Ashley Miller

i had almost the exact same situation last year and ended up just putting a 3el tape measure yagi up temporarily to test the path before committing to anything permanent. thing cost me like 8 dollars in materials and the difference was immediately obvious, like full quieting where before i was getting scratchy audio. ended up building a proper 5el after that and havent touched it since. the rotor thing does seem like overkill but if the two repeaters are 90 degrees apart thats kind of a tough spot without one tbh

yeah the touchscreen thing is real, mine did the same when i first got it. go into the menu and there's a touch screen calibration option buried in the settings somewhere, i think its under set > display or maybe function, honestly cant remember exactly but its in there. did it once and never had the problem again. and yeah the panadapter completely changes how you use a radio, i went through the same thing when i upgraded from an older rig. you start realizing how much activity you were just rolling past before. the 7300 is a solid radio for the money, especially used. congrats on the new shack addition

i did my first contest last year and it was actually field day not CQ WW, went with a club which helped a lot because people kind of showed me what to do. i think if you can find a club operating CQ WW and just sit next to someone for a few hours first that makes a huge difference. also SOTA isnt really a contest but if you want something lower key to practice making quick efficient contacts before CQ WW it might be worth trying an activation, forces you to get comfortable with the back and forth without the pile up pressure

congrats on getting through it, thats a big deal for a first activation. I've been doing ARES stuff for a while now and honestly the mental fatigue is underrated as a challenge. Like technically you might be doing very little but staying alert and ready for hours is genuinely tiring in a different way than a busy net. one thing our group started doing is rotating operators every 90 minutes or so during long activations if we have enough people, even just stepping outside for ten minutes helps reset your focus. depends on your staffing obviously. also if you havent already look into ICS-100 and 214 forms if your served agency uses them, knowing how to fill out an activity log the way they expect it makes a big difference in how the relationship goes long term.

i just did this like three months ago so i can actually tell you what it was like fresh. i bought the ARRL Technician book but honestly i barely read it cover to cover, i mostly used it to look up things i didnt understand after getting questions wrong on practice tests. the hamstudy site someone probably already mentioned is pretty much the go-to thing. took me about three weeks of casual studying. one thing i wasnt expecting is that at the actual test session the volunteers are really chill and not intimidating at all, i was nervous for nothing. also you can take all three license exams in one sitting if you pass each one, i didnt know that and kind of wish id studied a little further just to try for General while i was there

honestly the handheld on uplink situation is rough, i did the same thing for a while. what finally helped me was just printing out a doppler correction chart for a typical pass and taping it near my operating position so i at least had a rough idea of where to be without staring at gpredict the whole time. its not perfect but it frees up a lot of mental bandwidth. also some people program like 5-10 memory channels into the HT with the uplink frequency at different points in the pass. kind of old school but it works better than you'd think when you're also juggling everything else.

yeah S2S QSOs are the best part honestly, i get way more excited working another activator than racking up chaser points. what radio were you running? the KX2 is a solid choice for SOTA, i've been eyeing one for a while but keep talking myself out of it. curious if you had any battery issues, that seems to be the other thing people dont plan for on longer hikes

ok so i wasnt even planning to get on last night, just fired up the rig to check something on 2m and kind of drifted down to 6 meters out of habit and holy cow there were signals everywhere. worked a bunch of stations down into central america and even heard what sounded like a JA but couldnt pull him out of the noise. Es season is really starting to crank up i guess. also saw something on the ARRL site about that new Icom IC-905 getting more traction lately, people are actually doing stuff with it on the microwave bands which is cool to see. felt like it was vaporware for a while there but i guess units are actually in peoples hands now. anyway back to 6m — anyone else getting into this opening or is it just my part of the country seeing this

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF and some 2m weak signal stuff but EME has always been this thing in the back of my mind that i never actually committed to. well i pulled the trigger on a used 3m dish from a guy a few counties over and now im kind of staring at it in my garage wondering what i actually got myself into. the dish is solid, aluminum surface looks okay, probably needs a new feedhorn situation. im on 2m primarily, maybe 70cm later if i survive this project. from what ive been reading it sounds like i need to think about this in terms of total system noise figure and EIRP basically and that the antenna gain alone doesnt tell the whole story. running an IC-9700 right now which i know isnt ideal for EME but ive seen people do decent things with it using good preamps. main questions are what kind of low noise preamp are people actually running these days, i keep seeing EME references to down to 0.3 or 0.4 dB NF setups and is that actually necessary for initial contacts or can you get away with something a little warmer especially running JT65. also is the sequencer situation as critical as everyone makes it sound, ive fried a preamp before on 2m terrestrial just being sloppy with PTT timing so i get why but curious if people are running hardware sequencers or software only. sorry for the wall of text, just trying to get the lay of the land before i start spending money in the wrong direction

