Ashley Wilson27

haha yeah when i first got into this it seemed overwhelming too. honestly the short answer is you dont have to do all three, but each one serves a little different purpose so its worth understanding them. LoTW is run by the ARRL and its basically the gold standard for award credit - if you ever want DXCC or WAS through the ARRL you'll need it. it takes a little setup because you have to get a certificate and go through their process but once its running you just upload your ADIF log and it matches automatically with other LoTW users. pretty painless once its configured. eQSL is more casual, lots of people use it especially for casual digital confirmations, and the interface is pretty easy. some awards accept it, some dont. its fine but its not LoTW. physical cards are kind of a tradition thing - some people love getting them and sending them, some people find it a hassle. if you work a lot of DX you'll probably get cards mailed to you whether you like it or not lol. i'd say at minimum get LoTW set up even if you dont care about awards right now, future you might care and you cant go back and confirm contacts you already made if the other person isnt around anymore

yeah theres a ton of them but honestly you only really need maybe 20 or so for day to day stuff. the ones youll hear constantly are QSL (i confirm / did you receive ok), QRM which is man made interference, QRN is natural static and noise, QTH is your location, QRZ means whos calling me, QSY is change frequency, and QRP if someone mentions that they usually mean low power operation even though technically it just means reduce power. oh and QSO just means a contact or conversation. on phone most people will actually say the codes out loud like theyll say "my QTH is Denver" or "lots of QRM on this frequency" and it sounds totally normal after a while. on CW obviously you just send the letters. theres also a bunch of shorthand thats not technically Q codes like 73 meaning best regards and 88 which is love and kisses, 55 is good luck, stuff like that. 73 is the one youll hear at the end of basically every contact so learn that one first

had almost the exact same thing happen to mine last spring, though mine would also throw an error code before the reboot which yours apparently isnt doing. ended up being a failed electrolytic cap on the PA board — one of the filter caps had gone high-ESR and wasnt holding voltage steady when the PA started pulling current. tech found it pretty quick once he got in there with an ESR meter. if youre not comfortable opening it yourself honestly just find a local tech, a lot of the icom authorized repair places arent that backed up and it probably wont cost a fortune to diagnose. just the diagnosis at least tells you if its worth fixing or if its gonna be cheaper to find another used one.

so i finally stopped talking about doing a summit activation and actually did one. took the ft-818 and a homebrew linked dipole up to a local summit, nothing crazy, like a 45 minute hike. set up took longer than i expected because the wind was being annoying and the antenna kept wanting to fall over. ended up just leaning one end against a rock. made 12 contacts on 40m and a couple on 20 before the battery started getting low. honestly kind of addicted now. the whole experience of just being up there working people with this tiny little radio is hard to explain. also realized i need a better way to carry the mast, mine is this telescoping fiberglass thing and it rattled around in my pack the whole way up which was annoying. anyway if anyone else has been on the fence about trying it just go do it, the chasers are super patient especially with new activators

i had almost the exact same thing happen with my first 20m dipole, ended up resonant like 400 khz high and just left it for months before i bothered fixing it lol. the tuner thing works but once i actually trimmed it to where i wanted it the difference was noticeable, at least to me. could be placebo who knows also 20 feet is low for 40m, youre gonna get more of a cloud warmer pattern than anything useful for dx but for regional stuff and nets it'll work fine. good first build though, way better than staying on a rubber duck forever

WWFF does have its own portal, wwff.us for the US side of things, and yeah you do need to set up an account over there separately from POTA. The logging is a bit different in that you upload an ADIF just like POTA but they have their own system for processing it. One thing worth knowing is that a lot of references overlap — if youre activating a KFF reference it often counts toward WWFF at the same time, so you can get credit in both programs with the same activation which is pretty sweet. Activity level is definitely lower than POTA, ill be honest about that. But the hunters who are into it are really dedicated and youll often get called by Europeans and other DX stations which i always enjoy. Just make sure you announce on the WWFF spotting network or even just the regular POTA spots since a lot of people watch both. Your KX3 and dipole setup will be more than enough, i do most of mine with a similar setup.

