James Davis

This is where the clever QRPer can often steal a QSO from the QRO stations. QRP DXpeditions still work - you just need better operating technique and antenna placement. Not everyone needs to run legal limit to be effective from rare locations.

The trunk lip mount situation is actually pretty solid if you get a decent one — I ran a Comet RS-790 on my old Civic for like three years and never had a problem. The key thing people mess up is the ground, you gotta make sure the mount is actually making good contact with bare metal. Sometimes there's paint or a rubber seal right there and your ground is terrible and then you wonder why SWR is all over the place. On the 70cm SWR, 1.8 isnt the end of the world but you should be able to do better. with mag mounts specifically the coax routing can detune things if its pinched in a door or has a sharp bend near the base. also some of the cheaper Tram antennas are just kinda mediocre on 70cm even when everything else is fine. might be worth borrowing a dual band antenna from someone at your local club to compare.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me and honestly it went way better than i expected. got about 34 QSOs over a couple hours which i think is enough to count the reference, but i have a few things i wasnt sure about after the fact. first thing is logging — i was using paper in the field and then transferred everything to ADIF later. does the log need anything special for WWFF or is just the normal fields fine? i put the reference number in the notes field but i wasnt sure if thats the right place or if there's a specific field for it. second thing, and this is probably a dumb question, but do the hunters need to specifically know youre doing WWFF to count it for their own awards or can they just log it as a regular contact? i had a few people call me who clearly just heard me calling CQ and didnt mention WWFF at all, wondering if those still count toward the reference total on my end at least. also the spot on wwff.us didnt seem to work the first time i tried it from my phone, ended up just using pota spot which people seemed to find anyway. is that normal or was i doing something wrong with the wwff spotting

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the windstorm last month knocked out power for three days i finally got serious about it. got a pelican case, my IC-7300 probably wont go in it (too big?) so i was thinking the 705 or maybe just my old VX-8 for the HT side of things. i have a little power setup with a 20ah lifepo4 battery and a 30w solar panel that i tested in the backyard last summer. the part im fuzzy on is the antenna situation. at home i have a dipole strung up between two trees but obviously i cant take that anywhere practical. thinking a end-fed halfwave with a small tripod mast, maybe 20-30 feet? i do have a comet SMA whip for the HT but that feels pretty limiting. anyway i keep making lists and then losing them, figured id just ask here what are the things people forget until its too late. not the obvious stuff like extra batteries and a logbook, more like the small dumb things

same boat as you not too long ago honestly. what finally clicked for me was just picking one net and showing up consistently for a few weeks. i found a regional 40m net through a guy at a hamfest who literally just wrote the frequency and time on a piece of paper for me. low tech solution but it worked lol. now i know about like six or seven nets just from people i met through that one.

so i finally caved and ordered a couple pi zeros and an arduino mega a few weeks back after seeing someone at our club meeting show off their automated station setup. been messing with it on and off and honestly i went way deeper than i expected to started simple, just wanted to pull frequency data from my IC-7300 via USB and have it auto-log to a spreadsheet or something. ended up writing a python script that reads CAT commands, pushes the data to a little sqlite database, and now i have a dashboard running on my local network showing me band conditions, what frequency im on, mode, all that. its actually pretty slick but im not gonna pretend the first two weeks werent a nightmare of broken dependencies and me googling error messages at midnight now im thinking about hooking up an arduino to handle some physical stuff — like switching between antennas based on what band the rig selects automatically, maybe even triggering a bandpass filter bank if i ever build one. has anyone done relay control through an arduino that talks to a pi? im trying to figure out if i should do I2C between them or just have the pi handle the GPIO directly and skip the arduino altogether for the relay part. the arduino feels like overkill if i dont need the analog stuff but i have it sitting there so might as well use it