James Taylor

Looking to take the plunge into EME on 2m after years of terrestrial VHF work. Currently running an IC-9700 with about 100W output, and have space for maybe 4x17 element yagis. Seeing conflicting info online - some sources suggest 80-100W with modest antennas can work with digital modes, while others mention needing kilowatt stations. What's the realistic minimum for making first contact? Particularly interested in Q65 since it seems optimized for EME. Located in central US with decent clear horizon - any elmer guidance appreciated!

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and figured id just ask here. i have a decent location, second floor of a two story house, maybe 25ft above ground level if i add a mast, and im trying to decide whether to go with a collinear omnidirectional setup or just point a yagi at the repeater i use most and call it good. the repeater im hitting is about 18 miles out and i can reach it fine on a handheld from the backyard so its not like im desperate, but i want something permanent and a bit more capable. theres also one other repeater about 90 degrees off to the right that id like to be able to hit on occasion. the problem with the yagi obviously is the fixed direction thing unless i build some kind of rotator setup which feels like overkill for 2m repeater work. anyone run a decent collinear on a fixed mount and been happy with it? or am i overthinking this and just need to put up a 5/8 wave vertical and be done with it

so i finally got my general last spring and ive been mostly doing casual rag chewing on 40m and some digital modes but a few guys at the club keep telling me i need to try CQ WW this october. i set up a dipole in the backyard last month and honestly conditions have been decent lately so i figured why not give it a shot. my question is more like... how overwhelming is it really for someone whos never done a serious contest before. i tried field day with the club in june and that was kind of chaotic but fun, though i wasnt really running my own station i was just logging for one of the guys. CQ WW seems way bigger. do i need special software or can i just do it with pen and paper to start, and is there a way to participate that isnt like... trying to compete seriously. just want to have fun and work some DX without feeling completely lost

Sleeve coupling is tricky business. The spacing affects not just impedance but also the current distribution on each band. Too tight coupling and you get unwanted interactions between bands. I'd suggest starting 0.05λ away at the highest frequency and adjusting from there.

yeah 35 amp sustained for 12 hours is a generator situation, the math just doesnt work out for batteries alone unless money is no object and you have a truck to haul them. that said the hybrid approach the other guy mentioned is worth considering. one thing i'd add — if you do stick with the eu2200i, look into whether your group has or can borrow a power conditioner or at least a good line filter between the generator and your equipment. some groups run a small UPS in line which sounds weird but actually helps a lot with the waveform quality from inverter gennys and also gives you that buffer so the radios dont see every little fluctuation. the honda units are pretty clean but under varying load they still arent perfect. also for the feedline routing on that NVIS — how long is your feedline run? if you're going coax to a balanced antenna you probably already know about the common mode issues but its worth double checking that you have choking at the feedpoint and not just at the radio end. sometimes at a site with weird terrain and a bunch of metal around (like vehicles or a trailer) you get some unexpected coupling that moves around depending on where you park stuff.

JS8Call activity kind of depends on when and where you look honestly. 40m around 7.078 tends to have the most traffic at least in my experience, evenings are better. i ran it for like 6 months solid and had some genuinely good contacts, talked to a guy for probably 45 minutes one night on 20m while a thunderstorm was killing propagation. the heartbeat and relay stuff is neat in theory but in practice i found it pretty clunky compared to just using Winlink if you actually need to pass traffic. for casual ragchewing on weak signals though theres nothing quite like it. PSK31 used to fill that niche but good luck finding a busy PSK cluster these days, everyone jumped to FT8 and kind of abandoned the conversational modes. which is a shame really.

I keep hearing different interpretations about when exactly we need to identify our stations. Per Section 97.119, each amateur station must transmit its assigned call sign at the end of each communication, and at least every 10 minutes during a communication. But what constitutes a "communication"? For example, if I'm having a long ragchew with another ham, is each transmission part of one continuous communication, or do I need to ID after every over? And what about when operating digital modes like FT8 or RTTY? I want to make sure I'm following the rules correctly - no station may transmit unidentified communications or signals, and I don't want to inadvertently violate Part 97.

so i've been wanting to get into LEO satellite work for a while now and last weekend i finally just went out and did it with a cheap arrow antenna and my ft-818. got a few contacts on AO-73 which was honestly way more exciting than i expected, hearing your own signal come back through the bird is kind of surreal if you've never done it before. anyway my main issue is keeping up with the doppler shift on both the uplink and downlink simultaneously. i was using gpredict on my laptop but its kind of a pain to be adjusting both radios at the same time while also trying to hold the antenna and talk. i've seen some people mention just tracking the downlink and leaving the uplink fixed or doing it in reverse, not sure which is the more accepted approach. also does anyone actually use the doppler tuning automation in gpredict connected to the radio via CAT or is that more trouble than it is worth for a single pass? im running full duplex btw with the 818 on uplink and an sdr on the downlink side so i can hear myself, that part works pretty well actually.

