Karen Thompson

yeah what he said. also dont stress too much about being new, everyone there was new once and most ARES folks are pretty patient about it. the main thing is just show up and be present, half the job is literally just having ears on the freqency so the EC knows someone is actually listening. one thing i'd add — make sure you've got your served agency forms or whatever your local group uses printed out or at least downloaded. our county uses ICS-214 activity logs and the first time i showed up i had no idea what anyone was talking about. took me a minute to get up to speed on the paperwork side which nobody really talks about in the training nets

yeah the first time is always a little chaotic no matter how much you trained. the tabletop stuff is good but it cant really replicate that feeling when the radio traffic is actually real and theres people depending on accurate info. you adapt though. sounds like you held it together which is honestly more than some people do. one thing i'd say — after every activation or even drill, sit down within a day or two while its fresh and write down every moment where you felt lost or unsure. not to beat yourself up but just as a personal gap list. then go find out the answer before the next one. i built up a little laminated quick-reference card for myself with net procedures, common ICS form numbers, and my EC's backup contact info. dumb simple stuff but when youre tired and stressed your brain does not cooperate

yeah the baofeng CTCSS setup tripped me up for a solid week when i started lol. one thing worth checking — some repeaters also have a timeout timer, so if you hold the key too long without saying anything it'll cut you off and you might think you're not getting in when really you just timed out. not sure if that's what's happening to you but worth keeping in mind. the etiquette stuff kinda just comes with time honestly. i still feel awkward sometimes jumping into a roundtable that's already going.

so ive been a Tech for about 14 months now and mostly just do local repeaters and some APRS stuff, got a couple HTs and a mobile rig in the truck. honestly wasnt really planning to upgrade but a buddy at our club keeps saying i should go for General so i can get on HF. the thing is i dont really know what id even do on HF once i got there, like would i need a whole new radio setup? right now all i have is the IC-2300H in the truck and a handheld. the exam prep part is also kind of intimidating, i heard the General pool has a lot of electrical theory stuff that went over my head when i did my Tech. propagation and all that. is it actually harder than Tech or is that just me overthinking it. also does it even matter which band i start on when i first get down there, i see people talking about 40m and 20m a lot but idk what the difference really is in practice. not in a huge rush just kind of on the fence and curious what people think

so i finally finished my first real homebrew superhet receiver, been working on it off and on for about 4 months now. its a pretty basic design, single conversion, IF at 455kHz, nothing fancy but i wound all the coils myself and etched the board by hand with the toner transfer method which was honestly more satisfying than i expected. anyway its actually receiving stuff which is kind of amazing to me considering how many times i thought id killed it on the bench. 40m is coming in decent, 80m is a little deaf but i think thats an antenna situation not the radio. the problem im running into is this weird image rejection issue, im hearing stations at what i think are image frequencies and its getting confusing trying to figure out whats actually what. i know image rejection is a known thing with single conversion designs but i wasnt expecting it to be quite this bad. read that a proper preselector filter would help but i havent built one yet. also the audio stage is a little buzzy, not terrible but noticeable on strong signals. using an LM386 for the audio amp which i know isnt everyones favorite but its what i had. is that just a noise floor thing with the 386 or is there something i can do without replacing the whole audio section?

so ive been on HF for maybe 3 months now and i keep hearing guys just say their callsign normally, like not phonetically, and then other times people spell everything out with NATO phonetics. im never sure when youre supposed to use them and when its just overkill. like if im on 40m just having a ragchew with someone and they already know my call, do i still have to say Kilo Foxtrot whatever every single time i sign? feels kind of robotic honestly. and then theres the guys who use weird non-standard phonetics, heard someone say "Texas" for T and "New York" for N the other day which threw me off completely. is there an actual rule or is it just whatever feels right in the moment

nice work getting it on the air, ohio from western PA on a homebrew direct conversion is solid. i built something similar about two years ago and the hum drove me insane for weeks, turned out one of my ground connections on the volume pot was floating and i just hadnt noticed it. worth checking all your mechanical grounds on any panel hardware before going too deep into the circuit itself.

congrats on the first activation, 5 contacts is all you need so that one counts. to answer your questions -- you dont have to pre-spot but it helps a LOT. chasers watch sotawatch like hawks and if you post an alert the day before saying youll be on W4T/SU-017 around 10am on 40m SSB you will get a pile up pretty quick, way easier than cold calling CQ for 20 minutes. that said you can absolutely log it after the fact if you forget or the signal was bad, just go into the sota database and enter the contacts manually. the system doesnt care when you upload as long as the date and summit ref are right. and yes the cross mode thing is fine, if you work a CW station while youre on SSB it counts as a valid QSO for both of you. the contact just needs to be a legitimate two-way exchange. the chaser thing is totally normal by the way, they're often working multiple activators and chasing points so they keep it short. dont take it personally, theyre actually doing you a favor by being efficient when youve got a queue of people waiting. 20m is great for SOTA if you activate mid morning, you can pull in chasers from way further out and sometimes get S2S contacts with people on summits in other states or even Europe if conditions are decent.

