Sarah Taylor

i learned last year and just used the morse toad app on my phone while commuting, took me probably 6 months to feel comfortable but i wasnt super strict about practicing every day so thats on me. the thing nobody told me was that copying in your head and copying with a pencil are basically two different skills so practice writing it down even if it feels slow and annoying at first

so ive been trying to get back into checking in on the regional 2m net on tuesday nights and last week i finally remembered to tune in but i wasnt sure if the schedule had changed or if it moved frequencies. i used to check in pretty regularly maybe a year ago but life got busy and i kind of fell off it for a while. anyway i guess my question is more general too — how do people even keep track of nets these days? like is there a good resource for finding schedules because the ones i find online look like they havent been updated since like 2014. also been curious about those special event stations, i heard there was one for some anniversary of something last month and totally missed it. feels like i always find out after the fact. not sure if this is even the right place to ask but figured someone here probably knows whats going on with this stuff better than me

I use AMSAT's laminated frequency chart as a handy reference that demonstrates the relationship between uplink and downlink frequencies. For AO-73, I typically start around 435.160 MHz on the uplink which puts me at about 145.940 MHz on the downlink.

so ive been doing SOTA for about a year now and someone at the club mentioned WWFF and honestly i kind of fell down a rabbit hole reading about it this past weekend. looks like there are a bunch of parks and nature reserves near me that qualify as references and ive been wanting to do something a bit different anyway since theres not a lot of summits in my area worth activating. i registered on the wwff.cc site and claimed one of the local references which is a state forest about 20 minutes from my house. planning to run QRP with my KX2 and a wire antenna thrown up in a tree, same setup i use for SOTA mostly. do i need to do anything special with logging compared to SOTA, like do i still upload to ADIF on WWFF logbook? and is 44 contacts still the threshold for a full activation or did that change? i saw some conflicting info online and couldnt tell if it was outdated. also wondering if anyone has tips on spotting yourself for WWFF specifically, does the POTA app work or do i need to use a different spotter

mine did something similar, turned out to be a cold solder joint on the driver board. not the finals themselves. ran it for about 20 minutes on CW into a dummy load and then did a heat gun pass about 6 inches away over the driver area and it started acting up immediately, helped me nail down the location. tiny crack in a joint near Q1017 if i remember right, its been a while.

so i've been putting off doing a proper mobile install for like two years now and finally got around to it last weekend. got the FT-857D mounted under the passenger seat with a RAM mount bracket thing and ran the power leads straight to the battery which took forever because i had to pull the door sill trim and route it through the firewall. anyway the radio itself works fine, i can hear repeaters and make contacts no problem. the issue is the SWR on 2m is reading like 2.8 to 3.1 depending on where i park or which direction the truck is facing, but if i drive around it drops down to like 1.4 and stays there. i've got a Diamond MR77 on a mag mount on the roof. i thought maybe the mount wasnt making good contact with the roof so i cleaned it off with some alcohol but didnt really help. is this a grounding thing? the coax is just run through the door frame which i know isnt ideal. been chasing this for two weeks now and its driving me nuts

yeah that ICS-213 traffic pile-up is basically a rite of passage for any group doing their first realistic exercise. we ran into the exact same wall maybe three years ago during a statewide AUXCOMM drill. what helped us a lot was designating one person strictly as a traffic handler and keeping them completely off the net coordination duties. sounds obvious in retrospect but when you're short on bodies everyone ends up trying to do everything and it just falls apart. the generator thing is unfortunately super common. i've started telling every emcomm operator in our group to run their backup power under load for at least 30 minutes every three months, not just a quick start test. a lot of problems only show up when the thing is actually working hard. anyway sounds like you got a lot of good data from the exercise even if it was uncomfortable in the moment, which is kind of the whole point right

