David Park

yeah the doppler thing on linear transponders catches everyone at first. gpredict (and most software) will correct your downlink frequency automatically but you have to manually tune your uplink to compensate as the pass progresses - or at least thats how most people set it up. what you really want to do is tune your uplink until YOU sound clear to yourself on the downlink, not try to hit a fixed frequency. the sat doesnt care what uplink freq you use within the passband, it just translates the whole chunk up or down. so lock your receiver on a clear spot and adjust transmit until your signal comes back sounding right, then talk to people from there. also FO-29 has been having some power issues lately and the transponder is only on part of the time, might want to check the amsat status pages before assuming its your setup. AO-73 should be more reliable for practicing this stuff.

so ive been licensed since spring and just got my HF privileges sorted out, running a modest setup — IC-7300 into a wire dipole up about 30 feet, nothing fancy. everybody keeps telling me i need to do contests but honestly i dont even know where to start. like there's CQ WW coming up and everyone in the club acts like its the superbowl of ham radio which maybe it is? but i tried to read the rules and got kind of overwhelmed. then theres ARRL Field Day which i guess already happened this year but i missed it completely because i didnt really know what it was until after. someone also mentioned SOTA but i cant tell if thats a contest or just a thing people do on mountaintops. anyway my actual question is just like, for someone totally new to operating, whats a reasonable way to dip a toe in without embarrassing myself on the air or screwing up someone's run frequency. i listen to the 20m pileups during these events and it sounds like pure chaos to me still. is there like a beginner friendly contest or should i just jump into one of the big ones and see what happens

our club carpools every year, we usually grab breakfast nearby first and then hit the swap meet when it opens. if you want to tag along with us let me know, we have a couple extra seats this time. also the talks are actually decent this year from what i saw on the schedule, theres one on digital modes that im curious about

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general) and just started getting into chasing DX a bit more seriously. a buddy at my club told me to use dxwatch for cluster spots and qrz to look up the stations before i call them. makes sense i guess but im wondering if there's a better workflow or if people use other apps alongside these. right now im basically keeping two browser tabs open and jumping back and forth which feels kinda clunky. i tried the clublog ios app for a bit but honestly didnt stick with it. someone mentioned pskreporter too but that seems more for ft8 monitoring than actual spotting? not totally sure. also on dxwatch — does the filter actually work well for you guys? im trying to filter down to just 20m and 17m but sometimes spots for other bands still slip through, or maybe im just misreading the timestamps and they're old spots. hard to tell sometimes. anyway just curious what other people are doing, especially if youre running a mostly HF setup and chasing entities on the cheaper end of the hobby without a full station automation thing going on

so ive been getting more into DX chasing lately and honestly the cluster spotting thing has been kind of overwhelming to figure out. i know about DXwatch and i use it on my laptop but i want something i can just glance at while im sitting at the radio without switching windows constantly. someone at the club mentioned there are apps that tie into the cluster network but i dont really know what im looking for. been using QRZ pretty heavily for callsign lookups and their logbook which i actually really like, but i feel like im missing out on real-time spots. like today there was apparently a really rare one on 17m and i totally missed it because i wasnt watching anything. my buddy texted me after the fact which was frustrating lol. anyway just wondering what other people are running on their phones or tablets for this kind of thing, android preferably but curious about all options really.

I passed my General last spring after having my tech for like three years and barely using it. The exam felt harder than the tech for sure but not impossible. The math questions were the ones that got me, stuff like calculating resonant frequency and all that. I just kind of learned the formulas well enough to punch them in and moved on, didn't try to deeply understand every single thing. One thing I'll say is once I got on 40 meters with just a wire in my backyard I was kind of hooked immediately. Made a contact in Germany the second week on like 100 watts. So yeah the upgrade is worth it if you have any interest in HF at all.

is the fan spinning up normally when this happens? i ask because i had a weird one on a friends rig where the fan header had a cold solder joint and the fan wasnt getting full voltage, so it was barely moving air. everything looked fine externally but the finals were just cooking. the radio would eventually fault out and once it cooled down it was fine again which sounds kind of like what your describing. easy thing to rule out before you start pulling transistors.

what's the terrain like between you and the repeater? that matters way more than people give it credit for. i went through the exact same decision last spring and ended up just going higher with the collinear first — got the mast up to about 35 feet and the difference was noticeable enough that i didnt bother with the yagi. granted my path is pretty clean. if you've got a ridge or buildings in the way a yagi probably wont save you either unless you can get above the obstruction.

