David Johnson45

so i just passed my technician exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to get as my first radio. ive been reading reviews for like three days straight and im more confused now than when i started honestly. everyone seems to have a different opinion and half the threads i find are from like 2015 so i dont know whats still relevant. my main thing is i want to hit the local repeaters, maybe eventually do some APRS stuff if i can figure that out. budget is somewhere around $150-200 but i could stretch a bit if something is really worth it. i was looking at the Yaesu FT-65 and also the BaoFeng UV-5R which i know people have Opinions about, and somebody at the exam session mentioned the Kenwood TH-D74 but that seems like way overkill for where im at right now. do i just start cheap and see if i stick with this hobby or is it worth spending more upfront? genuinely dont know how to think about this

i started with a UV-5R about two years ago and then upgraded to an FT-70D after maybe six months. The Yaesu is just... nicer, like the buttons feel solid and the menu doesn't make me want to throw it out a window. but I used the Baofeng for a while first and it did the job. the main thing I noticed upgrading was the receiver, the Baofeng would sometimes pick up weirdness near my house from some local noise source and the Yaesu handles it way better. anyway both work for a local repeater so don't stress too much about it

welcome to the hobby. yeah HF is a whole different world when you get there, way more addicting imo. i spent like two months just on 40m after i got my general and barely slept some nights chasing dx. anyway good on you for just keying up, a lot of new hams buy a radio and then never actually transmit for months because theyre scared of doing something wrong

welcome to the waiting game lol. seriously though your experience sounds pretty typical and the fact that you stayed engaged and didnt just sit there on your phone the whole time already puts you ahead of some people ive seen at these things. the EC-001 is a good start but if you havent looked at EC-016 yet that one gets more into the actual operational stuff and i found it more useful day to day.

same boat as you not too long ago, i just started working whatever sounded interesting and then checked the awards page after a few months and realized i was already like 60% of the way to WAS without even trying lol. the ARRL website has a tool where you can check your LoTW log against award requirements which is kinda fun to poke around in. WAZ took me a little longer just because some of the zones dont come up as often on the bands i was using but zone 3 and the common ones pile up fast. dont stress too much about it, honestly half the fun is when you suddenly realize you need like Wyoming and some weird Pacific zone and you start actually hunting for those specific contacts. thats when it gets addictive

yeah the net discipline thing is pretty much universal in my experience, doesnt matter how many times you brief people beforehand, put them in a simulated high-stress situation and suddenly everyone forgets to wait for a break in traffic. we had almost the exact same thing happen at a county exercise a couple years back, ended up having to implement a very strict 'only speak when net control calls you' protocol mid-exercise which felt clunky but actually helped a lot. the ICS form thing is real too. what helped us was pre-printing a bunch of simplified relay templates that matched the 213 fields but had bigger boxes and plain english labels. still not perfect but it cut down the time considerably. also having a dedicated logging person separate from the radio operator at each station made a huge difference — trying to do both at once is a recipe for errors or missed traffic. one thing that always catches our group off guard is battery management. everyone shows up with full batteries but by hour 4 of a realistic exercise people are scrambling. worth building that into your next sim if you haven't already.

yeah they're pulling from the same underlying cluster network more or less — the DX cluster is kind of a distributed system where nodes all share spot data with each other, so DXwatch, QRZ spots, and apps like DXLab Suite are all tapping into that same river of information just through different pipes. the slight timing differences you see are just propagation delay between nodes, totally normal. DX4WIN and DXKeeper are both logging programs that can connect to a cluster feed and alert you when something you need shows up, they're not the same thing though — DXKeeper is part of the DXLab Suite which is free and honestly pretty capable once you get past the interface which looks like it was designed in 2003 because it basically was. DX4WIN is older and not really actively developed anymore last i checked. for just getting started i'd say keep using the browser tools, maybe try DXLab's SpotCollector which is the cluster piece of that suite, and see if that workflow clicks for you before diving into a full logging setup. the IC-7300 will work great for chasing dx with a wire, dont let anyone tell you otherwise

yeah 40 has been rough for me too, im in the midwest and its been noisy as heck most nights. honestly i just moved to 20 after like 9pm and its been way better lately. might just be seasonal stuff creeping in as for the digital rig question, i grabbed an old ic-7200 off ebay like two years ago just for ft8 and js8call and it was totally worth it. nothing fancy but having it always connected and ready makes a huge difference, i actually use digital way more now just because of that

