John Johnson

so ive been trying to get my APRS setup working for about two weeks now and im losing my mind a little. the TNC is definitely keying the radio, i can see the PTT light on my 2m rig going on and off on the beacon interval, and when i put a scanner nearby i can hear the data burst. sounds like normal APRS audio to me. but nothing ever shows up on aprs.fi no matter how long i wait. running a Mobilinkd TNC3 into a Kenwood TM-V71A, using APRSdroid on an old android phone. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. symbol is the little car icon. my grid square is EN52 which isnt exactly the middle of nowhere, theres definitely igates around because i can see other stations popping up near me on the map. checked the audio levels a dozen times, tried adjusting the deviation on the radio, even borrowed a friends TNC just to rule out hardware. same result. starting to wonder if maybe my path is wrong or something with the callsign-SSID setup. using KD9XXX-9 which should be fine for a mobile. anyone run into this before or have ideas what else to check

The task book structure is brilliant for tracking progress! It emphasizes that each ARES communicator needs proper dress, equipment, knowledge, and demeanor to support assigned tasks. Makes the whole organization more professional and accountable.

so we had a pretty significant ice storm roll through our county last weekend and the local ARES group got activated for the first time since i joined about 8 months ago. i've been to all the nets and done the ICS courses online and thought i had a decent handle on things but honestly nothing really prepares you for the real thing we were deployed to the county EOC and i was assigned to handle HF traffic between our county and the neighboring one because the repeaters were having issues - some kind of power problem at the hilltop site. ended up running Winlink for most of the afternoon and a little bit of voice on 40m. the EC was great, really calm and kept everyone on task. i was fumbling around with the laptop more than i'd like to admit but eventually got into a rhythm one thing that caught me off guard was how much just sitting and waiting there is. like a lot of it is hurry up and wait. and then all of a sudden someone needs something and you need to be on it immediately. also the served agency people (county emergency management) were really nice but had basically no idea what we actually do or what our limitations are, so there was some back and forth on expectations anyway just wanted to share for anyone whos thinking about joining their local ARES group and wondering if its worth doing all the training. it is. even if you feel underprepared going in, the training does kick in. mostly.

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now mostly for listening to airband, some HF with the direct sampling hack, and messing around with NOAA weather satellites. its been fine honestly but i keep reading about the SDRplay RSP1A and people acting like its a completely different world. the price jump isnt crazy, like 120 bucks or whatever, but i dont want to spend it if im just going to notice marginal improvement on the stuff i already do. main things i care about: HF reception is kinda mediocre with the direct sampling mode on the RTL, lots of images and it just feels noisy. also the dynamic range thing comes up a lot when people talk about the RSP1A and i sort of understand what that means in theory but not sure how much itd actually matter for casual monitoring. running SDR# on windows if that matters, might try SDRuno at some point. anyone actually made this switch and can tell me if the HF difference is noticeable or am i just reading too much into forum posts

so i finally got called up for an actual activation last month — county EOC needed amateur radio support during the flooding event we had here in the valley. ive been doing the monthly ARES nets and the SET exercises for almost two years now and honestly thought i had a pretty good handle on things but man, real world is just different. the biggest thing that caught me off guard was how much waiting there is, and then suddenly everything happens at once. during the SET we always had kind of a structured flow but at the actual EOC there were periods where nothing was coming through on the nets for like 45 minutes and then the served agency liaison dumped three traffic requests on me at the same time. my ICS message handling was fine i think but i kept second-guessing myself on the proper format for the radiograms we were passing to the section. also nobody told me to bring food. that sounds dumb but i was there for 11 hours and the EOC had some sad vending machines and that was it. the experienced guys all had go bags with snacks and everything worked out. lesson learned i guess. anyway curious if other people felt the same way their first time — like the training is good but it doesnt fully prepare you for the real thing?

might be worth checking if icom has any service bulletins on this, i vaguely remember something about audio path issues on early production runs but i could be mixing that up with a different model. if it's still under warranty obviously send it in, icom's turnaround isn't terrible.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually so take this with a grain of salt but what helped me was just picking DXCC as the main goal and treating the others as bonuses. like when I work a state I note it but im not stressing about WAS specifically. one thing I will say is get your LoTW account set up properly before anything else because its kind of a pain if you have a backlog of contacts to upload later. I had like 8 months of logs to go through and it was tedious getting it all sorted out.

yeah im in a similar boat, built my first dipole last spring and went back and forth on the balun thing forever. ended up just making a choke out of like 10 turns of RG-8X on a 4 inch PVC form, cost nothing and i feel better about it. whether it actually made a difference i honestly cant say, but my SWR got a little more stable across the band so something changed. your setup sounds totally reasonable though, 25 feet for 40m is decent especially inverted-V, the lower angle on those legs helps with regional contacts anyway.