the guy at your club is right, slow down. seriously. i know its not what you want to hear but sloppy fast code builds really bad habits that take forever to unlearn. there was a period where i thought i was making progress around 15 wpm and then hit this wall for like two years because my dits were mushy and i never noticed until someone recorded me and played it back. was humbling. for the paddle adjustment, start with the contact gap just barely enough that you dont get false triggers when you rest your fingers on it. some people like more tension, some less, just gotta experiment but dont crank it way down thinking it'll help your speed. also try holding the paddle with your whole hand loose instead of pinching with just two fingers, that might help with the death grip problem. and yeah your keyer speed being set too high for where you actually are sending-wise is probably the main culprit, drop it down to like 8 or 9 wpm and just make clean letters, then bump it up a wpm at a time over weeks not days.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend and wanted to share how it went because honestly i was pretty intimidated by the whole thing before i did it. been on the air about two years now but mostly just ragchewing and some local nets, so activating a nature reference felt like a big leap. the park i used was a local wildlife management area that had a WWFF reference already assigned, KFF-something i'll have to look it up, and i just set up my KX2 with a linked dipole strung between two trees near the parking area. conditions werent great on 40m in the afternoon but i managed to get 12 contacts which i know isnt a ton but it qualifies the activation so im happy. one thing i was not prepared for was how many people seemed to know what WWFF was and were actively hunting for new references. like i spotted myself on POTA spots (which also shows up for WWFF activators apparently?) and within maybe 3 minutes i had a small pileup going. nothing crazy but definitely more than i expected for a random tuesday afternoon. the logging was a bit confusing to me — i used paper in the field and then had to figure out the adif upload to the WWFF logbook afterward. took me a bit but once i figured it out it was pretty straightforward. if anyone has questions about the process im happy to share what little i know, and if anyone has tips for doing this better next time id love to hear them too.

i have a 7300 and an older Kenwood in the shack and honestly the Kenwood still wins for receive on CW in my opinion but for everything else the Icom is just more fun to use day to day. the spectrum scope alone is worth it. my only gripe is the menu system takes some getting used to but thats true of basically every radio made in the last ten years so whatever. how are you finding it on 40m at night, thats where i really notice the difference between radios

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general class) and everyone keeps telling me i should try one of the big contests but honestly the whole thing feels kind of overwhelming when i look at it. like CQ WW is apparently coming up and i looked at the rules page and my eyes glazed over halfway through. exchange formats and multipliers and all that. i get the basic idea, you contact as many stations as possible, but theres so much more to it than that apparently. field day i at least sort of understand because my club did it and i just sat next to someone experienced and they walked me through it. but doing CQ WW on my own feels like a completely different beast. also ive been seeing people mention SOTA activations and i know thats not really a contest in the same way but some people seem to count it the same kind of thing in terms of being a fun operating goal. anyway is there a good way to ease into contesting without completely embarrassing myself or wasting peoples time on the air. do people get annoyed if a new guy is slow with exchanges during a big contest like CQ WW or ARRL sweepstakes or whatever

yeah vara FM can be a little finicky with the audio levels, that tripped me up for a while too. in Winlink Express go to the vara FM setup screen and there should be a soundcard calibration option — run that first with the radio in a quiet state and make sure your input level from the 7300 isnt clipping. the 7300 has that USB audio built in so if youre using the Signalink you want to make sure youre pulling audio from the correct source in windows, ive seen setups where windows is defaulting to the wrong input device and the vara modem is basically getting silence or garbage. also check that the gateway youre targeting is actually active. the RMS list in Winlink Express shows last heard times and some of those stations arent on 24/7. if the last heard is like 8 hours ago during a weekday it might just not be up right now. try the Winlink gateway map on the website and filter for VHF, it shows activity levels. the 18 mile one should be totally workable if its online and your audio chain is sorted. ptt triggering and ALC moving is a good sign at least, so youre getting RF out. my first successful session took me like 3 days to figure out it was just audio levels the whole time, felt pretty dumb

so ive been messing with my audio chain for the past few weeks and honestly i cant tell anymore if the changes im making are actually doing anything or if im just convincing myself its better. running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 with their interface box, and ive been tweaking the TX equalizer settings in the radio trying to get something that sounds good without going full broadcast-y, which apparently everyone hates on HF the thing that got me started was someone on 14.225 telling me i sounded like i was in a tin can. i had the microphone gain cranked up because i thought more gain = better audio, which, yeah, i know now that was wrong. turned it down quite a bit and ran the ALC meter so it's barely moving on voice peaks and that helped a lot apparently. got a couple good reports after that but now im second guessing the EQ settings. ive been boosting a bit in the 2-3kHz range because i read somewhere that presence boost helps intelligibility. is that actually true on SSB or is it more of a studio mixing thing that doesnt really translate? also wondering if the compressor/processor in the 7300 is worth using or if i should just leave it off. some guys swear by it, some guys say it makes you sound awful. cant figure out who's right anyone with actual experience here, not just repeating what they read on eham

