Michael Peterson

so ive been at this for about 8 months now, started at 5wpm with the Koch method and honestly the first stretch up to around 10-11wpm felt pretty natural. did my daily sessions, used lcwo.net, things were moving along. but somewhere around 12-13wpm things just kind of... stopped. i can copy most letters fine in isolation but when actual words come through at 15+ i just fall apart trying to decode letter by letter instead of hearing the whole word as a sound. i know the advice is always "just listen more" and "stop counting dits" but its easier said than done when your brain wants to translate every single element. been doing this about 30 min a day, sometimes more on weekends. i really want to get to 20wpm eventually, i have no idea if thats a realistic goal for someone who isnt naturally musical or whatever. anybody been through this and actually come out the other side?

yeah the 10m thing is real, i noticed it too. worked a ZL station last thursday which honestly surprised me, wasnt expecting that at all just spinning the dial. solar flux has been up in the 180s some days which is pretty solid. if youre new to HF this is genuinely a great time to get on because even modest antennas do well when conditions are like this on the Icom thing i wouldnt hold your breath, every year before hamvention people swear somethings coming and half the time its nothing or its just a firmware update for something that already exists. that said the IC-7300 is getting old enough now that a proper successor wouldnt surprise me. i'd want to see better roofing filters if they do release something

oh man dont feel too bad about that, literally every single one of us has done something like that when we were new. stepping on someone during a net check-in is basically a rite of passage at this point haha. the thing that trips people up is that on a repeater you cant always hear the tail end of someone else's transmission before you key up, so you think the frequency is clear but it isnt. the general rule i always tell newer folks is just wait a beat longer than you think you need to before transmitting, like a full second or two of silence. and when net control asks for check-ins or responses, wait for him to fully finish speaking and then pause before you go. it feels awkward at first like youre being too slow but it actually sounds way cleaner on the air. for resources the ARRL has a decent intro to net operating on their website and there are some good youtube videos too if you search for like "amateur radio net procedures" but honestly just keep checking in, youll get the feel for it pretty quick. the net controls on these weekly nets have seen everything, they really dont mind helping new folks learn.

been running a remote setup for about two years now, not exactly the same as what you're describing but close enough. I use RemoteHams with a conventional transceiver on the remote end — IC-7300 — and the RRC-1258 microbit controllers for the audio and CAT side of things. works pretty well, the RemoteHams protocol is more efficient than just throwing a VNC session at it. the SDR backend thing is real but kind of a different use case. if youre trying to actually transmit you still need a real rig on the remote end with a license and all that. the SDR receive-only setup through remotehams is neat for monitoring but its not going to let you work a pileup obviously. that said the wideband view you get from something like an airspy remote is genuinely useful for spotting, you can see the whole band at once and cherry pick where to operate. your 8 up should be fine for audio, remotehams doesnt chew through a ton of bandwidth compared to what you might think. the latency matters more than raw throughput honestly. if your fixed wireless has consistent latency under like 80ms or so youll be okay for SSB, CW gets trickier if youre used to tight keying.

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years now and after the storm we had last month that knocked power out for three days i finally stopped procrastinating. got a pelican case, threw in my FT-891, a little switching power supply, some coax, and a random wire antenna i wound up myself. also tossed in a notebook and a few pens because i know from ARES meetings that logging stuff on paper is still important when everything else goes sideways. the thing is i feel like im definitely forgetting something obvious. my elmers always talk about having a go-kit ready but whenever i ask what exactly should be in it i get a different answer every time. one guy says always have a backup HT, another says dont bother with HTs for serious emcomm work, another says bring a laptop, another says paper only. its like everyone has a slightly different philosophy and i cant quite figure out what the baseline should be. right now i think my biggest gaps are probably power — i have a 30ah lithium battery but no solar panel yet — and i have zero documentation with the kit. like if someone else had to operate it they wouldnt know frequencies, repeater tones, nothing. anyone been through this process and figured out what the non-obvious stuff is that you wish youd included from the start?

this is something i want to get more involved in, ive only been licensed about 8 months and our local ARES group seems pretty active but i wasnt sure if drills like this were for newer hams or more experienced folks. is that something where a newcomer would just be in the way or is there usually a role for people who are still learning the ropes?

yeah what he said about lotw being the standard is right. i started with eqsl cause it seemed less intimidating but ended up switching to lotw when i decided to go for dxcc. the certificate thing with lotw is a pain at first but once you get it set up its pretty automatic. i still use eqsl sometimes just cause i like seeing the card images but for anything serious its gotta be lotw

okay so ive been messing with APRS for about two months now and i cannot figure out why my position beacons are showing up on RF just fine (i can see them on my TM-D710 display being digipeated) but they almost never make it onto aprs.fi. like maybe 1 out of every 8 or 9 packets actually shows up on the website. my setup is a TM-D710 with the internal TNC, WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path, beaconing every 3 minutes. i'm in a pretty rural area, about 30 miles from the nearest igate i think. the digi i can see hitting is a fill-in WIDE1 only digi which i guess might be the problem? not totally sure how the igate chain is supposed to work here. also tried bumping my beacon rate to every 90 seconds for testing and it didn't really help, and i read somewhere that too frequent beaconing is actually frowned upon and can cause congestion so i backed off. just not sure if this is a path issue, an igate coverage issue, or something with my settings on the radio itself.

