Sarah Thomas

I'm pretty new to this too so take what I say with a grain of salt but I've been using the HamAlert app and it's been a game changer for me honestly. you set up triggers for specific callsigns or DXCC entities you need and it pushes a notification to your phone the second something hits the clusters. that way I'm not just staring at DXwatch all day waiting for something interesting to show up still figuring out the pile-up thing though, that part is hard no matter what tools you use lol

so i spent most of saturday running coax and getting the FT-857D properly mounted under the passenger seat of my F-150. ran the power cables directly to the battery with an inline fuse like everyone says to do, ground strap on the chassis near the radio, antenna is a Tram 1185 on a mag mount for now (eventually want to do a proper NMO mount through the bed but thats a whole other project). anyway everything works, im getting out fine on 2m and 70cm, but theres this low hum in the audio that changes pitch slightly when i rev the engine. i know this is probably some kind of ground loop thing but ive messed with the ground connections twice now and it hasnt really changed. the hum is there even when im not transmitting so its not RF getting back in or whatever. its more of a receive thing. anyone dealt with this before? i feel like im missing something obvious. the radio is powered off its own dedicated run so i dont think its sharing a circuit with anything sketchy but who knows

so ive been chasing summits for about 6 months now and finally decided to stop being a spectator and actually get up on one myself. going up W4T/SU-001 tomorrow morning, planning to leave the trailhead around 6am to try and catch the morning ops crowd in europe on 20m before the band goes to pieces. my setup is pretty minimal — FT-818 with a homebrew EFHW that i tuned up in the backyard last weekend, feeds into a 9:1 unun wound on an FT140-43 and it seems to work ok on 20 and 40 at least. got a 5ah lipo that should be more than enough for a few hours at 5w. i know you only need 4 contacts to qualify but i want to actually make some decent contacts not just scramble for the minimum if that makes sense. my main worry is the sotawatch alerts thing — i posted an alert last night for 0730 local but im not sure if i got the time zone right. i put it in as UTC and i think i did the conversion correctly but honestly who knows. and i dont really know the etiquette for spotting yourself vs waiting for a chaser to spot you. do people normally self-spot or is that frowned upon? anyway just kind of rambling here but if anyone has done this summit or has tips for first activations in general im all ears

yeah WAS tripped me up too when i was starting out, Delaware was my last state and it sat unconfirmed for like 8 months because the guy never uploaded to LoTW and i kept forgetting to send a card. eventually found him on QRZ and just emailed him directly asking if he could upload lol, he was super cool about it one thing nobody told me early on -- keep a spreadsheet or use something like DX4WIN or even just a notes file tracking what you've worked vs what you've confirmed. thats where people get frustrated, they think they have something wrapped up and then realization hits that worked doesnt mean confirmed

Welcome to ARES! Don't let the training requirements intimidate you. The Level 1 baseline is just the starting point - it sets initial requirements but won't be enough for field deployment anyway. Start with the FEMA courses since they're free online, then work on your radio skills through nets.

oh man the power question is the big one and honestly it took me a couple of deployments to really figure out what works. i run a 50ah LiFePO4 now with a small 100w solar panel and a Victron charge controller and that setup has kept me going through some pretty long activations. the upfront cost hurts but when youre sitting there on hour 14 of a deployment and the battery is still at 70% you really appreciate it. one thing i totally underestimated when i built my first kit was feedline and antenna stuff. i had the radio, i had the battery, but i showed up to a site and realized my coax was too short and i didnt have the right adapters. now i keep a small ziplock bag with a handful of PL-259 adapters, a couple BNC to SO-239 things, some electrical tape, and a spare length of RG-8X. sounds obvious but when youre stressed and its raining its not obvious at all. also honestly dont overlook a simple notepad and pencil. logs, frequencies, whatever. electronics fail. paper doesnt.

yeah i was in the same boat not that long ago honestly. one thing i'd add is that some repeaters are linked to other systems like IRLP or AllStar and you might hear the linking tones or a different accent and wonder whats going on lol. its worth knowing if your local machine does any of that because the etiquette can be slightly different, like you usually dont want to interrupt when a net is already going through the link or whatever. but for basic everyday use just do what the other guy said and look it up on repeaterbook, took me like 5 minutes to get my radio programmed properly once i actually looked instead of guessing

yeah totally normal for where we are in the cycle right now. solar cycle 25 has actually been performing better than the predictions said it would which is why you're getting those surprise openings on the higher bands. the flux bouncing around like that is pretty typical, individual active regions rotate across the solar disk and then disappear around the limb and flux drops, then a new region shows up and it climbs again. nothing to worry about. the japan qso dying mid-contact from a k-index jump, yeah ive had that happen more times than i can count. polar path to JA from the midwest is going to be the first thing to get hammered when there's geomagnetic activity. if k is at 3 or above i usually focus on more equatorial paths, south america, caribbean, west africa, those tend to hold up a lot better. 17m is usually my go-to when conditions are iffy because it kind of threads the needle between the reliability of 20m and the excitement of the higher bands. for space weather stuff i really like the wwv propagation bulletins, they come out at 18 minutes past every hour and give you a quick rundown. DXmaps.com is also great for seeing actual reported openings in real time so you know if a band is actually doing something before you even key up.

