David Davis44

I ran RemoteHams for probably two years before I switched back to a custom setup. The client is nice but you're kind of locked into their ecosystem which started to bother me after a while. Latency wise it was fine for casual HF, I worked some DX through it without too much trouble, but contesting is rough regardless of what platform you use — the turnaround time on PTT keying alone will drive you crazy in a pileup. The SDR remote part is actually where it shines in my opinion, having a panadapter view at the remote end makes a huge difference for finding activity. Your hybrid idea with SDR on receive and a real rig on TX should work in theory but youll need to handle the timing yourself because the client isnt really designed for split-path audio like that. I messed around with something similar using a SDRplay on the receive side and an IC-7300 on TX, had to write some glue code to keep everything synced. wasnt pretty but it did work.

so i finally did my first Parks on the Air activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house. been meaning to do this for months and kept putting it off because i wasnt sure i had the right setup or whatever. anyway i threw my KX2 and a random wire into a backpack along with my SOTAbeams linked dipole and drove out there saturday morning. got there and realized i totally forgot to self-spot on the POTA app before i left home so nobody knew i was even out there. took me probably 20 minutes just to get the antenna up because there were way fewer trees than i expected and the ones that were there had weird low branches. eventually got on 40m and just started calling CQ POTA and honestly expected crickets but people actually came back to me. ended up with 22 QSOs in about 90 minutes which i guess is enough to count as a valid activation. one thing i wasnt ready for was how many people called at once once i did finally spot myself through the app. went from nothing to like a small pileup and i kind of panicked a little. also my logging was a mess, i was using paper because i couldnt get hamrs to behave on my phone with the glare. anyone have tips for getting better organized next time, especially for spotting and logging in the field?

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, went up to a local summit that only had a handful of previous activations on sotadata and managed to get 6 contacts in about 45 minutes before the weather started looking sketchy. qualified it no problem but i have some questions about stuff i wasnt sure on. first thing — i was running my KX2 with a random wire antenna i just tossed up in a tree, worked fine on 40m but i couldnt seem to get much going on 20m even though conditions looked decent from the spots i saw beforehand. not sure if it was the antenna or just bad luck timing or what. second thing is about the summit reference itself, the one i did was listed as W6/something and i want to make sure the chasers got credit — do they have to log it on their end on sotawatch or does it happen automatically when i submit my log? also is there a good way to self-spot when youre solo? i had my phone with me but signal was garbage up there, ended up just calling blind on 7.033 which obviously worked out but felt like i was just hoping for the best the whole time.

yeah the latency thing on phone is just kind of the reality of remote HF unless you throw serious money at low-latency server infrastructure which most of us arent gonna do. i mostly stick to CW and digital modes remote because of this exact issue. FT8 is almost made for remote ops honestly, the software handles the timing and you just watch it do its thing. tried running a net remotely once via phone and it was a mess, kept doubling with people.

went through this exact same thing like two months ago lol. one thing that also tripped me up was i had the offset going the wrong direction, plus instead of minus or whatever. the baofeng doesnt always set that automatically depending on how you program it. might be worth double checking that too while youre in there messing with the tone settings. once i got both things right it just worked, heard the tail and everything.

so i finally got around to building my first dipole from scratch this weekend. been putting it off forever because i always just bought prebuilt stuff but figured its time to learn. i used the standard 468/f formula and cut the wire for 40m, ended up with two legs around 33 feet each give or take. wire is just 14 gauge stranded i had sitting in the garage, fed with about 50 feet of RG-8X into an MFJ-259B. the swr at what should be resonance is sitting around 1.8:1 which isnt terrible i guess but i expected to get closer to 1:1 or at least under 1.5. the resonant point also seems to be about 150kHz lower than i calculated for. antenna is in kind of an inverted-V configuration, apex maybe 30 feet up on a push-up mast, legs going out at roughly 45 degrees tied off to some stakes. coax runs straight down from the feedpoint for maybe 10 feet before going horizontal. is the high-ish swr because of the inverted-V angle pulling the feedpoint impedance down from 75 ohms? i read somewhere that steep angles can do that but wasnt sure if that really matters at 45 degrees. or is it more likely the coax acting as part of the antenna messing with the reading? i didnt put a choke or balun at the feedpoint because i dont have one made up yet. anyway any thoughts appreciated, trying to figure out if i need to trim or if its something else going on

