Amanda Anderson

cluster spots are kind of addictive once you get the hang of it honestly. i use HRD and it has the spot browser built in which is convenient. my only complaint with DXwatch is sometimes the site feels slow on my old laptop but thats probably just me. QRZ is great but one thing i didnt know for a while is you can look up a callsign and see if they have a bio or equipment info which sometimes helps you figure out if theyre running high power or if its worth trying to call them on a marginal path. anyway sounds like youre getting it figured out, FT8 plus cluster spots is honestly how i worked most of my DXCC entities in the last two years so its a solid combo

so ive been sitting here the last few nights spinning the dial on 40m and its just... dead? like way quieter than it was even a couple months ago. got a few contacts but nothing like what i used to pull in around this time last year. not sure if its me, the band, or just that fewer people are on these days. my antenna hasnt changed, same old dipole ive had for years. maybe its just a slow patch idk

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now, mostly do HF and some 2m meteor scatter, but EME has always been kind of this mythical thing to me. like i know it works, ive seen the spots on pskreporter and stuff, but i honestly dont know what kind of station you realistically need to make it happen on a budget that isnt insane. from what ive read you basically need a big dish or a yagi array, a low noise preamp right at the feedpoint, and a lot of power. but i dont know what low noise actually means in practice, like is 0.5dB NF actually necessary or is that overkill for someone just trying to work a few stations. im running a 2m transverter off my IC-7300 and i can get maybe 150w out which i know is not a lot for EME. i have room for maybe a 4x9el yagi array in the backyard, would that even be workable with JT65 or is it just a pipe dream at that power level. also curious what the actual experience is like, like how long does a contact typically take and is there a specific window when the moon is in a good position for north america. any info appreciated, ive been reading ON4KST logs for a while now and the activity seems real but im not sure if im just watching the big guns have all the fun.

so i passed my technician exam last thursday and got my callsign in the ULS a couple days later. been sitting on my baofeng for like two weeks waiting for it to show up lol. anyway i finally keyed up on the local 2m repeater this morning and this older guy came back to me right away, we talked for maybe 10 minutes about signal reports and what radio i was using and stuff. honestly my hands were shaking the whole time which i did not expect at all. he gave me a 5 by 9 which i thought was being generous but whatever. just wanted to share because i was so nervous about that first transmission and it turned out totally fine. anyone else remember their first QSO being weirdly nerve-wracking?

yeah RF into the GPIO is a real thing, ask me how i know lol. i had a pi 3B running a rotator controller and anytime i hit the key on 20m with more than like 50 watts the thing would just freeze up. turned out i had totally unshielded jumper wires running like 18 inches from the relay board to the pi header and they were basically acting as a little antenna. once i switched to shielded cable and added some ferrite chokes on the power leads it got way better. still occasionally gets a bit weird at 100w but its stable enough that i just live with it. the MQTT to home assistant thing is great, i do the same thing. i have a dashboard that shows me band conditions, what mode im in, SWR reading from my tuner — all on a tablet on the wall. it genuinely feels like a proper shack now instead of a pile of random gear. the pi is doing a lot less than it looks like honestly, most of the MQTT messages are tiny and the CPU just sits there idle most of the time. if you want to keep things really separate the arduino approach for relay control isnt a bad idea — you can talk to it over serial from the pi and the arduino handles the timing-critical stuff while the pi does the network side. best of both worlds and the arduino is more forgiving about weird voltage spikes anyway.

the stranded copper from extension cords is fine electrically, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. but 25 feet apex in inverted-V is probably compressing the radiation angle and also slightly shortening the electrical length compared to a flat dipole — the inverted-V legs being angled down like that actually means the antenna acts a bit shorter than it measures. try adding maybe 6 inches to each leg before you do anything else and see if the dip shifts down toward where you want it. also — and this might sound dumb but ive been burned by it — are you sure your feedline isnt picking up RF? stranded wire at the feedpoint with no choke balun can cause the coax braid to become part of the antenna and that'll mess with your SWR readings in weird ways. a couple ferrite beads or a simple 1:1 choke wound on a toroid right at the feedpoint fixes that and sometimes completely changes the SWR picture. worth ruling out before you keep trimming.

also just double check your path isnt doing something weird. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine but some areas the local coordinator actually wants you to drop the WIDE1-1 and just run WIDE2-1 or even WIDE2-2 depending on digi density. wouldnt explain the igate issue but its worth knowing. what part of the country are you in roughly?

