Amanda Williams

oh man the TQSL certificate thing got me too when i first started lol. i had to have a guy from my club walk me through it on zoom before it finally clicked. but yeah once that part is done uploading is pretty easy, i just export from my logging software and drag it in every few weeks or so i do eQSL too mostly because some of the people i talk to on digital modes seem to prefer it and you do get a little card image which is kind of fun to look at. its not the same as a real card though. i actually just started mailing paper cards for any DX contact i make because i read somewhere that a lot of rare entities still primarily do bureau cards and if you want something back you kinda have to send something. havent gotten many back yet but i did get one from a station in the Azores a couple months ago and that was pretty cool ngl

ok so i passed my general exam like 3 weeks ago and ive been trying to figure out exactly what frequencies i have access to now vs when i was a tech. i read through part 97 but honestly a lot of it is written in a way that makes my head spin. like i get that theres the frequency allocations table but then theres all these sub-sections about power limits and modes and it gets confusing fast. my main question is about phone privileges on 40 meters. i see general class has access to 7.175 to 7.300 but then someone in my club was saying something about how you still need to watch out for certain operating practices near the edges of the band? and also i keep seeing people talking about the 200w vs 1500w limit and when each applies. i thought as a general you just had 1500w across the board but maybe im wrong on that. just trying to make sure im staying legal before i get too deep into this

i did my first EME contact like two years ago with a single 9el yagi and 400W and honestly it was mostly luck and a very patient station in PA with a huge array lol. Q65 is the reason that was even possible. so yeah two decent yagis and legal limit you should be able to work stuff, just be realistic about who you can call — you'll need to target the big guns at first until you get some decodes and figure out where your weak points are in the system. one thing nobody told me that i had to learn the hard way was doppler shift. on 2m its not huge but if your rig isnt being corrected for it your signals will drift across the Q65 passband during the contact especially near moonrise and moonset. WSJT-X handles some of this but worth understanding whats happening

good questions and honestly this trips up a lot of newer folks because you're right that there's a gap between the FCC rules and what actually happens on the air the short answer on the ID thing is that the 10 minute rule applies to your transmissions. if you check in once and then just listen for the rest of the net, your single check-in transmission covered your ID requirement for that contact. you said your call, you're good. the rule is really designed for situations where you're having an ongoing conversation and need to periodically remind people who you are, not for someone who just pops in once as for the different check-in formats, yeah every net runs a little differently and that's completely normal. most nets will tell you what they want up front if you listen to the preamble -- the net control usually says something like "give your call, name and location" or just "give your call" and you kinda follow along. if you're not sure just listen to how the first few people check in and mimic that the kerchunking thing... i mean technically if you key up without identifying yourself that's actually an FCC violation since any intentional transmission needs your call. most people dont think about it that way and just do a quick blip to check the squelch tail, but the proper way is to just say your callsign. nobody's going to come down on you for it but its a habit worth breaking early

rate optimization in sprint is really about mastering the search and pounce to run transition more than anything else. SO2R helps but only if you already have that dialed in. if youre hesitating at all on when to grab a run frequency youre going to lose more than you gain from having the second radio in the mix. one thing that helped me a lot was logging software automation — i use N1MM+ with the bandmap set pretty aggressively so dupes get flagged instantly and i can see multiplier status at a glance without thinking. that freed up enough brain cycles that SO2R felt less overwhelming. still wouldnt say sprint is the ideal contest to learn SO2R on though, probably better to get the flow solid on a 48hr first

ive been down this exact road, the NE602 plus LM386 combo is practically a rite of passage at this point. one thing i'd watch out for is the LM386 oscillating if your layout isnt tight, had that drive me crazy for a week on one build before i figured out it was just a grounding issue on the perf board. adding a 10 ohm resistor and 0.047uf cap from pin 7 to ground fixed it right away but ymmv. also dont underestimate how much a good 50 ohm termination on the input helps even before you add any real filtering. just having that impedance right can clean things up noticeably.