so ive been licensed for about 3 years now mostly just doing HF and some local 2m stuff but i finally decided to try working through one of the linear transponder satellites, specifically AO-73 since i kept seeing it mentioned. got gpredict set up on my laptop and printed out a pass schedule for this week. the problem is i can hear... something. like there's definitely signal there during the pass, some SSB voices and what sounds like CW, but when i try to transmit i either cant find myself in the passband or by the time i think i do the pass is basically over. im running a dual band yagi that i'm hand-holding and manually tracking which is probably not helping. also im not sure i have the doppler correction right — gpredict is doing it automatically through hamlib but i dont know if its actually working because i cant really tell if my radio is tuning or not. is this just a skill thing that takes practice or am i missing something fundamental about how the linear transponder works. i get the concept — uplink on one band downlink on another, inversed passband — but actually operating it in real time feels chaotic. any advice from people who've actually worked these things would be great

yeah what he said about LoTW is right. one thing that tripped me up early on was making sure the time in your log is UTC and matches exactly, like even being off by a minute can cause a non-match. took me a while to figure out why some of my contacts weren't confirming. also if you work a lot of DX stations some of them use QSL managers, meaning you dont send the card to the actual callsign you worked, you send it to a third person who handles all their cards. you can look up who manages a callsign on qrz.com usually it says right on their page. kind of a weird system but it works

32 radials is plenty for most installations - I run 32 32-foot radials in a spoke pattern. 18AWG will work fine at 100W, but 14AWG gives you future headroom for higher power. Use heavy-duty 8AWG copper lugs with M6 bolts for reliable connections.

so ive been putting together a go-kit for emcomm and general portable ops and im running into the usual rabbit hole of trying to figure out power. right now im using a 100ah lithium battery with a 30a solar charge controller and a small 100w panel, which works okay for HF but the minute i fire up the IC-7300 at anything above like 50w for any sustained period the voltage starts drooping and i get nervous. the question is really about whether to add a generator into the mix or just go bigger on the battery bank. ive been looking at the honda eu2200i since everyone seems to love them but that thing is expensive and kind of heavy to haul around if im doing a true SOTA or field day type setup. the cheaper inverter gens like the westinghouse or champion, anyone actually run one of those at a real event and had it hold up? not just backyard testing. also on the antenna side im currently using an EFHW with a 9:1 unun on a 31ft jackite pole and it works decent but i feel like im leaving something on the table. been thinking about a linked dipole or maybe one of those lab599 or alexloop type deals for faster deployment. not sure if that tradeoff in efficiency is worth the convenience. any thoughts from people who have actually done extended field ops would be appreciated, like 8+ hours not just a 2 hour activation

yeah you pretty much just pick most of them up over time honestly. but QRM and QRN are definitely different things — QRM is interference from other stations, like man-made noise, someone else transmitting nearby, that kind of thing. QRN is natural static, like from a thunderstorm or atmospheric noise. so if someone says the band has bad QRN they probably mean there's a lot of lightning crashes coming through. QRM means something or someone is stomping on the frequency. 73 is just the traditional sign-off, means best regards basically, goes way back to the telegraph days. OM means old man and its not rude, its just how hams call each other, doesnt matter how old you actually are. de just means from, so when you hear W5XYZ de K4ABC it means K4ABC is calling W5XYZ. the ARRL website has a pretty complete Q code list if you want to look them up all at once, but honestly after a few months of listening it all just clicks without trying.

For serious satellite work, consider the Open.space project's software-defined radio-based tiling system for creating phased arrays, specifically designed for affordable Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) bounce communications using small antennas working together in sync. It's still in development but could be game-changing for EME on a budget.

so ive been getting more into chasing DX lately and im trying to figure out which cluster spotting tools people actually rely on. i've had QRZ.com open basically forever for lookups but only recently started poking around their logbook and the DX spots section. then someone in my local club mentioned DXwatch and i pulled it up and it honestly looks pretty similar to me but maybe im missing something. i also saw there's DX Summit, and i know some guys run actual cluster clients on their computers but that feels like overkill for where im at right now. mostly just want something that tells me when a decent DX station is on so i can go spin the dial and try my luck. running a modest station, 100w and a dipole, so i cant work everything i see spotted but its still fun to try. anyway curious what apps or websites people here are using for this kind of thing. is there an android app that ties into any of these networks that's actually worth using or are they all kind of junky