Jennifer Walsh

yeah 4 QSOs is all you need, it counts. dont stress about how the antenna looked lol, ive done activations with wire literally laying on the ground and still worked a dozen stations. the KX2 is a great choice for that stuff by the way, i run one too and the built in tuner handles some pretty ugly SWR situations. next time try to get your spot out on SOTAwatch before you even leave the trailhead, makes a huge difference for pile-ups. congrats on the first one though

yeah the RSP1B is a solid box, I have one. for wspr it's honestly overkill though like even the v3 dongle decodes wspr spots fine in my experience, the signals are so weak you're limited by antenna way before you're limited by the SDR front end. where the SDRplay stuff actually shines is crowded band conditions — the dynamic range thing is real and if you're trying to listen to a weak station next to a strong broadcaster the RSP handles it better. that said $100 is $100 and if the RTL is giving you workable results it's not urgent. maybe try a better antenna first and see if that fixes the noise floor complaints before spending anything

so i just passed my technician exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to get. everyone keeps telling me different things. my elmer says get a baofeng to start and not worry about it, but then i see people online saying the baofeng is garbage and i should save up for a yaesu or kenwood. i dont really know what i need yet, i just want to be able to hit the local repeaters and maybe do some simplex stuff with my buddy who lives like 8 miles away. i was looking at the Yaesu FT-65 and also the BF-F8HP which is the higher power baofeng i think. the price difference isnt huge but its not nothing either. is there actually a real difference in quality or is this one of those things where people just get tribal about brands? also does dual band matter for a beginner or is that just a nice to have

so ive been running an IC-7300 for about 3 years now and honestly its been great, no real complaints, but ive got some birthday money burning a hole in my pocket and started looking at the TS-890S and now im going down a rabbit hole i cant escape from the roofing filter situation on the TS-890S is obviously a big deal on paper and the IF noise floor specs look impressive but im wondering how much of that actually translates to real world difference for a guy operating mostly 40m and 20m SSB with some casual CW thrown in. im not contesting seriously or anything, maybe a few hours a week on weekends. my antenna situation is a trap vertical in the backyard, nothing fancy, HOA neighborhood so i cant really do much better right now basically what im asking is whether people who have actually used both feel like the 890 justifies being like 3x the price for someone in my situation. ive read all the eham reviews and the sherwood table and i get the technical side of it but i want to hear from people who actually switched or tried both back to back

im in basically the same boat lol, been studying for like 3 weeks. the electrical theory freaked me out too but i watched some youtube videos and it made way more sense than the book somehow. just search for technician license study and theres a bunch of guys who walk through the whole pool. one thing that helped me was not trying to do the whole thing in order, i just kept doing random practice tests and focusing on whatever categories i kept missing. frequency privileges and operating procedures were pretty easy for me but the antenna and feed line stuff took a while to stick

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and recently started getting into DX chasing a little bit. a guy at my club mentioned cluster spotting and told me to check out DXwatch and QRZ's logbook lookup together and honestly i went home and spent like 2 hours just clicking around not really sure what i was looking at. like i get the basic idea — someone hears a station, they post a spot, you see it and go tune there. but im confused about a few things. first, the spots on DXwatch refresh pretty fast and sometimes by the time i get to the frequency the station is already gone or buried in a pileup. is there a way to filter by band or region so im not chasing spots that are on the other side of the world at the wrong time? second, i saw people mention using the QRZ page to check if a callsign is a new entity for me — is that actually the right way to do it or should i be using something else like Club Log or DXCC lookup? also do most people use these on a phone or just on a computer while theyre at the radio? im on HF with an ic-7300 if that matters.

yeah the 7760 thing has been frustrating, feels like icom has been teasing it forever. i saw some posts on one of the facebook groups where a guy had hands on time with it at a hamfest somewhere in europe and said the ergonomics were way better than he expected but couldnt say much about actual rx performance. take that for what its worth and yes 10m has been wild, i havent seen conditions like this since i got back into the hobby around 2012 or so during the tail end of cycle 24. ran a little impromptu contest session on FT8 last saturday afternoon and my log filled up faster than it ever has. made a few CW contacts too which was nice, the band felt alive in a way that SSB propagation especially just does for you, hard to explain if youve never experienced a real cycle peak

yeah the learning curve is real, not gonna sugarcoat it. first time i seriously tried SO2R during a sweepstakes i probably lost a hundred QSOs net just from fumbling between radios, clicking the wrong one in the logging software, sending CQ on the wrong VFO, the usual disasters. took me probably 3 or 4 full contest weekends before i felt like i was actually gaining anything from it. the filtering question is the big one and honestly with two radios on different bands its way more manageable than people think. if radio 1 is on 20 and radio 2 is on 40 the separation is enough that a decent set of bandpass filters handles it fine. where it gets ugly is same band operation and honestly for a casual setup you can kind of just avoid that. the dx engineering or w3nqn style filters arent cheap but theyre not insane money either, ive seen people build their own from kits for under a hundred bucks a band. the 4O3A stuff works great but yeah thats serious station money. for what its worth i think starting with search and pounce on radio 2 while you hold a run frequency on radio 1 is the most learnable entry point. you dont need perfect isolation for that, just enough to hear whats going on. and yeah your rate will probably drop first time out but you learn a ton just from trying it in a low pressure contest first