I messed this up pretty bad during a net check-in once, tried to do phonetics for my suffix and blanked completely on X-ray and just said... X. the net control asked me to repeat twice and i was mortified. honestly the way it finally stuck for me was just doing it out loud away from the radio, like when im driving i just run through my callsign phonetically over and over. sounds weird but it works

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still feel a little awkward about when to use phonetics and when to just say the letter. like on 2m repeater stuff around here most people just say their call sign normally, like they'll say the letters without spelling it out phonetically. but then on HF everyone seems to go full NATO alphabet every single time. is there an actual rule or is it just kind of a feel thing depending on conditions also i keep second guessing myself mid-transmission like i'll start doing phonetics and then forget what November sounds like for a second which is embarrassing. does that go away with practice or do people just have a little mental cheat sheet near the radio

yeah the zero is really not the right tool if youre trying to run anything that needs real time audio processing, it just doesnt have the muscle for it. what you're describing though — offloading just the rig control and logging relay to it — that actually makes a lot of sense and ive seen a few guys do exactly that. flrig in headless mode talking to cloudlog via its API works fine on a zero, cpu barely moves. for the arduino SWR thing, if you go down that path just make sure youre reading the forward and reflected voltages from a directional coupler and not trying to tap into the tuner's internal signals directly, those can be weird depending on the tuner. i built something similar with a nano and an AD8307 log amp chip and it feeds readings over serial to a pi 3 which then pushes them into a little sqlite database. nothing fancy but its been running for like 8 months without issues. the pi 3 might be worth grabbing over the zero if you want a bit more headroom, theyre not that expensive anymore.

your LMR-400 loss calc is pretty close, at 440 youre looking at somewhere around 1.5 to maybe 2dB per 100 feet so your 35 foot run is not the problem. id check the connectors first honestly. a poorly soldered PL-259 or a water-damaged barrel connector will kill you way worse than the cable itself. ive seen guys chase antenna upgrades for months when the actual issue was a connector that looked fine on the outside but was corroded inside. on the yagi question, if those two repeaters really are within 30 degrees of each other a yagi makes a lot of sense. something like an M2 or even a homebrew 6 element would give you a serious advantage on 440. the downside is exactly what you said, you give up the omni. what i did was keep the collinear for monitoring and put the yagi on a separate feedline, then used an antenna switch. its a bit more hardware but you dont have to choose.

honestly the antenna isolation thing is the real gotcha and with a tribander and a dipole at those heights you're probably going to have a rough time running 100w on both simultaneously on adjacent bands. the physical separation just isnt there. that said a lot of guys start SO2R in more of a search and pounce mode on radio 2 while running on radio 1, which means you're not actually transmitting on both at the same time and the RFI problem mostly goes away. that's how i started and it made a huge difference in rate without needing to rebuild anything. you basically use r2 to find your next mult or a good S&P qso ready to go while youre in a qso on r1. the mental load is still real but its way more manageable than full SO2R with interlocked transmit. the comfort thing takes like 2-3 contests before it starts feeling natural in my experience. first one you'll probably be slower, second one about the same, third one you start seeing the benefit. dont give up after sweepstakes if it feels rough

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and finally got something that half works. basically i have an old prop pitch motor setup on a home brew rotator and the original controller died ages ago so ive just been doing it manually which is obviously painful when youre trying to track anything. the idea was to use a pi zero w with a little motor driver board — im using one of those L298N modules i had sitting in the junk box — and just write some python to handle the positioning based on feedback from a cheap hall effect sensor on the shaft. its kind of working but the positioning is drifting like 10-15 degrees over a few rotations and i cant figure out if its the sensor or my code thats losing count somewhere. anyone done something like this or something similar? i know there are proper rotator controller kits out there but im cheap and i already had all this stuff laying around. also curious if people have used hamlib with a pi setup like this, seems like it should be possible to feed azimuth data back to the radio software but havent dug into that part yet.

what kind of coax run are you looking at from the antenna to the radio? asking because depending on how long that run is you might end up loosing more than you think with a collinear anyway, especially on 70cm. a good preamp at the feedpoint can help but still. just something to factor in before you commit to either option honestly.

the laminated card thing is huge, dont underestimate it. when youre stressed and tired at 2am you do not want to be digging through your phone trying to remember what the backup simplex frequency is. i have mine in a little clear sleeve on the outside of my bag. also put your call sign on everything, like everything, because if something happens to you someone else might need to operate your gear. for the bag itself i switched to a Pelican 1510 a few years back and honestly its overkill for most things but when it got dropped off a truck at a flood activation last year everything inside was totally fine so i have no regrets. a lot of people use the 5.11 Rush bags or similar and those work great too, just make sure whatever you pick has some water resistance or throw a trash bag liner in there. one thing i see people forget constantly is a way to charge stuff that isnt their radio battery. usb power bank, a small solar panel, something. and a headlamp. always a headlamp. you think youll have it but you wont and then youre fumbling around in the dark trying to make a log entry.

