Michael Miller

oh man i just did my first one last month at a wildlife refuge near me and it was so much fun. i was nervous about getting 44 contacts but ended up with like 67 in about two hours which surprised me. there seem to be a lot of hunters on the wwff frequencies who are looking for new references so once you get spotted the pileup comes pretty quick. i was on 40m SSB mostly. one thing i wasnt expecting -- some chasers will ask you to confirm the exact reference number like KFF-xxxx so have that handy. i fumbled it the first couple times and had to look it up on my phone mid-qso which was a little embarrassing but everyone was patient about it

yeah i caught the tail end of that opening, came home from work around 3:30 and 28.4 was still pretty lively. worked a couple of Brazilian stations and a guy in Argentina which was cool, both were strong enough that it felt almost like local 2m contacts which is always a little surreal on HF. my setup is nothing fancy either so thats always encouraging when the band does the heavy lifting for you on the IC-905 thing -- i actually got to play with one at the regional hamfest last month. its impressive hardware for sure but yeah the price is something else. the guy demoing it was doing 10ghz contacts which i never even thought about before. probably not something ill be buying anytime soon but its neat that the technology is becoming more accessible i guess, or at least more consumer-packaged. felt very solidly built, typical Icom quality

so ive been thinking about this for a while now and i finally started messing around with an arduino uno to control my 6-position antenna switch. the idea is pretty simple i think — use the arduino to read band data from my radio (FT-991A puts out band voltage on the ACC port) and then automatically switch to the right antenna based on whatever band im on i got the basic relay board working on the bench, just toggling relays on and off with a simple sketch, but im kinda stuck on reading the band voltage reliably. the voltage levels arent always clean and i keep getting false triggers when i transmit. thinking i might need some filtering or maybe an optoisolator in there to keep the RF out of the arduino but honestly not sure where to start with that anyone done something like this or have a circuit that worked for them? ive seen some stuff online but half of it is for older radios and the pinouts dont match. also wondering if i should just scrap the arduino idea and use a raspberry pi instead since i already have a pi4 sitting here doing nothing — though that feels like overkill for just switching relays

ok so i passed my technician exam about three weeks ago and ive been reading through Part 97 trying to figure out what im actually allowed to do. the study material kind of glossed over some of this stuff and now that im trying to actually get on the air im second guessing myself on a few things. like i know techs have HF privileges on 10m but im not totally clear on what modes are allowed there vs what general/extra class guys can do. and then someone at my club mentioned something about needing to identify every 10 minutes and at the end of a contact but i thought it was just every 10 minutes? and does that apply to simplex on 2m too or just HF, i genuinely cannot find a straight answer on this. also someone told me you cant use your callsign with a portable designator like /M or /P anymore and the FCC got rid of that requirement but then someone else said you still can if you want to. who is right here lol

congrats on getting out there, that first one is always a bit nerve wracking not knowing if you set things up right and if anyone's even listening. to answer your question yeah it's ADIF upload through the wwff logbook system, there's a spot on the wwff.us site or the regional coordinator page depending where you are. you do need the right fields filled in, the reference number being the big one obviously. partial activations do get logged and they count toward your total contacts at that reference over time i believe, so if you go back and do another 40 contacts at the same reference it should combine. but the 44 minimum is for a valid activation that gets listed as complete. honestly just get the reference number sorted and upload what you have, the coordinators are usually pretty helpful if something doesn't parse right in the ADIF

so I passed my general exam about three weeks ago and I've been using my sequential callsign that the FCC assigned me, which is fine but honestly it's kind of a mouthful and I'd really like to get something shorter or maybe use my initials if thats possible. I've been reading about the vanity callsign system and I'm getting a bit lost. from what I understand there's like a window system where certain applicants get priority — like if you're applying for a call that belonged to a close relative who was a ham, or if you hold a higher class license. but when I just looked at the 1x2 and 2x1 calls available in my district a lot of them show as unavailable or in some kind of queue. does that mean someone already applied or are they just not released yet? also I wasnt sure if there's a waiting period after getting your initial sequential call before you can apply for a vanity. someone at my club mentioned something about that but couldnt remember the details. any help appreciated, this is kind of confusing to navigate on the FCC ULS site

