James Rodriguez

im pretty much in the same boat as you actually, been using the Morse Mania app on my phone for a few months. its okay i guess, not sure im making as much progress as i should be. gonna check out that lcwo site the other guy mentioned one thing i heard is that writing letters down while you copy slows you down too once you get to higher speeds, like eventually you have to learn to just hear a whole word as one sound or something. no idea how that even works but supposedly it does

im pretty new to hf, just got my general a couple months ago, so i guess i dont have much to compare it to but my elmer told me to get on 10m right now because conditions wont always be like this. so ive been trying to get on whenever i can after work. made my first ever DX contact last week, guy in brazil, i was so happy i forgot to write down his callsign at first haha. had to ask him to repeat it. what should i be looking at to track propagation? someone mentioned pskreporter but im not sure how to use it exactly

yeah dont stress it. i checked into my first net like two weeks after getting my ticket and stumbled over my callsign phonetics and the net control just repeated it back corrected and moved on, nobody cared. just listen to a few sessions first if you can, most nets youll be able to hear even if you cant quite reach the repeater, get a feel for the rhythm of it before you transmit

yeah what he said about AE7Q is spot on, i spent like two hours on that site before i finally picked my vanity call. one thing i'll add — dont get too attached to a specific callsign before you check the availability, i had my heart set on one and then found out someone had already applied for it literally days before me. just kind of goes with the territory i guess. also the 18 day window thing tripped me up too when i first did this. you submit your application and then basically just wait. if nobody else applied for the same call in that window it just goes through. if multiple people did, FCC sorts it out by priority. i think mine took about 3 weeks total from application to getting the new call on my license.

so i finally dragged myself up to a local summit last weekend for my first real SOTA activation. been putting it off forever because i wasnt sure my setup was good enough but figured i'd just go for it. threw the KX2 in my pack with a 40m end fed and some paracord, took me way longer to hike up than expected and by the time i got to the summit i was sweaty and kind of out of breath and then spent like 20 minutes trying to get the wire up in a tree which honestly did not cooperate at all. finally got on the air and made my four contacts but barely, band conditions were rough and one of my contacts was super weak, not sure they actually copied my grid correctly. also my phone battery was dying so i was trying to log on paper which i havent done in ages and my handwriting under pressure is apparently terrible. anyway qualified the summit which i guess is the whole point but man it was way more chaotic than i imagined. does it get easier or is every activation kind of a scramble like this

i went through basically this exact situation about a year ago. ended up keeping both installed which i know isnt the answer you want but hear me out. Log4OM is genuinely nicer for day to day logging, the UI makes sense, clublog and LoTW sync works great, and the WSJT-X integration via UDP is actually pretty reliable in my experience, more so than N1MM weirdly enough. i had a period where N1MM was just silently eating FT8 QSOs and i didnt notice for like two operating sessions which was annoying. the contest thing though yeah, Log4OM has some contest support but its not really in the same league as N1MM for anything serious. if youre doing CQ WW or sweepstakes or anything where multipliers and rate matter you want N1MM. what i do is just export from N1MM after a contest as an ADIF and import it into Log4OM to keep the master log current. takes maybe five minutes and ive never had a dupe issue from it. its not elegant but it works and i stopped worrying about it.

the 7.175 vs 7.200 thing trips up a lot of people honestly. so the actual FCC allocation for general class phone on 40m starts at 7.175 MHz, that's the legal lower edge for voice. the 7.200 thing you might be seeing is probably either an older reference or maybe a band plan recommendation for certain nets or whatever. the FCC part 97 rules are what actually matter for where you're legally allowed to operate, everything else is just gentlemens agreements basically. the band edge thing your club guy mentioned is a real practical concern. your radio's carrier or suppressed carrier isnt always exactly where the dial says, and if you're on SSB your signal has sidebands that extend a few kHz from your indicated frequency. so if you're operating upper sideband and your dial reads 7.300 which is the top of the band, part of your actual transmitted signal could be going above 7.300 which is outside your allocation and technically illegal. most people just stay a few kHz inside the edge to give themselves a buffer. its not being overly cautious its just smart operating

commercial controller wouldve cost you what, 150 bucks maybe, but you wouldnt have learned any of this so I think the 40 hours is kind of beside the point honestly. I've got a G-450A that's been sitting in the shack for two years because the controller board fried and I just havent wanted to deal with sourcing the replacement. maybe I should just do what you did instead of waiting on a part.