Running into some coverage issues with my mobile APRS setup in rural Montana. I'm using an FTM-400XDR with WIDE2-2 path but my packets aren't consistently reaching the distant iGate. Local terrain is hilly with sparse digi coverage. Should I switch to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 for better local coverage, or consider higher power? Currently running 2-2 but wondering if 2-3 might help in West Texas-style sparse coverage. Also considering adding a temporary fill-in digipeater for our upcoming SAR exercise - any recommendations for minimal hardware setup?

so we finally ran a full simulated disaster exercise with our county ARES group, been planning it for like three months and i was honestly a little nervous going in because i was handling one of the net control positions for the first time. the scenario was a major flooding event cutting off two townships from normal communications infrastructure — cell towers assumed down, landlines out, the whole thing. what i didnt expect was how fast things got confusing even in a fake scenario. we had operators at the EOC, a few at the hospital, one at the Red Cross shelter, and a handful of portable stations scattered around. and within maybe 20 minutes the net was kind of a mess. people were stepping on each other, someone kept forgetting to ID, and at one point we had two stations both trying to relay the same message to the EOC simultaneously. the actual lesson i took away from it — and i feel dumb for not realizing this before — is that message traffic discipline matters SO much more under stress. like even in a fake emergency with people who know what theyre doing, things deteriorated pretty quickly without really firm net control. im curious if other groups have run exercises like this and what surprised them or what they changed afterward. we're already talking about doing a debrief next week but figured id ask here too.

i worked my first EME contact last year on 2m with a 2x9 el setup and an HL2.5FX amp putting out about 400w so it is doable on a modest station, just have to be realistic about who youre going to work. big stations in europe with 4x12m dishes and kilowatts, yeah they will hear you. other small pistols like yourself, thats going to be rough both ways. the moon window thing also took me a while to get my head around, you obviously need the moon above your horizon and ideally at a decent elevation, and the Doppler shift changes as the moon moves so WSJT handles that but you need accurate time sync like GPS disciplined or at minimum chrony running properly or the decodes just fall apart. lost a whole session once because my PC clock had drifted like 1.2 seconds, felt like an idiot when i figured it out

so i just passed my technician exam last week (finally) and now im trying to figure out what handheld to get. ive been lurking here for a while and everyone seems to have strong opinions about this stuff so figured id just ask directly. my main thing is i want to be able to hit the local repeaters, maybe do some simplex if anyone around here actually does that, and i dunno maybe eventually get into APRS or something. budget is probably around $100-150 but i could stretch it a bit if something is really worth it. ive been looking at the Baofeng UV-5R because its like $25 and seems like everyone has one, but then i also saw people talking about the Yaesu FT-60 and the Kenwood TH-D75 which is way more expensive. i genuinely cannot tell if the cheap ones are fine for a beginner or if im just going to regret it and have to buy again in 6 months. also does any of this matter if im mostly just going to be listening for a while anyway

congrats on the first one, 32 contacts is solid especially on a random wire. yeah the WWFF log submission is through the main wwff.to portal, you upload your ADIF and it processes after a little while. just make sure your reference number is in there correctly and your callsign matches your registration. took me a few tries to figure out the format the first time. for spotting, most people use either the WWFF spotter or just post to POTA spots since so many hunters watch both. i usually post to the WWFF facebook group the morning of an activation too, theres quite a few regular hunters who appreciate the heads up, especially for rarer references that dont get activated much. sounds like you had a great first time out, the hunters you ran into are probably regulars — there's a small but really dedicated community chasing these references worldwide.