nice work on the activation. im kind of in the same boat, only done two activations so far and the logging part confused me at first too. one tip i got from someone here was to download the VK port-a-log app before you go out, makes logging in the field way easier than paper and then you can just export the file and upload it directly to sotadata when you get home. saves a lot of headache.

Just getting into EME and have been reading conflicting info about power requirements. I've seen claims that 80-100W is sufficient for 70cm Q65 contacts with a decent Yagi, but what about 2m? Currently running 100W into a dual 17-element array with 0.6dB NF preamp. Several sources mention successful 2m EME with just 50W and a directional antenna using JT65, but wondering if Q65 requirements are similar. Anyone making regular contacts with modest power on 144 MHz?

congrats on getting it mounted, doing the coax run down the A pillar is always the part that makes people give up halfway through lol. the Tram 1185 is honestly a solid antenna for what you're doing, nothing fancy but its efficient and the NMO mount with a roof drill is the right way to do it so you're ahead of a lot of people already. for local repeaters and regional simplex it'll do just fine. if you ever get deep into weak signal work you might want to look at something with a bit more gain but dont worry about that for now. the fan on the FTM-400 yeah thats just how it is, mine kicks on pretty fast too especially in the summer. its not a problem its just the radio doing its thing. some guys put a little foam or velcro pad around the body unit to dampen it slightly but i wouldnt stress over it. and yes running direct to battery with an inline fuse is exactly right, good job there. a lot of people tap into the fuse box and wonder why they have noise issues or voltage drop

the thing about starting slow being bad is real — if you learn letters at like 5 wpm you end up counting dits and dahs in your head instead of just hearing the letter as a sound, and thats a really hard habit to break later. the Koch method is basically learning one character at a time but at a speed that feels almost too fast, like 15-20 wpm, so your brain has to just recognize it as a whole sound rather than picking it apart. you start with just two characters, get like 90% accuracy on those, then add another one. theres a free program called LCWO dot net that does Koch training in your browser, i used it for maybe 20 minutes a day for about 4 months and went from nothing to being able to copy simple QSOs. consistency is way more important than long sessions, seriously even 10 minutes a day beats an hour on weekends also just listening to actual on-air CW helps more than people think even before you can copy much. tune around 7.050 or so in the evening and just let it wash over you, your brain starts picking stuff out eventually

ok so ive been listening on HF for a few weeks now with my new technician ticket and people are throwing around all these weird codes and abbreviations and i cant figure out half of them. like what is QRM vs QRN, i see those a lot. and what does 73 mean, somebody explained it once but i forgot. also people say things like QSL and QTH all the time. is there a list somewhere or do you just pick these up over time? i tried googling but i get like wikipedia pages that list hundreds of them and most of them nobody actually uses so i dont know which ones to bother learning

nice work getting it up. i did almost the exact same thing for my first antenna except i used 12awg and it was way heavier than it needed to be, had a hell of a time keeping tension on the ends without pulling the tree branch down lol. one thing i didnt think about when i first built mine was the effect of nearby stuff, like my swr changed noticeably once i ran the coax along the fence vs hanging it free. might be worth checking if you move anything around it later on just to see if the numbers shift.

