Tom Anderson

ive been wanting to get into POTA and this kind of post makes me want to just go do it already. i have an old FT-817 sitting in a box that i havent really used much and i think i keep overthinking what antenna to bring and whether 5 watts is enough. sounds like it works though

so ive been going back and forth on whether to make the drive, its like 2.5 hours for me and gas isnt cheap. but i've got a bunch of old gear piling up in the shack that my wife keeps giving me the look about and figured maybe i can offload some of it. anybody else planning on going? also does anyone know if the Fairborn club is doing their usual table near the entrance or did that change this year

i did something similar but with a full pi 4 because i wanted to also run js8call and wsjt-x in the background. probably overkill but whatever i had it sitting around. the antenna switching thing i just punted on and bought one of those cheap 8 port HF antenna switches that takes BCD input, ran that from the GPIO directly with just some 1k resistors in series and honestly havent had any RF issues but im only running 100w so maybe thats why. higher power id definitely look at isolation more carefully like the other guy said.

oh man same thing happened to me last spring and i went down a serious rabbit hole. i started checking prop forecasts on spaceweather.com every morning like its the weather channel lol. the solar cycle is climbing right now so honestly the next couple years should be pretty wild for 10 and even 6m if we get lucky with sporadic E on top of F2 propagation. i dont fully understand all the mechanics still but ive learned enough to know when to at least turn the radio on and check

yeah running N1MM just for contests is pretty much the standard thing to do, dont overthink it. most guys i know keep N1MM for anything contest related because its just built for that, the rate display alone is worth it when youre trying to grind out a SS or a sprint. then Log4OM or whatever for the shack log. after the contest you export the ADIF from N1MM and import it into your main log, takes maybe five minutes if you set up the import filters right. the WSJT-X thing is annoying, i had the same band/mode import issues for a while. turned out i had the ADIF mode field mapping wrong in Log4OM, FT8 was coming in as some generic MFSK entry. there's a thread on the Log4OM groups.io about fixing that, worth searching. once i fixed the mode map it started flagging dupes properly. still manually verify my LoTW against Log4OM maybe once a month just to keep things honest, five minute job with the sync tool built in.

so ive been doing terrestrial stuff for years, mostly HF, but finally got curious about working through the LEO satellites after watching a video of someone working SO-50 with just a handheld. that got me down a rabbit hole and now im more interested in the linear transponder birds like FO-29 or AO-73 rather than the FM ones because honestly the FM ones seem like they'd get pretty crowded fast. my question is mainly about the doppler correction situation. i understand the concept — the satellite is moving toward you so the frequency shifts up on downlink, away from you shifts down, all that. but in practice do people just manually tune while they're in the pass or do you actually set up software to do it automatically. i have a IC-9700 so i think it can be CAT controlled but ive never set that up for anything moving before. also using a fixed yagi right now, not a tracking mount, is that going to be a total dead end for linear transponder work or can you make it work if the pass geometry is decent. any advice appreciated, been lurking this forum for a while and you guys seem to know your stuff

i had almost exactly this happen with an NE602 build a while back. ended up being that my audio stage was oscillating at RF frequencies, the 386 is notorious for that. there's a 10 ohm resistor and 0.047uF cap in series that you put from pin 7 to ground on the chip, most designs leave it out but it makes a huge difference with stability. might not be your exact issue but its worth trying before you tear the whole thing apart

clock sync is almost certainly your problem. windows time sync is not good enough for FT8, you need something like Meinberg NTP or just use Dimension 4 — either one will get you within a few milliseconds which is what the mode actually needs. if your clock is off by more than a second you'll transmit outside the decode window and nobody hears you even if your RF is perfectly fine. happened to me when i first started and i spent two days thinking my antenna was garbage. your frequency sounds right, 7.074 with audio in that range is exactly where you want to be. ALC barely moving is correct. go fix the clock first and i'd bet you start getting replies pretty quick.

