Rebecca Davis

yeah the Farnsworth thing the other guy mentioned is legit, that was big for me too. one thing i'll add that nobody told me until way later -- try actually getting on the air sooner than you think you're ready. i waited forever because i didnt want to embarass myself and when i finally did my first CW QSO at like 8wpm the other guy was super patient and it was way less scary than i built it up to be. the CW community is generally pretty good about slow operators especially if you send QRS at the start. also just sending with a straight key or paddle yourself even if youre just practicing helps more than only copying i think, something about having to produce the code makes you internalize it differently

So ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and mostly its been working fine, running a Mobilinkd TNC3 into my Baofeng UV-5R which i know isnt ideal but it gets the job done. The problem started maybe two weeks ago where my position on aprs.fi is showing me like 40 miles northwest of where i actually am. The packets are definitely getting out because i can see them being digipeated and hitting the igate, but the coordinates in the packet are just wrong. I checked the GPS lock on my phone (im using APRSDroid on Android) and it shows my correct position fine in other apps. Thought maybe it was a datum issue or something but honestly i dont know enough about that to even troubleshoot it properly. Tried power cycling everything, re-pairing the Mobilinkd, nothing changed. Anyone run into this before? Is there some setting in APRSDroid that controls how the GPS data gets formatted into the packet?

yeah the K index spiking will kill 15 and 10 fast, especially if you're trying to work into the pacific. what i usually do is check space weather dot com in the morning and look at both the flux and the estimated planetary A index for the day. if the A index is above like 20 i dont even bother with the high bands much, just drop down to 17 or 20 and call it a day. dxmaps is fine, i use it too, but pskreporter is actually really useful if youre doing digital modes because you can see real time where signals are actually being decoded and get a feel for which paths are open. even if youre doing phone or cw you can kind of infer whats happening from the digital spots. the flux being at 145 is pretty solid for this part of the cycle honestly, you should be seeing some good openings on 10 even, just gotta catch it when the K settles down

ok so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and i figure ill just ask because im not getting anywhere reading specs sheets. my situation is a suburban lot, maybe 60x120 feet, typical neighborhood with houses on both sides. i currently have an inverted V dipole fed with coax up about 30 feet at the apex, resonant on 40m, been using it for about two years now and its fine but im wondering if im missing something. a buddy of mine keeps telling me a quarter wave vertical with a good radial field would crush my dipole for DX because of the lower takeoff angle. and i get that in theory, but also my lot is basically all clay soil and i dont exactly have room to lay down 60 or 100 radials. so is a mediocre vertical going to actually beat a decent inverted V or am i going to regret ripping everything down to try something different. i mostly work DX casual, not contesting, and i do some rag chew on 40 too. anyone actually compared these side by side? not looking for simulation data, i mean real world use.

so i've had this 857D for probably 6 years now and always ran it stock because i was worried about screwing something up but last month i finally just did the extended TX mod and honestly it was way less scary than i built it up to be in my head. just a couple diodes on the main board, took maybe 20 minutes if you count the time i spent staring at the service manual convincing myself i had the right pads. while i had it apart i also went ahead and did the filter mod for the IF, swapped in a 500hz CW filter that i had sitting in a box forever. big difference on crowded bands, should have done that ages ago. the radio feels like a different rig now on 40m when things get busy. anyway i guess my question is — has anyone done the fan mod on these? mine runs pretty hot on digital modes and i've read about people replacing the fan with a quieter higher CFM unit but i cant find a consistent answer on whether the stock thermistor circuit handles a different fan okay or if you need to mess with that too. dont want to cook the finals just to get a quieter fan noise.

