Ashley Anderson

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly just listening around on SDR# and occasionally poking at ADSB stuff with dump1090. works fine honestly but i keep reading people saying the SDRplay RSP1A is a massive step up and worth the extra $120 or whatever it is now. my main uses are just general HF listening through a upconverter, watching the 2m/70cm bands, and occasionally i try to decode some APRS or NOAA weather fax. nothing super serious. im not doing any transmitting with it obviously. the RTL noise floor has been bugging me on HF especially, even with the Ham It Up upconverter i still get some birdies and the dynamic range just feels kinda mushy compared to what people describe with better hardware. has anyone actually done a side by side or switched from one to the other? is the SDRplay difference noticeable enough on HF that itd actually improve what im doing or am i just gonna end up with the same limitations because my antenna situation isnt great anyway. running a random wire off the back of the house right now, maybe 40 feet of it.

yeah I was confused by this too when I upgraded. the thing that finally clicked for me was understanding that the FCC rules and the band plan are two different things. one is law and one is just like... courtesy guidelines that everyone more or less follows so we dont all step on each other also dont worry too much about the band edge stuff at first just give yourself some breathing room and youll be fine. I think when I first got on 40m I just stayed around 7.200 area and listened a lot before transmitting anywhere, you learn pretty quick where the activity actually is

Make sure you're practicing with Farnsworth timing - characters at 20WPM with slower word spacing. This trains your ear for the right character sounds while giving you thinking time. Most software supports this now.

yeah solar cycle 25 has really surprised a lot of people, the prediction models had it being pretty mild and its turned out way more active than expected. flux around 200+ is genuinely good territory, anything above 150 or so and 10m starts waking up, above 200 and you start getting those crazy conditions where even a modest station can work the world. it does bounce around though, its tied to solar rotation so you'll often see flux rise and fall on roughly a 27 day cycle as active regions rotate into view. the kp index matters too — high solar flux is great but if a geomagnetic storm kicks up the kp goes high and can wipe out your HF propagation entirely even with good flux. so its sort of a combination of things. the DXMaps site and DX Summit are your friends for seeing whats actually open in real time rather than just guessing from the indices. enjoy it while it lasts, cycle peaks dont go on forever and 10m can go dead as a doornail at solar minimum, some guys go years without working dx on that band

73 isnt a Q code, thats a numeric code that goes way back to telegraph days, means best regards basically. you'll also see 88 which is love and kisses, usually sent to close friends or family. the Q codes are a whole separate system that started with maritime and aviation radio and hams kind of adopted a bunch of them. the reason people use QTH instead of saying location is partly tradition and partly because when the bands are rough and signals are weak, a short three letter code gets through static a lot better than a whole word. QRM means interference from other stations, QRN is natural static like lightning, QSB is when your signal is fading in and out. QSL means confirmed or acknowledged, which is why those little cards hams send each other to confirm contacts are called QSL cards. honestly the easiest way i found to learn them was just to look up a Q code chart and keep it next to the radio for a few weeks. you pick them up pretty fast once you start actually hearing them in context.

congrats on the first one, that feeling when you see chasers already waiting is something else isnt it. yeah 40m on a weekend afternoon is basically a warzone especially if theres any contest running, even a small regional one will just eat up chunks of the band. i usually try to get to the summit early and be on the air by like 9am local, bands are quieter and the chasers in europe are still active if you're in north america which is a nice bonus for the dx points. CW is absolutely worth trying if you can, not just for the QRM thing but the chasers you work are incredible operators and you'll fill your log way faster than SSB once word gets around. some of the regulars on the SOTA reflector can work you in under a minute flat. also make sure you're using the summit reference correctly on your spots, ive seen people post the wrong association prefix and then the chasers cant find them in the log later which causes headaches for everyone.