europe on 5w thats awesome. i did my first pota activation like two months ago and i was so stressed about getting the 10 contacts lol but honestly once the spotting network picks you up it just rolls. did you self spot or did someone else do it for you

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend up on W4T/SU-001 and i was honestly dreading it because ive heard people say the contacts can be slow but i had my pile up within like 10 minutes of setting up. brought my KX2 and a homebrew linked dipole strung between two trees and it just worked. only had 5w out and was still hitting europe on 20m which i still cant quite believe. took me forever to find a decent operating spot away from the trees enough to get the wire up without snagging everything but once i was set it was smooth. definitely doing this again, probably try a winter activation next month if the weather cooperates

so i finally did my first activation up on a local summit last weekend, been putting it off forever because i kept thinking i needed more gear or better antenna or whatever. anyway i just threw the KX2 in my pack with a 40m EFHW and hiked up. took me like 45 minutes to find a spot that wasnt completely surrounded by trees and even then i had to get creative with the wire. made my 4 contacts but man it was rough. i was barely getting signal reports above 55 and one guy asked me three times for my callsign. wind was picking up and i had the mic too close to my face i think. still counts as an activation though right? 4 is 4. already planning the next one with a better antenna setup maybe a linked dipole or something

yeah the touchy regen control thing is just kind of the nature of the beast with these circuits but there are some tricks. a lot of builders use a dual-gang pot where one gang is a coarse control and the other does fine adjustment — but honestly the easier fix is what you mentioned, putting a resistor in series with the pot. try something in the 4.7k to 10k range and just see how it spreads the curve, you might have to experiment a bit. some guys also use a vernier drive on the pot knob which helps a ton for usability even if it doesn't actually change the circuit behavior. shielding the coil is a mixed bag. if you're getting hand capacitance effects then some partial shielding can help but yeah you'll trade off some Q and sensitivity. i'd get the regen control sorted first before messing with that. also what's your feedback winding ratio looking like? sometimes the oscillation threshold being super sharp is partly a coil geometry thing.

so ive been at this for about 8 months now. started completely from scratch back in the spring and honestly 5wpm felt impossible at first but i got through it using the Koch method and just grinding through the LCWO website every morning before work. got up to about 10-12wpm and felt pretty good about myself. then somewhere around 13wpm things just... stopped. i can copy maybe 70% of what im hearing but then i get behind on a character and it all falls apart. its like my brain just cant keep up and once i miss one letter i panic and miss the next three trying to figure out what the first one was. does this happen to everyone or am i doing something wrong here im trying to get to 20wpm because i really want to actually get on the air and have a real CW QSO, not just the painfully slow ones where both ops are clearly suffering through it. any tips from people who have actually done this would be really appreciated. been a tech for two years and just got my general last month so im motivated to actually use HF properly

so ive been using N1MM for contests for a couple years now and it works great for that, no complaints really, but for general everyday logging its kind of a pain to set up and i always feel like im fighting it when im not actually in a contest. someone at the club mentioned Log4OM and i downloaded it but havent really dug into it yet. my current workflow is kind of a mess honestly — i run WSJT-X for FT8 and FT4, that logs to its own ADIF file, then i manually import that into N1MM every so often which is annoying and i always worry im creating duplicates. theres gotta be a better way to handle this. does Log4OM talk to WSJT-X any better or is it basically the same situation also do people just run two separate logging programs or is there a clean way to have one master log that everything feeds into. ive read about using UDP packets from WSJT-X but havent actually gotten that working yet

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. i looked it up and apparently you have to take a test? i dont really know where to start with studying or what the test is actually like. i heard theres an app or something but im not sure if thats enough or if i need a book too. also is the test hard? i did okay in school but its been like 15 years since ive had to study for anything lol. any advice would be appreciated, i just dont want to show up and embarrass myself

the feedline length can actually affect what you see on the analyzer depending on where you're measuring from — if you're checking at the radio end of the coax rather than right at the feedpoint you might be seeing some transformation from the line itself. not always a huge deal but worth knowing. i ran into something similar with my 80m dipole and thought something was wrong for like two weeks before someone pointed that out to me. anyway 1.4:1 is fine, go make contacts

yeah the flea market is definitely smaller than it used to be but honestly still worth it imo. picked up a barely used 706 for like 280 bucks two years ago so you never know what you'll find. the vendor halls are more crowded but theres still good deals if you get there early saturday morning before everything gets picked over

Don't worry, we all hit plateaus! Consistent daily practice is key, even short sessions can be highly effective if done regularly. Try increasing your character speed to 20 WPM but keep the Farnsworth spacing slow - this forces your brain to recognize characters at speed while giving you time to process.

