Amanda Thomas

i just passed mine like three weeks ago so this is fresh. the exam wasnt as bad as i thought it would be but i spent probably six weeks studying on and off. the math questions look scary but half of them you can just learn the pattern for and a lot of the answers are the same formula rearranged. what actually surprised me was how much of the extra question pool is about stuff i already vaguely knew from just operating and tinkering, like it wasnt all totally foreign. the privledges are nice but tbh i upgraded mostly because i wanted to say i did it lol. if you already know your way around HF and have some electronics background you could probably knock it out faster than you think

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few months now. i have a fairly decent station at my QTH — IC-7300, a tribander at 40ft, and an 80m dipole — and i want to be able to run it from work or when im travelling. currently i have a VPN into the shack and i was using a combination of TeamViewer for the desktop and some sketchy audio-over-IP thing i cobbled together, and it kind of works but the latency is brutal and CW is basically unusable above about 18wpm which is frustrating. ive been looking at RemoteHams and also the SDR remote stuff they have going. from what i can tell the RCForb client does some pretty clever stuff with the audio buffering to smooth out jitter, but im curious how it actually performs in practice over a residential cable connection on both ends. my shack side has about 30mbps upload which should be plenty. the other thing im wondering about is how people handle the internet linking side when you want to tie in something like a local repeater feed or run some kind of roundtable. ive seen people mention AllStar nodes and IRLP in the same breath as remote HF control and im not totally sure how those pieces fit together or if people are even doing that. anyway if anyones run RemoteHams for more than a few weeks id love to hear how it actually holds up day to day, especially on HF SSB and CW. the marketing stuff on their site is pretty vague about real world performance.

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still dont fully understand the whole QSL confirmation thing. like i get the basic idea, you worked someone, you send a card or whatever to confirm it. but then theres LoTW and eQSL and paper cards and everyone seems to have a different opinion on which one matters. i signed up for LoTW a few months back and uploaded some logs but honestly i have no idea if anyone is matching with me because the interface is kind of confusing. and eQSL i made an account but i havent really used it. then i actually got a real paper QSL card in the mail last week from a station in Japan which was super cool but i dont know what to do with it exactly, like do i need to do anything to confirm back? so basically my questions are — does LoTW count for DXCC and awards and stuff? does eQSL count for anything official? and when someone sends you a paper card should you always send one back? sorry if this is a dumb question i just see a lot of people talking about QSL managers and bureaus and i feel like im missing something

yeah what he said about food is no joke lol. my first activation i showed up with just a water bottle and thought itd be a few hours, ended up being there until like 2am during a tornado watch. also double check your HT battery is actually charged the night before, i had mine sitting in the bag for three weeks and it was at like 20%. small thing but kind of embarrassing when youre trying to check in on simplex

that FT240-43 choke is solid for 40m, good choice. i used a -31 mix on mine first and had all kinds of weird common mode stuff showing up on my shack equipment, switching to -43 for the lower bands made a real difference. your SWR numbers sound fine honestly, 1.4 at the bottom is totally workable even without a tuner.

so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and people just throw around QSL, QRM, QSB, QRN and like a dozen others and i can look them up individually but im still confused about how they actually get used in like real conversation on air. like i know QSL technically means "i confirm" but people seem to use it in different ways depending on context? and then theres all the other abbreviations that arent even Q codes like 73, 88, OM, YL and those dont show up in the same lists is there like a standard way these get used or is it more just whatever the person feels like saying. because sometimes ill hear someone say QRZ and it sounds like theyre asking whos calling but then other times it seems like theyre using it as a verb almost. anyway just trying to get a better handle on this before i actually start transmitting myself, still studying for my tech ticket

so ive been messing around with this idea for a while now and finally started actually building it. basically i want to use an arduino mega to handle all my antenna switching automatically based on band — right now i have a 40m dipole, a 20m yagi, and a 6m halo up on the roof and im constantly having to manually flip relays when i change bands on the rig. its not the end of the world but its annoying especially during a contest. the plan is to read the band data output from my IC-7300 (the CI-V serial stuff) and have the arduino parse it and then fire the right relay. i got a bunch of those SRD-05VDC-SL-C relays from amazon, probably overkill but they were cheap. im using a ULN2003 darlington array to drive them so im not pulling directly from the arduino pins. my question is whether anyones done something similar with the CI-V interface specifically. ive seen some sketches online but most of them are for older rigs and i cant tell if the baud rate stuff is the same for the 7300. also wondering if a pi would be better for this since i already have a pi 4 sitting around doing nothing. seems like overkill for just switching relays but maybe if i wanted to add logging or a web interface later it would make more sense. anyway if anyones built something like this id love to see your code or at least hear how you approached the CI-V parsing part

Interesting results. I've always wondered about the actual performance difference. Did you test SWR as well? Also, how much difference in received signal strength did you see on your local repeaters?

the antenna question is the one that'll bite you hardest in the field, so good that you're thinking about it early. mag mount is fine for local comms but if you ever get deployed somewhere without a vehicle nearby you're kinda stuck. a lot of guys i know keep a slim jim or jpole rolled up in the kit for 2m because you can hang it basically anywhere. for HF the EFHW is solid honestly, just make sure you have enough wire and a way to get it up -- i keep a 31 foot fiberglass mast broken down in sections and it packs surprisingly small. on the battery question, 40ah LiFePO4 should get you a long way depending on how hard you're running the rig. if you're doing mostly receive with occasional transmit you might be surprised how long it lasts. that said i would absolutely get the solar panel integrated now while you're building it out rather than later. a 100w panel and a decent charge controller just velcroed to the outside of the case saved me during a RACES activation two summers ago when we were at a site for almost 36 hours. paper log -- yes, always have one. laptops die, software crashes, and sometimes the served agency just wants to see paper anyway. i keep a rite in the rain notepad and a couple pencils taped inside the lid of my case. takes up almost no space and has bailed me out more than once.

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly i mostly just use my HT for local repeaters but ive been hearing people talk about HF and it sounds really interesting. a guy at my club said i should just go ahead and take the General exam but im not really sure where to start studying or how hard it actually is compared to the tech exam. the tech exam wasnt too bad for me, i used hamstudy.org and just drilled questions for like 3 weeks. is the General pool similar to that or is there a lot more actual theory stuff i need to understand? i dont want to just memorize answers without knowing whats going on but also i dont have a ton of free time right now. also once i pass, what HF bands do i actually get access to as a General? i know Extras get everything but i wasnt sure exactly what General opens up. any help appreciated