Mark Stevens

i was in basically the same spot like 4 months ago lol. ended up getting the UV-5R just to have something and then pretty quickly got a Yaesu FT-70D because the digital (Fusion) stuff seemed interesting and a couple repeaters near me run it. honestly both get used depending on what im doing. the baofeng sits in my car as a backup now. one thing nobody told me when i started was to download CHIRP before you even turn the radio on, makes programming frequencies SO much less painful no matter what you get

yeah what he said about mic distance is spot on. i had the same issue with a different mic and spent weeks messing with EQ before someone just told me to move the mic back. felt dumb but it fixed like 80% of the problem instantly. one more thing — check if the bass boost on the Heil is switched on. i think some of those mics have a small switch on the element housing for it and it's easy to accidentally have it enabled. might not be your issue but worth checking before you go too deep into the EQ rabbit hole

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. so yeah theres three license classes, technician is the entry level one and thats all you need to get started, most people just do that first and then upgrade later if they want. the technician exam is 35 questions multiple choice and you need to get 26 right to pass, so theres actually a decent amount of margin for error which helps take the pressure off a bit. for studying i always point people to hamstudy.org, its free and it pulls from the actual question pool that the test uses, so youre literally studying the real questions. theres also an app called Ham Radio Prep or you can just use the hamstudy app. the thing people dont realize is the question pool is public, all the answers are right there, so if you just grind through the practice tests for a couple weeks you should be fine even without deep electronics knowledge. some of the math questions can be skipped honestly if youre not comfortable because you only need 26 out of 35. find a local club too, most of them run test sessions pretty regularly and some even do free license classes. arrl.org has a club finder. good luck, its really not as intimidating as it looks at first

congrats on getting through it, the first real activation is definitely a thing. i remember mine felt almost surreal, like wait this is actually happening. one thing i'd suggest is after each activation write down a few notes for yourself about what worked and what you wish you'd had or done differently, even just in a text file somewhere. i started doing that and it really helped me improve my go bag setup over time, realized i kept forgetting stuff or bringing things i never used.

so i finally did my first park activation yesterday at a state park about 45 mins from me, been meaning to do it for months. packed up the ft-891 and my buddipole and drove out there feeling pretty good about myself. set everything up at a picnic table, got SWR down to like 1.4 which i was happy with considering the ground conditions out there, and then just... nothing. sat on 40m calling CQ for probably 20 minutes and got maybe 2 contacts. moved to 20m and picked up a couple more but honestly i was expecting it to be a little more lively than that. i think i just didnt spot myself on the POTA hunters site soon enough, by the time people saw me i was already packing up. the park closes at sunset and i cut it way too close. anyway gonna try again next weekend and actually pre-spot before i even leave the parking lot this time

ok so i finally got my technician license last month and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater. i programmed the offset and everything and i can hear people talking fine but when i try to transmit nobody responds and im not sure if they can even hear me. i looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it listed a CTCSS tone of 100.0 hz so i put that in but still nothing. then yesterday someone keyed up and just said their callsign and dropped off and i tried to answer right after and still nothing. also not totally sure about the etiquette here — like do you just start talking or do you say your callsign and wait? i dont want to step on anyone or come across as rude. been listening for about two weeks just trying to figure out how it works before jumping in.

so i was up at K-1234 doing a pota activation yesterday afternoon and kept getting this weird buzzing noise every few minutes on 20m. it would last maybe 10-15 seconds then disappear. didnt hear it on 40m at all. wonder if it was something in the park or just band conditions? was using my usual endfed with the 9:1 balun about 20 feet up in a tree anyone else notice anything funky yesterday around 1800z? worked about 30 contacts but that noise was really annoying

we ran something similar at our club's 2m machine years ago, had a DB224 omni plus a single 5el yagi off a hybrid combiner aimed at a valley about 15 miles out that the omni just couldn't reach properly. worked pretty well honestly, the main thing you have to watch is port isolation on the combiner — if you skimp on that you'll get intermod garbage coming back into the receiver and it takes forever to diagnose because it looks like random noise. the transition you're worried about is basically a non-issue in practice. mobiles just hear the repeater louder when they're in the yagi footprint and quieter when theyre not, there's no actual handoff happening, it's passive. the duplexer doesnt know or care which antenna path the signal came from. where it gets complicated is if you're running two separate receive antennas going into a preamp combiner rather than a passive hybrid, then you really need to think about phasing and isolation more carefully. but if you're just combining TX only on both and using the collinear for RX, keep it simple.

