Emily Wilson

oh man i was exactly where you are about a year ago, it feels like everyone is speaking a different language at first. QRZ is another one you'll hear constantly, people say it when they're asking who's calling them. and 88 means love and kisses which is usually only used toward female operators, though some people debate whether thats still appropriate or whatever honestly just keep a little cheat sheet next to the radio for a while. i did that for like the first 6 months and now most of it is just automatic

so i passed my technician exam last thursday and spent most of the weekend just listening on the local repeater trying to figure out what was going on. finally worked up the nerve to key up yesterday afternoon and this guy KD9 something responded right away and we talked for like 20 minutes about nothing really, just weather and how long he'd been licensed. felt pretty surreal honestly. i have a baofeng uv-5r that i know people hate but it was like $25 and i just wanted to see if i liked the hobby before spending real money. anyway just wanted to say hi i guess, ive been lurking this forum for a few months while studying

nice score on the FTM-400, those are great radios. i have the same one in my car and love the APRS stuff built in. for the cable management between the body and head unit, i actually just took my time routing it through the dash cavity and it mostly disappears. takes a while to figure out where all the gaps are in the trim panels but its worth it when its done. cant help much on the whine thing since i got lucky and mine was quiet from the start but the ground advice above sounds right from what ive read. good luck with it

RF path issue is my first guess too. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine but if there's no igate actually receiving you directly or via a digi then it just dies on the RF side and never hits the internet. I had basically the same thing happen when I moved, took me a week to figure out the nearest igate had been offline for months and nobody bothered to update the map. try running APRSISCE/32 or even Direwolf on a laptop with a cheap RTL-SDR and just listen on 144.390 for a while. if you can decode your own packets locally then the radio and TNC side is working and its definitely a coverage/igate problem not a config problem.

so ive been putting together a go-kit for probably the last six months, little bit at a time, and every time i think im done i realize theres something else i forgot or didnt think about. right now ive got my FT-857D, a LiFePO4 battery (the 20ah one), a dual band handheld as backup, coax, a roll of wire for a field antenna, and my logging stuff. chargers, cables, all that. but i keep reading posts from guys who do actual ARES deployments and they always mention stuff i never would have thought of — like waterproof labels on everything, a laminated card with local repeater freqs, even just a sharpie and some tape. small stuff that seems dumb until youre standing in a parking lot at 2am trying to remember what frequency the EOC wants you on. curious what you guys actually bring. not looking for a perfect list or anything, just wondering what the thing is that you forgot once and swore youd never forget again.

for 6-8 hours at that duty cycle the lifepo4 is honestly fine, i'd say bring the generator but dont plan on needing it. the eu2200i is great but it's also one more thing to fuel, one more thing that can throw rf noise into your receiver, and one more thing to haul. for an exercise that isnt going to run overnight just do the battery and call it done. if you have a 100ah pack and youre genuinely only at 30-40% tx you wont even come close to draining it unless something goes sideways. the sloper question though — yeah it does matter a bit at NVIS ranges but probably not as much as you're thinking. at 40m NVIS you're basically shooting straight up anyway so the horizontal component of the sloper doesn't buy you much directionality. the low angle stuff is where you'd really notice it. i'd just get it up as high and as conveniently as possible and not stress the orientation.

yeah same thing happened to me when i first got on air, i used N as in Nancy and someone politely told me its November lol. i was kind of embarrassed but its not a big deal, nobody's going to yell at you. the NATO ones are just more universal i guess. i still mess up Golf sometimes and say George out of habit from somewhere

okay so i passed my tech exam about three weeks ago and ive been reading through part 97 trying to figure out what im actually allowed to do and honestly its kind of a mess to read through. like i get that i have HF privileges on 10 meters but i keep seeing different things about what modes are allowed where and im not totally sure if i can do like SSB on 10m or just CW. also someone at my local club told me something about a 1500 watt limit but then i read something else that said it depends on the band or the license class or something. i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere i shouldnt be, especially since ive heard the FCC takes that stuff seriously. is there like a simpler breakdown somewhere or does anyone have the cliff notes version of what a tech can do on HF

so i finally bit the bullet and replaced the PA transistors on my 857 after it started dropping to like 8 watts on 20m. got a pair of RD70HVF1s from a supplier and followed the usual process, matched them as close as i could on my curve tracer, thermal grease, torqued down properly. now it puts out full power again on HF which is great but 2m is completely dead. like zero output, not even a watt. the driver chain seems fine because i can hear the ALC doing something when i key up on VHF, and the pre-driver stage is getting warm like it should be, but nothing making it out to the antenna port. checked the TX/RX relay and it seems to be switching correctly. my gut says maybe i knocked something loose around the band switching logic or maybe the VHF PA module itself was already marginal and me poking around in there finished it off. its a separate module so i dont think the final swap should have affected it but stranger things have happened. anybody dealt with a dead VHF section on one of these while the HF side is fine? wondering if its worth pulling the VHF module entirely and scoping the input to see if drive is even getting there before i start assuming the module is cooked.