so ive been licensed for about three years now mostly doing HF and some local 2m stuff, but ive been watching videos of people working SO-50 and some of the linear transponder birds and i finally decided to try it out this weekend. got a decent dual band HT and a arrow antenna and figured id give AO-73 a shot since everyone says its beginner friendly. heres where im confused though — i understand the concept of the transponder being inverted, so USB on uplink becomes LSB on downlink or whatever, but when i actually try to tune while the bird is passing i just hear a mess. like i can hear signals but i cant figure out if im hearing myself or other stations. and the doppler correction thing is driving me crazy, do i need to be constantly retuning the whole time or is there some trick to it. im using gpredict on the laptop for tracking which seems fine but its a lot to manage between that and the radio and the antenna and trying not to fall over pointing at the sky any advice from people who have actually done this would be great, im clearly missing something fundamental here

so ive been a general for about two years now and honestly i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with Extra. like i use maybe 10% of what general gives me as it is, mostly just HF and some 2m stuff. but something about having the full ticket is just... i dunno, it bugs me that i dont have it. the thing thats holding me back is people keep telling me the theory section is really rough. like the impedance matching stuff and the transistor amplifier questions and whatever else is on there. i was never great at math, got through the general okay but that felt more like memorization honestly. is Extra actually hard or are people just being dramatic about it. and does the extra HF band access actually matter in practice or is it mostly just bragging rights at this point

for the exam honestly just hammer the question pool. HamStudy.org or whatever app you prefer, just do practice tests over and over until you're consistently hitting 85%+ and you'll be fine. the gordon west book is decent background but the actual exam questions are finite and you can just learn them. the math questions tend to intimidate people but theres only a handful of them and if you know the formulas you can usually back-calculate the answer even if you dont fully understand why it works that way the reactance stuff is worth understanding at least a little because it actually matters when you start messing with antennas on HF, but for passing the test you dont need to go super deep, just know the basic relationships as for the apartment situation, look into magnetic loop antennas or even just a random wire run inside if you have high ceilings. ive talked to guys running indoor loops from apartments that were actually making contacts, not great DX but it works. also 40m in the evening is genuinely where i'd start if you want to actually hear people talking, the band is usually pretty alive around 7.200 and nearby depending on conditions

so ive been using N1MM for a while now mostly for contests and it does what it does really well, dont get me wrong, but outside of contest season i find myself fighting it a bit for everyday logging. the interface feels like its designed for someone who has 6 monitors and a paddle in each hand, which honestly maybe thats fine if thats your thing anyway a buddy at the club keeps pushing me toward Log4OM and i downloaded it last week and been poking around. the general day to day logging stuff feels a lot more comfortable, way easier to just log a random 40m QSO without it feeling like im setting up for a sprint. but now im wondering how well it plays with WSJT-X because i do a fair amount of FT8 especially in winter when the bands get weird and i dont want to lose that UDP integration or have it be a pain to set up has anyone run Log4OM as their main logger with WSJT-X feeding into it and then switched over to N1MM just for contest weekends? wondering if juggling two loggers is actually workable or if i should just bite the bullet and learn to live with N1MM full time. also curious if theres a way to keep the ADIFs in sync without it turning into a mess

that wall around 10wpm is super common, almost everybody hits it. whats happening is your brain is still sounding out individual letters instead of hearing whole words as a unit, and there's kind of a ceiling on how fast you can do that consciously. the jump to 20wpm really only happens when you stop thinking and start just... recognizing. like how you dont read individual letters when you read a book. what helped me more than anything was listening to fast code even when i couldnt copy it. like just having a 20wpm qso playing in the background while i was doing something else. sounds weird but after a few weeks my brain started picking out words here and there. also the farnsworth method where the letters themselves are sent at a higher speed but with longer gaps between them — that trains your ears to recognize the character sound without relying on the slower timing as a crutch. took me probably 8 months to feel comfortable at 20 but i wasnt super consistent about practice. if you do 20-30 min every single day you can probably do it faster than that. the consistency matters way more than doing long sessions occasionally.

not a dumb question at all, this confuses a lot of new hams. so yeah the sequential process is exactly what you described — the FCC works through a pool of unassigned callsigns in order and just gives you the next available one for your license class and call district. you'll usually see it show up in the ULS within a week or two of your exam session being submitted, sometimes faster. the vanity system lets you apply for a specific callsign as long as its available and matches your license class. technicians can only hold certain formats, same with general and extra — extras have access to shorter 1x2 and 2x1 format calls which is why a lot of people upgrade first before doing vanity. as for cost, the FCC started charging a $35 fee for new licenses and vanity applications a couple years ago, so yes there is a fee now unfortunately. my honest advice — just take the sequential call for now, get on the air, and then once you decide if you want to upgrade to general or extra, you can think about vanity then. a lot of people get attached to their first call anyway. i still use mine from 1987 and never bothered changing it.

