Sarah Taylor

congrats on the first activation, 23 QSOs is a solid first run especially on a weekend when the bands can get weird. on the partial call thing — yeah a lot of experienced activators will work the partial, like if you hear "whiskey something foxtrot" you just log W?F and move on, then you can try to look it up later or just let it go. honestly most hunters understand and will just call back if it didnt go through on their end. the POTA system flags unconfirmed contacts and people sort it out. dont stress too much about it or youll grind the whole pileup to a halt. for spotting without cell, some people bring a little satellite messenger like a Zoleo or Garmin inReach and there are ways to send spots through those but its kind of clunky. the easier thing is just to find a friend who can watch the cluster and spot you remotely if you text them before you lose signal. i usually text my buddy my frequency before i head into the park and he watches for me. low tech but it works.

the timeout issue on 40m could just be band conditions honestly. i run a gateway out of my shack and some days ill go hours without a successful connection from anyone and then the band opens up and i get 6 sessions in a row. propagation to a specific gateway matters a lot more than people think because youre basically doing a two way data transfer not just broadcasting. one thing that helped me figure out whats actually happening — turn on the session logging in Winlink Express and watch what it spits out during a failed connect. usually you can tell if its dying during the frequency negotiation or later in the handshake. that at least narrows it down to your side vs the gateway side.

honestly the exam itself isnt that bad if you just grind through the question pool. hamstudy.org is your best friend, i probably did like 3 weeks of practice exams every night before mine and passed with a decent margin. the tricky part is stuff like the LC circuit resonance calculations and understanding why certain filter topologies work the way they do, but the actual questions on the test are multiple choice so you dont need to derive anything from scratch. that said i will say actually understanding the theory made a lot of things click for me that i'd been kind of fuzzy on as a General. transmission line stuff especially, once you actually get why SWR matters at the feedpoint versus at the radio it changes how you think about your whole antenna system. so i'd say dont just memorize, try to actually follow the reasoning even if the math is a bit rusty. gives you more than just the ticket at the end of it

honestly in my experience getting the dipole higher is almost always going to do more for you than switching antenna types, at least on 40m. i went through this exact thing a few years back and spent way too long fussing with different antenna configurations when the real problem was just height above ground. that said, the end fed is genuinely more convenient to deploy if your lot is weird shaped, and with a good choke on the coax at the feedpoint the common mode stuff isn't really worse than any other antenna — its just that a lot of guys cheap out on the transformer or skip the choke entirely and then wonder why their noise floor is a mess. if you do try an EFHW, wind your own transformer. the commercial ones are hit or miss and its not hard to build one that actually covers the bands you want cleanly. plenty of good info on the K9YC and W8JI sites about that.

yeah the Icom thing i think you're talking about is the IC-7760 or whatever they're calling it, the one with the detachable head unit setup. saw a video from one of the guys who got a hands on at a show overseas somewhere. looked pretty slick honestly but im not dropping that kind of money anytime soon, my 7300 is still doing everything i need it to do. and yes 10m has been ridiculous, i worked into south america on like 5 watts last tuesday which i never thought id say with my setup. the cycle is really delivering right now. good time to be a ham for sure

yeah gpredict CAT to two rigs simultaneously works but getting the COM port assignments right is kind of a pain depending on your OS. what radios are you using for up and downlink? that matters a lot for how smooth the CAT tracking actually works in practice. some rigs respond to CAT commands way faster than others and if theres lag you end up with the correction always being slightly behind.

yeah i was in the same boat when i started, felt like everyone expected me to already know all this. i ended up just doing LoTW because thats what my elmer told me to do and it works fine. i do send paper cards occasionally when i work someone really rare or if they send me one first — feels weird not to respond to a physical card. but i dont go out of my way to mail cards for every contact, thats just not realistic with how many qsos people log these days. eQSL i have an account but honestly i forget to upload to it half the time. some people really care about it though so maybe worth setting up eventually.

check your ALC settings too. ive seen weird TX lockup behavior when the ALC is pegged and the radio gets confused about the RF drive state. probably not your issue but worth a look while youre at it. what firmware version are you on?

