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.

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and got me curious. i looked it up online and apparently theres like multiple licenses? technician, general, extra? im not sure which one i need to get first or if i can skip straight to a higher one. also how hard is the test actually, i took the practice tests on one of those websites and got like 60% which i know isnt passing but i only studied for maybe an hour. do i need to know morse code for any of these or is that old news now. any advice would be great im kind of lost on where to even start

yeah i was confused about the same thing when i upgraded. the band edge thing clicked for me when someone explained that a USB signal at 7.300 actually has audio content going up to like 7.303 or so depending on your audio, so youre technically out of band even if your dial reads 7.300. most rigs these days will let you tune right to the edge without stopping you so you gotta know this yourself. i just keep a sticky note on my desk with the general limits until i memorized them lol

yeah alternator whine is such a classic gotcha, gets almost everybody at some point. the power lead routing thing is exactly right. i always tell people run your power direct to the battery, keep it away from anything ignition related, and use the thickest wire that makes sense for the run. some guys also have luck with a ferrite choke on the power leads right at the radio but honestly fixing the routing is cleaner good call on the NMO too. mag mounts are fine for playing around but you really do give up some ground plane consistency especially if the magnet shifts around at all. whats your antenna, just a standard 5/8 wave or something else?

yeah the waterfall alone is worth the upgrade from basically anything that came before it in that price range. i went through a similar thing when i moved from a 450D a few years back, the difference in band awareness is just night and day. on 80m with a compromise antenna you might want to look at what your SWR is doing before the ATU — if its seeing something really ugly it'll keep hunting and sometimes just give up. i had a loading coil issue on one of my verticals that looked fine on other radios but the icom's ATU just wouldnt commit to a match. worth checking if you havent already. the accidental touchscreen thing happens to everyone at first, i ended up tweaking the screen sensitivity setting which helped a lot. its buried in the display settings somewhere, took me forever to find it the first time.

so ive been using N1MM for contests pretty much since i got my ticket and its fine, does what it needs to do, but a buddy of mine keeps going on about Log4OM for everyday logging and i started wondering if anyone actually switches between the two or just picks one and sticks with it my main thing is i do a fair bit of FT8 through WSJT-X and the ADIF importing situation between all three of these has been kind of a mess for me honestly. like i'll run a contest in N1MM, then come back to normal operating and WSJT-X dumps its log and then Log4OM is supposed to pull it all together but i end up with dupes or missing QSOs sometimes and i cant always figure out where the gap is does anyone have a workflow that actually works cleanly or am i just expecting too much from these things talking to each other

i had almost the exact same problem when i started with my paddle, turned out one of my contacts was slightly bent so it wasnt making clean contact every time. worth just looking closely at the paddle contacts and making sure theyre parallel and gapping evenly on both sides. probably not your issue but took me forever to figure that out lol

went last year, wasnt huge but there were maybe 30-40 tailgaters and i actually picked up a pretty clean Kenwood TS-430 for way less than i expected. depends what youre looking for tbh. the inside vendor hall has gotten smaller over the years but the parking lot stuff is usually where the good finds are, get there early though like right when gates open

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and figured id just ask here since theres some experienced VHF guys on this board. i have a semi-permanent hilltop setup i use for 2m SSB work, nothing fancy, just a mast bolted to a wooden frame on a ridge at about 1400m elevation. right now im running a 5/8 wave collinear which does okay for local stuff but when i try to work anything more than maybe 150-200km out it gets pretty rough even with decent tropo conditions. someone told me to just throw a yagi up there instead and call it a day but im not sure a fixed-pointing yagi makes sense unless im going to mount it on a rotator, which is more hassle than i want at this site since i can only get up there maybe once a month to maintain anything. the collinear at least covers all directions which has its uses. i guess what im asking is whether anyone has actually compared these two in a hilltop scenario or has some real world experience rather than just the theoretical gain numbers. the collinear is rated at around 5.5 dBi and whatever yagi id replace it with would probably be 7 or 8 element, so maybe 10-11 dBd depending on the design. i know the math but im wondering if the omnidirectional coverage loss is actually as painful as it sounds in practice.

so ive been running a mag mount on my F-150 for like two years now and finally got around to drilling for a proper NMO mount last weekend. figured id share since i spent way too long reading threads before doing it and most of them were kind of old or vague about the actual install details. did the hole just forward of the rear edge of the roof, roughly centered. used a step bit and went slow, had a friend hold a shop vac underneath the headliner which actually worked surprisingly well for catching most of the metal shavings. ran the coax down the A pillar and tucked it behind the door seal, pretty clean route. the NMO itself is a Larsen mount and i threw a 5/8 wave 2m whip on it to start. honestly the difference on receive is noticeable compared to the mag mount i was using. im running into the same mobile rig so its not that. the mag mount was always kind of sketchy on the ground plane since it was sitting on the bed cover which is fiberglass. that was probably most of my problem. anyway now im wondering if its worth putting up something for 70cm too or just getting a dual band whip. the single band 2m one is a Larsen 2/70 actually wait no that came with the package, its the NMO2/70B i think, so its already dual band. nevermind. its working fine.

yeah this is basically the eternal SO2R question and honestly there isnt one right answer. what i do — and i picked this up from watching some of the big gun scores talk about it — is i set a kind of mental rate threshold. if radio 1 is screaming i'll throw maybe one or two multiplier hunts per 10 minutes on radio 2, only when im actually waiting for a repeat or when somebody took forever to send their call. if youre in a genuine 150/hr run you probably shouldnt be doing full search and pounce on r2 anyway, the mental overhead will cost you more than you gain. where SO2R really earns its keep for me is in the medium-rate periods, say 60-100/hr, thats when you can comfortably park on radio 2 and grab mults. also useful during band transitions, youre calling CQ on r1 dying band while you establish a new run on r2 before you fully commit to switching. that alone is probably worth 50-100 Qs over a 48hr contest for me