Emily Wilson

yeah the listening thing is huge and most people skip it entirely. ive watched guys on the cluster spot a rare one and literally start calling before they even find the frequency — they dont even know if the DX is working split or simplex or what the tx frequency actually is. total chaos and it just adds to the noise. the timing rhythm point you made is real too. good DX operators have a pattern and if you can figure it out youre basically predicting when the next opening is. some of them are very consistent, like they'll work a string of europeans then swing to NA for a few, back and forth. if you can see yourself in the pattern you're way ahead of the random callers. one thing i'd add — tail-ending works sometimes in CW pileups but you have to be careful because if you misjudge it you just cause a collision. and on phone dont even bother trying it unless the timing is really obvious. ive had more luck on CW with just a clean single call at exactly the right moment than any other trick.

ok so i passed my general last month and got my sequential call which is fine but ive been reading about vanity calls and now im kind of down a rabbit hole and confused. from what i can tell you apply through the FCC ULS system and pick from available calls but the part i dont understand is whether theres like a waiting period after you get your sequential call before you can apply for a vanity. some posts i found said 18 days, some said something different. also do you have to pay the $35 application fee for a vanity on top of the original license fee or is that separate. my sequential call isnt bad or anything i just always wanted a short 2x1 or 1x2 if i could get one. im in the 7th district if that matters for call availability. also side question — if i apply for a vanity and dont get the one i want does the application fee still get charged or only if you actually get the call. sorry if this has been asked a million times i did search but got conflicting answers

food and water lol. sounds obvious but i completely forgot when i did my first one. also a folding chair if youre going to be somewhere for more than like an hour, your back will thank you. oh and a way to mount or support the radio that isnt just balancing it on your lap, i use a small clipboard i bungee corded to a tripod leg which sounds ridiculous but works fine.

congrats on hitting 100, thats a real milestone and two years is pretty solid going honestly. to answer your question — LoTW and paper QSLs are treated equally for DXCC credit, one isnt worth more than the other. what matters is that the QSO data matches up. the nice thing about LoTW is you dont have to mail anything in, you just apply online and the system already has your confirmations. for paper cards you can either mail them to Newington or bring them to an ARRL-approved card checker at a hamfest which is way easier if theres one near you. for WAS yeah absolutely work on it at the same time, theres a lot of overlap in your regular operating anyway. WAZ is a different beast, zone 2 is northern canada and the arctic and yeah it can be quiet but its not impossible, just takes patience and being around during the right conditions. honestly the awards kind of feed each other once you get into the rhythm of it, logging carefully and uploading to LoTW regularly makes everything easier down the road.

I just did my third activation two weeks ago and had the same exact confusion about overlapping parks. ended up just emailing the POTA help address and they got back to me pretty fast, super friendly. they basically said if youre unsure just submit with what you know and theyll sort it out, they dont penalize you for getting it slightly wrong. also 35 minutes to get 10 contacts is really solid for a first time out, took me like two hours my first activation because i forgot to spot myself haha. the self-spotting thing makes such a huge difference

so anyway i've been building this direct conversion receiver for 40m for the past couple months, just a simple affair with a NE602 mixer and an LM386 for audio. got the basic audio chain working fine a few weeks ago but the RF front end has been driving me crazy ever since i added the bandpass filter and preamp stage. the problem is i get this weird overload thing happening whenever i tune anywhere near the broadcast band bleeding in, even though im on 40m. i thought the BPF was supposed to kill that. i wound the toroid myself, T50-2 cores, tried to get the turns ratio right but honestly i may have miscounted at some point. it actually receives, like it does pull in signals, SSB sounds decent, but every few minutes there's just this low rumble that kinda swamps everything and i'm pretty sure its AM broadcast intermod. the preamp is just a single 2N3904 common emitter stage with maybe 15dB gain, wonder if that's just way too much gain before the mixer and making the whole thing more sensitive to junk. thinking about pulling it out entirely and going straight into the 602 through the filter. anyone done something similar or had this kind of issue with NE602 based builds?