so ive been on FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for logging contacts and watching the dx roll in but honestly it feels kind of hollow after a while. you exchange signal reports and grid squares and thats... it. no actual conversation happening, just automated handshakes essentially. been reading about JS8Call and it seems like it tries to fix that by being more of an actual messaging protocol built on the same weak signal foundation. like you can have a back and forth, send longer text, relay messages through other stations. sounds cool in theory but im wondering if the tradeoff in speed and sensitivity is actually worth it in practice. FT8 can pull signals out of the noise that nothing else can touch, and if JS8Call is noticeably weaker at that i might just stick with what works. also curious whether anyone still runs PSK31 regularly. i know its kind of old school at this point but there was something nice about it being a real keyboard to keyboard mode where you could actually chat. my understanding is the weak signal performance isnt anywhere near FT8 territory though so maybe thats a dead end for what im thinking about. anyway just looking for opinions from people who actually use this stuff day to day not just the wiki writeup version of it

yeah the question pool thing is real, the exact questions and answers are all public so technically you could just memorize them but honestly i think understanding at least the basics helps a lot especially if you blank out during the test or they word something slightly different than you expected. what worked for me was doing the hamstudy.org practice tests over and over, like just hammering through them every day for a couple weeks. it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and focuses on those. i barely touched the book honestly. the ohms law stuff is actually not that bad once you just draw out the little triangle thing where you cover the variable you want and it shows you the formula. there's maybe 4 or 5 questions in the pool that are straight ohm's law calculations and once you get the hang of it they're free points. the regulations and operating procedure stuff is where i spent more time because theres more of it and some of it is weirdly specific about frequencies and privileges.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from me, K-4857 if anyone knows it, and honestly it went way smoother than i thought it would. set up my end fed half wave in a tree, ran 25 watts on 40m and 20m, got my 10 contacts in maybe 35 minutes which i was pretty happy about for a first timer. few things im still fuzzy on though. when i uploaded to the POTA website it asked about the park reference and i just put the K number but i wasnt sure if i was supposed to note anything else. also a couple of the hunters i worked asked me to QSY to 20m while i was on 40 and i wasnt really sure about the etiquette there — like do you generally try to accommodate that or just finish your run on the current band? i dont want to be rude but i also dont want to lose my frequency either. and one guy called me like 6 times in a row while i was working a pileup and it was kind of stressful lol. is that just normal hunting behavior or was he being a lid? anyway really enjoyed it and already planning my next one, maybe try to do a two-fer if i can find overlapping park boundaries near me.

i was in basically the exact same spot like 8 months ago. ended up getting a baofeng just to have something to listen on while i waited for my license and then got a yaesu ft-70dr after i passed. the ft-70 does fusion which i dont use at all yet but the radio itself feels really solid and the battery lasts forever compared to the baofeng. i think i paid like 140 for it on sale somewhere. the dual watch feature is actually super useful when youre monitoring two repeaters at once, didnt think id care about that but i use it constantly now

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and people keep telling me i should be chasing DXCC but honestly i dont really understand the difference between all these awards. like is DXCC the one where you need 100 countries? and WAZ is zones? and WAS is all 50 states? im pretty sure thats right but every time i read about it on the ARRL site i get confused because they talk about entities vs countries and apparently those arent the same thing which threw me off completely. im running a modest station, just a Yaesu FT-891 into a wire dipole up about 30 feet, mostly on 40 and 20m. ive already worked maybe 40 or 50 different countries just casually without even trying to log them properly which is kind of annoying in hindsight. i think some of those would have counted. do i need to go back and get QSLs for all of them or does Logbook of the World work for this stuff? sorry if this is a dumb question

yeah that's almost certainly the igate issue you mentioned. a lot of igates out there are one-way, they hear you and push your packets to the internet but they don't do the reverse path back to RF. for messaging to work you need a two-way igate (sometimes called a bidirectional igate) that will actually take a message from APRS-IS and transmit it back out on 144.390 so your radio can hear it. you can actually check on aprs.fi by looking at the igate's info page, should say whether it's rx-only or bidirectional. if all the igates near you are rx-only thats your problem and basically nothing you change on the radio will fix it. the 710G itself handles messaging fine, its a solid rig for APRS, so i wouldnt go poking around the radio settings too much before you verify the igate situation first.

Honestly I went through this exact same thing about two years ago. Ended up keeping both installed and just accepting it. N1MM for any real contesting, no contest — pun intended — nothing touches it for that, the telnet cluster integration and the way it handles dupe checking during a run is just too good. But Log4OM as my everyday logger and it talks to WSJT-X way more cleanly in my experience. The LoTW and Club Log sync alone makes it worth it for day to day stuff. The WSJT-X UDP thing with N1MM used to drive me crazy too. I think part of the problem is WSJT-X logs everything including dupes and N1MM doesnt always know what to do with that. Never fully sorted it out, just gave up and let Log4OM handle the FT8 logging.

