Robert Taylor

the pirate thing is annoying and honestly just kind of comes with the territory for certain activations. after a while you get a feel for which callsigns to be skeptical of, like if you see a super rare entity spotted on like 14.195 with a massive pileup and then nobody on the clusters seems to be actually confirming a qso it's usually a red flag. there are a few dx info sites that track known pirates too if you search around. im fairly new myself so take this with a grain of salt but the HamAlert app has been pretty useful for me, you set up triggers for specific callsigns or entities and it just pings your phone. kind of nice so you're not staring at a cluster all day waiting

congrats on the first activation man, that feeling when the pile up hits and you realize it's actually working is something else. 34 QSOs on your first time out is solid, some folks struggle to get the 10 needed to count the activation so you did great. one thing i'd suggest for next time if you have the battery headroom — try popping up to 20 meters even just for 15 or 20 minutes. you'll sometimes pick up hunters from europe or the west coast depending on time of day and it really helps if you want to eventually chase the triple-triple award. also worth downloading the POTA spot app so hunters can see you're on the air, i forget to self-spot sometimes and it always slows things down when i do.

hey welcome to the hobby, dont stress too much about this stuff it clicks pretty fast once you actually use it a few times. so for the CTCSS thing — that 100.0 Hz tone on repeaterbook is your transmit tone, meaning your radio needs to send that subaudible tone along with your voice when you key up. that way the repeater knows to open its squelch and retransmit you. the receive tone is a separate thing and most of the time you dont actually need to set one unless you want your radio to stay quiet unless the repeater is also sending a tone back at you. for day to day use on a busy repeater i usually just leave the receive side open so i can hear everything. on the linked system question — yeah some repeaters are connected to other machines, sometimes through the internet using something like IRLP or Echolink or AllStar, sometimes through RF links. basically your voice can end up being heard on repeaters in other cities or even other states depending on how the system is set up. the operator usually announces it or it might say so on repeaterbook. just something to be aware of because you might get a reply from someone 500 miles away and it can be a little surprising the first time lol etiquette wise — on a repeater you dont really call CQ, you just say your callsign and say youre listening or monitoring, or just announce yourself and see if anyone comes back. wait for a pause between transmissions before you key up, that little gap is important so the repeater has time to reset. and if theres a net going on just listen until its done before jumping in.

the firewall hole thing is fine honestly, lots of people do it, just make sure RCForb has a password on it obviously. i run my remote into a VPS as a jump host which sounds complicated but its basically just ssh tunneling, keeps the home IP out of it and i can revoke access without changing anything at the shack. probably overkill for most situations but i was paranoid about it. never got the SDR panadapter working remotely in a way i was happy with, gave up and just use the 7300's built in scope streamed as part of the screen share which looks terrible but at least its one less thing to troubleshoot at 2am when something breaks

Don't forget that station builders should avoid using the term RF ground in favor of the more general term bonding, which means keeping all equipment at the same RF voltage, not necessarily zero. You can bond equipment together at RF by connecting each piece of gear to a copper strap or pipe with a short piece of strap or wire. The goal is equipotential bonding, not a perfect zero-volt reference.

From my testing, Q65 offers a wide variety of timed sequence lengths and tone spacings for different propagation conditions. This flexibility is huge for EME where conditions vary dramatically. I'm seeing Q65-60A working well during deep QSB that would kill JT65 completely.

honestly the best advice i ever got on this was to do a timed drill where you actually try to deploy everything in your driveway like you would in the field. i thought i was pretty ready and then realized i forgot a ground stake, had the wrong PL-259 adapter, and my battery tender had kept the battery topped off but i hadnt actually tested the whole thing together in months. kind of humbling. notepad is fine for logging in my experience, though if your ARES group uses ICS-214 forms you might want a few printed copies in there just in case someone asks. our EC is pretty particular about that stuff.

so i finally did my first real SOTA activation last weekend, W6/CT-047 up near Lake Arrowhead area. been chasing for about a year and figured it was time to actually get up on a summit myself. brought my KX2 with a 40m end-fed and a crappy little tripod that I honestly should have left at home. first thing i learned is that the trail time really eats into your setup time if you're not careful. i had this idea that i'd get up there with like an hour to spare before i'd announced on sotawatch but the hike took way longer than alltrails said it would and i ended up with maybe 20 minutes to set up before my alert time. got it all running but i was sweaty and flustered and probably not operating my best. second thing is the antenna situation was harder than i expected on this particular summit because there weren't great trees in the right places. ended up using trekking poles which actually worked fine but i hadn't practiced that at home and it took forever to figure out. should've done a dry run in the backyard first, lesson learned. but i did get my 4 contacts and qualified the summit which felt amazing honestly. got spotted pretty quick after i self-spotted on the app and the pile-up was small but fun. the chasers were super patient with me which i appreciate because im sure my exchange was all over the place at first. anyone have tips for managing alert times vs actual arrival time? i always see activators say they're running late and i get it now but is there a standard way to update your alert or do most people just post a new spot when they're actually ready?

The key threshold is usually around $200-300 in parts cost. Below that, component-level makes sense if you have the skills and tools. Above that, or if it involves proprietary ASICs, send it to a specialist. Professional shops with complete parts inventories and experience can typically repair most rigs in 3-4 hours.

I built a cheap tape measure yagi for 2m years ago and it works shockingly well for the weight, so that might be worth looking into if you havent already. For 70cm you can do the same thing, the elements are just shorter so its even lighter. Two separate tape measure yagis probably weigh less than one commercial dual band unit and you can tune each one properly. That said if youre doing satellites the duplexer thing the other guy mentioned is a real consideration. Juggling two antennas during a 10 minute pass sounds like a nightmare. Ive never done satellite myself so take that with a grain of salt but it seems like it would be a problem.

yeah i did almost exactly this about two years ago. ended up going the arduino route for the actual motor control because the real-time loop timing is just cleaner than trying to do it from a pi, but i used the pi as the brains running rotctld and gpredict and had it talk to the arduino over USB serial. that way you get the best of both worlds — linux handles all the scheduling and the gpredict integration, arduino handles the PID loop and the pot reading without any OS getting in the way. the easycomm II implementation on arduino isnt bad, theres a library floating around on github that gets you most of the way there. main thing i had to tune was the deadband on the pot feedback, mine was hunting back and forth like crazy until i put in about a 2 degree window before it would stop trying to correct. also watch your power supply, i was running the motor off the same 5v rail as the arduino initially and the voltage drop was doing weird things to the ADC readings. separate supplies fixed that pretty much immediately.

congrats on the ticket first of all. ok so honest answer — for just hitting local repeaters and messing around on simplex with a buddy, you really dont need to overthink this. a yaesu ft-65 is a solid little radio, easy to program, sounds good on receive, holds up well. its not fancy but it just works and thats kind of what you want when youre learning because you wanna be focused on actually operating not fighting with the radio. the baofeng thing is one of those debates that never ends. they work, plenty of hams use them, the build quality is just not as good and the receiver isnt great so you can end up with a lot of interference on busy RF environments. for a starter radio though if budget is tight theres no shame in it. ive seen new hams go baofeng for a year then upgrade once they knew what they actually wanted. i wouldnt jump to DMR right away personally. learn the basics first, get comfortable with repeater etiquette and just talking on the air. you can always add a digital radio later once you know if thats even a direction you want to go. the ft-65 is probably 60-70 bucks used and thats a good starting point.