so i just passed my technician exam last month and im trying to figure out what handheld to get. ive been reading threads here and on reddit and honestly im more confused now than when i started. everyone seems to have a very strong opinion about baofeng vs something else and i cant tell if the baofeng hate is real or just snobbery lol my main use case is going to be local repeaters and maybe some simplex with a buddy of mine who just got licensed too. we're both kind of just getting our feet wet. i dont really need anything crazy. budget is probably around $100-150 but i could stretch it a bit if something is genuinely worth it also is dual band like a must have thing or is that just nice to have? i see it mentioned everywhere but i dont know if i actually need 2m and 70cm or if i should focus on whichever one has more local repeater activity. anyway any thoughts appreciated, trying not to overthink this

I run both and honestly they serve pretty different purposes. FT8 is just a contact machine, theres no two ways about it. JS8Call is slower, yeah, and you wont get the -24dB decode sensitivity, more like -24 in ideal conditions but realistically weaker than FT8 when signals are borderline. that said when a signal is decent you can have an actual back and forth which is refreshing. the activity question is real though. on 40m at night i usually find a dozen or so stations on 7.078 which is the standard JS8 dial. not a ton but enough. 20m during the day is spottier. i think of it like PSK31 was back in its heyday, not every frequency is jumping but if you park and call CQ for 15 minutes somebody usually shows up. the store and forward and relay stuff is genuinely cool if you have a few friends who run it regularly, we use it in our emcomm group as a backup messaging system and it works pretty well for that. worth setting up if you have the patience for it. config isnt that bad once you've done WSJT-X, its basically the same audio interface setup.

so i finally did my first activation up on a local summit, nothing crazy just a 1 point peak nearby but i was so nervous i almost forgot to log half the contacts. brought my kx2 and a random wire up the hill with a little 4ah lipo and it actually worked pretty well. got 4 contacts on 20m SSB then switched to 40 and it kind of exploded, had like 11 more chasers in maybe 20 minutes. didnt expect the pileup honestly only thing that went sideways was my antenna support, the collapsible pole i brought kept wanting to fall over because the ground was too rocky to stake it. ended up leaning it against a tree which felt sketchy but hey it worked. anyone have a good solution for rocky summits? i've seen some people use guy lines but im not sure how to set that up without bringing a ton of extra stuff

honest answer — yeah you'll notice a difference on HF, especially below 10 MHz. the RTL-SDR direct sampling mode works but it's noisy and the dynamic range just isn't there when you've got strong broadcast stations nearby splattering all over the place. had the same setup as you for a while and switching to an RSP1C was pretty eye opening, mostly just how much cleaner the noise floor looked in SDRuno. that said with a random wire out a window you might be picking up more noise from inside the house than from the SDR itself honestly. SDRuno took me a bit to get used to, the UI is kind of unintuitive at first, lots of floating windows everywhere. but once you figure it out it's solid. still keep SDR# around for some plugins that don't exist in SDRuno.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, W6/NC-446 which is a pretty easy drive and short hike so figured it was a good starting point. brought my KX2 and a end-fed halfwave up in a backpack and honestly the whole thing went smoother than i thought it would. made 11 QSOs in about 40 minutes which i guess qualifies me no problem. couple things i was fuzzy on though -- when i spotted myself on SOTAwatch before starting, a few chasers were already calling before i even finished setting up my antenna which was kind of chaotic. is that normal? also one guy kept giving me his summit reference like he was doing a S2S but i wasnt sure if i needed to log that differently or if it just automatically counts when i upload to the database. i did write it down but wasnt sure what to do with it. also curious if the summit reference always stays the same or if they ever get reassigned. looking at some of the older logs on the site and seeing references i dont recognize from the current list

the repeater going down scenario gets people every time lol. we did something similar a few months back and i was net control when we switched to simplex and let me tell you it was humbling. i had stations calling in that i literally could not hear at all, had to rely on relays and i wasnt even sure who was relaying for who. one thing our group started doing is assigning specific relay positions ahead of time based on geography, like this person is responsible for the eastern end of the county, this person covers the hilly area near the reservoir etc. it doesnt solve everything but at least when simplex goes sideways there's already a structure for who talks to who instead of everyone just yelling into the void hoping somebody hears them.

