Michael Thomas87

yeah the ICS forms thing gets everybody the first time. i remember my first SET maybe 15 years ago now, i was so focused on the radio part that i completely forgot to put a precedence on the message and the net control just went silent for a second and then very politely asked me to reread it haha. good learning moment. the simplex thing is SO important and i feel like a lot of newer folks dont drill on it enough. we actually added a dedicated simplex-only segment to our county exercises after a real activation a few years back where the main repeater site lost power and we basically had a communications gap for about 40 minutes until someone figured out what freq everyone should move to. that was a real lesson learned situation right there. for practicing message handling at home, look into the National Traffic System nets. there are slow-net style ones on HF that are pretty welcoming to newer folks and you can get real reps passing formal traffic without the pressure of an exercise. ARRL has the radiogram format too if you want to drill that specifically. honestly just get on a local traffic net a few times a week and after a month or two it becomes muscle memory.

one thing nobody ever mentions is that some of those gateway entries in the list are just stale, like the node is listed but whoever runs it hasnt had it on in months. i wasted a whole afternoon on one that turned out to be an RMS that had been offline since forever. theres a last-heard timestamp in the gateway list, id filter to only ones that have been active in the last day or two and try those first.

so ive been trying to work some DX the past couple weeks and the bands have been all over the place. like one evening 17m was absolutely dead, couldnt hear a thing, then the next morning i tuned across and there were stations from japan and australia coming in like they were next door. i dont fully understand the relationship between the solar flux index and whats actually happening on the bands -- i know higher SFI is generally better for the higher HF bands but its not always that simple right? also noticed some days where the K index spikes and everything just falls apart. had a really promising opening on 15m the other day and then within like an hour it was gone, checked and sure enough the K index had jumped up. is that pretty much what causes that or is there more going on? been a ham for about 8 months so still getting my head around all this propagation stuff

so ive been a general for about two years now and my elmer keeps telling me to just go ahead and get my extra but honestly i dont know if its worth the effort. like i mainly do HF phone on 40 and 20 meters and i already have access to most of what i want. the extra portions of those bands seem pretty quiet from what i can tell when i listen around. but then part of me wants to understand the theory better anyway. i looked at the question pool and some of that stuff is way over my head, the transmission line stuff and the filter design questions and whatever that whole section on oscillators is about. i took electronics in high school like 15 years ago so its not completely foreign but its been a while. i guess my question is, is the extra exam mostly just memorizing answers or do you actually need to understand the theory to pass it? and did getting it change how you operate or think about the hobby at all? i cant tell if im just being lazy or if general is honestly fine for what i do

Areas may benefit from scheduling drills and exercises to keep operators ready to respond in emergencies, and drills also ensure that professionals and ham operators are comfortable working together. Try a hospital communication outage scenario - we partnered with local emergency management and it really showed gaps in our ICS knowledge. The served agencies loved the realism too.

yeah pretty much everyone i know does exactly that, Log4OM for the day to day stuff and N1MM just comes out when a contest weekend shows up. theyre solving different problems honestly. Log4OM has gotten really solid over the last couple versions and the WSJT-X integration is fine, it uses the same UDP logging that everything else uses so it just works once you point WSJT-X at the right port. the dupe checking across modes is actually better in Log4OM in my experience, you can set it to flag a dupe regardless of band or mode which is what you probably want for general logging anyway. the only thing i'd say is dont expect to use Log4OM mid-contest, it's just not built for the rate game. N1MM is still king for anything serious, the keyboard macros and the bandmap and the SO2R stuff if you ever go down that road, nothing else really touches it for that. but for a random wednesday night working DX or whatever Log4OM is way more pleasant to sit in front of.

oh man good luck with this, your first activation is such a good feeling when it comes together. the spotting thing — you can definitely pre-announce on SOTAwatch, there's an alerts section where you put in your planned summit reference and approximate time and frequency and chasers will be watching for you. that said plenty of people just show up and self-spot once they're there, there's an SMS spotting option if you have cell signal or you can use the SOTA Spotter app. honestly for a first activation I'd do both, put an alert up the night before and then self-spot when you get on frequency. 4 contacts is all you need, and honestly on a weekend with a decent alert up you'll probably get way more than that. 2m FM can work if there are locals but HF is where most of the action is for SOTA, 40m and 20m especially. what antenna did you build? if you're not sure it's working right that's the part I'd double check before you go, a random wire with a tuner or an EFHW can both work great portable but the feedpoint stuff matters.

