Patricia Kim

ive been thinking about getting into QRP for a while now and this kind of post is what finally might push me over. quick question though — do you need a General or can Techs operate on the HF bands you'd be using for QRP? im still a Tech and trying to figure out what i can actually do before i upgrade

so i finally pulled the trigger on an Elecraft KX2 kit a few months back and i gotta say the whole experience of building it yourself changes how you feel about the radio when youre done. like i know every solder joint in there which sounds dumb but it actually matters to me when im out in the field. took it out last weekend to a local park for POTA and was running maybe 5 watts into a random wire i threw up in a tree and worked a station in germany on 20 meters. first time ive ever done that, been licensed for almost 3 years and never had a contact that far. guy gave me a 559 which i thought was pretty decent considering what i was running. anyway for anyone who's been on the fence about going QRP i know its not for everyone and some days you just spin the dial for an hour and nothing happens but when it clicks it really clicks. just wanted to share. also curious if anyone has tips for getting the most efficiency out of low power setups, im sure im leaving some db on the table with my antenna situation

so i decided i want to get my technician license and ive been looking around online and theres like a million different study options and i honestly dont know which ones are actually worth using. i downloaded something called the hamstudy app i think and also someone at work told me to just memorize the question pool but that seems like a lot. the pool has like 400+ questions? or is it less than that i cant remember. anyway im not sure if i should be trying to understand the theory behind everything or just like brute force memorize answers. some of the electrical stuff is going over my head a little, the ohms law questions and stuff like that. been at it for about two weeks on and off. is there a smarter way to do this or did most of you guys just grind through the whole pool

so i've been meaning to do this for like two years and i finally sat down last weekend and actually built out a go-kit. nothing super fancy, just a rubbermaid tote with a Yaesu FT-891 in there, a 40ah lithium battery from bioenno, some coax, my KX4 antenna, a few adapters, and a notepad with my local ARES frequencies written down. threw in a headlamp and some granola bars too because why not. anyway my club has been pushing everyone to have a kit ready for the hurricane season and honestly i feel better having it done. but now im second guessing myself wondering if theres stuff i should have that i dont. like i dont have a backup HT in there — should i? and what about a copy of my license, do people actually keep a paper copy in their kit or is that overkill. also not sure about power — i can run the 891 at 100w but should i limit myself to lower power to conserve the battery during an actual deployment. my elmers kind of gave me conflicting advice on that last one. curious what others keep in their kits and if theres anything obvious im missing that you wish youd thought of earlier

yeah thats pretty much how it works honestly, youre not missing some secret step. the cluster is just a big network of radio ops posting when they hear something, so you get the freq, the callsign, maybe a short comment. DXwatch aggregates a bunch of those feeds which is why you see duplicates - same spot coming from multiple nodes. the off frequency thing is really common, especially on CW where someone might spot 1.2 kHz up from where the DX is actually listening. just treat every spot as a starting point not gospel. i usually tune around a few kHz either side just to make sure im not missing it. after a while you start to recognize which spotters in your region tend to be accurate too, which helps a lot. one thing that might help you is filtering by band right in DXwatch, theres a dropdown. and if you really want to get into it, N1MM and some other logging software can pull cluster spots directly so you dont have to juggle tabs. but two tabs works fine, dont let anyone tell you youre doing it wrong

yeah you have to go in order, technician first then general then extra, thats just how the FCC structures it. but honestly the technician exam isnt that bad at all. i used hamstudyhq.com or actually i think its just hamstudy.org, and i just did like 20-30 questions a night for maybe two weeks and passed no problem. the question pool is public so once you really get familiar with all of it you kind of just know whats coming. there are 35 questions on the actual test and you need 26 right i think. some of the electrical theory stuff tripped me up at first but there are formulas and you dont really need to deeply understand it you just need to know how to use ohms law basically. find a local club too because they usually host testing sessions and some of them do free study nights which honestly helped me more than anything else i tried

I did something similar in my F-150 with an FTM-300. Ended up using a RAM mount with the B size ball on a low-profile adhesive base stuck to the top of the dash near the windshield. Took me forever to find the right arm length but once I did it actually sits really nicely right in my sightline without blocking much. The separation cable on those Yaesus is long enough you have some flexibility with where the main body goes — I stuffed mine under the seat. For the Tacoma specifically I've seen guys mount to the overhead console area but you'd probably need a custom bracket or one of those truck-specific solutions. There's a company called Lido Radio that makes Tacoma-specific mounts, might be worth a look before you go the RAM route and end up buying three wrong pieces like I did.

so ive been trying to get Winlink Express working for a few weeks now and i think im close but not quite there. Running it on HF, got a Signalink USB hooked to my IC-7300 and using Vara HF as the modem. The problem is i can connect to an RMS gateway, it shows the handshake going through and then it just... drops. Sometimes i get a partial message through but most of the time it just times out and i have to start over. Im connecting to a gateway about 80 miles away on 40m, usually late afternoon. Signal reports from the gateway look decent, around S7-S8 on a good day. Ive checked the audio levels probably a dozen times and the ALC is barely moving so i dont think im overdriving anything. The IC-7300 is set to USB-D and data mode is on. Anyone dealt with this before? Is it a timing thing, is there some timeout setting in Winlink Express i should be adjusting, or am i just picking bad gateways to connect to? there are like 4 or 5 within range on 40m and some seem worse than others. Starting to wonder if some of the listed gateways are just poorly maintained or something.

