James Thomas

so ive been running Log4OM for general logging for maybe two years now and honestly i like it for day to day stuff, the QSL tracking and the awards tracking is pretty solid and it talks to my rig okay most of the time. but every time contest season rolls around i end up installing N1MM on the side because Log4OM just doesnt cut it for serious contest work, at least not for me. the problem is i end up with logs in two places and then i gotta remember to import everything back into Log4OM after the contest which i forget half the time. and then theres WSJT-X in the mix too because i do a fair bit of FT8 on weekends, and WSJT-X writes to its own log and i have Log4OM watching that folder but sometimes it misses dupes or picks up things weirdly. anyone running all three of these at the same time or have a sane workflow figured out? feels like im spending more time managing software than actually operating which is kind of ridiculous. wondering if theres something obvious im missing or if this is just how it is

i had a similar situation with my forester a couple years ago, ended up just going under the door sill trim on the passenger side and poking through the little rubber plug thats usually under the dash near the kick panel. its not glamorous but it works and you dont have to worry about disturbing anything important. some people hate that approach but for a mobile rig i just want it done and working honestly

yeah the generator rf noise thing is real and it bites people all the time. even the honda's arent perfect, i had one at a site where someone had run an extension cord across a wet field and the ground loop was causing all kinds of weirdness. ended up putting a 1:1 choke balun right at the rig power input and that helped a lot more than i expected. one thing i'd throw in — if you're doing winlink at any point during the exercise, test your audio chain before you get to the site. i cant tell you how many times ive seen guys show up to emcomm events with a perfectly good radio and a perfectly good laptop and the soundcard interface is either picking up generator noise or just configured wrong and they spend an hour troubleshooting instead of communicating. boring advice but it's saved us more than once

so i've been pretty frustrated with HF lately, mostly just hearing noise on 20m and 40m when i get home from work in the evenings, nothing exciting. but yesterday afternoon i just happened to tune across 10m kind of on a whim and it was absolutely lit up. worked a bunch of South American stations, a couple Europeans, even heard what sounded like a JA station for a few minutes before it faded out. i've been checking the solar flux index on the NOAA site and it's been bouncing around in the 150-160 range this past week which i guess is pretty decent? i'm still kind of learning how to read all this stuff. like i understand higher SFI generally means better HF conditions but i dont really know how to predict when a specific band is going to be open or for how long. is there a good resource or tool people actually use for this, not just the index numbers but like real-time propagation data? i saw someone mention VOACAP somewhere but i havent played with it yet. also curious what bands other people have been finding useful lately. feels like the cycle is really ramping up and i want to make sure im not sleeping on good openings

JS8Call is genuinely fun but you have to go in with the right expectations. it's not FT8 where you can work 30 stations in an hour, the pace is slow and sometimes you'll call around for 20 minutes and hear nothing. but when you do get a qso going it actually feels like talking to someone. ive had some good ragchews on 40m late at night, nothing fancy but better than 73 de grid square and done. the sensitivity thing is real — FT8 decodes at like -24dB SNR and JS8Call is more like -18 or so depending on the speed setting, there are a few different speed modes and the slower ones do better but then its even more of a crawl. for your setup with 50w and a decent dipole you'll hear plenty of stations i would think. 40m is probably your best bet, theres usually some activity around 7078 kHz. on the PSK31 question, yeah the old software like DigiPan or even the built in stuff in older logging programs can be a bit of a pain. fldigi is what most people use now and once you get the audio levels right its actually not bad. the problem is the mode itself has kind of died off compared to what it used to be, might spend a while tuning around before you find much action.

yeah i went through this same thing like a year ago. what finally got me off the fence was just using the morse code ninja videos on youtube, the guy has a whole progression and you dont really have to think about what to do next, you just follow along. i think i did about 20 minutes every morning before work for maybe two months before i felt like i could actually copy simple words without totally losing my mind also the Just Learn Morse Code software is free and works pretty well if you prefer something on your desktop instead of the browser. i bounced between a few things honestly. the main thing i'd say is just pick one method and stick with it for at least a month before deciding it isnt working, thats where i kept failing before i finally made progress

what battery were you running? i just switched to a 20ah lifepo4 and it lasts way longer than i expected even with the 891 at 100w. might be worth it if youre gonna do more of these

im actually thinking about going, been wanting to get a feel for what a hamfest is like since i just got my tech last month. is it weird to show up alone or do people usually just talk to strangers there? seems like it could be awkward idk