the end-fed halfwave is honestly fine for most situations, I wouldn't stress about the antenna too much until you figure out where you'll actually be deploying. what I would say though -- do you have a logbook and some paper? sounds dumb but when the laptop dies or you just dont want to mess with it, pen and paper saves you. also a headlamp with extra batteries, I cannot tell you how many times ive set up in a parking lot or a shelter at like 10pm and been glad I had one. the other thing a lot of people forget is documentation. like a laminated sheet with your freq plan, your local repeater info, net check-in procedures. your brain gets foggy under stress and having it right there in the kit is worth it. oh and zip ties. always more zip ties.

JS8Call does have a bit of a learning curve and yeah the activity is very time and frequency dependent. there are some organized nets, K5SDR runs one i think and there are a few EMCOMM groups that use it specifically because of the store-forward capability which is genuinely useful if you think about it — like you can leave a message and someone can pick it up later even if you're not both on at the same time. that part is actually pretty slick once you wrap your head around it. for PSK31 i wouldnt say its dead but its definitely thinned out a lot since FT8 came along and ate everything. you still find activity on 20m around 14.070 during the day, sometimes 80m at night. its honestly kind of a nice mode if you want a real back and forth without the 15 second grid exchange thing. just takes more signal than FT8 obviously, like you actually need a decent copy to decode it, so if conditions are rough you'll notice. my suggestion is pick a JS8Call net specifically and show up a few times before writing it off. the HF JS8 net frequencies are posted on the JS8Call groups.io list.

nice work getting it going, first time you hear an actual signal on something you built yourself is kind of a weird moment. i built one of those 40m DC receivers from a magazine article a while back and the hum drove me absolutely crazy for like two weeks before i realized my bench supply was the whole problem, swapped to a proper regulated supply and it was night and day. wall warts are pretty variable on how clean they are.

the farnsworth thing the other guy mentioned is what did it for me too. also i started listening to W1AW code practice on shortwave which sounds old fashioned but theres something about copying real transmitted morse versus computer generated stuff that felt different to me, maybe its the slight qsb or just the psychological thing of knowing its coming over the air. either way it helped. one other thing -- i stopped writing every letter down and started just listening for whole words. that was a big mental shift. like instead of c-o-p-y-i-n-g out each character i just tried to hear RST or the callsign as a whole chunk. took a while but once it clicked it really clicked

so i've been an ARES member for about 8 months now and mostly it's been nets and tabletop exercises and honestly i was starting to wonder if i'd ever actually get activated for something real. well last weekend we had that big 10k charity run in town and they needed comms coverage and our EC asked for volunteers so i signed up figuring it was low stakes enough to not mess anything up too badly. ended up being stationed at mile marker 6 which was kind of in a dead zone between two repeaters and i had to switch freqs a couple times to find what was working. nothing went wrong exactly but there were definitely moments where i was fumbling with the radio while trying to write stuff on my ICS-214 and also a medic was asking me something and i just felt like i had 3 things happening at once. the net control guy was great though, super patient, never made me feel dumb for asking him to repeat traffic. anyway just wanted to share because i feel like we dont talk enough about what the first activation actually feels like vs all the training. anyone else remember their first one? did you feel totally scattered or is that just me

honestly i tried JS8Call twice and both times i couldnt get the audio levels right and it kept showing weird decode errors that FT8 never gave me on the same setup. might have been a VAC issue i never bothered to track down. went back to FT8 mostly. PSK31 is what i use when i actually want to talk to someone, theres still activity on 20m around 14.070 and the software is pretty mature at this point. not as weak-signal capable obviously but if the band is even halfway decent it works fine and you can actually have a real exchange at a normal typing pace

yeah the PID thing is definitely the move for rotator control, bang-bang is gonna make you crazy. Brett VE3something posted a whole writeup on the arduino-rotator project a while back, worth searching for. the arduino PID library by Brett Beauregard is dead simple to drop in and tune. you'll want to spend some time with the Kp Ki Kd values but once it settles its rock solid, my old prop pitch hasn't hunted in over a year. the pi as a hamlib bridge works great, thats pretty much exactly how mine is set up. arduino does the hardware, pi runs rotctld with a custom backend, and everything in N1MM just sees it as a normal rotator. the only weird thing is you gotta make sure the serial baud rates match and sometimes the pi sleeps the serial port if nothing is talking to it for a while, had to add a keepalive thing in the script to stop that.

yeah im planning on it, our club usually sets up a table there so ill be around. honestly the swap meet has gotten better the last couple years, saw a really nice MFJ tuner go for like 40 bucks last fall at the one over in Millbrook so you might get lucky. show up early though, the good stuff is gone by like 9am