David Davis44

the fan dipole is probably less headache than an OCF for field work honestly, especially if you already have wire and you're comfortable with the NVIS setup. just add the 80m elements and you're done, no balun weirdness to deal with. i made mine with a simple 3-way wire connector from the hardware store at the feedpoint and it's worked fine. one thing to think about with the generator — if this is any kind of public safety adjacent exercise, some counties have rules about running a generator indoors or even in certain outdoor areas, just worth checking before you show up with it and get told no.

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.

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.

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

ha yeah i totally remember that feeling, my first QSO i said my callsign wrong like three times in a row because i kept second guessing myself on the phonetics. the guy on the other end just laughed and said welcome to the hobby. that was like 12 years ago and i still think about it. dont worry about the callsign at the end thing, everyone does stuff like that at first, the guys on most local repeaters have seen it all and theyre usually pretty forgiving. just keep getting on the air, the nerves go away pretty quick once you do it a few more times

tail-ending is the one that made the biggest difference for me once i actually understood how to do it right. you have to really nail the timing — transmit right as the last syllable of the previous station's callsign is finishing, not after the DX comes back, not a full second gap. just right in there. took me a while to get the feel for it and i definitely stepped on people a few times while learning but now its kind of second nature. the partial call thing is interesting too. i know some ops prefer to just send their suffix when the pileup is really dense and the DX is only catching fragments anyway. works sometimes but ive also had situations where two stations had the same suffix and it turned into a mess. i think for most situations sending full call once, clearly, then shutting up and listening is still the way to go. the guys who just keep sending over and over are the worst — the dx op already heard you or didnt, sending it 6 more times isnt changing that and youre just covering up other stations. for DXpeditions specifically the published operating style info on dx-world or the expedition's own site is worth reading before you even get on. a lot of them have preferred split ranges and if you know the op is working 5 up to 10 you can make some smarter guesses about where theyre actually listening vs where the whole pile is camping

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.

Even when a call sign doesn't appear in the FCC database, it may not be available for assignment. There are several reasons: pending applications filed the same day, reserved call signs, or calls in the two-year waiting period. Did you check the ULS for pending applications before filing?

Welcome to the hobby! When NCS asks for check-ins, just give your call sign followed immediately by your call - no need to unkey between. Keep it simple: 'N0ABC this is KC1DEF.' If it's your first time on that net, mentioning you're a new ham is actually helpful.

i was in the same boat when i got my tech, honestly just used a band chart printed out and taped it near my radio for the first few months. eventually it just kind of clicks. the ARRL one someone mentioned is good, there's also one on the website for the band plan that color codes everything by license class which helps a lot visually. one thing that tripped me up early on was not realizing that the privileges listed in part 97 are the maximum allowed, but a lot of repeaters and clubs have their own kind of gentlemens agreement about where certain modes go. like technically you could do a lot of things on certain frequencies but the community just doesnt. anyway youll figure it out as you go, dont be afraid to just listen for a while before transmitting, that alone teaches you a lot.

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

yeah the latency thing is real and theres not a whole lot you can do about physics unfortunately. i ran a RemoteHams setup for a while at my parents place about 200 miles out and even with a decent fiber connection on both ends i was seeing like 80-120ms round trip on the control path which is just barely workable for casual HF but forget about anything competitive or fast-paced. the raw IQ over the link idea is interesting but the bandwidth hits hard. at 2MHz sample rate with 16-bit samples youre looking at something like 64 megabits per second uncompressed which is obviously insane. people compress it down but then you get artifacts on weak signals which kind of defeats the purpose. theres some guys running remote SDR setups using SoapySDR with some compression on top and it can work but i think at that point youre basically reinventing what something like WebSDR or OpenWebRX already does. might be worth just setting up a proper OpenWebRX instance as your panadapter and keeping the audio path separate through RemoteHams, that way you can tune the SDR view independently from your actual transceiver. i did something similar with a KiwiSDR and it worked pretty well for monitoring while the rig was transmitting.