yeah im planning on it, went last year and honestly the tailgate stuff is still pretty solid if you show up like right when gates open. saw a guy walking out with a whole stack of old heathkit gear which i was kicking myself for missing. our club is doing a table again this year selling off some donated equipment so stop by if you see the W8 something banner, cant remember the exact spot we got assigned yet

the predator RFI thing is real but manageable in my experience. ran one at a county EOC exercise last fall and yeah there was some hash on 40m when the generator was close, maybe 30 feet away. moved it upwind to about 60 feet and used a decent ferrite choke on the power line coming in and it dropped way down, mostly usable. wouldnt say its a non-issue but its not a dealbreaker either if youre willing to do a little management. the honda is quieter in both senses of the word but if budget matters it matters. on the EFHW — honestly that's what a lot of people end up at for field work and there's a reason for it. quick to deploy, reasonably efficient if you're using a decent transformer, and you can get it high enough in most locations to work well. the buddipole is great kit but you're right that tuning eats time. only thing i'd say is bring a decent length of coax so you can get some separation between the feedpoint and your operating position, and make sure your counterpoise situation is handled or you'll have RF everywhere.

So I've been running an HT clipped to my visor for like two years now and finally broke down and bought a proper mobile rig — picked up a Yaesu FTM-300DR a few weeks ago and spent most of last weekend doing the install. Overall pretty happy with how it turned out but I have a couple things bugging me. First one is the antenna. I went with a NMO mount drilled through the roof, ran the coax down the A-pillar and under the dash. Used some LMR-400 I had laying around from a previous project. The SWR is reading fine on 2m, like 1.3:1 or so, but on 70cm it's climbing up around 2.2:1 and I'm not totally sure if that's the antenna or maybe how I routed the coax. It's a Diamond NR770H if anyone's familiar with it. Second thing is just noise. I get some kind of whine that tracks with engine RPM on receive, not super loud but annoying enough that I notice it. I haven't chased it down yet. The radio is powered off a fused run direct to the battery which I thought would help but apparently not. Anybody dealt with either of these? The SWR thing is what's really on my mind because I want to make sure I'm not cooking the finals on 70cm before I do any serious operating.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general class) and ive been listening to a lot of contest activity on 20m and 40m and it sounds like absolute chaos but also kind of exciting? i did a tiny bit of Field Day this past june with the local club but i was mostly just watching and logging for the more experienced guys, didnt really get to operate much on my own. i've been looking at the calendar and CQ WW is coming up and also there's ARRL Sweepstakes not too far off. i honestly dont even know which one would be better to try as a first solo attempt. my setup is pretty modest, just a vertical antenna and 100w, nothing special. also been seeing a lot of people talk about SOTA activations but thats a whole different thing right? more portable operating than contesting? anyway i guess my main question is — whats a good first contest to actually jump into and not feel totally lost, and any tips for someone whos basically a contest newbie would be really appreciated

so i've been a licensed ham for about two years now and finally joined my county ARES group maybe six months ago. been going to the monthly nets and the occasional training exercise but honestly i wasn't sure i was actually absorbing anything useful until last weekend. we had a pretty significant storm come through and the county EOC actually called us up. like a real activation, not a drill. i was assigned to the shelter at the middle school and spent about four hours doing health and welfare traffic and relaying resource requests back to the net control at the EOC. nothing crazy but it felt really different from the training nets. there's something about knowing its actually real that kind of sharpens your focus. anyway i just wanted to say for anyone who's been on the fence about joining their local ARES or RACES group - just do it. the training starts to make sense once you're actually in it. i still made a few fumbles, forgot to ID at one point which my EC gently pointed out after, but overall felt like i actually contributed something. weird feeling honestly, good weird.

