Dave Parker

yeah the net control handoff thing is huge and I think almost every group underestimates it until they actually try it live. we ran into the exact same thing a couple years back during a SET exercise. everybody kind of assumes there's always going to be someone experienced at the helm and then when that person isn't available suddenly nobody wants to step up or they step up but dont really know the standard procedures well enough to keep traffic moving smoothly. what helped our group was just making net control rotation a regular thing during our weekly nets, not just for emergencies. even if its a slow Tuesday night with five check-ins, we'd have a different person run it each time. took maybe six months before it started feeling natural for more people. also the dead battery thing is a perennial problem honestly, we eventually made a rule that if you show up to a drill with gear that isnt ready to go youre basically just an observer that day, which sounds harsh but it got people taking the prep part more seriously. sounds like you got a lot of good data out of it though, the exercises that go a little sideways teach you way more than the ones where everything goes perfectly.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and everyone keeps telling me i need to try a contest but honestly the whole thing feels kind of overwhelming. like i was looking at the CQ WW calendar and there's the SSB leg and the CW leg and i dont even know which one to attempt first. im running a pretty modest setup, just a Yaesu FT-891 into a wire dipole up about 30 feet, nothing crazy. someone at my local club mentioned ARRL Field Day which apparently already happened but theres another one next year obviously. they said its more beginner friendly but then someone else said CQ WW is actually fine for newcomers if you just focus on search and pounce and dont try to run a frequency. i honestly dont even really know the difference between running and S&P in practice, like i get the concept but when youre actually in the pile i imagine its different. also what about SOTA activations — do those count toward any of these contests or is that a completely separate thing? my buddy does SOTA stuff and loves it but im not sure how it fits into the bigger contest picture. anyway just looking for some advice on where to dip my toes in without totally embarrassing myself on the air.

oh man i was just looking into WWFF last week so this is timely. i didnt realize the 44 QSO thing was specific to WWFF, i thought POTA was 10 and assumed WWFF was similar. good to know before i go out and have the same problem. what antenna setup were you using with the buddipole on 40m, did you do the longer element config? i always struggle to get a decent match on 40 with mine below like 25 feet

yeah what he said about Field Day. i did my first one two years ago with basically no idea what i was doing and it was fine, people were super patient. just show up and tell someone its your first time and they'll set you up. SOTA is completley different vibe though and honestly if you like being outside its worth looking into separate from the contesting stuff. you dont need much either, i started with just a little QRP rig and a wire antenna and it works suprisingly well from a hilltop.

JS8Call is definitely thinner on activity but its not dead, you just kinda have to know when to look. 40m seems to pick up in the evenings US time, and there's a loose group that hangs around the standard calling frequencies — I think its 7.078 for 40m. The heartbeat feature helps a lot once you get a few people in your contacts list, basically lets you see whos active without having to manually check. The Normal speed is fine for most HF use. Slow mode is for when conditions are really rough or you're doing something like 160m or dealing with heavy QRM. I've used Turbo a couple times on 20m when the band was wide open and it moves along pretty quick but honestly Normal hits a nice balance between speed and sensitivity. Your point about it feeling more like a real contact is exactly why some people prefer it. FT8 is great for what it is but the 15 second turnaround and the structured message format means you're never really talking to anyone. JS8Call at least has some personality to it. I had a ragchew with a guy in New Zealand last winter that went almost 45 minutes, propagation was marginal but the mode just kept pulling it through.

