Amanda Foster

so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero w for the past few weeks trying to get it to control a few things in my shack automatically and i gotta say its been more of a rabbit hole than i expected but in a good way mostly right now i have it pulling weather data and keying a relay to turn on my fan when the shack hits a certain temp, and i also have it monitoring my power supply voltage over i2c with one of those little INA219 breakout boards. works pretty well once i sorted out the address conflicts which took me an embarassingly long time to figure out what i really want to do next is hook it up to rigctld and have it log bands automatically based on time of day, like switch to 40m in the evening without me having to remember. my radio is a 7300 so the CAT interface should be pretty straightforward but ive never actually done anything with rigctld before. anyone have a starting point for that or a script i can steal lol also curious if anyones done anything similar with an arduino instead — i started with an uno for the relay stuff and moved to the pi when i realized i actually needed network access, but maybe theres a better way to split the work between the two

I went through the exact same thing last year. ended up doing a fan dipole with elements for both 40 and 80 off the same feedpoint, works great and no real compromise on either band. just something to consider if you ever want to get on 80 too without running separate antennas. the elevated radial thing for verticals does work but you really want at least 4 and they should be resonant, not just random lengths. i had a buddipole style vertical for a while with like 2 drooping radials and it was pretty mediocre honestly. the dipole I have now is just better in every way for my situation.

the cognitive load thing is real and i wont sugarcoat it. first couple contests i tried SO2R i was a mess, blew exchanges, lost my run freq twice because i wasnt watching it, the whole deal. but honestly around contest number three something just clicked and now running S&P on radio 2 while holding a frequency on radio 1 feels almost automatic. its like driving stick, you stop thinking about the clutch eventually. on the filtering question — yeah you do kind of need to spend some money if you want to do it properly. the 4O3A or dunestar bandpass filters are the usual go-to and they make a massive difference. i tried it cheap first with just some extra separation and a good antenna switch and it was workable on different bands but same-band SO2R without proper filtering is basically asking for a bad time. there are guys who run two radios on separate antennas pointed different directions and claim it works OK but ive never tried that personally. if budget is the issue i'd honestly say start with two radios and just run them on different bands, get the workflow down before you worry about same-band operation. the rate improvement even from just mult hunting on band 2 while you run on band 1 is pretty significant once you get comfortable with it.

so ive been getting more into DX chasing lately and i set up accounts on both QRZ and DXwatch and honestly im a little overwhelmed by all the cluster spotting stuff. like i get the basic concept, someone hears a station and posts the freq and callsign and everyone piles on, but im not sure which network is actually more active or more reliable for finding good spots. i mostly operate HF, 20 and 17 meters, and im looking for anything that can help me work new entities. been at 87 confirmed on lotw and trying to push toward 100. been poking around the QRZ logbook tools too which are pretty handy for tracking but i feel like the spotting page there sometimes feels a bit slow compared to what other people describe. does dxwatch pull from different nodes or is it basically the same data? and are there any other apps people use on their phones for this, something that shows the spots on a bandmap or something would be great

yeah what he said about the Victron is solid advice. i run one in my truck and it made a huge difference vs just clipping to the battery directly. one thing i'd add -- the chameleon MPAS is great but if you're trying to do NVIS on 40 specifically you really want that antenna as low as possible, like 15-20 feet max above ground, which kind of goes against how most people deploy it. ive had better luck just throwing up a simple end fed halfwave on a 33ft radiator for 40m NVIS than messing with the MPAS in that config. cheaper to build too if you have a 49:1 unun lying around. just something to think about if coverage in the county is your main goal for the 40m portion

so i just passed my technician exam last week (finally) and im trying to figure out what handheld to get as my first radio. everyone i talk to says something different and i've been going down rabbit holes on youtube for like three days now and i'm more confused than when i started. right now i'm between the Baofeng UV-5R just because its cheap and everywhere, but a few guys at the club meeting said to stay away from it and get something like a Yaesu FT-60 or maybe a Wouxun. my budget is probably around $100-150 but i could stretch if something is really worth it. mainly just want to do local repeaters and maybe some APRS eventually down the road. does it matter that much which one i get starting out? i feel like i'll just use it to check into nets and learn the ropes for now. any thoughts appreciated, im a little lost

