Diana Foster

that waiting thing is so real and i dont think anyone really prepares new operators for it. i've been doing ARES stuff for close to 12 years now and i still tell people — bring a book, bring snacks, charge everything twice. the activation where you're slammed with traffic every 10 minutes is the exception not the rule. most of the time you're sitting there monitoring and drinking bad shelter coffee hoping nothing major happens, which honestly is the best case scenario anyway. sounds like you handled it well though. that moment of freezing when you get your first real message is completely normal, everyone goes through it. the important thing is your training kicked in and you got it done. the ICS stuff feels like overkill when youre sitting in a classroom but when you're actually in an EOC and someone's using the terminology it all clicks. keep going to the nets, keep your quals current, and if your EC does any go-kit exercises or simulated emergency tests make sure you show up for those. SET in the fall is good practice too if your section does a serious one.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, technician class, and i keep seeing people talk about CW on the forums and it sounds really cool but every time i try to learn morse code i just kind of give up after like a week because i cant figure out if im doing it the right way or just wasting my time i tried one of those apps where you tap along to letters but i dont know if thats actually how you're supposed to learn or if im building bad habits or whatever. also saw something about the Koch method but i dont really understand what that means exactly, like do you learn all the letters first or just two at a time? im confused about the whole thing honestly does anyone have a good starting point, something that actually worked for them? i have maybe 20-30 minutes a day i could practice

so i decided i want to get my technician license and honestly i have no idea where to begin. i downloaded something called the question pool from some website but its like 400 questions and i dont even know if thats the right one or if its outdated. a friend told me to just memorize the answers without understanding them but that feels wrong, like what if i actually want to use the radio and not know what im doing is there a study guide people actually recommend or do most people just use one of those online practice test sites. ive seen hamstudy.org mentioned a few times but im not sure if thats enough on its own or if i should get a book too. also not sure how long this realistically takes to study for, i work full time so i cant dedicate huge amounts of time to it

I just upgraded to General and want to build my first emergency go-kit after seeing what happened during the recent storms. There's so much info out there and I'm getting overwhelmed. Should I start with a multi-band transceiver like the Yaesu FT-857D or Icom IC-706MKIIG, or begin smaller with handhelds? My local ARES group suggests focusing on power first - they mention LiFePO4 batteries for stable performance. What would experienced operators recommend for someone just starting emergency preparedness?

i run SO2R with an FT-991A as the second radio mostly because it was cheap and i already had it, and honestly the 7300 would be fine for that role too. you dont need the second radio to be your best radio, its mostly doing search and pounce or listening for mults while you run on the primary. the antenna isolation thing is real though. i have my hexbeam on the main rig and a wire dipole on the secondary and they're oriented differently which helps but i still use the Array Solutions bandmaster filters and they made a huge difference. without them on 40 meters running the primary would completely wipe out anything the second radio was hearing on the same band which kind of defeats the whole point. one thing nobody really talks about is the mental load. like physically setting it up is solvable, its the operating technique that takes forever to get smooth. your brain has to process two things basically simultaneously and it feels really unnatural at first. i still make more dupe calls when im trying to do SO2R compared to single radio. but in a contest like SS or CQ WW where mults really matter it genuinely helps.

so i've been noticing 17m and 15m have been surprisingly open the last few days and im wondering if anyone else is seeing the same thing or if its just my location getting lucky. solar flux has been hovering around 180-190 which is pretty solid for where we are in the cycle and i caught a few EU stations on 15 yesterday afternoon that i wasnt expecting at all. usually by this time of day the band is totally dead here in the midwest but i was pulling in some decent signals, nothing crazy but definitely workable. checked spaceweather.com and the K index looked okay, stayed pretty low most of the day which probably helped. been trying to work more DX lately since i finally got my beam sorted out (long story, had the phasing wrong for months and didnt know it) and i feel like im finally in a position to actually chase some of these openings when they happen. anyone have a good resource for predicting when these openings are likely or is it mostly just get on and see what happens

yeah the simplex transition is always the one that bites people. we did a drill a few years back where we deliberately killed the repeater about 30 minutes in without warning and half the group just kind of... went silent. they didnt know what frequency to move to, didnt have a pre-planned simplex channel in their radios, some were even trying to reach the repeater input thinking it was a technical issue. total chaos for maybe 10 minutes until someone thought to announce a fallback on 146.52. after that we added a requirement that every member has at least three local simplex freqs programmed and we do a short simplex-only portion of every monthly net now, even if its just passing one piece of traffic. makes a big difference over time. the other thing we found was that HF capability was almost completely untapped in our group — we had maybe two or three people who could actually operate HF under stress and get traffic out to the section. thats a gap worth addressing if your county is similar.

so i was just messing around on 10 meters last weekend, not really expecting much, and suddenly i was working stations all over europe like it was nothing. im used to 10m being basically dead for the past few years but something has definitely changed. logged a handful of italian stations, a couple from spain, even got a contact with someone down in south africa which honestly shocked me because the band just opened up out of nowhere and i wasnt even set up properly, just had my old vertical out there. anyway been reading a bit about the solar cycle and apparently were getting close to the peak of cycle 25 which is why HF has been so good lately. anyone else been taking advantage of this? feels like a good time to dust off old equipment or try for some new entities if youre into DXCC. also curious if anyone has been seeing good openings on 6m too because i heard there were some decent Es events a few weeks back that i completely missed.

