Emily Miller

yeah this is basically the eternal ham software problem and i dont think theres a clean answer tbh. i ran a similar setup for a while, N1MM for contests, WSJT-X for digital, and DXKeeper for the main log and it was a constant juggling act. what finally helped me was just accepting N1MM as the master log for everything contest-related and doing a careful ADIF export right after the contest ends before i do anything else. set a reminder on your phone if you have to, seriously. for the WSJT-X and Log4OM thing, i think the issue a lot of people hit is that Log4OM's UDP listener can drop packets if the timing is weird or the PC is busy. theres a setting in WSJT-X under the reporting tab where you can point it at the Log4OM port, make sure the IPs match exactly and that nothing else is grabbing port 2237 or whatever you have it set to. also make sure Log4OM is actually open and has focus at least once before you start a WSJT-X session, sounds dumb but it matters sometimes.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend, went out to a state forest area that has a reference number and set up a simple wire dipole strung between two trees. overall it went pretty well, got way more contacts than i expected honestly, people really do hunt these references. but i have a few things im still confused about. when i self-spotted on pota.app i noticed some hunters were also logging it as a WWFF contact, is that normal? like do the two programs just kind of overlap for a lot of parks and forests? and also how strict are the rules about being actually within the boundaries? i was parked at a trailhead that was technically just outside the main reference area but i could basically see the boundary. felt a little sketchy so i packed up and hiked in about 10 minutes before starting, just wanted to make sure i did it right. also whats the deal with uploading logs, do i go through wwff.cc or is there another way now? i saw something about a different portal but couldnt find clear info. the whole logging side of this is honestly more confusing than the actual operating part lol

so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero w for the past few weeks trying to get it to handle some basic shack automation stuff and honestly it's been a rabbit hole i did not expect. started out just wanting it to log my contacts automatically from my IC-7300 via the USB connection and maybe flip a few relays for antenna switching but now im knee deep in python scripts and i cant stop adding features to the thing. right now i have it pulling band data from the radio over CI-V, deciding which antenna to connect based on what band im on, and logging to an sqlite database that syncs to ADIF every hour or so. also added a little 2x16 LCD so i can see basic status without having to look at the computer. the whole thing runs headless and just comes up when i power on the shack strip. my question is more about the antenna switching side - im using a 74HC595 shift register to drive 8 relays through only 3 GPIO pins which works great on the bench but i keep seeing weird behavior when i key up. wondering if anyone else has seen relay chatter or logic glitches from RF getting into the GPIO lines. i added some bypass caps but not sure if thats enough or if i need proper optoisolation between the pi and the relay board.

so ive been messing with this 80m dipole for about three weekends now and i cant figure out what's going on. cut it to roughly 130 feet total according to the standard formula, center fed with RG-8X running about 65 feet down to the shack. the swr dip is showing up around 3.4 MHz instead of where i want it which is closer to 3.7 or so for phone. i trimmed it back a little thinking maybe i'd cut it long by accident but the resonant point barely moved, like maybe 20 kHz which doesnt make sense if i took off a foot on each side. the antenna is basically an inverted V with the apex at about 35 feet off a pushup mast and the ends are only maybe 8 feet off the ground, which i know isnt ideal but thats what i can do in my yard. wondering if the low end height is loading it and pulling the resonance down? also have a 1:1 balun at the feedpoint that i built from a type 31 core, dont think thats the issue but who knows. any ideas before i start over from scratch, which at this point im tempted to do

welcome to the addiction haha. seriously though S&P is absolutely the right call for your first CQ WW, dont even worry about running a frequency yet. just tune around, work whoever you can hear, and log everything. N1MM+ is what most serious contesters use and yeah it takes a little setup but there are like a million youtube tutorials and the defaults are actually pretty reasonable once you get the basics in. your 891 and a wire antenna will do more than you think on 40m especially at night when the DX starts rolling in from europe. i did my first CQ WW with a dipole at 25 feet and still managed a few hundred QSOs over the weekend. the pile-ups are wild but if you just target the stations everyone isnt already calling you'll be surprised how many contacts you can rack up. the multipliers are what make it fun — every new country or zone is like a little dopamine hit. also check the 3830 scores page after the contest, lots of people post their results and writeups and it gives you a sense of what's achievable from different setups

congrats on the general by the way. i went through the vanity process about a year ago and got lucky on my first try for a 1x2. just want to add that you can submit multiple applications at once for different callsigns and the system ranks them by preference order i believe, so its worth applying for a few options rather than just one in case your top choice gets grabbed by someone else at the same time. the filing windows are like simultaneous so its not really first come first served within that window from what i understand anyway. ae7q is definitely the site to bookmark, i probably checked it every day for like two months waiting for the one i wanted to pop up lol

