Sarah Martinez

nice one, i did my first one earlier this year and was also surprised how many hunters were out there. the WWFF community is pretty active globally which is cool -- sometimes you get Europeans calling in which i wasnt expecting at all on my first go. one thing i'll mention is double check which log site your specific national program uses because theres been some confusion with the global vs national databases. but sounds like you figured out the spotting part already which honestly is half the battle

yeah the ALC thing trips up a lot of people on the 7300. the mistake most guys make is treating ALC like a VU meter and trying to keep it in a sweet spot, but on that radio you really want the ALC to barely move at all on voice peaks, like just a tiny flicker. if its bouncing around noticeably youre already in compression territory and the DSP starts doing weird stuff to the audio. what helped me a lot was getting someone to record my audio using a SDR receiver on the other end so i could actually hear what i sounded like, not just take their word for it. turned out my low end was way too hot even with the bass rolled off in the menu because the PR-40 is already a bass-heavy mic to begin with. i ended up cutting around 150-200hz pretty aggressively in the parametric EQ section and suddenly people started saying i sounded much cleaner. also make sure your TX bandwidth isnt set wider than the filter can actually support cleanly, sometimes 2800 is fine but on a crowded band it can pick up more noise floor than you realize.

omg YES the nervousness is so real!! i got my tech license last month and still haven't made a contact yet because im terrified ill mess something up or sound stupid. your post is making me think maybe i should just do it was there anything specific you said or did you just wing it? i keep listening to the local net but havent checked in yet either

I went the LoTW route for my first DXCC and saved a fortune on postage! Just send a copy of your license to ARRL and they'll provide the digital key to sign your logs. The fantastic bonus is being able to log in and see your totals in real-time.

yeah the ALC behavior change is almost certainly the capsule impedance thing. the 7300 mic input is expecting somewhere around 600 ohms for the electret and if you threw a low-impedance dynamic in there without a proper impedance matching transformer or preamp stage you're going to get weird gain staging. the radio's input amp is probably working harder than it was designed to which would explain the ALC going nuts on transients. i did something similar on my 7100 about two years ago, ended up putting a little inline preamp/impedance matcher between the mic and the radio and it sorted everything out. there's a schematic floating around on the icom reflector that someone designed specifically for this. before you go messing with more internal settings i'd try fixing the impedance problem first because right now you're basically trying to EQ around a fundamental mismatch and that never ends well. document your menu settings this time lol

N3FJP Special Event Logger is fantastic - we used it for our lighthouse activation last year. Real-time dupe checking across all stations, and the built-in certificate printing feature saved us hours. Well worth the modest cost for a serious operation.

so ive been using an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly just poking around HF with the direct sampling mode and running SDR# on windows. its been fine for getting started but i keep reading that the dynamic range is pretty limited and i notice it when theres a strong broadcast station nearby kind of washing out stuff around it. been looking at either picking up a HackRF One or stepping up to an SDRplay RSPdx. the HackRF is tempting because you get TX capability too and the frequency range is insane, but from what i understand the noise figure on it is pretty bad compared to something like the RSPdx? like 20+ dB noise figure on the HackRF versus something like 4-5 on the RSPdx. for just receiving shortwave and maybe some VHF air band stuff, does the HackRF even make sense or is it basically a transmit-focused device that happens to also receive. budget isnt unlimited obviously. RSPdx is around $200 which feels like a lot coming from a $30 dongle but if its genuinely that much better for HF i can probably justify it. anyone gone through this same upgrade path and have thoughts

oh man i remember that wall well. took me forever to get past 12wpm and i was ready to give up. what helped me was switching from character counting to word recognition - instead of hearing dah-dit-dah-dit and thinking K, i started training myself to just hear the rhythm as the letter. also recommend getting on the air with slow cw nets even if you feel like youre not ready. W1AW code practice helped alot too, they have 5-35wpm sessions

so ive been running FT8 for a few months now on 20m mostly and i can decode dozens of stations no problem, the waterfall looks great, i can see signals all over the place and WSJT-X is reporting good SNR on a bunch of them. but when i call CQ i maybe get a response like 1 out of every 20 or 30 attempts and im starting to wonder if something is wrong with my transmit side or if thats just... normal? my setup is a IC-7300 going into a dipole at about 25 feet, nothing fancy. i have the ALC sitting basically at zero and im running like 30 watts. audio levels into the software look okay i think, the green bar in WSJT-X doesnt clip. ive tried different frequencies in the passband and same result. i watch pskreporter and my signal IS getting out, people are spotting me from all over so its not like im not transmitting. is this just how FT8 works and im expecting too much, or should i be troubleshooting something specific. a buddy of mine with a G5RV gets responses way more often and i cant figure out what hes doing different