proximity effect is almost certainly a big part of your problem. dynamic mics like the PR-40 will get really boomy and muddy when you work them too close, you want to be maybe 6 to 8 inches away and speaking across it slightly rather than dead on into the capsule. that alone might clean things up quite a bit. on the 7300 EQ, what most people do is cut somewhere in the 200-300hz range to reduce that chest/box sound, and then add a slight bump around 2-3khz for presence. the passband on SSB is already pretty narrow so you dont want to go crazy with the low end or youre just wasting transmit power on frequencies nobody can hear anyway. also double check that your tx bandwidth isnt set too narrow, the 7300 lets you adjust the low and high cut filters and sometimes they get moved by accident. if your high cut is sitting at like 2400hz youre chopping off a lot of intelligibility. also keep the ALC barely moving, like just kissing the meter. if its bouncing around a lot youre overdriving something upstream of the final stage and thats its own kind of distortion.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been trying to figure out the whole QSL confirmation thing and honestly its more confusing than i expected. like i thought you just sent a card in the mail and that was it but apparently theres like three different systems now and some awards only accept certain ones? so far i set up an eQSL account because someone in my club mentioned it and it seemed easy enough, uploaded a bunch of my logs and got some confirmations back which was cool. but then someone else told me i really need to be on LoTW if i want to go for DXCC or WAS someday. i went to the ARRL site and the whole certificate process for LoTW looks kind of intimidating honestly, do you have to mail them something physically to get set up? and then theres still people sending actual paper cards through the bureau or direct mail and i kind of love the idea of getting physical cards but i dont even know how the bureau works or how much it costs. is it worth doing all three or do most people just pick one and stick with it? sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to figure out what the norm is

yeah the split thing trips a lot of people up at first. the spotted frequency is almost always the DX station's transmit frequency, so where you listen. the split — where you actually transmit — you usually have to figure out from listening around or sometimes the spotter will put something in the comment field like "up 5" or whatever. not every spotter bothers though so you kind of have to develop an ear for it. for phone apps i've been using DX Sherlock for a while and it does a decent job pulling from multiple cluster networks at once. its not perfect but the filtering options are pretty solid. you can set it to only show you spots for modes and bands you care about which cuts down the noise a lot. some guys swear by Ham Radio Deluxe's built in cluster browser but i never got along with that software personally. the latency issue with web clusters is real by the way. if you want fresher spots you might want to try connecting directly to a telnet node with something like N1MM or even just a raw telnet session — spots come through a bit quicker that way than waiting for a webpage to refresh

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, been chasing for about 6 months and figured it was time to stop watching from the sidelines. picked W4C/CM-073 mostly because its only like a 2 mile hike and i didnt want to bite off more than i could chew for my first time out brought the KX2 with a 49:1 unun and maybe 35ft of wire thrown up into a tree, worked better than i expected honestly. got my 4 contacts pretty quick once i spotted myself on SOTAwatch and the pile got surprisingly lively for a random tuesday morning. ended up with 11 QSOs total including a S2S with some guy in Colorado which felt pretty cool my questions are kind of all over the place -- first, is there a standard way people handle the log upload? i used SOTA CSV logger on my phone but when i went to upload it got confused about some of the times, think i had a couple entries where i forgot to note UTC vs local. also wondering if there's any unwritten etiquette about how long you stay on a summit before moving frequencies, felt weird just disappearing after i cleared the pile. and last thing, does the activation zone thing vary by summit or is it always the 25m vertical rule? someone in another group told me it depends on the summit reference but i couldnt find a clear answer on the SOTA database

im actually skipping dayton this year and just hitting the local hamfest in june instead. way less stress and i usually find enough junk to keep me happy lol. whats the club doing for the swap meet, is it open to non members or do you have to join first

Ha I totally missed the 6m opening too, had a big family thing going on and by the time I checked the cluster it was already dying down. DX Maps showed it was pretty solid coast to coast for a few hours though, looked like some real Es propagation not just a short skip. Painful to miss. On the 905, I got to play with one at Dayton last year, a guy in our club brought his to show around. The thing is genuinely impressive hardware wise but you're right that it's a specialty item for sure. Unless you've got a weak signal group nearby doing mountaintop stuff or microwave contests it might sit idle. The 144 and 432 side of it is great though if you're already active on weak signal VHF. My honest take is wait and see if prices come down a bit, the early adopters will figure out all the firmware quirks first anyway.