1.4:1 at your target freq is totally fine, i wouldnt mess with it. the 468 formula is just a starting point anyway and you got lucky landing that close on the first cut. honestly if your radio is happy and youre making contacts just leave it alone, trimming half an inch at a time to chase a 1.1:1 SWR is one of those things that will drive you crazy and the real world difference at 100w is basically nothing. on the wire gauge thing, the difference between 14 and 12 gauge at HF is so small its not worth worrying about. the skin effect at 7 MHz means current is mostly flowing on the surface anyway and even pretty thin wire has more than enough surface area. people have been working DX on wire antennas made from stuff thinner than that for decades. the rocky soil might have a small effect on your takeoff angle but with an inverted V at 30 feet youre not exactly doing low angle DX work anyway so it probably doesnt matter much for your use case.

yeah what he said. also dont worry about the weather thing, half the time thats exactly what people talk about on our local net anyway haha. our Wednesday net basically turns into a weather and ragchew session after the formal part is done. just jump in, worst case you stumble over your words a little and nobody cares at all, we were all new once.

honestly the height matters way more than the configuration in my experience. an inverted V at 35 feet is going to outperform a flat top at 20 feet pretty much every time. the pattern difference is real — flat top has more low angle radiation which helps for dx, inverted V is a bit more high angle so it can actually be better for regional stuff on 40m depending on what you're trying to do. but were talking maybe a few db difference in specific directions, not night and day. i ran both for a while when i had a temporary second support up, did some back to back comparisons on 40 during a few evenings. flat top was maybe marginally better into europe from my qth but it wasnt like the inverted V was embarassing itself. if the inverted V is working for you and raising it higher isnt in the cards, i wouldnt lose sleep over it. get the apex as high as you possibly can and call it done.

so i dont know if anyone else has been noticing but 6 meters has been absolutely wild the past couple weeks. im talking coast to coast contacts on FT8 with signals i wouldnt normally dream of working, had a guy in Arizona calling me from here in upstate NY and it was like he was next door. Es season seems early this year or maybe im just paying more attention now that ive actually got a decent antenna up finally. anyway while i was down the rabbit hole reading about propagation i stumbled across some chatter about Icom supposedly announcing something new in the IC-705 line or maybe a successor, couldnt find anything super concrete but there were a few posts on some japanese ham forums that got translated and it sounded legit. anybody seen anything more solid on that? i know icom has been hinting at stuff at hamvention but i havent been in a couple years so im kind of out of the loop on what was shown this year if anything. also if youre not already watching the dxmaps and pskreporter this time of year you're really missing out, the band opening visualization stuff is just so much better than it used to be.

I did a pixie build last year and had the same chirp issue, drove me absolutely crazy for a while. ended up being my power supply which was a cheap switching wall wart and it was just injecting noise into everything. switched to a battery and it got way better, not perfect but definitely better. for SOTA that actually works in your favor because youll be on battery anyway. the pixie type rigs are pretty sensitive to all that stuff but theyre fun to build. what did you use for the audio filter stage? im always looking for ideas to clean up the audio on simple rigs like that

im running both on a pi4 with a kenwood TM-V71A and it works pretty well. one thing i noticed is if you go the digipeater route keep an eye on your TX delay setting in direwolf, had mine set too high at first and it was causing all sorts of collisions that i didnt notice until a buddy of mine checked aprs.fi and pointed out my packets were mangling other peoples stuff. dropped it to around 150ms and things cleaned up a lot. also just a heads up aprs.fi doesnt always show you whats really happening on RF, its worth having a second receiver just listening and using a waterfall to see whats actually going out. i use an rtl-sdr for monitoring while the main rig transmits.

