Michael Moore

so ive been running a 40m dipole at about 35 feet for the last couple years and its been decent, works fine for domestic stuff, but i keep reading that verticals are supposed to be better for dx because of the lower takeoff angle. finally broke down and put up a hamstick vertical on a temporary ground mount with maybe 8 or 10 radials, nothing fancy, just wanted to see if the theory matched reality. honestly the results are kind of mixed and i dont know what to make of them. on some evenings the vertical is clearly pulling in signals from europe that the dipole just isnt hearing, but then other times the dipole stomps all over it. like last tuesday i was working a pile-up for a JA station and the dipole was clearly the better antenna. i wonder if its just band conditions messing with my perception or if there's actually a real pattern here. also my radial situation is probably not great. ive read you want 16 or 32 or even 60 radials buried for a real ground mounted vertical to perform right. maybe thats whats holding it back. anyone gone through this kind of comparison and figured out a rule of thumb for when to switch antennas?

so i finally got off my butt and did a proper WWFF activation last weekend at a local nature reserve about 20 mins from my house. been meaning to do it for months and just kept putting it off. anyway i set up my KX3 with a random wire up in a tree and got my 44 contacts which i know is the minimum for a valid activation so that was nice. but i have some questions about logging and uploading. i logged everything in HAMRS on my phone which worked great but now when im trying to upload to the WWFF logbook i'm not totally sure if i did the reference number right. the park i was at is listed on the wwff directory as KFF-XXXX (i'll look up the actual number) but i wasnt 100% sure if i needed to put that in every log entry or just the header. also do activators get credit toward hunter totals or is that completely separate tracking overall it was just a really nice day out. ran mostly SSB on 40 and 20, conditions were decent. had a few people call me that had obviously done this before and were really patient when i fumbled around a bit. good program.

yeah i run both, have for a couple years. JS8Call is a totally different vibe from FT8 — you can actually type out a real message, ask someone how the weather is, whatever. its slower obviously and the weak signal performance isnt quite as deep as FT8 but its still pretty impressive for what it does. i think the threshold is somewhere around -18 or -20 dB SNR which is still way better than PSK31 ever was. setup wise you dont need anything different really. same audio interface, same CAT control if you have it, just install JS8Call alongside WSJT-X and point it at the same audio device. just make sure youre not trying to transmit on both at the same time which sounds obvious but ive definitely done that accidentally when i forgot to close one of them. the 7300 works great for this stuff, the built in soundcard makes it pretty easy. honestly the activity on JS8Call is lower than FT8 but theres a dedicated group that hangs out on there and some of them will ragchew for an hour. totally different feel. worth installing and just listening for a while to see if anyones around on your bands.

yeah what he said about the inverted v. i had the exact same problem with my first 40m build a couple years ago, kept chasing my tail with the tuner when the fix was just snipping a bit off each side. one thing i'll add — extension cord wire works fine but the insulation on some of that stuff can mess with your velocity factor slightly especially if the wire is running close to a tree branch or touching anything. probably minor but worth knowing. my current 40m dipole is just speaker wire from the hardware store, two runs of 18 gauge, works fine.

ok so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and people are constantly using these like QSL QRZ QRM and a bunch of others and i know QSL means like acknowledged or something but im honestly lost on most of them. is there like a standard set i should learn first or are there hundreds of them? also people use other abbreviations that arent Q codes at all like 73 and stuff and i dont know if those fall under the same category or are totally different. been licensed about 4 months so still figuring all this out

so ive been sitting on doing this for like two years and finally just did it last weekend. the mars/cap mod on the IC-7300 is dead simple, just a couple jumpers on the main board, took maybe 20 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself and looking at the schematic twice. transmit now goes well outside the ham bands which i needed for some emcomm stuff where we sometimes operate on FEMA interop freqs. while i had it open i also did the ref oscillator mod, swapped the stock TCXO for a higher stability unit i got from a guy on the reflector. havent done a full before/after measurement but the frequency display just feels more solid if that makes any sense, and the guys on FT8 say im not drifting anymore so thats something. the one thing i did NOT touch was the internal speaker. i know people do the foam mod or swap it out entirely but honestly mine sounds fine to me and i didnt want to push my luck. already had the board out once, didnt feel like tempting fate again with more disassembly. anyway if anyones been on the fence about the oscillator mod especially, i'd say its worth it. just take your time with the ribbon cables, those are the things that'll get you.

so ive been at this for about three weeks now and i finally got a decent pass with AO-73 last night but the whole doppler thing is way harder to manage than i expected. i have a ft-817 for downlink and a cheap handheld for uplink which i know isnt ideal but its what i got right now. the pass was like 8 minutes and i spent probably the first 4 minutes just trying to hear myself in the passband let alone actually work anyone. im using gpredict for tracking and i had it set up to do the doppler correction automatically through CAT but it was only correcting the downlink, not the uplink obviously since the HT doesnt do CAT. so im manually tuning the uplink while also trying to adjust the downlink and hold the yagi and its just a lot happening at once. anyone have a good workflow for this or do i just need to practice more? also wondering if i should flip which radio does which job but i think you want the better rig on downlink right?

