Contester

so last tuesday i finally worked up the nerve to check into our local 2m monday night net (yes i know it was tuesday, i missed monday and figured id try anyway since they sometimes do a late session). ive had my technician license for like 4 months now and mostly just listened. anyway when the net control called for check-ins i gave my callsign and then just... blanked. completely forgot what i was supposed to say after that. i think i said my name and then just said "thats all" which probably sounded weird. net control was super nice about it and moved on but i felt pretty embarrassed. whats the usual format people use when checking in? like do you always give signal report, location, traffic, all that? and how do you know what the specific net expects vs like general practice? i dont want to be the guy who holds things up next time.

so ive been doing a lot of hilltop activations lately, mostly 2m and 440, and ive been going back and forth on whether to bother hauling a yagi up or just stick with the slim jim or a decent collinear. right now im using a jpole i built from 450 ohm ladder line and its fine for what it is but i feel like im leaving range on the table especially for hitting repeaters that are a bit further out or doing some ssb simplex if the band opens up. the thing is the yagi obviously gives you gain in one direction which is great if youre pointed the right way but on a hilltop you kind of want to work in multiple directions depending on whos around. so maybe a collinear makes more sense for that use case? ive looked at the arrow antenna yagi and also some of the homebrew tape measure designs and they seem practical enough to pack but i dunno. curious what others are actually running in this situation.

congrats on the first build, that feeling when it actually works is something else. i remember sitting there with my first homebrew rig just staring at the s-meter on my other radio going up when i keyed down, like yeah i actually did that. on the warble thing — check your power supply first before you go chasing component values. a lot of sidetone weirdness on those simple oscillator designs is just ripple from a noisy supply. if you're running it off a wall wart that might be your culprit. try a fresh 9v battery and see if it cleans up. if it does then you know where to look. also worth checking that all your ground connections are solid, cold solder joints can do weird things to oscillator behavior. 40m is a great call for starting out with QRP honestly, especially in ohio you've got a lot of population density within groundwave range and skip can be really good in evenings. 20 is where a lot of QRP operators live but the band is noisier and you're competing with higher power stations more directly. i'd stick with 40 for a while, get comfortable with the operating style then maybe build a 20m rig next.

so ive been at this for about three months now, slowly working my way up from around 5 wpm to maybe 10-11 on a good day. got myself a cheap single lever paddle off ebay to start and honestly i think that was probably a mistake but whatever, its what i have. the problem is my dits and dahs just dont sound clean. like there's no crispness to them and when i record myself and play it back it sounds like a drunk guy trying to tap out morse in the dark. ive been messing with the weight and speed settings on the keyer (its a MFJ-418 or whatever the little handheld practice one is) and nothing really seems to fix it. someone at my club said it might be my paddle tension but i honestly dont even know how to adjust that or if i even can on this thing. is this just a practice more problem or is there actually something i can tweak to make it feel less like im fighting the paddle every time i send

so ive been wanting to get my tech license for like two years now and i finally decided to just do it. problem is i dont really know where to start with studying. i looked up the question pool and theres like 400 something questions and it honestly feels overwhelming. a friend told me to just memorize the answers without worrying about understanding them but that feels wrong to me, like what if i actually want to use the radio after i pass lol anyway does anyone have a recommendation for a study guide or website or whatever. i tried hamstudy.org for like 20 minutes and it seemed decent but i dont know if thats enough or if i need an actual book. also the electrical stuff is kind of going over my head, the ohms law questions and the stuff about antennas. do i really need to understand all that or is just memorizing the formulas enough to pass

dude same thing happened to me last spring, built one of the Penntek TR-35 kits and i was like ok this is a toy right and then i worked a station in colorado from georgia on like 3.5 watts and i actually yelled out loud and scared my cat. qrp is weirdly addictive. also the kit building part is its own whole thing, i find it really relaxing even when i have to desolder something three times because i put a cap in backwards

so i finally did my first ever POTA activation yesterday at a state park about 40 minutes from me. brought the KX2 and a random wire thrown up in a tree, figured id be there maybe 2 hours and knock out the 10 contacts easy. well first off i forgot the counterpoise at home which i didnt realize until i was already set up and getting terrible SWR. ended up just draping some extra wire on the ground which kind of worked i guess. then about 45 minutes in it started raining and i hadnt brought any cover for the radio. just sat there hunched over it with my jacket trying to keep it dry lol. ended up with 12 contacts so technically a valid activation but man it was a mess. still really fun though and cant wait to do it again with my act together next time

im in basically the same boat passed my tech back in the spring and was totally lost on this too. what helped me was the Gordon West study material, he breaks it down in a way that actually makes sense. also there was a guy at my local club who just sat down with me for like 20 minutes and went through the band privileges and it clicked way faster than reading the rules on my own. if you have a club nearby that might be worth doing

