Sarah Collins

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, summit was only a 4 point but man i underestimated how much stuff id be carrying. had my ft-818 and a linked dipole and by the time i got to the top my legs were done. set up took forever because the wind kept collapsing my squid pole and i was fumbling with the feedline connector for like 20 minutes with cold fingers. ended up only getting 7 contacts in about 45 mins before clouds rolled in and i didnt want to get caught up there. needed 10 for a valid activation so it doesnt count but honestly im not even that bummed, the view was insane and i learned a ton. gonna try again next month with a different antenna setup, thinking a end fed halfwave might be easier to deploy fast. anyone done both and have thoughts on which is quicker to get in the air?

so ive had my technician for about 8 months now and honestly i mostly just use it for local repeaters and some simplex stuff but ive been reading about HF and i really want to try it out, specifically 40m and maybe 20m eventually. my buddy keeps telling me the general exam is way harder than technician but i dont know if he actually took it recently or if hes just going off old info. i grabbed the gordon west book and also been using hamStudy which seems pretty good but some of the questions about like propagation and the electrical theory stuff is kind of going over my head. is there a certain part of the pool i should really focus on? or is it worth just grinding all the flashcards until i can pass the practice tests consistently. also not sure if i need to understand all the theory or if just memorizing the answers is fine for passing any advice would be helpful, trying to take the exam sometime next month if i can get ready in time

same boat here, FT8 got kinda boring after a while honestly. js8call feels more like actual radio if that makes sense. i dont worry too much about the SNR numbers and just work what i can hear. the heartbeat beacon feature is neat for propagation stuff too

You'll do fine! The key is to listen first - sounds like you're already doing that. Our ARES nets are very welcoming to new folks. Most net control stations will ask if you have any traffic or announcements after they acknowledge your check-in.

ran RCForb for about two years with a 7610 on the remote end, the latency thing is real but honestly it depends a lot more on routing than raw bandwidth. i had a stretch where my shack ISP was doing something weird with traffic shaping and CW was garbage, then they stopped and suddenly 25wpm was fine. so before you blame the software id check if your upstream provider is doing anything funny with UDP packets. the SDR remote side of RemoteHams is a different beast, thats more like you're streaming the raw IQ from a SDR receiver hosted somewhere, which is cool for listening but it wont let you TX obviously. people sometimes get confused between the two modes the platform offers. if you want full transceiver control with TX you want the regular RCForb client pointed at your own station, not the SDR network side. as for mixing in AllStar or IRLP — i dont think RemoteHams itself does anything with that natively. those are separate systems. ive seen guys run an AllStar node on the same raspberry pi thats doing their remote shack stuff but theyre basically parallel setups that just happen to be in the same box. they dont really talk to each other unless you do some custom audio routing which gets complicated fast.

field day was my gateway too, did it for two years with the club before i ever tried anything on my own. one thing that helped me a lot was just downloading N1MM logger and running through the tutorial before the actual contest weekend. like just having the software make sense ahead of time took a huge load off. also if CQ WW feels like too much this year, theres nothing wrong with just doing a few hours of it and calling it a day. i think i made 23 contacts my first CQ WW and felt great about it lol. the guys on the other end are usually patient with newer ops, at least on phone.

yeah participation on nets goes in waves, i've noticed that too on the ones i check into. the wednesday 8pm slot might actually be hurting you depending on your area — a lot of folks have stuff going on midweek evenings, kids activities, that kind of thing. the nets i see the most consistent check-ins on tend to be either sunday evening or right around the dinner hour on weekdays, like 6 or 6:30. one thing that really helped a net i used to help run was adding a little program segment, even just 5 minutes where someone talks about an upcoming contest or a technical tip or whatever. gives people a reason to actually listen instead of just checking in and disappearing. the special event station idea sounds cool but yeah coordinating that with a net format is tricky, you'd almost want to run the 1x1 activation as its own separate thing and just announce it on the net.

