David Chen

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 years now mostly just doing HF and some local 2m stuff but i finally decided to try working through one of the LEO birds with a linear transponder. picked up a funcube dongle plus a cheap yagi and figured id give it a shot with SO-50 first but then someone told me SO-50 is FM not linear so i switched focus to AO-73 or maybe FO-29 i cant remember which one my tracking software was showing as having a good pass this weekend. anyway the doppler correction is what's killing me. i understand the concept, signal comes in higher frequency as the sat approaches and lower as it moves away, fine, i get that. but in practice when im trying to work a linear transponder i need to be adjusting both my uplink AND my downlink simultaneously? and they drift in opposite directions? that just seems incredibly annoying to manage in real time especially when the pass is only like 9 minutes long and you gotta actually make a contact in there somewhere. using gpredict right now linked to my ft-818 via hamlib and it seems to be doing something but honestly i cant tell if its actually correcting or just showing me pretty numbers. did anyone else go through this learning curve or am i missing something obvious

the WIDE1-1,WIDE2-2 path (note: WIDE2-2 not WIDE2-1 at the end) is actually the more common recommendation these days especially if you're in an area with fill-in digis. WIDE1-1 is specifically intended to be heard by those low-power fill-in digipeaters that might not respond to WIDE2 calls. if your area doesn't have many of those it's basically just adding hops for no reason and yes that can cause duplicate packets floating around which is why you see inconsistent behavior on aprs.fi. best way to test honestly is aprs.fi combined with findu.com — look at the raw packets and see which digis are actually picking you up and how many times each packet shows. if you're seeing the same packet relayed 4-5 times from the same digi chain that's a sign your path is too aggressive for the local infrastructure. i went through the same thing when i moved out here, took me a while to realize there was a really solid WIDE2 digi about 12 miles out that was doing all the heavy lifting and my WIDE1-1 was just creating extra garbage on the channel.

congrats on your first activation, those community event support ops are actually really great for getting your feet wet before anything high stress comes along. the ICS stuff is something a lot of groups handle differently but yeah most ARES groups around here at least expect you to have IS-100 and IS-700 done before you'd be assigned to anything during an actual declared emergency. they're free online through FEMA's training site and honestly dont take that long. IS-200 is worth doing too if you want to understand the command structure better and how we plug in as a support function rather than running our own show as for net control, your best bet is honestly just asking your EC if you can shadow the NC operator on the next few events and then maybe try a low stakes net yourself. a lot of people learned by doing weekly check-in nets first where the consequences of fumbling something are basically zero. there's also the ARRL's emergency communication course series, EC-001 through EC-003 i think, and the later ones get into net operations more specifically. but really nothing beats watching someone who's good at it and then doing it yourself with someone who can correct you in the moment

so ive been working on my CW for about 6 months now and i finally feel like im copying okay at around 12-13 wpm but my sending is honestly a mess. im using a cheap set of single-lever paddles i picked up off ebay and an MFJ keyer built into my radio (ts-590sg) and something just feels off. like the dots and dashes dont feel evenly spaced to me when i listen back to a recording of myself and its really frustrating because i can hear the difference between clean code and mine. ive been messing with the weight setting on the keyer but i dont really understand what that does exactly — does it affect the ratio of dot to dash length or is it more about the spacing between elements? i honestly have no idea if the problem is the paddles, my technique, or the keyer settings. the paddles feel a little wobbly too, not sure if thats normal for cheaper ones. anyway if anyone has been through this id love to know how you sorted it out. or if theres a better way to practice sending. i do use the Koch method on the computer for receiving but havent found anything that really focuses on the sending side.

35 feet apex on an inverted-V for 40m is totally workable, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. yeah the radiation angle is going to be higher than a vertical with a proper radial field but for regional contacts and even some decent DX when the band opens up youre not going to feel like youre handicapped. ive worked plenty of europe on 40m with an inverted-V at about that height, not every night but enough that it never felt pointless. the radial thing with verticals is real by the way. ive seen guys put up a ground mounted vertical with like 4 or 8 radials and wonder why it underperforms a simple dipole - its because youre basically dumping half your power into lossy ground. you need at least 16 radials before it starts getting competitive and 32-64 before you really see the low angle benefit people talk about. if you dont have the space or patience for that, the inverted-V is genuinely the smarter choice for your situation. build the dipole, get on the air, stop reading antenna comparison articles at 2am

