Amanda Williams

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (technician) and i finally got a baofeng set up properly i think. theres a repeater listed on repeaterbook about 12 miles from me, shows a 100hz PL tone. i programmed it in, keyed up and said my callsign and... nothing. no one responded, no courtesy beep, nothing. so i waited a few days tried again same deal. then yesterday i was just scanning and i caught people talking on it so it IS active. i tried to break in during a pause and said my call and still nobody acknowledged me. not sure if im doing something wrong with the tone or if theres like some etiquette thing i dont know about. i dont want to be rude but i also dont want to just keep kerchunking the thing trying to figure out if im even hitting it. any advice would be appreciated

the alternator whine thing trips up so many people, glad you figured that out. direct battery connection is almost always the answer and its one of those things thats hard to believe until you actually do it yourself. one thing i'll add for anyone reading this later -- if you still get some noise after going direct to battery, a ferrite choke on the power leads right at the radio can help too. also worth checking your antenna coax shield is actually grounded well at the mount point. bad coax ground can cause some weird audio issues that feel electrical but arent coming from the power side at all. nice choice on the NMO mount, mag mounts are fine for playing around but a properly grounded NMO through the roof is just in a different league. what repeaters are you hitting regularly?

yeah I was the same way for a long time, kept missing openings and felt like everyone else was getting in on something I wasn't. what finally helped me was joining a discord server where people were posting in real time when 10m was going nuts. like someone would drop a message saying "10m wide open to Japan right now" and id scramble to the radio and actually catch it. kind of a different way to do it but it worked lol. your dipole at 25 feet should be fine for catching a real opening, 10m propagates so well when conditions are good that even a wet noodle antenna will work.

yeah this happens more than you'd think - your logging software and the actual DXCC credits can get out of sync pretty easily. couple things to check first: make sure the callsigns match exactly between your log and what got confirmed, sometimes theres typos or the other station used a slightly different call. also check the dates - if you logged something on say march 15th but their qsl shows march 14th it might not match up automatically another thing is some of those countries might have changed entity status over time or there could be band/mode mismatches. ive found its easier to just go through the credit matrix line by line and compare it to your log rather than trying to figure out where the discrepancies are

haha yeah it definitely feels overwhelming at first but honestly you pick most of it up pretty fast just from being on the air. the ones you listed are the main ones youll hear constantly. QRM is interference from other stations, like man-made noise, and QRN is natural static, like from thunderstorms. QSB is when your signal is fading in and out, which happens a lot on HF. and yeah QRP just means low power operation, usually 5 watts or less, so if someone says theyre running QRP they're just telling you their transmitting with a small radio or low power. the ARRL has a full list on their website and honestly its worth bookmarking. but the ones that come up all the time on phone and digital are QTH, QSL, QRM, QRN, QSB, QRZ (which means whos calling me, youll hear that one a ton), and QRT which means shutting down or going off the air. 73 just means best regards or best wishes, its been used since the telegraph days. 88 is hugs and kisses, usually between close friends or husband and wife type thing, some people get weirdly sensitive about it being used casually. OM is old man which sounds rude but its just how hams refer to other male operators, YL is young lady for female operators regardless of age, and DE just means from, like its separating callsigns when someone IDs themselves. honestly just get on the air and ask. most hams are happy to explain stuff, especially to a newer op.

oh man i remember being confused about exactly this same thing when i started doing activations last year, the wwff.us vs wwff.world thing trips everyone up at first. i ended up just uploading to wwff.world directly and it worked fine, my contacts showed up for the hunters and i got the activation credit no problem also yeah sitting in the woods making contacts is just... i dont know its hard to explain to people who havent done it but its just a completely different vibe than operating from home. i did one activation at a wildlife refuge a few months ago and had a deer walk like 15 feet from me while i was mid-QSO, tried not to laugh into the mic

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new generals. so the short version is: the FCC part 97 rules are the actual legal limits, and the ARRL band plan is kind of a gentlemens agreement on top of that about what modes go where within your privileges. so like you might be legally allowed to transmit somewhere but by convention cw ops use the bottom chunk and phone starts higher up. you dont have to follow the band plan but people will probably tell you to move if you set up ssb down in the cw portion. the band edge thing is a real practical concern. your radio isnt perfect and neither is your signal -- if you're transmitting right at 7.125 or wherever your lower limit is, your sidebands can actually spill outside your authorized spectrum depending on how your rig is set up. most people stay at least a few khz inside the edge just to be safe. how much depends on your rig and what mode you're running but 3-5 khz is a common rule of thumb for ssb. some contesters cut it pretty close but they usually know exactly what their radio is doing.

yeah i use all three mostly out of habit at this point. logbook of the world is kind of annoying to set up but once its running its pretty much automatic if your logging software supports it. i use WSJT-X and JTDX and they just push to LoTW directly which is nice. eQSL i check maybe once a month, its kind of fun to browse the cards people design. some of them are really elaborate. but like the previous guy said it doesnt count for DXCC which is the big one most people care about. paper cards — honestly i go back and forth on these. i printed a batch of my own cards through one of the online printers and sending them out feels good but keeping up with it is a lot. i probably owe like 50 people cards right now that i havent gotten around to. dont be like me, either commit to it or dont and just say QSL via LoTW on your QRZ page so people know where to find you.

yeah the wind and cold combo is brutal, i did one last november and my log sheet literally blew away lol. i switched to logging on the phone after that but then yeah battery becomes the new problem. theres no winning sometimes. what summit was it if you dont mind me asking

so i passed my general back in the spring and joined the local ARES group mostly because my elmer kept bugging me about it and honestly im glad i did. weve been doing nets and tabletop exercises for a few months now and last week the EC announced were getting activated to support the county EOC during a winter storm exercise this weekend. i know its just a drill but i still feel like i dont really know what im doing. like i understand the basics of passing traffic and checking in to nets but actually sitting at a position in the EOC and being the comms link feels different. my go bag is mostly ready i think, HT with spare batteries, my logging sheet, a copy of the ICS forms we practiced. is there stuff i typically bring that i keep forgetting or things that surprised you your first time doing one of these activations? also my radio is just a baofeng right now and i keep hearing mixed things about whether thats fine for ARES work or if i should be looking at something better. not trying to start a radio war just genuinely asking because i want to be useful and not a liability

Been running an IC-7300 from my home shack for two years and love it, but I'm looking to get into POTA activations and the weight is a concern. The FT-891 keeps coming up as the go-to portable rig at 4.2 lbs vs the 7300's 10.8 lbs. Has anyone made this transition? How much receiver performance am I giving up with the 891? I know the 7300's direct sampling SDR is exceptional, but for field work with compromised antennas, does it matter as much? Also considering the detachable front panel feature on the 891 - seems like it could be useful for mobile installations down the road.

so i decided i want to get my technician license, been interested in ham radio for a while now mostly because my neighbor has one and he showed me some of the stuff you can do with it. anyway i went online and looked up how to get licensed and i know there's a question pool but honestly it's kind of overwhelming. like do i just memorize all 400 something questions? is there a better way to study? i found a couple apps but i dont know which ones are actually worth using vs just wasting my time. also some of the electrical theory stuff is going over my head a bit, i took basic physics in high school but that was a long time ago. does everyone struggle with that part or is it just me