oh man that recovery thing after missing a letter drove me absolutely crazy for like a year. the trick that actually helped me was just... letting it go. sounds dumb but i used to freeze up when i missed something and then id miss the next 5 characters panicking. eventually i just trained myself to drop it and move on and my overall copy actually went up because of it. and yes the farnsworth spacing is real and it works, at least it did for me. i ran characters at like 18-20wpm character speed with extra spacing between them so i wasnt using that slow dit-dah rhythm that gets burned into your head at 5wpm. thats the thing people dont always say — if you learn your characters at 5wpm char speed you end up counting dits and dahs instead of hearing the sound as a whole character, and then when you speed up it all falls apart because you cant count fast enough anymore. Farnsworth basically forces your brain to hear the character as a shape rather than individual elements. 30 minutes a day is fine honestly, consistency beats marathon sessions. just keep showing up.

That's awesome she's studying! I tell new hams to think of K-index like a vibration meter - low numbers (0-3) mean steady, smooth propagation, while high numbers (4+) mean the ionosphere is "shaking" and signals get scattered. Lower K = steadier signals.

What are the most critical pronunciation errors new hams make with NATO phonetics that cause confusion on-air? I've noticed some letters sound similar even when using proper phonetic words. Looking for specific examples of what to watch out for and tips for speaking clearly during weak signal conditions or when working DX stations.

im kind of in the same boat actually so watching this thread. im at about 11wpm right now and already dreading hitting that plateau everyone talks about. one thing i read somewhere was to try copying without writing anything down, just listen and try to retain words in your head, supposed to help break the habit of decoding letter by letter. havent tried it long enough to know if it works tbh.

im maybe not the best person to answer the contesting part but i did set up something similar last year for a buddy who has a killer antenna farm on his property but lives in an HOA now. we ended up going with a raspberry pi running the whole shack remotely, rig control through hamlib, and just a regular audio over IP thing for TX monitoring. for RX he runs spyserver on a separate little box and just pulls that into SDR-Console on his end. its not elegant but it works and he said the first time he worked JA on 40m from his living room he nearly fell out of his chair. the RemoteHams ecosystem is fine for casual stuff i think but yeah if you care about latency or audio fidelity youll probably end up wanting more control over your own stack eventually

The basic methods are Koch's method and Farnsworth timing. I'd add: practice sending too! Most people find sending easier than receiving - use tools like CW Checker or VBand to practice with immediate feedback. Don't wait until perfect - get on the air early for real experience. The community is very patient with new CW ops.

so ive been running my 7300 for about two years now and generally happy with it but i kept reading about the front end being a little soft on 40m especially when the band is crowded, so i went ahead and added an outboard preselector — not really a mod inside the radio itself just a bandpass filter setup i built from a design i found on qrz. that part went fine actually. but then i got a little ambitious and started looking at the LNA mod some guys do where you swap out the input section stuff to improve dynamic range. i found a writeup on a japanese site (translated it with google which was... interesting) and went in with a soldering iron. the work looks clean under magnification but now im noticing the noise floor seems slightly higher on 80m than before and im not sure if thats real or if im just paranoid because i touched something i shouldnt have. anyone done similar mods to theirs and have baseline numbers to compare against? i dont have an SDR to run proper measurements and im mostly going by ear which i know is not ideal. radio otherwise works fine, all bands, no weird spurs that i can hear.

Coaxial-sleeve dipoles were originally VHF/UHF solutions to avoid radials. Haven't heard of others using this concept on HF, but your experimental approach is fascinating. The physics should work fine - interested to hear long-term performance reports.

so ive been going to this one for like 4 years now and its usually pretty decent, not huge but the swap tables are worth showing up early for. last year i grabbed a pretty clean TS-430 for basically nothing from some older guy cleaning out his shack. wondering if anyone else from around here is planning on making the trip, maybe we could carpool or at least grab lunch after or something. also does anyone know if the ARRL forum thing they were doing last time is happening again? i kind of want to ask someone about my General upgrade situation in person

yeah the chart method is definitely the wrong way to go about it, youre basically setting yourself up to always be translating instead of just hearing letters. the thing that worked for me and a lot of people is the Koch method, theres a free program called LCWO dot net that does it online and its pretty well structured. you start with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you dont move on until you can copy them at 90% or whatever threshold you set. the idea is your brain learns the sound of the letter not the dots and dashes. also look up the Farnsworth method, its related, basically you send characters fast but space them out so you have time to think without slowing down the actual character sound. if you learn at 5wpm your brain gets used to slow dits and dahs and then speeding up later is brutal. realistically for a basic QSO, if you practice like 20-30 minutes a day consistently, most people say somewhere between 3 and 6 months to feel comfortable enough for a slow ragchew. some people faster some slower, just depends. dont give up after a week like i almost did