yeah they're mostly pulling from the same underlying DX cluster network but there's a little lag depending on which node they're connected to and how often the site refreshes. QRZ spots are fine for casual use, DXwatch is probably a bit more up to date in my experience. i use DX Summit personally, old faithful, been using it forever. for filtering — on DXwatch you can definitely set band filters, just look around the top of the page, theres dropdown options or checkboxes depending on which view you're using. QRZ spots i think you can filter too but i honestly dont use it that much for spotting specifically. the phone apps vary a lot. some are great, some pull stale data and you end up showing up to a frequency thats been dead for 10 minutes, which is super frustrating when you're trying to snag something quick. with an IC-7300 and a G5RV you should be doing fine on 20 and 40 at least, even in the attic. just keep at it, the cluster stuff becomes second nature pretty fast once you're used to watching it during a pileup

honestly i just use phonetics whenever im not 100% sure they got it. if someone confirms my call back correctly i wont bother spelling it out again. but yeah the feel thing is pretty accurate, you kind of develop an ear for when the signal is marginal enough to warrant it

nice one, two pointers are underated imo especially if theyre easy to access. i do a lot of POTA too and the park activations are even more chill if you want something with no elevation gain haha. bring more battery next time though, two hours on 40m will eat through a small lipo faster than you think depending on how hard you were driving it

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few months now and cant quite decide how i want to set up remote access to my station. right now i have an IC-7300 at the home QTH and im about 40 miles away at a rental place during the week for work. the internet at both ends is decent, maybe 50 down at home and 100 at the rental. i was messing around with RemoteHams for a bit and honestly the client software is a little clunky but it does work, and the SDR remote side of things is kind of interesting because i can at least hear what the band sounds like before committing to actually keying anything up. but i keep wondering if just setting up something with a raspberry pi and maybe floodgate or a VPN back to the shack would give me more control. a buddy of mine does internet linking through AllStar for the local repeater stuff but thats a different animal obviously. anyone gone through this decision recently? curious especially about audio latency on SSB, thats been my biggest frustration so far when the propagation is decent and im trying to actually work someone rather than just listen around.

honestly at 18 feet on 40m your dipole is going to be pretty much a cloud warmer, which like you said might actually work in your favor for regional stuff. i ran a dipole at similar height for years and worked plenty of stateside contacts no problem, the angle is high but for 300-500 miles that's kind of what you want anyway. the dx suffers but if youre not chasing dx then who cares. the vertical with a compromised radial system is a toss up in my experience. i put up a ground mounted quarter wave 40m vertical a few years back with only 8 radials because i was lazy and the performance was honestly underwhelming, noisier than the dipole and i felt like i was fighting the feedline the whole time. eventually laid down 24 radials and it got better but it was a project. if you dont want to do the radial work the dipole is probably the easier win for your use case. one thing worth considering — an inverted vee off that roof mast would let you get the apex up at 18-20 feet and the ends can drop down to like 6-8 feet and still work fine, and it fits in a smaller horizontal footprint than a flat dipole. might solve your space problem and the neighbor visibility thing since its one central support instead of two obvious end poles.

so ive been at this for probably six months now and i just cant seem to push past that 10-12wpm range no matter what i do. started at 5wpm back in the spring and honestly that part felt pretty natural, like i could hear the letters fine and copy them down without too much trouble. but somewhere around 10wpm my brain just kind of falls apart and i start missing letters and then i lose the whole word trying to catch up and then im just writing down random guesses for the next few seconds until i can lock back in. ive been using the lcwo website mostly, doing the koch method. also tried just of listening to qso365 podcast and some slow speed nets. my fist is decent i think, been told by a couple guys on the local club net that my sending is fine, its really just the receiving that kills me. anyone else hit this same wall and manage to get through it? curious what actually worked. i know the usual advice is just practice more but im putting in like 20-30 minutes a day and its been months so clearly something isnt clicking

so ive been messing around with setting up a remote station for a few months now and finally got the RCForb client talking to my IC-7300 at the home QTH which is great but the latency is driving me nuts on SSB. its like 300-400ms sometimes and i know thats partly just the internet connection but im wondering if anyone has tweaked the audio buffer settings in RemoteHams to get that down. also the SDR side of things — i have an RTL-SDR dongle plugged into the same machine as the rig and i was thinking about running SDR# or SDRuno alongside it so i could have a panadapter view remotely too. not sure if thats even practical or if the bandwidth requirements just make it a nightmare. the upload at my home site is only like 6 Mbps which probably isnt great for streaming SDR data on top of everything else. the other thing i wanted to ask about is linking this into the local repeater network via echolink or maybe wires-x. i know some guys do this but i dont really understand if youre supposed to bridge the audio from the remote session into the linking software or run them completely separate. seems like it could get messy with audio loops if you dont set it up right. anyway any pointers appreciated, been at this for a while and feel like im close but not quite there.