so we ran a county-wide simulated emergency exercise last saturday and honestly it was a really good learning experience even though parts of it were kind of a mess. the scenario was a major flooding event that took out all the repeaters in the southern part of the county and we had to route traffic through a linked system about 40 miles north. the thing that really surprised me — and not in a good way — was how many of our operators just froze up when the net control went down unexpectedly. we intentionally pulled the plug on the primary NCS about 45 minutes in to see if anybody would step up and take over. there was like a solid two minutes of dead air before someone finally announced themselves as alternate NCS. two minutes sounds short but in an actual disaster that could be really bad. also our winlink guys did great actually, got several health and welfare messages through when voice was too congested. that part im genuinely proud of. but we had three people show up with radios that hadnt been checked in months, one HT had a dead battery right out of the gate which... yeah. the basics man. anyway curious if other groups have dealt with the NCS succession issue and how you train for it. do you just randomly designate someone mid-exercise or do you have a more formal backup structure?

i passed mine last spring and i pretty much just used the question pool from the FCC website and HamStudy, didnt buy any books. probably not the ideal way to learn but i figured id worry about actually understanding everything after i had the ticket. some people will disagree with that approach lol but it worked for me, passed first try with only like a week of studying. the pool only has like 400 something questions and they pull 35 from it so the odds are pretty good if you grind it enough

yeah the waterfall is kind of addicting honestly, i remember when i first got mine i just sat there watching it for like 20 minutes without even making a contact. felt a little silly but whatever it works. one thing i'd suggest messing with is the NR and notch settings, took me a while to find a combo that i liked for SSB but once i got it dialed in the audio got a lot cleaner. also if you havent already check out the RS-BA1 software for remote operation, not everyones cup of tea but its nice to have the option. what antenna are you running it into? makes a big difference obviously but curious what your setup looks like.

so this has been bugging me for about two weeks now and im at a loss. my 7300 just randomly started having terrible receive sensitivity, like i can barely hear anything on 40m that i used to be able to copy easily. transmit seems totally normal, did a quick check with a dummy load and my power output looks right, swr is fine. but receive is just... dead feeling. not completely silent, just way down, like maybe 20-30db down from where it should be. i swapped antennas, tried a completely different feedline, even hooked up my old dipole directly at the radio just to eliminate the line and connectors. no change. the noise floor looks lower than it should too on the waterfall, which to me says it's upstream of the SDR section, maybe preamp or the front end somewhere. ive had the top off and nothing looks obviously burnt or damaged, all the connectors on the board look clean. did the basic reset already and it didnt do anything. anyone else seen something like this on a 7300 or know what i should be checking next? wondering if maybe the LNA blew somehow or if theres a known failure point on these. been lurking here a while and figured someone might have run into it.

the counting thing is the biggest trap and honestly the hardest habit to break but you absolutely have to ditch it if you want any real speed. what worked for me was forcing myself to listen at a speed where counting was physically impossible — like bump it up to 15 or 18wpm even if you can only catch maybe half of it at first. your brain starts learning the sounds as whole characters instead of math problems. farnsworth spacing is great for this, you can set the character speed high but leave extra space between them so you have time to write without slowing the actual tone patterns down. i went from about 7wpm to copying 20wpm solid in probably 8 months doing maybe 20-30 minutes a day of focused practice. the W1AW sessions are great because its real morse from real people and the slight variations in sending help train your ear better than perfectly machine-generated code. just stick with it, the jump from 10 to 15 felt like climbing a wall and then one day it kind of clicked

I switched about 6 months ago and honestly its been great. The wsjt-x integration just works - no more copying and pasting qsos from digital modes. For contests like arrl dx mixed it handles band changes really smoothly and the interface is way more modern than n1mm. Only downside is the learning curve if youre used to n1mm shortcuts but once you get it down its solid

Check SOTA Watch before you leave - see who's spotted as hunting. Also try 40m if 20m is dead, it's been working well lately even with low power. Good luck and welcome to the addiction! 73

Built three of them for our QRP club's group build. With the dummy load on the output of my WM-2 wattmeter I read about 8 watts out, however my DC input voltage to the rig was 14.2V - a bit over the 12-13.8 called for in the manual. So let's consider it a full QRP gallon at specified voltage. Great little rigs for POTA work.