Amanda Moore

so the RMS gateways are basically just nodes that other hams run - you dont need to be a sysop to use them, youre just connecting TO the sysop's station. Winlink Express handles all the session management automatically once you pick a gateway and start the connection. the list it pulls when you do a channel selection is ranked by your distance and last heard so the top ones should theoretically be your best bet. the timeout issue honestly sounds like an audio problem even if Vara says its okay. what i'd check is whether your radio is actually transmitting during the handshake - like does the TX light actually come on? because the Signalink sometimes needs the VOX sensitivity adjusted differently than what the Vara cal recommends. also make sure youre not running anything else that could be grabbing the audio device. fldigi open in the background will absolutely kill it. the 991A also has an internal soundcard which can confuse things if Windows decides to route audio there instead of the Signalink. go into your Windows sound settings and make sure the Signalink is set as the default playback and recording device, not just in Vara but system wide. that got me like three times before i figured it out.

im kind of in the same boat as you, been watching EME from the sidelines for a while. one thing i found really helpful was just getting on the logger at pisces.eas.asu.edu or wherever it is now and just watching contacts happen for a few sessions before trying anything. you get a feel for signal levels and what kind of exchanges are realistic with what gear pretty fast. i ended up going with a single 9el M2 and 400w through a cheap chinese LDMOS amp and managed to work 3 stations my first moon pass, all of them were big gun stations in europe but still it worked. so its not hopeless with modest gear but like the other guy said youre leaning on them hard.

im kind of in the same boat actually, stuck around 12wpm for the past couple months. one thing i tried recently is bumping the character speed up to like 20wpm but keeping the overall word speed lower (farnsworth method i think its called) so you get used to hearing the actual dit dah patterns at speed even if theres more space between characters. feels weird at first but supposedly it prevents you from counting dits and dahs which is a bad habit that catches up with you later. havent broken through yet but it feels like im building the right muscle memory at least

ha i went through the same exact confusion when i first started checking into nets. what helped me was just listening to a few nets without checking in, just to get a feel for the rythm before i jumped in. the tuesday nets around here can vary a lot depending on who's running net control too — some NCs are super relaxed and some run it pretty tight. if you're ever unsure just follow whatever the NC asks and you'll be fine, they're usually pretty patient with newer folks

so im finally doing a semi-serious field deployment this weekend, kind of a dry run for emcomm stuff but also just want to see how long i can run without having to pack up. been doing this on and off for a couple years but never really pushed the setup past a few hours. right now im looking at either running my honda eu2200i or just going deep cycle AGM plus a 100w panel. the generator is obviously more flexible but man the noise gets old fast and if im trying to do voice work on 40m the interference from that thing is brutal even with a ferrite loaded line filter on it. ive tried different bonding approaches and it helps but never totally goes away. antenna wise im leaning on my end fed half wave for 40/20 with the 9:1 unun, usually throw it up as a sloper off whatever tree i can find. works pretty well but im in a pretty flat area so the takeoff angle is never ideal. thinking about maybe trying a vertical with radials this time since ill have more time to set up properly. anyone run a similar comparison between gen vs battery for a full day deployment? trying to figure out if the solar setup is actually viable or if im kidding myself. my radio is an IC-7300 and i run 50-100w depending on conditions.

welcome to the rabbit hole, fair warning it never really ends lol. first thing id do is go through all your old logs and upload everything to LoTW if you havent already, you might be surprised how many entities you already have confirmed without realizing it. a lot of people are on LoTW now so matches tend to come back pretty quick especially for more common entities. for the actual chasing strategy, most people say knock out the easy ones on 20m and 17m first just to build up the count, then worry about band endorsements and the harder stuff later. there are entities you can work almost any day of the week if you know where to look — DX summit and the DX maps are your friends, just watch the spots and be ready to jump on stuff. the real fun starts when you start getting into the rarer ones and you have to plan around propagation windows and sometimes set an alarm at 3am to catch a short opening. as for submitting, you dont have to wait for 100, the tracking on the ARRL site shows your progress as QSLs match up, its kind of addictive watching the number go up honestly

so ive had my tech license for about two years now and mostly just been doing 2m/70cm stuff, some APRS, helped out with a couple of public service events. its been fun but honestly i feel like ive hit a wall with what i can do and everyone keeps telling me to get my General so i can get on HF. the thing is i dont really know what the exam is like compared to the tech exam. like is it way harder? i remember the tech exam feeling pretty straightforward but i heard the General has more math and like circuit theory stuff which honestly stressed me out a little. i was never great at math in school. also i guess my real question is what do you actually get when you upgrade? like i know its HF but i dont know which bands or how much of them. is it worth it if i dont even own an HF radio yet? kind of feels like putting the cart before the horse but i also dont want to buy a radio and then realize i cant use most of it