congrats on the first one, the pileup thing catches everyone off guard the first time. people are always hungry for a new reference especially if it hasnt been activated in a while or ever. for logging i use Fast Log Entry on my laptop in the field, its dead simple and exports to ADIF which you can upload straight to the wwff database. some folks swear by apps on their phone but i find typing on glass while trying to operate is a nightmare. as for checking if a reference is rare or recent, just go to wwff.world and search the reference — it shows you all previous activations with dates. if the last one was years ago or never done you can bet people will be calling you. theres also a wwff spotter page kind of like the dx cluster but just for wwff activations, really worth bookmarking that before your next outing. sounds like you did great for a first go though, 44 contacts is solid.

yeah ive been running a RemoteHams setup for almost two years, ts-2000 at a hilltop location about 40 miles from my house. the latency thing you're describing is just kind of the reality of it, at least on consumer internet. i ended up putting a dedicated 4g lte backup connection at the remote site and bonding it with the main dsl and that helped a lot but its not perfect. for voice i basically just accepted that anything under 150ms round trip is workable and anything above that i switch to digital or CW the SDR panadapter idea through RemoteHams is a dead end in my experience, the software really wasnt built with that workflow in mind. what i did instead was run a separate SDRangel instance at the remote site and just remote desktop into that when i want the visual spectrum, its not elegant but it works and the cpu overhead is manageable on a halfway decent mini pc the allstar bridge idea is interesting but i think youre overcomplicating it. allstar and RemoteHams are solving pretty different problems and trying to merge them sounds like a support nightmare. what are you actually trying to accomplish with the linking piece, like whats the end goal

so ive been trying to figure out if its worth the drive this year, last time i went i picked up a pretty decent old Kenwood HF rig for like nothing and also ran into a guy from my old club which was cool. anybody else planning on heading out that way? my buddy says the flea market part starts really early now like before 7am which is kind of brutal but thats usually where all the good deals are before the dealers grab everything

this is pretty much exactly where i was like a year ago. one thing that tripped me up forever was that Winlink Express has separate session types and i was mixing up the Telnet sessions with actual RF sessions in the log and thinking i was testing over radio when i wasnt. dumb mistake but check that you're actually initiating a VARA HF session and not accidentally clicking telnet to do a test send. also the RMS gateway list in the software has a "update" button that pulls a fresh list from the Winlink servers — the default list can be pretty stale. once i refreshed that and sorted by distance i found a gateway like 200 miles away that i had solid contact with almost every time. the one i was originally trying was apparently not super active. propagation on 40m is also going to matter a lot depending on time of day, ive had better luck in the evenings personally.

Remember that FT8 excels at weak signal work, so knowing when propagation peaks helps maximize opportunities by monitoring real-time propagation reports and solar data. During low solar activity, lower bands like 40 and 80 meters may perform better, while higher bands become more effective during strong solar cycles. Timing is everything!

honestly i just use N1MM for everything and stopped fighting it. the interface does look old but after a few weeks you stop noticing and the thing just works. the WSJT-X logging via UDP works fine with it too, i had it set up in maybe 20 minutes following the instructions on the N1MM wiki. for casual operating it's not as pretty as Log4OM but i dunno, i kind of like having one log and not worrying about syncing stuff between two programs.

yeah PID is absolutely the right call for that inertia problem, i did basically the same thing with a green heron style clone i built and the overshoot was driving me crazy until i tuned a proper PID loop. the derivative term is what really helps with the braking — it kicks in as youre approaching the target and starts slowing the motor down before it gets there. took me a while to tune the Kd value right but once i got it dialed in the thing parks within 2 degrees consistently. theres a decent arduino PID library already written that works well, dont bother writing it from scratch. one thing i also did was add a second slower speed relay so when its within like 15 degrees of target it switches to a slower creep speed and then the PID just handles final positioning. makes a huge difference with heavy beams.

hamstudy.org is free and worked great for me last month when i got my tech license. just drill the questions over and over until you memorize them basically. i probably did like 200 practice questions before taking the real thing and passed easy. the test isnt hard if you put in the time but there's definitely some weird stuff about frequency allocations and regulations that you just have to memorize

so ive been a tech for about a year and i keep hearing people talk about CW and how great it is and i kind of want to learn but i have no idea where to begin. like do i just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or is there some other way people do it. i tried printing out a chart and staring at it for a couple days but nothing is really sticking and i feel like im doing it wrong. is there like a recommended speed to start at or does that not matter at first. also does anyone actually use a straight key when learning or do i need a paddle right away, i dont even own a key yet so im kind of starting from zero here

