Sarah Moore

welcome to the rabbit hole ha. your instinct about the antenna is exactly right — at QRP power levels the antenna is basically everything. a random wire in the attic isnt terrible but if you can get anything outside and elevated youll notice the difference immediately. even a simple dipole out a window makes a real difference. the feedline losses matter too, if youre running coax any length make sure its decent quality because at 4 watts you really cant afford to be dumping a watt into lossy coax. for operating strategy honestly the biggest thing i learned is timing and band conditions. check the solar indices before you sit down, a bad day on 40m with QRP is just frustrating. also dont be afraid to call a station multiple times if conditions seem good but spread your calls out and listen carefully between them. and CW is your friend if you havent already gotten into it — those narrow filters and the way the human ear pulls CW out of noise is like having a free 10dB advantage over SSB.

so i've been on 10 meters pretty much every evening this week and the band has just been insane. worked a bunch of stations in europe tuesday afternoon and then last night i stumbled into a pileup for a VP8 station and actually got through on like my third call which never happens to me. im running maybe 100 watts and a dipole thats not even at a great height so im not exactly a powerhouse station here. checked the solar flux index and it was sitting around 180 which i guess explains some of it but honestly i dont fully understand how to read those numbers. like i know higher is generally better but is there a threshold where you start seeing these kind of long haul openings on 10? and does the K index matter as much as the flux number or is it kind of secondary? been hamming for about 3 years now and propagation is still kind of a black box to me even though i find it fascinating

haha yeah my first one i drove 40 minutes to the park and realized my coax was still at home. ended up just doing it with the antenna basically directly on the rig with a short jumper i had in the bag. it was ugly but 10 contacts is 10 contacts. the checklist thing is real, i laminated mine now and its in the go bag permanently. also for the table legs thing, i just bring a couple of those small cutting boards from the dollar store, slip em under the legs and it helps a lot on soft ground. picked that up from someone on the pota facebook group.

yeah that rhythmic pulsing thing is almost always a ground loop or you've got your audio return path sharing a wire with something noisy. on perf board builds the ground scheme matters way more than people think and its tempting to just daisy chain everything together but it bites you every time. what i'd do is trace where your audio ground goes back to the main filter cap and make sure the NE602 ground and the audio amp ground are both going to the same star point directly. if theyre sharing a long trace or wire with the oscillator circuit you'll pick up all kinds of garbage. also the 602 output pins can couple LO harmonics into the following stage if theres any impedance on those lines, some guys put a small RC low pass right at pin 4 and 5 before hitting the audio amp, something like 10k and 0.1uf, cheap fix worth trying. the 1000uf cap you added helps with ripple but its not gonna fix coupling issues inside the circuit.

nice work getting out there. i did my first one about a year ago and was totally paranoid i wouldnt make 4 contacts but the chasers are really dedicated, like there are people who chase almost every day and they watch the spots constantly. once you self spot you usually start getting calls pretty quick especially on a weekend morning. one thing i'd add is get the SOTA goat app or at least check sotawatch before you go, sometimes other activators are already on nearby summits and you can try to do a summit-to-summit contact which gives you bonus points and is just really satisfying. i got my first S2S like three activations in and it was weirdly exciting for just a radio contact haha

Honestly for what you're describing a longer collinear might be the smarter move before going yagi. Something like a Diamond X200 or even a Comet GP-9 if you can mount it high enough — the extra gain over the X50 is real and you keep your omni pattern. The GP-9 is around 9.5 dBd claimed, which in practice after you factor in feedline and mount losses still usually gets you a couple dB over what you have. That 55 mile repeater might just come in with a better antenna and a lower angle of radiation. That said if you really want to nail that one path, a small 5 or 6 el yagi on a cheap TV rotator isnt crazy. I ran a Cushcraft A147-11 like that for a while and it was great but I got annoyed having to point it every time I wanted to work different directions. Eventually took it down and just went back to the collinear. Your mileage may vary but it sounds like your use case doesnt really need the yagi complexity.

yeah the ARRL directory is honestly hit or miss, half the nets listed havent been active in years. what i usually do is check the Amateur Radio Newsline or just ask around on local repeaters, people tend to know whats actually running. there's also a site called netlogger that a lot of nets use for logging check-ins digitally, you can see which nets are active in real time which is pretty handy. as for special event stations, the ARRL special event page gets updated pretty regularly, thats where id start. there was one a while back for a lighthouse event and another for some civil war anniversary thing, they're usually on weekends and you can sometimes get a QSL card or certificate for working them which is a nice little bonus if youre into that sort of thing. dont sweat missing a wednesday net, net control usually just logs you as absent and moves on, nobody's keeping score haha

oh man yeah this happens to me every january/february without fail. i think its just seasonal stuff honestly. what usually gets me back into it is either a contest weekend or some kind of project, like last year i started building a simple end fed and that got me interested again for months. sometimes you just need a reason to key up i guess

