Ashley Wilson81

so i finally decided to give satellite operation a shot after watching a few videos and reading about it for like two years. got my 2m/70cm setup working pretty well for terrestrial stuff and figured how hard can it be right. very hard apparently. im using a yaesu ft-818 with a cheap arrow antenna, tracking with gpredict on my laptop. the pass looked good on paper, AO-91 coming overhead at about 73 degrees max elevation. i could hear the downlink fine at the start, nice clear signal, got excited. but then i tried to work anyone and just... nothing. nobody could hear me. i was transmitting on the uplink frequency but i think i was off because of doppler and just not compensating right. so my question is do you manually tune while the pass is happening or is there software that handles this automatically somehow. i saw something about CAT control but i dont really understand how that works with gpredict. also does the arrow antenna need to be cross polarized or does that only matter for certain satellites. feel like im missing something obvious

yeah part 97 is rough to read, dont feel bad about that. so basically as a tech you do get some HF privileges, not a lot but some. on 10 meters you can run up to 200 watts and use phone (voice) between 28.300 and 28.500 MHz, and then there's a chunk of the band lower down where you can do CW and some digital modes. on 40 meters its CW only and just a small slice, same with 15m and 80m — honestly those CW-only segments are pretty narrow and most people dont bother unless they really want to practice morse before their general exam. the ARRL website has a frequency/privilege chart thats way easier to read than the actual regulation text, i'd start there. and yeah get your general, its not that hard and it opens up basically everything

So I passed my general last spring and joined our county ARES group back in the fall mostly because a guy at the club convinced me it was a good way to get more operating time and actually feel useful. Ive been going to the monthly nets and the occasional training exercise but next weekend is my first real activation — the county emergency management office is running a full-scale exercise with shelters and EOC and everything. I guess my question is what do I actually bring, like beyond the obvious radio stuff. I know ill need my HT and probably my mobile rig if they want me at a fixed position but what about like paperwork and logging stuff. Do people still use paper logs for this or does everyone have some laptop situation going. Also how formal is it, do I show up in like a vest with patches or just normal clothes. I dont want to look like a total idiot showing up either way. Our EC gave us a briefing sheet but it was pretty vague honestly. Just feeling a bit nervous about the whole thing and figured someone here had been through a few of these.

so ive been running an old Baofeng UV-5R for about two years now since i got my tech license and honestly it's been fine for just getting started but i keep running into little issues with it, mostly the audio on receive is kind of muddy and i had one instance where i think the TX was drifting off frequency a bit which caused some confusion on the local repeater. nothing catastrophic but you know how it is. anyway i started looking at actual name brand HTs and i keep going back and forth between the Yaesu FT-65 and maybe the Kenwood TH-D74 but that Kenwood is way overkill for what i actually do which is mostly just checking into the weekly net and some simplex when im out hiking. the FT-65 seems solid and people seem to like the audio quality which is my main gripe right now. does anyone actually own one of these and use it regularly? curious what the battery life is like in real world use not just what the spec sheet says

the FT-991 as a second radio is kind of a rough choice for SO2R just because the front end isnt exactly known for handling strong adjacent signals gracefully. not knocking it for general use but when you've got a running station hammering away on 20m and you're trying to pull weak ones on 15 with it sitting a few feet away, yeah thats gonna be messy regardless of filters. something with a better roofing filter situation would probably help a lot if you're serious about pursuing it. that said i kind of agree with taking a step back and asking whether the antenna situation is sorted first. ive seen guys with SO2R setups that were technically impressive but their antennas were so mediocre that a single radio op with a good yagi was still beating them. rate optimization kind of assumes you're already competitive on the RF side, otherwise you're just optimizing a weak signal problem

so ive been trying to get Winlink Express set up for a few weeks now and i keep hitting walls. my basic situation is i have a Kenwood TS-590SG feeding into a Signalink USB and i got the audio levels sorted out (i think) but when i try to connect to an RMS gateway it just sits there doing the handshake thing and then times out. im using Vara HF as the modem because everyone said thats the thing to use now instead of the old Pactor stuff unless you have the actual hardware dongle. the weird thing is i CAN see the gateway in the frequency list and the waterfall shows something happening when it responds, like there IS signal coming back, but Winlink Express just reports a failed session every time. ive tried like four different gateways, some close some far, doesnt matter. my dial freq is set correctly based on what the channel table says and i have the rig control going through COM3 which works fine for other software. is there something dumb im missing with the RMS setup on my end or is this a VARA configuration thing? i did buy the VARA license if that matters. its not a free version issue.