the radial system makes or breaks the vertical tbh. i tried one with like 4 radials once and it was just sad. put down 32 later and it came alive. but even then my dipole at only 30 feet still outperforms it on 80 for receive at my place, too much local noise getting in. for dx on 40 the vertical is better in my experience but its not a night and day thing, more like situational. also building one is pretty fun so worth doing just for that even if you end up going back to the dipole

Great question! A 1/4 wave VHF/UHF has a relatively high angle of radiation, making it easier to reach radio communication sites located in higher places, like repeaters. So they're more useful in mountainous and metropolitan areas with tall buildings. If you're mainly hitting repeaters, stick with what you have.

honestly for the tech exam the question pool memorization approach isnt as dumb as it sounds because the actual test questions are pulled directly from the published pool, so if you know the pool you know the test. that said i get what you mean about wanting to actually understand stuff, and hh73.net or whatever its called now has decent explanations alongside the practice questions so you get a little context with each answer. the ARRL technician manual is the gold standard study guide but some people find it kind of dry. if you learn better from videos theres a guy on youtube, i think his channel is ham radio prep or something like that, who goes through all the material in a pretty digestible way. i used a combo of practice tests on hamstudy.org and the ARRL book when i did mine and passed first try with room to spare. the test is 35 questions and you need 26 right so its not brutal. just run through practice tests until youre consistently hitting 80-90% and youre fine

im still pretty new to all this propagation stuff so take this for what its worth but i downloaded an app called HamSatDX or something like that and it shows real time band openings and i think it pulls from the cluster spots. been helpful for me to at least understand whats going on even if i dont fully get the solar flux numbers yet. what does a flux of 180 actually mean in practical terms, like is that good or just okay? i see people get excited when it goes above 200 but i dont really have a reference point

Got my license two weeks ago and finally worked up the courage to make my first contact today. Kept meaning to jump on the local repeater but kept finding excuses. Anyway this morning I heard someone calling CQ and just went for it before I could chicken out again My hands were literally shaking when I keyed up lol. Called back with my call and just blurted out that I was a new ham which was probably obvious from how nervous I sounded. The other guy was super friendly though, turns out he was in the next town over. We talked for maybe 20 minutes about radios and antennas and stuff Feel pretty good about it now but man that first time pressing PTT was scary. Why do we get so worked up about this stuff when everyone is so nice about it

yeah i went through exactly this about two years ago and ended up just keeping both installed. N1MM for any actual contesting because nothing touches it for that, the bandmap and the rate display and the way it handles multipliers is just tuned for contest operating in a way Log4OM isnt really trying to be. Log4OM as my everyday shack log because the interface is way more pleasant to look at when youre just working DX or rag chewing and filling in QSL info and awards tracking and all that. for WSJT-X i have it set to log to Log4OM via UDP and then when a contest starts i just let N1MM be its own thing and after the contest i export the ADIF and import it into Log4OM. yeah you have to do that import step but its like 2 minutes and i only do it a handful of times a year so its not really a big deal. the duplicate situation is honestly fine as long as you stay consistent about which program is your master log. i treat Log4OM as master and N1MM is basically a contest-only scratch pad that syncs in after.

so i've been wanting to do this for probably two years now and last weekend i finally just did it. built a little Pixie kit i got off ebay for like $8, yeah i know i know, but i wanted to start somewhere. it took me maybe three hours including all the times i had to resolder joints that looked bad under the loupe. first time i've done kit building since i was a teenager messing with heathkits with my dad. anyway i took it out to the park sunday morning with a 9v battery and a wire antenna i just strung up between two trees, maybe 30 feet long, fed it against a ground radial i laid on the grass. running about 500mw which honestly felt like nothing, i kept second guessing myself like there's no way anyone's gonna hear this. but i sat there calling CQ on 40m for a while and eventually got a response from a guy about 200 miles away in ohio. i'm in western PA. he gave me a 559 which i was not expecting at all. not sure i have a question exactly, just wanted to share because it felt like a genuinely cool moment. does anyone have recommendations for what to build next? i kind of want something with a little more power, maybe 5 watts, and something i can actually tune to different frequencies instead of being crystal locked. budget is pretty tight, maybe $50-80 for parts.

not a dumb question at all, this confused me for a long time too. basically they're three completely separate things that accomplish roughly the same goal — confirming that both stations actually made the contact — but they're used in different contexts and the ham community has never really settled on just one. LoTW is run by the ARRL and it's what you need for their awards like DXCC and WAS. the confirmation is cryptographically signed so it's pretty trustworthy, which is why the ARRL accepts it. eQSL is a different website run by a private company, it does basically the same thing electronically but not all awards programs accept it. and then paper cards are just... the old tradition that a lot of people genuinely enjoy. some dx stations still only confirm via paper, especially if they're in rare entities and get flooded with requests. honestly for awards chasing you pretty much need LoTW, but if you're just enjoying the hobby and dont care about awards right now, dont stress about it. a lot of people do all three — upload to LoTW automatically through their logging software, opt into eQSL just in case, and then send physical cards to the ones that meant something to them. your first contact with a new country or a weird propagation path at 2am, that kind of thing.