i just did mine like two months ago so this is fresh for me. i used hamstudy dot org pretty much exclusively, just did like 20-30 questions every night before bed for maybe ten days. passed with only a couple wrong. the test itself was way less stressful than i expected, its 35 questions and you need 26 right so theres some wiggle room. dont stress too much about the formula questions if theyre confusing you, just make sure you know the ones that show up a lot and you can maybe drop a few of those and still be fine. look up an arrl exam session near you or honestly some clubs do them at hamfests which is kind of fun for your first time going to one of those

so ive been putting off building my own dipole for like two years now and finally just did it last weekend. used some 14 gauge stranded wire i had laying around from an old extension cord project, cut each leg to about 16.5 feet for 40m, center insulator is just a piece of pvc i drilled out, and im feeding it with some RG-8X i had left over from another project. got it up in an inverted V configuration, apex is maybe 25 feet up tied to my chimney and the ends slope down to about 8 feet off the ground on each side. swr is sitting around 1.8:1 at the bottom of the band and creeps up to like 2.6 by the top of 40m. i expected it to be a bit off but not sure if thats normal or if i messed up my feedpoint connections. i just twisted the shield to one leg and center to the other and taped everything with self amalgamating tape. no balun or anything. should i be worried about that or just trim the wire a bit and call it done

yeah ive done basically this setup twice now for RACES stuff. 100ah lifepo4 is plenty for an ic-7300 if you're not running it at full 100w output the whole time — like if you're doing mostly digital modes at 30-40w you're probably pulling 8-10 amps transmitting and maybe 2-3 at idle. do the math and you've got way more headroom than you'd think. the laptops are the wildcard honestly, depends if anyone has power bricks drawing 65+ watts each. i'd budget like 4-5 amps per laptop at the 12v rail through a cheap inverter or get one of those guys to bring a laptop with a usb-c pd charger so you can run it off a powerfilm or whatever directly. if the wx is good and you've got even a 100w panel in decent sun youre probably net positive or at worst breaking even. i wouldnt bring the honda unless you're paranoid about clouds rolling in or the exercise goes long. maybe throw a second smaller AGM in the truck as backup without dragging the generator out — saves fuel hassle and its quieter which the site owners usually appreciate

yeah im planning on going, me and a couple guys from the local club are carpooling over Saturday morning. bring cash because half the vendors never have a square reader or whatever. last year there was this one table that had a ton of old Kenwood stuff, most of it was beat to hell but there were some good finds in there if you dug around. not sure about the fox hunt though, i think the club that ran it had some drama and might not be doing it this year

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think im overcomplicating it but here goes. i have a 6-position antenna switch (the manual kind, big rotary knob) and i keep forgetting to switch antennas when i move between bands. like ill be on 40m and then jump to 2m for a net and wonder why my signal sounds terrible and yeah its because im still on the HF vertical. so i started building this thing with an Arduino Uno and a relay board — the idea being that when i change bands on the radio the arduino reads the band data output from my IC-7300 (it puts out band voltage on the ACC port) and then fires the right relay to switch the antenna. seemed simple enough but now im deep in interrupt handling and debounce timers and honestly questioning whether i should just buy one of those commercial band decoders instead. anybody done something like this? is there a library or sketch floating around that already handles the 7300 band voltage stuff because i feel like ive seen something on github but cant track it down again. also wondering if a raspberry pi would be made more sense here since i want to eventually log things and maybe display current antenna on a little screen.

honestly i went through the exact same thing and what finally made me stop tweaking was getting a websdr up on a second screen while i was transmitting. hearing yourself is a completely different thing than guessing from reports. you'll figure out in about 30 seconds if your audio is bassy or thin or whatever. changed my whole approach. also the PR-40 is kind of a dark mic to begin with so yeah a little cut in the low mids is probably not wrong

dont forget food and water lol. sounds obvious but i showed up to a six hour deployment once with nothing and was absolutely miserable by hour three. now i keep a couple cliff bars and a small water bottle in the kit as kind of a rule. also a basic first aid kit, nothing fancy, just band-aids and advil, some sites actually require you to have one. your setup honestly sounds pretty solid for what it is. the one thing id maybe think about is some kind of weatherproofing for the connectors if youre operating outside in the rain, even just some self amalgamating tape. lost like an hour once troubleshooting what turned out to be water in a PL-259

