David Davis41

30 feet is kind of low for a 40m dipole to be honest but its still probably going to beat a vertical with a questionable ground system. do you know how many radials you have down? that makes a huge difference with the 4BTV, like night and day difference. i put 16 down under mine and it woke up a lot.

the eu2200i is the right call for 48 hours with that load, full stop. solar and battery sounds great on paper but I've seen it fall apart on cloudy days or when someone forgets to watch state of charge and suddenly the whole station goes down at 2am. generator gives you predictable runtime, you know exactly how much fuel you need, and you can throttle down or up as needed. we ran a similar setup at a RACES activation last fall and having a dedicated fuel rotation schedule was honestly more important than the hardware itself. on the antenna side, ive been using a homebrewed fan dipole for about three years now in field conditions and yeah the feedline thing is real, especially if people are walking around camp. I switched to a 4:1 current balun at the feedpoint and run a single piece of LMR-400 back to the station and that helped a lot with common mode noise. the linked dipole is probably easier to deploy quickly if time matters but the fan dipole once it's up is just done, nothing to mess with between bands which i like during an actual activation when you're busy.

so after about three weeks of messing around i finally got my FT-7900 mounted in the truck and it's actually working pretty well. ran the power cables direct to the battery with an inline fuse like everyone said to do and the RF noise from the engine is basically gone now. had a terrible alternator whine before that was driving me nuts. the antenna is a NMO mount i drilled through the roof which was honestly terrifying but it came out clean. running a Larsen 2/70 on it right now. hitting the local repeater fine but i'm maybe 15 miles out and sometimes the audio is a little rough, not sure if thats just normal or if i should be looking at something. the radio is putting out 50w on high. also not sure where to point the squelch. i have it maybe 3/4 of the way up and wondering if thats too high or too low. im pretty new to all this, got my tech in march so still figuring stuff out. any thoughts appreciated

I started with lead-acid batteries and regretted it after my first deployment - they're just too heavy when you're hiking to a remote site. The FT-891 is a solid choice. Don't forget to budget for good coax and connectors too!

Just picked up an IC-705 and planning to take it up some local summits. Love the idea of having HF through 70cm coverage in one compact package, but I'm struggling with the antenna tuner situation. I know the biggest weakness of the IC-705 is the lack of an internal antenna tuner for the HF bands, so I'm looking at external options. The LDG Z-817 seems popular but adds weight and complexity. Anyone running EFHW antennas successfully without a tuner? What bands are you getting good SWR on?

general is definitely a step up from tech but its not as bad as people make it out to be. theres more propagation stuff, some antenna theory, a bit more on operating practices for HF. the math isnt crazy, mostly just variations on the same ohms law and power formulas you already saw. if you can grind through the question pool same way you did for tech youll probably be fine, most people pass it without understanding every single concept deeply and thats just the reality of how these exams work. as for privileges, once you pass the VE session they submit your info to the FCC and it usually shows up in the ULS database within a day or two, sometimes faster. technically you're supposed to wait until its in the system before operating on the new bands but a lot of people print out their CSCE from the exam session and call it good. i wouldnt stress too much about the timing part. HF is a whole different world compared to repeaters, you'll enjoy it. just be prepared for it to be kind of humbling at first when you cant figure out why nobody can hear you

so ive been meaning to do this for probably two years now and after watching a pretty nasty storm roll through our county last month without being able to do much of anything useful, i finally decided to stop procrastinating and actually build a proper go-kit. right now ive got a Yaesu FT-857D that i was planning to use as the main rig, a 40ah LiFePO4 battery from a local vendor, and one of those cheap anderson powerpole distribution blocks. threw it all in a pelican knockoff case i found on amazon. the thing is i keep reading different opinions on what actually needs to be in one of these and it gets overwhelming fast. some people are like you need a full satellite setup and others are saying just a handheld and a roll of wire is fine. im trying to hit a middle ground where im actually useful at a served agency or EOC but not lugging around 60 pounds of gear either. so far besides the radio and battery i have a 12v to 120v inverter (small one, maybe 300w), a logbook, some coax adapters, and a basic antenna kit with a linked dipole. am i missing something obvious? i feel like there is something i keep forgetting every time i think about this but cant put my finger on it.

so i just got my general last spring and ive been on HF for maybe 6 months now mostly just ragchewing on 40m and doing some SOTA stuff on my hikes. a buddy at my club keeps telling me i need to try CQ WW this october and i honestly dont really know what to expect. like i understand the basic idea, contacts and zones and multipliers, but ive never actually sat down for a full contest before. is it completely overwhelming for a first timer or is it kind of fun even if you're not super competitive about it? i dont have a great station, just a modest dipole and a 100w rig, wondering if its even worth trying or if ill just be calling into the void all weekend also is there much difference between doing CQ WW SSB vs the CW one in terms of difficulty for someone who's still pretty slow on code

so ive been messing around with remote station control for about six months now and finally got a decent setup going with a K3 at my parents place out in the country (way better noise floor than my suburban QTH) and im linking it back to my home PC using RemoteHams. works pretty well most of the time but im starting to wonder if the SDR remote side of things is worth digging into more. right now im just using the standard RRC-1258 microbit pair and it's fine for voice but when i try to do any digital modes the latency kind of kills me. not terrible but enough that fldigi gets a little weird sometimes. someone mentioned the SDR remote feature basically streams the raw IQ data back which would theoretically be a lot more flexible for digital work. anyone actually done this? feels like it could be a rabbit hole. also curious if anyone is using the internet linking side for things like echolink or IRLP integration with their remote setup. seems like you could tie a lot of this together but the documentation on RemoteHams is honestly not great and their forum feels kind of dead.

