Mark Stevens

yeah SOTA isnt really contesting but i totally get why it feels that way sometimes especially during the big activation events. i do a lot of SOTA and the "on the air" weekends they do periodically are kind of chaotic in a fun way, you get spotted on the cluster and suddenly theres a pileup on a mountain top which is a weird and great feeling. field day is worth doing with your club even if the digital station thing doesnt work out. honestly just being in that environment and seeing how an organized multi-op runs is worth it for the experience alone. my first field day i mostly just handed people coffee and logged for them and i still learned a ton just watching.

dull solder joint is almost certainly a cold joint — that'll mess with things for sure but probably isnt the whole story at 2.3:1. reheat it and get it to flow properly before you do anything else, its an easy fix and worth ruling out first. that said, 2.3:1 on a first inverted-V build at 28 feet apex isnt actually bad at all, the ground proximity at the ends is loading the antenna and pulling the feedpoint impedance around. 40m dipoles in inverted-V are notoriously fussy about height, you really want the apex as high as you can get it and ends at least 10 feet up. 6 feet is basically on the ground electrically speaking. stranded vs solid doesnt matter at 7mhz, honestly dont even worry about that part.

DC receivers are kind of notorious for this honestly. part of it is just the nature of the beast, you're basically amplifying audio all the way from the detector so any garbage in the supply chain gets amplified right along with your signal. i built a similar thing a few years back and spent like two weekends chasing a hum that turned out to be a ground loop between the audio board and the BFO section, had them on separate chunks of copper clad and the connection between them was creating a little antenna. ended up just mashing it all onto one board and most of it went away. also worth checking if the hum is actually 60 or 120hz, 60 suggests magnetic pickup (like from a transformer sitting too close or even just the orientation of your toroids relative to AC wiring in the room), 120hz is more classicly rectifier ripple. if you can borrow an oscilloscope even briefly itll tell you a lot fast.

so I've had my general ticket for about two years now and I've been making contacts here and there but never really with any purpose I guess. A buddy of mine at the club just got his DXCC plaque in the mail and now I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of chasing it myself. Problem is I don't really know where to start with the whole award credit system. Like I get that it's 100 entities confirmed but the LoTW stuff confuses me and I don't know if my old paper QSLs count or how to even submit anything. I also saw there's WAS and WAZ and a bunch of other awards and now I feel like I should be chasing all of them at once but that seems like it would spread me too thin? Do most people focus on one first or just work everything and sort it out later. I'm running an IC-7300 into a dipole in the attic so my signal isn't exactly thundering out there but I have managed to work some pretty surprising DX on 17 and 20 meters. Any advice from people who've done this would be really appreciated, even just knowing where to start would help a ton.

so basically the callsign thing — yeah you should be phonetically spelling it out pretty much every time you ID, especially on HF where conditions can be rough and people mishear stuff constantly. on a local repeater where everyone knows you and the signal is full quieting you can get away with just saying it normally but even then a lot of people still do phonetics just out of habit for names and stuff it depends. if your name is something like Bob or Jim nobody needs you to spell it out. but if youve got an unusual name or youre in a pileup situation where clarity really matters, phonetics just make sense. i usually say my name normal first and then if theres any confusion or someone asks me to repeat ill go phonetic. the main thing is just making sure the other station actually copied what you said, however you get there

the propagation map is underrated honestly. i ignored it for months and just kept manually trying gateways and wondering why half my sessions failed. once i actually started using the channel selection feature my connect rate went way up. also make sure your VARA HF is registered if you want the faster speeds, the free version is pretty slow and if the gateway times out before the handshake finishes it'll just drop. might be part of what youre seeing

so ive been messing with Winlink Express for a few weeks now and i think i mostly understand the concept but actually getting a session to go through has been hit or miss. im using a TNC-Pi with my 2m radio pointed at what should be a local RMS gateway and sometimes it connects fine, sometimes it just sits there throwing errors about no response or session timeout or whatever. my main question is about gateway selection — i know you can sort by distance in the gateway list but does signal path quality matter more than raw distance? like theres one gateway 12 miles away but its basically line of sight blocked by a ridge, and another one thats like 28 miles but supposedly on a hilltop. been going back and forth on which to set as my default. also not sure if i should be using the VHF-FM channel or trying to set up an HF winlink session for better coverage, i have an HF rig but havent tried to configure a pactor or vara session yet. also the message handling side is confusing me a bit — i get that its basically email but the addressing with the WL2K suffix and how it routes through the CMS servers, does the gateway forward everything automatically or do i need to trigger that somehow. feels like i set it up right but im not 100% sure messages are actually going anywhere

yeah i had the exact same thing happen with my 40m dipole last spring. kept second guessing myself thinking i measured wrong or something but it was just the inverted V thing. my ends were probably around 10 feet off the ground and it came in low too. ended up trimming maybe 18 inches total off both legs before it landed where i wanted it. just go slow with the trimming because obviously you cant put wire back on lol

