James Moore18

im in kind of the same boat as you actually, just hit 98 confirmed last week and i keep going back and forth on whether to just focus on getting those last two for the certificate or try to knock out some of the WAZ zones i'm missing. zone 26 has been killing me, feels like nothing ever comes out of there when im actually at the radio lol one thing i did figure out though — DX Summit and the cluster are your friend for timing. i set up alerts for the entities i actually need and just wait for the pile to die down a little before jumping in. used to just chase whatever was spotted and wasted a ton of time on stuff i already had confirmed.

honestly the SDRplay is night and day compared to an RTL dongle, even with an LNA. the 12 bit ADC on the RSP stuff just handles crowded band conditions so much better, like if you live near an FM broadcast transmitter you'll know what i mean, the RTL just gets completely blasted and even with a good bandstop filter it's a pain. the RSPdx specifically has some nice HF coverage improvements too if you care about anything below 30MHz. that said if you actually want to transmit for testing the HackRF is your only real option in that price range, the TX power is garbage but it works for loopback stuff and close-range experiments. i have both at this point which probably says something about how this hobby goes. started with a v3 RTL dongle, then got a HackRF, then got the RSP1A and honestly the RSP1A just sits on the desk doing ADS-B and ACARS all day and barely gets touched for anything else because it's just solid. SDR++ works great with all of them btw, way better than SDRsharp these days in my opinion.

haha yeah the forgotten antenna wire thing is basically a rite of passage at this point, i think most of us have had some version of that moment. i once made it all the way to the summit of a 6 pointer before realizing my coax adapter was sitting on my desk at home. had to try a direct connect situation that was just embarrassing. but congrats on the activation, 4 contacts is 4 contacts and that wire improvisation actually sounds like decent operating instinct. a lot of guys freeze up when stuff goes wrong in the field and you just worked around it. also 20m SSB at 10w from a summit usually pulls in chasers pretty reliably especially if you self-spot on SOTAwatch beforehand, which it sounds like you did. once you get a few more activations under your belt you might want to try adding 40m into the mix, sometimes when 20 is being weird the chasers are all sitting on 40 waiting.

Jump in, seriously. Search and pounce is exactly where you want to start, just tune around, find a station calling CQ contest, wait for a gap and throw your call out. The exchange for CQ WW is pretty simple — your callsign, signal report (everyone just says 59), and your CQ zone. You're in zone 5 if you're in the midwest, zone 4 or 3 on the coasts, just look it up beforehand so you dont have to think about it in the moment. Your setup is totally fine for making contacts. 30ft dipole will get you plenty of DX on 20m and 15m especially if conditions cooperate, and this time of year the bands can be pretty decent. Dont stress about rate or score, just focus on getting comfortable with the rhythm. After about an hour it starts feeling natural. Field Day is definitely more of a social thing, CQ WW has more of an edge to it but the DX stations are usually patient with newcomers as long as you keep it short and clean.

so i finally got around to building a proper 40m dipole instead of using that random wire i had strung up forever. cut the elements to roughly 33.5 feet each based on the 468/f formula, used some 14 gauge stranded wire i had sitting in the garage, and terminated it all at a SO-239 chassis connector I pulled off an old radio. the thing actually works pretty decent, got it up about 25 feet in an inverted V configuration with the center tied off to a tree. SWR is sitting around 1.4:1 at 7.150 which honestly surprised me, I expected worse for a first attempt. but here's the thing — the feedpoint connection is bothering me. I just kind of twisted the wire around the connector lugs and soldered it, seems solid but I'm wondering if that's the right approach or if I should be using some kind of proper strain relief. also did a quick coat of liquid electrical tape over everything but dont know if thats enough to keep moisture out long term. also not sure if i should have used a 1:1 balun there. read a bunch of conflicting stuff online about whether you need one for a basic backyard dipole. my coax run is about 60 feet of RG-8X down to the shack. feed line is picking up some RF i think because touching the coax changes my SWR reading slightly. any thoughts appreciated, been at this hobby about 8 months now.

so i passed my technician exam like three weeks ago and just been sitting on my HT scared to actually transmit anything. today i finally just went for it on the local 2m repeater and some guy named Bill came back to me right away. we talked for maybe 5 minutes about signal reports and where i was located and i dont even remember half of what i said because i was so nervous lol. my voice was shaking the whole time. anyway it counts right? im KD9 something and i still have to look up my callsign every single time i sign off which is embarrassing but whatever, it was a real contact and im pretty pumped about it even if it was just a short ragchew on a local machine.

