David Johnson45

congrats on your first real one. im still waiting for mine, been with our ARES group almost a year and we havent had an activation yet, just monthly check-in nets and the occasional SET. kind of antsy to see how it actually goes when its not pretend. did your group do any ICS training before this or were you just kind of thrown in? our EC keeps mentioning IS-100 and IS-700 but hasnt made it required yet and i wasnt sure how much it actually matters at the shelter level vs the EOC.

yeah the interaction between elements on a dual band yagi is real and its not just a modeling thing, you can actually see it in the SWR. i built one based on a design i found on a german amateur radio site — cant remember the callsign of the guy now — and the 70cm pattern was noticeably squirrely compared to a dedicated 3el 70cm yagi i tested alongside it. still useable but if you're trying to work weak signal stuff on 70cm you'd notice. for SOTA contacts on FM repeaters and simplex it probably doesnt matter much though

yeah 15 up should be more than enough honestly, IRLP and echolink dont use much at all, were talking maybe 8-12 kbps for a connected node in codec2 or GSM mode. the bigger issue you might hit is if the Pi is trying to do too many things at once — audio routing for RCForb, the node software, maybe some CAT control or logging stuff, it can get jittery. i'd almost suggest separating the node onto a cheap second Pi just to keep things clean. on the CW thing — i moved my keyer to the remote end a while back and that solved basically everything. running the paddles locally and sending keystrokes over the internet is just asking for trouble. if you haven't done that yet its worth the afternoon to set up, made the whole thing way more usable for me at least.

so i've had my general for about 8 months now and kept seeing ARES mentioned on here and at my local club meetings and i finally just showed up to one last tuesday. honestly wasnt sure what i was walking into, like i thought it was going to be very military-ish or something formal with people in uniforms haha. it was just a bunch of guys and gals in a church basement with folding tables and a bunch of radios set up. they did a kind of tabletop exercise where they simulated a county-wide power outage and had to figure out who would cover which repeater and how ICS forms get relayed and stuff. i sat in the back mostly just watching but the EC was super welcoming and had me pair up with a more experienced guy to shadow him through the exercise. ICS-100 and 200 came up a lot, apparently you need those before you can really participate in an actual activation. anyway just wanted to share because i was kind of intimidated before going and it turned out to be really worthwhile. has anyone else done the FEMA IS courses to get their ICS certs? wondering how long that actually takes and if theres specific ones that ARES groups tend to require beyond 100 and 200

so ive been messing with APRS for a few weeks now and i just cant figure out why my beacons arent showing up on aprs.fi. i can hear traffic on 144.390 just fine, my TM-D710G is set up with the internal TNC active, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1, and i can see the TX light flashing when it should be transmitting. the symbol is set to a house icon for home station use. ive got my callsign and SSID entered correctly as far as i can tell. the weird thing is i DID show up once like two days ago, just a single position report, and then nothing since. my QTH is kinda suburban so theres definitely digipeaters in range, i can see W3XYZ-3 and a couple others decoding on the waterfall. tried bumping my beacon rate down to every 10 minutes thinking maybe i was getting rate-limited somehow but still nothing. anyone dealt with this before or know what to actually check

so ive been sitting on this for a while but finally pulled the trigger on the mars/cap mod for my IC-7300 last weekend. pretty straightforward honestly, just the one jumper on the main board, took maybe 20 minutes including the time i spent second guessing myself and staring at the board with a flashlight. what i actually wanted to talk about though is the audio filter mods because thats where things got interesting. been running the default TX audio for like two years and just kind of accepted that it sounded whatever it sounded like. buddy of mine on 40m kept telling me my audio was a little boxy sounding and i kind of brushed it off. finally swapped in the mod for the bass rolloff and tweaked the mic EQ settings in the menu and man the difference on the waterfall alone is pretty noticeable. reports have been way better. anyone else gone down this rabbit hole with the 7300? curious if theres other mods worth doing that im not thinking about. i know theres the fan noise thing too but mine doesnt seem that bad so maybe ill leave it alone for now.

im in almost the exact same spot lol so no real advice but just wanted to say youre not alone. i tried bumping up to 15wpm on LCWO last week and it was pretty rough. gonna try that farnsworth thing the other guy mentioned, hadnt heard of that before actually

so ive been a General for about two years now and honestly i operate mostly on 40m and 20m SSB, maybe some 2m stuff locally. my buddy keeps telling me to just go ahead and get the Amateur Extra but i keep putting it off because the theory sections look pretty intimidating. like the stuff on transmission lines and impedance matching and filter design... i took some basic electronics in school like 20 years ago so its not totally foreign but still. i guess my question is whether it actually changes what you can do day to day or if its more of a pride thing. i know you get the full privileges on HF and some of the lower portions of the bands open up, but for casual operating does it actually matter? and how bad is the theory really, like the stuff about oscillators and feedback and all that. is it stuff you can just memorize for the test or do you actually need to understand it to pass