yeah it definitely feels that way at first but honestly you pick up the common ones pretty fast just from being on the air. QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural static like from storms, QSB is when the signal is fading in and out which happens a lot on HF, QSY means change frequency, QRZ is who is calling me basically. there are a ton of them technically but most people only use maybe a dozen or so regularly in actual conversation. ARRL has a full list on their site if you want to go deep on it but dont stress about memorizing them all at once. you'll hear QRT a lot too which just means a station is shutting down or going off air

so i was just poking around on 10 meters yesterday afternoon, not really expecting much since its been pretty quiet up here in the northeast, and all of a sudden the band just lit up. I worked a bunch of stations in South America and even snagged a couple Europeans before it faded out around 4pm local. its been so long since ive seen 10m do anything serious that i almost forgot what a real opening feels like honestly. anyway while i was waiting for the band to come back i was reading over on eham and apparently Icom has been teasing something new — looks like it might be a mid-range HF/VHF all mode rig, theres a photo floating around but nobody really knows the specs yet. could be interesting or could be another thing priced way out of reach for most of us, hard to say. anyone heard anything more concrete about that? i saw one post claiming it would sit between the 7300 and 7610 price-wise but i dont know how reliable that source is. also for anyone interested, there's a special event station running this weekend for some kind of regional hamfest, i think its somewhere in the mid-atlantic area but i'd have to dig up the callsign again. worth keeping an ear out on 14.250 or so if you're around.

i run both depending on what im doing and just do the ADIF import thing after contests, been doing it that way for like three years and never had a major problem. the duplicate detection when importing is usually good enough. only time it got weird was during a state QSO party where i worked some stations on both SSB and FT8 and the import got confused about the mode field but i just sorted it out manually.

yeah what youre describing is completely normal and honestly almost everyone goes through it. the hand-brain disconnect is real and it just takes time. one thing that helped me a lot was not practicing sending separately from receiving — like try to copy what you send right after you send it, so your brain starts associating the sound with the motion rather than the letter name if that makes sense. on the speed thing, 8 wpm is fine but a lot of people actually recommend keeping the character speed higher (like 15-18 wpm) but putting big gaps between characters. thats the Farnsworth method and it stops you from counting because the individual letters come too fast to count. most keyers and software let you set character speed and word speed independently. worth trying if your keyer supports it. and yeah paddle grip matters more than people say. your thumb and finger shouldnt be squeezing, more like just resting with light contact. if your hand tenses up you start rushing and everything sounds choppy. took me probably six months of on and off practice before my first real QSO and it felt amazing when it finally happened so stick with it

yeah same thing confused me when i was studying. the band plan stuff in the technician book doesnt really prepare you for 40m at all since techs barely get anything there. what helped me was just downloading the actual ARRL band plan PDF and keeping it open on my phone for a while until it clicked. also the part about your whole signal needing to stay inside the allocation -- yeah thats the real rule, not just the carrier, learned that the hard way when someone on the air pointed out i was too close to 7.300 and probably bleeding over

so ive been messing with APRS for about two months now and got my TM-D710G set up with the internal TNC and everything seemed fine at first. my beacon was showing up on aprs.fi which was cool but then i noticed the position dot is like 4 miles east of where i actually am. i double checked my coordinates in the radio menu like three times and they match my actual location so im not sure what's going on there. also running direwolf on a raspberry pi as a secondary igate and that one seems to place me correctly when i use that path instead. so something is definitely weird with how the radio is encoding the position or maybe its a datum thing? i dunno. the symbol is set to a house which is right at least. anyone run into this before with the D710 specifically or just APRS position weirdness in general

so ive been licensed for about 8 years mostly doing HF stuff and some weak signal VHF but ive always been fascinated by moonbounce and i think im finally at a point where i want to seriously try it. the problem is every time i start reading about what you need it kind of spirals out of control and i get overwhelmed and go back to working 40m or whatever. from what i understand the minimum viable setup on 2m EME is something like a decent sized yagi or array plus a low noise preamp right at the feedpoint, and then you need to be running JT65 or Q65 these days? i was reading some old stuff about CW EME and that seemed absolutely brutal, like guys running kilowatts into arrays of 4 yagis for hours to make a single contact. is that still a thing or has digital basically taken over. my biggest question is honestly the antenna. i have maybe room for a single long yagi on a good az/el mount — thinking like a 9 or 10 element on 2m but i dont know if thats enough to even hear anything. my lot is decent, no trees in the way of the moon path, and i have a good view to the east and south which i think matters for lunar windows. anyone actually done EME with a minimal single yagi setup or is that just a fantasy

Start simple - But if you are having a hard time dealing with two radios at any time, just concentrate on one. When I first started SO2R, I only used the second radio during my CQ transmissions to hunt for multipliers. Don't try to run dual pileups until you've mastered the basics of listening on radio 2 while transmitting on radio 1.

so ive been trying to plan this out for a few weeks now and still not 100% sure if im making the trip. last year i picked up a barely used ts-590 in the flea market for way less than i expected so im kind of hooked on going back. wife is less enthusiastic lol. anybody else from the midwest planning on heading out? also curious if the outdoor swap meet area is still worth getting there early for or if most of the good stuff is gone by like 9am anyway