I'm studying for my Technician exam and wondering about the most effective approach. Should I go straight to the back of the ARRL book and work through all questions, then study the material I missed? Or is it better to read through chapters first? The exam has 35 multiple-choice questions and I need to answer 26 correctly, so I want to make sure I'm using my study time efficiently.

the audio level thing is almost always it when the receive works but tx doesnt. the Mobilinkd has a calibration mode built into the app, i forget exactly where they hid it in the menus but theres a spot where it transmits a test tone and you can watch the deviation on a radio or use an SDR to monitor yourself. on the D710 specifically make sure youre going into the mic input on the external TNC jack and not just using the speaker out — easy to mix those up if you wired your own cable. also double check APRSDroid is actually set to use the TNC3 as the connection and not APRS-IS over internet, because if its connected to the network directly itll receive just fine but youre not actually keying up the radio at all. ive seen that bite people more than once

Field Day threw me off too my first time, the exchange has your class and section in it and nobody really explains that upfront. like you have to know that 1A means one transmitter club station and 1D means home station etc, took me a bit to sort that out. just print the exchange sheet from the ARRL website and tape it next to your radio, seriously helps. for CQ WW just get on and call CQ or answer stations, if you mess up the exchange most ops will just ask you to repeat, its not a big deal. people are generally patient with newer stations. the rate can get pretty crazy on the first night though so maybe start by search and pouncing rather than running a frequency right away

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new generals. so the short version is the FCC allocations are the hard legal limits — for general on 40m phone youre looking at 7.175 to 7.300 MHz. go outside that and youre in trouble legally. the band edge thing is a real practical concern though. your rig's displayed frequency is usually where your carrier or suppressed carrier sits, but your actual signal has sidebands that spread out from there. on SSB with upper sideband your signal is going to extend a few kHz above whatever frequency you're showing. so if you're sitting on 7.299 calling CQ, parts of your audio are probably spilling out past 7.300 into territory you're not supposed to be in. most experienced ops stay at least 3 kHz inside the edge to be safe, some say more depending on how wide your audio is. the band plan stuff from ARRL is a bit different — thats more like gentleman's agreements about where to put certain modes. CW at the bottom, digital stuff in the middle, phone up top. not enforceable but people get cranky if you ignore it

Extra privileges give you additional frequencies in the lower segments of 80/40/20/15 meters - often considered choice territory for DXpeditions and contesting. During contests or big DX openings, that extra spectrum is golden. You'll find less QRM and better propagation characteristics in those segments, especially for CW and digital modes.

so ive been a General for about three years now and i keep putting off the Extra exam because honestly the theory sections just feel like a wall. i got through the General okay but some of the Extra pool questions are just... i dont even know where to start with some of the filter design stuff and the Smith chart questions. like i understand conceptually what a Smith chart is for but the actual math behind reading one in an exam context is still fuzzy to me. i bought the ARRL Extra Class License Manual and ive been going through it but some chapters feel like they just throw formulas at you without really explaining why. the RF propagation stuff i mostly get, and the operating procedures and privileges section is actually pretty interesting to read through since thats the whole point right, getting access to those extra band segments. but the electronic theory chapters are where i keep stalling out. anyone been through this recently and have a sense of what actually shows up a lot versus what you can kind of skim? i know you're supposed to study everything but realistically some of it sticks better than others. also is hamstudy.org still the go-to for drilling questions or is there something better now?

yeah i'd check aprs.fi and look at the raw packets tab for your callsign. if you're seeing packets from multiple sources under the same call it could absolutely be old data from that opentracker still floating around, especially if you never changed the SSID. the IS servers cache stuff but it usually expires, though ive seen weird ghost entries hang around longer than they should. also worth checking your symbol and whether the position ambiguity setting got changed at some point — the D710 has that buried in the GPS menu and if it got bumped to like the 10 mile setting it'll deliberately fuzz your coordinates. dont laugh i've seen it happen to people. check menu 600-something on the radio, i dont remember the exact number off the top of my head.