so i've been licensed about 14 months now (general class) and i keep hearing about CQ WW being this massive event and i finally decided im just gonna jump in and try it this october. i did Field Day last year with my club which was fun but that felt pretty casual, lots of people around helping out, grilling burgers etc. CQ WW seems like a whole different animal from what i've read. my setup is pretty modest, just a Yaesu FT-891 running into a dipole up about 25 feet in the backyard. i know im not gonna set any records lol but i just want to get some contacts and learn how it works. do i need logging software? i've just been using paper logs for everyday QSOs. also not sure if i should try SO (single op) or just do search and pounce the whole time. any advice welcome, especially from people who remember their first real contest

so ive been trying to work AO-73 for the past few weekends and i feel like im missing something fundamental. i can hear the downlink fine on 145.950 region, signals sound decent when the bird is high enough, but i cannot for the life of me find my own uplink in the passband. using a FT-818 for the 2m uplink and an SDR on 70cm for monitoring the downlink on a separate laptop. i know about the doppler thing and ive been using Gpredict to get the shift values, applying them manually which is probably part of the problem honestly. when i key up i dont hear anything on the downlink, not even a squeal or anything to indicate im getting into it. the pass is usually around 12-15 degrees max elevation from my location so maybe thats killing me too. running about 3w into a pair of crossed yagis, Az/El capable. is there a trick to initially finding yourself in there that im not getting? i read about tuning around a bit while transmitting but that seems like itd just walk over everyone else in the passband which doesnt seem cool

ok so i got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to use the local 2m repeater that the club put in the repeater directory. i can hear people on it just fine but when i try to transmit nobody seems to hear me or respond. someone at the club mentioned CTCSS tones but i dont really understand what that is or how to set it up on my baofeng. like is this why nobody can hear me? i feel like im missing something obvious here. also separate question kind of — when i do manage to get on a repeater and someone is already in the middle of a conversation, do i just wait or is there a way to let them know im listening? i sat there for like 20 minutes the other night waiting for a gap and i wasnt sure what the etiquette was. sorry if these are dumb questions im still figuring all this out.

congrats on the first one, it really does get easier after that initial activation jitters wear off. i remember my first time i forgot to actually spot myself and just sat there calling CQ for like 20 minutes wondering why nobody was coming back to me, felt like an idiot when i figured it out the EFHW on 40 is a solid choice for portable work, i've been using basically the same setup for two years now and it just works. some people get fancy with linked dipoles and all that but honestly for a casual activation you dont need much. the KX2 is a great radio for this too, battery life is real good if you keep the power reasonable. one tip i'd add — if the pileup gets chaotic try working by last letter or a number in the callsign, just something to give it some order. some activators don't bother but when it's busy it helps a lot

congrats and welcome, that first contact feeling is something else isnt it. i still remember mine, i was on 40m ssb and completely fumbled my callsign twice before the other guy just waited patiently and then said good job for getting on the air. the nervousness goes away pretty quick once you do it a few more times. keep at it, 2m simplex is a good place to start but once you upgrade and get on HF youre in for a whole different world

i switched from inverted V to a flat top last summer and tbh the difference wasnt dramatic but i did notice slightly better signal reports on the longer paths, like into europe from the midwest. but my flat top is at about 45 feet and pretty level so apples to oranges maybe. the bigger pain was retuning the thing because the flat top resonated a bit different than i expected, ended up having to trim about 8 inches off each leg which was annoying after id already tied everything off.

honestly the math looks scarier than it is. most of the questions where there's actual calculation involved you only need to know a handful of formulas and the numbers are pretty forgiving, like they're not trying to trick you with weird decimals or anything. i studied with hamstudy.org for maybe 6 weeks doing like 20 minutes a day on my lunch break and passed with room to spare. the transmission line and filter stuff did take me a little longer to wrap my head around but once you get the basic concepts it clicks. i'd say don't just memorize blindly if you can help it because some of the questions are worded slightly differently and if you dont actually understand whats going on you can get tripped up. but plenty of people do pass just from drilling the pool, not gonna lie. and yeah i did feel like i learned real stuff. the stuff about antenna feedpoint impedance and why certain matching networks work the way they do actually changed how i think about my antenna setup. not saying you need the extra to be a good operator but it wasnt useless knowledge for me.

