Sarah Thomas

im kind of in the same boat as you, been licensed about a year and a half and still figuring out the cluster stuff. one thing i noticed is that the QRZ app shows spots but theres sometimes a bit of a delay compared to just watching DXwatch directly in a browser. not sure if thats a me problem or just how the app works. i started using DX toolkit on my phone which someone at a hamfest told me about and it seems a bit more realtime but honestly i flip between all of them and it gets confusing fast lol

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

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 running FT8 for about a year and a half now and honestly it scratches the DX itch fine but theres something that started feeling hollow about it after a while. like yeah i worked 140 countries and the waterfall looks cool but its basically just an automated exchange, you're not really talking to anyone.
a buddy at the club mentioned JS8Call and i installed it last weekend and started poking around on 40m. the concept makes sense to me — its built on the same weak signal encoding as FT8 but you can actually type messages back and forth, slower but workable. had a 20 minute QSO with a guy in Georgia (the country, not the state) running 5 watts into a dipole and the signal was way down in the mud on regular SSB but JS8 was decoding fine.
my question is — does anyone actually use JS8Call regularly or is it kind of a ghost town on most bands? i checked pskreporter and there seem to be spots but not a ton of activity compared to FT8. also wondering if there's some setting im missing because my auto-relay stuff doesnt seem to be working right, messages are going out but not getting forwarded the way i expected.
not trying to abandon FT8 just want something with a little more actual communication going on. PSK31 used to be that for me before FT8 kind of ate the digital world.

so i passed my general back in the spring and ive been trying to work on my CW ever since. started with the Koch method using LCWO and got up to about 13wpm receiving but i just cant seem to break through that wall. i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes i skip a day or two if work gets crazy. sending is actually not bad, i feel pretty comfortable around 10-12wpm sending but receiving anything faster than 13 just turns into mush in my head.
i know people say the jump from 5 to 13 is actually the easy part and the jump to 20 is where it gets hard, and man they werent kidding. i read somewhere that you have to stop hearing individual dots and dashes and start hearing whole words as sounds, like how you recognize a word when someone says it without spelling it out. i get the concept but i dont know how to actually make my brain do that. anybody been through this and come out the other side? feels like im spinning my wheels

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

ok so ive had my tech license for about 3 months now and i thought i understood the band privileges but now im second guessing myself. i was reading something online about HF and it said techs can use some HF frequencies but then someone at my club meeting said techs are basically limited to VHF and above except for a small slice of 10 meters. so which is it? and also is there like a simple version of part 97 somewhere because i tried reading the actual FCC document and it made my head hurt. i just want to make sure im not accidentally transmitting somewhere i shouldnt be, i dont want to get in trouble or step on someones QSO without knowing

so i've been building this direct conversion receiver for 40m over the past few weeks, based loosely on the old Neophyte design but with a few mods. got the VFO stable enough, mixer seems to be doing its thing, and i can actually hear stations now which is more than i could say two weeks ago.
the problem is the audio is really muddy and there's this low frequency rumble underneath everything, like a hum almost but not 60hz exactly, closer to maybe 120 or so. i've got a simple audio amp stage after the mixer using a LM386 and i know those things are noisy but this seems worse than it should be. decoupled the power supply pins with a 250uf cap and a 0.047 going to ground and it helped a little but not enough.
also getting a lot of what i think is AF feedback, when i turn the volume up past about half the whole thing kind of oscillates. i built it ugly style on a piece of copper clad and the layout is probably not great. anyone dealt with this kind of thing with the LM386, is it just a garbage chip or am i missing something obvious

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 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