CQ WW is fantastic but yeah it can be a bit of a wall of sound if youve never done it before, especially on 40 or 20 during peak hours. honestly not a bad starting point though because the exchange is dead simple — you just give your signal report and your CQ zone, thats it. your zone is probably 4 or 5 depending where you are in North America so you just say it the same way every time. Field Day is genuinely a great first experience if your club does it. its more relaxed, people are around to help you, and the whole point is kind of educational as much as competitive. id say if your club is doing Field Day go operate a few hours with them first, get the feel for running a pileup or hunting contacts, and then by the time fall contest season rolls around youll feel way more comfortable jumping into CQ WW or the ARRL Sweepstakes. SOTA is a totally different animal — its about activating summits, way more hiking than radio honestly. still fun but not really the same kind of contesting. worth doing eventually just for the adventure side of it. with an IC-7300 and a dipole you can absolutely make contacts in any of these. dont let the big gun stations intimidate you, just call CQ or go search and pounce and work what you can. everyone starts somewhere.

so i finally got my tech license a few months ago and ive been listening to the local 2m net on tuesday nights trying to figure out how it all works before i jump in. but honestly im still a bit lost on the timing of things. like when the net control calls for check-ins, do you just key up and say your callsign? do you wait for a pause? i heard someone say you're supposed to wait for a specific break but i wasnt sure if that was just for HF nets or what. also whats the deal with doubling — is that when two people key up at the same time? because i've heard some weird garbled stuff happen and i think thats what it was. just dont want to make a fool of myself when i finally check in. any advice from people who actually run nets or check in regularly would be great.

ok so ive been chasing rare DX for about 3 years now and pileups used to completely destroy me. id just sit there calling and calling and never get through. figured id write up what finally clicked for me after the recent 3Y0J attempt and a few others. the biggest thing that changed for me was actually listening before transmitting. sounds obvious but i mean really listening — figure out where the DX station is actually coming back to. if hes consistently pulling calls from slightly up or down from where everyone else is camping, thats your spot. i started keeping a little log of where i was hearing him come back and adjusting in like 200hz increments. made a huge difference. also the timing thing. a lot of guys just key up the second the DX station stops transmitting. if you wait just a hair — maybe half a second — you can sometimes land in a gap where youre not stomping on 50 other guys. hard to get the feel for it but once you do it becomes kind of instinctive. and honestly power isnt everything. i run about 500w into a 4 element yagi and ive seen guys with a kilowatt into a dipole who couldnt break the same pile i did. antenna is king, everyone says it and everyone ignores it. anyway curious what other peoples techniques are, especially for when the DX op is running split and the pileup is totally chaotic

so ive been running a lip mount on the rain gutter of my F-250 for a while now with a Comet SBB-5 and its fine i guess but i keep reading that a proper NMO through the roof is way better for the ground plane and SWR. the thing is i really dont want to drill a hole in a 2023 truck, that feels like a point of no return situation. my current setup has the coax running down the pillar and under the carpet, SWR is around 1.5 on 2m which i know isnt terrible but i feel like theres some room to improve. i mostly do linked repeaters and some 70cm stuff. the lip mount itself feels a little wobbly at highway speeds too, had a couple moments where i thought the whole thing was gonna go. anyone actually drilled a roof mount on a newer truck and regretted it or was it worth it? also wondering if those mag mount NMO bases are any good as a middle ground or if that defeats the whole purpose

I went through almost exactly this same thought process a couple years ago. ended up going with a 4x9el setup first just to see if I could even decode anything, and honestly it worked better than I expected with JT65 — made maybe 30 or 40 initials before I upgraded to a bigger array. the moon window and tracking software is kind of a whole other rabbit hole too, if you havent looked into that yet. WSJT-X handles most of it but you need something feeding it accurate az/el data if your antenna needs to track.

