John Wilson

yeah the activity thing is the killer with JS8. i check in on the watering holes every now and then and sometimes its hopping and sometimes its completely dead. no real pattern i can figure out. one thing though — your G5RV at 30 feet is probaly fine for 40m but if youre having trouble hearing anyone it might be worth checking your noise floor in WSJT-X or the JS8Call waterfall. the 7300 is a great rig but i found mine was picking up a ton of hash from the shack computer until i sorted out the USB grounding. made like a 10dB difference on the weak signal stuff which is huge when youre trying to decode -18dB signals

That's pretty much exactly how my first one went too, though mine was supporting a triathlon which is obviously way lower stakes but still good practice. The read-back thing Dave mentioned is huge and honestly something I still have to consciously remind myself to do on a busy net. One thing that helped me a lot was getting into the habit of writing everything down even when it seems redundant. You think you'll remember that a message came in at 14:32 but then three things happen at once and suddenly you have no idea what order anything happened in. Our EC actually does a pretty good AAR after every activation which I wish more groups did — that's where I learned half of what I actually know about operating in an EOC environment.

yeah the delay thing you noticed is real, those sites dont all pull from the same nodes at the same time. DX Summit and DXwatch both tap into the AR-Cluster and CC Cluster networks but they refresh on different intervals and some spots get filtered before they even show depending on the source node. its not a huge deal for most operating but if youre trying to snipe a rare one on a pile it can matter. for android ive been using DX Toolkit for a while now and its pretty solid, not the prettiest thing but it stays connected and lets you filter by band which is really all you need. some guys swear by HamSphere or just running DX Monitor on a laptop next to the rig. QRZ's spot feed is fine for casual browsing but id trust it less when things get busy, it seems to lag behind when theres heavy traffic on the cluster.

ok so I passed my technician exam like three weeks ago and I've been reading through part 97 trying to figure out what I'm actually allowed to do. I get the basic frequency privileges but what I don't understand is the stuff about third party communications and also the business communications prohibition. like if I run a small side business doing lawn care and my buddy who is also a ham needs to coordinate something that happens to involve my lawn care stuff, does that count as business communication? I feel like the line is really blurry there and the actual rule wording doesn't help me much. also I saw something about obscured meaning and using codes to hide the meaning of your transmission being prohibited but encryption for things like control links is ok in certain cases? I might be reading that wrong. I dont want to do anything wrong obviously but its hard to know where the gray areas are

the arrow antenna is honestly all you need for the low inclination LEOs, people way overthink the antenna side of things when starting out. i ran the arrow for like two years before i built anything else and worked plenty of stations through AO-73 and SO-50. the hardest part is just pointing and tuning at the same time, some people duct tape the radio to the antenna handle which sounds ridiculous but actually kind of works for a single-band pass. what elevation was your pass? anything under about 20 degrees is gonna be rough just from path loss and horizon noise, the high passes are way more forgiving when you're still figuring out the doppler thing

haha the X thing gets everyone at first, xray is the weird one because nobody says xray in normal conversation. honestly there isnt a hard rule about when to use phonetics vs just the letter, its more situational. if the band is clear and youre just doing a quick exchange and conditions are good, most people just rattle off the letters. but if theres any qrm or the signal is weak or youre giving out your callsign for logging purposes then phonetics just make sense because there are too many letters that sound the same. B D E P T V all kind of blur together especially on SSB with a little noise. that guy probably wasnt correcting you, more likely he was just confirming what he heard by repeating it back phonetically. thats pretty common, dont sweat it. after a while you stop thinking about it and just naturally switch modes depending on conditions

congrats on passing the test first of all. so the sequential callsign thing just means yeah, the FCC basically pulls the next available call from a pool based on your license class and call district when you first get licensed. you dont get to pick anything, it just gets assigned. thats why new techs end up with 2x3 calls most of the time. but the good news is you can apply for a vanity call pretty much right away, no waiting period tied to how long youve been licensed. you just go into the FCC ULS, find the vanity application section, and you can search for available calls and submit your preference. the catch is if you want a shorter callsign format like a 1x3 or 2x2 you have to be at least a general class, and 1x2 calls are extra class only. with a tech ticket your options for vanity are still 2x3 format but you can at least pick something more memorable. i went through this whole process a couple years ago and it was less painful than i expected, just take your time with the ULS interface because yeah its not exactly intuitive

