Emily Thomas74

honestly the radial thing gets way overhyped in terms of the number you need. like yes 120 radials is better than 16 but the difference between 16 and 32 is way more noticeable than between 32 and 64. something like 16-24 decent length radials gets you into the zone where youre not leaving massive amounts of efficiency on the table. thats probably the practical sweet spot for most people who arent going to spend a weekend every fall adding more wire to the ground. that said i do think for 40m DX specifically from a constrained lot the vertical has a real edge during gray line when the low angle stuff is working, ive noticed it on my setup at least. but its not like the dipole is useless either, contacts are contacts. just build whichever one you can actually put up well.

same boat as you was a few years ago tbh. i ended up just doing LoTW because thats what the guys in my club were using and it seemed like the most useful one for award chasing. i did sign up for eQSL too eventually but i barely check it anymore. the japanese QSL cards are always nice, some of them put a lot of effort into the design. i got one from a JA station that had a really nice photo of Mt. Fuji on it, still have it pinned up in the shack. theres something about a physical card that a digital confirmation just doesnt quite replicate i think, even if logically theyre doing the same thing

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i finally started participating in our local 2m net on Wednesday evenings but im a little confused about how the whole thing works timing wise. like do i just key up whenever there's a pause or is there a specific window where the net control asks for check-ins? last week i checked in fine but then i wasnt sure if i was supposed to stick around the whole time or if it was ok to just say 73 and drop off after i gave my call. also kind of a separate question but i saw something about a special event station operating this weekend for some kind of anniversary — a nearby club is running W4 something, i forget the full call — and i have no idea how those work differently from just a regular contact. do they give out certificates or is that only certain ones? my elmers kind of glossed over this stuff when i was studying.

im still pretty new to chasing DX seriously but one thing that confused me for a long time was working split properly. like i understood the concept but i kept accidentally transmitting on the DX freq which is embarassing when it happens lol. the VFO B thing on my 7300 took some getting used to. whats the deal with tail-ending, is that actually a valid technique or is it considered bad form? ive seen it mentioned a few times and im not totally clear on whether experienced ops do it intentionally or if its just people jumping in sloppily

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house. been wanting to do this for months and kept putting it off because i was nervous about not making enough contacts or something going wrong with the antenna setup. ended up using my FT-891 running 100w into a linked dipole i threw up between two trees, maybe 20 feet high in an inverted V config. conditions on 40m were pretty decent in the morning and i hit 10 contacts in about 25 minutes which i guess is the minimum, then kept going and ended up with like 34 total before i packed up. got a few on 20m too. couple things im not sure about though -- when i spotted myself on the POTA app, i noticed other activators were already at my park reference (K-2847 or whatever it was). does that mean im competing with them or can multiple people activate the same park at the same time? also i logged everything in the app in the field but haven't submitted yet, how long do i actually have to do that? i keep reading different things. and one more thing, should i be calling CQ POTA specifically or just regular CQ and mention the park in my exchange? overall it was really fun and i want to do more of these, just want to make sure im doing the logging right before i submit anything

yeah the cluster can be overwhelming at first, dont worry. for DXwatch you can absolutely filter by band — theres a little dropdown at the top, just set it to whatever band youre on and it cuts down the noise a lot. and yeah spots go stale fast, anything more than like 10-15 minutes old on a busy band is usually not worth chasing unless its a rare one and people are still working him. for entity lookup i actually prefer Club Log's DXCC checker over QRZ for that specific thing. QRZ is great for looking up who someone is, where they are, their bio and stuff, but for "is this a new one for me" you really want something tied to your actual log. if you upload your log to Club Log or even use LOTW it'll track your confirmed and worked entities and you can cross-reference way easier. some guys run like a dedicated spotting app on a tablet next to the rig — HRD has a built in bandscope and cluster thing, or you can just leave a browser tab open with DXwatch filtered to your band. i do the browser tab thing honestly, works fine.

Field Day counts, seriously dont undersell that experience. you already know the basic rhythm of contest operating, the exchange just changes depending on which contest you're in. for CQ WW on SSB the exchange is just your signal report and your CQ zone, so like 59 05 if you're in zone 5, thats really it. once you work a few stations it becomes totally automatic my honest advice is dont try to run a frequency your first time out. just search and pounce, tune around and call stations who are already CQing. you'll rack up contacts without having to hold a frequency against guys running a kW and a beam. log with N1MM or even just paper if you want to keep it simple, but N1MM is pretty much the standard and theres good tutorials on youtube for the basic setup CW at slow speed is gonna be rough in a big contest like that, the pileups move fast. stick with SSB for your first one and maybe try CW later in a slower contest like a state QSO party where people are more patient

Log4OM and WSJT-X work fine together, just make sure you set the UDP port correctly in both, default is 2237 i think but double check yours. the main thing i ran into was Log4OM not grabbing the grid square from the FT8 decode sometimes, might be a version thing, im running 2.x and it was better after an update a few months back. for what its worth i dont do many big contests so i cant speak to N1MM comparison there but for SOTA activations and general HF logging Log4OM has been solid for me. the built in map is kind of nice too when youre tracking new grids.

