John Johnson

good question and honestly its one of those things that confused me for ages when i started out too. short version is they all serve slightly different purposes. LoTW is run by the ARRL and its what you need for DXCC and most of the big ARRL awards, so if thats your goal you definitely want to get set up on there. its a bit of a pain to register the first time because of the certificate process but once its going its pretty seamless, you just upload your ADIF log after operating and matches happen automatically. eQSL is a separate thing, more of a community run site, and a lot of DX stations upload there too. some awards accept eQSL confirmations but not the big ARRL ones. its still worth having an account because some operators only confirm there. physical cards are kind of a different thing entirely — for a lot of people its just the tradition and the joy of it, getting a card in the mail from some station in the middle of nowhere is genuinely satisfying. some awards still require paper QSLs as backup or for certain achievements. you dont have to do cards if you dont want to but id say try sending a few via the bureau and see if you enjoy it. dont need to send direct unless youre chasing a rare one and want to speed things up.

so ive been seeing flyers for the Tri-County hamfest and swap meet coming up on the 14th, think its at the fairgrounds again like last year. anybody else planning to head out? last time i went i picked up a decent MFJ tuner for like 20 bucks so im hoping the swap tables are good again. also heard the club is doing a fox hunt in the morning before the gates open which sounds pretty fun if the weather holds up

yeah what he said about SmartBeaconing. also just double check your TX deviation is set right on the radio, ive seen D710s come out of the box slightly off and it causes packets to decode poorly. should be around 3.5kHz for 1200 baud APRS. you can verify with a scope or just ask someone local to listen and report back. sometimes the simplest stuff is what gets you.

made that exact jump maybe two years ago and honestly yeah the difference on HF is real, not imagining it. the RTL-SDR is fine for VHF/UHF but once you get below 30MHz the front end just gets swamped pretty easily and the dynamic range shows its limits. i live maybe 8 miles from an AM broadcast tower and that thing would just get crushed even with a good filter, the RSPdx handles it way better. SDRuno has gotten a lot better than it used to be, i actually use it now instead of fighting with the API in other software, though i know some guys still prefer HDSDR with the ExtIO plugin for the SDRplay stuff. if youre planning to do any serious HF monitoring i think youll notice it pretty quick, if youre mostly on 2m and 440 honestly the dongle is probably fine and save your money

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new techs. so yeah you're right that it gets complicated. basically as a tech you do get some 10m privileges — you can operate phone (voice) between 28.300 and 28.500 MHz, and CW is allowed from 28.000 up to 28.300. there are also small tech allocations on 40m and 80m and 15m but they're CW only and pretty narrow, a lot of people dont even bother with them. the power limits are a separate thing but they're generally tied to the band and mode, for HF it's usually 200 watts PEP maximum for techs i believe, though honestly double check that in the actual part 97 tables because i dont want to steer you wrong. the arrl website has a really good frequency/privilege chart that lays it all out in plain english, way easier than reading the raw FCC text. i'd grab that and just keep it handy for a while.

so ive been a General for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the Extra exam. i know you get the full privileges and the extra spectrum on HF which would be nice, 40 and 80 meters especially since thats where most of the DX action seems to be around here. but ive been looking at some of the practice questions and honestly some of that stuff is pretty intimidating. like the filter theory, the transmission line stuff, the phase angle questions... i passed my General without too much trouble but this feels like a different animal. my background is not really technical, im in sales, so i dont have an engineering degree or anything like that. is this something a regular person can actually study for and pass or do you kind of need to already know the math? i dont mind putting in the time i just dont want to spend months on it and then fail. any experience from people who went through it would be helpful i guess

CW was absolutely the right call for your first activation honestly, you'll get to 10 contacts way faster than you think especially if you self-spot. and yeah you do need to spot yourself, nobody's going to do it for you unless you get lucky and a hunter stumbles across you on a sweep. just download the POTA app before you go and do a test spot from your driveway so you're not fumbling with it in the field. takes like 30 seconds once you know where everything is. the EFHW should work fine for 40m, that band is usually your bread and butter for activations especially in the afternoon. if 40 is dead try 20 but honestly at a state park 20 minutes from home you'll probably have a pileup within 5 minutes of spotting. hunters are always watching. one thing i wish someone had told me before my first one -- bring more water than you think you need and check if the park has any rules about antennas or stakes in the ground, some of them get weird about it.