so ive been messing with my APRS setup for a few weeks now and im not sure my packets are actually making it very far. running a TM-D710G into a mag mount on the truck, using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which is what everyone seems to recommend but i live kind of rural and i think there might only be one igate within like 40 miles of me. been watching aprs.fi and sometimes my beacon shows up fine and sometimes it just disappears for like 20-30 minutes at a time while im driving. i bumped the beacon rate down to every 2 minutes from the default which helped a little i think but honestly not sure if that made a difference or if it was just coincidence. also noticed when i drive through town it picks up way better obviously. should i be adjusting the path for rural vs town or is that more trouble than its worth with a mobile setup. and does anyone actually use WIDE1-1,WIDE2-2 out there or is that considered bad form these days

so i've been chasing a 3B8 for about two years now and last weekend i finally got through on 17m and i'm still kind of processing how it happened honestly. i've been reading all the usual advice about timing your calls, listening to where the DX is actually pulling from, working split properly etc but i feel like none of that really clicked until i just sat there for like 45 minutes and watched the pattern before i even touched the mic. what i noticed was the DX op was consistently coming back about 2-3 khz up from where most people were piling on, and he had this rhythm where he'd work two or three stations then pause for like a full second before saying QRZ. i started timing my calls to hit right after that pause and on maybe the 8th or 9th attempt he came back with my suffix. genuinely couldnt believe it. anyway my question is really about DXpeditions specifically — like when you've got a massive one going, VP6 scale or whatever, is there any technique that actually works beyond just patience and good ears? i run about 500w into a 3 element yagi at 45 feet so i'm not exactly a pistol but not a barefoot dipole guy either. feels like there has to be something im missing because some guys seem to bust these pileups way faster than makes sense for their signal.

so ive been licensed for about three weeks now (got my tech) and everyone keeps telling me to just grab a baofeng to start but then other people say dont bother and get something better from the start. i dont really know what i need it for yet, probably just local repeaters and maybe some simplex if anyone in my area even does that. my budget is like $80-120 maybe a little more if it makes sense. the yaesu FT-60 keeps coming up but thats pushing the top of my budget and i also saw the wouxun KG-UV9D which looks interesting. does the extra money actually matter that the end of the day or is a uv5r going to do basically the same thing for local repeater use? i dont want to regret buying cheap but i also dont want to spend money i dont need to spend. any thoughts appreciated

the IC-9700 is actually a solid starting point, good phase noise floor on it which matters a lot for weak signal work. the single yagi though, yeah thats gonna be tough for random EME. path loss on 2m EME is around 252 dB give or take depending on moon distance, which sounds completely insane because it is. with a single 9el you're probably looking at maybe 12-13 dBd of gain which just isnt enough to hear most stations even with 100w. the minimum practical setup most people talk about for working initials with JT65B is something like 4x9el yagis and at least 400-500w at the feed, more is better obviously. some of the real big gun stations run kilowatts into stacks of 16 or 32 yagis or a 6m dish and those guys can work almost anything. but thats not where you have to start. with 4 yagis and a decent preamp right at the feedpoint you can get on and work the big stations at least. key thing people miss is the preamp location, if its at the rig and not at the antenna youre throwing away a lot of sensitivity with coax loss on 2m. check out the online EME chat on dxbase or ping around on the moonnet reflector, lot of helpful people there who will tell you exactly what youre able to work with a given setup before you spend anything

I built the SM0VPO design - operational within one hour and gives very nice results. You get about 6dB with 8 half-wave sections, 9dB with 16 sections. The trade-off is worth it for general VHF work where you want gain without constantly rotating.

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new generals. so the short version is the FCC part 97 allocations are the actual law — thats what you legally have to stay inside. the ARRL band plan is basically a gentlemens agreement that the amateur community came up with to keep things organized and reduce interference. so if you operate phone down in the CW portion of 40m you wont go to jail or lose your license immediately but you will have a bunch of CW operators pretty annoyed at you and honestly it's just bad practice. as for band edges, the reason people warn you about them is your signal has sidebands. if youre running USB and you tune to exactly 7.300 your actual signal is going to splash above that into frequencies you arent licensed to use. most people say stay at least 3 khz inside the edge to be safe, so like 7.297 or lower for phone. some rigs are worse than others too depending on how well the filtering is set up.

this is really helpful actually, im in almost the exact same situation — just got my tech license last month and im trying to figure out my first mobile setup. didnt realize the power connection made that much of a difference. does it matter how long the cable run is from the battery or is it more about where you tap in?