40 miles northwest is a weirdly specific offset, makes me wonder if its a sign error somewhere in how the lat/lon is being encoded. like if one of the decimal degrees is getting the hemisphere wrong or truncated. i had something similar once when i was using Direwolf and had a config typo in my position — came out like 3 degrees off because i had the wrong number of decimal places. probably not exactly your situation but worth looking at the raw packet data on aprs.fi, click on the packet and look at the actual string, sometimes the error is pretty obvious when you see it written out.

25 feet on 40m is definitely low, youre basically looking at a cloud warmer at that height, good for regional stuff but not gonna do much for dx. that said a dipole even at low heights still outperforms a compromised vertical in my experience and nearly every vertical in a suburban lot is compromised because of the radial situation. if you can only lay 4 or 5 radials youre leaving a lot of signal on the table. the ladder line idea is solid though, run it into a good balanced tuner and you can work other bands with it too which gives you some flexibility. i had a similar setup a few years back with a 40m dipole at about 30 feet and it worked pretty well for most of the midwest and up into canada on a good evening. not a dx machine but respectable. what direction are you mostly trying to work?

ok so i just got my technician license about 3 weeks ago and im still trying to figure out what im actually allowed to do. i read through part 97 or at least tried to but honestly its kind of dense and i got confused pretty fast. my main question is about HF — like i know techs get some HF privileges but i cant figure out exactly which bands and modes are ok and which arent. someone at my local club told me techs can use 10 meters but only certain parts of it? and something about CW only below a certain frequency? i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere i shouldnt be, already paranoid enough about that. also does it matter what power level im running or is that a separate thing entirely. sorry if this is a dumb question i just want to make sure im doing this right before i key up anywhere

yeah you're kind of overthinking it but also not, because the ground question actually does matter for the vertical. clay soil is decent but youre still going to want at least 16-20 radials if you want the 6BTV to perform anywhere close to spec. without a decent radial field it'll work but you'll be leaving signal on the table. the thing about a low dipole on 40 isnt that its useless, its just that the takeoff angle is high so youre better suited for shorter skip, like 500-1500 miles or so. for local ragchewing that might actually be fine or even preferable. if dx is the priority and you can commit to laying radials, vertical wins for 40 in my opinion. but if you just want something that works and you can throw up on a weekend, the dipole will get you on the air and you can refine later. first antenna is almost never your last antenna anyway.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 years and mostly just did local stuff, some contests here and there, never really paid attention to logging entities or anything like that. but i've been reading about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and now i'm kind of obsessed with the idea of actually chasing these things properly. problem is i don't really know where to start. like do i need to have been logging everything with the right info from the beginning? i have like 800 QSOs in my log but honestly a lot of them are sloppy, missing RST, some dont even have the right time offset because i hadn't set my computer clock right. are those contacts just worthless for award purposes or can i still submit them? also i keep seeing people talk about LoTW and i set up an account like a year ago but never really used it. is that basically mandatory at this point if you want credit for anything or do paper QSLs still hold up for DXCC? sorry for the wall of text, just trying to figure out the whole ecosystem before i dive in deeper

honestly i was wondering the same thing when i started. what i heard from someone at my club was that its just good practice to at least use them once when you first call CQ or join a net so people can copy your call correctly, but after that its up to you. i mostly just say my call normal unless someone asks me to repeat or the signal sounds rough. one thing i noticed is some of the nets i check into are pretty strict about phonetics even on VHF, like the net control will actually come back and ask you to re-ID phonetically if you just rattled off your call fast. so i guess it just depends on who's running things