I went through this exact same wall around 7wpm and it was frustrating as heck. What ended up helping me was just doing a ton of head copy instead of writing everything down. When you write you're always falling behind and then you panic. Try listening to slower QSOs on websdr and just following along without a pencil, even if you only catch half the words. after a few weeks of that something kind of clicked for me and the letters started just... arriving, if that makes sense. hard to explain. also the W1AW slow speed practice on 40m is really good, they announce the speed before each session so you can find your level. 20wpm is totally doable, took me about 18 months total but i wasnt super consistent about it either so you might get there faster

so ive been on HF for about 8 months now and i notice some guys use phonetics for everything and others barely use them at all. like on 40m SSB sometimes ill hear someone just say their callsign normally and other times they spell every single letter out with the full NATO thing. is there like an actual rule for this or is it just personal preference? i feel kinda awkward doing Alpha Bravo Charlie etc when the band is totally clear and we can hear each other fine. but then i also dont want to sound like i dont know what im doing by NOT using them. also does it matter if i use like... non-standard ones? i heard a guy say Sugar instead of Sierra once and it threw me off for a second

so i passed my technician exam last thursday and im still kind of in shock honestly. been lurking on this forum for maybe 6 months trying to understand everything before i jumped in. my elmers gonna help me set up a baofeng to start which i know everyone has opinions about lol but its what i can afford right now. havent made my first QSO yet, a little nervous about keying up on a repeater for the first time. like what if i forget my callsign or say something dumb. anyway just wanted to say hi and that this community has already helped me a lot just from reading old threads

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me, KFF-something i dont remember the exact number off the top of my head but i logged it on the wwff portal afterward. overall it went really well, made about 34 contacts in maybe 2 hours on 40m SSB, got a few on 20m too before the band went weird on me. my question is about the 44 contact minimum — i know thats the threshold to fully qualify a reference but does it have to be 44 unique callsigns or just 44 contacts total? i had a couple stations come back to me twice because conditions were so-so and i wasnt sure if those counted separately or not. also do park-to-park contacts count differently for WWFF versus POTA, i know theyre separate programs but i keep mixing up the rules also the logging software situation is kind of confusing, i used HAMRS in the field and then tried to import to wwfflog or whatever the website wants and it was a bit fiddly. anyone else have a workflow they like for this

im kind of in the same boat so following this thread. one thing my elmer told me was to slow WAY down, like go back to 10wpm in actual QSOs even if it feels embarrassing, and focus only on clean sending rather than keeping up. said it builds muscle memory better than pushing speed before your hands are ready. havent fully committed to doing it yet because i always feel bad asking people to QRS but probably should just do it

yeah the gap between knowing the theory and actually doing it under any kind of pressure is real. i think a lot of hams dont realize how much of emcomm is just practiced habits more than technical knowledge. the radio part is usually the easy bit. our group does a tabletop exercise every few months which helps fill in some of that gap between full activations. its not the same as being on the air but at least you work through the ICS stuff and think about how messages actually flow up and down the chain. might be worth asking your EC if theyd be open to something like that if they dont already do it.

im in pretty much the same boat lol, been at it about 4 months with a Vibroplex clone paddle. one thing that actually helped me was recording myself sending with audacity and listening back — like i thought i was doing okay until i heard the playback and it was kind of rough. really obvious where my timing was falling apart on specific letters. Y is the worst, you're right about that one.

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and im still a little confused about when youre supposed to use the NATO phonetic alphabet vs just saying the letters normally. like on 2m repeaters around here most people just say their callsign normally without spelling it out phonetically, but then i was listening to some HF stuff and everyone seems to go full phonetic every single time even mid conversation. is there like an actual rule about this or is it just kind of a customs thing that varies by band or mode or whatever. i dont want to sound dumb on air but i also dont want to be that guy whos overly formal when everyones just chatting casually

so ive been a tech for about 8 months and i keep seeing people talk about how useful CW is and i guess i want to try learning it but i have no idea where to start. like do people just memorize the dots and dashes on paper first or is there a better way to do it? i tried printing out one of those charts and staring at it for a few days and it just kind of bounced off my brain. im not trying to upgrade to general just yet but the CW thing keeps nagging at me. someone at my local club said something about a koch method but i didnt really understand what they meant. is there an app or something that actually works or do people mostly use real equipment to practice

the honest answer is it depends a lot on the angle of the legs. if youre getting the apex up high and the ends are still clearing the ground by 10 feet or so, youre not giving up much. the pattern does get a bit more omnidirectional which some people actually prefer for 40m since you're not always chasing one specific direction. the flat top will technically have a lower angle of radiation if both are at the same apex height but on 40 at night when the band is open, conditions are gonna eat that difference alive. i ran both for a few months when i had a second support available and honestly my signal reports were within a dB or two either way. the inverted V was easier to tune and the feedpoint impedance was closer to 50 ohms without as much fiddling. i actually went back to the inverted V when i lost a support tree in a storm and never really felt like i was missing much.

