Emily Thomas

honestly the extra segments on 20 are noticeably less crowded, at least on weekends when the bands are packed. during a contest you'll really notice it. but i think the bigger reason to get it is just the knowledge - working through the theory actually helped me understand why my antenna wasnt performing the way i expected, stuff about feedline impedance matching that i sort of glossed over before. the exam itself isnt as scary as it looks if you use HamStudy and just drill the question pool for a few weeks. some of the math you can sorta understand conceptually without being able to actually derive it, and thats good enough to pass. also if you ever want to be a VE or do any experimenting on the frequencies just below where Generals can go, youll want it. just do it, youll feel good about having done it

honestly for 40m a dipole at 45 feet is going to be pretty competitive with a vertical for most stuff you want to do. the takeoff angle at that height is somewhere around 40-45 degrees which isnt ideal for long path DX but for anything in the 500 to 2000 mile range its actually pretty solid, which is where most of the ragchewing happens anyway. the other thing nobody really talks about is noise. verticals in suburban areas can be rough depending on your neighbors. mine was picking up so much hash from switching power supplies and LED lighting that it was basically unusable on 40 and 80 unless I was running the preamp off. went back to the dipole and the noise floor dropped by probably 10 dB easy. that might not be everyone's experience but its worth thinking about if your neighborhood has a lot of that stuff going on. if you already have the wire and the tuner, id just put the dipole back up. you can always experiment with a vertical later but get something in the air first.

same boat as you were a few months ago, i just got my WAS certificate last week actually. totally do-able even with a modest setup. the thing that helped me most was just keeping LoTW synced after every session instead of letting months pile up, i made that mistake early on too. one thing nobody told me — some states are genuinely hard to work even on HF, Rhode Island and Delaware kept slipping through for me because theres just not that many hams there. ended up getting them both during a state QSO party which i highly recommend for filling gaps.

so ive been putting together a go-kit for ARES stuff and some general portable operating and im kind of going back and forth on the power situation. right now i have a 100ah LiFePO4 that runs my IC-7300 fine at home on receive but once i start transmitting at anything above like 50w it drains faster than i expected on longer activations. we had a 6 hour exercise last month and i was nursing it by the end. the obvious answer everybody says is just bring a generator but ive had bad experiences with RFI from cheap inverter gennies. tried a harbor freight one at a field day site a couple years ago and my noise floor went from S1 to like S6 on 40m which basically made SSB phone ops miserable. is that just a grounding issue or are some generators genuinely cleaner than others also on the antenna side im running a buddipole right now which is fine but its kind of a pain to tune for different bands and i feel like im spending half my setup time messing with it instead of operating. thinking about a end fed half wave with a 9:1 unun but not sure if that plays well on all bands without an auto tuner. anybody running something similar for rapid deployment stuff where you actually need to get on the air fast

yeah i was confused about this same stuff when i first got my general. someone in my club pointed me to DX Summit which is another one, i think its run by OH8X or something like that. anyway i ended up just having like three tabs open at once for a while which was kind of ridiculous lol. eventually i just picked one and stuck with it, i use the QRZ one mostly just because im already on that site checking callsigns half the time anyway so its convenient. probably not the most optimized approach but it works for me.

ok so ive been listening on HF for a few weeks now and i keep hearing and seeing all these weird codes and shortenings that i just dont understand. like QSL, QRM, QRZ, and then theres also stuff like 73 and 88 and DE and all that. is there like a master list somewhere or do people just kind of pick it up over time? i feel like everyone else just knows this stuff automatically and im sitting here googling every other thing i hear. also heard someone say QSB the other day and had no idea what was happening, thought maybe it was a callsign at first lol. im a tech class right now working on my general so maybe this gets covered more later but figured id just ask here

so i finally got my first summit picked out and im heading up W4T/SU-001 tomorrow morning. been chasing for about 3 months now and figured it was time to stop being a passenger and actually get up there myself. i have my KX2 and a linked dipole i built last month, tested it in the backyard and it seemed to work okay but obviously that's not the same as being on a windy ridge somewhere. my plan is to get there early enough to set up before the main activation window and try to self spot via the SOTA spotter app once im ready. i have a summit-to-summit contact list of chasers i know are usually around but honestly im not sure how long it'll take me to hike in — the trail notes say about 45 mins but i've never done this particular one. do i need to worry about alerting vs spotting? i posted an alert last night for around 10am local but if i'm late i dont want people waiting around for nothing. anyway any advice welcome, even dumb stuff i might be forgetting. i feel like i'm going to get up there and realize i left the coax at home or something

headphones. seriously. i never thought about it until i was trying to copy traffic in a noisy EOC with people talking on phones all around me and the speaker on my radio was basically useless. a basic pair of headphones or even earbuds with the right adapter made a huge difference. i think i paid like 8 bucks for a little 1/4 inch adapter at the hardware store and it changed everything.