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and a windstorm last month that knocked out power for three days finally kicked me in the butt to get serious about it. managed fine with my HT and a spare battery pack but it made me realize how half-baked my setup really was, like I couldn't have done much beyond simplex on the local repeater if things got worse. what I have so far is a Yaesu FT-891 I picked up last spring, a 20ah LiFePO4 battery, a basic end-fed for HF, and I threw in a small solar panel I had laying around (might be 50w, cant remember the exact rating). packed most of it into a Pelican 1510 case. also have a little notepad, some coax, and my ARRL emergency communication handbook which I honestly havent read cover to cover yet. the thing is I don't know if im forgetting something obvious. like I feel like theres stuff experienced emcomm folks just assume everyone has but nobody actually lists it out. do I need a dedicated charge controller, is the one built into my solar panel enough? and should I be thinking about VHF/UHF capability too or is HF sufficient for most ARES/RACES type work? genuinely unsure what the priority order should be here

tried both. RSP1C wins on HF no contest but tbh if youre just casually listening and not trying to dig weak signals out from under broadcast splatter the dongle is probably fine. i use a HackRF for transmit-capable stuff and keep an old rtl around just for wideband scanning, each thing has its place. SDRuno is rough yeah, stick with SDR++ or maybe give HDSDR a shot if you havent, some people like it better for HF work.

youre not wrong that inverted V tends to look a bit shorter electrically compared to a flat top, but proximity to ground when the ends are that low can actually add capacitive loading and push resonance down. 10 feet for the ends is pretty low and the ground coupling is probably doing exactly that. the coax on the ground shouldnt shift things that dramatically by itself but if you dont have a decent choke at the feedpoint youre also potentially getting some common mode current on the shield which will mess with your measurements and your SWR readings both. i would try trimming maybe 6 inches per side and re-check. and seriously slap a 1:1 choke balun on there before you do anything else — can make a huge difference in getting consistent measurements. i use the W2DU style with ferrites on the coax, cheap and easy to wind yourself.

i did my first EME qso on a single 9el yagi and about 750w maybe three years ago, worked a couple big gun stations in europe during a contest weekend. dont let the array guys make you feel like you need a field full of antennas to get started. the big thing i wasnt prepared for was the pointing accuracy, my el/az mount had some slop in it and tracking the moon precisely enough to actually stay on peak is harder than i thought. even being a couple degrees off tanks your signal noticeably. also coax loss between your shack and the antenna is going to kill you if you have any length of run, worth running hardline or putting the amp up at the antenna if you can swing it.

oh man yeah i do this all the time, especially on evenings when the band is in decent shape. 40m at night has this quality to it thats hard to describe, voices fading in and out, the occasional bit of interference, its almost like shortwave listening used to be for me before i got my ticket. sometimes i hear a net control i recognize from months ago and its like running into someone at the grocery store almost. anyway no youre not weird, or if you are then there's at least two of us.

HamAlert is the one to look at for sure, i just started using it a few weeks ago and its way better than refreshing DXwatch every 5 minutes lol. you can filter by band, mode, dxcc entity, even by whether you need it for a specific award. setup takes a bit of figuring out but theres a decent youtube walkthrough someone posted. also dont overlook the QRZ logbook integration stuff if you already log there — it can show you what you still need which is handy when your trying to figure out if a spot is even worth bothering with

so ive been running APRS for about 3 months now with a TM-D710G and a garmin puck GPS plugged into the back, mostly works fine but lately my position on aprs.fi is showing me about 2 miles southeast of where i actually am. the GPS itself shows the right coordinates when i look at the display, so its not the GPS lying to me. beacon interval is set to smart beaconing and ive double checked the NMEA sentence config, its outputting GGA and RMC. what gets me is it was working perfectly up until like two weeks ago and i havent changed anything. well i did update the firmware but that was after the problem started so i dont think thats it. also the symbol and SSID are showing up correctly, its just the lat/lon thats off. anyone run into this before or have any idea what to check next

So I finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, K-4829 if anyone knows it, and honestly it was kind of a mess but also really fun? I brought my KX2 and a end-fed half wave that I usually just toss up in the backyard and it worked fine at home but out in the field stringing it up in trees I realized I had no idea what I was doing with antenna placement. Spent like 25 minutes just getting it up and by then I was kind of flustered. Anyway I only made 14 contacts in about an hour and a half which I know is not enough to count as a valid activation so I didnt even get to log it. Got on 40m and called CQ POTA for a while and got a few hunters coming back but then the frequency got busy and I kind of lost confidence and just started S&P which was probably the wrong move. I think my main problem was not having a real system, like I just showed up with gear and hoped for the road. Anyone have tips for making those first 10 contacts faster? And is there a good way to spot yourself if youre solo and dont have cell service at the park? I saw something about the POTA app but wasnt sure if it works offline or needs data.

ok so i just upgraded from tech to general last month and im still trying to figure out where i can actually transmit. i know generals get more privileges but the charts i keep finding online all look different from each other and some seem outdated. specifically on 40 meters im not sure if i should be staying away from the very bottom of the band or what. like is 7.125 fine or is that too close to something i shouldnt be near. also someone on the air told me to watch out for the 'band edges' but didnt really explain what that meant or why it matters. i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere i shouldnt be.