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

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 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?

not exactly the same setup but i did something with an arduino mega controlling an old hygain rotator and it was way simpler than i expected once i stopped overthinking it. arduino just polls the serial port in the main loop, parses the GS232 commands, and drives a motor controller board. no threading, no wifi, no linux, just runs forever without issues. might be worth considering if the pi zero is giving you grief — sometimes the simpler tool is the right one for a job like this where reliability matters more than flexibility.

Scheduled for my Technician exam this Saturday and getting a bit nervous. Need to get 26 out of 35 questions correct (74%) to pass. I've been doing well on practice tests but want to make sure I don't choke on the real thing. What are your best test-taking strategies? Any specific approaches for handling questions you're unsure about? I know there's no waiting period to retake if needed, but I'd rather pass the first time!

i had the same frustration on my first few linear passes, honestly its kind of a rite of passage lol. one thing that helped me was switching to manually correcting doppler during the pass instead of relying fully on the hamlib link — not because automated is bad but because it forced me to really understand what was happening. you tune the downlink to keep what you're hearing centered, and the uplink chases accordingly. once you feel that in your fingers a few passes in it starts to click. AO-73 can be a little quiet honestly depending on how many ops are on. have you tried FO-29 or even TEVEL-2 when its operational, sometimes a busier bird helps because you have more signals to orient yourself with. also worth mentioning — whats your uplink power? the 818 is only 5w and with some antenna setups that can be on the edge for getting through cleanly on the linear birds, especially at lower elevations.

so i finally got my technician license last month and ive been reading about HF and everyone keeps saying to learn CW but honestly i dont even know where to begin. i downloaded like three different apps and they all seem different. one has you learn letters one at a time starting slow, another one throws random characters at you right away which was pretty overwhelming. theres also just youtube videos of people sending code but i cant tell if im supposed to be copying or just listening or what i guess my main question is does it matter which method you use or is it more about just putting in the time every day? i have maybe 20-30 minutes i could practice. also is there a point where i should get on the air even if im really slow, or should i wait until im faster

so ive been putting together a go-kit style setup for the county ARES group and we're doing a full drill this weekend where we actually have to run everything off our own power, no grid hookup. been running a little Honda eu2200i for the radio stuff and its been fine for HF but now they want me to also run a linked repeater node and a laptop for winlink and suddenly im not sure if im cutting it close on wattage. the HF rig is an IC-7300 which i know pulls around 20-22 amps at full output on TX but i dont usually run it at 100w in the field, more like 50-60. the repeater node is a baofeng-based thing someone cobbled together, not sure what it draws but probably not much. laptop is maybe 45w. the eu2200i is rated 1800w continuous so on paper i should be fine but ive heard people say those inverter generators get unhappy when you're running close to the limit for extended periods. also the antenna situation is a whole other thing. were setting up in a pretty open field, have a 40m OCF dipole and a 6m mast. thinking about using the mast for the dipole with the center up and the legs sloping down but i dont know if thats going to kill my radiation angle too much. the repeater node is just going to use a mag mount on a vehicle so thats easy. anybody done something similar and have thoughts on either the power side or the antenna setup

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and been doing mostly 2m local stuff but starting to get into HF a little bit and i keep hearing people use NATO phonetics like constantly, like even when conditions are perfectly clear they still go through the whole thing. my elmer told me to always use phonetics for my callsign but i see guys just rattling off their call without phonetics all the time too. is there like an actual rule about this or is it just personal preference? i dont want to sound like an idiot either way. also i was in a pileup last week trying to work a DX station and i panicked and forgot what November sounded like for a second which was embarassing

RemoteTx has better audio codec options and more robust error recovery. The subscription model is annoying but the extra reliability is worth it for contest operation where every second counts.

yeah I was in the same boat not that long ago. I'll be honest eQSL felt kind of pointless to me at first but then I worked a station in Reunion Island and he only confirmed on eQSL so now I upload to all three after every operating session just out of habit. takes maybe five extra minutes. one thing nobody told me early on — make sure your grid square is filled in correctly in your logging software before you upload anywhere, because fixing it after the fact on LoTW is a pain and some awards need it

was in the same boat not that long ago lol. what finally made it click for me was someone explaining that the frequency on your dial isnt where your whole signal is, its where the carrier would be. so yeah on LSB your voice is actually below that number. took me way too long to get that honestly