the working split thing still confuses me a bit if im honest. like i get that the DX transmits on one freq and listens on another but how do you know where to call if they just say listening up? do you just spread across the range and hope or is there a smarter way to figure out where they're actually pulling from. i tried working a 3B8 a few weeks ago and i really couldnt figure out where he was actually listening, felt like i was just guessing the whole time

so i've been interested in ham radio for a while now, like years honestly, but always put it off thinking it would be too hard or expensive to get into. my neighbor mentioned he passed his technician exam last month and said it wasn't as bad as he expected and now im seriously considering it. i guess my question is just... where do you start? like is there a book i should get, or a website, or do i need to take a class? i looked up some stuff online but theres so much information its kind of overwhelming and i dont know whats current or outdated. also does the test cost money and how long does it usually take people to study before they feel ready

oh and just to add - some of the WWFF references especially in Canada and Europe have almost no activation history so you might be one of the first people ever to activate that spot which is kinda cool. hunters get excited about those rare references. might be worth posting on the wwff spotting network before you go so people know to listen for you

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah the DX is great, worked like 60 countries with 10 watts into a dipole which blew my mind, but it kind of feels like... operating a slot machine? you click confirm and wait and thats basically it. heard about JS8Call and been messing with it the past few weeks trying to figure out if its actually useful or if im just chasing the next shiny thing. the weak signal capability seems similar enough, like its based on the same FT8 engine more or less but stretched out for messaging, but im finding the timing a lot less strict which honestly is a relief. had a few actual back and forth exchanges with a guy in Ohio and one in British Columbia and it felt more like actual radio contact. latency is rough though, like you send something and then just sit there for a while waiting. my real question is does anyone actually use JS8Call regularly or is it kind of a ghost town on most bands. i check 40m around 14.078 and sometimes theres activity and sometimes its totally dead. curious if theres a better time of day or if i should be trying HF or different bands. also wondering if the relay/store-forward stuff is worth learning or if thats overkill for casual use.

yeah that plateau around 12-15wpm is real and pretty much everyone goes through it. what got me through it was basically forcing myself off the software and onto actual QSOs on 40m, even when it was painful. the W1AW practice broadcasts are good too because the speed bumps up gradually in the session and you kind of get dragged along with it. one thing nobody told me that made a huge difference — stop copying every single character. seriously just let some go and keep your pencil moving. once i stopped trying to be perfect and just accepted i was gonna miss stuff, my brain relaxed and the speed came naturally over a few weeks. also make sure youre hearing the characters as whole sounds not dits and dahs, if youre still counting elements at 13wpm thats probably whats holding you back. took me about 6 months of actual on-air time to solidly hit 20 and another year to feel comfortable there

the chart thing is actually bad advice for most people, or at least starting by staring at a chart is. the way it was explained to me when i was learning is that you want to associate the sound directly with the letter, not the sound with dots and dashes and then the dots and dashes with the letter. thats an extra step your brain has to do every single time and at any real speed it just falls apart. what worked for me was the Koch method, theres a free program called LCWO dot net that walks you through it. you start with just two characters at full speed, like 20 wpm even though youre a beginner, and you dont move on until you can copy those two at like 90% accuracy. sounds brutal but it forces your brain to recognize the sound as a whole instead of counting dits and dahs. took me probably 3 or 4 months of 15-20 minutes a day before i felt like i could actually follow a slow QSO. also the app Morse Mania is pretty good for phone practice if youre commuting or whatever

man that shelter assignment on short notice with just an HT sounds stressful, but honestly it sounds like you did exactly what needed doing and that's the whole point. i remember my first real activation back maybe 2012 or so, flooding situation, and i sat at a staging area for four hours doing essentially nothing because the EmComm needs were pretty light that day. felt useless but the EC told me afterward that just having bodies in the right seats matters because you never know when things escalate fast. the ICS forms thing is real and unfortunately a lot of ARES training glosses over the paperwork side. ICS 309 for message logs and knowing how to fill out a 213 properly — that stuff matters a lot more during an actual activation than most nets ever practice. if your group does any future training exercises i'd push the EC to run a full simulated message flow with actual forms, it's tedious but it sticks. you clearly have the right instincts already though, just keep showing up