so i finally did my first parks on the air activation last weekend at a state park about 40 minutes from my house, K-2345 if anyone's curious. been hunting other peoples activations for like 6 months now and kept telling myself i'd get around to doing one and i finally just did it. brought my FT-891 and a linked dipole i built from the sotabeams kit, ran it up between two trees with some paracord. setup took way longer than i expected, probably 45 minutes just to get the antenna sorted out because one of my tie-off lines got tangled and i was fighting it in the wind. by the time i got on the air i only had about 2 hours before i had to pack up and get back. made 12 contacts on 40m and 4 on 20m so i did get my 10 for a valid activation which was nice, but honestly i was hoping for more. a couple guys spotted me on the POTA website which definitely helped. i think my problem was i wasnt very confident calling CQ and kind of second guessed myself a lot on whether i was actually on a clear frequency before transmitting. anyway just wanted to share, it was way more fun than just hunting from home. already planning my next one, thinking about doing a 2-fer where two park boundaries overlap near me. anyone done those before, is it just one log submission or do you have to do two separate ones?

HamStudy is honestly all you need to pass, i went from zero to General in like 3 weeks using just that site. the way it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong is really useful. for the electrical formulas just learn ohms law and how to rearrange it and you can figure out most of the math questions from scratch instead of just memorizing answers, that helped me a lot more than trying to brute force the whole pool. the propagation section is genuinely interesting once it clicks, stuff about which bands do what and why is actually useful knowledge once you get on HF and start chasing DX. good luck with it, General opens up a ton

so the Tri-County hamfest is coming up and i havent been to one in like two years, last time i went i picked up a decent MFJ antenna tuner for like 20 bucks so im hoping for similar luck this time. does anyone know if theyre still doing the tailgate swap meet portion outside or did they move it all inside after that rain situation they had a few years back. also wondering if the club is doing a license exam session at this one, i think i saw something about it on their website but the page looked like it hadnt been updated since 2019

log4om has gotten a lot better recently, the v2 rewrite was a big deal. WSJT-X integration works fine, cloudlog-style features, looks decent. but yeah if youre contesting N1MM is still the standard, nobody at a serious multi-op is gonna run anything else the import thing should be ok but i'd test it on a copy of your logs first before you do anything permanent just in case

so ive been licensed for about 3 weeks now (technician) and everyone keeps telling me to just get a baofeng to start but then other people say thats a terrible idea and i should spend more on something better right away. honestly im kind of overwhelmed because i dont even fully know what features i actually need vs what sounds cool but ill never use. mostly i want to hit a couple of local repeaters, maybe do some simplex with my brother who just passed his tech exam too. we're not doing anything fancy. budget is probably around $50-100 but i could stretch to maybe $150 if it was really worth it. i keep seeing people mention the yaesu ft-60 and also the kenwood th-d74 but that last one seems way overkill for what im trying to do. anyone have thoughts? does dual band actually matter this early on or should i not worry about it

congrats on the build, QMX is a great little rig. to answer your antenna question -- yes, antenna absolutely matters more at QRP levels, probably more than anything else you can do. when youre running 100 watts you can kind of mask a mediocre antenna with brute force but at 4 watts every dB counts. that end-fed will work fine but if you can ever put up a dipole at a decent height or try a vertical with a good ground system you'll notice the difference pretty quick. as for which band to start on, 40m is solid especially for regional stuff and in the evenings. but honestly 20m during the day when conditions are decent is where QRP really shines for me, i've had contacts across the atlantic running 5 watts and it never gets old. just watch the propagation forecasts, when the bands are cooperating QRP feels like magic and when they're not it can be frustrating. stick with it though, you'll develop a feel for it.

yeah the HM-219 is pretty mediocre tbh, i swapped mine out for an Heil PR-781 and the difference was noticeable right away. that said i spent probably two weekends messing with the menus before i touched the mic so definitely rule out settings first like the other guy said. one thing i'll add is get someone you trust on the other end while you tweak, doing it blind by yourself is really frustrating and you'll just go in circles. find a local buddy or somebody on a club net who will give you honest feedback and just go through it systematically.