so i've been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has like three antennas in his yard and it always looked interesting. i finally decided to just go for it and take the technician exam but honestly i dont even know where to start. there's so much stuff online and some of it looks really outdated? i found one site with questions but it said 2018 on it somewhere so i dont know if those are still valid. also does anyone actually memorize all the answers or do you study the concepts behind them. feels like there's a lot of electrical theory stuff i'm never gonna fully understand. been out of school for like 20 years so the math isnt exactly fresh in my mind. is there a good guide someone recommends or maybe an app or something

i was in the exact same spot about 8 months ago, zero background in any of this. i used the Gordon West technician book which i found at a hamfest for like two dollars, went through it pretty casually over maybe three weeks, then did practice tests on hamStudy for another week and passed first try. honestly the hardest part for me was the antenna and propagation questions, just because i had no frame of reference for any of it. but once you look up a few youtube videos explaining how radio waves actually work it clicks pretty fast. dont overthink it, the tech license is genuinely not that hard

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and ive been just kind of ignoring the whole QSL confirmation thing but i keep seeing people talk about it and i think i need to figure this out before i lose track of all my contacts in my log from what i can tell there's like three different ways to confirm contacts? there's LoTW which is the ARRL one, eQSL which is a different website, and then actual physical cards you mail to each other or through a bureau. but i dont really understand how they relate to each other or if one is better than the other or if i need all three i applied for my LoTW certificate thing a few weeks ago and got it set up in WSJT-X which apparently does it automatically for FT8 which is most of what im doing right now. so does that mean im already confirming contacts without doing anything else? and do i need to bother with the other methods too also what even is the bureau, people keep mentioning it and i have no idea what it means in this context. sorry if these are dumb questions just trying to wrap my head around it all

so ive been running a 40m dipole inverted-V style for about two years now, apex at around 35 feet which i know isnt ideal but its what i can do with the trees i have. it works fine for local and regional stuff, decent on 7.200 area but anything over about 1500 miles gets inconsistent. i get into the midwest from the southeast pretty reliably but the west coast is hit or miss and dx is mostly miss unless conditions are screaming. been thinking about putting up a vertical, probably something like a trap vertical or maybe just a dedicated 40m quarter wave with a decent radial field. read a bunch about how verticals have lower takeoff angles which should help with dx but then you hear just as many guys saying their dipole blows away their vertical and im going back and forth on this. part of the problem is i dont have a lot of room to lay down a good radial field either, maybe 20-25 radials at 16 feet each which i know isnt textbook. anybody actually done a real a/b comparison on 40m between these two? not looking for theoretical stuff, just what you actually heard on the band.

Emergency communications may always fall back to the 'least common denominator' - keeping it simple with analog. That said, DMR's efficiency is impressive and the audio quality is fantastic when it works.

I had almost the exact same experience on my first one. Battery connector issue too, mine was the XT60 on my pack just wasnt seated all the way and i didnt notice. After that i started putting a little piece of electrical tape over the connector once its plugged in, dumb simple fix but it hasnt happened again. The wind thing I still havent fully solved honestly, some summits are just miserable no matter what you do.

so ive been doing a lot of hilltop activations lately mostly on 2m and 70cm and i've been going back and forth on whether to bother lugging a yagi up there or just stick with my Diamond X50 which i've been using for years and honestly works pretty well from a decent elevation anyway. the thing is i had a buddy who brought his 9 element yagi on a recent outing and yeah ok the difference was noticeable especially working some of the weaker stations but it was also kind of a pain to deal with in the wind and getting it pointed right takes time. i guess my question is whether people who do this regularly think the gain tradeoff is worth it for casual portable ops or am i just overthinking it and the collinear is fine for 90% of what ill be doing up there i should mention im mostly doing FM simplex and the occasional linked repeater, not contesting or anything serious like that

