Michael Miller

so i finally did my first activation on saturday, been meaning to do one for about a year and a half now and kept putting it off. took the ft-818 and a homebrew linked dipole up to a local W4V summit, nothing too crazy, maybe a 45 minute hike but still felt real good to finally be up there with the radio. managed to get 4 contacts which i know is the minimum to claim the activation points, but im not sure i did the spotting right. i posted to SOTAwatch before i left the house with an estimated time but ended up being like 20 minutes late getting to the summit and i think chasers might have given up by then. ended up calling CQ on 40m for a good while before anyone came back to me. is there a way to update your spot from the summit? i had cell service up there which surprised me honestly. also do i need to log the contacts anywhere specific or just submit through the SOTA database the normal way? i read the general summit to summit stuff but the logging part confused me a bit.

Love this idea. As someone who got licensed last year, those first few weeks were pretty intimidating. Having a dedicated net where I could ask "dumb" questions without feeling judged made all the difference in staying active.

I've been thinking about this lately. DXCC gets all the attention, but WAZ (Worked All Zones) seems more logical for actually "working the world" since it requires you to work stations in all 40 geographic zones. With DXCC, you could work 100 countries that might not be spread worldwide - lots of European and Caribbean entities clustered in small areas. WAZ sounds easier at 40 zones vs 100 countries, but apparently it's harder because you literally have to reach every corner of the globe. Anyone else working on WAZ? How does it compare?

so ive been doing serious contesting for about 4 years now mostly single op single radio and honestly been pretty competitive in my category but every time i look at the top scores in CQWW or SS the guys crushing it are almost all running SO2R and i keep wondering if im leaving a massive amount of points on the table the thing is i understand the concept, run on one radio while the other is tuned to S&P on a second band, fill in the dead time between CQ responses — but actually implementing it seems like a nightmare. the station i have right now is a K3 and an IC-7300 so i technically have two radios but the interference between them even with decent band separation is brutal if i dont have proper filtering in place. tried it briefly during last years sweepstakes and the second radio was basically useless because it was getting hammered by the first one i guess my question is, for someone who's mostly been doing high-rate running, what's the actual workflow when you add the second radio. do you just let the run radio sit there CQing and quickly tune around on radio 2 between responses, or is it more active than that. and is it even worth doing if my rate is already decent on the run radio. feels like it might just be a distraction

I've been wrestling with this exact problem on my homebrew 40m transceiver. Because the newest version of Jason's Si5351 library is not compatible with older sketches, try using the 2015 version of the Si5351 library. Also try the calibration reset procedure - press the calibration button twice without tuning to reset, then recalibrate.

I run almost identical - IC-7300 + 100Ah Battle Born + 200W solar. In summer with good sun, can run all day digital modes no problem. Winter or cloudy days, maybe 4-6 hours at 50% duty cycle before needing the generator. Pro tip: Add a DC-DC charger between solar and battery - prevents overcharging issues I had initially.

im in almost the same boat as you, been licensed about a year and just started actually paying attention to this stuff a few months ago. one thing that helped me was downloading the DXCC entity list and just keeping it open while i operate so i can cross check. also there's a website called Club Log that's really useful, you can upload your ADIF log and it tells you what entities you've worked and which ones are confirmed vs just worked. saved me a lot of confusion honestly. the 40 or 50 countries you've already worked might be more entities than you think once you start sorting it out properly

so i finally did my first park activation last weekend at a state park about 45 min from my house. been putting it off forever because i kept thinking my setup wasnt good enough or whatever. ended up just throwing my kx2 and a random wire in a backpack and driving out there. set up under a picnic shelter, threw the wire up into a tree maybe 20 feet, tuned up on 40m and just started calling. had 10 contacts in like 25 minutes which i know isnt impressive but man it felt great. a few hunters were really patient with me fumbling around with the log sheet too which was nice. anyway just wanted to share because i kept reading about people's elaborate setups and got intimidated. you really dont need much to get a valid activation apparently.

yeah 40 has been weird for me too, though i actually had a pretty good run last sunday afternoon. caught some decent skip and worked a few stations down in florida no problem. i think a lot of guys have moved up to 17 or 15 honestly, propagation there has been way better with the solar flux where it is lately. try checking around 18mhz if your radio goes up there, its been pretty lively

so ive been running single op for years now, mostly CQWW and sweepstakes, and im finally starting to think seriously about setting up a proper SO2R station. right now i just have the one radio (IC-7300) and a second radio sitting on the shelf that i picked up last year, a used TS-590SG that i got for like 400 bucks. both decent HF rigs but making them play together without one killing the other is obviously the whole problem. my antennas are kind of a mess — a 40m dipole up at about 35 feet and a tribander at 45 that covers 10/15/20. so not exactly an optimized SO2R antenna farm. i know the real stations running this stuff have separate antennas for each radio with a ton of isolation but im wondering if theres a middle ground where i can at least get the second radio going for S&P while the main radio is running a frequency. mainly asking because last SS i felt like i was leaving a lot of mults on the table by not being able to hunt sections while holding a run frequency. the rate drops killed me every time i went searching. anyone actually run a budget SO2R setup that was more than just an exercise in frustration