Kevin Turner

im in almost the exact same spot as you, been going about 6 weeks. what helped me a ton was actually recording myself with Audacity and listening back - i had no idea how bad some of my E's and T's sounded until i heard them. its kind of painful to listen to but you catch stuff your ear misses in the moment. also someone in my club told me to practice sending with my eyes closed which sounds weird but it actually made me focus more on feel than watching my hand.

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, W6/NC-471 up near tahoe area, and man i was not prepared for how cold it gets up there even in like late september. had my KX2 and a random wire strung up in a tree which took way longer than expected because i kept picking the wrong branch angles and the whole thing just looked terrible. ended up making contacts though, got my 4 so the summit counted but it was close. wind kept messing with my paper log too, had to put rocks on everything. also forgot sunscreen which was dumb. anyway just wanted to share because everyone makes it look so easy on youtube but its really not the first time out

2m is probably still the better starting point honestly. the community is huge compared to 23cm EME and youll find activity way more easily especially on the big EME contest weekends. minimum workable setup on 2m with JT65B is generally considered to be something like 4x long yagis, maybe 16-17 dBd of gain, and at least 500w into the array. some guys claim to work stations with less but theyre usually on the other end with a kilowatt and a big array so it doesnt really help you. the preamp is honestly where a lot of people underestimate the importance. you want a good low noise preamp right at the feedpoint, we're talking 0.3 to 0.5 dB NF or thereabouts, because the sky noise on 2m is low and your system noise figure really matters. coax loss before the LNA just kills you. sequencing is critical too, get that sorted before you ever key up or you'll toast the preamp. 23cm is a different beast entirely, the dishes get physically smaller which sounds easier but feed design and surface accuracy become a headache. i started on 2m EME about 4 years ago with a 4x13 element array and an old Mirage amp putting out around 600w and made my first contact about 3 weeks in. it's addictive, fair warning

ok so i just upgraded from tech to general last month and im still trying to figure out where i can actually operate. i know generals get more hf privileges but the band plan stuff is really confusing me. like on 40 meters i see people saying dont go below 7.125 or whatever but then i look at the arrl band plan and the fcc rules and they dont seem to match up exactly and i dont know which one im supposed to follow also whats the deal with band edges, my elmer told me to stay away from them but didnt really explain why. is it like a rule or just a courtesy thing? i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere illegal or step on a dx station or whatever

been doing this for years and i still just use the QRZ cluster tab on my laptop when im at the shack, the phone thing never really clicked for me. but one thing worth mentioning — not all cluster spots are accurate. like sometimes youll see a spot and race to the frequency and its just somebody who misidentified a station or the callsign got garbled through the telnet chain or something. so dont get too frustrated if you show up and theres nothing there or its not who the spot said it was. happens to everyone, part of the game

i was exactly where you are like two years ago and just want to say CQ WW as a casual first timer is actually a blast because literally everyone is on the air and calling CQ so its easy to find contacts even if your signal isnt great. with a vertical you'll do fine on 15 and maybe 10m if propagation cooperates. my first time i just ran search and pounce the whole weekend and ended up with like 200 contacts which felt huge to me at the time. the zone thing confused me at first but there are maps online that help a lot

the math heavy stuff is what gets people, specifically anything around resonant circuits and calculating impedance or figuring out the bandwidth of a filter from Q values. a lot of folks just skip over that because you can sometimes logic your way through the multiple choice but honestly if you take maybe one afternoon and just work through the formulas by hand a few times it sticks way better than flashcards. the transmission line section tripped me up a bit too, standing wave ratios and the stuff about matching networks. i kept second guessing myself on the ones about velocity factor. and yeah, getting Extra does open up some genuinely less crowded real estate on 75 and 40, the CW sub-bands on 80 are nice and quiet if youre into that. day to day not a huge difference if youre already a General but it feels good to have the full ticket honestly.

Welcome to one of the best corners of the hobby honestly. The spotting thing — you'll want to do that yourself, at least to get it going. Post yourself on the WWFF spotter or use the POTA app (a lot of hunters watch both), just put your callsign, frequency, and the KFF reference. Once you're spotted people will find you pretty quick, especially on 40m on a weekend morning. Your setup sounds totally fine for a first activation. The EFHW on 40m will do most of the work. If you can get spotted before noon local you'll catch a lot of the regular hunters who are already sitting there with coffee waiting for new spots to pop up. Dont stress about the 44 count too much on your first time out, just get comfortable with the flow of it — calling CQ WWFF, logging, keeping things moving. You'll probably hit it once you get rolling. Have a good one out there.

