Ashley Miller

Our club went through the same thing last year. What helped was making a simple checklist about 2 weeks before - who brings what, antenna assignments, meal planning etc. The digital station really just needs a quiet corner and good power - don't overthink it. Also agree with practicing the software beforehand. We used N1MM+ and had zero issues once everyone knew which buttons to click.

I've been using QRZ.com's mobile web interface for checking DX spots while away from the shack, but it's kind of clunky on my phone. What are the better mobile apps that you guys are using for real-time spotting? I saw DXPocket mentioned somewhere - anyone tried it? Looking for something that filters by band/mode and maybe lets me post spots too. Thanks!

the ARRL net directory is decent but yeah you're right it can be out of date, the better thing honestly is just to find your regional club and ask around because most nets have a Facebook group or an email list or something these days. the tuesday night net you're probably thinking of — if it's the one i'm thinking of — did move up about 15 minutes a while back, net control mentioned it was to avoid a conflict with another net on a neighboring repeater. for special event stations i just watch the ARRL website, they post them under operating resources and you can usually see a few weeks out what's coming up. some of them have pretty short operating windows though so it helps to actually put it on your calendar. i missed the D-Day one two years running before i finally caught it. once you get a few special event QSL cards you kind of get hooked on chasing them, fair warning

The major advantage of aluminum is the ease of nesting telescoping sections for portability. I've built both types and for serious portable work, aluminum wins hands down. Yes, it's more expensive initially but the time savings and reduced setup complexity are worth it. My aluminum vertical goes up in under 5 minutes.

ok so i just passed my general last month and i've been trying to figure out 40 meters but honestly the band plan stuff is really confusing me. like i know there's a chart somewhere that shows what modes go where but when i look at different sources they dont always match up. and then someone at my club said something about the band edges being dangerous and not to operate too close to them but didnt really explain why. also is the band plan the same thing as what the FCC actually says i can do or is it more like a suggestion? i tried looking it up but i got like 5 different answers. mostly trying to figure out where i can do SSB on 40 without stepping on anybody or getting yelled at

been looking at these two for my first hf radio and cant decide. the icom seems more popular but the yaesu has vhf/uhf built in which might be handy. both are around the same price used. anyone have experience with both? im mostly interested in ssb and maybe some digital modes eventually

so i just got my technician a few months ago and ive been on 2m mostly doing local repeater stuff. i notice some people use the full NATO phonetics like Alpha Bravo Charlie and others just kind of say the letter. like i heard a guy on the repeater last week just say his callsign as letters without phonetics and nobody seemed confused but then on another net they were really strict about doing full phonetics every time. i guess my question is when are you supposed to use them vs when is it ok to just say the letter. is there a rule about it or is it just whatever the net prefers. also is it always NATO or can you use other ones because i heard someone say something like "E for Edward" which i dont think is the NATO word for E

had almost the exact same thing happen on mine about a year ago. turned out to be one of the RD70HVF1 finals was getting weak, not fully dead but just degraded enough to drag the output down. the ALC behavior you describe matches up too because the radio is basically trying to compensate and the loop goes a bit haywire when one device isnt keeping up with the other. before you pull it apart though, check your mic gain and the RF power knob settings in the menu, i know it sounds stupid but ive seen people chase hardware faults for days and it was a menu setting that got bumped. if those are all correct and you're still at 20-25w on a dummy load across multiple bands, yeah id be looking at the PA stage. Icom's service manual for the 7300 is floating around online and its actually pretty readable, bias adjustment procedure is in there too which you might need after swapping transistors if you go that route.

Building a VFO controller using Si5351 and ESP32 for my IC-718, following the W8TEE design from Arduino Projects for Ham Radio. Got the frequency generation working perfectly, but struggling with implementing proper CAT control over serial. The ESP32 serial handling seems different from standard Arduino - anyone successfully integrated CAT commands with Si5351? Planning to add band decoder outputs and memory channels next. Current setup: ESP32 DevKit, Si5351a breakout, 2x16 LCD with I2C backpack.