so i finally finished building one of those QRP kits, went with the ubitx v6 after reading about it for like 3 months before pulling the trigger. took me a few evenings to get it all together and honestly the build went smoother than i expected for my first real radio kit. hooked it up to a dummy load and SWR meter and im seeing about 8 watts on 40m which i thought was going to be higher? manual says up to 10w but i read somewhere that a lot of these come in a bit under that and its not a big deal. anyway i took it out to the back yard with a random wire antenna and made a few contacts on 7.200 and people could hear me fine so im not really complaining. the thing i cant figure out is when i drop down to 20m the power falls off quite a bit, maybe 4-5w at best. is that normal for this rig or is there a trimmer adjustment i should be looking at? ive seen mention of the PA bias pots but dont want to touch anything without knowing what im doing. also curious if anyone else runs this radio portable, wondering what battery setup people use for hiking since i want to take it out on a SOTA activation eventually.

so ive been licensed about 4 months now (general) and i keep hearing people talk about nets but i honestly still dont fully understand the whole thing. like i know theres a net control and you check in but what actually happens after that? do you just say your callsign and thats it, or do they actually talk to you? ive been lurking on 7.250 and a few 2m repeater nets locally but i get nervous to jump in because i dont want to mess up the flow or say something wrong. also someone at my club mentioned there are special event stations during holidays and stuff — are those related to nets or completely separate? i looked up W1AW and saw they have a schedule but the page was kind of confusing to me. just trying to figure out where to start honestly, any nudge in the right direction would help

yeah same boat as you like two years ago, ended up going down a deep rabbit hole. i started with a single 17el yagi i built from the K1FO design and a cheap Chinese LNA that turned out to have about 1.2 dB NF which isnt great but workable. worked maybe 15 or 20 stations in the first year mostly through skeds arranged on the chat, none of it was random CQ stuff, you just dont hear random CQs with a small setup. one thing nobody told me and i had to figure out the hard way -- azimuth and elevation accuracy is really important. i was off by a few degrees on elevation and it was killing me. moon noise is actually a useful tool for peaking your antenna because you can hear the noise floor change as you hit the moon, kind of cool when it works. anyway im now running 4x17el and its a totally different experience

so im trying to figure out if its worth making the drive out to xenia again this year. went two years ago and had a blast but last year i skipped it and honestly kind of regretted it. the flea market alone makes it worth it imo even if you dont buy anything its just fun to walk around and see whats out there. my buddy WB8 something is trying to get a group together from our club but half of them are flaking already lol anybody else planning to go? and if you went recently was the vendor hall still as packed as it used to be or has it thinned out? feels like every year i hear people say its not as good as it used to be but then they still go so

so i've been putting off doing a proper mobile install for like two years now and finally pulled the trigger last month, got a FT-7900R going into my F-150 and overall it went pretty smooth except for this one thing thats been driving me nuts when i'm transmitting, especially if the truck engine is running, the guys on the local repeater keep telling me they hear a whine or buzz in my audio that kind of changes with the RPM. i've read a bit about alternator noise and i think thats probably what it is but im not totally sure how to track it down or fix it. i ran the power leads directly to the battery with an inline fuse like everyone says to do, so i thought that would take care of it the antenna is a nagoya NMO mount through the roof, coax goes down the A pillar and under the carpet. everything looks clean to me but clearly something isnt right. has anyone dealt with this before? is there something obvious im missing

our club is actually doing a group trip and we rented a van lol. theres still one spot if your interested, we're leaving pretty early like 6am to beat traffic and get first crack at the swap tables. shoot me a message if you want details. also the club meeting this thursday we're gonna talk about what the club booth is doing at the event if anyone wants to help out with that

so ive been playing around with a few different tools lately trying to figure out the best workflow for chasing DX and im a bit confused about how people actually use all of this together. like i have QRZ open in one tab, DXwatch in another, and sometimes i pull up DX Summit too just to cross reference. feels like im doing it the wrong way or at least the inefficient way. basically what happens is i see a spot come up on DXwatch for something rare, then i go try to look up the callsign on QRZ to see if theres a bio or qsl info, and by the time i get back the pile is already a nightmare or the station moved freq. is there a smarter way to do this? do most people just pick one cluster source and stick with it? ive heard some guys swear by the telnet cluster approach through their logging software but i havent set that up yet and honestly it sounds kind of intimidating also are the spots on DXwatch and DX Summit pulling from the same underlying network or are they totally different feeds? i genuinely dont know and couldnt find a clear answer