yeah the mult hunting while running is basically the whole point, you've got it right. when your run frequency is cooking and you don't want to leave it but there's a juicy mult on 15 that's going to fade in an hour, that's where SO2R earns its keep. without it you're basically gambling on whether to abandon the rate or miss the mult. that said, the filter situation is not optional. i tried running without proper bandpass filters once — just to see — and it was a disaster. the K3 handled it better than i expected but the audio bleed was still bad enough that i couldn't copy anything on radio 2 while transmitting on radio 1. W3NQN filters are what most people use, or the Array Solutions stuff. it's an investment but if you've already got two decent radios it's the obvious next step. the rules question is worth checking per-contest but most of the major ones allow it for single op unrestricted now. ARRL SS is fine, CQWW is fine. some of the smaller sprints get weird about it so just read the fine print before you start wiring things up.

okay so i just upgraded from tech to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually operate on 40 meters. i looked up the FCC allocations and i see generals get 7.225 to 7.300 for phone but then i keep hearing people say you should stay away from the band edges and i dont really understand why. like is 7.225 off limits or just frowned upon or what also i saw something about a gentlemens agreement about SSB starting higher up but i cant find a clear answer on where that actually is. my elmer told me to just stay around 7.250 but that seems really crowded and id like to spread out a bit if i can. sorry if this is a dumb question

yeah the menu depth got me too when i first got mine. i think i had it for like two weeks before i felt like i actually knew what i was doing. the scope is the thing that changed how i operate more than anything else tbh, same experience as you with watching 40m at night. its almost too easy to find activity now compared to how i used to do it

the hearing yourself drift thing is pretty much just doppler doing its thing, at least early in the pass. AO-73 moves fast enough that you'll notice the shift pretty clearly. i had the same confusion when i started on it coming from FM birds where you just set and forget. one thing that helped me was running gpredict with CAT control to my radio but then still keeping my hand on the VFO knob for fine tuning the downlink. kind of a hybrid approach. feels clunky at first but you get used to it. the main thing is just keeping yourself in the linear portion of the passband and not stomping on other qsos, the passband is pretty narrow on these things