so ive been thinking about this for a few weeks now and cant quite make up my mind. i do a fair amount of hilltop activations with the local club, mostly 2m and 70cm FM, sometimes SSB on 2m if conditions are decent. right now im using a telescoping j-pole which honestly works fine but i feel like im leaving some gain on the table especially when were trying to hit repeaters that are marginal from certain summits. the question is basically whether to build or buy a 5 or 6 element yagi for 2m, or just go with a decent collinear like a diamond X50 or X200 type thing. the yagi obviously gives more gain in one direction but the collinear is omnidirectional which matters when youre working multiple stations around you. i can build a simple yagi from some aluminum rod and a tape measure obviously but then i gotta point it and that gets annoying when youre also trying to log contacts and deal with weather. anyone done both and have a strong opinion either way? gear already have is an FT-60 and a TH-D74 so nothing fancy on the radio side, just want a better antenna situation for portable ops.

same boat here lol, been stuck at like 11wpm for what feels like forever. someone in my local club told me to just try copying text from ARRL W1AW practice transmissions on the air even if i can only get half of it, said something about how it just clicks eventually. havent tried it much yet but figured id mention it

yeah mixed is definitely the right call first, thats how pretty much everyone does it. get that first DXCC plaque and then the mode endorsements kind of fill in naturally over time as you keep operating. i chased phone and CW separately after getting mixed and it was a lot more fun having something to specifically hunt on each mode rather than just generically logging everything the LoTW vs paper card thing never really goes away unfortunately. some of the rarer entities only have paper options and some DXpedition teams are better about uploading than others. i usually give it 6 months after a major DXpedition before i start worrying, and for regular stations in rare countries i just accept that the bureau is what it is. some guys pay for direct cards to speed it up which can be worth it for a hard to get one but i wouldnt bother for common entities 87 confirmed in 3 years is solid by the way especially if youre on a modest station. what are you running antennas wise

the guys you're hearing below 7.125 on phone are probably just lids or maybe legitimate extras, hard to say. i'd honestly just bookmark the ARRL band plan page and tape a printed copy next to your rig, thats what i did when i upgraded. after a few weeks it just becomes muscle memory and you stop thinking about it. dont stress too much, youre clearly trying to do the right thing which puts you ahead of half the people already on the air lol

oh man congrats on the first contact. im also pretty new and have been eyeing QRP kits but wasnt sure if 5 watts would actually be enough to make contacts or if id just be frustrated spinning the dial. this is kind of encouraging honestly. what length did you cut your random wire to

congrats on the first one. the 44 QSO minimum trips people up all the time, you're not alone. i think it comes from the old SOTA thing where people expect a lower threshold but yeah WWFF is strict about it. once you get a few under your belt you kind of plan your setup around making sure you can hit that number comfortably, like picking a reference that might already have some chasers familiar with it. the portal upload is a bit clunky i'll admit, took me a couple tries to get the ADIF format right the first time. just make sure your log has the right exchange fields and it usually goes through fine. some people use HAMRS or Log4OM and they have WWFF export built in now which makes life easier. also worth checking out the pota.app spotting network since a lot of WWFF activators use it too even for non-US references. youll get more chasers that way for sure.

