James Wilson

congrats on the first one, 44 contacts is exactly the qualifying number so you're good. for log submission you want to go to the wwff.net site and upload your ADIF there, make sure your log has the reference number in the right field or it might not parse correctly — i think the field is called SIG_INFO and it should have the KFF-XXXX format. some logging programs handle this automatically if you set up a WWFF activity before you start logging. as for checking recent activations, yeah the site lets you look up any reference and see its activation history. there's also a spots page kind of like sotawatch where people self-spot during activations. honestly once you get used to the site it makes more sense, just takes a bit of poking around. welcome to WWFF, it really is a great program especially if you like being outside without the summit scrambling

so for 40m as a general you can do phone (SSB) from 7.175 up to 7.300, that's your chunk. extras get the whole phone portion starting lower at 7.125 but dont worry about that for now. the CW guys hang out down at the bottom of the band, like below 7.125 or so, and as a general you can do CW down there too actually, just not phone. the band edge thing is real and worth taking seriously. if you're sitting right at 7.300 and your signal has any kind of splatter or your rig isnt perfectly calibrated you could be transmitting outside the allocation which is an FCC no-no. most people just stay a few khz inside to be safe. i usually wont go above 7.295 or so just to give myself some room. it's not a huge deal but its one of those things where theres no reason to push it, you know?

NS-168 is a decent one, good choice for a first activation. i chased somebody off that summit maybe two years ago. the wind up there can be brutal in the afternoon which it sounds like you found out lol one thing that helped me a ton when i started was joining the SOTA reflector email list, theres a lot of experience on there and people post trip reports sometimes which give you a feel for what works on different summits. also if you have an android phone the SOTA Goat app or just using the website from your browser to self-spot is a game changer. you kind of have to self-spot aggressively especially when youre new and the chasers dont know your callsign yet

so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and i just want to hear from people who have actually tried both. my situation is a small suburban lot, maybe 60ft of usable run in the backyard if i go diagonal, and my neighbor on the east side has this massive oak that id have to work around. i can get a dipole up maybe 25 feet at the center which i know isnt ideal but its what i got. the other option ive been thinking about is a vertical — was looking at the Hustler 6BTV or maybe just building a simple quarter wave with a decent radial field. my concern with the vertical is the noise floor on 40, it seems like every time im listening on that band theres just garbage coming from every direction and i feel like a low dipole might at least reject some of that by being more directional. but then again low dipoles on 40 are pretty much nvis and id just be talking to people in a 300 mile radius. my main interest is working some DX, not contesting seriously, just want to make contacts outside north america semi regularly. what would you guys actually do in this situation

so ive been running a remote station at my parents place about 90 miles away for maybe two years now, using a mix of hamlib, a raspberry pi, and a VPN tunnel to get into the shack. works fine most of the time but it's kind of a house of cards honestly, every time there's a power blip or the router at that end does something weird i'm spending an hour troubleshooting from here and occasionally driving up there which kind of defeats the purpose anyway a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just use RemoteHams and be done with it, says the client software handles most of the annoying bits and the audio latency is manageable for SSB work. i looked at it and the SDR side of things actually looks pretty interesting, like you can expose a wideband SDR to registered users and it functions as kind of a community resource which is cool in concept my main hesitation is i've also been poking around with the idea of linking the remote into some kind of internet gateway situation, not full echolink but something where club members could at least monitor the HF bands remotely through the SDR without needing to actually key up. has anyone done something like that through RemoteHams or is that getting too complicated and i should just keep my janky VPN setup and stop overthinking it

i just went through this like two months ago so feel you. ended up getting the Baofeng UV-5R just to have something while I figured out what I actually wanted and tbh its fine for hitting repeaters. programmed it with CHIRP which was kinda confusing at first but there are youtube videos. the main thing nobody told me was to make sure you set the correct CTCSS tone for your local repeater or nobody will hear you even if youre keying up, took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure that out lol

oh man i remember my first net check in, completely blanked on my own callsign for like two seconds which was embarrassing but the NCS just waited and it was fine lol. one thing that helped me was literally writing out what i was going to say on a notepad before i keyed up. sounds silly but it works. also maybe listen for a few check-ins before yours so you can hear what format people are using, that way you can just kind of mirror it.

