Dave Patterson

Good info - I maintain a club station with three 991As and had to deal with this on all the computers. Pro tip: Some users might have a USB to serial converter based on the chips (Prolific, FTDI). These drivers will not work with the 991/991a. You need to download and install the Yaesu drivers. Don't mix up your driver installs!

yeah the battery thing bites everyone at least once. we had the exact same wake-up call a couple years ago during a SET. guy showed up with an HT that he swore was charged and it was at like 40% from sitting in his go-bag for three months. after that our group made a standing rule — 24 hours before any exercise or activation you physically charge everything and write the date on a piece of tape on the battery. sounds dumb but it works. the message traffic chaos you're describing is super common when groups practice checkins all the time but never actually move any traffic. like the net control skills and the formal message skills are almost separate muscle memories and both atrophy if you dont use them. we started doing monthly digital nights just pushing Winlink traffic between members so at least the mechanics stay fresh. not the same as voice traffic under pressure but it helps. one thing that really changed our drills was adding a dedicated logging position separate from net control. when NCS is also trying to keep a log AND manage the net it falls apart pretty quick. having one person just on the log made a huge difference in our last exercise.

dont stress too much about the band edge thing in normal operation. i mean unless youre running like a kilowatt into a mismatched antenna or something your splatter isnt going to be some huge problem. the main thing is just knowing 7.175 is your lower limit and stay above it. i got confused by the same thing when i upgraded, kept second guessing myself before calling CQ. just get on and operate, youll figure it out pretty quick just by listening to where everyone else is hanging out

so ive been building a direct conversion receiver for 40m based on a design i found in an old ARRL handbook, like the 1987 edition i picked up at a hamfest. been at it for maybe 3 weeks on and off. finally got audio out of it last night which honestly felt amazing after all the troubleshooting. the problem is theres this really pronounced hum riding on everything, and its not just a little hum, its almost as loud as the actual signal. tried a different audio transformer thinking that was it but no change. the VFO seems stable enough, im using a colpitts oscillator with a 2N3904 which i know isnt ideal but its what i had. the product detector is built around a NE602 which i grabbed from a kit i never finished. im running it off a bench supply right now, regulated 12v. replaced the filter caps on the DC rail already. the hum tracks with the audio volume so its definitely getting in through the AF stage somehow but i cant figure out where. grounding is kind of a mess honestly, i did point-to-point on perfboard and its not exactly pretty. would adding a proper ground bus help or am i chasing something else here

hamexam.org is honestly probably all you need if you're the type who learns by doing. i passed tech in about 10 days just hammering that site every evening after work for maybe 45 mins. the way it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong is actually really useful. that said some of the electrical theory stuff like ohms law and the decibel questions make a lot more sense if you read even a little bit of background on them rather than just memorizing the answers, because occasionally they word a question slightly differently and if you just memorized you might get tripped up. gordon west's book is popular and pretty short but honestly i never finished mine and still passed fine

the general is definitely a step up from tech but honestly not as bad as people make it out to be. i studied for maybe 3 weeks using hamstudy and gordon west's book and passed with an 88. the electrical theory questions are annoying but theres only so many ways they can ask about ohms law and reactance, just grind the practice tests until the wrong answers start looking obviously wrong to you, thats kind of the trick. on the FCC thing -- once you pass the VE session they submit it electronically and it usually shows up in the ULS database within a day or two, sometimes same day if theyre quick about it. you dont need the physical card to operate, as soon as it shows active in ULS youre good to go on the HF bands. i was on 40m the next afternoon after passing. just make sure you know your new privileges cause the general HF allocations are a little confusing at first, especially on 75/80m where the phone portion starts at different frequencies depending on region.

same boat as you about 6 months ago haha. what helped me was just picking one thing at a time — get LoTW solid first since thats what actually moves the needle for awards, then mess with eQSL later if you feel like it. i honestly mostly use eQSL just to see the card artwork people make which sounds dumb but some of them are really cool. one thing nobody told me — make sure your QRZ page has your eQSL address listed if you sign up, otherwise people cant look you up to send confirmations. took me forever to figure out why my inbox was empty lol

oh man the 2am parking lot thing is SO real, been there more than once lol. honestly the thing i always forget and always regret is food and water. like actual sustenance. i get so focused on the radio gear that i show up with a fully operational station and no snacks and then im useless after four hours because im hungry and cranky. also a small notepad and a few pens taped to the inside lid of whatever case you use. paper doesnt need batteries and sometimes you need to write down traffic that you cant type fast enough or your laptop is occupied doing something else. sounds old school but seriously. your kit sounds way better than mine was starting out so youre already ahead of where i was