yeah the inverted V impedance thing is what gets everyone the first time. i spent way too long trying to get a flat 1:1 on my first one before someone on here told me to just stop worrying about it lol. 1.4 into most rigs is a non issue. one thing i did on my feedpoint that helped a ton — i drilled a small weep hole in the bottom of the PVC cap so any water that does get in has somewhere to go instead of just pooling on the connector. sounds counterintuitive but it made a real difference. still seal everything up top but that little drain hole at the bottom saved me

yeah the jump from FM birds to linear transponders is a bit of a head scratcher at first. the key thing to understand is that on a linear transponder the sat is basically just frequency inverting a chunk of spectrum, so everyone in the passband gets their own slice. you transmit SSB on the uplink and listen on the downlink but because of the inversion if you're using LSB up you hear USB down, or vice versa depending on the bird. AO-73 is USB on the downlink if i remember right. the doppler thing is what really gets people. the trick is you dont chase the doppler on your transmit, you chase it on your receive. find your own signal on the downlink first before you even try to work anyone, that way you know you're actually getting into the bird. with gpredict you can set up hamlib to control the 817 and it'll handle doppler on both VFOs automatically which is huge. took me a while to get that working but once it clicks its a game changer. look up the gpredict hamlib rig control docs, theres a decent walkthrough somewhere on amsat's site. FO-29 has been a bit spotty lately in terms of when they have it in linear mode so AO-73 might be more reliable to practice on. good luck, it's worth the effort once it starts coming together.

so i've been wanting to get my tech license for a while now and i finally decided to just go for it. my neighbor is a ham and he's been bugging me about it forever lol. anyway i downloaded the question pool PDF from the ARRL website i think and its like... a lot. like way more than i expected. someone told me i should just memorize all 423 questions but that seems insane, do people actually do that or is there a better way to study the actual concepts behind it? i dont really have a background in electronics at all, i work in IT so i kind of understand networks and stuff but ohms law and all that is pretty fuzzy for me. is the hamstudy.org thing worth using or should i get an actual book

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into the local 2m net last tuesday, ive been licensed for about 4 months now and just been listening mostly. the net control called for check-ins and i waited for a pause and gave my callsign but then the guy running it kind of repeated my call back weird and there was this awkward silence and i honestly dont know what i did wrong. like did i step on somebody? was my timing off? i thought i waited long enough but maybe i didnt. also i wasnt sure if i was supposed to say my name and location right away or wait to be acknowledged first. i ended up just blurting out my name and that i was a new ham and it felt kind of clunky. nobody was rude or anything but i just felt like i clearly didnt know the protocol. is there like a standard way people are supposed to check in or does it vary net to net?

Many radio enthusiasts chose to camp overnight in their motorhomes at the exhibition site, where more than 560 vehicles were parked on all days of the fair. The RV camping is very popular and well organized. Book early though - spots fill up fast! The atmosphere in the camping area is like a mini hamfest itself.

Got an odd issue with a 4-element M2 6M5 on 50 MHz. SWR is flat as a board (1.1:1) in horizontal polarization but shoots up to 3:1 when I flip to vertical. Everything looks physically sound - elements are aligned, connections tight, boom level. Using Type-N connectors at the feed point. Anyone seen this asymmetry before? Ground plane should be adequate at 50 MHz - the tower's metal structure provides plenty. Feedline is RG-213 with good velocity factor specs per manufacturer.

yeah the pileup thing caught me off guard my first time too haha. i was not ready for 8 people calling at once. what helped me was just going back to basics, listen for the strongest signal, get the callsign, confirm it, log it, next. dont try to get fancy with it. some activators do split or whatever but for a normal activation on 40m its usually not necessary unless you get a really big spot surge. also side note, if you ever want to try 2m fm activations those can be fun too especially if theres a repeater nearby, sometimes you get locals who are hunters and dont even know it yet which is kinda cool. different vibe than HF but worth doing at least once

honestly i moved most of my ragchewing to 17m this summer and havent looked back. smaller band, less drama, and propagation has actually been pretty solid. might be worth trying if you havent

morse code requirement got dropped back in 2007 so dont worry about that. for the technician exam you just need to pass a 35 question multiple choice test, 26 correct to pass. honestly the hardest part for most people is the electrical theory section, things like ohms law and how antennas work, but its really not that bad if you just put in a couple weeks of studying. the resource most people point to is hamstudy.org, its free and it drills you on the actual question pool that the exam comes from. the fcc question pool is public so every single question on your test will come from that pool, no surprises. i passed my tech on about 3 weeks of studying maybe 20-30 minutes a night using that site and the gordon west book my elmer lent me. you dont need the book though, hamstudy alone is probably enough for most people. find a local club and they usually hold license exams pretty regularly, some even do free classes before the test.