so ive been messing around with an arduino uno for the past few weeks trying to build a simple automatic antenna tuner for my end-fed. got the basic idea working where it reads SWR from a bridge circuit and then drives some stepper motors to adjust a variable cap and inductor, but the tuning algorithm is kind of garbage right now — it just sweeps through positions which takes forever. before i go down the rabbit hole of writing something smarter, has anyone actually built one of these and does it work well enough on SSB where the power is constantly changing? my concern is it'll be chasing its tail every time i talk. also not sure if the arduino is fast enough to do anything useful or if i should just throw a raspberry pi at it and run some actual python. the pi feels like overkill for this but maybe not idk running about 100w into it on 40m mostly, if that matters for the bridge design

the part that got me was realizing the ARRL band plan isnt law, its just what everybody more or less agreed to do. so technically you could operate phone right at 7.175 if you wanted but you'd probably step on someone doing digital or whatever. i just bookmarked the ARRL band plan page and the FCC part 97 subpart D and kind of cross reference them when im unsure. honestly after a few months of just operating you start to get a feel for where things actually happen on the band vs where the plan says they should happen which is sometimes pretty different lol

yeah that 13-14 wpm zone is basically a rite of passage, almost everyone stalls out right there. what helped me — and this took a while to accept — was to actually stop worrying about my copy percentage for a while. like just let stuff go by, dont try to write everything down, just listen. your brain needs to start recognizing the sounds as whole words and not as individual dits and dahs, and that transition is uncomfortable because your copy rate temporarily tanks and it feels like you're going backwards. also, have you tried just listening to actual QSOs on the air even if you cant copy it all? HF propagation willing, 40m has a decent amount of CW traffic in the evenings and even catching a few exchanges here and there does something different for your ear than practice software. the real stuff has a different feel to it, RST exchanges, callsigns, all of it at natural rhythm. took me from stuck-at-14 to solid 18 in maybe 3 months of doing that alongside the software sessions.

so ive been messing with APRS for about 6 months now and mostly its been fine, i can see my position on aprs.fi and stuff gets relayed around locally no problem. but theres this weird thing happening where my packets get picked up by the local digi maybe 8 miles away and then just... stop. like they never make it to the next one which should be on the hilltop to the east. i can see other stations getting through that path just fine so i dont think its the digi itself. im running a TM-D710A with a mag mount on the truck, 50 watts into what is honestly probably not the greatest antenna but it shouldnt matter at 50w right? using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 for my path. ive tried bumping the TX delay up thinking maybe the digi was timing out on my packet but that didnt change anything. im kind of stumped and dont really know what else to check at this point

yeah 10m has been coming alive lately, its been pretty quiet for a while so its nice to see some life up there again. the flux being in the 170-180 range definitely helps open up the higher bands especially for paths into South America in the afternoons. you kind of get a feel for it after a while. for tracking i'd say just bookmark the NOAA space weather page and glance at it in the morning, takes 30 seconds. solar flux index above like 150 and you start seeing real DX on 10 and 12m, above 200 and things get genuinely exciting. also watch the K index, if that starts climbing above 3 or 4 it can mess things up even when the flux looks good because of geomagnetic disturbances. the two things work kind of against each other sometimes which is annoying. anyway yeah dont sleep on 10m when conditions cooperate, it can be magic and the whole band feels different compared to 40

yeah thats pretty much just how it goes this time of year honestly. the solar flux swings have been pretty wild since we're climbing toward the cycle peak and the geomagnetic stuff has been throwing curveballs too. when the K index spikes up after a CME hits you can basically write off the higher bands for a day or two depending on how hard it hits. i usually keep spaceweather.com open in another tab when im on during the day 17 and 15 are fantastic when conditions line up but they can go completely silent if the ionosphere decides to have a bad hair day. the trick i found is just to be persistent and check the DX cluster for spots on those bands. if youre seeing spots from stations near you to a particular region thats a good sign the path is open. sounds like you already figured out the basics though, those contacts you got are real, band was open, you worked em. thats the game.

check the LPF relays too before you commit to PA work. i know it sounds boring but those relays can get flaky and cause weird band-dependent power issues that look like a finals problem but arent. theres a known thing on some early production 7300s with the relay contacts getting oxidized. you can sometimes hear a faint click that sounds slightly different on the affected band when you TX. probably not your issue if its affecting multiple bands but worth a look since its an easier fix than pulling the finals.

so this has been driving me nuts for about three weeks now. my 7300 will just cut out mid transmission, sometimes after 30 seconds sometimes after like 8 minutes, completely random. when it drops it doesnt shut off fully, the display stays on, audio comes back on receive, but TX power goes to zero and the ALC is doing weird stuff. key up again and sometimes its fine, sometimes it just does it again immediately. before anyone asks — yes i checked the fan, its spinning fine. yes i checked the SWR on the antenna, running under 1.5:1 on 40m where this happens most. the PA finals arent getting crazy hot from what i can tell by feel on the case. i did a factory reset last week which changed nothing. power supply is an Astron RS-35M putting out a steady 13.8v under load, checked it with my meter while keyed up and it doesnt sag more than a couple tenths. the part that has me confused is that it seems worse when the shack is warmer, like today it was maybe 75 in here and it dropped out four times in an hour. a few weeks ago when it was cooler outside it ran a whole contest session with no issues. thermal issue somewhere is my guess but i cant figure out where to start poking around. anybody dealt with something like this on a 7300 or similar SDR-type radio?