Definitely start by bypassing that external compressor. Compressing audio for SSB introduces harmonic distortion, generating harmonics up the audio band to 6kHz for 2nd harmonics, 9kHz for 3rd. Most external audio processors create more problems than they solve in amateur service.

im actually trying to find a hamfest closer to home that isnt a 3 hour drive lol. the arrl website has that hamfest finder thing but half the listings seem outdated when i actually look them up. found one last fall that was supposedly happening and showed up to an empty parking lot which was not great

yeah im going, driving up from Kentucky with a buddy from my club. we usally make a whole weekend out of it, stay at that motel off 35 that isnt too bad. the swap meet is really the only reason i bother at this point, the vendor hall is fine but prices in there are basically retail so whats the point. bring cash and get there early friday morning if you want the good stuff, by saturday afternoon the table guys are just trying to unload whatever and the quality drops off fast

welcome to the hobby, dont worry about the callsign thing everyone does that at least once. i forgot mine like three times during my first week on the air, the guy on the other end just laughed it off. you'll get into a rhythm pretty fast. the baofeng is fine for getting started on repeaters honestly, people give it grief but it works. when you're ready to upgrade just lurk around here and ask questions, theres always someone who knows whats for sale locally or can point you toward something decent without spending a fortune

So anyway after about three weekends of messing around I finally got my FT-7900R installed in my F-150 in a way I'm actually happy with. The whole thing started because I was running off a cigarette lighter adapter like a dummy and kept getting that weird engine noise on transmit, that alternator whine everyone talks about. Drives you nuts when you're trying to hit the local repeater on the way to work. Ended up running 10 gauge wire directly to the battery with an inline fuse right at the battery, ground goes to a chassis bolt under the back seat. Night and day difference honestly. Also swapped out the little mag mount I was using for a Tram 1185 lip mount on the bed rail and the SWR came way down. Was sitting around 1.8 on 2m with the mag mount for whatever reason and now its basically flat. One thing i'm still not totally happy with is the control head placement, I've got it kind of wedged in the lower part of the dash area but it blocks one of my vents. Anyone else deal with that, is there a better way to mount these? Saw some guys using RAM mounts but wasnt sure if that was overkill for something this size.

so ive been licensed about 4 months now and i finally worked up the nerve to check in to our local 2m net on tuesday nights. the net control guy seems friendly enough but i feel like im always doing something slightly off and i cant really tell what the right way to do things is. like last week i checked in and gave my callsign but then i guess i was supposed to wait and he had to ask me again if i had traffic or anything. i just said no and that was fine but then another guy checked in and said something like "no traffic, monitoring" and that sounded way more official. is that the right way to do it? also how do you know when its your turn to talk vs when you should just be listening? i keyed up once when someone else was mid-sentence and got a pretty awkward double transmission situation. i know this probably sounds like basic stuff but i just dont want to be that guy who annoys everyone on the net. any tips from people who actually run or participate in nets regularly would be really appreciated

so i've been reading about WWFF for a while now and kept putting it off because it seemed complicated to get started but honestly it was way easier than i expected once i just went for it. activated a state forest near me, KFF-something, i'd have to look up the exact reference. took my KX2 and a sotabeams linked dipole, found a nice clearing, set up in about 20 minutes and got on 40m. ended up making 47 contacts over about 2 hours which i know isnt a ton but for my first time i was pretty happy with it. called CQ WWFF for a while and also spotted myself on the wwff spotter page which definitely helped. got a pile up for maybe 15 minutes which was fun and a little chaotic honestly. my questions are — do i need to do anything special to submit the log, and also does it matter if i operated from inside my car at one point because it started drizzling? i was still within the boundary of the reference area. also wondering if anyone uses 20m more than 40m for these, propagation was kinda weird that day and i felt like i was missing a lot of europe that might have been calling.