so i finally participated in one of those full-scale simulated disaster drills our county ARES group puts on every year. i'd been meaning to join for like two years and kept putting it off because honestly i wasnt sure i knew enough to be useful. glad i finally went. the scenario was a major flooding event that knocked out all the normal comms infrastructure — cell towers down, EOC needed traffic relayed between shelters and the hospital. they had us set up a net and start passing formal messages using ICS 213 forms. i have practiced NTS traffic handling before but doing it under time pressure with people actually depending on the info was a totally different feeling. couple things i learned the hard way: first, my go-bag setup looked great at home but i forgot to fully charge the spare battery for my HT the night before so i was scrambling. second, i had never actually practiced setting up my portable dipole in the dark and it took me way longer than it should have. small stuff but it adds up fast when theres a simulated "mass casualty" event happening around you and the net control is waiting on you. anyway the whole thing was really eye opening. anyone else done these kinds of exercises? curious what scenarios your groups run and what caught you off guard the first time.

yeah you basically just pick up the common ones over time, nobody memorizes all of them. the full ITU list has like 100+ but in practice on amateur radio you probably only ever hear maybe 20 or 30 of them regularly. you got QSL and QTH right. QRM is interference from other stations, man-made noise basically. QRN is natural noise like lightning static. QSB is when your signal is fading in and out, you'll hear someone say "you're getting some QSB" meaning your signal is going up and down. QRZ means "who is calling me" so when someone comes on and says QRZ it usually means they didn't catch the callsign or they're calling CQ and checking if anyone responded. QRP is low power operation, under 5 watts, lots of people are really into that. QRO is the opposite, high power. QSY means change frequency. and then 73 is probably the most used one and it technically isn't even a Q code, it just means best regards or goodbye basically, people have been using it since the telegraph days. there's a decent reference on the ARRL website and also just searching "amateur radio Q codes" will get you a PDF you can print out. keep it near the radio for a while, it'll sink in faster than you think once you start hearing them in context.

yeah what he said about gpredict CAT control, that changed everything for me. before i set that up i was basically just spinning dials the whole pass and never actually made a contact. once the computer handles doppler you'd be amazed how much easier it is to actually find signals in the passband. one thing i'd add is try just listening first on a busy pass without even transmitting. AO-73 on a weekend afternoon you should hear a bunch of guys in there doing SSB. if you cant hear anything at all even on a good high pass then yeah something is off with your rx setup or antenna polarization maybe.

so ive been doing contests semi-seriously for a few years now, mostly single band stuff on 40 and 20, and i keep reading about SO2R guys putting up these insane rates and im wondering if its actually worth getting into or if the complexity just eats into your operating time more than it helps my current setup is an ft-991a and a tribander at about 45 feet, nothing fancy. i understand the concept of SO2R — run on one radio while the second is searching and pouncing or finding a new mult — but actually implementing it seems like a whole other thing. the station switching, the audio routing, the antenna switching so you're not blowing up your own front end, keeping track of two radios at once mentally... i dunno. seems like a lot to manage especially during a busy contest when you're already trying to keep rate up anyone here actually made the jump from SO1R to SO2R and noticed a meaningful improvement in score, or did it feel like diminishing returns given the added complexity? and what was your first SO2R setup like, did you start cheap or just go all in

the TX EQ thing is real, i went through the same thing when i got mine. what ended up working for me was rolling off a little of the low mids around 300hz and boosting slightly around 2.5k, made it sound a lot more natural on the other end. had a buddy on 20m tell me it sounded processed before i made that adjustment which was kind of embarrassing lol. also if you havent already, look at the AGC settings. the defaults are a bit aggressive for my taste on SSB, particularly on fast moving signals. i run it a little slower now and it smoothed things out quite a bit. the radio has a lot more adjustability buried in those menus than people give it credit for, just takes a while to find it all.

check your direwolf config for the IGATE settings — specifically whether you have igating enabled for messages vs just beacons. there's a setting in direwolf.conf called IGTXVIA or something similar (been a while since i looked at it) that controls whether your igate will pass message packets to RF from APRS-IS. if that's misconfigured messages can just silently not go through while position beacons work totally fine because they follow a different path through the system. also worth pulling up the raw packet log in direwolf and watching what actually happens when you send a message — does it show the packet being transmitted on RF? does it show acknowledgment coming back? that'll tell you real quick whether its a local TX problem or something further upstream. the message ack system in APRS is actually really useful for debugging this exact kind of thing, if youre not getting acks back at all then the packet probably isnt making it to any digipeater.

so i passed my technician exam last tuesday and been lurking on the 147.xxx repeater in my area just listening for like 5 days trying to get the nerve up to actually key up. finally did it this morning just said my callsign and that i was new and honestly wasnt sure what to expect got like 3 people come back to me right away which was cool but also kind of overwhelming because i didnt really know what to say after that lol. one guy was super patient and walked me through a basic qso and told me to not worry about messing up the format. ended up talking to him for maybe 10 minutes about my HT and where i live anyway just wanted to share that because ive been nervous about it for days and it ended up being totally fine. if anyone else is on the fence about jumping in just do it