so ive been lurking on here for a while reading about QRP and finally just did it. built a Rockmite 40 from a kit i got off ebay, took me about three evenings spread over two weeks mostly because i kept second guessing my soldering. anyway got it finished, did the smoke test, nothing blew up, and i actually heard signals on 40m which honestly shocked me a little. took it out to the park yesterday with a 9v battery, my paddle, and just a wire i threw up in a tree maybe 20 feet or so. made two contacts in about 45 minutes which i know isnt impressive but for 500mw i was absolutely floored. one guy in ohio was running like a kw into a beam and i was just sitting on a picnic bench with this little board in an altoids tin basically the efficiency thing is what really got me. i spent maybe $18 on parts and a couple evenings and i'm actually making contacts. i feel like i wasted years running 100w into mediocre antennas when i could have been doing this. anyone else have that moment where QRP just clicks for you? also curious what other kits people recommend for a next build, im thinking something with a vfo so i can actually tune around

im kind of in the same boat so following this thread. i just got a used Bencher BY-1 and i think its a nice paddle but im still not sure im holding it right half the time. someone at my local club said to try straight key first and build up from there but i dunno if that advice is still relevant or kind of old school thinking

yeah the RSP1A works fine with SDR# through the ExtIO plugin, SDRplay still maintains it as far as i know. SDRuno is actually not bad once you get used to the layout, its kind of modeled after old Sony software radios so it has a certain logic to it, but i totally get preferring SDR# if thats what youre used to. and yeah you basically answered your own question on the HackRF thing. its a great tool if you need the TX capability or want to do transmit experiments, replay attacks for your own devices, that kind of thing. but as a pure receiver its genuinely worse than the RSP1A on most metrics. the noise figure on the HackRF is pretty bad compared to dedicated rx hardware and it only does 8 bit samples vs the RSP1A doing 12 bit. for HF work especially that difference shows up real fast. id go RSP1A if youre receive focused, save the HackRF money for something else or wait until you actually have a reason to transmit.

the height thing is real, a dipole at 35 feet on 40m is only about 0.25 wavelengths up which actually isnt as bad as people think for mixed use — youre not going to be exclusively high angle at that height, theres still useful radiation at lower angles. but yeah compared to a vertical its going to favor the higher angles more. 8 to 10 radials on a vertical is definitely not ideal but its not useless either. i ran a vertical for a while with about 16 radials and it worked fine, not as good as a proper elevated radial setup but workable. the real killer with ground mounted verticals is the ground losses if you skimp on radials, so honestly if you can only do 8 i might try elevated radials instead — even 2 or 4 elevated radials at like 6-8 feet up can outperform 16 ground mounted ones depending on your soil. slopers are interesting but they can be a bit finicky and the radiation pattern depends a lot on what the feedpoint is attached to. some guys love em, some hate em. id probably just try optimizing the dipole height first before adding a whole new antenna to the mix.

yeah so the general phone allocation on 40m is 7.175 to 7.300 MHz, your friend was close but had the number slightly off. below 7.175 is extra class territory for phone. you can still operate CW and digital modes lower in the band as a general though, down to 7.025 i believe for CW. as for band edges, the main thing people worry about is that if your rig has any drift or if youre running a sideband signal and you set your dial frequency too close to the edge, part of your actual transmitted signal can end up outside the allocation. like on LSB your signal extends a few kHz below the dial frequency so if youre sitting right at 7.175 you might be stepping on the extra-only segment. most people just stay a couple kHz inside the edge to be safe. its not a huge deal if you understand whats going on but a lot of new generals get caught out by it

LoTW is the one that counts for DXCC and most of the big ARRL awards, yeah. both sides have to upload the same contact and the dates/times match up within a tolerance and then it shows as confirmed. its actually pretty satisfying when you log in and see a new confirmation pop up for a rare entity you worked. eQSL is kind of its own thing, some awards accept it but the ARRL stuff mostly doesnt, at least not for DXCC. a lot of people use it just to exchange the digital cards because you can put artwork on them and it feels a bit more like a real QSL. i use both honestly. for paper cards, the old tradition was to reply to every card you received but most people these days only send paper when someone specifically requests it or if its a special contact they want to commemorate. sending cards back via the bureau is cheap if you can wait a year or two for delivery, direct mail gets expensive fast especially overseas. dont stress about it too much, nobody is going to think badly of you for not sending paper unsolicited.

okay so i just got my technician license like three weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater that the club runs. i programmed my baofeng (yeah yeah i know) with the input and output frequencies but whenever i key up nobody seems to hear me or respond. looked it up and i think i need a CTCSS tone but the repeater directory listing just says 100.0 and im not sure if thats the tone i need to transmit, receive, or both. also i noticed sometimes people just start talking on the repeater without saying anything first, and other times someone says their callsign and then pauses for a second before talking. is there like a right way to do this? i dont want to step on anyone or come across as rude before i even know what im doing. any help appreciated, been lurking here for a while and everyone seems really knowledgeable.

i ran almost exactly this setup for a while, x50 plus an old home brew 5 el yagi i had sitting around pointed at a mountain top machine about 38 miles from me. coax switch at the operating position, worked fine. the yagi didnt completely solve my path issues but it was noticeably better, like going from marginal to solid most of the time. wasnt perfect but good enough that i kept it up there for a few years until the boom cracked in a windstorm. one thing i will say is make sure whatever mast or mount you use for the yagi is solid because even a little movement in the wind will take you off axis and if youre already on a marginal path that can make a big difference. i used a TV antenna J-mount on the chimney and it was fine but your situation might be different.