yeah that feeling doesnt really go away honestly. i built my first QRP rig back in the early 2000s, a little 40m crystal controlled thing, and i still remember the first contact. guy was in florida, i was in vermont, and i was running maybe 400mw into a dipole in my backyard. kept asking for repeats but we got through it and i logged it and just sat there kind of stunned. for your next build if you want a vfo the SW-40+ is a classic though i think small wonder labs isnt around anymore so youre looking at used kits. the uBITX is a completely different animal, its not a kit exactly but theres a lot of building involved getting it into an enclosure and sorted out. if you want something really satisfying to build yourself, look into the NorCal 40A or even just grab the EMRFD book and start from a schematic. that said for bang for buck right now a lot of people are pretty happy with the Xiegu G90 if you want a real vfo rig that you can also take portable, though thats not really a kit build obviously. the antenna situation you described is basically how it works. QRP rewards a good antenna way more than high power does in my experience. get that wire up as high as you can and youll be surprised what 5w can do.

the short answer is no, you dont have to use them every single time, but theres a reason they exist. NATO phonetics are standardized so that anyone anywhere in the world regardless of language knows exactly what you mean. Frank, Freddie, Florida — those could all get confused especially when conditions are rough. Foxtrot is Foxtrot, nobody's going to hear that and think anything else. on a casual ragchew with a strong signal yeah most people just say their call normally and thats fine, nobody's going to come down on you for it. but in nets, especially anything formal or emcomm related, net control is going to expect standard NATO phonetics and honestly they're right to enforce it. the whole point of a net is structured communication and if everyone starts making up their own phonetics it gets messy fast. your net control wasnt being pedantic, that's just good net discipline. id say get in the habit of using them properly anyway, it becomes second nature pretty quick and then when you actually need them in a pile-up or when signals are rough you just do it automatically without thinking

i dont know whats wrong with me lately, i used to get on 40m every night after dinner and now i just kind of... dont. set up the rig last tuesday and just stared at it for like ten minutes then went and watched tv instead. not sure if its the bands being garbage or just me being lazy. propagation has been weird too which doesnt help. anyway just curious if anyone else goes through phases like this or if im just losing interest which i hope is not the case because ive been doing this for 11 years now

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at this about 6 months now. one thing that helped me a ton was just tuning around 40 meters in the evenings around 7.050 or so and just listening even when i cant copy everything. your brain starts to pick out patterns after a while its kind of wild. also the LCWO website is way better than most apps for building real speed imo, you can set it to random 5 letter groups and it forces you to not overthink each letter. i ended up getting a cheap set of paddles from amazon and just using the keyer built into my radio for now. works fine for learning, ill upgrade eventually maybe

2.1:1 at your target freq honestly isnt that bad, most tuners will handle that no problem, but i get wanting it cleaner. i built a 40m dipole last spring and had almost the exact same situation — resonated about 50kHz low of where i aimed. ended up trimming about 8 inches total and got it down to like 1.3:1 at 7.15. just go slow, easier to take wire off than put it back on

11 contacts in 90 min with 4w and a wire in a park is a solid afternoon honestly. people underestimate how well 40m does during the day especially to closer skip distances, sounds like conditions were cooperating. the near miss on the european contact is what gets you hooked — once you actually pull one of those through on QRP you start rethinking what low power really means. i've been doing mostly SOTA activations with a Mountain Topper the last couple years and the weight thing you mentioned is real. there's a point where your whole station fits in a jacket pocket and that just changes how you think about operating. welcome to the rabbit hole i guess, it only gets more expensive from here in the best possible way.

so ive been doing single op assisted for a few years now and consistently finishing in the upper tier of my section but i keep hitting this wall around 800-900 QSOs in SS phone where i just cant seem to squeeze more rate out of the setup. been reading a lot about SO2R and honestly it sounds like either a game changer or a complete nightmare depending on who you ask. my current setup is an ic-7300 as the main rig and i have an older ft-950 sitting on the shelf doing nothing. the antenna situation is two separate dipoles on different bands so at least that part seems workable. what i dont really get is how people manage the intermod between the two radios when theyre both transmitting. like do you just accept some noise or is there actual filtering hardware you need to buy before this is even viable. also genuinely curious whether the rate improvement is real or whether its one of those things that sounds better in theory. ive seen claimed rates of 200+ per hour from the big SO2R guys and i cant tell if thats because of SO2R specifically or just because theyre better operators running better stations in better locations.

