Amanda Anderson

oh man don't sweat it, literally everyone does this at least once when they're starting out. the "please identify" thing — yeah net control probably heard the collision and was asking whoever keyed up to try again. best thing in that situation is to just wait a beat and then say your callsign so they know who was trying to get through. you dont have to make a big apology out of it, just id yourself and it's fine. the timing thing is real and it takes a while to get the feel for it. on a repeater there's usually a little tail after someone unkeys — that short bit of carrier before the squelch closes — and waiting for that plus maybe a one or two second pause is usually enough. some people count to two in their head before keying. also sometimes the repeater itself has a courtesy tone which is kind of your green light. if your net has one, wait for that before jumping in and you'll almost never step on anyone. just keep showing up, it gets way more natural after a few weeks.

10 contacts on your first one is solid man, some people struggle to get the 4 minimum especially if conditions are off. i do a lot of VA summits and yeah the tree situation can be rough. i just started carrying one of those arborist throw bags, makes getting the wire up way easier than chucking a rock tied to some paracord like i used to do the cell service up in that area is also just bad in general, i keep paper logs as backup for every activation now just out of habit

yeah the first few passes are pretty overwhelming honestly. the thing that clicked for me was to stop chasing the doppler so aggressively and just tune for your own downlink first, then worry about working somebody. once you can consistently hear yourself coming back down you kind of develop a feel for where everything sits in the passband relative to the center beacon. on the power question — 5 watts into a decent antenna is probably on the high end for AO-73 depending on elevation. the rule of thumb most people use is you should be able to hear yourself at roughly the same level as the transponder noise floor, if youre way louder than that youre probably stomping on the passband. AO-73 is pretty forgiving compared to something like FO-29 was but its still worth keeping the power down, especially near AOS and LOS when the path loss is worse and people crank it up and make a mess. try 2-3 watts and see if you still hear yourself, you probably will. gpredict with CAT control to the radio for doppler is a gamechanger if you haven't set that up yet. takes the uplink/downlink tracking off your plate and you can just focus on actually operating. takes a little bit of fiddling to get the offset right but once its dialed in its pretty much automatic.

TX EQ is worth spending an afternoon on for sure, even if you dont do any hardware stuff. just playing with the bass and presence settings through the menu made my audio reports way better on SSB. running a decent mic helps too obviously but the built in EQ on that radio is actually pretty flexible once you dig into it.

honestly the extra subbands are more useful than people give them credit for, at least on 40 meters where the general portion can get pretty crowded on weekends. the extra-only segment tends to be a bit quieter and you can actually find a clear frequency sometimes. 20m less so but still nice to have the option. as for the exam itself, yeah theres a chunk of it that most people just memorize without really getting the underlying math. the filter stuff, the transmission line calculations, a lot of the rf propagation theory — you dont have to derive anything, you just have to pick the right answer. i used the hamstudy.org flashcards and just drilled until i was hitting like 85% consistently and then took the exam. passed first try without being able to explain half of it at a real engineering level. that said some of it does stick after a while, especially if you start actually building stuff or getting into antenna theory more seriously. its not wasted knowledge even if you cram it.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state wildlife management area near me, KFF-something, i had to look up the reference number on the wwff.us site beforehand. been meaning to try this for ages after watching some youtube videos about it and figured it couldnt be much harder than SOTA except no hill climbing involved which my knees appreciate. ran about 3 hours with my kx3 and a random wire up in a tree, got maybe 65 contacts which felt pretty good for a first time. mostly 40m with a bit of 20m thrown in when 40 got weird in the afternoon. spotted myself on the wwff spotter page and that definitely helped, contacts started coming in pretty steady after that. couple things im not sure about though — do you have to submit your log to the wwff database separately or does it go through lotw somehow? i exported an adif from my logging app but wasnt totally sure where to send it. also is there a minimum contact requirement like SOTA has with the 4 contact thing? i saw 44 mentioned somewhere but wasnt sure if thats for a full activation credit or just for hunters to get a point or whatever. any help appreciated, planning to do another one next month if i can find a reference near my cabin up north