT65 and works even better for EME in some conditions. i made my first EME contact last year with a single 17el yagi and about 200w and it took maybe 3 sessions before i got a confirmed qso. the station i worked had a 4x9el array so they were doing the heavy lifting honestly but it still counts lol one thing nobody told me upfront — your coax run matters a lot on this. i had about 40ft of LMR400 and that was manageable but someone i know was running RG8 for like 60 feet and was basically throwing away a chunk of his signal before it even got to the antenna. preamp at the mast is not optional in my opinion, i use a down east microwave unit and it made an immediate difference when i switched from having it in the shack.