For stationary operation, you might want to consider a shorter path or even direct operation if you're in a well-covered area. If you're a stationary object, we don't need to hear from you any more than every 15 minutes. Preferably 30 unless you're serving up weather data. Check your local APRS activity first before adding to the network.

so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up saturday and im trying to nail down the power situation before i show up with half my gear and realize ive forgotten something critical again. last time i ran off a 100ah lifepo4 and it lasted fine for the 6 hour window we had but this one is supposed to go 18-20 hours and i dont want to babysit battery voltage the whole time. thinking about bringing my little honda eu2200i alongside the battery so i can keep the pack topped off without running the genny the whole time. the question is whether its worth the hassle of a proper charge controller in between or if i just run the genny output through a decent power supply straight to the battery. ive seen people do both and get weird answers when i ask at club meetings. antenna side is pretty sorted — going up a 40m inverted vee off a 33ft jackite pole, got the coax run figured out, and for vhf i have a small yagi i can throw on a camera tripod for the point to point stuff. the site has decent tree cover so ground anchoring shouldnt be a bad time. main thing bugging me is the generator noise on HF. last field day i was running SSB on 40 and the eu2200i sitting maybe 20 feet away was putting a faint hash on the waterfall. not terrible but annoying. anyone dealt with that specifically with the honda inverter gens, curious if distance is the main fix or if there's something else going on there.

oh nice i didnt even know WWFF was a thing seperate from POTA until like two months ago haha. are they totally different programs or do they share activations somehow? i keep seeing both mentioned and im still confused about how the references work across them

the overwhelm is real and i went through the exact same thing about two years ago. what finally got it to stick for me was just committing to one method and ignoring everything else for at least a month, which is harder than it sounds when you keep reading about some other approach that sounds better. i used the LCWO website with Koch method and honestly just doing it 10-15 minutes every single day was more valuable than longer sessions a few times a week. the brain needs repetition spread out over time to actually wire those sounds in. the big thing people mess up early on is learning the dits and dahs as a visual pattern instead of just a sound — like dont ever look at a chart while youre training, just let the audio hit you and try to respond. took me maybe 3 months to get comfortable enough to actually call CQ and copy a basic exchange, wasnt pretty but it worked also just forget about speed for now completely. seriously. even 5wpm is fine to start, you can always bump it up later and it goes faster than you think once the letters are locked in

yeah what he said about the buffer setup, thats pretty standard for serious field ops. one thing i'd add — watch the honda's runtime at that load. the EU2200i at like quarter load is gonna sip fuel but if you're also running a charger pushing 20+ amps into a partially depleted battery it'll be working harder than you think for the first couple hours. bring more gas than you think you need, always. the pushup mast in a gravel lot situation, ive been there. get yourself some sandbags or water jugs for the base, wind comes up and a 31 footer with wire attached becomes a problem real fast. learned that one the hard way at a SET a few years back, mast went over and took out someones coffee setup. no one was hurt but it was embarassing lol

For weak signal work, I've found that practicing with semi or full break-in mode helps you become comfortable hearing what's going on between the dits and dahs. Also, tune around and listen to stations making QSOs at speeds just above your comfort level - builds your pattern recognition.

DXwatch is perfectly fine for casual DX hunting, i've used it for years. the interface is a bit dated looking but it updates fast and you can filter by band which is really the main thing. one thing i like is being able to set it to just show the bands im interested in — cuts down on the noise a lot. for phone i use DX Toolbox which has cluster access built in along with propagation stuff, its not free but not expensive either. there's also the HamSphere apps and a few others but honestly i found most of the free ones are pretty barebones. the telnet thing still works fine if you want real-time stuff piped right into your logging software — i have mine set up through Log4OM and it just shows spots automatically which is handy. QRZ is fine for looking people up but i wouldn't rely on it as my main spotting source, its more of an add-on feature there i think

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now and honestly its been great for learning but im starting to feel the limitations especially on HF where the direct sampling mode is just kind of mediocre. been looking at either picking up a HackRF One or an SDRplay RSP1A and i cant really decide which direction to go. the HackRF is tempting because of the transmit capability even though i know its not a great transmitter by any stretch, and the frequency range going up to 6GHz is kind of interesting for poking around at stuff. but the RSP1A seems like it would just be a better receiver across the board, the 14-bit ADC vs the HackRFs 8-bit makes a pretty big difference from what ive read and the sensitivity specs look a lot better for actual HF work. mostly what i want to do is monitor HF shortwave, maybe some utility stuff, WSPR decoding, that kind of thing. not really doing any transmitting since im just a tech class right now. using SDR# mostly but ive been messing around with GQRX on linux too. anyone gone through this same decision? feel like i keep going in circles reading reviews online