so our ARES group finally did one of those full-scale simulation exercises we've been talking about doing for like two years. the scenario was a major flood cutting off the county EOC from three shelter locations, no internet, no phone, just HF and VHF to get traffic through. i've been doing emcomm stuff for about six years now and honestly i still learned a lot from this thing. the good stuff first — our net control guy did a great job keeping things organized, we had solid comms on the 2m repeater for most of the shelter check-ins, and the ICS forms we've been practicing actually got used correctly for once. like people actually wrote down the right info and passed it properly, that felt like a win. but here's where it fell apart. when we simulated the repeater going down (which obviously is exactly when you need it most), half the guys had no idea what simplex frequency we were supposed to fall back to. we'd briefed it but apparently it didn't stick. and then on the HF side, conditions were not great that morning and nobody had thought to pre-plan an alternate frequency in case 40m wasn't working. we ended up burning like 20 minutes just figuring out where to meet up on the band. also — and this is a big one — one of our newer members showed up with a HT that was barely charged and no backup power. during a real event that person is basically a liability at that point, not an asset. we had a whole thing about that afterward. anyway just curious if other groups have been running drills lately and what kinds of stuff has caught you off guard. feels like no matter how much you prep there's always something.

so ive been listening to the local 2m net for a few weeks now trying to get comfortable before actually checking in and i finally did it last tuesday. net control asked for check-ins and i just said my callsign and that was it i guess? net control acknowledged me and moved on but afterward one of the guys on the repeater told me i should have given my name and location too. i wasnt sure if that was like a requirement or just a local thing because i listened to another net on a different repeater and people just gave callsigns there. also is there a standard way to pass traffic if someone asks you to relay something? i got asked to relay a message to another ham and i kind of fumbled through it. wasnt sure if there was a specific format or if informal is fine for a casual net. nobody seemed annoyed but i felt pretty awkward about the whole thing. still learning all this stuff and dont want to be the guy who steps on people or does something embarrassing on air.

yeah the channel picker thing drove me nuts too when i was getting started. one thing i noticed is that the propagation predictions dont account for whatever noise floor situation the gateway is dealing with on their end. ive had gateways show green in the selector and then i connect and Vara is struggling to decode anything because apparently that site has some kind of interference issue. theres a couple gateways near me that are just always solid and i basically just default to those now unless band conditions are really weird. also make sure your Vara is actually tuned right, that took me forever to figure out. if your audio levels are off even a little bit it makes everything flaky and you blame the gateway when its actually your own setup. the Vara calibration thing in the settings is worth doing if you havent already.

Took me about three weeks of casual studying, maybe 20-30 minutes a day. I used HamStudy and also went through the ARRL General manual but honestly the manual is a lot to get through if you just want to pass. The question pool approach works fine, especially once you start seeing patterns in the answers. The theory stuff isnt as scary as it looks once it clicks. Things like the relationship between frequency and wavelength, understanding why certain bands are better at certain times of day — that actually does help when you get on HF because youre not just randomly spinning the dial wondering why you cant hear anything. Knowing that 40m is usually good for regional contacts in the evening and 20m opens up longer paths during the day actually matters when youre trying to work someone. Just do the practice tests until youre consistently hitting 80% or above and you should be fine. The real test felt easier to me than the practice ones for some reason.

Thanks for the heads up! I'm still learning about propagation - should I be looking at any particular websites to track these conditions in real time? Want to make the most of my General privileges.

yeah this is basically every drill ever lol. the cascade failure from one inject is so common and honestly its kind of the whole point -- you want to find out where your single points of failure are before a real event. the backup operator list thing is something our group struggled with too, we now keep a laminated card at net control with at least two alternates for every position and their current contact info, and we actually verify the numbers are still good before each exercise. the battery thing is a perennial problem. we started requiring anyone assigned to a shelter position to show up with a fully charged spare battery or a way to charge from a car. sounds obvious but you'd be amazed how many people show up with a half dead HT even knowing its a drill. for the real world we have a couple of battery boxes built up that can charge HTs off of a sealed lead acid but those take time to deploy. for the after action review, we use a pretty simple format -- what went well, what didnt, and what do we change. we try to get input from every single participant not just the leadership because sometimes the guy running a shelter saw something that the EC never knew about. we also write it up and actually keep it on file so the next EC inherits that institutional knowledge and doesnt have to relearn everything from scratch. that last part took us a while to figure out honestly.