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general) and everyone keeps telling me to check into a net but honestly i dont really know what to expect. like i know roughly what they are but what actually happens when you check in? do you just say your callsign and thats it or do you have to talk to people? im a bit nervous about transmitting in general still and the idea of jumping into something with a bunch of people listening feels pretty intimidating theres a local 2m net on tuesday nights that my elmer mentioned, think its a traffic net or something. would that be a harder one to start with? or should i look for something more casual first. also ive been seeing mentions of special event stations online and i have no idea how those are different from a regular net. are those something beginners can participate in or is that more of an advanced thing

So last weekend was my first real activation with our county ARES group and i figured id share how it went because when i was searching around before joining i couldnt find many posts from people just talking about what its actually like on the ground. Background: ive been licensed about 14 months, got my General last spring, and joined ARES maybe 4 months ago after going to a few nets and meeting some folks. Did the ICS-100 and 200 online courses which they basically require now, and went to two training exercises before this. So there was a bad storm system that came through and the county EOC activated us to support the shelter that opened at the middle school. I was paired with a more experienced op — guy named Dave who has been doing this for like 20 years — and we basically handled message traffic between the shelter and the EOC for about 6 hours. Nothing too crazy, mostly welfare traffic and some logistics stuff, but it felt real in a way the exercises just dont. What surprised me was how much of it was just... waiting. And then suddenly things would get busy for 20 minutes and youd have to be really on your game with your logging and passing things accurately. Dave kept reminding me to slow down and read back everything which i was glad for. Anyone else remember their first activation? Im curious how different it is county to county because ive heard some groups are really well organized and others are kind of a mess.

the inverting transponder thing threw me off for a long time too. one thing that helped me was just running gpredict with the doppler correction set up before i even tried to transmit — at least that way i could see what the software thought the frequencies should be in real time and check if my manual tuning was even in the ballpark. also 2.5w is fine for AO-73, people work it with less if the bird is at decent elevation. low passes are brutal tho

I was in the exact same spot about 8 months ago lol. I went with the UV-5R because I wasnt sure if id keep up with the hobby and honestly it's been fine. hits my local repeater no problem, people can hear me okay. the chirp programming thing takes about an hour to figure out but then its easy. the one thing nobody told me is that the antenna that comes with it is pretty mediocre, I got a nagoya NA-771 for like 12 bucks and it made a real difference. so factor that in if you go that route.

congrats on the general, that's awesome. okay so first thing -- don't stress about it, net controls have heard everything and they're not gonna judge you for being a little clunky the first time. most of them were there once too. as for format, most voice nets just want your call sign, first name, and location. something like "W5XYZ, Tom, in Oklahoma City" and thats usually enough. if theres a traffic net or something more formal they might want signal report or if you have traffic to pass, but for a basic ARES check-in you're probably fine keeping it simple. just speak clearly and don't rush. checking in late is totally fine. most nets have a late check-in period, the NCS will usually say something like "any late or mobile check-ins" at some point toward the end. just wait for that and jump in then. honestly the net control will probably appreciate that you waited for the right moment rather than just keying up in the middle of something. good luck tonight, let us know how it goes

so ive been licensed for about 8 years, mostly HF stuff with some 2m weak signal when conditions are decent, and ive always kind of looked at EME as this mythical thing that only guys with massive antenna farms and kilowatt amps can do. but ive been reading more about it lately especially with WSJT-X and JT65 and it seems like maybe smaller stations can actually work it now? not sure if im reading into that too much. my current setup on 2m is a single 9 element yagi and a 100w radio, M2 preamp at the feedpoint. i know thats probably not enough but i wanted to get a realistic picture of what a minimal workable EME station actually looks like these days. like if i wanted to start making contacts in the next year or so, what am i realistically looking at for an upgrade path. do i need to go 4 yagis minimum or can a 2 yagi setup with a decent amp actually get me somewhere with JT65. also curious how the scheduling side works, is there like a specific time you have to operate relative to moon position or is it more flexible than i think. ive read about perigee and stuff but dont fully understand how that plays into actual contact rates.