the warbling hum thing sounds like it could be your LO getting into the audio path, especially if youre running the VFO and audio stages close together on the same board. direct conversion receivers are notoriously sensitive to that kind of stuff. the fact that it changes when you touch the enclosure makes me think theres a ground loop somewhere or maybe the bypass caps on your audio amp power rails are insufficient. id try stuffing a 100uF right at the chip supply pins if you havent already, and make sure all your grounds are star-grounded back to one point rather than daisy chained. on the BFO injection question — for a standard SBL-1 or similar diode ring mixer you generally want around 7 to 10dBm at the LO port, going higher doesnt help much and can actually start to degrade things depending on the diodes. 10dBm should be fine. if sensitivity feels low id check your RF preamp gain first, or just try adding a simple one or two transistor amp stage ahead of the mixer. sometimes that makes a huge difference.

no waiting period anymore, that was eliminated a while back — you can apply for a vanity call pretty much as soon as your license shows up in the ULS database. the priority system still exists though, so if you're applying for a call that was previously held by a deceased ham and you're an immediate family member that bumps you up. otherwise it's just general applicant pool. the calls that show as unavailable in the various lookup tools are usually either in an application queue (meaning someone already filed for them and it's being processed) or they havent been released back into the pool yet after the previous holder's license expired. there's usually a waiting period after a call becomes available before it can be applied for, I think its around 30 days or something like that but don't quote me on the exact number. AE7Q's website is way more useful than the FCC ULS for figuring out call availability, I'd start there. you can see exactly what status a callsign is in and when it becomes eligible. good luck, hope you find something you like

yeah the two-logger workflow is annoying but honestly once you set it up it becomes muscle memory. i run N1MM for every contest and just export the ADIF at the end and drop it into Log4OM. the import is mostly clean, i did have some issues early on with the contest exchange fields showing up weird but i think there was a setting in N1MM about ADIF output format that fixed it, been a while so i dont remember exactly which one. the real reason to just accept N1MM for contests is the function key macros and the way it handles dupe checking in realtime. Log4OM is great software but its not built around the idea that youre going to be doing 800 QSOs in 24 hours and need everything to be a single keystroke. different tools for different jobs basically. ive tried to force other software during contests before and it always costs me rate when it matters.

so our ARES group has a county-wide exercise coming up and im putting together a portable station for the first time on my own without just riding along with someone elses gear. ive been doing this for a few years but always just showed up and plugged into whatever was already running so actually sourcing and setting up my own kit is new territory for me. the plan is to run an IC-7300 as the primary HF rig, maybe a 2m/70cm mobile unit for local nets, and i need to keep everything going for potentially 8-10 hours. the exercise site has a parking lot and a small shelter but no shore power, so its either generator or battery and ive been going back and forth on this for a while. for antennas i was thinking an end-fed halfwave on a 31ft jackite pole for HF and just a mag mount on the car for VHF/UHF. the EFHW with a decent tuner should cover 40 through 10 okay i think. my main hangup is the power side — a small Honda 2200i runs clean enough for the radios but its another thing to haul, needs fuel, makes noise which the served agency isnt thrilled about. on the other hand a 100ah lithium battery is expensive and i dont totally trust my math on how long it would actually last under real operating conditions. anyone run similar setups for extended exercises? curious how people handle the generator vs battery tradeoff when you actually need the station to stay up reliably

oh man i had the same exact feeling my first time, that little pileup moment is such a rush. i kept second guessing whether i was doing the exchanges right lol one thing i'd add is check out the POTA subreddit and also there's a really active facebook group where people post about upcoming activations and stuff. i learned a ton just from watching how other people log and operate from their posts and videos. also if you can ever go out with someone who's done a bunch of activations it really helps, i tagged along with a guy from my club before i tried solo and it made a huge difference

yeah the message traffic thing is a really common stumbling block, we had the exact same issue a few years back. what helped us a lot was doing a dedicated winlink drill separate from the voice stuff — just getting everyone comfortable with the format before you add the chaos of an actual exercise on top of it. also we started keeping laminated quick reference cards at every deployment position with the frequency plan, the fallback simplex channels, and the ICS form field explanations all on one page. sounds basic but it made a huge difference when people are stressed and trying to remember six things at once. the thing about your newer guy stepping up doesn't surprise me at all honestly. sometimes the people who havent built up bad habits yet just adapt faster. we had a tech licensee who'd only been licensed like four months handle a traffic net better than some of our old timers during a real activation a couple winters ago. keep that guy engaged, those operators are valuable.