That changed about six weeks ago and I'm still kind of processing it, which is part of why I wanted to write this down somewhere. I'd been watching the propagation forecasts more seriously over the past couple months. I downloaded a couple of apps, started checking the solar flux index every morning like some people check the weather, and generally started paying attention to what the bands were actually doing rather than just tuning around and wondering why I wasn't hearing much. The SFI had been sitting in the low 150s for a stretch there and a friend from my local club kept saying that 17 meters and 15 meters should be producing something interesting in the afternoons. He was right, I just hadn't actually sat down and committed time to listening. So one Saturday I cleared my afternoon. Nothing on the calendar, coffee made, radio warmed up. I'm running a mid-tier transceiver — nothing exotic — into a fan dipole strung between my house and a tree maybe 40 feet away at the high point. It's not a beautiful antenna but I built it myself and I've been pretty happy with how it loads up. I use a small tuner to clean things up on bands where the match isn't great. I started on 17 meters, around 18.130 MHz give or take, just listening. And it was there. Signals I couldn't identify, pile-ups happening, people calling and calling. I tuned around slowly and started picking out accents and suffixes I didn't recognize. A station in what sounded like southern Europe was running a small pile-up and I just listened for a while, trying to figure out the rhythm of how he was working stations. That's something nobody really told me early on — that listening is a skill and it matters as much as transmitting. Watching how an operator manages a pile-up, how they use split frequency, how they give signal reports, all of that is an education by itself. After maybe twenty minutes of listening I figured I understood what was happening well enough to try. I tuned my VFO B up a couple kilohertz from where he was transmitting, set my power to about 75 watts — I didn't want to just blast at full power when I'm still figuring this out — and waited for a gap. I called once. Nothing. Called again a minute later. Nothing. Third time I got a partial, he came back with what might have been part of my call but I wasn't sure so I didn't respond. Fourth attempt he came back clean with my full callsign and a signal report. I gave him his report, he confirmed, and that was it. Contact made. The whole exchange was maybe fifteen seconds. I sat back and just stared at the radio for a second. I checked the map on my logging software and saw the distance. Somewhere around 5,400 miles. From my backyard fan dipole. On 75 watts. On a random Saturday afternoon. I know that for a lot of the experienced operators reading this, that's not exactly front page news. People work DX all the time, DXpeditions pull in thousands of contacts in a weekend, some folks have confirmed entities on every continent multiple times over. I get it. But for me, standing at that starting line, it genuinely rearranged something in my head about what this hobby is and what's actually possible. The propagation angle is what really grabbed me though. I went back and looked at what the conditions had been doing that day. The SFI was up a little, K-index was sitting at 1 which is nice and quiet geomagnetically, and there'd been some good solar activity earlier in the week that seemed to have charged things up without causing a storm. The opening on 17 meters was well-timed — mid-afternoon on my end, evening in Europe, and the path was apparently in good shape. It all lined up. What I didn't appreciate before was how fleeting that can be. I went back the next afternoon to try again and 17 meters was a ghost town. Checked the K-index and it had bumped up to 4, which isn't a full storm but it was enough to knock things back. The same frequency that had been wall-to-wall signals the day before was just hiss and a faint carrier somewhere far off. That's the thing about HF — it rewards you when the conditions are right and completely humbles you when they're not, and you don't always get to choose which one you're getting on any given day. I've been spending a lot more time on 15 and 17 meters since then. I even took a shot at 10 meters last weekend when someone in a Facebook group said there was an opening. I heard a few signals but couldn't pull off a contact — my antenna probably isn't optimized for 10 and I'd need to rethink the feedline situation to really take advantage up there. That's a project for later in the year. For now I'm just trying to log more contacts, get better at reading the conditions, and learn how to work a pile-up a little more gracefully. I fumbled around a lot before I made that first DX contact. Transmitted on the wrong VFO once, called when another station was finishing up their exchange which was embarrassing, forgot to write down the time in UTC until after I'd already clicked over to another frequency. Small stuff but it adds up and I want to get the mechanics cleaner. If you're in a similar spot — general ticket, HF capable radio, modest antenna, not sure if you can actually work DX — I'd say just start listening. Seriously. Put on headphones, tune slowly across 17 or 15 meters on a quiet afternoon, and pay attention to what's happening. Watch the propagation data even if you don't fully understand it yet. And when conditions look good and you hear a pile-up you want to join, give it a shot. It took me four tries to break through on that first contact and the whole thing lasted fifteen seconds but I'm still thinking about it six weeks later. I'll try to post more as I figure things out. Not sure how regularly, but this felt worth writing down.

classic GAS but also not wrong to want the waterfall, thats a real quality of life thing not just shiny object stuff. i kept my 590 for years telling myself the same thing and then borrowed a buddys 7300 for a weekend and yeah i bought one the next month. the 590 went to my secondary station and i dont regret either decision. your line noise on 40 probably wont get better with a new radio btw, have you tried tracking down the source? sometimes its a neighbors switching power supply or LED bulbs and its actually fixable, might be worth spending an afternoon on that before dropping money on a new rig.

honestly WAS is probably the most satisfying place to start if youre in the US, just because the feedback loop is faster — you can knock out a bunch of states pretty quick on 40m especially during evening hours and it starts to feel real pretty fast. DXCC takes longer obviously but once you get the bug its hard to stop. for credits — LoTW is the way to go now, most serious DX stations upload there and it just auto-matches when both sides upload the same QSO. paper QSL still counts for DXCC but honestly unless the DX station only does paper (which does still happen especially with some of the rarer ones) youll want to get comfortable with LoTW early. the ARRL has a tutorial and its a bit clunky to set up the first time with the certificates but once its running its basically automatic. mode endorsements are separate achievements — like you can get basic DXCC on mixed, then separately on phone only or CW only or digital. dont worry about those yet just start working stuff and uploading logs, the credits will accumulate and youll start to see where you stand.