welcome to the hobby, dont stress too much about this stuff it clicks pretty fast once you get a handle on it. so CTCSS — the short version is that most repeaters require you to transmit a subaudible tone along with your voice so the repeater controller knows to actually open up and retransmit you. if you dont have the right tone programmed to transmit, the repeater just ignores you. thats almost certainly whats happening. the receive tone (sometimes called DCS or just CTCSS receive) is optional on your end — it just means your radio will stay quiet until it hears that tone coming back, which is useful if theres interference, but you dont NEED it set to get into the repeater. for the baofeng specifically, you want to go into the channel settings and look for T-CTCS — thats the transmit tone. set that to whatever tone the repeater uses. you should be able to find the tone listed on the repeater's entry on repeaterbook.com, just search your area. most common ones around here seem to be 100.0 or 136.5 but it really varies. as for breaking in — if two people are having a QSO just wait for a pause between transmissions and say your callsign. dont say break break unless its an emergency, some old timers get pretty grumpy about that. just your callsign is enough and whoever is using the machine will usually acknowledge you and welcome you in.

This is only my second year with ARES so I haven't been through a ton of drills yet but the one we did in the spring had a moment where two people were transmitting on the net at the same time for like a full minute and nobody caught it right away. The net control that day was pretty experienced but she said afterward she had so much going on she genuinely didn't register the doubling for a while. Made me realize net control is way harder than it looks from the outside when you're just checking in.

Been looking forward to this one! Last year's event generated 292,496 contacts around the world. That's impressive participation. I'll be running QRP from the park - should be fun to work them with just 5 watts. PSK31 is perfect for low power.

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and last month after that big windstorm knocked power out for three days in our area i finally got off my butt and started putting a real go-kit together. nothing fancy, just a Pelican case with foam cutouts for my FT-817ND, a small antenna tuner, some coax, and a few connectors. threw in a LiFePO4 battery pack i had sitting around from a solar project, maybe 20Ah, and one of those little folding solar panels. i also added a laminated card with my local repeater frequencies and some simplex calling channels because honestly when things go sideways im not gonna remember anything. plus a notepad and some pens because somehow you always need a pen and never have one. thing is im not sure if im overthinking this or not thinking enough. like i feel like i probably have too many adapter cables and not enough of the right ones. and i realized i dont have any kind of backup for the radio itself if something fails. do most people carry a spare HT at minimum? i have a Baofeng kicking around that i could toss in. also not sure about antennas — i have a roll of wire and some banana plugs but ive never actually deployed a field antenna under pressure and im a little worried about that. anyway just curious what other people keep in theirs and if theres something obvious im missing. been licensed about four years but never really done any serious emcomm work.

congrats on getting licensed! first qso is always memorable. dont worry about being nervous, we've all been there. the community is pretty welcoming to new folks. you'll find most hams are happy to help newbies get comfortable on the air. what's your next goal, general maybe?

Oh man don't sweat it, we've ALL done something like that at least once. Stepping on someone is basically a rite of passage and the fact that you felt bad about it means you're already ahead of a lot of people who don't even notice they did it. The basic thing with most directed nets is once you check in you just wait until net control calls your callsign specifically before you transmit again, unless it's a roundtable style net where people just talk in turn. But even experienced ops mess this up especially if the repeater has a weird hang time or the net control talks fast. The Thursday night crew at my club is super patient with newcomers, most nets are honestly. Just keep showing up, you'll get the feel for the timing after a few sessions and it'll be second nature.

congrats on the first one, its a great program. ok so for US activations you're dealing with KFF references which are the Flora Fauna USA program, and those logs get uploaded to the KFF system which then feeds into the global WWFF database. so basically you want to go to florафауна.us (or just google KFF ham radio) and register there if you havent already, then upload your ADIF through their portal. the wwff.eu site is the global umbrella but for US stuff KFF is really the one you deal with day to day. spotting yourself is really just for attracting chasers during the activation, it doesnt affect whether your activation counts. you need the 44 QSOs regardless and those are verified through your log. but yeah next time throw yourself on the WWFF spotter or even pota.app works too since a lot of chasers watch both. youll probably fill your log faster. sounds like you did great for a first outing though, random wire between trees is a perfectly fine setup for a forest activation.