honestly i tried SO2R for about two contests and went back to single radio. maybe im just not wired for it, kept losing my run frequency while tuning around on the second rig and then fumbling the exchange when a good mult showed up. some guys make it look effortless but i think theres a real learning curve that costs you more QSOs than you gain until you're really practiced at it. N1MM has decent SO2R support if you do decide to go that route, the alt-tab between radio focus works okay once you get used to it

yeah WWFF has a slightly different feel than POTA even though theyre similar on the surface. I think part of it is the international scope — WWFF references exist all over the world so when you get a DX hunter calling in from Europe for your little state park its kind of a cool moment. I had a guy from Germany call me when I was activating a wildlife refuge in Oregon last spring and that made the whole trip worth it honestly. on the boundary question I wouldnt lose sleep over it, just make sure for future ones you screenshot the reference map before you head out. some parks the boundaries are obvious, others are weirdly drawn and you can end up in a reference without even knowing there was one there. the WWFF finder app on your phone helps a lot for that if you havent already got it downloaded.

so ive been a tech for about two years now mostly doing 2m and some satellite stuff and i finally decided its time to just go for General so i can get on HF. i ordered the ARRL handbook but honestly its kind of overwhelming and im not sure if thats even the right study material for the exam itself or if its more of a reference thing. i downloaded the HamStudy app which seems decent but some of the questions about like... impedance matching and the electrical theory parts are just going over my head. i passed the tech exam pretty easily but this feels like a bigger jump than i expected. is there a certain section i should focus on more or is it pretty evenly spread out across the question pool? also not sure how long most people take to study for this, i dont want to rush it but i dont want to drag it out forever either

i was so nervous my first check-in i forgot my own callsign for a second, so dont feel bad. the thing that helped me was just writing out exactly what i was going to say on a sticky note before the net started. felt dumb but it worked. now i dont even think about it.

yeah messages in APRS are a bit different than beacons, you actually need to make sure the destination station is reachable and that you're getting their acks back. one thing to check is whether the station youre trying to message is RF-reachable or if theyre only showing up on aprs.fi because they're connected via APRS-IS on the internet side. if theyre igate-only you might need to make sure there's a two-way capable igate in your area that can pass the message back down to RF. also the D710 has some quirks with message retry settings, i think the default retry count is pretty low. dig into the menu and bump up the retries, i think mine is set to like 8 or 10. and double check that the callsign youre addressing the message to matches exactly including any SSID, even a missing -9 or whatever will make it fail silently

yeah the multi-tab juggling gets old fast, been there. what a lot of folks do is move over to something like DX4WIN or even just use the built-in cluster in Log4OM or Ham Radio Deluxe if you're logging with either of those — they pull spots directly and you can click a spot and it'll tune your radio automatically if you have CAT control set up, which the 7300 does really well. that alone changed everything for me because you stop losing 30 seconds flipping between windows. for filtering on DXwatch just set it to your bands, no point seeing 160m spots if you cant work it right now. you can also filter by mode. once you narrow it down to like 20m and 15m SSB or whatever you're working it becomes way more manageable. the QRZ lookup habit is good though, keep doing that, its how you learn the entities and start recognizing prefixes without having to look them up every time.

so ive been noticing for the past couple weeks that 20m seems totally dead in the afternoons when it used to be my go-to for working europe from here in the midwest, and then randomly at like 7pm local time it just opens up like crazy for maybe 45 minutes and then closes again. happened three days in a row last week. checked the solar flux index and it was sitting around 145-150 which honestly i thought would mean decent conditions but maybe im reading too much into it also 17m has been doing some weird stuff, had a solid opening to japan two mornings ago which i wasnt expecting at all, worked like 6 or 7 JA stations in a row and then nothing. my buddy down the road said he didnt hear anything on 17 that morning so either his antenna is the problem or i got lucky with some kind of short path thing. anyway just curious if others are seeing the same kind of inconsistent conditions or if somethings going on with the sun that i should be reading up on

jealous, i still havent done mine yet. what park is K-4566? might try to hunt you if im around tomorrow morning