yeah the first one is always like that haha. i remeber my first activation i forgot to actually spot myself on SOTAwatch and just sat there calling CQ for like 15 minutes wondering why nobody was answering. the throw bag thing is huge, i use a tennis ball with some fishing line now and it makes getting the antenna up so much faster. 6 contacts is fine you only need 4 to qualify so you did great

I did something kind of like this a while back but I used a Raspberry Pi and kind of regret it honestly. Booting up takes forever and if the power blips the thing doesn't always come back clean. For just relay switching an Arduino or even a bare ATmega chip is way more reliable in my experience. The Pi is great if you want to run fldigi or log software or something that actually needs real compute power but for I/O stuff the Arduino wins on simplicity. One thing to watch out for with that relay module — make sure it's optoisolated between the control side and the relay side or RF can get into the Arduino and cause all kinds of weirdness. Most of the cheap ones are optoisolated but not all of them, worth checking the board markings.

Good observation! That SFI drop will definitely affect 15M and 10M reliability, especially for European paths during contests. 20M will become even more important - make sure your antennas are optimized there. I've seen similar drops kill 10M completely during winter contests.

morse code hasnt been required since like 2007 so dont worry about that. the technician exam is whats called element 2 and its 35 questions, you need to get 26 right to pass. honestly its not that bad at all, i was nervous before mine but the actual test was way easier than i expected after studying best thing i did was just use hamstudy.org, you can drill questions over and over and it tracks which ones you keep getting wrong. some people also swear by the ARRL technician manual but i found just doing the question pool practice was enough, the whole pool is public so theoretically you could just memorize every answer but actually understanding the material helps when you get on the air and start wondering why things work the way they do find a local club too if you can, a lot of them run licensing classes and will help you find a VE session to take the test at. mine was like 15 bucks to sit for it

As someone new to GNU Radio, should I start with 4.0 RC1 or stick with the stable 3.x branch? I'm mainly interested in learning basic DSP concepts with my RTL-SDR dongles.

I'm fairly new to chasing (only been doing it a few months) but from the chaser side -- when an activator doesnt know their reference I just look it up on the SOTAwatch map if I can figure out roughly where they are. not a big deal at all. most of us chasers are pretty patient especially with someone's first activation. the main thing is just being on the air, we'll sort out the paperwork haha

okay so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get into the local 2m repeater scene. there's a repeater listed in the repeater directory that says it needs a 100.0 Hz tone to access it. i programmed that into my baofeng and i can hear people on the repeater just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me, or at least they dont respond. im not sure if the issue is the tone, my radio, my antenna, or just that nobody happened to be listening. i also wasnt sure if you're supposed to announce yourself somehow before just jumping in? like is there a proper way to do this or do people just start talking? a guy at the club meeting mentioned something about listening before transmitting but didnt really explain what he meant by that. im only about 4 miles from the repeater site so range shouldnt be an issue i think. also there are like 4 or 5 repeaters listed for my area and some say they're linked together — does that mean if i key up on one i can hear stuff from another frequency? sorry for all the questions im just trying to figure this out without making myself look dumb on the air

the drift you're seeing is almost certainly the crystal warming up, totally normal for that circuit especially if you didnt add any kind of enclosure or thermal mass around the xtal. some guys wrap theirs in a little foam or even just let it live inside a small tin to keep the temp stable. after a while you kind of just know to key up and let it sit for a bit before calling CQ. mine used to drift like crazy until i built a simple little wooden box for the whole rig and it helped a surprising amount, probably just keeping drafts off it. on the antenna thing — yeah its not really overstated unfortunately. when youre running a watt or less there's just no margin for sloppiness in the feedline or a mediocre antenna. every db matters a lot more. the EFHW is a great choice for portable stuff, the matchbox is pretty simple to wind, 49:1 transformer is what most people use. look up the QRPguys EFHW kit if you want a reference design, even if you dont buy it the schematic is worth studying.

so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now and the position beaconing works fine, i can see myself on aprs.fi moving around no problem. but i cant for the life of me get two-way messaging to work. im using a TM-D710G with the built in TNC and everything looks configured right to me. tried messaging a buddy who runs Dire Wolf on his laptop and he says he can see my position packets but the messages just never arrive at his end. i checked the path settings and im using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. message ack packets are showing up in the log on my end so it seems like its at least trying. not sure if this is a digipeater issue in my area or something wrong with my config. anyone dealt with this before? its kind of annoying because i wanted to use this for some local ARES stuff and reliable messaging would be pretty important for that.