hamstudy.org just do that, seriously dont overthink it. i passed in like 3 weeks only studying maybe 20 minutes a night. the ARRL book is good if you actually want to understand the stuff but for just passing the exam its overkill imo

yeah 10m has been something else this solar cycle, we're definitely riding a good peak right now. i worked a VK on 10m SSB last thursday with just my little vertical and 100 watts, signal was 59 both ways which still kind of blows my mind. been telling the guys at my club for months to get their antennas sorted before conditions start rolling back and now theyre finally listening lol on the 7760 thing, ive been following that pretty closely. the japanese release has apparently been out for a bit but US distribution keeps slipping. the form factor is interesting, kind of unconventional with the detached head unit design but i get what theyre going for if you want to mount it properly in a vehicle or a clean shack setup. price rumors are all over the place, some people saying north of five grand which is oof but thats just how it goes these days i guess. still running my 7300 and honestly not complaining

psk31 nostalgia is real lol. i miss when 14.070 was just wall to wall psk signals on a weekend afternoon. that was actual ragchewing over digital, people would go back and forth for 20 minutes. now its a ghost town most of the time which is kinda sad. i tried JS8Call last winter and made a handful of contacts but it did feel like work to find someone. FT4 is somewhere in the middle i guess if you want slightly more throughput than FT8 but same basic format. doesnt really solve your problem of wanting a real exchange though. RTTY contesting is still pretty alive if you havent tried that, thats at least got some chaos and energy to it even if its not a conversation either.

yeah i had almost the exact same thing happen when i built a 40m direct conversion receiver, not a superhet but similar problem with LO leaking out the antenna port. what finally helped me was adding a bandpass filter right at the antenna input — nothing fancy, just a simple LC filter tuned to the band. cuts down on the junk getting in AND stops some of the oscillator from sneaking back out. might be worth trying before you tear the whole board apart.

haha yeah my first one i forgot the coax adapter and had to improvise with a piece of wire touching the connector which somehow worked for like 3 contacts before it fell apart. you figure it out. 6 QSOs is solid for a first activation honestly, some people dont even get their 4. the battery thing on the KX2 is real, i started carrying a small 3ah lipo and that thing lasts forever now compared to the internal pack

yeah the listening part is huge and honestly most people just dont do it. ive worked some genuinely rare ones — a few top 10 most wanted — and almost every time it came down to figuring out the operator's pattern before jumping in. some guys work strictly end of the spread, some work the bottom, some actually rotate through. you can usually figure it out in 15-20 QSOs if you pay attention. the timing thing you mentioned is real too, especially on CW. theres a window right after the final K or the sign where if you nail it your signal kinda stands alone for just a fraction of a second before the rest of the pile crashes in. its not always enough but it gives you a shot. on SSB i find calling slightly shorter than everyone else helps — like dont give your full callsign twice every time, just once, clean and loud. the DX op can pull a single call easier than two overlapping doubles. one thing i'd add is antenna polarization and timing of propagation peaks matter way more than running more power in my experience. ive broken piles running 100w while guys with amps were getting nothing because i was on the right part of the band at the right time. grey line stuff especially.

the pattern recognition thing you described is really the whole game honestly. most people just key up whenever there's a gap and wonder why it doesn't work. the ops on big DXpeditions especially — those guys are running thousands of QSOs and they get into a groove. if you can figure out their groove you're halfway there. one thing i've had luck with on SSB is being really deliberate about how i send my callsign. not faster, not slower, just very clean and precise. a lot of pileup callers get sloppy under pressure and end up sounding like mush in a wall of noise. the DX op picks out the one that's clearest not necessarily the loudest. on CW it's even more pronounced — a clean fist or clean keying at a moderate speed stands out from the guys hammering away at 30wpm when the dx is only sending at 20. for the big DXpeditions i think timing matters more than anything else. listen for which continent they're favoring, and if they're doing that thing where they call for NA only or EU only, wait for your turn rather than trying to bust through when they're not even listening for you. seems obvious but you'd be amazed how many people just call constantly regardless.