Jessica Johnson

so ive been trying to learn CW for about 3 months now and im using an old Bencher paddle i picked up at a hamfest connected to my IC-7300's built in keyer. the problem is everything i send just sounds... off. like the dits and dahs are all running together and i cant tell where one letter ends and another begins when i play it back. ive been practicing with the paddle every day, maybe 20-30 minutes, mostly just copying off the air at like 13wpm and trying to send along. my receive is actually getting pretty decent i think, at least for slower QSOs. but my sending is just embarrassing. i tried slowing the keyer speed way down to like 8wpm and it sounds better but then i feel like im developing bad habits because the timing feels unnatural at that speed. is there some trick to getting the paddle tension and spacing dialed in right? i feel like the paddle itself might need adjusting but i honestly have no idea what im doing with that part. any help would be great, been lurking here a while and finally decided to just ask

so ive been part of our local ARES group for about 8 months now, been going to the monthly nets and did the ICS-100 and ICS-200 courses online like they asked. this weekend theres an actual activation for a half marathon the county is putting on and our EC asked if i wanted to help cover one of the water station checkpoints. i said yes obviously but now im second guessing myself a little. like i know the basics, im holding an HT on the simplex frequency and just relaying runner bib numbers and any medical stuff back to net control. seems simple enough but i dunno, when its real i always get nervous i'll freeze up or mess up my callsign or something dumb like that. anyone else feel this way before their first real deployment? any tips from people who have done these community event things before? also my EC mentioned something about a shadow shift, is that where i just follow someone experienced around first or is it something different in ARES context

Log4OM's integration with LoTW, eQSL, Clublog and multiple other services makes it excellent for general logging. It's really a comprehensive logging environment comparable to commercial applications. For light contesting, it might be sufficient - depends on your specific contest goals.

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still feel kind of weird about when to use the NATO phonetics vs just saying a letter. like if someone asks me to confirm a callsign do i always spell it out phonetically or is that only when theres interference or something. i was on a local 2m repeater the other day and just said my call normally and someone came back with "say again" so i spelled it out and felt kind of dumb that i didnt just do that from the start also is it a big deal if you mix up the phonetics sometimes, like i always blank on what X is. xray? i think its xray. anyway is there like an unwritten rule about when you should and shouldnt use them

im in basically the same boat as you honestly so take this for what its worth but i've been using an app called Morse Mania on my phone during my commute and its actually been pretty decent for just drilling letters. not sure its the most scientific approach but i can copy my callsign now without thinking about it so something is sticking lol. someone in another thread mentioned just sending random stuff with a straight key even before you can copy well, like just to get the muscle memory going, havent tried that yet but it sounds like it might help

yeah the antenna isolation thing is real and you cant just wing it, at least not without some pain. ive tried running SO2R with a shared antenna system and the intermod just kills you, especially if both radios are on adjacent bands. you really do want separate antennas if you can swing it. a second dipole cut for 15 or 20 hung at a different angle isnt that expensive and makes a huge difference. that said i think people way overthink SO2R as a concept. the real skill isnt the hardware, its learning when to actually switch your attention to radio 2 without losing your run frequency on radio 1. thats the part that takes a whole contest season to really internalize. ive seen guys with full two-radio setups who still cant rate well because they break their run at the wrong moment and lose the pileup they had going. the hardware is maybe 30% of it. also for audio i just use one ear for each radio, sounds weird at first but your brain adapts faster than you'd think

yeah the CMS part confuses a lot of people at first. so basically when you connect to an RMS gateway (which is someone elses radio/node that has internet), your message goes from your radio to their station, then from their station up to one of the CMS servers (there are several around the world, they sync to each other). the recipient doesnt get it instantly — they have to connect to any RMS gateway or directly to a telnet node and the CMS pushes the pending messages down to them at that point. so yes theres inherent delay, sometimes hours if the other person doesnt connect often. for your test to yourself — when you sent it and then checked webmail, did you wait a minute or two? sometimes theres a short delay getting into the CMS. but also make sure your callsign in Winlink Express is entered exactly right including any SSID if you used one. i had a situation where i had a -10 SSID set on one session and nothing on the other and they were treating them as separate accounts basically. the webmail on winlink.org should show everything tied to your callsign regardless of SSID though so that shouldnt be the issue usually. 144.990 is the standard VHF winlink simplex calling frequency yeah, so youre on the right track there. one thing to check is whether the gateway you connected to actually had a working internet link at the time — some of the lesser used gateways go offline or lose their CMS connection without the sysop noticing right away. you can check gateway status on the winlink.org maps page.