so ive been playing around with online cluster spotting for maybe a month now and im still not totally sure im using these tools the right way. basically what i do is have dxwatch open in one tab and qrz.com in another and when i see something interesting pop up on the cluster i jump over to qrz to look up the callsign and figure out what entity it is and whether i need it. feels kind of clunky honestly. someone at my local club mentioned there are dedicated apps that kind of tie all this together but i dont know what hes talking about. i have an android phone if that matters. also i noticed the spots on dxwatch sometimes show the same station like 4 or 5 times in a row within a few minutes — is that normal or is something misconfigured on my end? i assumed it was just multiple nodes reporting the same spot but i genuinely dont know. any help appreciated, still pretty new to chasing dx

yeah what he said on the third party stuff. i'll add that when youre in a QSO and the other person hands the mic to someone at their end who isnt licensed, that person becomes a third party and the rules kick in right there. had to explain this to a guy at a field day once who wanted his kid to say hi to someone in Brazil and we had to look up real quick whether Brazil was on the list (it is, so it was fine). the music thing is pretty cut and dry in practice even if the actual rule language feels a little vague. ive heard people get pretty bent out of shape about someone playing guitar and singing on 75 meters and whether thats a violation, and honestly i think in most cases nobody is going to come after you for one guy strumming chords but technically its in a gray area. the rule is really aimed at people rebroadcasting FM stations or running pirate music programming over ham freqs which used to be more of a thing apparently.

yeah what he said, just bring everything you think you might need and dont stress about looking overprepared. i was nervous my first one too and honestly it was kind of anticlimactic in a good way? like you realize pretty quick that a lot of ARES work is just... being a reliable presence. the hardest part for me early on was learning the proper prowords and not just talking like im on a casual ragchew. net control will appreciate it if you listen more than you talk until you get the rhythm of how they run it

so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and honestly the contact logging side of it is great, worked a bunch of new entities and filled in a lot of band slots on logbook of the world which is cool. but lately its starting to feel like a slot machine more than amateur radio, you know? like im not actually talking to anyone, just exchanging signal reports and grid squares and then both move on. someone at my club mentioned JS8Call and said it lets you have actual QSOs with weak signal capability similar to FT8. ive looked at it a little bit but the interface feels kind of clunky compared to WSJT-X and i wasnt sure if there was enough activity to make it worthwhile. my setup is nothing fancy, IC-7300 into a fan dipole up about 30 feet, so i can do most of the HF bands reasonably well. is anyone actually using JS8Call regularly and finding contacts? or is it one of those modes where you fire it up and the waterfall is basically dead? also curious if the weak signal performance is actually comparable to FT8 or if thats kind of oversold. id be fine giving up a few dB if it means i can actually type a sentence to someone.

so i finally did it after like two years of telling myself i was gonna get my license. passed the technician exam last thursday at a local club session and my callsign showed up in the ULS database two days later which was honestly way faster than i expected. anyway i borrowed a baofeng from my buddy who got me into this whole thing and yesterday i just keyed up on a local repeater and said my callsign and asked if anyone was around. felt super awkward honestly, like way more nervous than i thought id be. but this guy came back to me immediately and we talked for maybe 15 minutes about... honestly i dont even remember, antennas i think and where i was located. he was really patient and explained a bunch of stuff i didnt fully understand yet. not sure what radio to get next, the baofeng works but everyone seems to have opinions about it lol. just wanted to share because im pretty pumped about it

so the first thing most people go for is the Technician class license, thats the entry level one and it gets you on VHF and UHF which is plenty to start with. the question pool is like 35 questions on the actual exam pulled from a pool of 423 or so questions and you need to get 26 right to pass. the whole pool is public so you literally know every possible question before you walk in. honestly the easiest way most people do it now is just ham study dot com or hamradioprep, you can do practice exams over and over until youre consistently passing and then just go take the real thing. some people are ready in like a week or two if they put in an hour a day. the tests are usually given by volunteer examiner teams, your local radio club probably has sessions pretty regularly, arrl dot org has a search tool to find one near you. the electronics stuff on the tech exam isnt that deep, mostly just basic concepts and safety stuff, you dont need to be an engineer or anything close to it

so ive been a tech for about 2 years now and mostly just done VHF/UHF stuff, some APRS, talked on a couple local repeaters. decided i want to get onto HF finally and started going through the general question pool but honestly its a lot and im not sure what actually matters vs what i can kind of skim. like the electrical stuff i get mostly, and propagation makes sense to me after playing with PSK31 a bit. but some of the operating procedures and the band plan questions are tripping me up because i dont actually know any of it from experience yet. is there a part of the pool that tends to catch people off guard on the actual test? i dont want to just memorize and forget, i want to actually understand it but also i have a test date coming up in like 3 weeks so also wondering if once i pass, is there a waiting period before i can actually use the HF privileges or does it kick in pretty fast now