nice writeup. im just getting my technician license sorted out and was already looking at ARES, good to hear from someone whos actually done it. does your group require HF capability or is 2m/70cm enough to get started? i keep reading different things depending on which county group's website im looking at

yeah drills and real activations are just different animals, theres no way around it. the stress level changes everything. i've done maybe a dozen activations over the years and i still get that slightly anxious feeling the first hour or so until things settle into a rhythm. the EOC coordinator thing is tough sometimes honestly. some of them really get what we bring to the table and some of them kind of see us as a checkbox on their resource list. just gotta be patient and prove yourself useful. once they see the traffic actually moving and you're not in their way, it usually gets better.

so im finally making the trip out to dayton this year, first time in probably 6 years. last time i went i picked up a pretty clean kenwood ts-430s for like 80 bucks from some old timer who just wanted it gone. hoping to find something similar this time around but honestly even if i dont score anything good its just fun walking around and talking to people our local club is also doing a swap meet next month, nothing huge just the parking lot at the fire station we usually meet at but usually a few decent rigs show up. if anyones in the central ohio area its the second saturday, check the arrl website for the details i think someone posted it there

clay soil is actually not the worst for a vertical if you put down a decent radial field — like 16 to 32 radials at least a quarter wave long makes a huge difference regardless of soil type. the ground loss thing matters way more with only a few radials than it does with soil conductivity once you have a proper mat laid down. that said, 35ft for a 40m dipole isnt as bad as people make it sound. youre not going to be working deep dx on a gray line opening with it but for general operating and even some dx on a good band night its totally usable. ive worked europe on a 40m dipole at 30ft before, wasnt easy but it happened. if i had to pick one for your situation id probably lean dipole just because you dont have to deal with the radial work and theres nothing to tune against a bad ground. but honestly either one will get you on the air and thats the point right.

the 7300 into RigPi combo can be a little finicky with VARA from what ive seen, not saying thats definitely your problem but the USB audio on that radio sometimes needs the sample rate locked at 48k explicitly otherwise VARA gets weird. worth double checking that in windows sound settings if youre on windows, not sure how RigPi handles it on their end actually. also just a thought — have you tried Winlink Hybrid mode? basically lets you go through a telnet connection to test if your message formatting and everything is working right before you blame the RF path. if it works over telnet then you know its a radio/modem issue not a software config thing

i did almost exactly the same thing on my civic hatch last year, went with a lip mount on the trunk because i was too nervous to drill the roof lol. works fine for what i do which is also mostly repeaters. the ground plane thing is a bit of a compromise but i honestly cant tell the difference in practice. congrats on the direct battery wire that was the first thing my elmer told me to do and it really does clean things up

just passed my General like two months ago so this is fresh for me. took me maybe 2 weeks of studying, i used the Gordon West book AND hamStudy both because the book helped me actually understand stuff not just memorize it. the electrical theory was the part that took the longest for me too but honestly on the actual exam it wasnt as brutal as i thought it would be. one thing nobody told me before i upgraded was that having the General ticket doesnt mean youll immediately be able to have great conversations on HF lol, propagation is a whole thing and some days 40 meters is great and some days you cant reach anyone. but thats part of what makes it fun i guess. welcome to the rabbit hole

so ive been watching the solar flux numbers for the past few weeks and something weird is going on. we had a couple days where the SFI was pushing up around 180-190 and i was hearing europe like they were next door on 15m, like genuinely loud signals, S7-S8 from stations i normally can barely pull out of the noise. then the next day it just collapsed and 15 was completely dead, couldnt even hear the beacon network. i know solar cycle 25 is ramping up and everyones excited about it but i dont really understand why it swings so hard day to day. like is this normal for this point in the cycle or is something else going on? the K index was pretty low both days so i dont think it was a geomagnetic thing. been a ham for about 3 years now and im still trying to wrap my head around how all this actually works in practice vs what i read in the handbooks. also noticed 17m has been doing some weird stuff around sunrise, like there was this maybe 20 minute window a few days ago where i was working japan with just my vertical and 100w, then it snapped shut and nothing. is that a greyline thing or something else?