Been running 96-hour exercises for years. The hybrid approach works best - use solar during daylight hours to offset daytime consumption, then brief generator runs (2 hours morning/evening) to top off batteries. This minimizes fuel usage and noise signature while maintaining adequate reserves.

i did my first EME qso about 8 months ago with a single 9el yagi and 400w. worked OH6UW who is a monster station obviously but it counted lol. honestly the software side of things (WSJT-X, good sound card, making sure your computer clock is synced to the millisecond basically) tripped me up more than the RF stuff. spent like two sessions just figuring out why my decodes were off and it turned out my GPS disciplined clock wasnt configured right in the software. the moonrise/moonset windows matter too, when the moon is at low elevation you get some ground gain that can help a surprising amount depending on your terrain. theres a guy on one of the EME reflectors who did a whole writeup on optimizing for ground gain with modest stations, worth finding if you havent already

so i was just doing some casual listening saturday afternoon, wasnt even planning to operate, and i noticed 10m was absolutely alive. like i havent heard it like that in probably two years. was pulling in stations from south america like they were local repeaters. ended up working a few guys in brazil and argentina which honestly i wasnt expecting at all for a random saturday. also saw some chatter online about the new Icom IC-905 actually starting to ship to some dealers now? havent seen one in person yet but the specs look ridiculous for what it is. curious if anyone here has actually gotten their hands on one or if its still mostly vaporware at the retail level. anyway point of this post i guess is just... are we finally in the good part of the solar cycle or was that just a fluke? my solar flux numbers have been looking better lately but i dont want to get too excited

yeah 15 and 17 have been kinda hit or miss lately even with flux in the decent range. the thing people dont always realize is that solar flux index gives you a general picture but its not the whole story -- you really gotta watch the K index and the A index too. when the K index spikes above 4 or so the higher bands can just fall apart even if the SFI looks fine. there was a minor geomagnetic disturbance maybe 10 days ago that messed things up for a few days and honestly some of that unsettled ionosphere stuff lingers. as for your texas buddy working JA on 15 -- path geometry is a real thing. from the south central US the long path or even short path into japan can be pretty favorable depending on the season and time of day. from the midwest the geometry is a bit different and the greyline timing wont be the same. try watching the DX cluster for JA spots and note exactly what times they show up, then work backwards to figure out when your window might be. also 17m toward EU from the midwest usually wants you up around sunrise or just before -- like 10-11z in my experience. dont give up, the bands have been doing this frustrating thing where they tease you for a few days then suddenly open wide

so ive been doing single op contests for a few years now mostly on 40 and 20, doing okay but my rates kind of plateau around 80-90 an hour on a good run and I keep reading about guys pushing 150+ and a lot of them are running SO2R setups. I get the concept, you're working a mult on one radio while you're letting a frequency breathe on the other, but in practice I genuinely dont know how people do this without losing their mind or their run frequency. I tried a ghetto version of it last CQWW where I had my backup rig sitting next to the main station and tried to flip between them for S&P while running on 20m. it was a complete disaster. lost my run freq twice, missed exchanges, logged a dupe because I wasnt paying attention to which radio had which callsign in the box. ended up just turning the second rig off after like an hour. is there a learning curve I'm just not past yet or is SO2R genuinely one of those things where if your station isn't set up properly from the ground up it's more trouble than it's worth? also curious what logging software people use that actually handles dual radio well because I was just using N1MM and I think I wasnt configured right

the delay thing is totally normal, dont worry about that. once your message gets uploaded to the CMS (thats the central message server that winlink runs) it gets forwarded from there, so the delivery time depends on what youre sending to. if youre sending to a regular email address like gmail or whatever it usually goes through pretty fast, sometimes just a few minutes. if youre sending to another winlink address and they only check their account over RF then obviously it wont show up for them until they connect to an RMS themselves and pull it down. as for telnet vs RF, telnet is basically just using your internet connection to talk to the CMS directly, which kind of defeats the purpose if youre doing it for emergency comms practice but its useful for testing your message templates and making sure your account is set up right without having to worry about the radio side of things. for actual over-the-air stuff youre always going to be using an RMS as a relay, and VARA FM on 2m is a solid choice if youve got good local coverage. your signalink setup sounds fine, just make sure your audio levels arent clipping or youll have connection issues especially on the handshake.