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now, mostly just poking around on airband and occasionally looking at ACARS and ADS-B and whatever else catches my eye. its been a great little dongle for the price but im starting to feel the limitations, mostly on the lower HF stuff where the direct sampling mod only gets you so far. ive been going back and forth between picking up an SDRplay RSPdx or just jumping straight to a HackRF One. the price gap isnt huge if you consider what youre getting but theyre pretty different animals from what i can tell. the SDRplay seems more like a serious receiver and the HackRF is more of a do-everything swiss army knife thing but not quite as sensitive on receive. is that a fair read on it? im not planning to transmit anything with it, i just want better dynamic range and actual coverage down to like 1khz or whatever the RSPdx specs say. also running SDR# right now on windows and wondering if ill have driver headaches switching to either of these. ive heard the SDRplay API is pretty solid but the HackRF on windows can be a bit of a pain depending on the software. anyone gone through this comparison recently?

honestly same boat here, been at it maybe 5 months and the recording yourself thing is brutal but it really works. i use the Koch method with the LCWO website to practice receiving and i feel like that actually helped my sending too because you start to internalize what proper timing sounds like. also dont worry too much about what your elmer thinks sounds good — your own ear is what matters on the air lol. keep at it 15 wpm is solid for 3 months

Equipment failures may be a mere annoyance if you're only doing fun operating, but if it were a situation that really mattered, like in a disaster, a failure with no solution can have very serious consequences. I do monthly power-on tests and quarterly full deployments in the backyard.

so i just passed my general exam last week (finally after studying for like 3 months) and i got my sequential callsign assigned from the FCC which is fine but its kind of a mouthful and not super memorable. someone at the club meeting mentioned i could apply for a vanity call and i looked it up on the FCC ULS site and honestly the whole thing just confused me more than helped. like i understand there are different groups and you have to qualify for certain callsigns based on your license class, but what i dont understand is the timing of it all. is there a waiting period before i can even apply? and when i pick a callsign to apply for how do i know if its actually available or if someone else is going to snag it at the same time as me. also does it cost anything now i thought i heard it was free but not sure if thats still the case any help appreciated, been lurking here a while and you guys always seem to know this stuff

yeah the 40m band can be a bit of a mess to wrap your head around at first. so the deal is the FCC gives you a frequency allocation which is basically the legal limit of where you can operate, but the band plan is more of a gentlemens agreement about where different modes tend to hang out. for generals on 40m your phone privelege starts at 7.175 and goes up to 7.300, the cw and data stuff goes from 7.025 to 7.125 for generals. below 7.025 is extra class only. the band edge thing is real and worth paying attention to. your signal isnt just sitting on one exact frequency, it has width to it. ssb voice takes up maybe 2.5 to 3 khz, so if youre transmitting with your carrier at say 7.299 youre probably splattering audio outside the band which is a no-no. most people say stay at least 3 khz inside the edge to be safe, so 7.297 or lower for upper 40m. the reason you might hear ssb lower in the band is either dx stations operating under different ITU region rules or somebody who doesnt know better or doesnt care.

so i decided i finally want to get my technician license after years of just listening on a scanner and i picked up the ARRL technician manual at a hamfest last weekend but honestly its kind of overwhelming. like there's so much in there and i dont know if i should just memorize the question pool or actually try to understand all the theory stuff. i looked up ham study dot org and some people swear by it but other people say just read the book cover to cover first. im worried about the electricity and math parts mostly, i was never great at that in school. the exam is in about 6 weeks at a local club session and i really dont want to fail in front of people lol. anyone have a good approach that actually worked for them?

I ran a trunk lip mount on my old Civic for probably three years and honestly it was fine. The ground plane thing is real but in practice for hitting repeaters youre not gonna notice much difference. The antenna isnt perfectly centered but you still have metal around it and it works. My signal reports were always decent. The clamp itself, just make sure you get a decent quality one, the cheap no-name ones can crack or strip after a while especially in cold weather. I used a Comet one and it held up really well. One thing to watch is where you route the coax through the trunk seal, take your time with that part because if water gets in it can cause issues down the road. I used a bit of self amalgamating tape around the entry point and never had a problem.