yeah what he said about the tone is right. also just to add — once you do get on and youre not sure if anybodys around, a lot of people will just say their callsign and say "listening" or "monitoring" and leave it at that. dont feel like you have to do some big formal thing. some repeaters also have a weekly net night where theres always people on, worth looking up if your local one does that, good way to actually have a qso when youre starting out

yeah the touchy regen thing is just kind of inherent to the design honestly, but 4:1 sounds like you might have too much tickler coupling which can make it snap into oscillation really abruptly rather than sliding in smoothly. i usually start around 5:1 or even 6:1 and wind the tickler in the same direction as the main coil — if you wound it backwards you'll get positive feedback spiking way too hard the other thing that helps a lot is putting a small series resistor in the regen control circuit, like 2.2k or so in series with the pot, so the bottom of the range isnt at true zero. gives you a little more usable travel at the useful end. some guys also swear by using a vernier dial on the pot even with a regular single turn, just slows your hand movement down mechanically regulated supply probably wont fix the touchy problem but 9v battery voltage sag as it drains will drift your operating point so worth cleaning up anyway

js8call is genuinely great if you want that conversational feel, it scratches a different itch than ft8 for sure. the sensitivity isnt quite ft8 level but its still way better than most modes, think the threshold is somewhere around -18 or -20dB depending on conditions and your decoder. for real ragchewing over weak paths its hard to beat and the store-and-forward relay stuff is actually pretty clever for mesh-type comms activity is definitely thinner than ft8, 40m seems to have the most consistent traffic especially in the evenings. 14.078 is the usual hangout on 20m. you wont be racking up 200 contacts in a contest weekend but thats kind of not the point. i honestly run both, ft8 when im just filling in the map and js8call when i actually want to talk to somebody. the 7300 handles both fine, wsjt-x and js8call play nice with the same rig CAT settings for the most part

oh also check if your park has a K- reference AND maybe a state/county reference that overlaps, sometimes you can activate multiple references at once from the same spot which the hunters love. the POTA website should show you the boundaries. good luck tomorrow

yeah the chainsaws thing is pretty accurate honestly. it took me probably a full contest season before SO2R stopped costing me rate instead of adding it. the thing nobody tells you upfront is that the second radio is only useful if your run frequency is locked in and you have genuine dead time to fill — if youre in a pileup or calling CQ every 5 seconds there really isnt a window to work it for learning id actually suggest trying it during a slower part of a 48 hour contest rather than a sprint. sprints move too fast and you end up just abandoning the second radio out of panic. like sunday afternoon of CQWW when NA is thinning out and europe hasnt fully come up yet, thats when you can actually practice using the second radio to snipe mults on 15 or 10 without it wrecking your 20m run. also make sure your logging software is doing the heavy lifting on dupes, N1MM with the bandmap doing the checking for you is basically essential, youre not gonna do that manually under pressure

yeah you've basically got it right already — LoTW is the one that counts for DXCC and most of the ARRL awards, eQSL is kind of its own ecosystem with the Worked All Europe award and stuff like that. they dont talk to each other at all which is annoying. i still upload to both just out of habit and because some ops only use one or the other. takes maybe an extra two minutes with ADIF master or just exporting from whatever logging software you use. for paper cards, no you dont have to send one back to everyone who sends you one but its considered good form especially for dx. a lot of people use the buro to keep costs down — you basically send a batch to your national society and they route them out. its slow though, like months sometimes. direct mail is faster but yeah the postage adds up fast especially internationally. for DXCC specifically just focus on LoTW and make sure your callsign certificate in TQSL matches the dates and bands you're actually operating on, that trips a lot of people up early on.

im pretty new to all this but i just finished my technician and i've been reading a lot about go-kits because i want to be useful in my local ARES group eventually. one thing i saw mentioned in a webinar was having a small notepad and pens that actually work in the cold, apparently regular ballpoints fail and people use fisher space pens or just pencils. seemed like a small thing but the guy presenting was pretty emphatic about it lol. also your antenna question -- ive heard a lot of people really like the wolf river coils for portability but i dont have personal experience. someone in my club uses a linked dipole in a backpack and sets it up in maybe 10 minutes which seems pretty good.