I was in the same boat not too long ago, kind of overwhelmed by all the award tracking stuff. One thing that helped me was just setting up a LoTW account properly and making sure every QSO gets uploaded even if you dont expect a confirmation back. you'd be surprised how many confirmations just show up weeks later out of nowhere. for WAS i actually found it easier to chase than DXCC just because you have more control, like you can specifically hunt for states you're missing instead of waiting for some rare DX entity to come on. good luck with it, its a fun rabbit hole to fall into

i went through almost exactly this same thing last year. tried RemoteHams first because it was the quickest to get going and yeah the interface is not winning any awards but the actual RF control is solid enough once you tweak the audio codec settings. the SDR preview feature saved me a bunch of times when i would have just been calling into dead air. eventually i moved over to a pi-based setup using a combination of hamlib for rig control and just a plain mumble server for audio and honestly the latency is way better, like night and day on SSB. had to do some port forwarding and set up a wireguard VPN but once it was running its been rock solid for months. the tradeoff is obviously setup time and you need to actually be comfortable messing with linux config files. if you just want something that works out of the box in an afternoon RemoteHams is probably still the answer. AllStar is a totally different thing like you said, thats more for linking repeaters into the node network, though some people do use it creatively for HF gateway stuff but i wouldnt go that route for what youre describing.

yeah the IC-9700 is actually a solid starting point, good receiver, low noise floor which matters a lot for EME. the preamp situation is where people get religious about things though — you really want a low NF masthead preamp, like sub 0.5 dB if you can manage it, because by the time that signal comes back from the moon it is absolutely in the noise floor. single yagi on 2m EME is doable but honestly you're going to be limited to working the big guns, the stations with the large arrays or dishes. not saying its impossible but your contact rate will be frustrating if you expect it to be like FT8 on 20m. most people do a 4-yagi cross-polarization setup as a reasonable minimum for actually having consistent QSOs. the mechanical side of it, the H-frame, the rotor with moon tracking, thats where the cost and effort stacks up fast. for software yes WSJT-X with JT65A is what basically everyone uses on 2m EME. you want to make sure your system clock is synced tight, like within a second, because the timing really matters. look up the online EME logger too, that shows whos on and where the moon is relative to your location and theirs, it helps a ton when youre first starting out trying to figure out windows.

so i've been wanting to do this for like two years and i finally just ordered a QCX mini from QRP Labs back in the fall, took me about a weekend to build it, and honestly the soldering wasn't as bad as i thought it would be. im running it at 5 watts on 40 meters and i was genuinely shocked the first time i made a contact with it. like i know 5 watts is still 5 watts but coming from my IC-7300 at home where i kind of just turn it on and it works, there's something completely different about pulling a tiny rig out of your bag at a picnic table and making a CW contact with something you built yourself. took it out to the county park last saturday with a end fed half wave and just threw it up in a tree with some paracord. worked a guy in ohio from new england, nothing crazy but i was pretty happy. the keyer built into the QCX is actually really nice, i was expecting it to be kind of clunky but it held up fine. battery was a 3ah lipo i had from an old RC car project, lasted way longer than i needed. anyway just wanted to share because i feel like people on here were helpful when i was first asking about whether the kit was worth doing, and yeah it was. if anyones on the fence about it just do it. curious if anyone else is doing POTA with QRP only, feels like a fun challenge.

yeah so the encode vs decode thing trips up a lot of new folks. for accessing a repeater you pretty much only need to set the encode tone — thats the one your radio transmits as a subaudible tone along with your voice. the repeater itself has a decoder that listens for that specific tone before it opens up and retransmits you. if you dont send the right tone the repeater just ignores your signal even if you have a perfectly good signal into it. for the decode side on your radio, thats optional and just means your radio will mute incoming audio unless it hears a specific tone — useful if theres interference but for just getting started you can leave decode off or set it to carrier squelch. and yeah if a repeater isnt listed with a tone it might be open carrier access, though some just dont have their info updated in the directory. worth checking the repeater owner's website or asking someone local who uses it regularly.

got this diamond nr770h on my truck and its been working fine for months but now im getting high swr on 70cm. 2m is still good around 1.2:1 but 440 is showing like 2.8:1 on my meter. didnt change anything recently that i can think of. mount is still tight, coax looks ok. anyone else run into this with these antennas?

oh man i remember being totally lost with this stuff when i was studying for my tech. what got me was that some Q codes mean different things depending on whether you're asking or answering, like QRV as a question means are you ready and as a statement means i am ready. once i figured that out it made a lot more sense why people were saying the same code in different situations and i wasnt just mishearing things lol