so this has been bugging me for a while now and i finally decided to ask. been running SSB on 40m mostly, sometimes 20m, and my audio reports have been all over the place. some guys say i sound great, other times people tell me i sound muffled or like im talking through a blanket. nothing has changed in my shack setup as far as i can tell, same mic, same rig, same everything. im using an SM-8 desk mic into an IC-7300 and i know the 7300 has that built in eq and compression but honestly i havent touched any of that stuff since i got the radio. my TX bandwidth is probably whatever it defaulted to. my mic gain is around 60-65% which somebody told me was a reasonable starting point but maybe thats wrong? i do notice the ALC is kinda bouncing around a lot when i talk, not sure if thats related. is there a standard way people set up their audio for SSB or is it really just personal preference and whatever the other station's radio does with it. feels like there should be some kind of baseline best practice for this stuff but i cant find anything consistent online

yeah PSK31 is pretty much a ghost town these days, at least on HF. you'll occasionally find some activity on 20m around 14.070 on weekends but its nothing like it was in like 2010-2015 when that mode was everywhere. kind of sad honestly because PSK31 actually rewarded good antenna work and low power in a way that felt more tangible than FT8 — if you could decode someone it meant the path was actually usable for a QSO not just a marginal signal report exchange. i run JS8Call pretty regularly on 40 and 80m, mostly late evenings. the HF Messenger network integration is handy if you care about store-and-forward messaging but honestly i mostly just use it to ragchew with a few regulars. the heartbeat beacon feature is nice too if you want to monitor propagation passively. its never going to have the user base of FT8 but i think thats kind of the point — the people who are on it actually want to communicate not just log contacts. for weak signal stuff though nothing really touches FT8 and FT4 for throughput vs SNR. if youre trying to work a rare one through a pile at -20 dB js8call isnt going to cut it. different tools for different jobs i guess.

Congrats on the first activation, 22 contacts is a solid first run especially if you had weather chasing you off. The spotting network thing is real -- if you're not getting spotted automatically you can self-spot on the POTA app which helps a lot when youre just starting a run and nobody knows youre out there yet. For setup time honestly the biggest thing for me was just doing the same setup at home a few times until muscle memory takes over. I know where everything goes in my pack now and I can be on the air in about 15 minutes even in the dark. Also pre-cut your feedline if you use coax and just leave the EFHW at whatever length works, dont mess with it in the field. The other thing id say is get to the park early enough that you're not rushing because that's when mistakes happen and stuff gets left behind. The thunderstorm pack-up is a rite of passage, we've all been there. Just wait till you're mid-pileup and have to pull the plug, that one hurts more haha.

congrats on getting out there man. i keep saying im gonna do SOTA and never do lol. what summit was it if you dont mind me asking

congrats on the ticket first of all. okay so the Baofeng debate is kind of a classic and honestly both sides have a point. the cheap ones work, they receive fine, transmit okay, but the build quality is what it is and the programming software is a bit of a nightmare until you get used to it. for just hitting local repeaters and casual use a UV-5R will absolutely do the job and lots of new hams start there. that said if you can swing the FT-60R i'd point you that direction. its just a more solid radio, better receive filtering which matters more than people think especially if you're near a city with a lot of RF noise, and Yaesu's build quality is noticeably better. i've dropped mine more times than i care to admit and its still going strong. the VX-6R is submersible which is cool for camping in the rain but its a bit more to learn and the menu system takes some getting used to. honestly for camping and local repeaters the FT-60R hits a real sweet spot and you can usually find them right around your budget. dont overthink it too much, just get something and start using it, you'll figure out what you actually want from an HT after a few months of real use.

oh man yes that 13wpm wall is absolutely real, i think almost everybody hits it. what youre describing with the cascade panic thing is basically your brain still trying to process letters one dit and dah at a time instead of hearing the whole character as a sound. the fix that worked for me was bumping the character speed way up even if i had to slow the overall speed down. like set your characters to 20wpm but drop the farnsworth spacing way out so you have more time between each one. that way your brain starts learning what a 20wpm character actually sounds like even if the overall pace is slow. i used that approach for about two months and when i finally tightened the spacing up it wasnt nearly as jarring. also and i cant stress this enough -- just get on the air. even if youre slow. find somebody calling CQ at around 12-15wpm and just try it. the real QSO pressure is different from practice in a way thats hard to explain but it forces your brain to commit to answers instead of second-guessing. i made my first CW contact at like 11wpm and the other guy was super patient, most cw ops are honestly. good luck with it

what he said about the preamp is no joke. i upgraded mine and it was like night and day, more than going from 500w to 1kw honestly. also worth joining the Moon-Net mailing list if you havent, its old school email list stuff but thats where a lot of the serious EME operators still coordinate skeds and talk equipment. you can find some pretty deep technical threads in the archives going back years. one thing nobody told me when i was starting out was to pay attention to where the moon actually is in the sky relative to your antenna. sounds obvious but i spent like two sessions wondering why i wasnt decoding anything before i realized my elevation rotor was reading about 8 degrees off and the moon was partially behind my garage roof half the time. az/el tracking matters more than people think when youre dealing with margins that tight