David Park

the node question honestly doesnt matter much for casual use, theyre all pulling from the same aggregated data pretty much. if you're using something like Log4OM or even WSJT-X you can plug in a telnet address directly and filter right there in the software which is way cleaner than the web interface. for DXwatch specifically yeah there's a band filter dropdown, its kind of small and easy to miss, top right area of the cluster view i think. took me forever to notice it too.
the real tip i'd give you is to also look at the dx summit site — dxsummit.fi — which lets you filter by band AND by spotter continent so you can see who's actually being heard from your part of the world rather than wading through spots from JA stations hearing things you'll never reach. makes a huge difference.

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i keep going back and forth on this. like sometimes i hear people on 2m just saying letters normally when they give their callsign and other times everyone is doing the full NATO thing. is there a rule about when you have to use phonetics or is it just kind of a preference thing? i was on a local repeater last week and someone corrected me for NOT using phonetics and i felt kind of dumb but then the next day i heard a bunch of guys just rattling off callsigns with regular letters and nobody said anything. im confused about when its actually required vs just good practice

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.

i was in the exact same spot about 8 months ago and ended up going with the baofeng uv-k5 which is a slightly newer one and i think it was like 30 bucks. its been fine for hitting repeaters, i got chirp set up after watching a youtube video and had all my local ones programmed in an afternoon. no complaints really for what i paid. flat area should be fine, line of sight matters more than anything and most repeaters are up on towers or hills anyway so youll probably reach more than you think with even 4-5 watts

Pro tip: Listen to the repeater during commute hours (morning/evening) when it's most active. Jump in with "KC1XYZ monitoring" when there's a lull in conversation. Local hams love helping new folks and will probably ask about your setup and how long you've been licensed. You've got this!

If a station exhibited this type of signal over the course of a contest or generated complaints from participants, it could be subject to disqualification. You're borderline but not terrible. Try reducing COMP to level 1 or 2 and remeasure. The SM-30 is a good mic for that rig.

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

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.

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

yeah 10m has been like that all season honestly, dont get too frustrated by it. what youre describing with the Japan contact and then the band dying is actually pretty classic for sporadic-E combined with F2 propagation at this point in the cycle. they can stack sometimes and give you these incredible short windows that feel almost random.
the solar flux thing is real though -- anything above like 150 and 10m starts getting interesting, but the K-index matters just as much if not more. if the K-index spikes above 4 or 5 after a CME, all bets are off and even a high flux day can be garbage for DX. i usually check both before i sit down for a session. DXmaps.com is also really useful for seeing in real time where the openings actually are instead of just guessing from the indices.
that qrp Japan contact is seriously impressive by the way, save that one in your log and brag about it a little, you earned it.

yeah what the previous guy said about bidirectional igating is the thing. i ran into this exact same issue when i set up my first igate. most igates running aprx or even some direwolf configs are only listening and not gating back down. look at aprs.fi and find the igates near you, click on them and see if it says RF-only or bidirectional. if all your local ones are RF-only then messages from the internet side are just never gonna make it back to RF and to whoever your trying to reach. its kind of a frustrating gap in APRS infrastructure honestly, not enough people running full bidirectional igates.

yeah 12 miles on 2m shouldnt be the issue at all, sounds like a TNC config thing like the other guy said. one thing i dont see mentioned - are you running split frequencies or simplex? some of those local RMS nodes are on odd splits and if your offset is even slightly wrong you might be getting into the gateway but its not quite hearing you clean enough to hold the session together the whole way through. just worth double checking the exact freq and offset in Winlink Express matches what the RMS is actually on, the Winlink maps arent always 100% current on the technical details.

yeah wind is the enemy out there, i've had activations where i just gave up on a linked dipole entirely and went with a random wire and a 9:1 unun just to get something in the air fast. not as efficient but when its 40 degrees and gusting you just wanna get your 4 contacts and get off the hill. 6 contacts is solid for a first activation honestly, some people struggle to get to 4. what summit did you do?

I'm comparing two portable setups for SOTA activations and would like some input from operators with field experience. Currently using a quarter-wave vertical with four radials on 20 meters, but considering switching to a vertical dipole (center-fed) to eliminate ground plane requirements. The vertical GP has been solid, but laying radials on rocky summits is a pain. Has anyone done A/B comparisons between these two configurations at similar heights? I'm particularly interested in real-world performance differences and setup time considerations.

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.