so ive been chasing 3Y0 and a few other rare ones for a while now and honestly pileups used to just destroy me. id throw my call in there for an hour and get nothing, watch other guys work them in like 3 tries and wonder what i was doing wrong. spent a lot of time reading about split operation and listening patterns and i think i finally get it. the big thing that clicked for me was actually listening to where the DX station is coming back to, not just randomly transmitting 5 up or wherever. like if you pay attention for a few minutes you can start to hear a pattern in where they're fishing, they tend to work their way up or down in a range and if you can anticipate that you can put your tx frequency right where they're about to look instead of where everybody else already is. also timing matters way more than i thought. waiting for the pileup to thin out a tiny bit right after a qso ends before you throw your call in seems to help. and running a bit more power than usual doesnt hurt obviously but i dont think thats the main thing, ive seen guys with 100w crack pileups when kw stations couldnt get through. anybody else have techniques that actually work? im still struggling with the really big ones, like when a new entity comes on and theres 2000 guys in the pileup it feels almost impossible without a yagi or something.

which kit did you end up building? im in the same boat been looking at a few different ones and cant decide. the torroid winding part is what keeps putting me off honestly, watched a few youtube videos and it still looks like black magic to me

so yeah its been a slow week and i just fired up the rig after dinner, nothing much happening on 20m so i dropped down to 40 and just been listening mostly. caught a couple guys ragchewing about the wx down in florida which was mildly interesting. anyway just curious what everyone else is up to these days, feels like the bands have been kinda weird lately. some days propagation is amazing and other days its just dead quiet which i guess is just how it goes but still. been a ham for about 12 years now and i still cant fully predict it

So after about three weekends of messing around I finally got my FT-857D mounted in my truck in a way I'm actually happy with. For anyone who hasn't done a serious mobile install before, it is way more work than the youtube videos make it look. I ended up running the power cable directly to the battery with a fuse right at the battery end, which I know is the right way to do it but man crawling under the dash and finding a grommet to run it through took forever. The negative went to a chassis bolt near the firewall and so far no noise issues at all which I was honestly a little worried about with a diesel engine. The head unit is on a RAM mount on the dash and the main body is under the seat. The antenna is a Tram 1185 on a lip mount on the hatch which probably isnt the ideal ground plane situation but its working decent on 2m and 440. SWR was like 1.3 on 2m and a little higher on 70cm but nothing crazy. Anyway just wanted to share because I remember how lost I was when I started planning this out. Happy to answer questions if anyone's doing something similar. It feels great to finally be able to hit the local repeaters while driving to work.

the ALC thing is probably real, not in your head. from what i understand the stock firmware has some soft limiting that's tied to the band plan and when you open it up it behaves a bit differently near the edges. nothing dangerous just slightly different curve. i wouldnt sweat it unless your reports start coming back distorted. on the fan mod — honestly for casual SSB and digital work i think its overkill. the 7300 runs pretty warm on long FT8 sessions at high duty cycle but i've had mine for 3 years, no fan, and the thermal management seems fine. now if you're running it at full power for extended periods then yeah maybe worth thinking about. i put a small piece of copper tape over the heatsink fins just to help spread a little more and that felt like enough for my use case.

yeah JT65 basically democratized EME, before that you needed serious antenna farms just to hear anything. these days guys are making initials with 4 yagis and 500-600w on 2m which would have been unthinkable in the cw only days. your 7 element single yagi is going to be rough though, the path loss to the moon and back on 2m is like 252dB which is just brutal no matter how you look at it. realistically the smallest stations making contacts on 2m EME with JT65B are running something like a 2x9el or 4x9el array and at least 400w at the feed. the preamp thing is absolutely critical — you want something like an SSB Electronics or a homebrew unit with a really good low noise transistor, NF under 0.5dB ideally, and it HAS to be at the antenna not in the shack. coax loss between the antenna and preamp kills you because that loss adds directly to your noise figure. honestly the best thing you can do right now is get on wsjt-x and just try pointing your 7el at the moon and see if you can decode anything from the big guns. some of the serious stations run kilowatt legal limit amps and massive arrays and their signals are occasionally copyable even on small setups. itll give you a feel for the mode and then you can figure out what you need to upgrade to be a real two way station.