yeah same here, though i did catch a couple guys running a net on like 7.235 last sunday morning. think it was a local club thing. 40m isnt totally dead just gotta know when to look i guess. propagation has been weird too lately which doesnt help

same boat as you were like 8 months ago lol. passed general last spring and the thing that got me over the line was just doing the practice tests on repeat, like i did probably 40-50 full practice exams in the last two weeks before i sat for it. the question pool isnt that huge and stuff starts repeating and you just kind of absorb it dont stress too much about fully understanding everything, some of it clicks more after you actually get on HF and start doing stuff. the regulations section tripped me up more than the theory honestly, theres some weird little rules in there that dont come up very often but they love to test on them and yeah apartment life with HF is rough, im in a similar situation, i ended up getting a magnetic loop that i can set up inside near a window and its surprisingly usable on 20 and 40m. not ideal but it gets you on the air which is the point

so ive been messing with APRS for a few weeks now and i can see my packets hitting the local digi (W4XXX-2 shows up in my log) but the position is just never showing up on aprs.fi or anywhere online. i've got a TM-D710G with the internal TNC and im using the built in APRS stuff, beacon is set to every 3 minutes, path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard for my area. checked my callsign and SSID like five times. symbol is set to the little car icon. honestly not sure what else to check, the radio seems to be transmitting fine because i can see it keying up and the digi is clearly hearing me. is there maybe no igate in range or is there something wrong with how im configured? i dont really understand the whole digi vs igate thing even though ive read about it like three times now

so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now, mostly just tracking, and that part works fine — i can see my icon moving around on aprs.fi no problem. but i started messing with the messaging side of things and i cant get it to work reliably at all. sometimes messages go through, sometimes they just sit there with no ack, and i have no idea if its my setup or the network or what. im running a TM-D710G with a decent antenna on the roof, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. i can hear digipeaters all over the place when i monitor 144.390. the igate in my area is supposedly bidirectional but i honestly have no way to verify that. is there a way to tell if a specific igate is actually passing traffic both ways or just ingesting? feel like im missing something obvious here

made that exact jump about 18 months ago and yeah the HF difference is real. the RTL-SDR direct sampling mode is kind of a hack and it shows, you're losing a lot of dynamic range and the front end just wasnt designed for it. the RSP1A has proper filtering and a much wider IF bandwidth which makes a huge difference when the band is busy. as for software you dont have to use SDRuno, i actually run mine in HDSDR with the ExtIO DLL that SDRplay provides and it works great. some people prefer it because HDSDR is a bit more lightweight. SDRuno has gotten better over the years but it does eat RAM. if youre doing HF monitoring seriously the RSP1A is worth it, just dont expect miracles if your antenna situation is rough because that matters more than anything else at those frequencies

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house and honestly i was kind of nervous going in because ive been licensed for about 8 months and most of my operating has been just ragchewing on the local repeater and some FT8 stuff at home. figured POTA would be a good excuse to finally take the radio outside and do something with it. i brought my IC-705 and a random wire antenna i built from instructions i found online, threw it up in a tree using a tennis ball and some paracord which worked better than i expected. took me maybe 20 minutes to get set up which was longer than i wanted but whatever. spotted myself on the POTA website and within like 2 minutes i had people calling me. i was not ready for that honestly, the pile up wasnt huge but for me it felt like a lot and i fumbled through the first few contacts. ended up with 23 contacts in about 90 minutes on 40m, which is more than the 10 you need to count as an activated park. only thing that tripped me up was i forgot to log the park reference number in my head before i started so i had to look it up mid-operation which felt embarrassing but nobody on the air knew that. anyway if anyones been sitting on the fence about trying this, just go do it. bring more coax than you think you need and maybe practice your exchange before you go so you dont freeze up like i did the first few calls.

950 is a solid price if it's in good shape. ive been on the fence about upgrading from my 7200 for a while and the main thing holding me back is honestly just that the 7200 still works fine and i feel werid spending money when nothing is actually broken lol. but the waterfall thing you mentioned is exactly what makes me want one, seems like it changed how people actually operate

yeah this is basically exactly what i do. N1MM stays closed unless im actually in a contest, Log4OM handles everything else. the WSJT-X integration is done through the UDP logging port and once you set it up right it pretty much just works, i havent had dupe issues in a long time. the trick i found is to make sure you're not also logging to an ADIF file in WSJT-X at the same time because then you end up importing the same QSOs twice if you're not careful about it. the one thing N1MM does that Log4OM just cant match is the contest-specific stuff, rate meters, multiplier tracking, all that. for a serious contest weekend theres really no substitute. but for a random tuesday night working some DX on 17 meters Log4OM is way more pleasant to use honestly.

yeah what he said about the NE602 dynamic range is real, i gave up on using it as the first RF stage on anything near a broadcast band and just use it downstream after a proper filter and sometimes a JFET preamp if the band is dead. sounds backwards but the 602 as a product detector after a proper front end works way better in my experience. also curious what your VFO looks like physically — is it in a separate enclosure from the rest of the board or just sitting on the same ugly construction ground plane? ive found that even just a small piece of PCB material bent into a wall between the oscillator section and everything else helps a lot more than you'd think.

the band switch audio drop is almost certainly a sample rate mismatch or the SDR is reinitializing when the 7300 changes its IF output characteristics. some rigs do this, the 7300 especially when you switch between certain band segments because the internal routing changes slightly. what software are you using on the server side to bridge the SDR to RemoteHams? if its SDR# or HDSDR there's a setting for locking the sample rate that might help. also check if you have VAC or VB-Audio pipe in the chain because those virtual cables sometimes reset on device state changes. on the allstar question — yeah i run both on the same machine but i use a dedicated USB audio interface for allstar and keep the SDR on its own device, never tried to share. mixing them sounds like a headache honestly.

