Jessica Williams

so our ARES group has a county-level exercise coming up in about three weeks and i've been tasked with figuring out the power situation for our main communications node. we're talking two HF stations running simultaneously, probably an IC-7300 and an old TS-570 that one of the guys is bringing, plus a handful of VHF/UHF stuff for local coordination. maybe a digipeater node too if we can swing it. my question is basically whether its worth dragging out the generator or just going full battery/solar. last exercise we used a Honda EU2200i and it was fine but it was also kind of annoying — noise, the fuel logistics, someone had to babysit it. i've been looking at running a couple of 100ah LiFePO4 batteries with a 200w folding panel and a decent MPPT controller but i honestly dont know if that's enough sustained current for two HF rigs both potentially running 100w for like 8 hours. on the antenna side we're planning a linked dipole for 40/80m hung between two telescoping poles, and probably a vertical for 15/20m. the site is kind of a big open field which is good but we have basically no trees so everything needs to be self-supporting. anyone done something similar and have thoughts on the power math or what's actually worked for you in the field?

so ive been licensed about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF stuff, some meteor scatter on 6m, and i keep seeing people talk about EME and honestly it just sounds insane to me in the best possible way. bouncing signals off the moon. like what even is that. anyway i started reading into it more seriously over the past few months and i guess my question is what does a realistic entry-level setup actually look like these days. i keep seeing people say you need a massive dish or like a 4x4 yagi array and a kilowatt and some kind of low noise preamp right at the feedpoint and honestly it sounds like it costs as much as a car. is that still true or has the digital mode stuff (JT65 i assume?) changed that at all. i have a pretty solid station already, running about 500w on 2m with a pair of M2 yagis stacked, and a decent SSB rig. wondering if thats even close to usable or if im way off base. also curious how you even find people to work, like is there a specific calling frequency or do people schedule these things in advance. sorry if this is basic stuff, i just dont want to spend a ton of time going down the wrong rabbit hole before i at least understand what im dealing with.

welcome to the rabbit hole lol. i joined ARES about two years into the hobby and was pretty nervous about it too. the ICS stuff (like ICS-100 and 700) threw me a bit at first because it feels really bureaucratic but you get used to it and it actually makes sense once you see how an activation runs. some groups require you to complete those online FEMA courses before you can deploy, so worth checking with your EC ahead of time if thats a requirement locally. the training exercises are honestly the best part, weve done simulated hospital communication drills and one big county-wide exercise where we supported the EOC. that was a lot of fun even though it was basically just passing traffic and filling out ICS forms for 4 hours. sounds boring written out but in the moment it feels pretty real. anyway definitely go to the meeting, worst case you decide its not for you.

Setting up my shack with RemoteHams and having significant latency problems with my Adalm-Pluto SDR setup. The RCForb client is connecting fine to my remote base, but I'm seeing 200-300ms delay during SSB operation which makes real-time QSOs challenging. RemoteHams server and RCForb Client software provides the capability to easily remotely control a ham radio station including an amplifier, antenna rotator, and switches. The RCForb client software integrates with popular logging programs and includes a keyboard keyer and DX cluster. My setup: Raspberry Pi 4 running F1ATB's Remote SDR v5.0, Pluto connected via USB, 50Mbps fiber connection. Anyone else experience similar delays with this configuration?

WAZ is Worked All Zones — the world is divided into 40 CQ zones and you need to work one station from each zone. it's actually a really fun one to chase because some zones are pretty rare and you have to actually think about propagation and timing to get them all, not just wait for a big DX station to show up on a pile-up as for which one first, honestly just work whatever sounds good on the bands and let the awards sort of chase themselves. most people end up with decent progress on WAS pretty quickly because US stations are everywhere, and DXCC builds up faster than you'd expect especially if you hit the low bands during good conditions. LoTW is definitely accepted for all three, you dont need paper cards unless you really want them or for specific rare entities that only confirm via paper 23 entities in 8 months on 100w and a dipole is actually pretty solid, keep at it

ok so i just passed my general exam last week (finally after studying forever) and im looking at my callsign and its honestly kind of a mouthful. someone at the club mentioned i could apply for a vanity call but i have no idea where to start or how the whole thing works. like is it first come first served or do they do it in batches or what? i looked at the FCC ULS site and got pretty confused pretty fast. there seem to be different application types and i dont know which one to pick. and i also saw something about a waiting period? like you have to wait a certain number of days before your call is actually assigned? somebody told me its 18 days but another guy said something different so now im not sure what to believe. also can i apply for any available callsign or are there restrictions based on my license class? im a general now if that matters. any help would be appreciated, this stuff is weirdly complicated for what seems like it should be a straightforward process

so ive been doing contests seriously for maybe 3 years now, usually finish somewhere in the middle of the pack in my category and i keep reading about SO2R and how it transforms your rate but honestly every time i look into it i feel like im opening a can of worms. the station complexity, the filtering issues, the second radio bleeding into everything... i dunno. currently running a K3 and an old FT-950 that i picked up cheap, so i technically have two radios. the antenna situation is two yagis stacked for 20/15 and a wire for 40/80. my main concern is the RFI between the two rigs when both are transmitting even on different bands. i ran some tests just playing around and the second radio totally craps out when the first one is keying up on 20. is SO2R actually worth pursuing or am i better off just focusing on single radio rate optimization? feels like i could squeeze more out of my operating technique before adding the complexity. but then again i see guys posting 1200+ QSO rates in phone contests and i cant figure out how theyre doing it without SO2R.