yeah the privileges table trips everybody up at first, dont feel bad. for technicians you get full privileges on 10 meters for phone, and then yeah theres a handful of other bands where you can do CW and some digital modes but not voice. 40, 15, and 80 meters have small CW-only windows for techs if i remember right, around 7.025 to 7.125 on 40 for example, but double check that because i might be slightly off on the exact edges. on the ID thing your elmer is probably referring to the same rule you are, it IS every 10 minutes during a contact and then at the end of the transmission or series of transmissions. thats straight from part 97.119. the ARRL website actually has a pretty readable breakdown of the privilege table if you search for technician HF privileges, way easier than staring at the actual CFR. once you upgrade to general a lot of this stuff becomes kind of a non-issue anyway but knowing the rules is always worth it

You can search the internet for setups with your hardware for WSJTx, because the configuration in WSJTx is identical to JS8Call. Try configuring WSJT-X first to verify your CAT setup, then copy those exact settings to JS8Call.

yeah 10m has been crazy good, i worked something like 30 countries on 10 last month which is more than i managed in the previous two years combined. the JA path has been really consistent in the afternoons here, usually opens around 2pm local and runs for a couple hours give or take. for predicting openings i use a combination of things honestly. prop.kc2g.com is pretty solid for a quick visual overview, shows you realtime paths that are active based on RBN spots. VOACAP is good if you want to actually plan a schedule with someone specific, you put in your location and theirs and it gives you probability charts by hour. but honestly once you get a feel for the solar numbers and your local sunrise/sunset times a lot of it starts to become intuitive. gray line is still magic for 40 and 80m DX if you havent played with that yet. the cluster is fine for knowing whats happening right now but yeah it doesnt really help you predict anything. just gotta keep an eye on spaceweather.com and get a sense for what SFI and A/K index numbers mean for the bands you care about.

honestly the first one is always a little nerve wracking but you sound way more prepared than most people showing up for their first drill. the fact that you already did ICS 100 and 200 puts you ahead of like half the volunteers i've worked with over the years, no joke. the form stuff becomes muscle memory pretty quick. just write slow and legible, that's 90% of it. and dont be afraid to ask your EC or whoever your supervisor is for clarification -- in a real activation thats expected and in a drill its literally the point. nobody wants you guessing when youre not sure. one thing i'd add to your kit -- pen. two pens actually. sounds dumb but you'd be amazed how many people show up without one. and a notepad separate from your ICS forms for scratch notes.

GOTA stations are fantastic! We've run one for three years now. Anyone licensed since the previous year's Field Day can operate it, plus generally inactive licensees, and non-licensed persons under direct supervision. 20M SSB works great for newcomers.

The Extra-only segments are still the best frequencies for working DX stations on both CW and phone - that's where the DXpeditions concentrate their operations. As someone who does a lot of DX chasing, those extra 25 kHz segments make a real difference in finding clear frequencies.

okay so yeah this confused me too when i was starting out, its actually not that complicated once someone explains it properly. LoTW is the Logbook of The World run by the ARRL and for awards like DXCC it's basically the gold standard — most serious DX chasers upload there and it counts for official ARRL awards. the certificate thing you're thinking of is a TQSL certificate, you request it through the ARRL and they send you a postcard with a code to verify your address, takes a week or two by mail. once you have that set up you use the TQSL software to sign and upload your log and it matches your callsign against whoever you worked if they also uploaded. eQSL is totally separate, its more casual and some awards accept it but a lot of the big ones dont. that said plenty of people use it and its fine for general confirmations, just dont expect it to count for DXCC or WAS through the ARRL. for FT8 specifically, WSJT-X can log directly to various things and there are tools like TQSL or JTAlert that can automate uploading to LoTW. honestly once you get it set up its pretty painless. paper cards are still fun though if you ever work someone rare or have a nice QSO, some people still really appreciate getting a card in the mail.

i tried JS8Call last winter and gave up after like two weeks because i couldnt find anyone on 20m during my operating hours. might be a time zone thing, im on the west coast and was mostly trying evenings local time. maybe ill give 40m a shot, hadnt really thought about that. FT8 scratches an itch but you're right that its not really operating in the traditional sense. feels more like a log filling exercise sometimes lol