yeah I did both mods on mine back when i first got it, probably 2013 or so. the RX mod is worth doing imo just because the 857 actually recieves pretty decently below the broadcast band and you get coverage down into the longwave stuff which is fun to poke around on. the jumper version vs software thing — i went the hardware route because i didn't fully trust the software only approach, seemed like it could get reset by a firmware update or factory reset. with the physical jumper change it's just done and stays done. there's a thread on eham somewhere that lays it out pretty well, look for the one by KD9 something, forget his suffix. just make sure you're looking at the right version of the board because they changed the layout somewhere around 2009 i think and some of the older diagrams are wrong for the newer units

So I finally did my first activation last weekend up on W4T/SU-001 and honestly it was way more fun than I expected. Been chasing summits for about 8 months now and kept telling myself id get around to doing an actual activation and i finally just did it. Took my FT-818 and a linked dipole I built from a kit, threw it up in a tree with a painters pole and just started calling on 40m. Got my 4 contacts pretty quick which was a relief because I was worried nobody would hear me, running only 5 watts. A couple of the chasers gave me signal reports that seemed way too generous honestly but whatever I'll take it. Then I moved to 20m and got a few more including one guy from Ontario which felt pretty cool for 5 watts. Couple things I'm not sure about — do you log the summit reference in your personal log or just on SOTAdata? I've been putting it in my notes field in HAMRS but wondering if theres a standard way people do it. Also I noticed when I uploaded to SOTAdata it said my activation was valid but I only see 1 point for the summit, thought it was worth more? Maybe I'm reading the page wrong. Anyway really enjoyed it and already planning the next one, probably something a bit more of a hike next time.

could also just be the VFO. if its not well shielded the audio wiring running nearby can FM modulate it slightly and that'll mess up the output in a way that doesnt really look like classic hum, more like that muddy thing you're describing. i had a manhattan style build years ago where the VFO was totally open and my mic cable was only a couple inches away, took me forever to figure out why it sounded bad on SSB. stuck a little tin can shield around the VFO coil and it cleaned right up.

might also want to throw a small cap across the transistor collector to ground, like 0.1uf ceramic, ive seen that tame some of the switching transients on the PTT line. also are you sure youre not accidentally feeding audio from the arduino into the mic input somehow? some of those boards can leak a tiny bit of signal on the GPIO when they switch states and if thats anywhere near the mic circuit on the 7300 itll pick it up for sure.

so i finally got my general last month and ive been lurking on a few local nets just listening but i want to actually check in and participate. the thing is i dont really know the proper way to do it and i dont want to step on anyone or sound like a complete idiot my first time keying up on a net. like when the net control calls for check-ins, do you just say your callsign once or twice? do you say your name and location every time or just the first time? i heard someone give a signal report during check-in and wasnt sure if that was expected or just something that guy does. also what happens if two people check in at the same time, does net control sort it out or do you just wait and try again? i know this is probably super basic stuff but i searched around and couldnt find a straight answer that wasnt like... a 40 page PDF from the 1980s. any help appreciated

ok so ive been licensed for about 4 months now (general) and i keep hearing people talk about nets but honestly i still dont fully understand the whole process. like i know you tune to a frequency at a certain time and say your callsign but thats about where my knowledge ends. i found a couple nets listed on a site but some of them seem to only run certain days and i missed a few trying to figure out the timing. also saw something about a special event station for a lighthouse weekend thing and have no idea if thats different from a regular net or what. do you just call them like a normal contact or is there a specific procedure? mostly i just want to start participating in something regular, even just to hear how it all sounds. any nets that are good for newcomers would be appreciated. im in the midwest if that matters.

I've built several Arduino Nano/Si5351 VFO projects over the past year, but I'm consistently running into calibration problems. The EEPROM does not save the previous VFO frequency and reverts to default upon every restart, even though I've followed the standard calibration procedures from multiple sources. When I try to set correction factors over 32767 (like 93000), I get overflow warnings with 16-bit integers. Has anyone found a reliable workaround for persistent frequency storage and calibration value handling? Currently using the Etherkit Si5351 library v2.1.3 with Arduino IDE 1.8.19.

the 7300 idles around 1.5-2A on receive depending on display brightness and what you have running. if your tx duty cycle is reasonable for emcomm work (which it usually is, you're not contesting) then 50ah should absolutely cover a full 8 hour op day with room to spare. i'd derate to maybe 80% usable on the lifepo4 just to be safe so call it 40ah effective — you'll be fine. on the mast question, i've been using a 33ft jackite pole for the past couple years and it's been really solid. stakes into the ground well enough with the right guying setup and you can get a wire antenna up fast. throw a linked dipole off the top in an inverted-v config and you're covering most HF bands in maybe 20 minutes once you've done it a few times. dont bother with a tuner if you build the links right for your target bands, one less thing to power and mess with. the generator-as-backup-only approach is the right call imo. run it only when you need to top off the battery and keep it well away from the op position. get a long enough extension cord that you can really isolate it, i run about 50 feet and that plus ferrites on the power lead basically killed the rfi for me.