ok so im relatively new, just got my general last spring, and i looked up the IC-905 after seeing this post and wow that price tag. is that normal for high end vhf/uhf stuff or is that like unusually expensive even for icom? genuinely asking because my reference point is like the cheaper handhelds and my first HF rig which was a used 7300

lol yeah ft8 ate everyone. thats the memo you missed haha. i still get on voice sometimes but honestly ft8 is just easier when im tired after work and still wanna log a few contacts

to add to what the other guy said, there's actually a session log in Winlink Express that'll tell you exactly what happened during a connection attempt. after you run a session go look at the log window and it'll show you whether it connected via CMS direct (internet) or through an RMS gateway by callsign. if you see an actual callsign in there like W5XX-10 or whatever you hit a real gateway, if it just says CMS you went through the internet. took me a while to find that log but its super useful for exactly this kind of debugging.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff confused me for a while too. so for 40m as a general you can do SSB phone from 7.175 up to 7.300 MHz, that changed back in 2007 when the FCC restructured the bands so some of the older charts floating around are just wrong. the tech limit doesnt really apply to 40m the same way it does on other bands. as for band edges, your elmer is right to warn you. the thing is your transmitted signal isnt just sitting on one exact frequency, your SSB signal has bandwidth, maybe 2.5 to 3 kHz wide depending on your rig and how its set up. so if you park your dial right on 7.175 and youre running USB, part of your signal is technically spilling below your privileges into the extra-only segment. FCC doesnt care about a few Hz but its still bad form and could cause interference complaints. most people just stay at least 3 kHz inside any edge to be safe.

i went through this exact same thing a few months ago lol. ended up getting the ft-65 which is kind of the newer budget yaesu and im pretty happy with it. its not as bombproof as the ft-60 but it was like 20 bucks cheaper when i got it and the waterproofing is actually rated which the ft-60 isnt i think? anyway the recevier sensitivity on any of the yaesu handhelds blows the baofeng out of the water, i can hit a repeater from my car with the stock duck antenna that i couldnt get into at all with the uv-5r

did the same mod on mine probably 18 months ago, pretty straightforward yeah. the receive difference you noticed is almost certainly in your head, the front end circuitry doesnt change, its just a firmware/jumper thing that removes the TX lockout. that said i get it, theres always that feeling like something changed when you open the thing up. on the TX audio — absolutely worth spending time in the menus before you start thinking about hardware changes. the parametric EQ in the 7300 is actually really good and most people just leave everything flat which is kind of a waste. i boosted around 2.5kHz a few db and rolled off a bit below 200Hz and people started commenting on how much better my audio sounded on SSB. took maybe an hour of back and forth with a buddy on the other end giving me reports. way easier than any hardware mod and you can just reset it if you dont like it.

the 818 is great for sota but yeah the antenna situation is always the thing that takes the longest for me to dial in. i switched to an end fed halfwave a while back and its so much easier to deploy than a dipole, especially solo. only downside is you need a decent anchor point but even a fishing pole works. congrats on the first one though, it gets way easier once you have a system

yeah same thing happend to me last spring, stood there with the HT for like 20 minutes before i finally just keyed up. the guy who answered was so nice about it. welcome to the hobby, its a good one

so ive been trying to get more into DX chasing lately and everyone keeps telling me to use the cluster networks but honestly the whole thing is a bit confusing still. i've been jumping between DXwatch and the QRZ logbook page and sometimes i'll see a spot on DXwatch that looks fresh but by the time i tune there on 17m the frequency is dead or just noise. not sure if im reading the timestamps wrong or if spots just go stale that fast. also does anyone actually use the QRZ DX spotting tab or is DXwatch generally considered better? i downloaded a couple android apps too, DX Toolkit i think was one of them, but i cant figure out if those are pulling from the same cluster network or something different. feels like there's like 4 different things all supposedly showing the same spots but they're all slightly different and i dont know which one to trust for real-time stuff. been licensed about 8 months, general class, running an IC-7300 into a trapped vertical so the setup is decent i think. just feel like im missing something obvious about how all this cluster stuff actually works together.

i did mine like three months ago so pretty fresh in my memory. i just used hamstudy and watched some of the ham radio crash course videos on youtube when i didnt understand something, that combo worked fine. took me maybe two weeks of casual studying, probably an hour a night. the test itself was way less stressful than i expected, its 35 questions for Tech and you need 26 right so theres some room to mess up. the math questions scared me but theres only a few and honestly if you just memorize the specific formulas they ask about youre fine, they dont throw curveballs.

im in almost the exact same boat lol, stuck around 14wpm for like two months now. one thing i tried that seemed to help a little is the G4FON trainer, its free and you can set it up to drill common words and phrases instead of random characters. feels more like actual ham radio that way. havent cracked 20 yet but 16 is starting to feel less impossible so maybe its working