buddipole at a picnic table sounds rough honestly, did you have any way to get it up higher? i use a 31ft spiderpole lashed to whatever i can find and it makes a noticable difference. also 10m has been absolutely insane lately if you havent tried it for POTA, i got like 40 contacts in an hour last saturday

oh man this sounds exactly like my first time lol. i also forgot to spot and just sat there wondering why nobody was answering. i didnt even know about SOTAwatch properly yet, i thought you just got on the air and people would find you somehow. took me embarassingly long to figure out the whole ecosystem of spots and alerts and chasers monitoring. congrats on qualifying it though, W6 summits are no joke terrain-wise from what ive heard.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general) and i keep seeing people mention checking into nets and i finally found a local 2m net that runs tuesday nights. i listened in last week and it sounded pretty simple but when they got to the check-ins part i kind of froze up and didnt say anything because i wasnt sure what the right format was. do i just say my callsign? do i need to give my name and location every time? some of the guys were just giving callsigns and others were giving their name too and i couldnt really tell if there was a rule or just a preference thing. also is there any difference when its like a special event station or one of those bigger national nets versus a local repeater net? i dont want to sound like an idiot my first time actually transmitting on one

yeah single yagi EME is very much real on 2m, people do it all the time with JT65B and Q65 these days. the old school guys with the 4x16el arrays would laugh but honestly with a good preamp you can work it. you want something in the 12dBd gain range at minimum, so a longer boom yagi like an M2 2MXP28 or a Tonnaerre or home brew equivalent. the key thing people underestimate is the preamp, you really want something like 0.3dB NF or better and it needs to be RIGHT at the feed, like within a foot, every tenth of a dB matters more on EME than anything else youll ever do in radio. doppler and delay yeah the software handles it, WSJT-X just needs accurate time (GPS locked or at least NTP synced well) and you need to set your grid square exactly right. the moon tracking is the other thing, you need an az/el rotator setup, you cant just point it and hope. some guys use a cheap dish rotator for elevation and a normal yagi rotator for azimuth and that works fine. its a rabbit hole but a fun one

the bands are always weird lol welcome to ham radio. but seriously solar activity has been kinda all over the place so that could be part of it

3 contacts is totally fine for a first activation, dont worry about it! i remember my first one was pretty rough too. the ft-817 is great for sota but 5 watts doesnt always cut through especially on 20m during busy times. try 40m or even 15m if its open - less competition usually for antenna i'd suggest looking into an end fed half wave, theyre super lightweight and perform way better than a dipole in my experience. also make sure you're spotting yourself on sotawatch, makes a huge difference for getting chasers to find you

so ive been running a pretty basic 40m dipole for about two years now, inverted V config with the apex around 35 feet up on a push-up pole. works okay but ive always wondered if i'm leaving something on the table by not trying a vertical. the noise floor at my QTH is already kind of rough — suburban lot, lots of switching power supplies and LED drivers from neighbors — and i keep reading that verticals are worse for that kind of thing but then other guys say theirs is quieter because of the lower angle radiation and it nulls out local junk somehow. honestly im confused. my main use is casual ragchewing on 40 and sometimes 80, not contesting or anything serious. i thought about building a simple quarter wave vertical with a few radials just to see, wouldnt cost me much. but before i spend a weekend doing that i wanted to see if anyone has actually set both up at the same location and done any kind of real comparison. not looking for EZNEC models, i can poke around with that myself, im more interested in practical real world experience. does the vertical actually perform differently enough to notice on receive? transmit i assume theyre in the same ballpark if the radial system is decent.

I've been hearing more hams using non-standard phonetics lately - things like "Kilowatt Zero November Romeo" instead of "Kilo Zero November Romeo." While creative phonetics might be memorable, they can cause confusion, especially in contests or emergency situations. What are the most common phonetic mistakes you hear on the bands? How do we encourage proper ITU phonetics without sounding like phonetic police? Looking for input from both new and experienced operators on this topic.

honestly the best thing i ever did was find someone local on a repeater who was willing to do an A/B test with me while i messed with settings in real time. you cant really know what you sound like from recordings because your own voice sounds different to you anyway, and remote SDR receivers are helpful but they're not the same as another ham with a decent radio just telling you straight up what sounds good. also just to throw this out there, have you checked your ground situation? i had a weird hum/low rumble thing for a while that i kept blaming on mic settings and it turned out to be a ground loop between my rig and the computer i had connected for logging. had nothing to do with the microphone at all. not saying thats your problem but muddiness can come from weird sources sometimes.

your elmer who said it depends on the net type is exactly right. a directed net is run tight — net control is in charge and you wait to be recognized before transmitting, full stop. but a lot of casual local nets are what they call undirected or informal, and those are way more relaxed. people just kind of jump in when theres a natural break and nobody bats an eye. the guy you saw jump in probably knows that net well enough to read the rhythm of it. after a few months you start to get a feel for when a pause is just a pause vs when net control is about to call someone. honestly the best thing you can do is just listen to a few full nets without checking in at all and pay attention to how the experienced guys handle it. and if youre ever unsure just wait — nobody ever got in trouble for being too patient on a net.