so ive been using just a basic paper log for like 3 years now which i know is ridiculous but i finally want to get a proper software setup going. the problem is every time i start reading about logging software i end up in some rabbit hole for 2 hours and come out more confused than when i started from what i can tell N1MM is basically the gold standard for contests but kind of overkill if youre just doing casual HF work and chasing DX on the side? and Log4OM seems more like an everyday logbook that also handles awards tracking and stuff. but then WSJT-X is its own thing and i guess it has its own log built in but i dont want to have like 3 separate logs that never talk to each other i did a couple FT8 contacts last month using a friends setup and i want to get into that more, also maybe try some SSB contesting this fall. is there a setup where one piece of software kind of handles it all or do people just run N1MM for contests and Log4OM the rest of the time and import stuff back and forth. the ADIF export/import thing sounds like it works but also sounds like a pain honestly running windows 10 on a pretty average laptop if that matters, IC-7300 is the radio

not to go off on a tangent but this is why i just run everything through a behringer mixer before it hits the radio. yeah its a bit of extra desk clutter but you get way more control over the audio chain without ever touching the inside of the rig. my audio reports went from mediocre to genuinely good just by having real EQ and compression before the mic input. zero voiding of warranty too which matters to me since my 7300 is still under extended coverage. the internal TX EQ on the 7300 is honestly pretty limited once you start pushing it, only so much you can do with those few bands. if you do want to keep going the internal route though i'd reset to defaults first and start fresh rather than trying to figure out what changed

JS8Call has a decent user base but its definitely not FT8 numbers, youre right about that. the sweet spot ive found is 40m in the evenings and sometimes 20m during the day if conditions are decent. the thing that took me a while to understand is that JS8Call is running at maybe -24dB SNR capability which is actually weaker than FT8 in terms of threshold, so you get contacts that PSK31 would never even decode. its slower though, like a full message exchange can take a couple minutes depending on the speed setting you pick PSK31 is honestly still alive, especially on 14.070 on weekends. i fired it up a few months ago just to see and worked maybe 8 guys in an afternoon without trying hard. the decoder in fldigi is rock solid and there's something satisfying about watching that waterfall fill up with signals. for actual keyboard to keyboard conversation it still beats everything in my opinion just because the speed feels more natural FT8 i use when i want to work a new entity or check if a band is open at all. its a propagation tool more than a communication tool at this point, which is fine, thats what it's good at

so we finally got our county ARES group together for a tabletop/actual-radio exercise last saturday. been trying to coordinate this for like 4 months because everyones schedules never line up. anyway we did a simulated scenario where a major ice storm had knocked out power to about 60% of the county, cell towers were down or overloaded, and the EOC needed served agency welfare checks relayed through amateur radio. honestly the biggest thing that tripped us up wasnt the radio stuff at all. it was message handling. people were improvising their own formats, some were using ICS 213 forms some werent, and it created this bottleneck at net control where Dave (our NCS for the drill) was basically transcribing everything in real time and falling behind. by like the second hour he was pretty frazzled. we had three mobiles deployed, two portables, and the EOC station running and in theory that should have been plenty but the message flow just wasnt organized. we also discovered that one of our members had never actually sent a formal radiogram before. like ever. and he's been licensed for 9 years. no judgement at all but it highlighted how many of us have drifted away from traffic handling basics and just kind of assumed we knew what we were doing. anyway wondering if others have run drills recently and what your biggest surprises or facepalm moments were. feels like we can always improve but its hard to know where to start sometimes.