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend, been wanting to try it for a while after watching some youtube videos of guys doing POTA and someone mentioned WWFF in the comments and i kind of fell down a rabbit hole from there anyway i went out to a local nature reserve that's registered as a WWFF reference, set up my KX2 with a end fed wire up in a tree, and spent about 2 hours on 40m and 20m making contacts. got around 48 QSOs total which i thought was pretty decent for my first time out. logged everything in a paper log and then transferred it to ADIF when i got home my question is mainly about the upload process — do i submit the log to the WWFF database directly through their site or is there some other way? i saw something about wwff.us but also the global wwff.world site and im not totally sure which one to use or if i need to do both. also does the reference number need to be in a specific field in the ADIF or does the website sort that out somehow the whole thing was just a really nice experience honestly, way more relaxed than contesting, just sitting in the woods on a camp chair watching squirrels while working stations on SSB. might be my new favorite thing

I'm getting tired of manufacturers claiming "24+ hour battery life" when their HTs barely last 8 hours of actual use. Looking for real-world battery performance data from operators who actually use these radios regularly. Some radios like the BF-F8HP have exceptional battery life - 20 hours even in the highest 8-watt setting with the 2000 mAh battery pack. What are your experiences with battery performance on current models? Yaesu FT-5DR vs FT-65RAnytone AT-D878UVII PlusKenwood TH-D75AParticularly interested in DMR vs analog power consumption differences. Do the digital modes really drain batteries faster?

JS8Call gets used a lot more than you'd think but you have to go looking for it. the 40m JS8 calling frequencies are actually pretty active in the evenings especially around 7.078, and there are some nets that run it regularly for actual message passing not just signal reports. the relay thing really does work, i passed a message through three intermediate stations once just to test it and it got there fine. that said you're not wrong that the FT8 ecosystem is just massive by comparison. JS8Call is more interesting to me personally because it lets you actually have a conversation, even if its slow and awkward. i think of FT8 as a propagation tool that also happens to log contacts and JS8Call as something closer to actual communication. they're not really competing in my head anymore PSK31 nostalgia is real though. i still fire it up occasionally on 14.070 when the bands are decent. not many takers but the ones who are there usually wanna ragchew which is nice

25mbps upload at the remote site is plenty, i run mine on less than 5 and the audio is fine. your bottleneck is almost always going to be latency not bandwidth, like whats the actual ping between the two locations? if youre going cross country or worse internationally even 200ms can make SSB feel weird and CW basically unworkable unless you really turn up the sidetone locally and just dont listen to the actual transmitted audio

food and water, honestly. sounds dumb but when i did my first ARES activation i was so focused on the radio stuff that i basically didnt eat for like 6 hours and was completely useless by the end of it. a few granola bars and a water bottle in the kit sounds obvious but it wasnt obvious to me at the time lol also a small solar panel if youre running LiFePO4 anyway. even a 50w panel can keep you topped off during the day if youre not transmitting constantly. doesnt have to be fancy.

ran almost this exact setup at a real deployment last year (flooding, not just an exercise) and the generator noise thing is real, people do not want to hear that thing all day. we ended up running the honda only during peak traffic periods and coasting on a pair of 100ah battleborns the rest of the time which worked out fine. one thing that bit us was the inverter on the laptop charger being inefficient and drawing way more than expected, worth measuring your actual loads with a meter before you commit to anything. also just fwiw the buddipole is kind of a pain if the wind picks up, had mine go over twice. if you have a way to stake it down properly its okay but id honestly rather deal with throwing a wire up a tree if theres one available

yeah techs do get a slice of HF, its not much but its something. on 10 meters you get phone privileges from 28.300 to 28.500 MHz which is actually pretty decent when the band is open. for CW you can operate on portions of 80, 40, and 15 meters i believe, 28.000 to 28.300 on 10 for CW too. theres also 10 meter data/RTTY. the ARRL has a frequency allocation chart that is way easier to read than the actual part 97 text, i would just google that and print it out honestly. the raw CFR text is brutal to parse if youre not used to legalese. main thing to just remember is always check before you key up, and if youre ever unsure about a band just stick to what you know until you can verify