Carlos Martinez

this is making me think I should actually join our local ARES group. ive got my general and some decent HF gear but I always assumed emcomm was kind of just... showing up with a radio. sounds like there's a lot more to it than that. the ICS stuff especially, I dont think I know any of that.

Welcome to the addiction haha. Okay so Field Day is really its own beast — it's technically an emergency preparedness exercise but basically every club turns it into a big social event and operating marathon. You don't need to be with a club though, you can operate as a home station in class D which honestly takes all the pressure off and you can just work whatever stations you hear calling CQ FD. Great way to get your feet wet without feeling like you have to perform. CQ WW is a whole different animal. That one is seriously competitive and the bands get absolutely packed, like wall to wall signals on 40 and 15 meters. For a newer operator it can feel chaotic but thats actually kind of the fun of it? Just tune around, find someone calling CQ and throw your callsign in. Exchange is easy — signal report and your CQ zone. You'll figure it out fast once you're in it. Don't stress about winning anything, just see how many countries you can log. SOTA is not really a contest, more like a combination of hiking and radio. People hike up summits and activate them for points, and you can also chase activators from home to get points. It's its own whole community and a lot of people really love it. If you like outdoors stuff it's worth looking into separately.

so ive been running APRS for a few months now with a TM-D710G and it tracks just fine, i can see my callsign moving around on aprs.fi when im mobile and everything looks good there. the problem is when i try to send messages through the rig they just seem to disappear. like i'll type out a message to another station who i can see is active on the map, hit send, and the rig shows it queuing up and retrying but never gets an ACK back and eventually just gives up. i thought maybe it was a path issue so i changed from WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 to just WIDE2-2 but same deal. the other station told me they never see my messages come through on their end either. position packets work fine though which is what makes this weird to me. running 50w into a mag mount on the roof, 144.390 obviously, digipeater coverage in my area seems decent based on what i can see hitting the igate near me. anybody dealt with this before or have any idea what im doing wrong here

so ive been lurking on the JT65 EME frequencies for a while now and honestly its kind of blowing my mind that people are bouncing signals off the moon and actually making contacts. i get the theory, i just cant quite figure out where the floor is in terms of equipment if you actually want to get on and work stations. right now i have a pretty solid 2m setup — TS-2000 driving a SSPA putting out around 500w into a pair of 9el yagis, az/el rotator situation on the mast. i know the big guns are running 4x32el yagis or dish setups and like a kilowatt or more but i see mentions of guys doing EME with a single yagi which seems impossible to me honestly. is that actually happening or is that just the good stations working the little ones? also the preamp situation confuses me — i know youre supposed to have a really low NF preamp right at the feedpoint but how much does that actually matter when your path loss is like 250dB? feels like youre fighting a losing battle either way. just trying to figure out if my current hardware gets me in the door at all or if i need to seriously upgrade before i even bother trying.