Great question! We've conducted several lessons-learned meetings and certainly have learned many lessons from this event. Focus your AAR on interoperability - how well did you interface with served agencies? Also document message handling procedures that worked under stress. The small stuff matters when everything else is falling apart.

yeah the onboard 5v aref on those arduino megas is pretty dirty, its riding on whatever noise is on your power rail which in a ham shack is basically a disaster waiting to happen. try wiring the AREF pin to a 3.3v regulator or better yet one of those little LM4040 precision voltage references, makes a huge difference with position feedback pots. also are you using shielded cable between the rotator and the controller box? that whole run is acting like an antenna and picking up everything especially if youre near your feedlines. the software averaging thing works too, i usually do a rolling average of like 16 or 32 samples and only update the position variable if the new reading is more than a degree or two away from the current stored value. kills the jitter pretty effectively. i did almost exactly this project with a CD-45 about two years ago and ended up with maybe plus or minus 1.5 degrees accuracy which is honestly better than the original controller was doing anyway

i was in basically the exact same spot about a year ago and went with the Baofeng just to have something while i figured things out. it worked, got me on the air, learned a lot. eventually upgraded to a Kenwood TH-D74 which is way overkill probably but i got obsessed with APRS and D-STAR so here we are lol. one thing nobody told me starting out — get a better antenna for whatever HT you buy. the stock rubber duck antennas on pretty much everything are mediocre and a $15-20 aftermarket whip makes a real difference, especially inside buildings or if youre at the edge of a repeaters range.

Don't miss the food vendors - hamfest food is part of the experience. Also, check out the ARRL booth for the latest club info and activities. Bring a cart or wagon if you plan on buying much gear.

yeah im kind of in the same boat haha been at it maybe 4 months and my sending is still pretty rough. one thing that helped me was actually recording myself with fldigi or something similar and listening back, you can really hear where youre clipping the dits or squashing the dahs. its kind of painful to hear yourself but it works. also someone on another forum told me to not look at my hand while sending and i thought that was weird advice but it actually helped me stop overthinking every character

so i finally did my first parks on the air activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, K-2847 if anyone knows it, and honestly i was kind of nervous going in because i had heard you need at least 10 QSOs to count it as a valid activation and i wasnt sure my little setup would cut it out in the field i brought my IC-705 and a end-fed halfwave wire antenna i just threw up in a tree, ran it off a 5ah lipo battery and honestly the whole thing fit in a small backpack which still amazes me. set up on a picnic table near the parking lot. within about 20 minutes on 20m SSB i had my 10 contacts and ended up with 23 total before i packed up, couple of them were park to park which i didnt even realize was a thing until someone called me and said they were also activating a park in ohio my tip for anyone nervous about their first one -- just spot yourself on the POTA website or the app and the hunters will find you almost immediately. i wasnt sure anyone would even be listening but the frequency got busy fast. also bring more water than you think you need, i was out there longer than planned because i was having too much fun

just took my General two weeks ago after being a tech for like a year and a half. the electrical theory section tripped me up a little, stuff like impedance and resonant circuits but if you watch some of the KB6NU or dave casler videos on youtube it clicks way faster than just reading. i probably watched like 4 or 5 of his videos and then drilled hamstudy for maybe 3 weeks and passed with an 88 i think. also one thing nobody told me before i studied -- some of the questions on the actual exam feel worded slightly different than the practice ones so dont just memorize the answers, try to actually understand whats being asked at least a little bit. caught me off gaurd on a couple questions but still passed so it wasnt a huge deal

so we finally got around to doing a proper SET last Saturday and honestly it was a mixed bag. the scenario was a tornado touchdown that took out the EOC's primary comms and we were supposed to provide backup voice and digital traffic handling for about 4 hours. on paper it sounded straightforward but man did things fall apart in interesting ways. biggest lesson for me personally was how fast people forget basic net control discipline when things get even a little chaotic. we had operators jumping in out of turn, one guy was transmitting way too long trying to explain something that could have been a 10 second message, and we had a couple people who apparently hadn't looked at the ICS forms in like two years and were basically guessing. not throwing anyone under the bus, i've done the same thing. the digital side actually went pretty well, we had winlink running through a couple different paths and managed to get simulated health and welfare traffic through even when we had to reroute around the node that was pretending to be down. that part i was happy with. but it also exposed that we only have maybe 3 people in the whole group who are really comfortable with packet under pressure, everyone else kind of freezes up when the software doesnt cooperate. curious if anyone else has done these kinds of exercises recently and what surprised you or what you wish you'd practiced more beforehand. we're already talking about doing a tabletop before the next one to work through some of the procedural stuff

so i just passed my technician exam last week and i'm trying to figure out what handheld to actually buy. everyone keeps telling me different things and i'm kind of overwhelmed. some people say get the baofeng uv-5r because its cheap and fine to learn on, other people act like i just insulted their family by suggesting it. then theres the yaesu ft-60r which seems popular but its like three times the price and i cant really tell what you're actually getting for that extra money. i mostly want to hit the local repeaters and maybe do some simplex with a buddy of mine who lives like 8 miles away. not doing anything fancy. do i really need to spend $150+ or is the cheap route genuinely okay for just getting started