so ive been wanting to build something from scratch for ages and finally sat down last weekend and threw together a direct conversion receiver for 40m based on a design i found in an old ARRL handbook from like 1994. got the LO running with a NE602 and a colpitts oscillator, output goes into an LM386 audio stage. it actually receives signals which i was honestly not expecting on the first try. the problem is the audio is really badly affected by every little thing. like if i touch the volume pot the whole receiver kind of chirps, and theres a low hum thats always there even with nothing connected to the antenna port. i tried adding some bypass caps near the 386 supply pins like everyone says to do but it didnt really help much. also the image rejection is basically nonexistent which i know is kind of the nature of DC receivers but its worse than i expected. anyone gone through this with a similar build and figured out what the actual culprit was, because im going in circles a bit

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general class) and i keep hearing people talk about checking into nets but honestly i have no idea where to start. like i know there are nets on 2m and HF but every time i try to search for schedules online i end up on some website that hasnt been updated since 2011 and half the frequencies listed are dead when i tune in. i did manage to catch the end of what sounded like a traffic net on 40m last week, the net control was calling for late check-ins and i was too nervous to actually transmit anything which is dumb i know. are there any good resources for finding active nets? and is it weird to just check in without knowing anyone on the net? feels like showing up to a party where you dont know the host

so ive been playing around with cluster spotting for a few months now and i think i finally have a decent workflow going but wanted to see what other people do. basically i keep DXwatch open in one tab and then ill cross reference on QRZ when i see something interesting pop up — like if i see a spot for some rare prefix i dont recognize i can just pull up the callsign on QRZ real quick and see what country/entity it is and whether ive worked it before. the thing im wondering about though is whether there are better apps or tools for this. ive seen people mention DX4WIN and Log4OM and some others but honestly the browser based stuff seems to work fine for casual chasing. im running windows so android apps arent really an option at the desk. is there something i should be looking at that would kind of tie all this together in one place instead of flipping between tabs all the time

I didn't even know this was happening, how do I find out more about it? Is there a website or do I need to check the ARRL events page or something. I just got my ticket last month and have never been to one of these before so kind of curious what its actually like.

yeah the TCXO on the 857 is worth it, i did mine maybe 3 years ago and same thing you describe with the warmup drift, it was driving me nuts on PSK31 back when i was doing a lot of that. the mod itself is straightforward but i remember the connector on the replacement unit being slightly fiddly to seat properly. if anyone reading this does it just make sure you dont force it. i never bothered with the MARS mod on mine since i dont really have a use for out of band TX but i get why people do it just to have the flexibility. the 857 is such a capable little radio thats kind of underrated honestly, people sleep on it because its older but it does a lot for its size.

I did my first one earlier this year and had no idea what I was doing either so you're not alone. I actually forgot to self-spot at all and just sat there calling CQ for like 20 minutes wondering why nobody answered. Someone finally found me I guess but yeah, lesson learned — get yourself spotted before you even leave the trailhead if you can get cell service. also W7W is a great association, lots of good summits out that way. what rig setup were you running weight wise? im trying to figure out if the KX2 is worth it for packable ops, been going back and forth on that for a while now.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF stuff, some satellite work on SO-50 and a few others, but EME has always been this thing in the back of my mind that seems completely out of reach. talked to a guy at the club meeting last month who said he works the moon on 2m with a single yagi and i honestly didnt believe him at first. like i always assumed you needed a massive dish or a 4-yagi array minimum. anyway im starting to do actual research now instead of just assuming. i've got a fairly clean QTH, not much in the way of obstructions to the east and west, and i could probably put up something reasonable in the backyard. running an IC-9700 so the radio side is probably okay? im assuming i need a serious LNA right at the feedpoint and im guessing low loss coax is non-negotiable. but the antenna question is where i get stuck. is single yagi on 2m actually realistic for working anyone these days or is that just kind of a bragging thing people say. and what are people using for software, i keep hearing about WSJT-X and JT65 but im not sure which mode is actually what people use for EME right now

i was in the exact same spot like 8 months ago haha. ended up getting the UV-5R because i couldnt justify spending more when i wasnt even sure how much id use it. honestly its been totally fine for just talking on repeaters. only thing i wish i'd known is to buy a better antenna for it right away — the stock rubber duck that comes with it is pretty mediocre and a nagoya 771 or whatever its called makes a real difference. costs like 12 bucks and its probably the best upgrade you can do early on.