One thing that trips up new hams is thinking they only need to ID at the end of a QSO. No station may transmit unidentified communications or signals, or transmit any call sign not authorized to the station. This means every transmission needs to be identifiable to your call sign within the 10-minute window.

yeah 10m has been absolutely wild, i worked a station in zimbabwe last week running 100w from my dipole and he came back first call. first call. on 10 meters. from my backyard dipole. i almost fell out of my chair. the solar flux has been holding above 200 on a lot of days which we havent seen since like 2001-2002 era so this is genuinely exciting stuff especially for anyone who got licensed in the last cycle and never really experienced good HF conditions. get on 10 and 12m as much as you can right now because this window wont last forever, cycle peaks dont stick around. on the yaesu thing i saw the same rumor but nothing concrete yet. there was supposedly something shown at a trade show in japan but i dont read japanese so i cant confirm anything. wouldnt surprise me though, the FT-60 is getting pretty long in the tooth at this point.

I had similar issues a few months back and it turned out to be packet loss on my work connection. Try running a ping test or traceroute to see if you're getting timeouts. Also check if your work IT department changed anything with their firewall rules - mine started blocking some of the UDP traffic which caused all sorts of weird behavior with remote operation.

dont overlook the actual relay specs too — some of the cheap SRD-05VDC relay modules have a pretty long operate time like 10-15ms and if youre stacking 8 of them on the same power rail they can droop the voltage enough to cause weird behavior. powered mine off the arduino 5v rail for way too long before i figured out that was causing half my problems lol. separate supply for the relay board made a big difference. anyway thats probably not your exact issue but worth checking if the timing fix doesnt solve it

haha dont worry about it, everyone goes through this. the Q codes came from old telegraph days and theres actually a pretty long official list but in practice you only really hear maybe a dozen or so on a regular basis. QSY means change frequency, QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural static like lightning crashes, QSB is fading signal, QRP means low power, QRX means stand by or wait, and QRZ is asking whos calling. QTH is your location. thats probably 90% of what youll hear in casual HF ragchews. 73 just means best regards, its been used forever. 88 is hugs and kisses, usually between certain operators. FB means fine business which is basically just saying something is great or good copy. honestly after a few months it just becomes second nature you dont even think about it. just keep listening and itll click

congrats on the ticket first of all. okay so here's my honest take — the baofeng uv-5r isnt terrible for what it is, which is a very cheap radio. the receive is a bit broad so it picks up a lot of noise it probably shouldnt, and yeah the programming without chirp is a genuine pain. but plenty of people run them on local repeaters just fine. if you're mostly budget constrained right now, grab one, download chirp, and get on the air. that's the whole point. that said if you can stretch to like 80-100 bucks the yaesu ft-65 or the ft-4xr are a noticeable step up in build quality and the audio is just clearer. i handed my ft-65 to a new ham at a club meeting once and she had it programmed and hitting the local 2m repeater in about 20 minutes without much help. cant really say that about the baofeng experience for most people. the kenwood th-d74 is a totally different animal — aprs, d-star, all band receive — its a great radio but thats not what you need right now. save that rabbit hole for later when you know what you actually want to do with the hobby.

bring the generator anyway, you dont have to run it the whole time. just nice to have if the scenario extends or they throw something unexpected at you. nothing worse than being the guy who has to tap out of the exercise because you ran out of juice and your backup plan was... a second battery you didnt bring. also the eu2200i is pretty painless to haul, its not like your dragging a big open frame unit. i run mine with a 30 foot extension cord so i can stick it away from the operating position and you barely notice it. one thing worth checking — make sure whatever you use to charge the battery from the genset doesnt produce a ton of rf noise. ive had cheap charge controllers absolutely hammer 40m, like S5-6 noise floor kind of bad. the better units are filtered but its worth testing at home first before the exercise.