Always listen before transmitting. Make sure the frequency isn't being used before you go barging in. I learned this the hard way my first week! Also ask "Is this frequency in use?", followed by your callsign. So, "Is the frequency in use? This is M6ABC." If nobody replies, you're clear to call.

the small stuff is exactly what gets you, you nailed it. I spent three years on our county ARES team and the number of times someone showed up with a beautiful kit and no PL-259 to SO-239 adapter or forgot a fuse is... a lot. throw a small ziplock bag in there with a handful of spare fuses, a few adapters, some electrical tape, a couple zip ties, and maybe a short patch cable. trust me. on the antenna question, I personally run an EFHW for most deployments just because setup time actually matters when things are going sideways. a dipole is fine but if youre doing it alone you need somewhere to put the other end and thats not always easy. the EFHW with a 9:1 unun and a decent length of wire just works. you can tune it up with a manual tuner if needed and the 891 has a decent internal one anyway. 40Ah should be totally fine for a day of mixed rx/tx if you keep your duty cycle reasonable. i've run an 857 off a 30Ah for 8 hours at a field day style event with no issues. just dont crank power to 100W and transmit constantly and youll be good. one more thing — document your kit. I know that sounds boring but write down whats in it and where things are. when youre tired and stressed you dont want to be digging around.

the 400-500ms thing is pretty normal if you havent touched the audio buffer settings. in RCForb go into the server config and look for the codec, if youre using the default it might be set to something conservative. dropping to OPUS at lower bitrate actually helps latency more than you'd think even though that sounds backwards. also check if youre running through the RemoteHams relay servers vs direct connection -- relay adds a ton of latency, direct p2p between your client and the server is way better if your firewall allows it. port 40000 UDP needs to be open on the server side. for the SDR panadapter refresh honestly 15 up should be plenty, might be a CPU thing on the remote machine if its older hardware. what are you running on that end

honest answer — for 6-8 contests a year it depends entirely on how much you enjoy the station building side of it. the rate improvement is real but its not magic, especially if youre not already running consistently high rates on one radio. the gains mostly come from being able to S&P on radio 2 while youre running a frequency on radio 1, so you dont lose your run frequency every time you go hunting for new mults. if your single radio rate is already limited by propagation or antenna then SO2R isnt gonna save you the TS-590 pairs reasonably well with the 7300 actually, the 590 has solid close-in dynamic range so it holds up when the other rig is nearby. you'll want an Ameritron RCS-4 or similar for antenna switching and honestly the microHAM stuff for SO2R control is pretty solid but yeah it aint cheap. N1MM+ handles the SO2R logic fine once you get it configured but that first setup weekend is gonna test your patience i'd say do a full contest season focused purely on rate optimization on one radio first — keyboard shortcuts, dueling CQs, keeping the cluster filtered right — before jumping to SO2R. most guys i know who made the jump said that discipline on one radio first made SO2R actually useful instead of just complicated

so this has been bugging me for a couple weeks now. my 7300 is doing something weird where 40m is down to like 30-35 watts max no matter what i set the power to, all other bands are putting out full 100w no problem. i swapped antennas, checked the coax, ran it into a dummy load to rule out the antenna side and still the same thing on 40m. ALC looks a little weird on that band too, kind of jumps around when i key up where on other bands its steady. the rig isnt throwing any error codes and everything else works fine, audio is good, receive is normal. i pulled the top cover off and dont see anything obviously burnt or leaky caps or anything like that. its about 4 years old and gets used pretty regularly, maybe 3-4 hours a day on average. just wondering if anyone has seen this before or has an idea where to start digging. i dont really want to ship it off to icom if i can avoid it

34 QSOs on your first activation is honestly a solid number, a lot of people struggle to get the 10 minimum the first time out just because of nerves or antenna issues. sounds like you did everything right. for the two-fer logging, the way it works is you just log each QSO twice in your ADIF file, once with each park reference. when you upload to the POTA website it'll sort it out. some folks use HAMRS or Fast Log Entry and those handle it pretty cleanly. just make sure you're actually physically inside both park boundaries when you operate or it doesnt count, some of those overlaps are smaller than they look on the map and its worth double checking with the satellite view on the parks website before you go. the pileup thing gets easier, just take your time and dont be afraid to say "please stand by" if you need a second. hunters are generally very understanding, theyre just happy youre out there activating.