so we finally pulled off a county-wide simulated emergency exercise last Saturday and honestly it went better than I expected but also revealed some stuff we really need to work on. The scenario was a multi-day flood event where all normal comms infrastructure was assumed down — cell towers, internet, the whole thing. We had net control set up at the EOC, three relay stations out in the field, and something like 14 operators scattered across the county checking in and passing traffic. The good stuff first — our net control operator (shoutout to Dale, K9DPF) kept things moving really well even when we started throwing curveballs at him like a simulated repeater failure mid-exercise. Switching to simplex was a bit bumpy but we got there. Passed probably 40-something ICS 213 forms over the air which felt like good practice. Where things fell apart was honestly the message handling. We had two or three operators who weren't super comfortable with formal traffic format and it slowed everything way down. One guy was just reading his radiogram header out of order which caused confusion on the receiving end. And we had a situation where a relay station missed a handoff completely and a message just kind of disappeared for like 20 minutes before someone noticed. My question for folks who've done a lot of these — how do you handle operator training for message handling without making it feel like homework? We're a pretty volunteer-heavy group and I dont want people to tune out. Thinking about doing shorter focused drills but wondering what's actually worked for other groups.

Great timing for Field Day prep! Mondays at 8 – 9 PM is the New England DMR Net on New England Wide TG (3181). Good discussion of Tech Topics and New England Amateur Radio Events. They usually announce special events on the regional nets if you want to stay updated.

went through the same thing last spring. tech for like 3 years doing mostly simplex and some APRS stuff then finally sat down and did the general pool. took me maybe two and a half weeks of hamstudy before i was consistently hitting 85%+ on the practice tests and i just went for it. passed with only two wrong which surprised me honestly. the HF thing is so worth it by the way. got on 40m like two days after my upgrade showed up in the database and worked a station in Argentina on my very first try with just a wire dipole in the backyard. kind of blew my mind after two years of talking to the same 10 guys on the local repeater.

The ARRL's decision to end funding for the bureaus at the end of this year has a lot of hams talking. However, this support ended on December 31, 2024. It seems that the ARRL Board of Directors chose this budget-cutting move in light of the increasing use of electronic QSLs. How is this affecting your QSL operations? I use the bureau system regularly and wondering if the fee increases will push more people to electronic-only QSLing. What are you folks seeing in terms of response rates between paper, LoTW, and eQSL these days?

had the exact same thing in my Silverado when i first put my 2320 in. drove me nuts for like a month lol. ended up being the ground like the other guy said but i also had to move where my coax was routed because it was running too close to some of the truck's wiring harness and picking up noise that way too. took a while to sort out but its dead quiet now. mag mounts on modern trucks can be a pain because the roof isnt always making great contact through the paint

Think of it like a mirror - the transponder inverts everything. The frequency ordering is reversed, and USB/LSB are swapped. For AO-73, use this formula: Downlink = 581.090 - Uplink. So 435.140 uplink = 145.950 downlink.

I actually had a pretty decent run on 40 Tuesday night, worked a few guys in Canada and one station down in Florida which was cool for me since im in Ohio. Maybe try later in the evening like 9 or 10pm local, thats when I usually start hearing more. Also what direction is your dipole oriented? that matters more than people think

yeah the jump from RTL to RSP1B on HF is pretty significant, not gonna sugarcoat it. the direct sampling hack on the v3 is clever but it really is just a hack — you're working around hardware that was never designed for those freqs. the RSP1B has actual front end filtering and the ADC is way better so your dynamic range goes from like 8 bits effective to something actually useful. i noticed right away on 40m that the broadcast splatter was manageable instead of just wrecking everything. SDRuno takes some getting used to if you're coming from SDR# but once you get the SP panels set up it's actually pretty good. one thing though — if you're going HackRF route that's a transmit-capable device and the receive specs are honestly not as good as the RSP for pure listening. HackRF trades sensitivity for that wide tuning range and TX capability. depends what you want to do with it really.

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i keep hearing everyone talk about CW and how great it is and i finally decided i want to learn it. problem is i have no idea where to actually start. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on paper or is there a better way to go about it? i downloaded like 3 different apps and they all seem to do different things and i honestly dont know which one is even worth sticking with. also someone in my local club told me to learn at a higher speed from the start and not to bother with slow code, is that actually true? seems counterintuitive to me but i dont want to develop bad habits either. any advice would be appreciated, even just pointing me in the right direction would help at this point

Your SWR of 1.8-2.0:1 on 80m is normal depending on surroundings and antenna height. Try trimming proportionally - if you cut 6 inches off the long leg, only cut 3 inches off the short leg to maintain the proper ratio.

that's really cool you got a real activation so early on. a lot of people go years without getting called up for anything beyond a SET. the ICS stuff clicks way better once youve actually used it under some pressure, at least thats how it was for me. i remember my first real one i kept wanting to just go around the net control and call direct because it felt faster — had to remind myself thats not how it works and theres a reason for the structure. the 700 and 800 courses are worth doing too if you havent already, some counties actually require them before you can staff the EOC at all. glad it went well and that you had somebody nearby to keep you on track, thats how it should work.