so i heard the Tri-County club is doing their annual thing this saturday at the fairgrounds, supposed to have a decent swap meet section this year. last time i went there was like 2019 and found a really clean TS-430 for almost nothing. anyway im thinking about going but its like 90 minutes from me and i dont want to make the drive if the tailgating is gonna be sparse. anyone been to one of their recent events or know if its worth it

so ive been messing around with my audio chain for a while now trying to get a decent SSB signal and honestly it's hard to tell sometimes what's actually helping vs what im just convincing myself sounds better. running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 with the icom adapter and the reports i get are decent but not great — people say im a little bassy and sometimes muddy on peaks. ive tried tweaking the TX equalizer in the radio and that helped some, cut a bit around 200hz and it seemed to clean things up but then someone on 14.225 told me i sounded thin. so i bumped it back and now im back to muddy. the mic gain is set pretty conservatively, ALC is barely moving, compression is off because i read a dozen posts saying not to use it but now im reading stuff saying a little compression is fine and actually helps intelligibility on a busy band. at what point does any of this actually matter on a noisy HF band vs just having a decent signal level and good mic placement? genuinely asking because ive spent way too many evenings on this and im not sure im hearing real differences anymore

so our local ARES group finally did a full scale simulated exercise last saturday and i wanted to share what happened because some of it was kind of eye opening, especially for those of us who think we're more prepared than we actually are the scenario was a major flood event cutting off three municipalities from normal communications infrastructure, cell towers down, power out in two of the three areas, the whole deal. we had about 14 operators deployed across different served agencies and a net control set up at the EOC the part that surprised me most was how quickly message handling fell apart. like we all know the ICS forms and we've practiced traffic handling but when you're actually in a simulated environment with people throwing information at you from three directions at once, the paper forms become a real bottleneck. one of our guys at the shelter site was trying to relay health and welfare traffic while also handling logistics requests and he basically froze up for like 10 minutes trying to prioritize we also had some antenna issues at the EOC that nobody caught during setup because everyone assumed someone else had checked the coax run. classic. the SWR was way off and we lost probably 40 minutes troubleshooting something that should have been done as part of the go-kit checkout anyway the debrief was really valuable and the EC is putting together some changes to how we do pre-deployment checks. curious if anyone else has run drills lately and what surprised them

the way i do it — and this has worked pretty reliably for me on FO-29 and AO-7 — is to let Gpredict handle the downlink correction automatically via CAT and then i manually tune my uplink to keep my downlink signal where i want it in the passband. the reason is your downlink is what youre actually listening to and you want that to stay stable in your receiver, so automated correction there makes sense. the uplink you adjust yourself based on where you hear your own signal coming back down. 5 watts to a handheld yagi is honestly fine for most passes if you keep your antenna pointed reasonably well. the bigger issue people have starting out is not accounting for full duplex — if you cant hear yourself while transmitting you kind of flying blind. the IC-9700 should do full duplex natively so thats good. took me a while to get my doppler timing down but once it clicks it becomes pretty automatic, just gotta work a few passes and youll get the feel for it

so i finally got activated for a real ARES deployment last weekend, been a member of our local group for about 8 months now and done maybe 4 or 5 training nets but this was the first actual thing where they needed us out in the field. county emergency manager requested us for a pretty bad storm situation, some flooding in the low areas and they had a shelter set up at the high school. i was assigned to the shelter as the primary station, just running HF packet and voice check-ins back to the EOC every hour. nothing super complicated but man it felt different than any drill. like the EC was actually counting on the info getting through and there were real people sitting in cots behind me. ran my ic-7300 off a battery bank i brought and everything held fine for about 14 hours. anyway just wanted to share because i know some folks here have been on the fence about joining their local ARES group. the training stuff can feel a little repetitive but when it actually matters its a completely different headspace. glad i stuck with it even when the nets felt kind of tedious

i dont know maybe im getting old but i just like sitting on 40m in the evenings and just talking to whoever's around. not chasing DX, not doing contests, not logging anything. just... talking. had a great chat with a guy in ohio last night for like 45 minutes about his garden and his old kenwood rig he's been using since the 80s. that kind of stuff is why i got into this hobby in the first place honestly. feels like fewer people are doing that these days, everyone's either digital mode or they want a quick signal report and then theyre gone. nothing wrong with that i guess but still

fan mod is underrated, did the same thing to my IC-7300 even though it doesn't run as hot. just a thing i do now when i get any new radio, the stock fans in most of this japanese gear are adequate but not generous if you know what i mean. FT8 and JS8 will find the thermal limits of anything eventually if you leave it long enough.