so i got my general back in march and ive been mostly just doing some casual ragchewing on 40m and a little bit of digital but everyone keeps telling me i need to try a contest and honestly the fall season is making me kind of anxious about it. like i looked at the CQ WW coming up and the operator counts on those things are insane, i cant imagine jumping into that as basically a first timer. someone at my club mentioned maybe starting with something smaller before CQ WW but i dont really know the calendar that well. is field day totally different from these other contests or is the operating style basically the same? i did field day this summer with the club but i was just logging for someone else the whole time so i didnt really get a feel for actually running a frequency or hunting and pouncing or whatever. also heard some guys talking about SOTA activations counting toward some kind of contest thing? i thought SOTA was just its own separate thing but maybe im wrong. anyway if anyone has suggestions for like a good first contest to actually operate on my own id appreciate it, im running a pretty modest setup, ic-7300 and a wire dipole up about 30 feet.

so i finally got activated for a real event last weekend, been doing the training nets and drills for about 8 months now and was starting to wonder if any of it would ever actually matter. our EC called us up for a county-wide severe weather watch that turned into a pretty serious situation saturday night, multiple tornado warnings in adjacent counties and our served agency (county OEM) needed people at the EOC and a couple of the shelter sites. i was assigned to one of the shelter locations running a simplex link back to the EOC since the repeater coverage there is spotty at best. honestly i was nervous as hell going in but once i sat down and started passing traffic it just kind of clicked. all those ICS drills and the message handling practice on the weekly nets really did prepare me better than i realized. we ended up running about 4 hours before the watch expired and they stood us down. anyway if anyone is on the fence about getting more involved with their local ARES group, i guess im just saying the training actually does translate when the real thing happens. took me a while to believe that

the yagi is absolutely worth it for simplex distance work, especially on 2m. ive used a 5el homebrew tape measure yagi on summits and the difference vs a vertical is not subtle — you can hear stations that just arent there at all on the collinear. the trick i use is set up the yagi on a lightweight painters pole and just slowly rotate it by hand when im scanning. you get used to where the likely paths are pretty quick especially if you check a topo map before the activation. the slim jim or a roll up jpole is fine for repeater work but for simplex dx youre fighting physics with a vertical. for what its worth a 6el on 2m is maybe 10dBd and that blows any collinear out of the water for a point to point path. wind is a real issue though, i had a lightweight yagi act like a sail at about 30 mph and it was not a fun time trying to hold it steady

ok so i just passed my general last month and im still using my sequential callsign which is kind of a mouthful honestly. a guy at the club mentioned i could apply for a vanity call and i looked it up on the ULS but now im more confused than before like is there a waiting period after you get your license before you can apply? and how do you even know which calls are available? i tried searching a few on the FCC database but some show up as expired and im not sure if that means they're up for grabs or if theres still some holdover period where the previous holder can reclaim it or something also does it cost anything now? i thought i read somewhere that the FCC started charging but then someone else told me that was only for new licenses not vanity... im getting conflicting info everywhere. any help appreciated, been lurking here for a while and you guys usually know whats up

yeah what he said, LoTW is the main one to worry about if awards matter to you. i personally use all three just because why not, it doesn't take much extra effort once your logging software is set up to auto-upload. i use Log4OM and it handles LoTW and eQSL uploads pretty automatically after a contact which is nice. one thing i'll add — some DX stations especially from rarer entities only do paper QSL cards either direct or through a bureau, so if you ever work someone really exotic dont assume LoTW will cover it. always worth checking the DX station's QRZ page to see what they accept. i've had contacts that never confirmed on LoTW just because the other op never uploaded their log, which is frustrating when it's a new country for you

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend, been meaning to try it for ages after a buddy at the club mentioned it. went out to a state forest reference here in the midwest, set up my KX2 with a linked dipole strung between two trees and just started calling on 40m. honestly wasnt sure what to expect but the pile up came pretty fast once i spotted myself on the WWFF spotter network. ended up with 44 QSOs over about 3 hours which i think qualifies the reference? i read somewhere you need 44 to get the activation counted but im not 100% sure on that. logged everything on paper because i forgot to charge my tablet the night before, classic. also had a couple of stations come back to me saying they needed that reference for their award which was pretty cool to hear. anyway a few things im still fuzzy on — do i need to submit the log to both WWFF and any national program like USFF separately, or does one cover the other? and is there a time limit on how long after the activation you can upload the log? left my notes in the car and only just found them lol