Bob Wilson

the chart thing is basically the wrong approach, or at least thats what burned me when i tried the first time years ago. you end up counting dits and dahs in your head which makes you slow and it never really clicks as a sound. the Koch method basically starts you at full speed on just two characters, like K and M or whatever the program picks, and you dont move on until you can copy them at like 90% accuracy. the idea is your brain learns to hear the whole character as a sound pattern instead of counting individual elements. LC software is what a lot of people use, its called Just Learn Morse Code i think, or there's an app called Morse Toad that some guys at my club swear by. honestly the one that worked for me was just hamradiosolutions.net or something, ive slept since then. the key thing everyone will tell you and youll probably ignore at first is dont slow down the speed, use farnsworth timing instead where the characters come fast but theres longer space between them. took me maybe 6 months of like 15 minutes a day before i could have a basic QSO and i still wouldnt call myself fast but i can hold a ragchew on 40 meters no problem and yeah people absolutely use it, 40 and 80 meters especially, the CW portion is always busy. DX stations you cant touch on phone youll work easy on CW once you get decent at it

went two years ago and honestly it was pretty small but the guys running it are good people. heard they got a few more vendors signed up this time around. if you like digging through junk boxes its worth the trip, last time i found a working Kenwood HT for like 15 bucks buried under a pile of coax. no guarantees though lol

so i've been running an old TS-570 for probably eight or nine years now and kept telling myself i didnt need to upgrade, the 570 is a solid radio and i still believe that, but i finally caved and picked up an IC-7300 about three weeks ago and man i kind of wish i hadnt waited so long. the real time spectrum scope is the thing everyone talks about and yeah it lives up to the hype, but honestly what surprised me more was just how clean the receive audio is out of the box. didnt have to mess with the DSP settings much at all, just tweaked the NR a little on 40m during some noisy evenings and it was basically there. the touch screen took maybe a day to get used to but now it feels totally natural. one thing i wasnt expecting — the built in USB audio for digital modes is genuinely seamless. had WSJT-X running in about 20 minutes with zero fuss, no external interface needed. coming from fighting with a Signalink for years that alone felt like witchcraft. anyway not trying to sell anyone on it, just figured id share since i see this question come up a lot. happy to answer stuff if anyone has questions about coming from older kenwood gear specifically.

the writing thing is actually a real debate and honestly both guys at your club have a point depending on where youre at. when you're just starting out copying to paper can feel like a crutch but it also keeps your brain from panicking when you miss a letter because you just keep going. the problem is some people get stuck on it and can never copy in their head later. what worked for me was the Koch method, theres a free program called lcwo.net which walks you through it — you start with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you dont add a new one until you can copy the ones you have at like 90% accuracy. the key is learning the sound of each character as a whole sound, not counting dots and dashes. took me maybe 4 months of 20-30 minutes a day before i was making actual qsos on air and they were rough at first but thats fine. just dont try to learn all 26 letters before you ever hear any of them at speed, thats where a lot of people give up.

so ive been putting together a go-kit for our county ARES group and we have a deployment exercise this saturday and im trying to figure out the power situation. right now i have a 100ah LiFePO4 battery that i run my IC-7300 off of and it does fine for a few hours but we're talking about an 8+ hour activation and i honestly dont know if ill make it without recharging at some point. the club has a Honda EU2200i they're willing to lend out but hauling that thing plus fuel plus my antenna gear is already pushing it for my truck bed. my current antenna setup is a Chameleon MPAS Lite which i love for quick deployment but i've been thinking about adding a second feedpoint so i can run NVIS on 40 for local traffic and switch to a higher angle for the linked simplex stuff we do on VHF. anyone dealt with this trade-off before? like at what point does the generator actually make sense vs just bringing a second battery. i can charge the LiFePO4 from my truck alternator too but id rather not idle the truck for 4 hours if i can avoid it