congrats on making the leap, first activation is always a little nerve wracking but youll do fine. on the log upload question — you have a few days, i think its like 7 days or something, definitely not same day required. but i usually just upload mine that night when i get home while its fresh. as for spotting yourself, totally fine to do it, thats what the POTA spot system is there for. just go to pota.app and throw yourself up on there once you start calling, hunters are watching that constantly. honestly once you get a few QSOs in you kind of forget youre nervous and it just feels like regular radio. 40m is a solid choice, especially in the afternoon. have fun with it

the farnsworth method is what everyone recommends and honestly it works but you gotta stick with it for more than a week or two before judging it. i was impatient and kept switching between methods which probably set me back. one thing nobody told me that helped a lot was just copying random 5-letter groups instead of actual words, because when you're copying real words your brain tries to predict the next letter and you start getting ahead of yourself and making mistakes. random groups force you to actually hear every single character. i still do this when im warming up before getting on the air.

had something similar on a friends 7300 a while back, turned out to be the internal fan connector was loose and the radio was going into thermal protection even though the temps werent actually that high -- the protection circuit was seeing bad data from the sensor not actual heat. pulled the board, reseated the connector and it was fine. probably not exactly your problem but worth checking anything on the PA monitoring side. also the ALC circuit on those can get flaky, ive read a few posts on eham about people chasing intermittent power issues back to something on the ALC line getting noise on it. if you have a scope its worth watching that line while you TX and see if theres anything weird going on right when it drops. intermittent stuff like this is always a pain to catch but at least the 7300 isnt impossible to work on compared to some of the older rigs.

so i finally got off the bench and actually participated in one of the county ARES simulated emergency tests last saturday and i really wasnt prepared for how different it felt from just rag chewing or even contesting. like i know how to operate but when someone hands you a piece of paper with a message and says relay this to the EOC net control and do it NOW, the brain just kind of freezes for a second. we were running a scenario where the main repeater had gone down (they actually took it offline for the exercise which was a gutsy move i thought) so we had to coordinate on a backup simplex frequency and figure out who could actually hear who. turns out there were some pretty significant dead spots that nobody really knew about because we all just assume the repeater covers everything. several stations basically couldnt reach net control directly and we had to set up relay stations on the fly which was not something anyone had really practiced before. the other thing that got me was traffic handling. i write maybe 20 words per minute by hand and trying to copy a radiogram format accurately while also monitoring the frequency and keeping track of who else needs to check in... yeah. i think i need to practice that a lot more. anyone else do these exercises regularly? what do you work on to actually get better at this stuff, asking genuinely because i want to be useful if something real ever happens

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and honestly embarrassed to say I still dont have a real go-kit put together. been meaning to do it forever and after the storm we had last month that knocked power out for like 4 days I figured I really need to stop procrastinating on this. right now I have an FT-817 that I was planning to build around, a 20ah lifepo4 battery I picked up last year, and a couple of antennas — an EFHW I built myself and a mag mount dual band for the car. I've got a cheap power pole distribution block and some misc cables. I'm thinking about putting it all in a Pelican 1510 but I haven't actually bought one yet, still on the fence about size. My main use case would be ARES stuff, maybe setting up a portable station at a shelter or EOC if needed, and also just general emergency use at home if power goes out for an extended period. what do I actually need that I'm probably not thinking about? I feel like I'm missing the non-radio stuff more than the radio stuff if that makes sense. like the logbooks and the documentation and whatever else you're supposed to have in there.