Yeah the waiting is real, thats pretty much how it goes. I've been doing ARES for about twelve years now and the activations that stick with me are the ones where the pacing was completely unpredictable. Our EC always says treat it like a long contest but without the fun parts haha. Glad the ICS training clicked for you in the moment though, a lot of newer operators kind of glaze over that stuff in the classroom and then scramble when the actual forms need to be filled out or when someone asks them for a status update in proper format. The snack thing is no joke either. I started keeping a small bag in my go kit after the second or third time I ended up running on vending machine coffee for six hours. good work getting out there and doing it for real

okay so i just got my technician ticket a few weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local FM repeater but im not having much luck. i can hear people talking on it just fine but when i key up nobody responds and im not sure if they can even hear me. i looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it shows a 100.0 Hz CTCSS tone for the input. i programmed that into my baofeng (yeah i know, i know) and set it to transmit that tone but still nothing. i did a radio check the other day and one guy came back and said my audio sounded a little off but at least i know the signal is getting in there. my main question is actually about the linking stuff — this repeater apparently connects to some kind of network, IRLP or maybe echolink, i cant remember which one. does that change anything about how you use it? like do you have to wait longer between transmissions or something? i dont want to be that guy who steps on people mid-conversation without realizing it. also is there like an unwritten rulebook for repeater etiquette that someone can point me to? i feel like im missing something obvious here.

i run almost the exact same setup but i skipped the arduino and just used an optoisolator board i got off amazon for like 6 bucks, 4 channel thing, goes between the pi GPIO and whatever im switching. works fine for PTT control anyway. might not be enough if youre doing something more complex but for basic relay stuff its hard to beat. one thing that bit me with direwolf and the V71A specifically — make sure you have the DATA BAND set correctly on the radio, mine was defaulting to band A and my antenna was on band B and i spent like two hours wondering why decode rates were garbage before i caught it

cant speak to Log4OM much since i went all in on N1MM years ago and never looked back for anything contest related, but the WSJT-X port conflict thing is a known headache. pretty sure you can set a secondary UDP address in the WSJT-X settings under reporting, so you could theoretically have it send to two IPs or ports but i havent personally tested that setup. theres a thread on the N1MM reflector about it from like 2022 that went into a lot of detail if you can find it in the archives.

im still pretty new to HF but my elmer told me 40 opens up better after dark? i havent had much luck either but im also running like 50 watts into a dipole thats probably not ideal so maybe thats my problem lol

yeah the FO-29 thing is frustrating, i gave up on it for a while. AO-73 worked great for me last winter but i havent tried recently. honestly SO-50 spoiled me because FM is just so much easier to work even if its less interesting technically. i keep meaning to get more serious about the linear birds but manual az/el with doppler correction at the same time is a lot to juggle. what yagis are you using, homebuilt or Arrow or what

Most successful QSOs with smaller setups are skeds with high-power stations on the other end - the big guns can help compensate for your modest setup. Even without elevation control, you can work EME when moon is within 15-18 degrees of horizon if your antenna is fixed horizontal.

so i finally got activated for a real ARES callout last weekend, been a member of the local group for about 8 months but this was my first actual deployment and not just a drill. county EOC needed amateur radio support because a pretty bad storm had knocked out some of the usual comms infrastructure in the area and they wanted backup nets running. honestly i wasnt sure what to expect going in. our training exercises always felt kind of... organized? like everyone knew where to stand and what frequency to be on. the real thing was a bit more chaotic at first, EC was juggling like three different things at once and it took maybe 20 minutes before i even had a clear assignment. i ended up doing welfare traffic relay between two shelter sites which wasnt glamorous but it needed doing. the thing that surprised me most was how much of it was just sitting around waiting and then suddenly a burst of activity. i went through almost a full notepad writing down traffic. net control was running things pretty tightly once things settled down, but that first hour was definitely an eye opener compared to the SET exercises we do. anyone else remember their first real activation being kind of overwhelming at first? curious if thats normal or if i just wasnt prepared enough

yeah direct conversion receivers can be a pain with audio, ive built a few and they always need tweaking. one thing i dont see mentioned often is that the physical layout of a DC receiver really matters a lot more than you'd think, the LO leaking back into the audio stage is a real thing and can cause all kinds of weird artifacts. shielding the oscillator section from the audio section even with just a piece of scrap PCB material soldered in as a divider can make a pretty noticeable difference. what toroids did you end up substituting btw? the bandpass filter on the input side has a big effect on what garbage gets through to the mixer and if the impedance transformation is off you might just be letting in way more signal than the NE602 wants to see

had a cushcraft 13b2 for years, great antenna but the matching network on those older ones can get flaky if its been outside a while, worth checking the gamma match before you commit to buying it. if the swr looks weird on 2m it's usually that for what it's worth i ran mine fixed for about a year pointing roughly toward the city and it was fine for what i was doing but i missed a lot of sporadic e openings that went a different direction so eventually i caved and got a rotator. the innovantennas stuff looks nice but ive never used one personally