went through the exact same thing when i upgraded. honestly what helped me was just listening for a few weeks before i ever transmitted on hf. you start to get a feel for where the dx pileups are and where the regular rag chew nets hang out. no chart really prepares you for just hearing how the band actually gets used day to day. one thing i'll add is the 7.200 upper edge for generals used to cause a lot of drama back before the band plan got revised, there used to be a notorious net that would park right there specifically to mess with people, look up 7.200 if you want a rabbit hole. anyway point being band edges attract weirdos sometimes so just worth knowing about

i cant speak to the 590 specifically but i went from an older icom to the 7300 last year and the waterfall really does change how you use the radio day to day. only thing id mention is the 7300 has been out a while now and theres rumors floating around about what icoms gonna do next in that price range, might be worth keeping an eye on that before pulling the trigger if youre not in a hurry anyway.

yeah i went through the same thing when i started. what clicked for me was just thinking about whether the other person could actually write down my call correctly if they had to. on a noisy 40m QSO at night, november versus mike sounds really different but N and M are almost the same in static. on the local 2m machine where everybodys full quieting it doesnt really matter. some contesters also drop phonetics mid-contest just to save time which always threw me off at first lol. just practice saying them until they come out naturally and you wont have to think about it

hamstudy.org is genuinely the best free thing out there for this, just use that and you'll probably be fine. the way it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those specifically is really helpful. i think i spent maybe three weeks on it, like 20-30 minutes a night, and passed with only a couple wrong. the technician pool isnt as scary as it looks when you first open it. the regulations stuff clicks faster than you think once you just start doing practice tests because youll see the same concepts show up over and over. dont try to memorize every answer cold, just do enough practice rounds that the right answers start to feel obvious. and honestly failing isnt the end of the world, plenty of people have to take it twice, but you probably wont need to

yeah im basically in the same boat, built a 20m dipole last spring and went back and forth on the balun thing for a while. ended up just winding one from a piece of mix 31 ferrite I ordered, worked out fine. your swr sounds good though. one thing I noticed with my inverted V is the legs want to droop more than I expected over time especially with any wind, worth checking your wire tension every few months if the ends are just tied off to stakes or something low.

this is making me think i should actually check my own battery before i show up and look like that guy with the dead gel cell haha. im pretty new to ARES stuff, just got my general last spring, and watching the SET from the sidelines made me realize theres a lot of procedural stuff i just dont know yet. like i understood the radio part fine but the net control scripting and the ICS forms and all that — it felt like everyone else had a shared language i hadnt learned yet. do most groups do any kind of intro training for newer members or is it mostly just learn by doing

so ive been chasing VP6R for like three weeks and kept getting nowhere. tried everything i thought i knew, calling on their exact frequency, calling right when the pileup seemed to die down a bit, nothing. just got buried every single time. what finally worked, and i feel kinda dumb for not doing this sooner, was actually listening to where they were pulling calls from in the split. like really listening. not just throwing my call out on whatever frequency i picked but watching where the DX station was actually going back to. i noticed they kept fishing around 4-6 up and people calling on 2 up were basically invisible to them. also started sending my call only once, maybe twice max, instead of just hammering it over and over. seemed counterintuitive but i think it made me stand out more when the frequency got a little clearer for half a second. got through on a sunday morning around 0200 local when the pileup had thinned out a bit too, which probably helped. anyway curious what techniques other people swear by because i still feel like im mostly guessing. is there some actual method here or is it just luck and persistence

yeah theres no hard rule on local FM most of the time, people just do what works. the whole point of phonetics is when theres QRM or the signal is weak and letters start sounding alike, like B and D or M and N can totally blend together on a noisy HF path. on a clear 2m FM repeater with full quieting youre fine just rattling off the letters. but if you ever get into HF especially DX or contesting youll want the NATO ones down cold because everyone expects them and using the wrong ones just slows things down for everyone. as for the old timers using different words, yeah thats a thing. there used to be different phonetic alphabets before NATO standardized everything and some guys who got licensed in the 50s and 60s still say things like Abel Baker Charlie or use some mix. its not really wrong on a casual repeater but youd want to stick to NATO if youre ever working a net or doing anything more formal.