the cable routing through the door seal is what would push me to do the NMO honestly. that wears through the jacket over time and then youre dealing with a shorted coax which is a pain to diagnose. mag mounts are fine for temporary or if you swap vehicles a lot but for a dedicated install the NMO is just cleaner. one thing worth mentioning — ground plane matters a lot on VHF. the roof center is ideal but if your mag mount is already on the roof and you've got decent metal around it you're probably not losing that much vs a mounted whip in the same spot. the connection and cable quality is probably more of a variable than mount type tbh. i ran LMR240 on my last mobile install and it made a bigger difference than i expected compared to the el cheapo coax that came with the mag mount kit

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (technician) and i keep hearing people talk about CW and honestly it sounds kind of cool but i have zero idea where to even start. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or is there some better way to do it? i tried looking it up and got overwhelmed fast, theres like apps and youtube videos and people saying you have to learn it by sound not by sight and i dont really understand what that means practically speaking. does anyone have like a simple way to explain how they actually did it? im not trying to upgrade my license or anything just kind of curious if its something a normal person can pick up

so i finally did my first park activation last weekend at a state park about 40 min from my house. been putting it off forever because i kept thinking i needed more gear or a better antenna situation but honestly i just threw the KX2 in a bag with my end fed and a fiberglass pole and drove out there set up on a picnic table near the trailhead, got 10 contacts in maybe 25 minutes on 40m which i guess counts, and then spent another hour just goofing around on 20m trying to work some of the SOTA guys. it was genuinely more fun than sitting in the shack and i dont know why i waited this long the only issue was the EFHF kept drooping because i didnt bring enough cord to tension it properly and the wind was doing weird things to my swr. ended up just holding the pole with one hand and keying with the other which was ridiculous but it worked. anyone else do dumb stuff like that on their first activation

oh man dont worry about the setup at all, ive worked CQ WW with a wire antenna and barefoot power plenty of times and had a blast. you're not gonna win the plaque category but that's not the point when you're starting out. the experience of just getting in there and making contacts is worth way more than your score on paper. for your zone just look up the CQ zone map, theres a decent one on the CQ magazine website and once you know your number you'll have it memorized for every contest going forward. and yes send your full callsign every single time, no shortcuts, especially in a pileup situation where people are copying you partial. the S&P approach is honestly perfect for learning, you can take your time, listen to how the running stations do their exchanges, and build up a rhythm before you even think about trying to hold a frequency. just have fun with it, that's genuinely the whole point

yeah 15m has been genuinely surprising me lately too. worked a guy in Japan last tuesday morning on 15 with just my vertical and like 100w which i was not expecting at all. didnt even realize the band was open, just happened to spin the dial that direction i use the DX toolkit app on my phone now just to get a quick sanity check before i sit down for a session. not perfect but at least i know roughly what to expect

yeah what he said about hamStudy is solid. I'd also add that the ARRL Ham Radio License Manual is worth grabbing if you like having an actual book to read through, some people absorb things better that way. the tech pool has 426 questions and the test pulls 35 from it so once you're consistently hitting 80%+ on practice tests you're probably ready. the electrical theory stuff — just memorize the formulas honestly, you dont need to deeply understand all of it for the tech exam. that comes later if you go for general or extra. one thing I always tell new folks is dont overthink the waiting period after you pass, your callsign usually shows up in the FCC database within a day or two now, used to take longer. your neighbor can probably help you find a local VE session too, that's the easiest way to get it scheduled

FT-60R is a solid choice and honestly kind of a classic at this point. rugged, great receiver, battery lasts forever compared to most HTs. only thing is it doesnt do APRS natively which it sounds like you might want down the road. if APRS is even a maybe for you, might be worth stretching the budget a bit for the VX-6R or looking used for a TH-D72A which shows up on QRZ classifieds pretty regularly for reasonable prices. that said if budget is the main concern the FT-60R wont let you down for basic repeater work, thing is practically indestructible. i dropped mine off a tailgate onto pavement and it still works fine three years later.

wait the 7760 is actually out or just announced? i saw something on one of the facebook groups but couldnt tell if it was shipping yet or still vaporware. also totally agree about 10m, i just got my general a few months ago and literally the first week i could use HF i stumbled into an opening and worked like 8 countries in an afternoon, my mind was blown. nobody told me it could be like that lol. def gonna be spending more time up there

yeah the first few passes are rough, honestly it took me probably 10-15 passes before i felt like i wasnt completely lost the whole time. a few things that helped me — first, if gpredict supports CAT control for your radio it can do the doppler tuning automatically which is a huge help, worth looking into if you havent already. the 818 should work with that. the other thing is on a linear bird like AO-73 or SO-50 (well SO-50 is FM but you know what i mean), find your downlink first before you even think about transmitting. tune around the passband and find a clear spot or a beacon if the bird has one. then you kinda know where the passband center is and you can work from there. transmit a short low power burst and listen for yourself — with the inverting transponder if you tune up on the uplink youll hear your downlink go down, which gets confusing but once it clicks in your head it makes more sense. just takes reps basically.