Dave Parker

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly i kind of hit a wall with what i can do on VHF/UHF around here. repeaters are pretty dead except for the weekly net and i want to actually talk to people further away. a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just upgrade and get my general so i can get on HF but im not sure where to start with studying. i used the hamstudy.org site for my tech exam and it worked pretty well but the general pool feels way bigger and more complicated? like theres stuff about propagation and feed line losses and i dunno, operating practices on HF that i really dont have any context for yet. is it worth just grinding through the question pool or should i actually try to understand the material. also how much of the HF stuff will i actually need to know vs just passing the test. im asking because i dont want to get on 40m and embarrass myself not knowing what im doing

yeah what he said about the powerpoles. also depending on how long you might need to run -- 20ah is decent but if you're running HF at any kind of power you go through that faster than you expect. i have a second smaller battery just for the radio and use the big one for accessories and a fan if its hot out. probably overkill for most situations but after sitting through a 14 hour ARES deployment i kind of learned my lesson on that one. one more random thing -- snacks. sounds stupid but when youre focused on the radio for hours you forget to eat and then you make dumb mistakes. i keep a couple granola bars and some instant coffee packets in a little zipper bag in the lid of my case. not exactly emergency prep advice but trust me on this one lol

Our repeater offers all three systems full-time and we believe we're the first in Wisconsin to do so. AllStar gives the best audio quality but EchoLink sees the most casual use. IRLP is rock-solid reliable but limited to RF-only access.

so ive been listening on HF for maybe 3 weeks now and i keep seeing people type things like QSL and QTH and QRZ in the logbooks and on websites and i honestly have no idea what half of them mean. i looked some up but then theres like a hundred of them and some of them seem to mean different things depending on context? like QRM vs QRN i still get those mixed up. also people on the air say things really fast and abbreviate everything so even when i do try to listen in on a QSO... see i just used one, i think... i cant follow whats happening. is there like a go-to reference people use or did you all just kind of absorb this stuff over time

went through this exact thing like 8 months ago. i used hamstudy and also watched some youtube videos from a channel called Ham Radio Crash Course, it helped me understand the why behind some of the questions instead of just memorizing answers. took me maybe 3 weeks of casual studying before i felt ready and i passed first try. the electrical theory questions tripped me up at first but once you get the basic formulas down its fine. just dont overthink it

so ive been going back and forth on this for probably three weeks now and i need someone to just tell me to stop second guessing myself. im putting up my first real HF antenna for 40m, mostly interested in working some regional stuff and maybe the occasional DX when conditions cooperate. i have a decent sized backyard, maybe 80 feet usable in one direction and like 60 in the other if i do an inverted-V off the chimney. the thing is my neighbor on the east side has this massive oak that would make a great support and the other end could go on my garage, so a half wave dipole is totally doable. but then i keep reading about verticals and how they have that low angle radiation for DX and i start second guessing the whole thing. i dont have a great place for radials though which is what everyone says you need for a ground mounted vertical to actually work right. i guess my question is - for someone who isnt doing serious DX chasing, just wants a solid antenna that actually works on 40m, is the inverted-V with a decent apex height (probably 35 feet off the chimney) going to do the job? or am i leaving too much on the table by not going vertical

so we finally got enough people together to run a half-day SET and honestly it was kind of humbling. we've been doing weekly nets for a couple years now and i figured we had a pretty good handle on things but actually simulating a real disaster scenario made it obvious real fast where the gaps are. the scenario was a prolonged power outage across the county after a major storm, EOC is up but several shelter sites need to be activated and we need to get traffic moving between them and the hospitals. sounds straightforward right. well about 20 minutes in we realized that three of our operators at the shelter sites had never actually done formal traffic handling, like they knew nets but not NTS-style formatted messages and it just kind of fell apart a little. not badly but enough that you could see how in a real event it would create problems downstream. the other thing that surprised me was propagation — we'd planned to use a local repeater as the backbone but we had two shadow zones where HTs basically couldnt hit it reliably and nobody had thought through a workaround. we ended up improvising a linked cross-band setup which worked but that shouldn't be improvised during an actual emergency. anyway curious if anyone else has done these and what kind of stuff caught you off guard the first time. we're already talking about doing another one focused on go-kit interoperability since everyone showed up with wildly different equipment

okay so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly on 40m and some 20m when propagation cooperates. people keep mentioning QSL cards and LoTW and eQSL and honestly im not sure if i need to be doing all of them or just one or what the difference even is practically speaking. i understand the basic concept — you confirm a contact happened with the other station — but like does it matter which method you use? i tried signing up for LoTW a while back and got confused with the certificate stuff and kind of gave up. and then some guy i worked told me to just use eQSL because its easier but then another guy said eQSL doesnt count for the awards he cares about so now im more confused than when i started also do people still actually mail physical cards? i kind of like the idea of that but it seems expensive if youre doing it for every contact

Don't forget the band edges - your signal's occupied bandwidth matters too. If you're running SSB on 7.175, make sure your upper sideband doesn't extend below 7.175 MHz or you're technically out of band. The FCC defines bandwidth as the width where mean power is attenuated at least 26 dB below the transmitted signal.