yeah this is the classic problem and there's no perfect answer really. what most guys i know do is just run N1MM for contests, period, and then after the contest export the ADIF and import it into their main logger. Log4OM handles that import pretty cleanly in my experience, just watch out for the time format sometimes coming in weird depending on your N1MM export settings. for WSJT-X there's actually a UDP broadcast option where you can have it feed N1MM directly during a contest if you want credit for digital contacts in something like RTTY Roundup or whatever. never tried it myself but ive heard it works. outside of contests just keep using Log4OM as your main book, its honestly better for general logging anyway, the award tracking and LoTW integration is nicer than anything N1MM does for day to day stuff. Log4OM does have a contest mode but i tried it once for a county expedition and it felt kinda clunky compared to N1MM, maybe they've improved it since, im running an older version

been doing SO2R seriously for maybe 3 seasons now and i feel like im still leaving rate on the table. not asking about the basics, i know how to run and S&P at the same time, got the radio focus switching dialed in, interlocks are set up right. what im trying to figure out is more the strategic layer on top of that. like for example — when youre running a pileup on radio 1, how aggressive are you about pulling away to grab a multiplier on radio 2 that might not be there in 20 minutes. i keep second guessing myself. sometimes i stop a good run to snag a mult and then the run frequency gets picked up by someone else and ive lost both. but other times i wait and the mult disappears. theres got to be some rule of thumb people use or maybe just experience. also curious if anyone has thoughts on which contests are actually worth the SO2R overhead versus just focusing on single radio execution. CQWW and SS seem obvious but im not sure its worth the setup for like a state QSO party.

the messaging thing caught me off guard when i first tried it too. sent a message to a buddy and it just kind of... sat there. turns out his tracker was a DIY thing running KISS mode to a raspberry pi and nobody had configured the messaging side at all. so yeah, depends totally on what the other person is running. one thing worth knowing is that APRS messages do have an ACK system built in so if the other station is actually capable of receiving and acking you'll get a confirmation. if you never get an ACK after a few retries its pretty safe to assume they either didnt get it or their setup cant respond. i use APRSdroid on my phone sometimes as a backup and that works pretty reliably for messaging when im near a good igate.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and always kind of written off EME as something only the big guns with huge arrays could do, but ive been reading more about it lately and apparently weak signal digital modes have changed things a lot? like people are doing it with a single yagi now which still blows my mind my current setup is nothing special, i have a ic-9700 and ive been running satellite a bit so im already somewhat familiar with doppler correction and that whole thing. i do have a decent sized lot so putting up a bigger antenna isnt totally out of the question but i dont really know what minimum viable looks like for 2m EME these days also the timing thing confuses me, i know you need the moon to be above the horizon for both stations but how do people actually coordinate this, is there a dedicated cluster or net or something? i see mentions of dx.qsl.net and the ping jockey site but not sure if those are still active or what the current workflow is. any pointers appreciated, been lurking this topic for a while

i just use N1MM for everything honestly, even outside contests. i know thats not how most people use it but it handles FT8 via the WSJT-X UDP port and logs it automatically so i dont have to do any importing at all. the general logging stuff is a bit clunky compared to Log4OM i'll admit, the interface isnt exactly pretty, but having one log that never gets out of sync is worth the tradeoff for me. LoTW credits match up pretty cleanly because its all one source.

i was exactly where you are like 6 months ago lol. what helped me was just writing down the ones i actually heard during a session and looking those up rather than trying to memorize the whole list. QRM got drilled into me real fast because every time i tried to make a contact there was QRM ha. also QSB which means signal fading, youll hear that one a lot on 40m especially in the evenings. dont stress about learning them all at once just pick them up as you go