so ive been using N1MM pretty much since i got my ticket and it works great for contests, no complaints there, but for everyday logging its kind of a pain honestly. like i have to remember to switch modes and half the time im just doing casual rag chews or some POTA stuff and N1MM feels like overkill or at least not really designed for that use case. a buddy of mine keeps telling me to look at Log4OM and from what i can tell it seems way more flexible for general logging, nice interface, integrates with stuff like QRZ and clublog without jumping through hoops. but here's my thing — i also run WSJT-X for FT8 and the integration between WSJT-X and N1MM is already set up and working. i got UDP logging going, dupes get flagged, the whole deal. i dont really want to break that. so i guess my question is has anyone actually run Log4OM alongside WSJT-X and does that UDP pipe work the same way? and if you do contests do you just fire up N1MM for those events and let Log4OM handle everything else, or is that going to create a mess with duplicate logs you have to merge later. the ADIF import/export thing seems like it should work but ive heard horror stories about dupe QSOs and date/time mismatches when people try to merge logs from different programs. not looking to overthink this i just want something that doesnt feel like im running a contest 24/7 when im just sitting down for an hour on 40m.

honestly for sprint i barely bother with true SO2R anymore. what i do now is use the second radio strictly as a bandscope and a place to park a frequency while im running on R1. like ill be running 20m, see a pileup forming on 15, note the freq, finish my current run freq if its still going, then jump over. its not real SO2R but it keeps me from missing band openings and the mental overhead is way lower. the problem with full SO2R in sprint is exactly what you said — the contest moves so fast and the QSY rules mean youre constantly having to rethink who you can work where. i tried going full SO2R in the SSB sprint a few years back and my rate was actually worse because i kept fumbling the transitions. maybe if your station is set up with footswitch interlock and dedicated audio switching it gets easier but i never got there.

copying real QSOs off the air helped me way more than any software tbh. just tune around 40m in the evenings and find a slow ragchew or a CWT contest and just listen, dont even try to write anything down at first. something about real signals with real people just trains your ear differently. also dont underestimate just taking a break for a few days sometimes — came back after a week off once and somehow i was copying better than before i left which made no sense but here we are

i made that exact switch about a year ago and yeah it's a noticeable difference. not like night and day on every band but on the lower HF stuff especially 160 and 80 meters the RTL was basically useless from my place, too much intermod from a 50kW AM station about 8 miles away. RSP1A handled it way better once i dialed in the gain settings in SDRuno. one thing nobody told me is SDRuno has kind of a steep learning curve compared to SDR#, took me a while to figure out the whole RSP control panel / virtual radio setup. theres good youtube tutorials though. also HDSDR works with the RSP1A if you install the extio plugin and honestly i ended up going back to that for a while just because i knew the interface already.

yeah same thing happened to me a few months ago lol. what helped me was that our club actually has a training net specifically for new people and the net control kind of walks you through it. might be worth asking your local club if they have something like that, or even just emailing the net manager and asking them to explain the format. in my experience net managers love when new hams reach out, they'd rather have you check in imperfectly than not at all

so ive been running an old TS-480SAT for years and always told myself i didnt need to upgrade, the 480 is a solid rig and i still think that, but i kept reading about the 7300's waterfall and how much it changes the way you operate and i finally caved during a sale at HRO last month first thing i noticed is how much real estate the spectrum scope takes up in terms of your attention — like i catch myself just watching signals move across the display instead of actually working them, which is kind of a problem but also genuinely useful when you're hunting a DX station and trying to find where the pile is splitting audio out of the box was a little harsh to my ears on SSB, spent some time in the menu fiddling with the treble rolloff and it got much better, probably took an hour total to get it sounding the way i like. RTTY setup was actually easier than i expected through the USB audio, got WSJT-X running in maybe 20 minutes which honestly surprised me coming from the external interface i was using before one thing that bugs me a little is the fan noise, not terrible but my old 480 was dead silent in receive and im noticing it now in a quiet shack at night. not a dealbreaker just something i wasnt expecting from reading reviews anybody else make a similar jump from an older Kenwood or Yaesu to the 7300? curious if the honeymoon feeling wore off after a few months or if people are still happy with it