Michelle Garcia

been there with the baofeng menu confusion, that thing is a maze when you first get it. one thing i'd add is double check the repeater directory or the club's website for the exact tone because ive seen a few repeaters listed wrong in chirp and other places and 100.0 vs 100hz can sometimes be entered differently depending on which version of the software or firmware you have. the etiquette thing is pretty relaxed on most machines around here honestly. i used to stress about it way more than i needed to. just listen for a natural gap, say your call once, and you're good. the worst that happens is someone doesnt hear you and you try again.

yeah the waiting is THE thing nobody tells you about lol. i did my first activation like two years ago for a marathon and even that was just a lot of standing around and then a burst of traffic when someone needed medical. i cant imagine a storm activation, that sounds way more intense. good on you for sticking with the nets for 8 months before it came together, some people just show up once and disappear when nothing happens right away

half a mile is actually pretty significant for a fixed offset, yeah that does sound like a datum or encoding problem rather than GPS accuracy. my old handheld used to do something similar and it turned out i had the position manually set somewhere in the config that was overriding the GPS lock — took me forever to find it. might be worth doing a full reset on the radio and setting up APRS from scratch just to rule out some weird config conflict.

yeah you basically nailed it — JS8Call is intentionally slower because the encoding is more robust and its built around store-and-forward messaging rather than just signal reports. the heartbeat thing is just your station periodically broadcasting a beacon so other JS8 stations know youre there and what your grid is, its part of how the network mesh thing works. its honestly pretty cool once you get a few people in your area running it. the activity is definitely sparser than FT8, thats just reality. i have the best luck on 40m in the evenings and sometimes 80m late night. if you want actual conversation JS8 is the way to go, i had a 20 minute back and forth with a guy in finland last winter about antenna modeling of all things, try doing that on FT8. the tradeoff is you have to be patient and sometimes just leave the radio on and walk away, someone might respond an hour later. PSK31 isnt totally dead but youre right that its thin. i check 14.070 once in a while and occasionally find someone, but it requires both people to be there at the same time which is kinda the whole problem compared to the async stuff JS8 does

the takeoff angle thing is real but it only really matters when propagation is supporting those low angle paths anyway. ive found on 40m at night when the band is open properly both antennas kind of equalize. i switched to a vertical a couple years ago and honestly miss the inverted V for local and regional stuff, the vertical just kind of hears everything including all the garbage. depends what you want i guess

Welcome to the hobby, congrats on passing the exam. Honestly the Baofeng vs proper radio debate has been going on forever and the answer is kind of... both sides are right depending on what you're doing. For hitting local repeaters and learning? A UV-5R will absolutely work, tons of new hams start with one. The programming software (CHIRP, free download) makes it a lot less painful to set up. The build quality is not amazing and the transmit audio can be a little rough but for local 2m/70cm work you'll be fine. I started with one and dont regret it. That said if you have the budget the Yaesu FT-65 or even a used FT-60 is a noticeable step up in terms of durability and audio quality and the menus actually make sense. Kenwood TH-D75 is incredible but thats probably overkill unless you know you want APRS built in from day one. My honest take: if money is tight get the Baofeng, learn on it, and upgrade later once you know what features you actually want. If you can swing $80-100 the FT-65 is worth it and you wont feel the urge to replace it as quickly.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i finally feel comfortable enough to actually get on HF but im completely lost on the frequency thing. like i know generals have some restrictions vs extra class but when i look at the band charts its honestly just confusing. on 40 meters specifically, i see numbers like 7.175 and 7.300 thrown around but i dont know if those are hard limits or like suggestions or what. also somebody at the club meeting mentioned something about band edges and said i should stay away from them but didnt really explain why. is there a simple way to think about this or do i just need to memorize the whole chart

okay so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i finally got my baofeng programmed with the local 2m repeater frequency. i can hear people talking on it just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me, or at least nobody responds. talked to a guy at the club meeting and he said i probably dont have the right CTCSS tone set. so i looked it up on the repeaterbook listing and it says 100.0 Hz for the tone. i put that in but im not 100% sure if i set it on TX only or both TX and RX and now im second-guessing myself. also separate question — is there some kind of protocol for jumping into a conversation that's already going on? like do you just key up between transmissions or wait for a pause or what. i dont want to be rude about it but i also dont want to just sit there listening forever waiting for an opening that never comes. any help appreciated, still figuring all this out

so ive been using WSJT-X for FT8 stuff for about a year now and it logs to its own ADIF file which is fine but i want something that actually keeps everything organized and also works when i do the odd contest here and there, nothing serious just the state QSO parties and maybe CQ WPX when i feel ambitious been looking at N1MM Logger+ and Log4OM and honestly im a bit confused because it seems like N1MM is really built around contesting first and everything else second, whereas Log4OM seems more like a general logger that can maybe do some contest stuff? or am i reading that wrong my main use case is probably 70% casual HF logging with WSJT-X integration, 20% SSB ragchews i want to log manually, and maybe 10% actual contest operating. does N1MM even make sense for that mix or is it overkill and kind of annoying to use outside of a contest environment also does anyone know if Log4OM handles the WSJT-X UDP logging cleanly or is there weirdness with duplicate entries when youre running both