So ive been messing around with remote station control for about a year now and started out just using RemoteHams because it seemed like the easiest entry point. Got it working pretty well with my IC-7300 out at my parents place about 40 miles away, the latency is manageable for SSB but CW is kinda rough sometimes depending on what the internet is doing out there. Anyway the reason im posting is I came across some stuff about people building their own systems using things like flrig plus some kind of VoIP layer and maybe a rasberry pi handling the CAT control, and I'm wondering if anyone has actually gone through both approaches and has opinions. The RemoteHams client software is fine but it feels like I'm kind of at the mercy of their servers for the connection brokering, which has bit me a couple times when their stuff was down and I needed to get on for a net. Also separate question — does anyone have experience with the SDR side of RemoteHams? Like the remote SDR panadapter thing. I see some stations have that set up and it looks pretty slick but I dont know how much extra overhead it puts on the connection. My parents place only has like 15mbps down which is fine for voice but I dont want to saturate it.

oh man don't beat yourself up, literally everyone does this at least once. the tail end stepping thing is super common especially on repeaters because there's that delay before the squelch tail drops and new people don't always know to wait for it. what you want to do is wait until you hear the repeater's courtesy tone — that little beep after someone unkeys — before you start talking. if your repeater has one, that's basically its way of saying "ok your turn." some nets also have the net control give a specific cue before each station, so just listen for your callsign or a "go ahead" before you transmit. as for identifying, on most voice nets you just say your callsign at the start and end of each transmission, pretty simple. the main thing is just slow down, wait a half second after that courtesy tone, and you'll be fine. the fact that you checked in at all is the hard part honestly, most new hams sit on nets for months before they ever actually check in.

oh man i was in the exact same spot not that long ago. one thing that helped me was just keeping a little notepad next to the radio and writing down anything i didnt recognize and looking it up after the QSO. also QRN vs QRM tripped me up for the longest time, i kept mixing them up. the N is natural noise like lightning crashes and the M is man made, once i remembered that it stuck. also dont sleep on QRP, thats low power operation and youll see it everywhere especially on digital modes. some guys are super proud of their QRP setups haha

ran almost this exact setup for about a year, IC-7610 remote with a Pi running spyserver for the SDR piece. honestly the separate connection approach the other guy mentioned is the right call. i tried to be clever and do it all through one tunnel and it was just flaky enough to be annoying, never fully broken just never fully right either the allstar thing i never did myself but a guy in my club has it running alongside his remote HF setup and he says it works fine as long as you QoS the HF control traffic. apparently allstar is pretty tolerant of a little jitter but the rig control stuff absolutely is not so you prioritize that and let allstar take whatever is left over

So I finally did my first activation on Saturday, went up to a local summit here in the Cascades, W7W/LC-073 I think it is, maybe I wrote it down wrong. Anyway I lugged my KX2 and a wire antenna up there, took me about 2 hours to hike in and I was totally wrecked by the time I got to the activation zone. Set up a linked dipole between two trees which was kind of a mess honestly because the terrain wasnt exactly cooperating. I managed to get 4 contacts on 20m SSB before the weather turned and I had to pack up fast. I know you need at least 4 QSOs to qualify the summit so I think I made it? But I'm not sure if I logged everything right in SOTA Spotter or if I even need to use that. I submitted my log to the database already so hopefully thats fine. Also one of my contacts was another activator on a different summit at the same time, does that still count as a regular QSO or is that something special? I've seen people mention S2S but I wasn't sure if it changes whether the contact counts toward the 4 required. Overall it was pretty great even though I was exhausted and nearly left my paddle on a rock. Going to try another one next month if the weather holds.

ok so ive been interested in ham radio for probably two years now and keep putting it off but i finally want to just do it and get my technician license. problem is i have no idea where to actually start. like i googled it and got a million different things and now im more confused than before. someone mentioned hamstudy.org and someone else said to get a gordon west book and i dont know which way to go or if i even need to buy anything. also how hard is the test actually, im not great at math and i heard theres some electrical stuff on it. i work full time so i cant really do a class but i can study on my own if i know what im doing. any advice would be genuinely appreciated