Having essential communication support and staying connected, prepared, and resilient no matter what challenges arise is exactly what we train for. Helene was a good reminder that amateur radio provides communication "when all else fails" - saw this firsthand when cell towers went down but our repeater network kept running on backup power.

Alerts are definitely not required, just really helpful for the chasers who want to work you. Lots of activators just self spot from the summit and still get a pile up within a few minutes, especially on a weekend. The 4 QSO minimum is still the rule and hasn't changed as far as I know, at least not in any of the regions I've activated in. One thing I'd say about the weight thing — I made the mistake of bringing way too much battery on my first couple activations thinking I'd need it, and honestly the KX2 is so efficient you'll probably be fine with the 3Ah for a normal length activation. I usually only drain maybe a third of that on a good morning session. Just watch your power setting and you won't have any problems. Good luck Saturday, hope the bands behave. 40m in the morning should be solid if you're on by like 9 or 10 local.

im pretty new so i dont really know what a good opening looks like yet tbh, i just got my technician last month and im still figuring out what all the numbers mean on pskreporter and stuff. but this thread is making me want to actually pay attention to the solar flux more. is there like a good site to check that that isnt super overwhelming? the NOAA one kind of makes my eyes glaze over

the latency inconsistency you're describing sounds more like jitter than raw bandwidth to me. fiber to a cabin is great on paper but the route from the cabin back to whatever the ISP's backbone is can still have variable latency depending on how they provisioned it and what equipment is sitting between you and the first hop. i'd run a continuous ping test for like 20 minutes and look at the variance, not just the average. if you're seeing ping times jumping around a lot thats your culprit and no amount of tweaking the SDR buffer is gonna fully fix it. as for the IRLP node on the same connection — ive done something similar with Allstar and a remote HF setup and it was mostly fine as long as you're not expecting to run both hard at the same time. the voip traffic for linking is actually pretty light, way less than the SDR stream. the bigger thing is making sure your QoS rules on the router prioritize the audio correctly or you'll get choppy audio on the linking side when the SDR kicks in heavy.

yeah the inverted-V thing is definitely real, the closer those ends get to the ground the more the antenna electrically lengthens itself so your resonant point dropping toward 6.9 makes total sense. the formula gives you a good starting point but for an inverted-V with low ends you usually end up needing to trim a bit more than you'd expect. i'd try taking 3 or 4 inches off each leg and remeasure, do it in small steps. dont just cut a foot off and wonder why you went past resonance. the chain link fence is probably contributing some capacitive loading too which could be pushing it further down. if you can route that leg away from the fence even a little it might clean things up. honestly 1.8 at 7.150 isnt bad and most tuners will handle that no problem but if you want it cleaner its just a trimming exercise. resonance and low swr arent always exactly the same point either depending on your feedline situation so worth checking where the actual minimum swr dip is across the band first before you start cutting.

You don't need to be an ARRL member to use the incoming bureau system which is great for new hams. Keep your QRZ.com email updated since many sorters use that to contact you if there are issues with your account.

congrats on the activation, getting those 4 QSOs is what matters and you got the points so thats a win. the antenna thing is real though, i struggled with the same stuff early on. i switched to a linked dipole on a 6m sotabeams carbon fiber pole and honestly it changed everything for me. you can set it up pretty fast once you practice at home a few times and it tunes great without an ATU on the linked bands. the EFHW can work well but you really need some height and a decent counterpoise situation which is hard on a rocky exposed summit. also -- and i cant stress this enough -- post your activation spot on SOTAwatch before you leave the trailhead if you have any cell signal at all. chasers are watching and youll have people waiting for you when you get up top instead of calling CQ into the void. i started doing that and went from barely scraping 4 contacts to sometimes getting 20+ in a pile. the community is really good about watching for activators.

i had a X510 up for two winters in northern maine and the radome cracked on the second one, might have been a bad unit or maybe the cold just got to it, idk. comet felt more solid to me physically when i was handling them side by side at a hamfest. that said i know guys running X510s in worse conditions with zero issues so maybe i just got unlucky. for a permanent hilltop install id probably lean comet just based on that one experience but its not exactly scientific.