14 gauge stranded is totally fine, i've run antennas with that for years without issues. some guys swear by solid copper but honestly for a backyard dipole at reasonable power levels you're not gonna notice a difference. the main thing is to seal everything up — that center connector being oxidized after a week is a bit of a red flag. if you didnt weatherproof it that's gonna cause you headaches, moisture gets in there and it gets ugly fast. i usually wrap the whole feedpoint in self-amalgamating tape, like several layers, and that keeps things pretty solid through winter. the inverted-V is a good pattern for 40 too, you get some low angle radiation if the apex is high enough but also decent coverage closer in. what are you feeding it with, coax straight to the rig or do you have a balun in there?

Short answer is for DXCC you really need LoTW, thats the one the ARRL actually accepts for the award without you having to physically mail cards in. eQSL is fine and a lot of people enjoy it but the ARRL doesnt count those for DXCC credit. That said eQSL does have its own awards program and some people really get into that. Paper cards still matter more than people admit though. Some rare DX entities have operators who just dont do digital confirmation at all, or the upload takes forever, and if you ever want to submit a mixed batch to the ARRL you can send paper cards for those and LoTW credits for everything else. So its not really an either/or situation, more like you end up using all of them eventually depending on who youre working. My suggestion just get in the habit of logging everything carefully and uploading to LoTW regularly. Even if nothing matches right away the confirmations will come in over time, sometimes months later when the other station finally uploads their log. Its kind of a nice surprise actually when you check and suddenly have a new entity confirmed.

so anyway the thing that always got me when i was starting out was that some Q codes mean different things depending on whether youre asking or answering. like QRV as a question is "are you ready" but if someone just says QRV they mean they ARE ready. took me a while to catch onto that pattern. most of the time context makes it obvious but it can trip you up at first for sure the 73 thing is funny because you hear people say "73s" with an s on the end all the time even though technically the code itself is already plural in meaning. pedantic people will correct you on it but honestly nobody really cares on a casual ragchew

im pretty new to HF, only been licensed about eight months, and this whole solar flux thing still confuses me a lot. like i get that higher numbers are generally better but i worked my first European station last week when the flux was only around 118 and i thought conditions were supposed to be bad. was on 15m in the afternoon and the guy came booming in. is that normal or did i just get lucky with like a specific propagation path opening up or something?

so ive been thinking about this for a while now. been doing contests for maybe 4 years, mostly single op on 40 and 20, usually finish somewhere in the middle of the pack for my section. my rate is decent but i feel like i hit a ceiling — like i know where to find the mults, i know when to S&P vs run, all that stuff. but i keep reading about SO2R and how the top guys use it to fill dead time while they're running on a primary radio and i honestly cant figure out if its worth getting into or if its just going to make everything worse. my current setup is a 756 pro iii into a hex beam at about 35 feet, nothing fancy. would need a second radio and some kind of switching setup minimum. ive seen some guys run SO2R with just a bandpass filter setup and careful band selection so you're not totally hosing yourself with intermod, but i feel like the hardware investment alone is significant before you even get to the operating skill side of it. the mental load thing is what worries me more than the gear honestly. like splitting attention between two radios during a run sounds brutal. is there a good way to ease into it or do you just kind of throw yourself in the deep end during a slower contest

dont bother with the commercial boards imo, half of them are just someone else's arduino project in a box and you lose the ability to tweak the code. the learning is worth it if you have the time. that said if your deadline is a contest or something just buy the N1MM rotator interface and call it a day

yeah this tripped me up too when i started. QRM is interference from other stations, like man-made noise, and QRN is natural static, like lightning crashes and stuff. QSB is fading signal, you hear that one a lot on 40m when conditions are shifting around. QRP means low power operation, under 5 watts usually. QRO is the opposite, running high power. QRZ just means who is calling me, you hear that at the end of CQ calls a lot. the 73 thing just means best regards, its been around since like the telegraph days, nothing complicated. 88 is love and kisses, traditionally sent to women but honestly its just friendly now. OM means old man which sounds rude but its actually just a friendly term for any male ham, doesnt matter how old you actually are. YL is young lady but again used for any female operator. dont overthink the social ones, people arent being weird they just have weird traditions going back a hundred years ARRL has a decent reference page for Q codes, just google ARRL Q codes and itll come up. honestly though you absorb most of it just by being on the air. took me maybe six months before i stopped having to think about what QSB meant mid-QSO