honest opinion? the ft-60 is a really solid choice for where you are right now. its a tank, the receiver is way better than the baofengs, and the menu system while not exactly intuitive isnt as maddening as some of the cheaper chinese radios. ive had mine for like 8 years and it just works. APRS is neat but you really dont need it starting out, its basically a system where your radio can beacon your GPS position and send little text messages over the air, some handhelds have it built in some dont. worth learning about eventually but not a day one thing. for hitting repeaters around town, dual band VHF/UHF is all you need. tribanders that also do 220 MHz are cool but the repeaters on that band are getting pretty thin in most areas honestly. if the ft-60 is at the top of your budget look at the yaesu ft-4xr too, its cheaper and stripped down but people seem to like it fine for basic stuff

yeah i do this all the time honestly. ive got the radio on like background noise half the evenings. sometimes i'll hear something interesting and actually grab the mic but mostly just letting it run. 40m has been weird for me lately, lots of noise from somewhere, think its my neighbors new solar inverter setup but havent confirmed that yet. still enjoyable though.

the hollow sound on a direct conversion receiver is almost always one of two things in my experience — either your audio filtering is letting through a ton of RF that the LM386 is partially rectifying, or you have a ground loop somewhere in the enclosure. the LM386 is notorious for being sensitive to layout, pins 1 and 8 especially. did you put a cap between those for extra gain? if you did and your layout isnt tight it will oscillate or just sound terrible. also check what value you have from the NE602 output to the LM386 input. a lot of people use too low a value coupling cap and it rolls off the low end making everything sound thin and hollow. try something like 1uF there and see if it helps. and make sure pin 7 on the LM386 has a bypass cap to ground, 10uF usually does it. the rumble you're hearing could be hum getting in through the supply if that isnt well bypassed

yeah the IC-7300 with SignaLink can be a little fussy. make sure you're going into the radio's USB audio and have DATA mode selected on the 7300 side, not SSB or anything else. theres a menu setting in the 7300 for the USB input/output levels too and if those are wrong your calibration in software means nothing because the radio is already clipping before the modem even sees it. i think its under set > connectors somewhere, been a while since i dug in there. also 144.990 seems a little off to me, most of the VHF winlink traffic i've seen is on 144.990 simplex yeah but double check the gateway entry in the RMS list because some areas run it on different freqs. the gateway being active recently doesnt necessarily mean its perfectly healthy, had one near me that was showing activity but the sysop's pi had some kind of filesystem issue and it was only partially working for like a week before anyone caught it.

the tin can thing is almost always too much high frequency or the mic is too close to your mouth. with the stock HM-219 on the 7300 the first thing id do is back your mic gain down to like 50-55% and make sure your ALC is barely moving on voice peaks, like just tickling the bottom of the ALC range. a lot of people drive it too hard and the compression artifacts are what makes it sound bad. the TX EQ on the 7300 is actually pretty approachable once you just go in and mess with it. i run a slight cut around 200hz to clean up the low end muddiness and a gentle boost somewhere around 2-2.5khz which helps with intelligibility without sounding harsh. the bass rolloff thing is real — SSB has maybe 2.4khz of bandwidth if youre lucky and all that low end energy is just wasted and kind of smears everything. speech intelligibility lives in the midrange anyway. also check your compression setting if you have it on. the 7300 has a speech processor and if its cranked up it will absolutely make you sound congested. try turning it off entirely first and see if you get better reports before adding any back in.

yeah the ARRL band plan and the actual FCC allocations are two different things, thats where a lot of people get tripped up. the FCC rules in Part 97.301 and 97.305 are what actually matter legally, the ARRL band plan is more like a gentlemans agreement on top of that. so technically you could operate somewhere the band plan says not to and still be legal, but youd probably annoy everyone around you so most people just follow the ARRL plan anyway. for the emission types thing, yeah 97.305 spells out which emission types are allowed in which segments. like CW is allowed almost everywhere on HF but phone has more restrictions, especially for General class on 40 and 75/80 meters where you're kind of squeezed into a smaller slice than Extra class gets. power wise 1500 watts is the max for most of HF but there are some spots, 60 meters being the main one, where youre limited to 100 watts ERP and you can only use specific channels. 60 meters is kind of its own weird thing honestly. best thing i ever did was just print out the actual Part 97 subpart D and read through it with the ARRL band plan side by side. takes maybe an hour and after that it all clicks way better than trying to read either one alone.