47 countries in 4 hours on a first solo effort is actually pretty decent, don't sell yourself short. the learning curve with contesting is real and most of it is just seat time honestly. you start to learn when to run vs when to search and pounce, when to move bands, how to deal with qrm without losing your mind. antennas matter a lot, yeah, but at 100w you can still have a ton of fun and do well in your category. a decent dipole at reasonable height will get you a long way in CQ WW because the dx is actively hunting for contacts too, they want you as much as you want them during a contest. where it really starts to bite you is the multipliers you just cant hear at all, stuff thats in the noise that a station with a yagi would pull out easy. on the SOTA and contesting combo - people do it but its kind of apples and oranges. SOTA activators can get spotted and chasers will come to them but running a pile in the middle of a summit activation while also trying to work contest contacts is a lot. i know a few guys who do winter field day from summits and kinda blend it but CQ WW on a hilltop with a handheld radio is not gonna go well for your score haha. keep them separate for now i'd say

so i just got my technician license like two months ago and ive been listening around on HF a bit (my uncle lets me use his rig sometimes) and i keep hearing people use all these weird codes, like QSL and QRM and QTH and stuff. i know QSL has something to do with confirming a contact because ive seen the cards but thats about it. is there like a master list somewhere or do people just kind of pick these up over time? also some guys on the repeater use abbreviations that arent even Q codes, like they say 73 at the end of everything and someone said OM to me which i guess means old man?? anyway just trying to figure out how to not sound completely clueless when i get on the air

yeah the frequency card thing is such a classic problem lol. we solved that by just taping a laminated copy to the inside lid of the main go kit case. still gets ignored sometimes but at least its findable now. im kind of new to all this ARES stuff, only joined the group earlier this year, and the tabletop exercises have been the most useful thing for me by far. reading the EOP is one thing but actually running through a scenario where someone is throwing curveballs at you is totally different. i had no idea how much i didnt know until the first one we did.

I went through basically this same thing last year. one thing that bit me was assuming my battery was fine because I charged it before I packed the kit and then didn't check it for four months. LiFePO4 holds pretty well but still, I showed up to a drill with like 60% capacity and was kind of embarrassed. now i have a recurring phone reminder every six weeks just to top it off and do a quick radio check. also dont overlook the boring stuff like a headlamp, a couple granola bars if you might be somewhere a while, and some way to charge your phone. I use a small USB power bank for the phone stuff separate from the radio battery so they dont compete. and zip ties, always more zip ties than you think you need

same boat as you basically, im at like 87 confirmed on LoTW right now and been chasing for about 18 months. one thing i wish someone told me earlier is to actually check the DXCC entity list on the ARRL site before you get too excited about a contact — some places you think would count as separate entities dont, and some weird tiny islands you'd never guess DO count. caught me off guard a few times. also get on the DX clusters and just watch for a while before you start calling. you learn a lot about how pileups work and when to call and when you're just wasting your time. i wasted so many calls early on not realizing the DX station was listening up 5 or whatever

welcome to the hobby, dont stress too much about this decision honestly. the UV-5R gets a bad rap from some folks but for hitting local repeaters as a new ham its totally fine. ive handed them to family members for emergency comms and they work. the programming can be a bit quirky and you'll probably want to use CHIRP software to load your local repeaters instead of trying to do it manually from the keypad, that part is genuinely a pain. that said if you can stretch to like $120-130 range the Yaesu FT-65 or even the older FT-60 are noticeably better built and the receiver is cleaner — you'll notice less interference and the audio is just louder and clearer. for everyday repeater use the difference might not matter much but you'd probably keep a Yaesu for 10+ years and the Baofeng might become a drawer radio after a year or two. either way dual band is definitely worth it, 70cm opens up a lot of repeaters especially in more urban areas so dont skip that.

ok so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been listening to the local 2m repeater for a while now trying to get a feel for things before i key up. i understand the basic concept of the repeater rebroadcasting your signal but im confused about a few things. first the CTCSS tone thing — my radio came preprogrammed with some tones but i dont really understand if i need to match the tone the repeater uses or if its something else entirely. i set it to 100hz because someone on youtube said that was common but i honestly have no idea if thats right for my local repeater or if thats even how it works. second thing is the etiquette part. ive been listening for like 2 weeks and sometimes the repeater is totally silent for hours then someone has a whole conversation and then silence again. is there like a right time to just say hi and introduce myself or do i need to wait for a break in something? i did try to key up once and just said my callsign but nobody came back to me. was that wrong or did i just catch a bad time? sorry if these are dumb questions, everyone on here seems to know way more than me