congrats man, 32/35 is solid. honestly the baofeng is fine to start, dont let anyone give you grief about it. for the first time keying up just listen to the repeater for a bit first, get a feel for the rhythm of how people are talking. then just give your callsign and say youre a new tech looking for a contact. most guys on local repeaters are pretty welcoming. the worst that happens is nobody comes back and you try again later, no big deal. also dont forget to wait like half a second after you key up before talking, the repeater needs a moment to open up

the band edge thing is mostly a practical issue rather than a hard rule — your radio's VFO might show 7.300 but depending on how your transmitter is aligned and what mode you're in, part of your signal could actually be spilling above that. with SSB especially, if you're on upper sideband your signal occupies a chunk of spectrum above the carrier frequency, so if you park at 7.300 you're almost certainly going out of band. most people stay at least 3 khz inside the edge to be safe, so like 7.297 or lower. as for the general privileges on 40m, you get 7.175 to 7.300 for phone. below 7.175 is extra class territory for phone. the 7.025 to 7.125 range is where you'll find cw. there are also digital modes mixed in there depending on what band plan version you're looking at — the ARRL has a suggested plan but it's not law, just what people generally follow. the FCC part 97 rules are what actually matter legally, and those just give you the frequency ranges, not the sub-band stuff.

so ive been on HF for about two years now and mostly do SSB on 40 and 20 meters. lately ive been getting reports that my audio sounds kind of muddy or boxy, one guy said I sound like im in a tin can which... great. thanks for that. anyway im running an IC-7300 with the stock mic and I know thats probably part of it but I feel like theres more going on than just the mic. I went through the menu and messed with the TX bandwidth settings a bit and the bass and treble adjustments but I honestly dont really know what im doing in there. I read something about keeping your TX monitor on to hear yourself but the sidetone on this thing doesnt give you a real sense of what the other end is hearing. anyone gone down this rabbit hole and come out the other side with settings that actually work? also does mic technique matter that much on SSB or is it mostly just a processing thing

yeah same boat as you a while back and i ended up doing the dipole just because it was easier to put up and take down if something went wrong. noise thing is real, my neighbor has some kind of switching supply that absolutely murders my S meter and the vertical made it way worse for some reason. dipole at 25 feet still gets me into europe on 40 most evenings around sunset so its not like its useless at that height

had almost the exact same symptom on mine about a year ago and it turned out to be a cold solder joint on the driver board, not the PA at all. tiny hairline crack that you basically couldn't see without a loupe and good lighting. the joint would open up as the board warmed and then sometimes reseat when it cooled down. i found it by very carefully reflowing suspicious joints around the driver transistor area while watching the output on a dummy load. took me an embarrassingly long time to find it but once i reflowed that one spot it never happened again. worth going over those joints carefully before you dig any deeper into the RF sensing stuff.

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

so our ARES group has a county-wide exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and im trying to nail down my portable setup before then. ive been running a 100w HF station at home for years but doing this kind of extended field operation is new territory for me. my current thinking is to bring my IC-7300 with a Chameleon MPAS Lite vertical and either run off my 40ah LiFePO4 battery or rent a small inverter generator. the exercise is supposed to be 8 hours continuous and there may be some periods of high traffic where im keying up a lot on SSB, so im not sure the battery alone is gonna cut it. the other issue is antenna placement. the site is a county fairgrounds and theres a lot of chain link fencing and metal buildings around. i scouted it last week and theres maybe a 30 foot clearing on the south side away from most of the junk but i dont know if thats gonna be good enough for 40m work. was thinking about throwing a wire up between two masts if i can get permission but logistics of that get complicated fast. anyone run an 8 hour field exercise with a 7300 before and have a realistic read on battery draw? ive seen the numbers on paper but real world duty cycle at an exercise is different than what the spec sheet tells you