Just passed my General and getting on HF for the first time. I keep hearing different phonetic alphabets on the air - sometimes NATO (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie), sometimes what sounds like DX phonetics (America, Boston, Canada), and occasionally people using weird words like "Kilowatt" for K. When should I use which system? Are there any rules about this, or is it just operator preference? I want to sound like I know what I'm doing! My callsign is KG5ABC for reference - should I always say "Kilo Golf Five Alpha Bravo Charlie" or are there better alternatives for HF work?

yeah N1MM is really a contest tool first and everything else is kind of an afterthought. i tried using it for general logging a few years back and the everyday QSO stuff just felt clunky, like its not designed for that workflow at all. for WSJT-X i just let WSJT-X log to its own adif and then import into Log4OM at the end of each session, its not perfect but it works and the dupe thing doesnt bother me that much since i mostly know what ive worked anyway. the UDP logging from WSJT-X direct to Log4OM should work though, i had it set up that way for a while. think i had port 2237 or whatever the default is and it was logging in near realtime. had one issue where Log4OM wasnt catching every QSO if i was clicking through them fast on a busy FT8 pileup but it got most of them. probably a timing thing.

i use Log4OM for everything except actual serious contesting and i think thats kind of the honest answer about what its for. it tracks awards, handles LOTW and eQSL upload really smoothly, looks good, the stats are great. but when im doing CQ WW or something where every second counts im loading up N1MM because thats just what it was built for the dupe checking in N1MM is instantaneous and the way it handles exchange logging with just a few keystrokes once you have the macros set is really slick. also the community around N1MM for contest-specific stuff is huge so if something isnt working there's usually someone who already figured it out. my only gripe is syncing between the two but i just export adif from N1MM after a contest and import it into Log4OM, takes maybe two minutes

APRS messaging is honestly kind of unreliable by design, like the whole system is built around unconnected packets so theres no guaranteed delivery except for that ack handshake. but if youre not getting acks at all that does point to something more specific. few things id check — first, is the other station actually on RF or are they only showing up via an igate? because if theyre IGated in from the internet their radio might not be on or they might not be in a position to receive. the message would go out over RF from you, get picked up by an igate, forwarded to the APRS-IS, and then it needs another igate near them to gate it back down to RF, and a lot of igates are receive-only so that last step never happens. also worth checking if your igate supports message gating in both directions. some of them are set up as receive only which means your packets get to the internet fine but nothing comes back down to RF. the D710 setup sounds fine honestly, path is reasonable, i wouldnt go wider than that in a decent coverage area.

yeah i was in the same boat like eight months ago lol. i used the Gordon West study book which some people swear by but honestly hamStudy and also the hamstudy app on my phone is what actually got it to stick for me. i studied maybe 20 minutes a day for like 3 weeks and passed. the electrical stuff tripped me up a bit at first, ohms law and that kind of thing, but theres youtube videos that explain it way better than just reading it cold. one thing i wish someone told me -- find a VE session near you before you feel totally ready, because you can usually just retake it same day if you fail and the fee is pretty small. took some of the pressure off knowing i wasnt stuck waiting months to try again

yeah this is pretty much exactly why drills matter and why so many groups put them off for too long. the email to spam thing is almost a universal problem — we had the same issue and eventually just started a group text thread for anything drill or activation related. not elegant but it works. the grounding noise problem on generator power is something we ran into too, took us an embarrassingly long time to figure out what was going on. ended up being a ground loop with the way everything was connected. after that we made a laminated checklist specifically for generator hookup that lives in the go kit. boring solution but we havent had that problem since. one thing that really changed how we do our drills was adding a "stress factor" — basically the EC throws in a curveball mid-drill like hey the shelter at the high school just reported they're overflowing and need to open the secondary site, can you get comms there in 20 minutes. it exposes assumptions real fast. your group sounds like they're on the right track though, honestly the groups that never drill are the scary ones

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and honestly it scratches the DX itch pretty well but theres something that bugs me about it — like yeah i worked 87 countries and whatever but i never actually talked to anyone. its just grid squares and signal reports flying around and you close WSJT-X feeling like you ran a database query not had a QSO. anyway somebody at my club mentioned JS8Call a few months back and i finally got around to setting it up last weekend. its basically running on top of the same weak signal foundation as FT8 but you can actually type messages back and forth, relay stuff, even do store-and-forward messaging which is kind of wild. the tradeoff is its slower obviously and the band has to cooperate a bit more but on 40m last night i had like a 20 minute back and forth with a guy in New Mexico and it felt more like ham radio to me than anything ive done in a while. my question is whether anyone is running both regularly or if you kind of pick one and stick with it. also curious if the JS8Call nets are actually active enough to be worth monitoring — i havent found a ton of activity on 20m during the day. the heartbeat stuff is cool but only if theres people sending them