Those loading coil positions sound about right for best efficiency. Try winding on air-wound forms if possible - the PVC has some dielectric losses at HF. A simple 5-turn coax choke on FT240-43 works great as a current balun.

the LoTW cert thing tripped me up too but theres a pretty decent walkthrough on the ARRL site and once you do it once its fine. i was overthinking it personally i do all three just because i like getting paper cards in the mail, theres something nice about it even if its slow. got a whole wall of them going now. but if youre purely chasing DXCC then LoTW is really the only one that counts toward that so id prioritize getting that set up

so ive been on 17m and 20m pretty regularly for the past few weeks and something just feels off. like some days ill work europe no problem in the morning and then the next day at the exact same time its just dead quiet. i know solar flux has been kind of bouncing around but i dont really have a great handle on how to read those numbers and figure out what to expect before i sit down at the radio. been using pskreporter and dxmaps to get a rough idea of whats open but even then sometimes the map looks great and i hear nothing, or the map looks terrible and i stumble into a pile calling some rare pacific island. i guess my question is -- is there like a reliable way to predict when the bands will actually be good, or is it mostly just show up and see? i feel like im missing something that the more experienced guys just kind of know intuitively at this point.

i put a lip mount on my jeep because i also didnt want to drill and honestly after about a year the cable got pinched at the door seal and i started getting noise into the receive. had to reroute the whole thing. so yeah, firsthand experience, they work but they're more hassle than they look in the youtube videos

Wait I didnt even know 10 meters was open, I'm so new to this I still kind of forget to check the higher bands. I've just been hanging out on 40m talking to people locally. Does 10m need like a special antenna or can I use what I have? I have a G5RV up in my backyard.

So ive been using a cheap vertical whip since I got my technician last year and honestly it works fine for local stuff but I want to try HF properly and everyone says build a dipole first. ok, fair enough. I picked up some 14 gauge stranded copper from the hardware store and I have a bunch of coax sitting around from a old TV installation. My question is mostly about the feed point. I see people using baluns and I see people just connecting the coax center and shield directly to the two wire halves and calling it a day. Does it actually matter for a first build? Like will I blow something up or will it just work a little worse without one? I'm going for 40m so roughly 66 feet total, I know the formula. Also the coax I have is RG-6 quad shield from the TV stuff. I know RG-8 or RG-58 is more common for RF but RG-6 is 75 ohm not 50. Is that going to be a serious problem or just a minor mismatch my tuner can handle. I have an LDG autotuner on the rig.

the dupe thing across modes in N1MM has bitten me too, i think theres a setting somewhere in the contest config for how strict it checks but i never bothered figuring it out for casual operating because like you said it wasnt really designed for that. for WSJT-X i actually just let WSJT-X keep its own log and then export to ADIF periodically and import wherever i want, bit of a workaround but its clean enough. probably not what you want to hear if youre trying to keep everything in sync in real time though.

i got my first EME qso last winter with a single 11el yagi on 2m and the 9700, so it can be done. took me most of a weekend sitting there watching the screen but when that callsign finally decoded i genuinely just sat there for a second. worked a station in germany if i remember right, they had a big array obviously doing most of the heavy lifting on their end. the moon tracking software is something people underestimate. i use a cheap az-el rotor setup and getting the pointing right is honestly half the battle, there's a few programs that interface with WSJT and handle the tracking automatically. thats something worth sorting out before you even worry about the antenna size honestly

WAS first is honestly a pretty natural starting point for a lot of US hams because its achievable pretty quick if you work the bands regularly, especially on 40 and 80 at night. You're already at 34 confirmed which is great for 8 months in. finish that one off and getting the certificate in the mail is a good feeling, motivates you to keep going. For DXCC, you apply when you hit 100 confirmed entities on LoTW — you pay a one time application fee and then after that additional endorsements (when you hit 150, 200, etc) cost a bit but not terrible. The credits just sit in your account and ARRL tracks them. You dont have to do anything special just keep logging and confirming via LoTW. WAZ is trickier yeah, some zones are genuinely rare and you can go months without hearing anything from zone 23 or parts of zone 26 depending on conditions. Totally doable from the midwest but you might be waiting on the right opening or a DXpedition. Id say chase all three simultaneously honestly — when something comes on that you need, you work it regardless of which award its for. Thats kind of the whole fun of it.