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

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i finally got my first HT sorted out (baofeng uv-5r, i know i know) and im trying to get on some of the local repeaters in my area. i can hear people talking just fine but when i try to key up nobody seems to hear me or respond. figured out eventually that i need a CTCSS tone programmed in but here's where im getting confused. i looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it shows a tone of 100.0 hz. so i programmed that into the radio as the transmit tone. still nothing. then i read somewhere that some repeaters also need you to set a receive tone? or maybe i dont need that? honestly at this point ive been messing with chirp for like two hours and im going in circles. also is there like... a right way to break into a conversation or do you just wait for a gap and say your callsign? dont want to be that guy who does something embarrassing on his first real transmission

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.

ok so i just got my technician a few months ago and ive been listening a lot before actually transmitting much. i notice some people on the repeater use alpha bravo charlie and all that but some guys just say whatever they want like they'll say A as in apple or whatever comes to mind. my elmer told me i should learn the proper NATO ones but i guess im wondering if its actually required or just a convention thing. like will i get in trouble if i say something different. also sometimes i hear people on HF doing really weird ones that sound almost like jokes, is that a thing or am i misreading the situation

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.

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

so ive been watching the solar flux index pretty closely these past few weeks and it keeps jumping around a lot more than i expected. yesterday it was up around 180 which got me excited so i jumped on 10 meters and yeah there was some decent stuff happening, worked a couple stations in europe which i almost never do from here in the midwest. but then this morning i checked and it dropped back down to like 140ish and the band sounded completely dead when i tuned around. my question i guess is how much does the flux number actually matter day to day versus the overall trend? like is 180 actually meaningfully better than 160 or is it more about the K index and geomagnetic stuff? i feel like ive read conflicting things about this. also is there a good resource people actually use to track this stuff in real time, i know about spaceweather.com but wondering if theres something more ham radio focused

so i've been putting off building a QRP rig for probably two years now, always telling myself i'd get around to it when i had more time or whatever. finally bit the bullet last month and ordered one of those QCX mini kits from QRP Labs and man, what an experience. the build itself took me a couple evenings spread over a week, nothing crazy difficult but there were definitely a few moments where i had to slow down and just stare at the schematic for a while before things clicked. i'm not the most experienced builder — my previous kit was just a simple audio filter thing — so the QCX was a step up for sure. anyway got it working, aligned it okay i think, and took it out to a local park last weekend with my end-fed and a little LiFePO4 battery pack i've been using for POTA stuff. worked three stations in about an hour on 20m with 5 watts. one was in Florida which is pretty far from my QTH in the midwest. im still kind of amazed that 5 watts gets out at all honestly. the efficiency thing is what really got me thinking. like i've been running 100 watts on my main rig forever and yeah it's convenient but there's something different about working a contact knowing you're running on basically nothing. anyone else feel like QRP kind of changes how you think about operating? also curious if anyone has tips for getting more out of low power — antenna stuff, best times of day, whatever you've found helps

this is really good to hear, im about 4 months into ARES and havent been on an activation yet. kind of nervous about it tbh. did you use just a handheld or did you bring a mobile setup into the EOC? our EC mentioned something about bringing a go-kit but i havent built mine yet and im not sure whats actually expected vs what you can get away with for a first time.

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 rule requiring it in part 97 as far as i know, its just good practice. on a local repeater with a strong signal most people just say their call normally and thats totally fine. where phonetics really matter is on HF when youre dealing with QRM or weak signals or working DX and the other station is struggling to copy your call. i've had plenty of contacts where i gave my call twice normally and the other guy still had it wrong, soon as i went phonetic he got it first try. the mixing random words thing you mentioned is pretty common and honestly kind of annoying because then you get people using stuff like "Washington" for W or "New York" for N and half the time the other guy still mishears it because those words arent optimized the way the NATO ones are. the NATO alphabet was actually tested and chosen specifically so each word sounds distinct even with bad audio, so theres a reason Victor sounds different from Foxtrot and so on. but yeah on a clear local repeater nobody really cares either way