honest answer — i memorized about 60% of it and understood the other 40% and still passed first try. the math questions specifically, like the ones about LC circuits and reactance, i just learned the formulas well enough to plug numbers in without really internalizing why. that said the filter stuff actually clicked for me after a while because i was building some stuff at the time and it started making practical sense. the ARRL book is fine but i found the HamStudy.org flashcards way more useful for daily drilling. the extra pool is 702 questions and the test pulls 50 so theres some room to have weak spots. the 60 meter channels alone made it worth it for me honestly, and getting into the lower portions of 40 and 75 where the DX hangs out is a real difference. dont overthink it just start studying and give yourself like 2 months of consistent review and youll be fine

yeah the timing thing is so real and nobody talks about it enough. theres almost a rhythm to how a good DX op runs a pileup — if you can lock into that rhythm you can anticipate the gaps instead of reacting to them. took me probably two years of serious DX chasing before it felt natural. one thing i'd add for split pileups specifically: dont just park on one frequency in the spread. i'll move around a bit, try 5 up for a few calls, nothing, try 8 up, nothing, drop back to 3 up. the idea being the DX op is probably tuning around in the spread too and youre more likely to land in his ears if youre not glued to one spot where 200 other guys are also sitting. some ops announce where theyre listening but plenty dont and you just gotta work it out. also — and this is maybe controversial — i actually turn my power down sometimes in a massive pileup. if everyones running a kw all you get is this wall of noise, and occasionally dropping to like 300w with a clear signal and good timing cuts through better than being part of the noise floor at full gas.

yeah the doppler thing on linears trips everyone up at first. short version: for SSB through a linear transponder you generally want to tune your downlink to keep your received signal stable, and let the uplink drift a little OR use gpredict to drive doppler correction on both radios if your setup supports it. the key thing to understand is the transponder is inverting — so if you tune up on your uplink your downlink goes down. that catches people off guard when they try to manually chase their signal. gpredict can actually control two radios at once over hamlib if you set it up right, one for each band. that way it handles the math automatically and you can focus on actually operating. with just the sdr on the downlink being corrected and the 818 fixed youre only doing half the job, which explains the drift you hear later in the pass when the doppler delta is bigger. AO-73 is a fairly low bird so your doppler shift on 70cm uplink can be several kHz across a pass, definitely noticeable on SSB.

honestly the antenna isolation thing is what kills most people before they even get started. on a small lot you're probably looking at needing band pass filters no matter what, the W3NQN style filters or the 4O3A ones are what most serious contesters run. even with good separation you'll have issues if you're trying to run 20 and 40 simultaneously without them. i run a stacked pair on 15 and a 4el on 20 and i still use filters because the second radio bleeds into the first enough to be annoying even at 100w. as for the learning curve yeah it's real but i wouldnt say it takes as long as people make it sound. first contest or two you'll barely use the second radio and thats fine, just start using it for S&P on a dead band while you're running on the main radio. you dont have to be doing full blown SO2R where you're CQing on both simultaneously right away, that comes later. the rate bump even from basic two radio operation is noticeable enough that it's worth it. mixing brands is fine btw, N1MM handles it well as long as you get the COM port stuff sorted out which is its own little adventure but nothing terrible

so i was browsing around this morning and apparently Icom made an official announcement about the IC-905 successor or whatever it is, cant remember the exact model number now but it was all over the usual spots. been seeing rumors about this for like six months and people kept saying it was gonna have built in GPS and some kind of improved ALC handling which honestly would be nice because my current setup has given me grief on that front. anyone else been following this? im not sure im ready to drop the money on it but if the receiver specs are actually what they're claiming that could be interesting for weak signal work. also heard there might be a band opening on 6m this weekend if the conditions hold, solar flux has been looking decent lately. been a good few weeks actually for DX if you havent been on much. anyway curious what people think about the new Icom thing, worth waiting to see reviews or is this just marketing hype again