this is making me want to actually show up to more of my local ARES meetings lol. ive been a general for about 8 months and joined the group but only made it to like two nets so far. do you find the training nets are pretty welcoming if youre still figuring things out? i dont want to slow anyone down during an exercise or whatever

so ive been using hamalert for maybe 6 months now to track POTA activations in my state, had a pretty good trigger setup for colorado parks and was getting regular notifications on my phone. but lately the past couple weeks it seems like im barely getting any alerts even though i can see there's definitely activators out there on the pota website checked my trigger settings multiple times and they look right - park division K, state CO, all modes enabled. anyone else having issues with pota spots coming through hamalert lately or am i missing something obvious here?

oh yeah the 13-15wpm wall is a real thing, almost everyone hits it. what happens is you're still decoding characters one at a time in your head instead of hearing whole words as sounds. the brain has to make a switch at some point where it stops translating dits and dahs and just... recognizes the pattern directly. that switch doesnt happen on command, it happens when you force it to. what actually helped me was two things. first i stopped going back down when i got frustrated. i know that sounds harsh but dropping back to a comfortable speed every time you struggle is basically just reinforcing the lower speed. second i started using the word training on lcwo instead of just character drills, common words at a speed thats just a little too fast, so you miss some but not all. your brain starts to fill in gaps and that builds the pattern recognition faster than perfect copying does. also honestly just getting on the air even when you're not ready helped me more than any software. people slow down for you if you ask, and real QSOs have context which makes copying way easier than random code groups.

so ive been going back and forth on this for like three weeks now and i think im just overthinking it but here goes. im trying to put up something decent for 40m at my place, lot is about 80x120 feet so its not tiny but the neighbors are close enough that i have to be a little careful with what i do. right now im running a little vertical that came with my radio package deal and honestly it works but i feel like im leaving a lot on the table. the question is basically whether to build a half wave dipole and just string it between the house and the big oak tree in the back, or go with a proper quarter wave vertical with some radials. ive read a bunch of stuff saying verticals are better for dx because of the low angle radiation but then other guys are saying a dipole up 35 feet is going to outperform a vertical in most situations. at 40m 35 feet is not that high obviously, only like a third of a wavelength, so im not sure the dipole would have that great a low angle component anyway. current setup is a ts-590sg into the existing thing. just trying to figure out what makes sense before i spend a weekend building something.

yeah same here honestly. 17m has been treating me pretty well around sunset, had a nice run of European stations last weekend without really trying. 40 gets kind of crowded with the nets and stuff but late night its actually pretty decent for DX if you can stay awake. i think the flux has been all over the place, checked pskreporter the other day and signals were bouncing weird. just gotta keep the rig on i guess

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and just got my first HT, a Baofeng UV-5R which i know everyone has opinions about but its what i could afford. anyway i found a local repeater listed on repeaterbook and it shows a 100hz CTCSS tone. i programmed it in and when i key up i can hear myself come through the repeater but nobody ever responds and i dont know if im actually transmitting with the tone or just hearing the repeater squelch open from RF. also i read something about DCS vs CTCSS and now im even more confused. is there a way to test if the tone is actually going out? and is there like a standard thing you're supposed to say when you first get on a repeater or do you just start talking? i dont want to be rude or step on anyone but i also dont know the etiquette here. any help appreciated

Just finished my first homebrew collinear using half-wave wire elements in PVC - getting 1.2:1 SWR at 146MHz and can now hit repeaters 60-75 miles out full quieting from my QTH. This gives me about 10dB gain over my old 1/4-wave mag mount, similar to what I've read about other homebrew designs. For those running commercial collinears like Diamond X-series - how does real-world DX performance compare? Considering upgrading to something like an X-500 but wondering if the extra cost over homebrew is justified for VHF/UHF work.

yeah the cpu thing is real, i had the same issue running two WSJT-X instances on an old thinkpad. eventually just set up a cheap mini PC dedicated to digital stuff and that solved it. js8call does run a bit heavier than ft8 because of all the extra framing i think. honestly though i still go back to PSK31 when i want an actual conversation. i know thats kind of old fashioned at this point but theres still people on 14.070 area and the exchanges feel more like a real QSO. ft8 kind of ruined me for caring about signal reports because nobody actually means anything when they send you a -14