okay so first thing, no morse code requirement anymore, they dropped that years ago so dont let that scare you off. the technician exam is 35 questions, all multiple choice, and you need to get 26 right to pass. the whole question pool is publicly available which is kind of a cheat code honestly because you can literally just memorize the answers if you want to. HamStudy.org is what most people use these days, its free and it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong. some people bang through it in a week or two if they study a little every day. the electronics stuff does come up but its pretty basic, like they might ask you to calculate something with ohms law but they arent going to throw anything crazy at you. just use hamStudy, take practice tests until you're consistently hitting like 85% or better, and then go find a testing session near you through the ARRL website. the test itself is way less intimidating than you'd think, usually just a few people sitting around a table at someones house or a library

classic alternator whine, yeah. the rpm-following behavior is the giveaway. few things to try — first check that your radio chassis is actually grounded to the vehicle body and not just floating. sometimes the RAM mount isolates things a bit. short heavy gauge wire from the radio body to a good chassis ground point nearby can make a big difference. also those ferrite cores / chokes can help a lot on the power leads if grounding doesnt fix it. snap-on type, put one close to the radio end. i had a similar situation in my old Tacoma and it turned out the ground strap between the engine block and chassis was corroded. tightened that up and most of the noise went away on its own. the routing close to the engine harness probably isnt helping either but i'd start with grounding before you start moving wires around.

This is actually what got me into ham radio in the first place. My uncle used to do exactly this. I got my ticket thinking I'd do all this technical stuff and mostly I just end up on 40 talking to retired guys about their gardens. Not complaining at all honestly.

honestly the antenna problem is the real barrier, not the radios. i ran SO2R for a while with an FT-1000MP and a spare 756 Pro and the intermod between the two was brutal until i got a proper bandpass filter setup going. ICE makes decent ones, the dueling CQ type setup from 4O3A is what alot of serious contesters use but that stuff adds up fast. if your second antenna is on a different band it becomes way more manageable. like running 20 on the dipole and having a 40m vertical or something, then you're not trying to transmit on two antennas that are physically close to each other on adjacent or harmonically related bands. the real rate gain from SO2R comes from the listening-while-transmitting thing, you're sending a cq on one radio and tuning for a mult or a new guy on the other, and when your cq finishes you've already got a callsign lined up. but yeah if you're spending mental cycles troubleshooting audio routing or RFI you lose that advantage fast. for a casual contester i'd say get comfortable with your logging software's SO2R keying first, N1MM has decent support, before you invest in filters and switching. worth a try in a low stakes contest before you go deep on hardware.

ha, welcome to the tuesday night awkwardness club, i went through the exact same thing when i first started checking into our county net. "traffic" just means formal messages — like if you had a radiogram to pass along to someone. most of the time nobody has any and the net control just moves on, so staying quiet was actually the right call. the "just monitoring" thing is a bit net-specific honestly. on our net people will check in and say "no traffic, just monitoring" which means they're listening but dont need to have a QSO or anything. some nets the net control will ask for monitors separately at the end. best thing you can do is just keep checking in, after a few weeks you'll start to pick up the rhythm of how that particular net runs. every net has its own little quirks depending on who's been running it for the past 20 years.

honestly the Just Learn Morse Code software was what did it for me back when i was starting out, not sure if its still being updated but it works on the Koch method like the other guy said. also there's a podcast called Morse Code Ninja that has like hours of practice material at different speeds which i found really helpful once i had the basic characters down. the jump from knowing the letters to actually copying real QSOs is the hard part nobody warns you about lol, real operators dont send perfectly and the rhythm gets weird. i'd say budget like 4-6 months before it clicks for casual on-air use, some people faster some slower

just went through this exact thing a few months ago lol. i ended up going with a 20ah lifepo4 from bioenno and its been fine in my case, i dont seal it up completely when its charging though just to be safe, probably overkill but whatever. the weight difference vs the AGM i had before was pretty significant for lugging stuff up stairs at a served agency. one thing i wasnt expecting — having a laminated sheet inside the kit with your callsign, your local net info, and like a quick startup checklist is really useful. sounds dumb but when you havent touched the kit in 6 months and someones asking you to get on the air in 10 minutes your brain just goes blank

went through almost this exact thing last year. one thing that got me was the ALC moving doesnt always mean PTT is actually working correctly with VARA specifically. VARA has its own PTT keying method and if you're using both CI-V and VOX at the same time you can get into a situation where they fight each other or the timing is off and the gateway hears garbage at the start of your transmission. id pick one method, either the COM port CI-V or the VOX, not both, and also bump up the PTT lead-in time in VARA's settings to like 200-250ms and see if that helps. the IC-7300 can be a little slow to get fully into transmit sometimes.

Started EME last year with similar setup - IC-9700 and 4x15el. The software side is straightforward - just change from FT8 to Q65-60C mode in WSJT-X, really that simple! Key is patience and finding an experienced EME operator to guide you through first contact via sked.

so i've been a tech for about a year and just upgraded to general last month, and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is for weak signal stuff and dx and whatever. i got curious and started looking into it but honestly i dont even know where to begin. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on paper? i tried that and it feels completely wrong, like im just memorizing a chart and not actually learning to hear it. is there some specific way people do this that actually works or is it just grind until it clicks? i feel like im missing something obvious