hey dont sweat it, everyone fumbles their first few net check-ins, seriously. the traffic thing just means do you have any messages to pass through the net — like formal radiogram traffic in the NTS system. most of the time for a casual 2m net you just say no traffic and you're fine. some nets are more formal than others so it really depends on which one you're on. typically when net control says "QNI" or just asks for check-ins you key up, give your callsign phonetically, your name, location, and whether you have traffic or any announcements. something like "W4XYZ, John, in Springfield, no traffic" and that's honestly it for most nets. the more you do it the faster it becomes second nature. i remember my first HF net i was shaking a little haha. for the W1AW stuff, check the ARRL website, they post the operating schedule for portable operations and centennial stuff well in advance. you just tune to the listed frequency at the listed time and call them. its a pileup usually so be patient.

so i finally did my first summit activation last weekend, took the FT-818 and a random wire up a little hill about 45 mins from the house. nothing crazy elevation wise but it counted. was honestly kinda nervous about the whole thing because ive read so many posts about people struggling to get their 4 contacts and i wasnt sure the antenna situation was gonna work out up there with all the trees ended up making like 11 contacts on 20m SSB in maybe 40 minutes, a few chasers who clearly knew what they were doing and a couple random guys who had no idea what SOTA even was but were happy to give me a contact anyway. the wire just draped over a branch at like 20 feet or so, nothing fancy, ran the radio off a little 3ah lipo and had plenty of juice left over. overall really stoked on how it went, already planning the next one

so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im stuck somewhere around 10-12 wpm depending on the day and how much coffee ive had lol. started with the Koch method using LCWO and it was great at first, like the progress was really noticeable week to week, but now it feels like im just spinning my wheels. i can copy most letters fine when theyre sent slowly but the moment someone bumps it up even a little i start falling behind and then i panic and lose the whole thing. my main practice routine right now is just doing the LCWO word trainer for maybe 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes i hop on 40m and try to copy whatever i can hear but honestly most of what i find is either too fast or in a pile-up which is not exactly beginner friendly. i know people say just do it every day and youll get there but i guess i was hoping someone could tell me if there was a specific thing that helped them break through that plateau. did you change methods, practice longer, find a specific resource? also curious how long it actually took people to get to 20wpm because i see some guys saying a few months and others saying years and that range is a little discouraging

so ive been running a 5/8 wave mag mount on the truck for years and it works fine for hitting the two main repeaters in town but theres one about 40 miles out i can barely scratch on a good day, maybe S1 into the machine and sometimes it just doesnt open the squelch at all. been thinking about swapping to either a longer collinear or maybe a small 3 element yagi on a bracket off the side of the cab but im not sure if its actually worth messing with a directional antenna when im moving around. the repeater im trying to hit is roughly northeast of where i drive most days which is kind of convenient but obviously not always. anyone actually run a yagi on a mobile install? seems like itd be a pain to aim while driving and i guess you wouldnt really aim it at all, just point it the direction you usually travel and hope for the best. or maybe the gain from a longer collinear would just solve this without the directional headache. the Diamond NR770HB has been on my radar for a while, gain is supposed to be pretty decent for an omni. also wondering if its a feedline issue, i have about 12 feet of whatever coax came with the mag mount which is probably garbage but i dont know what loss im actually seeing there. maybe thats the low hanging fruit before i go buying new antennas.

so i know a lot of folks have been watching the solar flux numbers lately and man, the last few weeks have been something else. flux index was sitting up around 180-190 for several days in a row and 10m just absolutely came alive. i've been a ham for about 6 years now and honestly hadn't seen conditions like that in a while, at least not consistently. anyway i finally snagged a contact with a station in the Maldives on 10m SSB which has been on my list forever. the signal was like 59 both ways, just rock solid, and i'm only running 100 watts into a wire dipole up maybe 25 feet. nothing fancy at all. the guy on the other end sounded just as surprised as me that the path was that clean. my question for the more experienced folks is — when we see the SFI sitting that high and the K index staying low, how far out can you usually predict a good opening? like is checking the solar data the night before actually useful or is it really just hour to hour? i've been using DXmaps and pskreporter to watch propagation in real time but im still kinda learning how to interpret the solar weather stuff on sites like NOAA. any pointers appreciated, and if anyones been working interesting DX lately drop it below, curious what paths have been open