yeah no worries this tripped me up for a while too. DXwatch and the QRZ spot network do pull from some of the same AR-cluster nodes but they dont have identical coverage - DXwatch tends to aggregate a bit more broadly in my experience, especially for EU spots that sometimes dont make it into the QRZ feed as fast. so the duplicates you're seeing are real, its just the same spot echoing through different paths into each site. for filtering - on DXwatch you can set band filters in the display settings and it'll stick between sessions once you're logged in. took me forever to find that. honestly once you get it filtered down to just 20 and 17 and whatever bands you actually work it becomes way more useful. the lag with HRD is pretty normal, some of those telnet cluster connections just have more latency depending on which node you connect to, try switching to a geographically closer one if you can.

that Ohio contact on 500mw is pretty solid for a first outing honestly, dont undersell it. QRP is one of those things where the distance almost doesnt matter — its the fact that you built the thing and made it work that counts. i remember my first pixie contact and it felt completely out of proportion to how excited i was about it given it was like 40 miles away haha. to your question about the jump to something better — i went the kit building route for a while before i got a KX2 and both are genuinely fun but for totally different reasons. the kits teach you something real about whats happening inside the radio, you start to understand why certain design choices get made. the KX2 is just a fantastic radio but its kind of a black box. if i had to do it again id probably build a few more kits first, maybe look at the QCX series from QRP labs, hans summers stuff is really well documented and the receivers are actually good. youll learn a lot more than the pixie taught you and youll be able to work some real DX on 5 watts if conditions cooperate.

im basically in the same boat as you tbh, been licensed about four months and still get tripped up. one thing that helped me was just keeping a little cheat sheet next to the radio for a while. QRO means high power and QRP is low power, that one comes up a lot especially if you get into the low power operating crowd which is a whole rabbit hole btw. QSY means you're changing frequency which i did not know for an embarassingly long time lol. dont stress too much about knowing them all right away

yeah Q65 changed things quite a bit compared to the old JT65B days. i worked my first EME contact last winter with a single 13el yagi and the 9700, no fancy preamp either just the internal one, and i got a response from a station in europe running a big array. it took forever and i was definitely the weak end of that contact but it counted. so its possible. that said i upgraded to a pair of crossed yagis a few months later and the difference was immediately noticeable, way more decode attempts actually turning into full contacts. if you have any room at all for a second yagi its worth doing from the start rather than trying to retrofit it later like i did. the mount and rotator situation gets annoying to redo.

yeah 10m has been genuinely fun lately, we're climbing pretty well into solar cycle 25 and a lot of folks didn't expect it to peak as high as it has been. flux in the 150-180 range is solidly good, anything above like 120 or so you'll start seeing real 10m action especially during daylight on paths that have the sun up on both ends. the K index thing is actually pretty simple once it clicks — K index is basically a measure of geomagnetic disturbance, 0 or 1 is quiet and great for DX, once you get up to 4 or 5 you'll often see the higher HF bands degrade and the polar paths get really messed up. A index is just a daily average of K so its a little smoother. general rule i use is if K is 3 or below im probably fine, above 4 i start expecting problems on 10 and 15 especially on paths that go over or near the poles. for resources honestly just bookmark the Space Weather Center page and DXMaps.com, you can literally watch spots showing up in real time and start connecting what the solar numbers look like to what youre actually hearing. after a few months it starts to make intuitive sense without having to think too hard about it

did the same mod about six months ago and yeah the difference is real, not placebo. before the TCXO i was seeing maybe 1-2 Hz of drift in the first 10 minutes or so which isnt the end of the world but on FT8 it was just enough to make me second guess myself. after the swap it basically sits within a fraction of a Hz from the moment you power on. the spec goes from like ±0.5 ppm down to ±0.1 ppm with the TCXO which sounds small on paper but you feel it in actual use. on the fan mod — i did that too but honestly only because im running a lot of JS8Call and FT8 sessions that go for hours. if youre doing casual digital work or mostly SSB voice i wouldnt bother. the stock fan is fine for normal duty cycles. the aftermarket fan they usually recommend is quieter anyway which is a bonus but its definitely not a must-do mod in my opinion. the TCXO is the one that actually changes how the radio performs, the fan is more of a comfort thing.

im in almost exactly the same boat as you, been researching this for like 6 months. one thing i kept seeing that nobody mentioned to me at first is the az/el mount is really where a lot of the money goes if you want to do it properly. a lot of guys underestimate how precise the tracking needs to be especially as the moon moves and you're trying to hold a marginal signal. also the EME2 or WSJT-X setup for JT65 on 2m is pretty well documented at this point, the learning curve on the software side is manageable. i havent made my first contact yet but im getting close i think, just finishing up the mount wiring.

honestly the raspberry pi route is more work upfront but you understand every piece of it which matters a lot when something breaks at 2am and you cant physically get to the site. i went down that road with hamlib and a cheap audio interface and it works but ive spent way more hours debugging it than i ever would have with a dedicated solution. depends how much you enjoy that kind of thing i guess. the RemoteHams ecosystem at least has actual support forums and the protocol is pretty well documented at this point.