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and mostly done HF stuff, some VHF contesting here and there, but EME has always been this kind of mythical thing in the back of my head. lately ive been reading more about it and watching some videos of guys making JT65B contacts via the moon and it just looks insane to me that this is even possible. my main question i guess is what does a realistic starter setup actually look like for 2m EME. ive seen guys with these absolutely massive yagi arrays and dish setups that look like they belong to a government agency, but ive also heard you can do it with more modest gear now that WSJT-X is so refined. is a single yagi even remotely viable or do i need at minimum a pair? my current 2m antenna is just a 9el yagi up about 30 feet which i know is not gonna cut it but trying to understand the gap between where i am and where i need to be. also what are typical power levels people run, i have an amp that does 500w on 2m which i always assumed would be enough for most things but EME is a different animal obviously. appreciate any input from guys who have actually done this, not just read about it

Honestly I just keep both running. N1MM for any contest I enter, Log4OM for everything else including FT8 via WSJT-X. The trick is when a contest ends I export the N1MM log as ADIF and import it into Log4OM so everything ends up in one master log. It's a bit of a manual step but takes maybe two minutes and I've never had a dupe issue from it. N1MM is genuinely not great for casual logging, it's not really designed for that. The interface is all about rate and multipliers, there's no good way to just log a random 20m SSB contact without it feeling weird. So yeah, two programs is kind of the answer most contesters land on. Your 3 years of Log4OM history is fine, just keep adding to it.

dont overthink the SDR part just use whatever rig you have on the remote end and let RemoteHams handle the audio, the built in waterfall on something like an 7610 or even a cheaper rig with a panadapter output is going to be more practical than trying to sync a separate SDR stream over the same link imo. ive tried the dual stream approach and keeping the two things in sync is a headache you dont need. the latency question is real though, i cant speak to their current infrastructure but when i tested it a while back from my cabin setup it was totally fine for SSB and even digital but i wouldnt want to do serious CW contesting over it

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals. so the fcc allocation for general phone on 40m starts at 7.175 MHz, but here in the US the whole 40m band only goes up to 7.300. thing is your signal has a certain bandwidth — if youre doing SSB youre looking at maybe 2.8 kHz or so of occupied bandwidth. if you tune your rig to 7.175 and youre on LSB, your signal actually extends a couple kHz below that carrier frequency. so technically part of your signal could be bleeding into the extra-only portion below 7.175. thats why guys say stay a bit above the edge, like 7.178 or so gives you some breathing room. most rigs are close enough on calibration that it wont matter much but old radios can be off a little. the people you heard down around 7.150 are probably extra class, or they could be DX stations since the band plan is different outside the US and 7.125-7.175 is wide open in other countries.

general is definitely a step up from tech but its not as scary as it looks at first. the propagation section tripped me up too when i was studying, but honestly once it clicks it makes a lot of sense and you start to see why 40m behaves so differently at night vs daytime and stuff like that. i used hamexam dot org and just drilled the question pool every day for like three weeks, maybe 20 minutes a day, and passed with a pretty comfortable margin the band privileges thing is a bit confusing at first yeah. basically as a general you get big chunks of most HF bands but there are portions near the bottom of some bands that are reserved for extra class. like on 20m you get phone privileges starting at 14.225 MHz i think, extras get a bit more below that. the ARRL website has a band plan chart that lays it all out, its worth printing and sticking on your wall. 40m and 15m are probably where youll spend most of your time starting out anyway and you get solid access on both just start drilling the practice tests, dont try to memorize everything conceptually right away, the patterns start to stick and then the concepts make more sense after

had the 7300 for two years before moving to the 7610 and honestly the dual receiver is something i use way more than i expected. not just for contesting either, i run SO2R lite basically, monitor 20m while calling on 40m and it just becomes natural after a while. the receiver performance difference is noticeable too if you're in a noisy RF environment, the 7610 handles strong adjacent signals better in my experience. that said if you're not doing contests heavily and your 7300 is doing the job i'd be hard pressed to tell you its a must-do upgrade. it's real money for a real but incremental improvement. depends what's buggin you about your current setup i guess

yeah what he said about the ADC bits matters more than people realize when you've got strong locals. i run an RSPdx now which is the newer one, stepped up from the RSP1A, and the HF performance on that is genuinely impressive for the money. but honestly if youre coming from an rtl dongle the RSP1A is gonna feel like a huge upgrade anyway so dont overthink it. one thing worth mentioning — whatever you get, spend some time with SDR# or HDSDR with ExtIO before settling on software. SDRuno is fine but some people get on better with the others depending on what they want to do. and if you do the pi route look into SigDigger or CubicSDR, both run decent on ARM.

so ive been putting off building a QRP kit for like two years now and i finally just sat down and did it last weekend. went with the ubitx v6 mostly because i kept seeing people recommend it and the price seemed reasonable for what you get. took me most of saturday to get it together, my soldering is pretty rough but i think i did okay. first contact was a guy in ohio running 5 watts on 40m and i just about lost my mind when he came back to me. i was running 4 watts into a random wire i threw up in the backyard and honestly i wasnt even sure the thing was working right. the whole experience kind of reminded me why i got into this hobby in the first place, like there was something really satisfying about making a contact with gear you built yourself on basically no power. anyway i know the ubitx isnt everyones favorite and theres some quirks with the software and stuff but for a first kit i thought it was manageable. thinking about doing a parks on the air activation with it sometime soon. anyone else been doing portable QRP stuff lately, curious what antennas people are using out in the field