K=1 is about as good as it gets for HF. Your G5RV should work great on 20M and 17M tonight. Pro tip: check FT8 activity on 15M and 12M first - if you see decent signals there, fire up SSB or CW!

yeah ive seen this exact thing happen to a buddy of mines 7300. turned out the problem wasnt the finals themselves but a failed bias adjustment — the driver was running hot and slowly cooking the finals even at normal power levels. the shop fixed the symptom but not the cause basically. if you can borrow a spectrum analyzer or even just a current probe you might be able to see if the quiescent current on the final stage is running higher than spec between transmissions. icom specs that out at a pretty specific value in the service manual and its worth checking before you throw more MRF101s at it. also check the low pass filter section, one of the caps in there can go leaky and cause weird reflections internally. its a long shot but ive seen stranger things. honestly though if the same shop is fixing it twice without finding root cause id probably look for someone who specializes in Icom gear specifically.

so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero w for the past few weeks trying to get it to handle antenna switching based on what band im on. the idea is it reads the band data output from my ic-7300 (the one on the back, acc port i think) and then fires the appropriate relay to route the coax to whichever antenna makes sense. right now i have 4 antennas and im sick of manually swapping things around especially during contests when im moving bands fast. i got the basic python script talking to the serial port fine and i can read the CI-V data no problem, wrote a little loop that polls it every half second or so. the part im stuck on is the relay board. i picked up one of those 8 channel 5v relay modules off amazon and when i try to drive it from the pi gpio the relays kind of half-trigger sometimes, like i can hear them click but they dont always latch properly. wondering if its a power issue or if i need to add transistors or something between the gpio and the relay coils. the module has a VCC and a JD-VCC jumper and im honestly not 100% sure i have that set up right. anyone gone down this road before? im comfortable with basic electronics but i dont have a ton of experience with driving inductive loads from gpio pins

this will actually be my first hamfest if i go, just got my tech license like 6 weeks ago. is it worth going even if i dont really know what im looking for yet? dont want to feel totally lost walking around

ran a lip mount on my old civic for about two years on 440 and honestly it was fine for what youre describing. local repeaters, no real complaints. the ground plane situation isnt ideal but at uhf the wavelength is short enough that a little compromised ground plane doesnt tank your signal the way it might on 2m or lower. i switched to NMO eventually mostly because i got a new car and just decided to commit, not because the lip mount was giving me problems. one thing i will say — pay attention to how tight the lip mount clamps. some of the cheap ones vibrate loose and you get that horrible scratchy noise while driving. i had that happen once and spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking my radio was dying before i figured it out. the comet ones seem to hold better in my experience

yeah im in a similar boat, did my first EME contact about 8 months ago with a single long boom yagi and a medium PA. Q65B is just ridiculous in a good way, like i could not believe what was getting through. honestly the hardest part for me wasnt the RF side it was getting the az/el control working reliably and making sure my system clock was synced properly because if youre even a few seconds off it messes up the decode. the moon-net mailing list is still pretty active for scheduling, dont overlook that.

Digital modes like FT8 and FT4 are really helping snag weak-signal DX, especially on 10m and 12m. I've been running 5 watts on FT8 and working into Europe on 12m around noon local time. The stable conditions make weak signal work so much easier!

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state forest about 45 minutes from my house, KFF-something, i have the reference written down somewhere. brought my FT-818 and a random wire up in a tree and managed to get like 14 QSOs on 40m before the battery started getting low. logged it on the app and uploaded to the POTA website which was surprisingly easy actually. couple things im not sure about though — i had one guy call me who gave me what sounded like a park reference number, does that mean he was doing a park to park? i didnt really know what to do so i just logged him normally. also i noticed some activators on the spots page were running like 50+ QSOs in an hour which seems insane to me, how are they doing that so fast, is it just CW or are they running a pile up on SSB somehow? im still pretty slow at working a crowd i guess anyway it was a great time and the park was empty so nobody gave me weird looks for hanging wire in trees which is always a bonus

yeah mode B vs mode A tripped me up for ages too, i eventually just switched to mode A and never looked back tbh. some people swear by B but i could never get the hang of the difference in how it handles the last element. might be worth trying both and seeing which one feels less awful lol. also what keyer are you using, some of the cheaper built in ones have pretty questionable timing

yeah the doppler thing is huge, especially on a short 8 minute pass. on fo-29 the shift across a full pass can be something like +/- 10 kHz on the uplink which sounds like a lot but you kind of get used to compensating as the bird tracks across the sky. the trick most people do when they dont have computer control is to pre-set the downlink to where you expect the center of the passband to be at your target part of the pass (usually near AOS or max elevation depending on what youre trying to do) and then just manually twitch the dial as you track. its a bit of an art form. also the eggbeater is fine for FM birds but for linear transponders a lot of people find it undershoots on the link budget unless its built really well and has a preamp on the downlink. what are you using for the uplink side, same antenna? because if youre running like 5 watts into an omni on the uplink you might just not be getting enough into the transponder to pull your signal out of the noise on the way down. its a tight system.