so ive been on SSB for about two years now mostly on 40m and 20m and i keep getting reports that my audio sounds bassy or muffled, occasionally someone tells me i sound fine but more often than not people are asking me to speak up or say my audio is muddy. my mic is the stock heil that came bundled with nothing special, just plugged straight into the front of the 7300. i run the comp at maybe 4-5 and the rf power around 80-90 watts. i feel like ive read everything about this but nothing really clicks for me. what i dont get is how some guys sound absolutely crisp and present on the band and others sound like theyre talking into a coffee can. is it mic placement? the EQ settings? i messed with the bass and treble on the radio a bit but i honestly dont know what im doing there. ive heard people talk about cutting the low end below like 300hz but i dont really understand how to do that on the icom. and whats the deal with ALC — mine is always pegged and someone told me thats bad but i dont know why exactly. anyway if anyone has dialed in their audio on a 7300 or just has general SSB tips id appreciate it, been bugging me for a while

Welcome to the hobby! All ham radio users should learn these codes to effectively communicate with other hams. A lack of Q code knowledge also can lead other hams to view you as inexperienced. Don't worry though - we all started where you are. The ARRL has excellent reference materials, and there are smartphone apps that can help you drill the common ones.

i was in the exact same spot not too long ago honestly. the one that confused me forever was QRN because i kept mixing it up with QRM, QRM is man made interference like other signals bleeding in and QRN is natural stuff like static from lightning and weather. took me embarassingly long to keep those two straight lol. also hear PSE a lot which is just please and TU is thank you, those arent Q codes just abbreviations people use specially on CW but they bleed over into phone sometimes too

Check your balun placement and ground connections. A current balun gives you extra protection from getting RF on your coax, but if it's saturating or poorly grounded, it can affect bandwidth. Also verify your coax isn't contributing to the issue - measure SWR right at the balun terminals.

You did fine, don't stress it. When net control asks for traffic it just means formal written messages being passed using the NTS format, most local nets have zero traffic most nights and everyone just stays quiet exactly like you did. You only speak up if you actually have a message to pass to someone. The mobile thing is just a courtesy so net control knows your signal might vary or drop out, some nets ask you to identify as mobile or portable so they know what to expect. Not every net requires it but its a nice habit. Honestly the best way to learn net procedures is just to keep showing up and listening, you'll pick up the rhythm pretty fast. You're doing great for three weeks in.

the audio level thing is almost always the culprit with VARA, people set it too hot thinking more is better and it just destroys the signal. in Winlink Express go to settings and open the VARA FM modem configuration, theres a sound card tab and you want your transmit audio level set so the ALC on your radio is barely moving if at all. a lot of folks aim for like 50-60% in the VARA audio slider and leave it there. overdrive on FM is particularly nasty because the gateway on the other end has to decode that mess. also 40 miles on VARA FM is doable but you're kinda pushing it depending on terrain. have you tried looking in the RMS list for something closer? the gateway map in Winlink Express shows whats around you and you can sort by distance. sometimes theres a closer node somebody set up that isnt well advertised.

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. ok so for CQ WW the exchange is pretty simple once you get it — you send your signal report (everyone just sends 59 or 599, dont overthink it) and then your CQ zone. you can look up your zone on the CQ zone map, its based on your geographic location. for most of the US its zone 3, 4, or 5 depending where you are. my advice for a first timer is honestly just do search and pounce to start. tune around, find someone calling CQ contest, wait for a gap, throw your call in. if they come back to you great, log it and move on. you'll start to get the rhythm pretty quick. the speed thing does feel overwhelming at first but you get used to picking out calls after a while, and most contest ops will QRS a bit if you ask. Field Day is a completely different vibe, much more casual and a good time if you can find a local club doing it. CQ WW is more cutthroat but thats what makes it fun. just go in with zero pressure and see how many contacts you can make, dont worry about your score the first time.

honestly the memorize the pool approach works fine for passing but youre going to kick yourself later when someone asks you something about Q factor and you just stare at them. i did it both ways — took my tech by grinding answers and then when i went for extra i actually spent time with the ARRL handbook going through the theory sections. took me way longer but i feel like i actually understand what my rig is doing now, at least somewhat. the pi network stuff clicks pretty fast once you realize its just impedence matching and you can visualize what its doing to the signal. the really rough bits for me were the transistor biasing questions and some of the digital mode protocol stuff. as for privileges, i mostly use the extra segments for 40 and 75 meters where it gets less crowded, especially early morning. whether thats worth it depends how much you operate i guess.