CQ WW is honestly a fantastic first contest even if you dont make a ton of QSOs. the sheer activity on the bands is wild, every frequency is occupied and you can just tune around doing search and perce at your own pace, no pressure to actually hold a frequency and run stations if you dont want to. with an IC-7300 and a dipole you'll work plenty of DX, trust me, that radio punches way above its price point. for software most people use N1MM+ which is free and pretty much the standard for serious contesting but honestly for your first outing you could even just use a paper log and not worry about it. the exchange for CQ WW is just your signal report and CQ zone number so its not complicated to learn. just listen to how the other stations are doing it for like 20 minutes before you start transmitting and youll pick up the rhythm pretty fast. SOTA activations are a different animal entirely, more about portable ops and summits, but contesting is its own fun rabbit hole and CQ WW is a great place to jump in

so i just passed my general last month and ive been looking into getting a vanity call. my uncle was a ham for decades and his old call is available (he became a silent key a couple years ago, still miss him) and i really want to get it as kind of a tribute thing. i went through the FCC ULS site and filed the application but now im just sitting here not sure what happens next or how long this takes. from what i read theres like a window period where multiple people can apply for the same call and then its basically a lottery if more than one person wants it? or did i misunderstand that. and does being a family member of the previous holder give me any advantage or is that not a thing anymore. i thought i read something about that years ago but couldnt find current info. also does my license class affect which calls i can even apply for, like can a general get any 2x3 or only certain ones. just trying to understand the whole process before i get my hopes up too much

so ive been using Log4OM for general logging for a couple years now and honestly love it for day to day stuff, the QSO management and the LoTW sync is pretty solid and the interface doesnt drive me crazy. but every time a contest rolls around i find myself firing up N1MM because thats just what everyone told me to use when i started contesting and i never really questioned it. lately ive been wondering if theres a better workflow here. running two separate programs feels clunky especially when i want my contest QSOs to actually end up in Log4OM without importing and reformatting and hoping the ADIF doesnt mangle something. ive had a couple of dupes slip through because of that exact problem during a state QSO party last year. also on top of all this im trying to integrate WSJT-X for FT8 and that adds yet another layer. WSJT-X will log to its own file and ive got it kind of pointed at Log4OM via UDP but it doesnt always behave. sometimes entries show up twice, sometimes the signal report comes through weird. feels like im duct taping three programs together and hoping for the best. anyone actually sorted this out in a clean way or is running multiple logging programs just the reality of this hobby? curious if anybody went all-in on N1MM for everything including day to day logging or if thats a miserable experience outside of contests.

I did exactly what you mentioned - went right to the question pool and worked backwards. Remember the 35 exam questions aren't truly random - they're a weighted selection from the 411 questions in the current pool. Focus extra time on subelements with more questions.

so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra. like i mostly operate on 40 and 20 meters doing casual SSB and the occasional psk31 when im bored. from what i understand the extra opens up some more HF spectrum but honestly i dont feel like im running out of room on what i have now. the question pool looks brutal too, all that stuff about filter theory and reactance and whatever else. my buddy at the club keeps saying the theory is actually useful and not just test trivia but i dunno. is the extra exam mostly just memorizing a bigger question pool or does it actually teach you things you end up using? also is there a good way to study for it thats not just hammering hamstudy.org for weeks

so i've been wanting to build something from scratch for like two years now and i finally just sat down and did it over the long weekend. threw together a direct conversion receiver for 40m based on that EMRFD design, nothing fancy, just manhattan style construction on a scrap of copper clad i had sitting around. the thing actually receives SSB pretty well, way better than i expected honestly. i mean its noisy and the audio chain definitely needs work, probably the op-amp stage i slapped in at the end cause i didnt have the right part and just used whatever was in my junk box. but i can pull in stations, like real ones, EU pile ups last night which blew my mind considering the whole thing cost me maybe 8 bucks in new parts. the LO is just a colpitts oscillator and it drifts a bit when things warm up but stabilizes after maybe 10 minutes. wondering if anyone has gone down the rabbit hole of adding a PLL or even just a good VXO to one of these to clean it up. or do i just live with the drift and call it character

same here, 20m too. got a contact in japan on like 15 watts which never happens for me then the next night couldnt reach the club net 30 miles away. ham radio is weird man

hey welcome to the hobby, dont sweat it too much. so the CTCSS thing — most repeaters require you to transmit the tone, meaning your radio encodes it on your signal when you key up. the repeater hears that subaudible tone and knows to open up and retransmit you. some repeaters also have tone squelch on the output so you only hear traffic that has the matching tone, but thats less common and honestly not something you need to worry about starting out. on your UV-5R go into the menu and look for T-CTCS (thats the transmit tone) and set that to 100.0. you dont need to mess with R-CTCS for now. and yeah, keying up to test and giving your callsign is totally normal, thats exactly what you should be doing. nobody minds that at all. if the repeater is active you might hear a courtesy beep or tail when you let go of PTT, that means you got in. good luck