Sarah Thompson

so ive been doing a lot of portable ops from a local hilltop, mostly 2m and 70cm, and right now im running a Diamond X50 on a painters pole which honestly works pretty well for the casual stuff. but ive been thinking about dragging a yagi up there for when i want to actually reach out further or work some weak signal stuff. the thing is im not sure if a 5 or 6 element yagi is even worth the setup time vs just sticking with the collinear. the hilltop has decent elevation, maybe 800ft above the surrounding terrain, so the omni covers a lot already. but theres a repeater about 140 miles out i can sometimes hit and im wondering if a yagi pointed that direction would make it more consistent. does anyone actually do this regularly, like bring a yagi out for hilltop portable work? curious what the workflow is like and whether you bother with a rotator or just hand point it

CQ WW is absolutely the deep end yeah, but honestly dont let that stop you from jumping in even if you just make a handful of contacts. nobody is judging your score, especially not a new general. the exchange for phone is literally just your signal report and your CQ zone so its not that complicated once you hear it a few times. for warmup contests i'd look at the state QSO parties, theres usually a bunch of them in the sept/october timeframe before CQ WW phone rolls around. your own state probably has one and they tend to be lower pressure with simpler exchanges. also ARRL Sweepstakes is coming up in november which is a big domestic one — the exchange is more involved but its a really fun one to try. SOTA is its own whole thing, separate from contesting really. its about activating summits and getting contacts from portable setups. some guys love it, some focus purely on contesting. i'd say try a contest first just to get your feet wet then see if the outdoor portable operating appeals to you later on.

lol same, spent like 90 mins calling CQ last tuesday and got one reply and it was someone two towns over. at least we talked for a while i guess

so our ARES group has a county-wide exercise coming up and im trying to figure out the best way to power everything without relying on shore power. we'll be running an IC-7300, a small packet station on a separate laptop, and probably a 2m/70cm mobile rig for local coordination. rough estimate is somewhere around 30-40 amps continuous draw when the HF rig is transmitting which honestly is more than i expected when i added it all up. my question is mainly whether to bring the Honda EU2200i I borrowed from a club member or just stack a couple of the 100ah lifepo4 batteries i already own. the generator obviously gives unlimited runtime but its loud and at the last exercise the EOC people got pretty annoyed about generator noise near the building entrance. the batteries are quiet but i dont know if 200ah is really enough for a full 12 hour activation, especially if we end up doing a lot of HF traffic. also still havent settled on antennas. was thinking a NVIS setup with a 40m horizontal loop fairly low to the ground for in-state comms, and then maybe a buddipole or something similar for longer range if needed. anyone done something like this for a real exercise or actual activation and have opinions on what actually works vs what sounds good on paper

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and im starting to get into DX chasing a little bit. i keep seeing people mention DXwatch and then also QRZ has that spot thing built into the logbook and i honestly cant figure out if theyre pulling from the same data or what. like sometimes ill see a spot on DXwatch and then check QRZ and its not there yet, or vice versa. also someone in my local club mentioned using a dedicated cluster client, i think they said DX4WIN or maybe it was something else, and connecting directly to a telnet cluster node. is that actually better than just using the web stuff? feels like a lot of setup for something i can just open in a browser. im probably missing something obvious here. running mostly HF, TS-590SG if that matters, just getting into chasing DX on 17 and 20m mostly.

honestly the General isnt that much harder than Tech, at least thats how i felt when i did it. the question pool is bigger yeah but a lot of it is stuff you kind of already know or can figure out with common sense if youve been doing any reading about ham radio at all. the math stuff is there but its not like calculus or anything, mostly ohms law and some decibel stuff and a few propagation questions. if you use HamStudy or the ARRL study guide you should be fine in a few weeks of casual studying. the one area that caught me off guard was the regulations section, there's more of it than on tech and some of the band plan stuff gets a little specific. as for skipping to Extra right away, i wouldnt bother unless you're really motivated. get the General first, get on HF, figure out what you actually want to do, then decide if Extra makes sense. Extra opens up a few more slices of the bands but for most people just starting HF, General privs are plenty to keep you busy for a long time.

so ive been trying to get Winlink going for a few weeks now and i think im close but something isnt clicking. Running Vara HF on a IC-7300 connected to a windows 10 laptop, got the audio levels sorted out (took forever btw) and i can see the waterfall activity when i tune around the Winlink frequencies. The problem is when i try to connect to an RMS gateway it just times out. Like i can see the CMS list in Winlink Express, i pick a gateway thats supposedly nearby and hit connect and it just sits there. I think im misunderstanding how the RMS gateways actually work. Is the gateway just a relay station that someone is running on their end, and it has to actually be active at that moment? Or is it more like a server thats always up? I assumed they were always listening but maybe not. Also do i need to do anything special with the message routing or does Winlink handle all that automatically once youre connected to any gateway? The other thing thats confusing me is the difference between a telnet connection and an RF connection in the software. I tested with telnet and got messages through fine so i know my account is set up right, its just the RF side thats not working. Any ideas would be appreciated, been poking at this for a while now.

Don't forget that the knowledge from studying for Extra gives you background to experiment with antennas and electronics with more confidence. It's not just about frequency access - you'll understand your equipment better. Extra operators get the choice portions of phone bands, usually toward the center where antennas have better SWR.

I'm planning my first remote station setup using an IC-7610 at a remote site about 50 miles away. I understand the basic CAT control part, but I'm confused about the audio routing for both receive and transmit audio over the internet connection. The audio setup is a bit trickier than just the rig control. My goal is to be able to install software for FT8, PSK31, RTTY, and even digital voice. What's the most reliable method for getting clean audio paths set up? Should I be looking at IP-Sound which provides low quality audio with low latency for use with remote control software, or are there better solutions?