so i finally worked up the nerve to actually participate in CQ WW SSB last weekend instead of just listening to it like i've done the past two years. been licensed about 18 months, have a modest setup, IC-7300 into a dipole in the attic (yeah i know, i know) and i figured how bad could it be right well. pretty bad but also kind of amazing? like i knew the big guns would be running hundreds of contacts an hour but i wasn't really prepared for how fast everything moves. i'd tune to a frequency and before i could even get my call sign out someone else would answer the DX station and they'd already be in QSO. my timing was just completely off for the first few hours. ended up with 47 contacts over the whole weekend which i know is nothing but i worked Japan, Brazil, and a couple European stations which felt incredible given im running like 100 watts into an attic dipole. logged it all in N1MM which i'd never used before and that was its own adventure trying to figure out the exchange format on the fly. anyway just wanted to share because i keep seeing people say contests are intimidating and yeah they are but also just do it. already looking at ARRL November Sweepstakes as my next one since the exchange seems a bit more manageable than CQ WW.

okay so i got my general a few months ago and ive been trying to figure out the 40 meter band but honestly the more i read about it the more confused i get. like i understand there are frequency allocations from the FCC but then theres also the ARRL band plan which seems different? and people keep talking about band edges like its dangerous to get too close but nobody really explains why i was trying to get on SSB last weekend and someone told me i was too low in the band, i thought 7.150 was fine but apparently thats not where people hang out anymore or something? i dont know if i was causing interference or just in the wrong spot. my radio was showing the right frequency i think basically just trying to figure out where its actually okay to operate and what the difference is between the legal limit and where people actually use

FT4 is kind of the middle ground nobody talks about enough — faster than FT8, slightly weaker signal floor but you can actually run it during a contest sprint and it doesnt feel totally robotic. i used it during the ARRL Digital last year and once you get the timing down it moves pretty quick. still no ragchewing obviously but at least the pace feels less like watching paint dry compared to the 15 second FT8 cycles. havent tried JS8Call but might mess with it this winter when 40m opens up more. sounds like the kind of thing that rewards patience which i dont always have lol

so ive been noticing the last couple weeks that 17m and 20m have been kind of all over the place. some days i can work europe no problem around 1400-1500 local and then the next day at the same time theres nothing, like the band just isnt there. checked pskreporter and there are signals showing up but im not hearing them at all on my end. solar flux has been bouncing around a lot too, saw it up around 180 something last week then it dropped back down. i know higher SFI is generally better but ive had good 10m openings on days where the flux wasnt even that impressive so i dont fully understand how it all works together. is there a better resource than just checking the raw SFI number? feels like im missing something when im trying to predict whether its worth setting up for a DX session. running 100w into a trapped vertical if that matters, been licensed about 2 years now

same boat as you were like a year ago so maybe my experience helps. i just worked everything that looked interesting on FT8 and PSK reporter and after about 6 months i checked my LoTW totals and realized i was already at like 67 entities without trying. that was when i caught the bug bad lol. WAS took me longer actually because some states just dont show up that much on FT8 — ND and MT were my last two and i had to actually go looking for them on the DX clusters instead of just calling CQ. one thing i wish someone told me earlier is to submit for the WAS award as soon as you hit 50 confirmed because theres something about actually having the certificate that makes the whole thing feel real and keeps you motivated for the next goal

just upgraded myself like 6 weeks ago so pretty fresh on this. the reactance and impedance stuff i just kind of brute forced through memorization tbh, i dont think i actually understand it deeply but i know enough to get the right answer on the test lol. took me maybe 2.5 weeks of studying on and off. havent had a chance to get on HF yet because im still figuring out my antenna situation, apartment living is rough. but yeah from what everyone tells me 40m is the place to start, might try a random wire out the window or something

Ham Radio Prep makes it super easy - some people prepare in less than 5 hours using their video lessons and interactive games! The explanations really help you understand the theory, not just memorize.

yeah i do this all the time honestly, usually with coffee around 9 or 10pm. 40m at night feels different somehow, like the band has a personality. i picked up a guy last week who was talking to someone in europe about fixing up an old tube rig and i just sat there listening for like half an hour. never keyed up. sometimes thats the best part of the hobby for me honestly