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. so ARES and RACES do overlap a lot and honestly in a lot of counties they basically function as the same group of people, the difference is more about the legal/organizational structure. RACES is specifically tied to government emergency management and only gets activated through official channels, whereas ARES is the ARRL-affiliated volunteer side and can be activated by served agencies like hospitals or red cross without a full government declaration. in practice most of us hold both registrations and just show up when needed. as for getting involved, dont stress too much about the ICS stuff right away, everyone starts confused by it. the main thing is to keep showing up to meetings and nets, get your name known, and do the FEMA online courses when you have time — IS-100 and IS-700 are the usual starting points and theyre free. after a few months of being a familiar face youll start getting included in the tabletop exercises and eventually real deployments. nobody expects a new general to walk in knowing everything, the good groups are pretty patient about it

so ive been trying to get more serious about CW lately and i finally picked up a used Bencher paddle off ebay, hooked it up to my little Winkeyer USB and... i dont know, everything i send just sounds off to me. like the dits and dahs kind of run together at anything above maybe 15 wpm. i spent probably two hours last night messing with the weight and ratio settings in the software and i feel like im going in circles. im practicing with just.learn.morse.code on my phone for receiving and thats actually going ok, im up to about 18 wpm copying but my sending is nowhere close to that. someone at my club said maybe my paddle tension is too loose and thats causing the problem but i honestly cant tell. how do you guys even know what the right tension feels like? like is there some trick to setting it up or do you just kind of figure it out over time

yeah what the other guy said. i showed up to my first ARES meeting with just my HT and honestly that was totally fine. been doing it for three years now and the training nets they run are actually where i learned the most about operating under pressure, way more useful than just chatting on the local repeater. some groups do ICS-100 and IS-700 training together which is worth doing early if yours offers it, makes you way more useful on an actual activation.

dude yes this is exactly why i got into QRP, i just passed my general like 3 months ago and im still saving up for my first kit but reading stuff like this makes me want to just do it already. what kit was it exactly? the 4state ones look cool but i wasn't sure which band to start on, 40 or 20. also did you need any test equipment to build it or can you kinda just put it together and trust the process

yeah i was in your exact spot about 18 months ago and went with the BF-F8HP which is kind of the slightly beefier baofeng and honestly it was fine to start. got me on the air, learned a ton just fumbling around with it. but i did eventually get a FT-70DR and the difference in how the receiver handles busy areas was pretty noticeable. not trying to talk you out of the baofeng if budget is tight, just saying the upgrade itch is real and you might end up spending the money anyway down the road. whatever you get just get on the air, thats the whole point right

so its like 9pm local and i've been parked on 7.200 for the past hour just kinda listening and there's almost nothing going on. couple guys ragchewing down around 7.180 but even that kinda faded out. i remember when this time of night on 40 was just wall to wall signals, now it feels like i'm tuning a dead band half the time. maybe its just my location, i'm in a pretty RF-noisy neighborhood and my antenna situation isnt great but still. anyone else noticing this or is it just me being impatient

yeah i had the same issue for months and it turned out my transmit filter shape on the 7300 was set way narrower than i realized, i think someone had been messing with the passband settings and cut the low end way back. once i reset it to defaults and then nudged the low cut to about 100hz and high cut to 2800 it sounded way more natural. also — and this is a little thing but it helped me — mic placement really does matter with the PR-40, its a side-address mic and i was basically talking into the wrong part of it for way too long and felt dumb when i figured that out lol

yeah the front end on the 7300 is decent but it definitely has headroom issues when youve got a big signal nearby. i did something similar but went a different direction — added a bandpass filter array on a relay board before the antenna input, switched by band. pain to build but the IMD situation on 40 and 80 is way better now especially during contest weekends when everyones running legal limit a few kHz away. didnt touch the firmware, been on whatever shipped with mine for over a year and havent had issues with the AGC people complain about. though i mostly do CW so maybe the SSB AGC weirdness doesnt affect me as much. the DSP filter in that radio is genuinely good if you set it right but it cant fix a garbage signal coming in, garbage in garbage out as they say.

thats basically how i operate every weekend tbh. dont have the patience for contesting so just having something on in the background while i do other stuff around the shack works for me. sometimes ill hear something interesting and actually sit down and work it