Emily Thomas

oh man park to park contacts are the best part of hunting honestly, you should have seen the excitement on my end when i got my first P2P haha. dont stress too much about the QSO rate thing, ive seen people get competitive about it but the whole point is just being outside and making contacts. some parks are also just way more popular and get spotted constantly so they get a flood of hunters right away. your 14 from a random state forest is probably harder earned than someones 50 from a super popular national park tbh

oh man this is something ive been meaning to do too so im watching this thread. one thing my elmer told me that stuck — he said dont forget a headlamp. like specifically for the kit, not just assuming you have one somewhere. he showed up to a midnight exercise and couldnt see anything he was doing for the first half hour. sounds obvious but yeah

haha the shaky mic thing is totally real, i did the same thing. dont worry it goes away after like the third or fourth time. welcome to the hobby, the 2m repeater scene is actually a great place to start before you jump into HF which can get overwhelming fast. get that general ticket though seriously, it opens up so much more of the bands

M2 antennas typically use quality hardware but I'd suspect the relay or switching mechanism first. If you're using a relay to flip polarization, swap it with a known good one. The contacts might be making poor connection on one side.

Just got licensed and feeling overwhelmed by all the Q codes I'm hearing on the air. I understand they're useful abbreviations, but there seem to be dozens of them! Which Q codes are absolutely essential for a new General class operator to learn first? I'm particularly interested in QSOs on 20m and 40m CW, and want to avoid embarrassing myself in my first contacts. Should I memorize them all at once or focus on the most common ones?