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at this about 18 months and just cracked 100 entities confirmed last month which was a big moment. one thing nobody told me at first — dont ignore WAZ while youre doing this. i almost had all 40 zones without realizing it and its a really satisfying side award that doesnt require a ton of extra work if youre already hunting DX. zone 26 and some of the pacific zones were my hardest, took forever to find them at the right time of day on 17m. also just anecdotally, FT8 is kind of controversial in some circles for award chasing but for someone trying to build up confirmed entities it is really hard to argue with the results. i got like 30 new ones in my first month on that mode. your mileage may vary i guess depending on how purist you wanna be about it

so i've had my technician for about 8 months and kept seeing ARES mentioned on this forum and at the club and finally just went to one of their monthly meetings last tuesday. honestly wasnt sure what to expect, i thought it might be a bunch of guys sitting around talking about radios which yeah there was some of that but it was actually way more organized than i figured. they went over their ICS structure which i had zero knowledge about before, and the EC talked about how they interface with the county emergency manager and what kinds of activations they've done in the past few years. apparently last summer they helped with communications during a pretty bad flooding situation when cell infrastructure was down. that part really got my attention. my question is kind of basic but — do i need my general to be really useful in ARES or is tech enough for most of what they do locally? i dont want to volunteer for something and then find out i cant do half the activations because of license limitations. also they mentioned something called AUXCOMM which i havent looked into yet, anyone know if thats different from ARES or kind of the same thing?

okay so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general class) and i keep hearing about nets and how i should check in to practice but honestly every time i tune in i just freeze up and dont know when to jump in or what to say. like i listened to the local 2m net last tuesday and the net control was going through check-ins and everyone just said their callsign and maybe a signal report and that was it? but then sometimes people said more stuff and i got confused about when that was appropriate also i saw there was some kind of special event station thing happening for a state park this weekend, W4 something, and i have no idea how those work differently from a regular net. do you just call them like a normal contact or is there some special procedure? i dont want to make a fool of myself on air, or at least not more than necessary haha anyone got tips for a nervous new ham trying to figure this out

yeah that logging assignment thing is super common for newer folks and honestly its one of the most important jobs at an activation, people underestimate it. accurate logs are what everyone falls back on when things get hectic and someone needs to know what was passed three hours ago. your EC probably put you there on purpose and not just to keep you busy. my first activation was a wildfire support thing back in i think 2017 or so and i made the mistake of trying to do too much too fast, jumped on a frequency without checking in properly and stepped on another station. felt terrible about it. the training drills just dont fully replicate the pressure of a real event, you're right about that. the good news is it gets more natural pretty fast once you've had a real one under your belt. sounds like you handled it well though.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, been chasing for about 6 months and always wanted to try the other side of it. picked W4T/SU-001 because it looked doable on the topo and a buddy said the trail wasnt too bad. well the trail was fine but i completely forgot to spot myself on SOTAwatch before i left cell range and then my phone died anyway so that was fun. spent about 40 minutes up there calling CQ on 40 and 20 and managed to scrape together 4 contacts, two of which were the same guy on different bands which i hope counts as separate QSOs because i really needed that 4th one. the whole thing with the antenna was a mess too, i brought my linked dipole and one of the links got stuck and i couldnt get 20m configured properly so i just ran 40 the whole time with the ends drooping because the trees werent cooperating. got home and realized i had the wrong summit reference in my log, had to go back and fix it before uploading to sotadata. anyway i did get the activation credit and im already planning the next one, just need to figure out the spotting thing before i lose cell signal next time.