so ive been a General for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the Amateur Extra. i mostly do HF, some 40m and 20m SSB, occasional digital. the operating privileges on the extra arent huge compared to what i already have access to but there are those little slices on 20 and 40 that do seem to get less congested so that part appeals to me. what im really unsure about is the theory. i passed the General without too much trouble but i remember people saying the Extra has actual circuit theory, like filter design and transmission line stuff and i genuinely dont remember much of that from school. is it the kind of thing you can grind through with hamstudy or do you actually need to understand the math to pass. i guess what im asking is how hard is hard

so ive been trying to learn CW for about 3 months now and i finally got a decent paddle — picked up a used Bencher BY-1 off ebay and honestly the paddle itself feels great, way better than the cheap single lever thing i started with. but here's the thing, my sending still sounds like garbage and i cant figure out if its my keyer settings or just my technique being bad. im running it through my IC-7300's built in keyer and i've been practicing around 15 wpm which is probably too fast for where i am honestly. the dits and dahs just blur together sometimes especially when im trying to do letters like C or Y where you have to go back and forth a lot. i watched a bunch of videos and everyone says iambic mode B is better but i honestly cant tell the difference when im actually sending. does anyone have tips on what keyer settings to actually mess with first, like the weight adjustment or the sidetone or whatever? or is this just one of those things where you have to put in reps and it gets better on its own

yeah i had almost this exact thing happen when i first set mine up, turned out my USB audio latency was the culprit -- had a cheap USB sound card in the loop and it was introducing enough jitter that the pactor session would go sideways on anything longer than a short test message. switched to the built in audio path on the 7300 via the USB connection and it sorted itself out almost immediately. not saying thats definitely your problem but worth ruling out if you have any extra audio interfaces in the chain.

CQ WW is honestly a great first big contest experience even if you dont have a monster station. The exchange really is just 59 and your zone so dont overthink that part. What trips people up is the pace, especially on phone, guys are throwing their callsigns really fast and sometimes youll just have to ask for a repeat and thats totally fine, nobody is going to yell at you for it. Your setup sounds perfectly fine for getting on the board. A fan dipole at 30 feet will get you plenty of contacts especially if conditions cooperate, and right now the cycle is treating us pretty well so 15m has been surprisingly good for DX. I did my first CQ WW with an indoor dipole and still had a blast, came away with maybe 200 contacts and learned a ton. Sweepstakes is great too but the exchange is actually more complicated if you ask me, you gotta send a serial number, precedence, call, check, and section, so for a true first timer id actually say CQ WW is easier to get your feet wet. Do both if you have the time, there's no rule against it and Field Day next summer would be another good one to find a local club to operate with.

so i was just doing some casual monitoring on 28.400 yesterday afternoon and all of a sudden i started hearing stations from europe coming in like they were next door, like S9 plus on some of them. havent heard 10m open up like that in a while honestly. i managed to work a couple of Italian stations and something from Spain before it all faded out around sunset my time. also been seeing some chatter about the new Icom IC-905 actually starting to ship to dealers in the US finally, anyone here actually gotten their hands on one yet? ive been curious about it for a while but the price tag is a bit rough. seemed like it was vaporware for a long time there. anyway if anyones been watching solar flux lately the numbers have been pretty encouraging, we might actually be getting close to a real solar maximum which would be fun. my old timer friends keep telling me stories about the last cycle peak and how wild the bands were. hoping we get some of that this time around too.

so ive been a ham for about two years now and just joined my local ARES group and they keep talking about go-kits and being deployment ready and honestly i feel a little lost. like i have a general idea of what it is but when i look at lists online everyone seems to have completely different stuff and some of these guys have like full on pelican cases with everything including the kitchen sink and others just have a small backpack. my situation is i have an ft-991a and a baofeng as backup, a few different antennas, and i live about 20 minutes from the EOC we'd be supporting. i dont have a generator yet but ive been looking at the jackery stuff or maybe a bioenno lifepo4 battery setup. what do i actually need versus what is nice to have? and how do you power everything if youre at a site for like 12+ hours? that part is what im fuzzy on. also curious if anyone has a good way to organize cables and adapters because every time i grab stuff in a hurry i end up with a tangled mess and missing the one connector i actually need lol

the logging thing you mentioned -- that got me. i tried to do a solo deployment at a small community event last year just to get practice and i was absolutely drowning trying to track ICS213 traffic AND maintain a station log AND monitor two different frequencies. never again without a second person at minimum. some people use a tablet app for logging now which speeds things up but you still need eyes and hands free to actually operate. also dont underestimate how weird it feels to do formal traffic handling under pressure when there's real officials watching. completely different vibe from just doing it with your club on a wednesday night net.