LoTW confirmations count toward ARRL awards like DXCC and WAS, while eQSL doesn't count for ARRL awards but has its own program. LoTW is cheaper than mailing cards and doesn't require verification. I'd set up LoTW first since you'll need it eventually for the major awards.

okay so the good news is you really only need the Technician license to get started and that's just one test, 35 questions multiple choice and you need 26 right to pass. its pretty manageable honestly. the General and Amateur Extra are the ones above that and you dont need those right away, plenty of people stick with Tech for years. for free study stuff HamStudy.org is probably the best place, it uses spaced repetition so it kind of figures out which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those more. also hamstudy has an app if you want to do it on your phone. the actual question pool is public so everything on the real test is literally in that pool, no surprises. i'd say do like 20-30 minutes a day for a couple weeks and you'll be fine. find a local club too because they often run free licensing classes and the exam sessions are usually pretty cheap, like 15 bucks or sometimes free depending on the club.

oh man i went through the same thing a few months ago. one thing that actually helped me was just picking DXwatch as my main and then using the QRZ lookup as a separate thing only when i actually need the callbook info or to see if the entity counts for an award. trying to use QRZ spotting AND DXwatch at the same time was just confusing me more than it helped. also some of the spots you see are dupes anyway, same station spotted by 5 different people within 2 minutes so the list looks busier than it actually is

yeah the audio levels will absolutely kill you with VARA, thats almost always the first thing to check. in the VARA HF setup screen there's a drive level adjustment and you want to watch the ALC on the radio — it should not be moving at all or barely flickering. if the ALC is pumping you're overdriving and the gateway just hears garbage even if your waterfall looks fine on your end. also make sure the Signalink jumpers are set right for the 7300, the USB version should be pretty straightforward but people still get it wrong sometimes. the other thing i'd check is whether you have the PTT delay set long enough. VARA sometimes fires audio before the radio is actually keyed up and the first part of the handshake gets clipped. try bumping that up to like 200ms or so and see if that changes anything.

yeah the pattern compression thing is real and its not just theoretical, especially if you're in a valley or have terrain in the mix. i went from an x50 to a GP-9 and honestly for the repeaters that were already solid, no real change. for the edge cases it helped maybe a little but not dramatically. the bigger variable for me ended up being coax — i had like 40ft of RG-8X which was fine but when i swapped to LMR-400 for the run i noticed more improvement than from the antenna change. if that one repeater 34 miles out is actually important to you, a yagi on a cheap tv rotator is genuinely not that bad. i did that setup for a while, pointing at a linked system, and it worked great. pain to set up initially but once its done its done. just gotta commit to the feedline going to the rotator which adds another connector point to keep sealed.

3-4 weeks is plenty honestly, i did it in like 10 days when i was motivated. HamStudy is free and pretty solid for drilling the question pool which is really what the test comes down to. the gordon west book is fine if you want the actual explanations behind the answers but if youre pressed for time just do the practice exams on HamStudy until youre consistently hitting 80%+ and youll be fine the electrical theory questions tripped me up at first too, stuff like impedance and the reactance formulas, but theres really only so many ways they can ask it and once you see the pattern it clicks. propagation stuff is actually kind of interesting once you start playing with HF for real, like understanding why 40m acts totally different at night vs daytime actually makes sense once you get on the air dont stress too much about fully understanding every single concept before the test, get your ticket first then the rest comes from actually operating

the germany contact at 4w is pretty awesome actually. i run a KX2 mostly and the pileup thing is real, you kind of learn to be patient and also a little strategic about it. one thing that helped me was finding stations that are calling CQ with no takers rather than chasing pile-ups. if someone is just calling CQ and nobody's answering, your 5 watts sounds the same as anyone else's 100w to them. also what time of day were you operating, 20m can be really different mid afternoon vs evening depending on where youre trying to hit

These abbreviations come from the Morse Code era to cut down on transmission time, later finding their way into voice communications for DXers and contesters. As a CW operator, I love seeing new hams learn the history behind our shorthand. Try some CW - you'll appreciate why these abbreviations exist!