Great tips! I'd add that don't send foreign stamps as they could be out of date - IRCs or dollars are better. Also learned the hard way that some countries like Germany and Japan only deliver bureau cards to national society members.

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the storms last month kind of woke me up i finally sat down and started building out a proper go-kit. got a pelican-style case, threw in my FT-817 which i know isnt the most powerful thing but its what i have, a small 20ah lifepo4 battery, some coax, and my j-pole that i can hang pretty much anywhere. also packed a logbook, pencils, and a laminated copy of local ARES frequencies. feels like im missing something obvious though. like i keep looking at it and thinking theres a gap somewhere. do you guys carry anything that you only remembered after you actually got deployed somewhere and realized you needed it? im especially thinking about longer activations, like more than a few hours. the battery situation has me a little worried too because i dont really have a way to recharge it in the field unless i bring a solar panel which i have but its kind of bulky. anyway first real attempt at this so be gentle haha

so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now and finally decided to just go for the technician exam. downloaded the ARRL study guide pdf and honestly its a lot more than i expected. like i know i need to learn the question pool but some of this stuff about electrical theory is going way over my head and im not sure if i should be spending equal time on everything or if certain sections actually show up more on the test than others. also not sure if i should just do hamstudy.org or if the actual book is worth reading cover to cover first. my test is in about 3 weeks so i dont have a ton of time. any advice from people who went through this recently would be helpful

yeah i did basically this exact thing about two years ago for a satellite setup. ended up writing my own GS-232 parser from scratch because honestly the ones i found online were a mess — half of them didnt implement the full command set and the other half had weird timing bugs that would cause N1MM to lose sync every few minutes. the protocol itself isnt that complicated once you sit down and actually read through the spec. the main commands you need for basic azimuth/elevation are M, C, S, and A and thats honestly it for most software. i wrote a simple state machine to parse incoming serial bytes and it worked first try pretty much. if you want i can dig up the repo, i think i cleaned it up at some point. the tricky part for me was debouncing the feedback pot reading because i was getting noise from the motor driver coupling back into the analog lines — ended up just running shielded wire for the pot and that mostly fixed it. 2 degrees is totally fine btw, my yagis have like 15 degree 3dB beamwidth at 2m so its not like you need arcsecond precision here

Be careful with antenna sharing on the 7300. SDR radios can be damaged by transmitter power when an SDR and transceiver share the same antenna. Make sure your switching circuit is bulletproof - I've seen guys fry dongles when their T/R switching failed. Test it thoroughly at low power first.

the D710 has been a bit finicky with messaging in my experience. one thing to check is whether your MYCALL is set correctly including the SSID -- if your beacon is going out as W1ABC-9 but your message destination is set to W1ABC without the SSID those wont match up and messages just get dropped. also worth checking if your buddy has his Dire Wolf callsign config matching what youre actually addressing. sounds dumb but ive chased this exact thing for like an hour before. also depending on where you are the digipeater coverage for two-way can be spottier than you'd think even if your position packets get through fine. position beacons are shorter and more redundant so they survive bad paths better than a message exchange which needs acks to go both ways.

same boat as you were a few months ago lol. what helped me was just downloading the ARRL band plan as a PDF and keeping it on my phone. also your radio will usually let you know if you punch in a frequency that doesnt make sense but dont rely on that obviously. the 10m thing is real and its actually pretty fun when the band opens up, ive worked a few states on SSB already which i wasnt expecting as a tech. just stick to VHF for now and you'll be fine, nobody's going to come after you for an honest mistake if you're clearly trying to learn