SFI of 135 is still workable, but you're right to be concerned about contest planning. The key is that geomagnetic activity matters more than absolute SFI - even SFI 120 with K=1-2 can produce great contest conditions. Watch the A-index trends too, not just solar flux.

yeah 40ms round trip shouldnt be causing drops, that's totally workable. i remote into a station thats like 800 miles away and the latency is higher than that and it works fine most of the time. honestly the separate WebSDR panadapter idea is kind of clever but i wonder if its adding to the problem — pulling two streams at once even if they're independent might be enough to occasionally saturate something in the path, maybe not the internet link itself but maybe the CPU on your local machine or something weird with your NIC. the VLAN idea isnt overkill honestly, i set one up for my shack traffic and it made a noticeable difference in consistency. nothing magical about it, just keeps the bufferbloat from my kids streaming video from messing with the radio stuff. if your router supports it its worth trying before you start chasing hardware problems.

yeah receive current is sneaky, a lot of guys dont think about it until they're out in the field wondering why the battery died. on the KX2 you can drop the rx backlight and also turn down the rf gain a bit when conditions are decent, that helps some. for the QCX mini specifically i think the rx draw is pretty low already, like under 150mA if i remember right, so that part should be fine. the bigger thing with lipos is they dont like being run all the way down and they also sag under load on transmit so what your meter says at rest isnt the whole story. a 3ah pack sounds right for a good half day of casual operating if you're not transmitting constantly. SSB will absolutely murder your battery faster than CW because you're at or near full power more of the time. with CW and decent keying speeds you're probably at maybe 50% duty cycle at most, often less. so yeah if runtime matters, CW is genuinely just more efficient, not just a matter of preference. also worth checking if the lipo is actually healthy. those cheap cells can lose capacity faster than you'd expect especially if they've been stored discharged.

congrats on the first activation, that feeling of getting your 4 and qualifying is pretty great even if it felt tight. you definitely had the process a little backwards yeah -- alerting on sotawatch ahead of time (even just the night before or morning of) is what gets chasers ready and watching for your spot. then when youre on the summit and actually transmitting you spot yourself and the chasers who set up alerts on their phone apps will see it almost immediately and start calling. the self-spot-while-still-on-air thing clicks pretty fast once you do it a couple times. on the frequencies, 7.285 is fine and does get used but a lot of sota activity especially in the US gravitates toward 7.195 and also watch for what other activators are using when you look at recent spots, thats honestly the best way to figure out where the action is in your region. some areas have slightly different habits. and CW is genuinely easier to get 4 contacts in my experience, you have a bigger pool of chasers listening and CW carries a lot further with the same power. i run 5 watts CW from a KX2 and rarely have trouble qualifying even from obscure summits

so i just passed my technician exam last week (finally) and now im trying to figure out what handheld to actually buy. ive been reading threads on here for like two hours and im more confused than when i started honestly. there's so many options and everyone seems to have a strong opinion. my main use case is going to be hitting local repeaters and maybe doing some APRS stuff eventually. i also want something that wont fall apart if i drop it, which knowing me is going to happen. budget is probably around 100-150 bucks but i could go a little higher if it really makes sense. ive seen a lot of people mention the baofeng UV-5R which is cheap but also ive seen people sort of roll their eyes at it. and then theres the yaesu FT-65 and some kenwood options. i just dont know where to start. any advice from people who have actually used these things day to day would be really appreciated.

so i've been wanting to do this for like two years and i finally just did it. built a little MTR-3B kit over a few evenings, nothing fancy, took my time with the soldering and only had to reflow maybe three joints that looked cold. total output is somewhere around 3-4 watts on 40 and 20 meters depending on the band conditions and battery charge. took it to the park last saturday with a random wire antenna thrown up in a tree, just a 28 foot wire with a little 9:1 unun i had lying around, and honestly i was not expecting much. figured id make one or two contacts and call it a win. ended up working 14 stations in about 90 minutes including one guy in ontario which felt pretty wild for 4 watts. had to really slow down my sending and ask for repeats a few times but nobody seemed annoyed about it. the battery situation was interesting — ran the whole thing off a small 3ah lipo and barely made a dent in it. thats the thing about QRP that nobody really tells you upfront, the efficiency is just on another level compared to dragging out the big radio. my whole kit fit in a small drawstring bag. like genuinely small. anyway just wanted to share because i was kind of nervous about it and it turned out great. if anyones been on the fence about trying SOTA or just park activations with low power, its worth it. the contacts feel more earned somehow if that makes sense.