The top contesters can maintain rates over 4 contacts per minute in CW, but I'm stuck averaging 60-80 QSOs/hour during peak times in major DX contests. Currently running an IC-7610 with 600W to a 3-element SteppIR at 50 feet from central Pennsylvania. Using N1MM Logger+ with standard macros and headset operation. What specific techniques separate the 100+ QSO/hour operators from the rest of us? I know high rates require excellent operating technique and resilience, but looking for concrete advice on timing, frequency management, and mental approach. Should I focus more on CQ technique, frequency selection, or is this primarily a location/antenna limitation?

so ive been running a diamond x50a on my roof for about two years now and honestly its been fine for hitting the local 2m and 70cm repeaters, no complaints really. but theres a repeater about 55 miles out that i can kinda hit but its marginal, sometimes it opens up and sometimes i get into the machine with a lot of noise and the other ops can barely copy me. started wondering if a yagi would help but then i got to thinking — if i put up a yagi pointed at that one repeater im basically giving up the omnidirectional coverage i have now and id have to rotate it or just accept that im only pointing one direction. the x50a is up about 30 feet on a pushup mast and the feedline is about 40 feet of LMR-400 so i dont think the feedline is really killing me. is there a middle ground here or am i just stuck picking between omni coverage and the gain i need for that distant machine. somebody mentioned a collinear with more elements but i thought the x50a was already pretty good, whats the actual real world difference going to be from like a 5/8 collinear versus something with more dBd on 2m

psk31 is not totally dead just uh... resting. i worked a guy in ukraine on it last month which surprised me. but yeah FT8 ate its lunch pretty thoroughly. the JS8Call thing i keep meaning to set up properly, i downloaded it twice and never really committed. sounds like for emcomm it could be genuinely useful but my local group is still arguing about winlink vs everything else so who knows when we'd actually use it

so ive been trying to figure out if its worth making the drive out for the hamfest theyre doing near the dayton area next month, i think its the second weekend but cant remember exactly. last time i went a few years ago i picked up a decent antenna tuner for like 20 bucks and some coax but also spent way too long talking to a guy about his vintage collins gear lol. anyway my club here hasnt mentioned anything about doing a group carpool this year which is kind of a bummer because splitting gas made it way more doable. does anyone know if the swap meet portion is still a big deal or has it kind of shrunk down like some of the other fests have been doing lately

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly on 40m and 20m, some SSB some FT8. everyone keeps telling me i need to confirm my contacts but honestly the whole QSL thing is kind of overwhelming. like there's LoTW which seems to be the official ARRL thing, and then theres eQSL which is a different website, and then some people still send physical cards through the mail or through the bureau? and i don't really understand which one i'm supposed to use or if i need to do all three. i did make a LoTW account and uploaded my ADIF log but i've only gotten like 3 confirmations in two months even though i've made probably 150 contacts. is that normal? do most people just not bother uploading? also someone mentioned something about a QSL manager and i have no idea what that is. i'm not chasing any awards right now but i think i might want to eventually so i want to make sure i'm doing this right from the start.

yeah the doppler on linear birds is genuinely a bit of a puzzle the first few times. the thing that helped me most was just forgetting about the uplink doppler correction at first and only correcting the downlink. find your own signal on the downlink, lock onto it, and then make tiny adjustments to stay on frequency as the pass progresses. the uplink will drift relative to your transmitted frequency but on a linear transponder the transponder itself handles the inversion so you kind of chase your own signal on the receive side rather than trying to predict both shifts simultaneously. gpredict does have doppler correction built in and if you have it talking to your radio via CAT it can handle both VFOs separately which is the real solution honestly. once i got that set up on my 9700 my pass success rate went way up. you set the downlink on VFO A and uplink on VFO B and let gpredict chase the frequencies automatically while you just focus on the antenna and actually making contacts. the manual tuning approach works but its a lot to juggle especially handheld. also AO-7 mode B is more forgiving for beginners imo, the transponder is pretty sensitive and the passband is wide enough that you have some margin for error. FO-29 is a bit pickier.

yeah im going, went last year and picked up a pretty decent mobile antenna for like 8 bucks so definitely worth the drive. bring cash though cause half the guys selling stuff dont do venmo or whatever. also they usually have a talk-in frequency listed on the club website if you need it coming in from the highway

not a dumb question at all, part 97 is genuinely kind of a maze when you first dig into it. the third party traffic thing trips a lot of people up. basically if youre just talking to another ham in another country, that's not third party traffic — that's just two licensed operators having a QSO, totally fine. third party traffic only comes into play when youre passing a message on behalf of someone who isnt a licensed amateur, like if your neighbor asks you to relay something to their cousin in another country through a net or whatever. when that happens the country the other station is in has to have a third party agreement with the US, and there's a list of those countries on the ARRL website. some countries dont have an agreement so you just cant do it period, doesnt matter how simple the message is. as for music — your club guy is mostly right. 97.113 prohibits broadcasting, which includes music intended for general audiences. the narrow exception people sometimes cite is like, music incidental to a retransmission of a space shuttle audio feed or something weird like that. for practical purposes just dont transmit music and youll be fine.