so ive been messing with APRS for about two months now and i cannot figure out why my packets arent getting picked up by the local digi. im running a TM-D710G into a Raspberry Pi with direwolf, pretty standard setup. i can see my own packets in direwolf's output so the audio path from the radio seems fine, and i can hear other stations being decoded just fine too. my path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be totally normal. checked aprs.fi and my station just doesnt show up. well it showed up once like three weeks ago and then nothing. the nearest digi is maybe 12 miles away, 50w into a vertical so i wouldnt think RF is the issue but who knows. anyone run into something like this before or have ideas what to check next

The Extra license test consists of 50 questions drawn from a pool of 621. Memorizing the answers to 621 disconnected questions is difficult, but The Fast Track makes getting your upgrade easier by explaining the logic behind each correct answer. Focus on understanding concepts rather than memorizing - especially the Smith chart and complex impedance topics.

that sounds like a really solid first activation honestly. the repeater getting overloaded thing is super common and its one of those things that doesnt come up enough in training. our group actually started doing simplex-only exercises a couple times a year because of exactly that scenario. you learn real quick who has actual RF out and who's been relying on the repeater to do the heavy lifting lol the logging under stress thing is real too. i've been doing ARES stuff for going on 12 years now and i still have to consciously slow myself down when things get hectic at the EOC. some guys swear by the paper ICS 309 forms even if you're also doing digital logging, just as a backup and honestly i think the physical act of writing slows your brain down enough to actually capture what was said. might be worth trying at the next exercise

honestly i tried JS8Call for like two weeks and went back to FT8, but mostly because my operating time is limited and i wanted to actually log contacts efficiently. if you have time to sit and chat it seems cool. the UI felt a little cluttered to me compared to WSJT-X but that might just be learning curve thing one thing nobody mentioned — PSK31 still has some activity and if youre looking for keyboard-to-keyboard ragchew that works on weak signals it's worth checking out on 40m around 7.070 or so. not as resilient as JS8 but the rhythm of it feels more like a real conversation cadence if that makes sense. anyway just throwing that out there

Q65-30 works surprisingly well for stronger stations. Made several ARRL EME contest QSOs using Q65-30B with my modest 2 x 9 element setup. The faster turnaround really helps during contest pileups, though you still need -20dB or better for reliable decodes.

i went through this exact thing last year and ended up just building a fan dipole instead of switching to a vertical lol. didnt really answer your question i know. but my takeoff angle situation improved a bit when i moved the dipole feedpoint up to about 45 feet and inverted-v'd it instead of flat top, not sure if thats a real thing or just placebo honestly

stranded wire runs a bit longer electrically than solid from what ive read, so that might be nudging things too. not a huge effect but stacks up with everything else you got going on. im dealing with something similar on a 20m dipole i threw up last month, mine resonates like 400kHz low and i still havent figured out if its the wire or the fact that half of it runs along the roofline of the house

you're pretty much right about the ALC thing, that trips up a lot of people. the way i explain it to guys at our club is that the ALC is a limiter of last resort, not a tool for setting your level. if its riding hard constantly the radio is just clipping and distorting trying to keep up with your voice peaks. set the gain so normal speech barely touches it and shout peaks maybe hit the first couple bars, thats about it. on the TX filter question — yeah it does make a difference, more than people think actually. most of the older rigs default to something pretty wide, like 2.8kHz or even 3kHz passband which sounds great on the air but you're eating more spectrum than you need and in a crowded band that matters. i usually run mine around 2.4kHz for general rag chewing, tighter like 1.8 or 2.0 if the band is really packed. honestly the difference in audio quality is minimal to the other station but you stop stomping on the guy 3kHz up from you which everyone appreciates. the mic thing is a whole rabbit hole. heils are popular for a reason but ive heard guys sound phenomenal on cheap dynamics and terrible on expensive condenser mics. a condenser in an untreated shack picks up every fan noise and keyboard click and the room itself which can make you sound like youre operating from inside a tin can.

I just passed mine last month so this is pretty fresh for me. The element 4 pool is big but a lot of the questions are actually pretty logical if you understand the underlying concept rather than just drilling flashcards. I tried pure memorization first and it wasnt sticking, switched to actually reading about why things work the way they do and it clicked way faster. The oscillator and amplifier stability questions tripped me up more than anything, and there's a decent chunk on amateur satellite and some emission stuff that felt random. But the ham study sites have the full question pool and the practice tests are pretty representative of what you'll actually see. Vanity thing is probably underselling it a little, the extra segments genuinely do get less cluttered on a busy weekend.