John Wilson

i had almost the exact same problem on a receiver i built a while back and spent way too long trying to fix the VFO before i realized the mixer was the culprit, one of the 1N4148s in my diode ring was leaky and it was doing weird things to the balance. not saying thats your issue but worth pulling the VFO signal and checking it standalone on a counter to see if the drift is actually in the oscillator or somewhere downstream. took me forever to figure that out and i felt kinda dumb after

Critical point on frustration management - don't leave the pileup hanging - if a QRX or QSY to another band is necessary, inform those DXers in the pileup as considerable frustration can be avoided. Communication prevents chaos better than any technical solution.

so i finally did my first solo activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, K-4567 if anyone knows it. been hunting from home for a few months and kept telling myself id get out there and actually do one, and i finally just did it. threw the EFHW up between two trees, ran 100w on FT8 for a little while then switched to SSB because i wanted actual contacts not just computer contacts if that makes sense. got my 10 pretty quick on digital and then spent another hour on phone picking up maybe 8 or 9 more which honestly surprised me, i expected it to be harder. a few people gave me signal reports and then just disappeared without logging which was a little frustrating but whatever. my questions are -- does it matter what order i put the park reference in when i call on SSB, like do i say the K number before my callsign or after? i've been saying it after but someone on the air told me i was doing it wrong. also is there a way to know if my activation will actually show up on the POTA website, like is there a delay or do i need to submit something first?

yeah i ran N1MM for contests and Log4OM for everything else for about two years and it works fine actually. Log4OM's WSJT-X integration is pretty solid once you get the UDP port configured right, it just auto-imports the contacts and handles the dupe checking against your master log. the learning curve is real though, took me a weekend of just clicking around before it clicked. the LoTW sync in Log4OM is way better than trying to wrangle that in N1MM outside of a contest context, that part alone made it worth it for me the thing i will say is dont try to use Log4OM for a serious contest, it's just not built for that. the rate display and the way it handles multipliers is nowhere near what N1MM does. so my workflow is still N1MM for any contest and then i export the ADIF after and import into Log4OM to keep my master log clean

Check the PA bias voltage first before you go digging into relays. I've seen these develop bias issues on individual bands when the switching transistors start to go. Should be around 0.7v on the PA base but measure it on 20m vs a working band. Also worth checking if you're getting any drive to the PA stage at all with a scope if you have one

honestly i struggled with this too when i first got on air. what helped me was just listening to more HF and noticing that most experienced operators drop into phonetics automatically when theyre not getting a clean copy — like if someone says "say again your call" then the next time they spell it out with phonetics. i still catch myself forgetting mid-QSO and just saying my call letters normally out of habit. nobody has ever said anything about it but i do get asked to repeat myself more on those occasions so that probably answers the question lol

I mount my Si5351 on a separate small PCB with thick copper ground plane for thermal mass. Also added a small aluminum heat spreader - reduced drift to about 30Hz in the first few minutes. The key is keeping it away from the PA section.

dont ditch the arduino for the simple relay stuff, thats exactly what its good at. i run both — arduino handles all my physical switching and sensor polling because its rock solid and doesnt need to boot up, and the pi handles anything that needs network or a real OS. they talk to each other over serial and its been running for like two years without me touching it. the pi rebooting during a contest or an EMCOMM activation because of some software hiccup is not something you want to deal with. the arduino just sits there doing its thing no matter what.

had a HackRF for a couple years and honestly for pure HF listening the SDRplay just destroys it. the HackRF is a pretty mediocre receiver, it was designed as a dev tool more than a serious monitoring rig. noise floor on HF is noticeably worse and you'll see spurs that arent real signals if youre not careful. that said if you ever want to do anything with transmit side testing or need that wide bandwidth for like spectrum analysis type stuff its kind of unbeatable for the money. for what you described, 40m 80m evenings and some shortwave utility, get the RSP1C. SDRuno is a bit clunky but SDR++ works great with it and the drivers are solid on windows and linux both. sensitivity difference on HF is not subtle, its obvious within like 10 minutes of comparing them side by side.

so ive been trying to figure out the best spot to mount my 2m/70cm antenna on my 2019 honda civic and honestly im going a little crazy over it. i dont want to drill through the roof if i can help it — the car is still relatively new and my wife would kill me — but every other option i look at has some kind of compromise. right now im using a magnetic mount stuck on the trunk lid and the coax is just running through the door jamb which i know is not ideal. getting some multipath issues in certain parts of town and im wondering if its partly the antenna location. the radio itself is a Yaesu FT-7900R that ive had for a couple years now, been running it at 50 watts on 2m mostly for local repeater work and the occasional simplex chat with guys from my club when were driving to the same place. has anyone done a lip mount on a civic? or found a good trunk lid spot that doesnt look terrible? i really want a proper ground plane situation but without committing to a hole in the roof

oh nice, which reserve was it if you dont mind me asking? im always looking for new unactivated refs in this region. and yeah the logsearch thing confused me too when i started, i think i messaged the national coordinator and they sorted it out pretty quick. might be worth dropping them an email just to double check everything came through ok on their end.

I'm upgrading my phone soon and wondering what everyone's using for DX spotting on mobile these days. I've been trying the DX Spots app but missing some features compared to desktop web clusters like DXWatch. Anyone finding good mobile solutions that can alert me to spotted call signs? Looking for something that covers all bands including 4M, 2M, 70CM for VHF/UHF work.

Been doing this for 30 years - your preparation sounds solid. Rates will be fierce, but clean exchanges save minutes over a long night. Trust your skills and remember: even smaller stations discovered how far 100 watts can go when propagation smiles in recent contests.