James Rodriguez

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

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.

yeah the sliding is the thing that finally made me do it too. woke up one morning and my mag mount had blown completely off on the interstate, antenna and coax just gone. luckily didnt cause an accident but man that was a wake up call. drilled the hole that weekend. if youre keeping the truck more than another year or two just do it, resale value hit is basically nothing

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

i made exactly this switch a few years back, had a 4btv and replaced it with a dipole center fed at about 35 feet and honestly for local and regional stuff the dipole crushed it but yeah DX was about the same or sometimes worse. ended up putting the vertical back up and using both, feed them into an antenna switch. its not always convenient but having the option is nice when youre chasing something specific

so ive been running a remote station for about two years now using a combination of RemoteHams RCForb client and a SDR as a panadapter on the back end and honestly its been... okay. not great. the latency on the audio path drives me nuts sometimes especially when trying to work weak signal stuff on 40m at night. like youll hear a station come up and by the time your PTT registers through the internet link the guy is already done with his transmission and moved on.
i was talking to a guy at our club who basically rolled his own setup using a Pi, a couple of audio-over-IP bridges, and some custom scripting for the CAT control and he swears its lower latency than RemoteHams but i honestly dont know if its apples to apples because his station is only about 15 miles from his house and mine is like 350 miles away colocated at my brother in laws place in rural Oklahoma so the WAN hop alone is going to add jitter no matter what i do.
anyone running RemoteHams with a proper SDR on the RF side? im using an SDRplay RSPdx right now as the pan but thinking about whether it makes more sense to just send raw IQ over the link instead of dealing with the audio codec. has anyone actually tried that over a decent broadband connection? curious what kind of bandwidth that actually chews through at like 1MHz sample rate or whatever.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF stuff, some weak signal VHF on 2m and 70cm, but ive always had this thing in the back of my head about moonbounce. like the whole concept of bouncing a signal off the moon and having someone on the other side of the planet pick it up is just insane to me still.
anyway i finally started looking into what it would actually take to get on EME and honestly the equipment requirements are kind of all over the place depending on who you ask. from what i understand you basically need a big dish or yagi array, a low noise preamp right at the feed, and a decent amount of power. but how much is enough? ive been reading about guys running single yagi setups on 2m with like 400w and making JT65 contacts and then other people saying you need a 10 meter dish to do anything useful. im on a suburban lot so a giant dish is probably out but i have room for maybe a 4 yagi array if i get creative with the neighbors.
also the moon tracking thing seems complicated - do most people build their own az/el rotators or buy something. the commercial stuff looks expensive. and whats the deal with the EME2 software everyone keeps mentioning, is that still what people use or has something replaced it

so i've been meaning to get into LEO satellite work for a while now and last weekend i finally sat down and actually did it instead of just reading about it. been licensed for about 6 years but mostly hf so this was pretty new territory for me.
managed to track AO-73 with gpredict and got my ft-991a set up for split operation, uplink on 70cm and downlink on 2m. the doppler correction was the thing that really got me — i knew intellectually that i'd need to compensate but actually doing it manually while trying to hold a qso is a whole other thing. i kept losing my own downlink signal because i was chasing it the wrong way for the first couple passes.
got a few contacts in there though which was cool. my question is about the linear transponder behavior — i noticed that when the bird gets crowded with stations the signal levels all kind of drop together, is that the ALC behavior of the transponder compressing when total power goes up? ive read a few things about this and some sources say you should basically run as low power as you can get away with but im not totally sure how to judge what 'enough' is. running about 5w on uplink with a yagi and it seemed okayish but hard to tell.
also gpredict is doing most of the doppler correction automatically for me but it feels like im still drifting a bit on the downlink. is that normal or am i missing something in the config?

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.

the cluster nodes do share spots with each other pretty well through the DX Spider and other interconnected networks so youre not really missing a ton by using one vs another, but some nodes have better uptime or less lag than others. the web tools like DXwatch and dxmaps.com are honestly fine for casual operating, i used them for years before bothering with a dedicated client.
one thing that might help you is filtering by band on DXwatch so youre not chasing spots on 10m when the band isnt open or whatever. and if you see a spot thats more than 10-15 minutes old, good chance the pileup has moved on or the DX already went QRT. freshness of the spot matters a lot more than people realize when theyre starting out.
your 40m dipole at 25 feet is totally workable for working DX when conditions cooperate, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. just takes patience and timing

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 ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. i looked into it and apparently you need a license first which makes sense but i dont really know where to start. like is there a book i should get or a website or what. also how hard is the test actually, im not great at math and someone told me theres some antenna calculations and stuff on it which is kind of intimidating. any advice would be appreciated, i just want to get to the point where i can actually transmit and talk to people