so ive been messing around with a pi zero W for a few weeks now trying to get it to pull WSPR spot data from wsprnet and log it locally whenever my rig is running. the idea is pretty simple, just a python script that polls the API every few minutes and dumps it into a sqlite database with timestamps and band info. i also want it to trigger a relay when conditions on 10 or 12 meters look good based on spot density from like DX stations, kind of a poor mans band condition indicator. the relay part is where i started running into weirdness. im using one of those cheap 4-channel relay boards from amazon and the logic levels are all over the place — the pi zero GPIO is 3.3v but the relay board wants 5v to trigger reliably. i threw in a transistor to level shift it but honestly im not sure i did it right because one of the channels fires when it shouldnt. might just be floating inputs, havent totally figured it out yet. has anyone done something similar or have a cleaner way to handle the relay triggering from a 3.3v GPIO? and also curious if anyone has played with wsjtx remote or similar to actually see what mode the rig is in and only log when its in WSPR mode specifically.

Interesting data! I'm surprised your eQSL rate is that low - many logging programs auto-upload to eQSL so I'd expect higher. Maybe more ops are using it but not checking for incoming cards? I've had good luck with OQRS systems for DXpeditions - almost 100% success rate.

your stack should be enough to get started, honestly. the game changed a lot when JT65B became the standard and then guys moved to Q65 more recently — i made my first EME contact with a single long yagi and 150w which would have been completely laughable in the cw EME era. you'll hear signals you can't work and that gets frustrating but contacts are definitely possible. on the preamp question — you really do want to be under 0.5dB NF at the feedpoint, like as close to 0.3 or even lower if you can swing it. at 2m EME your system noise temp matters enormously because the signals are right down in the mud. SSB Electronics used to be the go-to but there are some good homebrew VLNA designs floating around too. Italab makes decent units. the difference between a 0.3dB and a 0.8dB preamp at the mast is actually meaningful when you're this close to the noise floor. the horizon obstruction at 15-20 degrees is annoying but not fatal. moon windows are still usable above that, it just shortens your operating time and you miss some of the lower elevation passes. plenty of guys work EME from less than ideal situations. the main thing is tracking software — get something like Moon Sked or WXtrack running so you know exactly when the geometry is favorable for the path you want to work.

so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now and the tracking side works fine, i can see my position on aprs.fi updating every couple minutes which is great. but whenever i try to send a message through the network to another station it just... doesnt work. like i can see the message leaves my TNC (its a Mobilinkd connected to an FT-65) but the other station never receives it and i never get an ack back. ive tried messaging a few different stations that i know are active, even tried the messaging test bots and nothing comes back. my path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i figured was pretty standard. is there something different about how message routing works vs just beacon packets? i feel like im missing something obvious here

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, mostly because my neighbor has a big antenna setup and he let me listen in on some contacts he was making and it just seemed really cool. anyway i looked it up and apparently you have to take a test? i dont really know where to start or what the test is even like. is it hard? do i need to know a lot of math or electronics stuff because im not super technical. i found some websites but there were like 5 different ones and i dont know which one is actually good or if i should just buy a book or something. also not sure what license level to even go for, someone told me there are like 3 of them

so i just passed my technician exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to get. ive been looking at stuff online for like three days and now i have too many tabs open and im more confused than when i started lol. everyone seems to have strong opinions about Baofeng vs Yaesu vs Kenwood and i honestly dont know what matters and what doesnt for someone just starting out. like do i actually need dual band right away or is that just nice to have. and whats the deal with the chirp software i keep seeing mentioned everywhere. my main goal is to get on a local repeater and maybe do some APRS stuff eventually but not right away. budget is probably around 100-150 bucks but could stretch a little if theres a really good reason to. any advice from people who have actually used these things would be great. i feel like im going in circles reading reviews