JS8Call is genuinely underrated for what you're describing. I run it on 40m mostly and yeah the decodes arent quite as deep as FT8 but ive pulled out contacts at -15 or so without much trouble. the thing is the community using it tends to be people who actually want to ragchew so the quality of contacts is way higher even if the quantity is lower. theres a heartbeat network thing built in where stations can beacon automatically and you can see whos around without having to call CQ yourself, useful if you just want to lurk and see whos active before committing. PSK31 isnt completely dead but its close. if you want to find it try 14.070 around 20-21z on weekdays, sometimes a handful of guys still hang out there. its kind of nostalgic at this point honestly. the signal handling is nowhere near FT8 obviously, you need a decent copy to decode it, so a noisy suburban location is going to make it rough.

ok so the chart thing is basically the worst way to do it, i did the same thing and wasted probably two months on it. you want to hear the characters as sounds, not think about dots and dashes at all. the koch method is legit and the app most people seem to use these days is called morse trainer or just look up lcwo.net, thats a website that does it pretty well and its free the idea is you start with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you drill those until you can copy them without thinking, then you add another letter. it sounds weird to start at high speed when youre a beginner but it forces your brain to hear the rhythm instead of counting dots. if you slow it down too much you end up counting and then youre back to the chart problem basically 13wpm is totally doable as a first goal, thats around where most people feel comfortable enough to actually make contacts. give yourself six months of consistent practice, even just 15 minutes a day, and youll get there. the consistency matters way more than how long each session is

yeah what he said about the sidebands is the big thing. i learned this the hard way when i first got on HF, was sitting right on 7.300 calling CQ and somebody told me i was splashing above the band edge. your typical USB signal can be 3kHz wide so if your carrier is at 7.300 your audio could be going up to like 7.303 which is out of the amateur allocation entirely. just keep a few kHz of margin and youre fine, its not worth sweating over too much once you get the hang of it

the fumes thing is real, we had the same issue at a Red Cross shelter drill a couple years back. ended up having to move the genny like 30 feet downwind and run a longer extension cord. kind of a pain but it worked. honestly for an 8 hour op if your lithium is a decent one and youre not running the amp, the math usually works out better than you think — the laptop and fan are probably your bigger draws than the radio at 50w. on the antenna question, ive used a trapped vertical (specifically a Chameleon MPAS Lite on a tripod) at several exercises and its genuinely faster to set up solo. the inverted V will probably outperform it if the bands cooperate but if you're dealing with trees or tight spaces the vertical just gets done quicker and you can actually focus on the actual comms work instead of messing with a feedline for 20 minutes. depends what 40m is doing that day i guess.

yeah that 13-15wpm wall is super real, almost everyone hits it. what helped me finally crack through was honestly just forcing myself to stop writing every single character and start listening for whole words instead. like dont try to copy the letters, try to recognize the whole word as a sound. took a few weeks of feeling like i was getting worse before it clicked but once it did the speed kind of unlocked pretty fast. also 20-30 min a day is fine but make sure some of that is head copy even if you only do 5 minutes of it. your brain needs to learn to trust itself without the pen as a crutch. i know that sounds rough but it really does help. and keep doing the W1AW stuff, that real-world text at variable speeds is way better practice than random letters honestly.

so ive been using Log4OM for a while now and honestly pretty happy with it for day to day stuff, QSL tracking, LoTW sync, all that. but every time contest season rolls around i feel like i should just be in N1MM because everyone else seems to be and the rate logging is just so much faster when things get busy. the problem is i really dont want to maintain two separate logs and then try to merge them after the fact because last time i did that with ADIF imports i ended up with a bunch of dupes in my main log that took forever to sort out. also throwing WSJT-X into the mix because i do a fair amount of FT8 and that has its own logging thing going on. right now WSJT-X is set to UDP to Log4OM and it mostly works but occasionally it just stops sending spots and i have to restart something, never sure which end is the problem. anyone running a similar setup or have a cleaner way to handle this? feels like im overcomplicating it but i also dont want to lose any QSOs between the cracks during a contest weekend

ive been looking at the 7300 for months and posts like this dont help me keep my wallet closed lol. question though — how does it handle weak signal stuff, like are you doing any CW or SSB DX with it? most of what i see talked about is FT8 and i want to know if its actually a good CW rig day to day. im coming from an old Yaesu FT-857D which i love but its not exactly a shack radio, more of a mobile that lives on my desk.