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.

so i finally worked up the nerve to check in to our county ARES net last night, ive been licensed for about four months now and just been listening mostly. the net control asked if anyone had traffic or announcements and i kind of panicked and said my callsign wrong the first time, then when he came back to me i just said "no traffic" but forgot to say my callsign at the end like i heard everyone else doing. nobody said anything but i felt like an idiot after. is there like a standard thing you're supposed to say when checking in? i know you're supposed to ID but i wasnt sure if that means every single transmission or just like at the beginning. i dont want to mess up the net for everyone else, these guys all sound like they really know what theyre doing and i dont want to come across as not taking it seriously. also is it weird to just listen to nets for a long time before checking in or should i have jumped in sooner? i feel like i waited too long and now i dont know the unwritten rules

ALC thing is probably your main issue honestly. on the 7300 a lot of people run the mic gain way too high trying to get loud and then the ALC is pinned constantly which is what causes that processed crunchy sound. general rule ive heard and it seems to work — set your mic gain so the ALC is just barely kissing the lower end of the scale on voice peaks, not sitting there the whole time. like it should flicker on peaks not be a steady bar. for the PR-40 specifically i run mine about 2-3 inches off axis and slightly off to the side, that mic is pretty sensitive and being dead-on axis can make it sound harsh through the radio even though it sounds great into a DAW. the TX bandwidth on the 7300 i have mine set to 2.4kHz which is pretty standard, going wider sounds good on your end but it annoys people on crowded bands. bass boost I wouldnt touch it, the PR-40 has plenty of low end already and adding more just makes you muddy on the other end even if it sounds full and warm to you locally. external processor is kind of personal preference thing. ive used a behringer MDX2600 before and it did tighten things up but honestly once i got the mic gain and ALC sorted i didnt feel like i needed it for ragchewing. contesting or anything where you want to cut through pile-ups maybe different story.

classic ground loop symptom honestly, especially with electret mics since they need that bias voltage and if the return path isnt clean you get exactly what youre describing. what does your mic preamp power supply look like — are you pulling it from the same rail as the RF sections or is it regulated separately? ive seen guys have this exact issue and the fix was just adding a small LC filter on the 8V mic bias line, something like 100uH and 10uF tantalum right at the preamp board. also check if the feedback changes at all when you touch the chassis, if it does thats almost definitely your ground scheme. the rats nest thing you mentioned is probably the culprit, i'd spend an afternoon tracing every ground return back to a single star point before chasing anything else.

22 QSOs first time out with a sloping end fed and a low battery is honestly pretty solid. i had like 11 on my first activation and thought i was doing great haha. which state park was it if you dont mind me asking, im always looking for new references within driving distance

so ive been running single op for years and finally picked up a second radio setup to try SO2R properly this past field day and honestly it was kind of a disaster but also kind of clicked toward the end so im trying to figure out what im doing wrong and what to prioritize my main issue is the mental load of it. like i know the theory, run and gun on radio 1, S&P on radio 2, swap when rate drops, but in practice i keep losing my run freq on radio 1 while im working a station on radio 2 and then i come back and someones sitting on it. happened maybe 8 or 9 times in a 4 hour period which is just brutal for rate im running an IC-7300 as radio 1 and a borrowed FT-991A as radio 2, both into a bandpass filter setup i threw together from dx engineering stuff. the filtering is okay but not great, still getting some bleedover when both are on 40. interlock is handled with a cheap footswitch right now which is obviously not ideal anyone whos been doing SO2R for a while — what was the thing that actually made it click for you? is it just reps or is there some specific technique or workflow change that made the difference

yeah done almost exactly this with a pi 3 not a zero but the concept is the same. the short answer is you definitely need level shifting between the pi GPIO and the rotator controller — the G-450A runs on 5v logic for its control lines and the pi is 3.3v, so straight connection will either not work reliably or you'll fry the GPIO pins eventually. i used a simple BSS138 level shifter board, cost like a dollar fifty on ebay and does the job fine. the azimuth sense line from the rotator is actually an analog voltage that varies with position, so you'll also need an ADC since the pi has no analog inputs natively. i used a MCP3008, which is SPI and works great with python. then you just read the voltage, map it to degrees, and close the loop with a little PID controller or even just simple bang-bang control if you dont need it super precise. hamlib has rotctld which can run on the pi and expose a network interface so your logging software can talk to it. thats honestly the cleanest part of the whole thing once you get the hardware sorted. the $80 adapters are mostly just doing what youre trying to do yourself so yeah, worth building it.

im in basically the same boat so ill be watching this thread lol. currently at like 11wpm and just downloaded the lcwo.net thing which seems pretty good. somebody told me to try setting the character speed higher than the overall speed, like 20wpm characters at 13wpm effective or whatever they call it, farnsworth spacing i think? havent tried it long enough to know if it actually helps but maybe worth looking into if you havent already

i did the same mod on mine maybe three years ago, went fine. one thing i'll add is just make sure your SWR protection is still working right after — i had a weird issue where it seemed like the ALC was behaving a little different on 10m after i did it, might have been totally unrelated but worth checking. also if you haven't already the display dimmer mod is worth doing too, the default display brightness is way too high for night driving and theres an easy trim pot adjustment for it. small thing but quality of life improvement for sure.

the stacked tribanders you already have are honestly more valuable than a second radio in my opinion. a lot of SO2R guys are running that second radio into a wire or a modest antenna on a different band and yeah it helps with multipliers but you're already in good shape antenna wise. i'd spend some time just really learning to squeeze the rate on one radio before complicating everything. that said the SO2R interstation interference problem is what gets people, not the operating strategy part. running two radios close together in frequency is a pain even with good filtering and you'll spend a lot of time on the bandpass filter situation. not trying to discourage just saying go in with eyes open on the RF management side of it

so ive been running single op for years now, usually do okay in the sprints and state QSO parties but i keep getting crushed by the SO2R guys and i finally decided to look into it seriously this past winter. spent about two months reading everything i could find and honestly im more confused than when i started. my current setup is a K3 as the main radio and i have an older FT-950 collecting dust in the corner that i could theoretically use as the second radio. the interstation interference is what scares me most — my antennas are an 80m dipole and a 40m dipole up about 40 feet, which arent exactly optimally decoupled. i know guys running stacked yagis with 60dB of isolation between bands but thats not my situation at all. the bigger question im wrestling with is whether the rate improvement actually justifies all the complexity. like even if i get the hardware working, now im managing two VFOs, two loggers, trying to run a frequency on radio 1 while SandP-ing on radio 2, and my brain is already fried after 6 hours of single radio contesting. anyone gone through this transition and have honest thoughts on whether it was worth it or not