Dave Patterson

yeah gpredict can absolutely do rig control, thats actually one of the main reasons people use it for sat work. you go into the settings and configure the radio interface, it uses hamlib under the hood so as long as your 991a is in the hamlib list (it is) you should be fine. once you get doppler correction automated it changes everything, you can actually focus on operating instead of constantly retuning. one thing to watch with linear transponders though — remember the transponder is inverting so if you tune up on the uplink your downlink moves down. gpredict handles that but just make sure you have the transponder passband entered correctly or your corrections will be fighting you instead of helping. took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out when i started. the arrow is honestly fine for most LEOs especially if the pass goes above like 30 degrees. low passes are rough by hand but a good overhead pass with the arrow works. lots of people work satellites their whole ham career with just an arrow and no rotator.

I did my first real ARES activation last spring during the flooding we had, and let me tell you nothing quite prepares you like the real thing even with all the training. we were running a net for about 14 hours straight passing health and welfare traffic between two shelters and the EOC and by hour 6 my logging was getting sloppy and i had to really slow myself down. the ICS forms thing is real, NTS message format and ICS-213 kept coming up constantly. but yeah start with the FEMA courses, they're genuinely useful and not as dry as you'd think once you see how it all connects to what you actually do on the air. your EC can probably point you to any local specific requirements too since some counties have their own supplemental training they want before an activation. welcome to the rabbit hole i guess.

yeah 80m is just rough in general for noise, i dont think ive ever had a totally quiet 80m setup at any qth ive lived at. the waterfall will actually help you track down noise sources too once you get used to reading it — you can usually see interference as a pattern rather than just hearing it and wondering where its coming from. my neighbor had one of those cheap LED grow lights and i found it in like 10 minutes just by watching the waterfall while he turned stuff on and off in his garage.

so ive been messing with APRS for about 3 months now and i think i finally have a decent setup but something is off with the igate side of things. running a TM-D710G with the built in TNC, path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 and i can see my own packets on the waterfall coming back from the local digi about 2 miles away. aprs.fi shows me sometimes but its really inconsistent — like ill pop up for a few minutes then disappear for 20-30 mins even when im stationary at home. the digi is definitely hitting my packets, i can see it in the raw data on aprs.fi when it does work, it shows the digi callsign in the path. but then it just stops. talked to the guy who runs the digi and he said its fine on his end but im not sure he actually checked. the igate is supposedly connected to APRS-IS but i have no way to verify that from my end. is there some way to tell if the igate is actually passing packets upstream or is it dropping them? or is this maybe a path issue on my end. i feel like WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 should be fine for suburban area but maybe im stomping on something.

yeah what he said. bring water and snacks too honestly, nobody tells you that and then you end up stuck at a shelter position for four hours wondering why youre cranky. also a fully charged battery pack for the HT, learned that the hard way at a flood response drill we did two years ago, had to borrow a charger from the red cross table which was embarassing

yeah im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for like 6 weeks now. the LCWO thing the other guy mentioned is what im using and its pretty good but i'll be honest some days i sit down to practice and my brain just refuses to cooperate, like i'll know a letter fine one session and then the next day its completely gone. i think thats just how it works though. one thing i read somewhere is that you should practice copying by writing or typing it out rather than just listening passively, something about how the motor memory helps it stick. havent gotten on the air yet myself but thats the goal

so i finally got around to building a proper dipole instead of just buying one. been putting this off forever honestly. used 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had leftover from some electrical work, cut it to length for 40m using the 468/f formula which gave me something like 66.5 feet total. the balun is just a choke i wound myself, 8 turns of RG-8X through a FT240-43 toroid i had in the junk box. anyway my question is about the center insulator. right now i just drilled two holes in a piece of PVC pipe cap and ran the wire through with some silicone around it. it works but it feels kinda janky and im worried about water intrusion over time especially since this thing is going up and staying up. does anyone make their own or do most people just buy the plastic egg insulators or whatever. also wondering if the PVC is gonna get brittle in UV after a while. SWR is coming in around 1.4:1 at the low end of 40 which im pretty happy with for a first attempt. gonna try to get it up higher than the current 25 feet if i can talk my neighbor into letting me use his tree.