so ive been chasing this one for a while and wanted to write up what finally got me through because honestly i learned more in those three days than in like the previous year of DXing combined background: im running about 500w into a 4el yagi on 20m, nothing exotic. the T32C operation was drawing absolutely insane pileups, like you could hear the wall of stations just absolutely crushing each other on the tx frequency even though they were working split. i tried the obvious stuff first -- listening to where they were actually pulling calls from, figuring out the pattern if there was one, all that. nothing. what finally worked was a combination of things. first i started really paying attention to WHERE in the split range they were tuning. a lot of guys just park on one frequency in the split and hammer away, but i noticed the op was kind of drifting upward over time, so i started anticipating that and positioning maybe 2-3 up from where i thought hed be. second thing -- and this sounds dumb but -- i stopped sending my full callsign every single time. when the pileup is really dense sometimes just throwing the last two letters when youve heard a partial helps. and third i actually dropped power slightly which i know sounds backwards but i think i was getting too wide and stomping on guys close to me in the split which was making the op's job harder. anyway the QSO itself lasted about 8 seconds lol but it counts. curious what techniques other people have had luck with, especially on low bands where its a whole different animal

i just passed mine last month so maybe i can help. the oscillator and active filter questions tripped me up the most, there were a few where i really had to think about what was actually happening in the circuit vs just pattern matching the answer. the privileges thing, i mean for HF contesting the extra segments do give you a bit of breathing room when things get packed. whether thats worth it depends on how much you operate i guess. for me it was more of a personal goal thing than a practical one

yeah what he said on the generator, dont fight it. the math just doesnt work for two stations that long in october. i tried to do a 16 hour thing on solar and batteries last spring and even with decent sun by hour 10 i was rationing transmit time on the HF side which kind of defeats the purpose of a comms exercise. one thing id add — if you do run the genny, bring a small UPS or at least a decent power conditioner between it and the rigs. eu2200i has pretty clean power but ive seen weird RFI issues with some inverter gennies and certain SDR-based rigs. probably fine with a regular transceiver but worth knowing. also just bring way more fuel than you think you need, 18 hours on eco-throttle with light loads you might get through it on 2 gallons but id bring 4 and not worry about it.

yeah i had almost the exact same experience on my first one lol. i was so focused on remembering the RST exchange format that i totally forgot people would also want the park reference and my state. had to ask the third contact to repeat their callsign twice because my brain just wasnt keeping up. it gets way easier after a few times though, now it feels pretty natural. which park did you activate if you dont mind me asking, always curious to see what references people are working

not a dumb question at all, this stuff can be genuinely confusing when youre starting out because people throw all these names around assuming everyone already knows the context. so the quick version — Field Day is more of an operating event than a pure contest, its run by the ARRL every June and the whole idea is emergency preparedness, you set up portable stations and operate for 24 hours and the rules kind of encourage getting new people on the air which is exactly your situation. CQ WW on the other hand is a serious DX contest, happens in October for phone and November for CW, and the goal is working stations in as many different countries and CQ zones as you can. the exchange is just your signal report and your zone number, so like 59 05 if youre in zone 5. its actually pretty simple once you hear it a few times. SOTA is totally different — thats Summits on the Air, not really a contest at all, its an award program where people hike to mountain summits and operate from the top. you can get points as an activator going up the hill or as a chaser working them from home. some people do chase SOTA during contests but theyre separate things. definitely go to that multi-op for CQ WW. just sit with someone for an hour and listen to how they do the exchange and by the end of the weekend youll want to get on yourself, i almost guarantee it.

so we finally got around to doing a proper tabletop-turned-actual-field exercise with our county ARES group and honestly it was a humbling experience. we've been talking about doing one for like two years and kept pushing it back for various reasons, weather, scheduling, the usual. the scenario was a major flood event cutting off three communities from normal comms infrastructure — cell towers down, EOC needs health and welfare traffic handled, shelters need to coordinate with the county EOC. pretty realistic stuff given what happened in the region a few years back. what went sideways almost immediately: two of our operators showed up without knowing their assigned frequencies. we had put them in a net roster that got emailed out but apparently some people just... didnt read it. so right out of the gate we had confusion on simplex trying to get everyone on the same page. net control had to basically restart the check-in process twice. the other thing that caught us off guard was how quickly the message traffic volume got overwhelming when we were doing it realistically. when we just practice sending one or two radiograms at a meeting it feels manageable but when youre simulating actual shelter population numbers coming in and outgoing welfare messages it piles up fast. our message handling was genuinely stressed and i think a couple forms got filled out wrong under pressure. on the positive side our HF link to the section EOC held up great, the operator there was fantastic and we had solid copy the whole time. and people really seemed to engage with it more than our usual tabletop stuff. anyway curious if others have done similar exercises and what caught you off guard the first time

yeah totally, i do that more than i probably should. sometimes i'll just park on 17m for like an hour while im doing other stuff around the shack. its almost like background noise but then you catch something interesting and suddenly youre paying attention again. nothing wrong with it, radio doesnt always have to be about making contacts i think