David Davis44

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

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?

I've got a TS-590S that's putting out full 100W on 6m but dropping to about 60W on all HF bands. This is a common issue in the TS-590 series, often caused by voltage drop under TX load from poor power cables, corroded fuse holders, or loose connections. The rig needs ~13.8V at the finals; even a 1-2V drop limits HF output (6m often draws less current). I've verified SWR is good on all bands with my dummy load, so it's definitely not an antenna issue. Has anyone experienced this specific pattern where 6m works fine but HF doesn't? I plan to measure voltage AT THE RADIO while transmitting on high power, using terminal strips on the power leads so I can monitor voltage during TX. Any other diagnostic steps I should consider?

oh man i went through the exact same thing when i first got licensed lol. the baofeng programming is kind of a nightmare at first but once you get it it makes sense. one thing that helped me was just using CHIRP software to program the radio from my laptop instead of doing it all by hand on the keypad, way easier to see what youre doing and make sure the tone is actually set right. and yeah what the other guy said about etiquette is pretty much it. i was nervous to jump in at first too but honestly most people on repeaters are really friendly, especially to new hams. just listen for a while to get a feel for how the conversations flow on that particular machine, some are really busy and some are pretty quiet and the vibe is a little different on each one.

im in pretty much the same boat as you, been sitting on my General ticket for like 18 months telling myself ill study for Extra eventually. the thing that keeps tripping me up is the question about whether its worth it if youre not doing much CW or contesting. my elmer keeps saying just do it for the knowledge not just the license but then i look at some of those questions about phase locked loops and celestial mechanics or whatever and my brain just kind of goes blank. might just sign up for a test session to force myself to actually commit to studying

so the short version is the FCC allocations and the band plan are two different things, which is what trips up a lot of new generals. the FCC part is the legal part — for 40m as a general you can do phone from 7.175 up to 7.300, and CW and digital from 7.025 up. that's what's actually in part 97 and what matters for your license. the band plan is more of a gentlemens agreement thing that the ARRL puts out, so like even though you technically could call CQ SSB at 7.175, most of the phone activity is up around 7.200 and above just by convention. the digital stuff tends to cluster down around 7.040-ish and the CW guys are down at the low end. nobody's gonna report you for being at 7.176 but you might get some weird looks on the air if you know what i mean. just stay away from 7.000-7.025 as a general because thats extra class only territory, and honestly id just start somewhere around 7.200 or higher for your first phone QSOs and you'll be fine

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.

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

So I passed my technician exam last Saturday and my name finally showed up in the ULS database yesterday which was super exciting. But now im looking at my callsign and its kind of a mouthful — its a 2x3 format and I was just curious how all that works. Like did the FCC just pick this randomly or is there a rhyme or reason to it. Also I keep seeing people talk about vanity calls and I had no idea that was even a thing until I joined this forum. Can anyone explain how you go about getting one and is it expensive? I live in the 5th call district but my callsign starts with a W not a K, does that matter or mean anything these days. Sorry if this is a super basic question, I tried reading the FCC website and it kind of made my head spin a little.

so ive been messing around with RemoteHams for a few months now and overall its pretty impressive for what it is, but im running into some weird latency stuff on the audio side that i cant quite nail down. my setup is a IC-7300 at the remote end feeding into the RemoteHams client software, and im running the RCForb client on the home end. the RF side of things works great honestly, decode is clean, the SDR waterfall behaves pretty well considering im on a 15mbps upload at the remote site. the problem is the audio is lagging like 800ms to maybe a full second sometimes and it varies, doesnt seem tied to band conditions or anything obvious. ive tried bumping the audio buffer settings down and that helps a little but then i get dropouts. feels like theres something upstream of my setup thats introducing jitter but i cant figure out where to even start poking at it. the internet linking piece is what im suspicious of, like maybe something in how the packets are being prioritized on my router at the shack end. anyone dealt with this before? running QoS on the router helps at all for something like this or is that kind of a bandaid on a bigger problem