yeah the door seal thing is probably it, i did basically the same install in my Tacoma and had to switch to a thinner coax to stop the squishing. 2.1 on 70cm isnt gonna hurt anything though tbh, the radio will just back off power a little. good luck on the net saturday

yeah the PR-40 is a pretty warm mic, great for broadcast type stuff but it can work against you on SSB if you dont account for it. the 7300's TX EQ is actually pretty capable once you wrap your head around it — what i'd suggest is cutting some of the low end, like below 200hz, and boosting slightly around 2-3khz where voice intelligibility lives. you want the audio to cut through, not sound full and rich like a podcast. on the compression thing — the guys saying never use it are probably reacting to people who slam it way too hard and end up sounding like a AM broadcast station from 1943. a little ALC limiting and maybe 4-6db of compression on voice peaks is fine and actually helps you average out louder on the band. the key is your mic gain should be set so you're hitting the ALC on the loudest syllables, not pegging it constantly. if the ALC is pinned the whole time you're overdriving it and that's what causes that hollow processed sound you're probably hearing. get a friend on a known good receiver and just talk while you adjust. thats still the only reliable way to know what you actually sound like on the air.

so i finally did my first activation yesterday, W4V/SH-001, been wanting to do this one for a while since its only like a 2 mile hike in. packed my KX2 and a 40m EFHW with a little 9:1 unun i built last month. got up to the summit no problem, winds were calm, thought it was gonna be perfect. spent like 20 minutes trying to get the wire up in a tree and kept snapping it back on myself. finally got it strung up in kind of a sad sloper configuration, maybe 25 feet off the ground at the high end. SWR was all over the place at first but eventually got it trimmed down enough to work. called CQ for probably 10 minutes on 40m and nothing, switched to 20m and immediately got a pile up which was wild. got my 4 contacts no problem after that but man i was stressed for a bit thinking i wasnt gonna make it. anyone else have activation jitters the first time? i kept second guessing whether i was actually in the activation zone and had to check the map like 3 times on my phone

I operate 60m regularly for NVIS work. For PSK31 on channel 1 (5330.5 center), I set my 991A to exactly 5330.5 kHz in USB mode - the sound card interface handles the 1.5 kHz offset automatically. Digital modes that comply with emission designator 60H0J2B are permitted, which includes PSK31 as well as any RTTY signal with a bandwidth of less than 60 Hz. Max power is 100W ERP.

yeah so the single yagi question comes up constantly and the honest answer is it depends a lot on who youre working and what mode. pure CW EME is basically dead for newcomers, you need serious antenna gain for that, but JT65B changed everything for smaller stations. i made my first ever EME contact on 2m with a single 9el M2 yagi, an IC-9700, and an SSB Electronics preamp right at the feedpoint. it worked but it was not easy — you have to be very patient and you basically have to catch the bigger stations who are actively trying to work smalls. the preamp placement thing you mentioned is absolutely real and probably the single most impactful thing outside of antenna size. every tenth of a dB you can save matters on this mode. i run about 25 feet of LMR-400 from feedpoint to shack and even that is kind of painful, id put the preamp right at the boom if i could get power up there cleanly. the IC-9700 is genuinely good for this by the way, its not overkill at all, the built in preamp is decent but you still want external for serious work. look up the WSJT-X EME procedures and start monitoring the 2m EME calling frequency, just listening for a while before you transmit teaches you a ton about how it actually works operationally.

Planning to upgrade from my trusty Wolf River Silver Bullet for POTA activations and torn between the Chameleon CHA MPAS Lite and Super Antenna MP1DXG. Both seem well-regarded for portable HF operations but approach the multiband challenge differently. The MPAS Lite uses a stainless whip with transformer matching, while the MP1DXG relies on the traditional tapped coil approach. Has anyone done side-by-side comparisons on bands like 20m/30m/40m in the field? Particularly interested in setup time, SWR bandwidth, and actual signal reports received. Weight difference appears minimal (both around 2 lbs) but the MPAS frequency agility seems appealing for contest work.

So ive been a ham for about 8 months now and I mostly just do HT stuff but I finally picked up a used Yaesu FTM-400 and want to get it properly installed in my F-150. I've watched probably a dozen youtube videos on this and I feel like I have a general idea but there's a few things I cant quite figure out and wanted to ask people who have actually done it. First thing is the antenna. Truck has a bed so I was thinking mag mount on the roof of the cab for now just to keep it simple, but everyone seems to say NMO is the way to go long term. Is it worth just doing the NMO mount right from the start or is mag mount fine for everyday use? The other thing is power — I keep seeing people say run it direct to the battery and not use the fuse box, but the fuse box seems way easier. Is there actually a reason to avoid it or is that just the hardliners talking. And do I need to do anything special since its a newer truck with all the electronics in it, like noise issues or whatever. Sorry for the rambling post just want to make sure I dont screw anything up before I start.