Slovenia nice, i havent worked them yet. im still pretty new so a lot of stuff on the bands sounds like noise to me but im slowly figuring out what im hearing. what antenna you running?

yeah placement absolutely matters more than people think, especially on trucks where the roof geometry is all over the place. the ground plane on a pickup isnt the same as a nice flat sedan roof and the angle of the glass panels and stuff does affect the radiation pattern. forward vs rear can shift where the pattern is strongest by a meaningful amount. i had an Icom 2730 in a Tacoma a while back and spent a whole afternoon with a buddy driving laps around the neighborhood just keying up and comparing signal reports. center of roof was consistently better but the difference wasnt huge, like a few dB tops in most directions. the coax routing thing is real though. i ended up running mine through the door seal and people say it damages the coax over time but honestly ive been doing it for three years and havent had an issue yet, just use good quality coax and dont let it kink at the bend

yeah so the short version is LoTW is run by the ARRL and its the one that counts for DXCC and most of the big awards, so thats kind of the one you want to eventually get set up with even though it feels like a pain at first. eQSL is easier to get going and some people use it but a lot of DX stations dont bother with it, so its kind of hit or miss depending on who you worked. physical cards are definitely not dead, i still get them in the mail pretty regularly and sending a nice card to a DX station you worked is kind of a tradition thats worth keeping alive imo. some guys only confirm via paper and thats just how they are. for domestic contacts though most people just do LoTW and call it a day. the certificate setup for LoTW is annoying but you only do it once, theres a pretty good walkthrough on the ARRL site and honestly if you just follow it step by step it clicks eventually. eQSL confirmations can take a while or never come depending on whether the other station even uses it. dont worry too much if you dont see anything right away.

so i got my general back in 2021 and spent most of my time just doing local stuff and some casual SSB on 40m but lately ive been getting really into DX and decided i want to actually go for DXCC. worked about 67 entities so far confirmed on LoTW which feels pretty good for someone who wasnt really trying until a few months ago. my question is kind of basic maybe but i dont fully understand how the credits work when you upgrade from like basic DXCC to the higher endorsement levels. do you have to submit separately each time or does the ARRL just look at your LoTW confirmations and automatically bump you up when you hit the thresholds? i submitted my initial DXCC application already and got the certificate but now im confused about what happens at 150, 200 etc. also started looking at WAS and WAZ too because apparently a lot of the contacts i already have count toward those too, which is cool. WAZ seems really doable actually once i looked at the zone map. is it worth chasing all three at once or does that just make everything more stressful

So ive been licensed about three years now and mostly just ragchewed on 40m with the local guys but lately ive been getting more into actually working DX and someone at the club mentioned I should start tracking contacts for DXCC. I guess I never really thought about it seriously before but looking at my log I might actually have a decent start without even trying. My question is kind of basic but I honestly dont fully understand the difference between what counts for DXCC versus WAS versus WAZ. Like are these totally separate programs with different rules or do some contacts overlap and count toward multiple awards at once. And for DXCC specifically — does it matter what band or mode or is it just any confirmed QSO with an entity. I keep seeing people talk about chasing credits on LoTW and I set up an account but havent really used it much. Is that the main way people confirm these days or do QSL cards still matter. Sorry if this is a really obvious question, I just want to make sure I understand the system before I start putting real effort into chasing things.

Congrats on the first activation, 60 contacts on your first time out is really solid especially if you were self-spotting without much of a following yet. To answer your log question -- yes you upload directly to the WWFF website, woodsnwater.net is where most of the global program is coordinated but if you're in the US the KFF references are managed through the WWFF-USA program and they have their own upload portal. The format is just a standard ADIF file same as you'd export from any logging software. Make sure your reference number is in there correctly and it usually processes pretty quickly. As for virgin references, yeah it's kind of bragging rights but there is a first activator award and some hunters specifically look for unactivated references so you do tend to get a small pile when you're the first one there. Worth checking the database before you go out honestly, you might have one closer to home than you think that nobody has hit yet. And yeah the hunters logging contacts with you are working toward their own awards on the flora fauna side, different tiers based on how many unique references they've worked. Pretty fun system overall.

so i dont even have anything specific i want to do most nights i just tune around 40 meters and listen. sometimes ill call CQ for a bit and get nothing and then just go back to listening. its kind of meditative honestly. picked up some station out of argentina the other night just barely readable but it was there. didnt even try to work him just enjoyed knowing he was there anyway just curious if other people do this kind of aimless radio time or if im just weird