Field Day is actually a great starting point if you havent done that yet — its technically more of an emergency preparedness exercise than a pure contest but it runs like one and clubs usually set up big multiop stations so you can just show up and get a feel for how contesting works without having to manage everything yourself. my club does it every June and we always have people there who have never touched HF before for CQ WW though yeah just hop on. 25ft dipole is fine, ive worked Europeans on worse. the main thing is just learning the rhythm of it, 59 followed by the zone number, over and over. after like the first hour it becomes muscle memory

i just use the qrz logbook and dxwatch in separate tabs lol, same as you. never really felt like i needed anything fancier for the amount of dx i actually work. though i did download the HamAlert app on my phone and that thing is actually really cool — you set up triggers for specific callsigns or entities and it pushes a notification to your phone when they get spotted. woke me up once at like 6am for a pacific island i needed and i actually caught it so cant complain about that

ok so ive been licensed about 4 months now (general) and i finally worked up the nerve to check into the local 2m net last tuesday. been lurking on it for like 6 weeks just listening so i thought i had a decent idea of how it went. anyway when net control asked for check-ins i keyed up and gave my call but apparently i did something wrong because there was this awkward pause and then net control kind of repeated back my call in a weird tone and moved on. i dont think i introduced myself properly or gave enough info? i wasnt sure if i was supposed to wait for a pause between other check-ins or just jump in when he called for them. and do you always say your name and location or just the call? ive heard people do it both ways on different nets. nobody was rude or anything but i felt like i definitely flubbed it and i havent gone back since which i know is dumb. just want to make sure i understand the procedure before i try again

one more thing — make sure your system clock is synced. sounds dumb but vara is pretty picky about timing and if your PC clock is off by more than a few seconds it can cause weird connection failures that look exactly like what youre describing. just run the windows time sync or use something like Meinberg NTP and see if that changes anything. fixed it for me after i wasted a whole afternoon on audio settings.

i learned from the Just Learn Morse Code software and also used the Ham Morse app on my phone a lot when i was commuting. honestly just having it on my phone meant i could practice like 10 minutes here and there throughout the day instead of only when i was sitting at my desk and that made a huge difference for me. took me probably 4 or 5 months to feel comfortable enough to actually call CQ on 40m and my first real QSO was terrifying but also kind of amazing one thing nobody told me was that copying in your head is really different from copying with a pencil so practice both. and dont give up if you plateau, everyone does around the 10-12 wpm range supposedly and it feels like you just cant get faster but then something clicks

Honestly the plateau you're hitting around 10-12 wpm is super common, almost everybody goes through it. The brain is basically rewiring itself to stop counting dits and dahs and start recognizing whole characters as sounds, and that transition takes time and can feel like you're going backwards sometimes. One thing that really helped me was the Farnsworth method — sending characters at the target speed you want (like 20wpm character speed) but with longer gaps between them so your overall word rate stays manageable. The idea is your brain learns to hear the characters at full speed from the start instead of getting used to slow drawn-out tones that you then have to unlearn later. G4FON does this too if you havent already played with those settings. Also I'd say copying real QSOs off the air, even just as listening practice before you can really decode everything, gets you used to the rhythm of actual operators which is different from generated practice text. took me probably 8 months to get comfortable around 17-18wpm but i was only practicing maybe 15 min a day so your mileage may vary

yeah so mixed is basically the catch-all — any mode counts toward it. so if you work an entity on SSB that QSO counts for mixed and for phone. if you later work them on CW that one counts for mixed, phone AND CW. you dont have to re-work anyone for mixed specifically, it just sort of accumulates from everything you do. the separate mode awards are what require you to actually chase on that specific mode. for tracking i really do recommend DXKeeper or if youre already using Logger32 or something it has decent DXCC tracking built in. the LoTW interface works but its painful compared to having it integrated in your logging software where it just updates automatically when you sync. once you get past 100 and start pushing toward the higher honor roll numbers youll really want something better than the web interface trust me. WAS and WAZ are totally separate from DXCC, different award programs with their own applications. but yes the same QSOs in LoTW can be credited to multiple awards simultaneously, you just apply for each one when youre ready. ARRL handles DXCC and WAS, WAZ is through DARC. so youll need to make sure your contacts are confirmed in LoTW for the ARRL ones or have paper QSLs for WAZ depending on how you want to do it.

this is really helpful, im about to do my first mobile install in the next few weeks and the noise issue is exactly what im worried about. quick question — does the type of car matter much for how bad the noise gets? i have a newer car with a lot of electronics and i keep reading that modern vehicles are worse for this kind of thing

i had the same thing happen when i first got my Winkeyer, kept messing with settings and made it worse lol. what helped me was just running it completely stock and recording myself on audacity to actually see the waveform. seeing that my dits were inconsistent lengths was way more useful than trying to hear it in real time. also 15 wpm might actually be a weird middle speed — some people find it easier to practice at like 20 wpm character speed with extra spacing between characters (the koch method thing) rather than just slowing everything down uniformly.