yeah the battery thing gets everyone at least once. we had almost the exact same situation during a SET a few years back, guy swore his pack was good and then poof. our group ended up writing an informal checklist, nothing fancy, just stuff like charge date, load test result, that kind of thing, and members have to log it before any activation or drill. doesnt have to be official just needs to happen. the net control succession problem is real and i dont think theres a clean fix other than just rotating the role more often during normal nets. like make your tuesday night 2m net a training ground, let different people run it, let them make small mistakes in a low stakes environment. by the time something real happens youve got five or six people who have actually done the job not just read about it.

ok so i got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get into the local FM repeater but nobody seems to hear me, or maybe they do and just arent responding? hard to tell. anyway i programmed the repeater frequency into my baofeng and i can hear people talking just fine but when i key up nothing happens and no one responds. my buddy at the club said something about needing a CTCSS tone and i looked it up but now im more confused than before. from what i understand the repeater needs a specific sub-audible tone sent along with my transmission so it knows to open up, but i have no idea what tone this particular repeater uses or how to find out. the repeater directory online lists like three different things and im not sure which one is right. also is it rude to just jump in when people are mid-conversation or should i wait for a break? i dont want to be that guy

honestly my go-kit started as just a shoebox with my HT and a spare battery and i told myself id upgrade it eventually lol. that was like four years ago. its a little better now but not by as much as i want to admit. one thing i will say — dont let perfect be the enemy of good here. a charged HT with a spare battery and a copy of your local repeater info written on paper is infinitely better than a fancy kit you havent finished building yet. tornado warning isnt going to wait for you to get the right pelican case. the SLA vs lithium debate is real but if budget is a concern just get a decent SLA to start, a 12ah is cheap and will run an HT or low-power rig for a long time. upgrade later when you have the funds. also check if your local ARES group does go-kit workshops or show and tell type things, mine did one last spring and it was super helpful just to see what other people actually carry

yeah QRZ does have a DX spots section, its under the tools menu if i remember right. its not bad for a quick look but honestly for serious cluster watching most people use something more dedicated. on Android i've been using DX Toolkit for a while now and it pulls from multiple cluster sources, you can filter by band which is really handy when you just want to see whats happening on 17m for example and dont want to wade through a wall of FT8 spots on 40 there's also the HamAlert service which is kind of a game changer once you set it up — you give it a list of entities or callsigns you need and it pushes a notification to your phone when one gets spotted. saved me from missing a few rare ones i'd been after for years. takes a bit of setup but worth it

yeah the timing thing is huge and i dont think people realize how much it matters. i spent about two years just calling randomly in pileups and wondering why i couldnt break anything harder than a mult in a contest. then i started actually listening to the rhythm of how a good dx op works a pileup — most of them have a very consistent cadence once they get rolling and if you can lock into that and put your call in at exactly the right moment you go from invisible to getting picked up pretty regularly the other thing i'd add is working the band conditions angle. if the dx is on 20m and the pileup is massive, sometimes jumping to 17 or 15 when those open up gets you through in ten minutes what wouldve taken two hours on 20. you have to actually monitor where theyre operating across bands and be ready to jump. i missed a 3Y0 slot years ago because i was too stubborn to move off 20 and by the time i tried 17 the band had already shifted your point about sending just the callsign is something i argue with people about all the time. had a guy in our club insisting you need to send your full call twice slow and clear every time and i just... no. the dx op has been doing this for 12 hours, they dont need it spelled out, they need to be able to grab your suffix out of the noise and come back to you