i just got my tech in march so this is pretty fresh for me. i used hamexam.org mostly and watched some youtube videos from a guy called Ham Radio Crash Course, that helped a lot for the concepts i couldnt quite wrap my head around just from reading questions. the electricity and antenna questions tripped me up at first but once i got the basic formulas down it clicked. the test itself is 35 questions and you need 26 right so theres some room for error. i was so nervous at the session but honestly the VEs were super chill about the whole thing, it wasnt like a DMV experience at all if thats what you're picturing.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about DXCC and chasing entities and all that. i kind of get the basic idea, you work a hundred different countries or whatever they call them, entities i guess, and then you apply for the award. but theres so much stuff i dont understand about the whole process. like first off, how do you actually submit for the award now? i know the ARRL handles it but is everything through logbook of the world these days or do people still mail cards? and whats the deal with WAS and WAZ, are those totally separate things you chase independently or is there some overlap in how you track them? i feel like ive been casually logging contacts for months and probably have stuff that counts toward something but i have no idea what. also someone at my local club mentioned mixed mode vs phone vs cw endorsements and i kind of nodded along but honestly didnt fully follow. do most people just go for mixed first and then worry about the mode-specific stuff later? sorry if these are dumb questions, just trying to figure out where to even start with all this

the eu2200i should handle that load no problem honestly. i ran mine with a 7300 plus a raspberry pi gateway and a 12v battery charger ticking away and never had a hiccup. the thing to watch is your duty cycle on the HF side - digital modes like winlink will run that finals harder than voice would and the generator doesnt care what mode youre in, it just sees the current draw. if youre doing any kind of extended packet or vara sessions just keep an eye on the rig temp and maybe dont push it past 50w and you'll be fine. on the antenna - sloping dipole from a 6m mast is totally workable for 40m. youre not going to get a great elevation angle for DX but for regional emcomm work which is probably what you need anyway, the NVIS characteristics are actually decent especially if the legs are at a pretty shallow angle. i wouldnt overthink it. get it up, get a baseline SWR, adjust if you have to. the 7300's tuner will handle a lot of weirdness anyway.

so i finally joined our county ARES group about four months ago after sitting on the sidelines forever and just got word that we're being activated this weekend to support the county EOC during a winter storm watch. nothing crazy, just a watch not even a warning yet, but our EC said they want us staffed up just in case things escalate. i've been to maybe five or six of the weekly nets and done two of the training exercises we ran in the fall, one of which was a simulated hospital comms drill which was actually pretty cool. but an actual activation is different i guess? i dont really know what to expect when i show up at the EOC. do i just bring my HT and wait around? my EC mentioned something about ICS paperwork but honestly that went over my head a little during the briefing. anyone been through a first activation and have any tips? feel free to tell me if im overthinking this, its possible im overthinking this.

Why not do early bird pricing? $20 if paid 2 weeks early, $25 at the door. Gets you advance commitments and helps with planning. We've had good luck with that approach.

I'll second hamstudy but also want to say don't completely skip understanding the material. I passed my tech just memorizing answers years ago and then when I got on the air I had no idea what half the stuff on my radio meant. Ended up having to go back and learn it anyway. That said if you're short on time the question pool approach works fine, the exam pulls directly from those questions and nothing else so there are no surprises. One thing that helped me was doing the practice tests until I was consistently hitting 80 percent or better before I scheduled the actual exam session. Gordon West also has a study book that some people swear by, more conversational than the ARRL one if the dense technical writing puts you to sleep.

im in almost the exact same boat lol, stuck at like 12wpm for the past two months and its driving me nuts. did you use any specific practice audio on 40m or just tune around and try to copy whatever? i feel like i can do fine on lcwo but then i tune into an actual qso and it just sounds like noise to me, different fists and the qsb and everything just throws me completely off.