they're really three separate things and yeah it can feel like a lot when you're starting out. short version is LoTW is what the ARRL uses so if you're chasing awards like DXCC it basically has to be LoTW, a lot of DX stations and contest stations won't count a contact without it. eQSL is more casual and some people love it but certain award programs dont accept it. paper cards are kind of their own thing, some folks still really value them especially for rarer contacts or DX, and sending one unsolicited is almost always appreciated even if you dont get one back. the certificate setup for LoTW is a pain the first time, not gonna lie. but once it's done it's done. there's a pretty good walkthrough on the ARRL site and if you get stuck post back here with the specific error and someone will know what it is, ive seen most of the common ones come through on here before. as far as uploading, most logging software like Log4OM or WSJT-X can do both at once so once you get it configured it's not really extra work. you just hit upload and it goes everywhere.

I had the same issue with my Pluto setup. The problem was my home router's QoS settings prioritizing other traffic. Make sure you configure your router to give priority to the Pi's traffic, especially UDP packets.

yeah the listening thing is huge and most people dont do it nearly enough. ive worked a lot of rare ones over the years and the single biggest mistake i see is guys who clearly havent figured out where the DX is actually pulling from before they start calling. the operator tells you the split but that's like a 10khz range sometimes, you gotta narrow it down yourself by watching who gets picked. one thing i'd add to your suffix-only tip — it depends heavily on band conditions and how big the pileup is. on a really huge pileup like a genuine top-10 most wanted entity, sometimes just your suffix gets lost because there are 40 other guys with the same suffix. in those cases i've had good luck going full callsign but saying it once very cleanly, good mic audio, not too fast. on CW obviously you just keep it tight, no prosigns, no extra garbage. the other thing that doesnt get talked about enough is timing relative to propagation peaks. if you're chasing something transoceanic, there's usually a window of maybe 15-20 minutes where your signal path is optimum and the DX station's signal to you is loudest. that's when you go hard, not when the band sounds marginal. ive seen guys pound away for hours and then quit right before their window opens up.

the WSJT-X plus N1MM thing is doable but you kind of have to decide whos in charge of the radio. i tried it once during a mixed mode sprint and it was more trouble than it was worth, kept getting into this situation where N1MM thought it had CAT control and WSJT-X was also trying to do things and the rig just sat there confused. there are guides online about setting up a virtual COM port splitter to let both programs share the serial connection but i never got it totally stable on my machine. for actual FT8 contesting though like FT Roundup or whatever, most people just run WSJT-X by itself and use its built in log and then export after. its not perfect but trying to tightly integrate the two during a live contest seems like a recipe for something breaking at the worst time

so ive been messing around with an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now, mostly doing aircraft stuff and occasionally poking around the ham bands just to see whats out there. honestly the dongle has been great for what it is, no complaints considering i paid like $30 for it. but ive been reading more about the RSP1A and the specs look a lot better on paper — 1kHz to 2GHz, 12-bit ADC vs the 8-bit on the RTL, better dynamic range etc. the price isnt insane either, like $120ish depending where you find it. question is whether the real-world difference is actually noticeable for general HF monitoring and stuff like that or if im just going to end up with a more expensive dongle that still needs a good antenna to do anything useful. i already have a decent wire antenna out back so thats not the issue. been using SDR# mostly but also tried SDRangel a bit. anyone made that jump and have a take on it?

Fellow QRPers, I'm trying to get better battery life out of my portable setup. My KX2 seems to drain my 4400mAh LiFePO4 pack much faster than expected - maybe 3-4 hours of casual CW operation on 20m. Meanwhile, my friend's G90 runs all day on similar power. Any tips on optimizing current draw? I've turned off the display backlight and lowered RF gain when possible, but wondering if I'm missing something obvious. Planning some POTA activations this spring and want to maximize my operating time!

Welcome to EmComm! Start small with your local ARES group's weekly nets first. Take part in nets, learn to relay messages, and participate in public service events. Get comfortable with basic message handling before jumping into the big exercises. Your current equipment is fine to start - don't let gear worry hold you back from participating.