yeah the waterfall freeze thing is a known annoyance with the RemoteHams SDR mode, at least in my experience. i ended up putting a dedicated SDRplay RSP1A on the remote end feeding a separate SDR-Console session and that helped a lot actually. the transceiver IF tap was always a bit of a compromise anyway depending on what rig you're using. latency on the audio side is still gonna be whatever your internet connection decides to do that day though, not much you can do about physics i tried the full DIY route with RigCtld and a VPN for a while and it works but you're basically your own IT department forever. every time my ISP at the remote site does something weird i'm troubleshooting at 11pm. RemoteHams at least has some infrastructure behind it even if its not perfect. for casual remote ops i just keep using it and accept the occasional freeze

yeah the timing thing is real, spots can be anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes old by the time you see them and react. what helps me is having the radio already close to the band the DX is supposed to be on before i even start looking. like if i know a rare one is active this week on 17m, i just park myself near that band and watch the cluster rather than starting cold. QRZ does have a logbook and some tools but i dont think they do real-time cluster spotting the way DXwatch or DX Summit does. you might be thinking of their lookup page which is great but different. for android i really like the DX Toolkit app, its pretty clean and lets you set alerts for specific callsigns or prefixes which is handy if youre chasing a specific entity. give it a shot.

yeah Dayton is worth the trip if you havent been before, though its been a few years since i went myself. the tailgate is definitely where its at, showed up early one year and grabbed a barely used IC-7300 for way less than i expected, guy just wanted it gone. just bring cash and get there before the doors open if you can as for local stuff, check if your regional club has a mailing list or a nets on 2m, thats usually where they announce swaps and field day planning and all that, the websites are almost never current

Ok so i just got my ticket a few months ago and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly on 40m and some 2m local stuff. Someone in my radio club mentioned I should be uploading to LoTW and also eQSL but honestly im kind of lost on how all this works together. Like do people actually still send paper cards through the bureau or is that mostly an old timer thing now? I set up a LoTW account but the whole certificate process was kind of confusing and I'm not 100% sure my logs are actually uploading correctly. I use WSJT-X for FT8 and I think it logs to ADIF automatically but then what, I just drag that file into the TQSL thing? Also someone told me eQSL is kind of looked down on by some people which seems weird to me. Just trying to figure out what the actual workflow is that most people use these days.

yeah the repeat callers are just part of it, some of them are hunting multiple programs at once and get confused or whatever. anyway congrats on getting out there, SOTA is even more of a workout if you ever want to try that lol, literally hauling everything up a mountain

so i finally got my callsign after studying for like 3 weeks and i was so pumped to get on the air. got my baofeng all programmed up with the local repeater and keyed up and just completely blanked on what to say. said my callsign wrong twice, forgot to say over, the whole thing. the guy on the other end was super patient though and we had a decent little chat once i stopped being a nervous wreck. anyway just wanted to introduce myself here, im KD9 something something, based in ohio, and apparently this hobby is going to take over my life based on how much ive been reading since yesterday

could also be the power connection honestly. i know it sounds unrelated but my FT-7900 was doing something similar a while back and it turned out one of the ring terminals on my battery leads hadnt crimped all the way. under load on transmit it would just dip enough to cause weirdness. the highway thing makes sense too because vibration can make a marginal connection go from annoying to actually dropping. not saying its not the antenna but worth checking the whole chain before you pull the NMO apart. those Diamond mounts are usually pretty solid in my experience.

Congrats on the first activation, that feeling of getting your 10 never really goes away honestly. To answer your questions — yeah paper log is totally fine, most people transcribe into something like HAMRS or just build a spreadsheet that exports ADIF. The POTA website only cares about the ADIF file at the end so however you get there is up to you. Some people use logging apps in the field on their phone which makes it easier but theres no requirement. On the CQ thing, calling CQ POTA is pretty standard and it helps hunters scanning the bands know youre an activator. Some people do CQ POTA CQ POTA then their callsign. Either works but the explicit POTA call definitely gets you more hunters faster especially on a busy weekend when theres a lot of activity on like 40 or 20m. For the hunter credit question — hunters log the contact on their end independently. They dont need to wait for you to upload. When you do upload your log it just confirms the contact but hunters can self-log immediately after the QSO. The system reconciles everything and marks it confirmed once both sides are in there. So your hunters were already getting credit before you even got home, which is pretty cool actually.