Sarah Brown

i just passed mine like three weeks ago so this is fresh lol. the theory bits are real, theres definitely questions about things like reactance and impedance matching and some digital mode stuff that i had no idea about going in. but the pool is public so its not like they're hiding anything from you. i just drilled questions every day on my phone during lunch for me the biggest thing wasnt even the sub-bands honestly, it was just wanting the full ticket. feels weird to explain but like i wanted to actually finish the license track. the extra subbands on 40 are nice though i'll say that much

so i finally took the plunge and built one of those QEX kits, well actually it was a 4state QRP kit for 40m, took me about two weekends to get it put together and honestly the build process was half the fun. i was pretty nervous about winding the toroids because i'd never done that before and every video i watched made it look either super easy or terrifying depending on who was doing it. anyway it came out working on the first power up which felt like a miracle. getting about 4 watts out into my end-fed and i've already worked 6 states from my backyard in ohio just doing some casual calling around. not a huge deal for some of you guys i know but for me it felt unreal making contacts with something i built with my own hands. only thing thats been bugging me is my sidetone sounds a little off, like there's a slight warble to it that i cant quite pin down. might be a cap value issue or something with the oscillator but i havent dug into it yet. if anyone's built one of these and had similar weirdness let me know. also curious if people think 40m is the right band to start QRP on or if i should've done 20 — i feel like 40 is more forgiving but maybe i'm wrong about that.

so ive been licensed for about 3 years now mostly doing HF and some 2m FM but i finally decided to try working through the linear transponders on AO-73 and FO-29. got a pair of yagis mounted on a cheap az-el rotor setup and SDR# running on one machine while i try to transmit on another. the tracking software i went with is Gpredict which seems pretty solid but im genuinely confused about how to handle the doppler correctly when youre using a linear transponder. like i understand the concept — satellite is moving so the frequency shifts — but when youre working SSB through an inverting transponder do i adjust my uplink or my downlink or both? ive seen people say you tune your receiver to keep your downlink constant and let the uplink drift but that seems backwards to me because then the person youre working hears you moving around on the passband. or do i have doppler correction running on both radios simultaneously? gpredict can apparently do CAT control to two rigs at once but i havent gotten that working yet. had one pass yesterday where i could hear beacon fine and even heard some SSB QSOs but couldnt figure out what i was doing wrong, my signal just wasnt showing up anywhere on the passband that i could tell

welcome to real world ARES haha. the exercises are honestly kind of sanitized compared to when there's actual stakes. our EC always says the training gets you to the starting line but the activations are where you actually learn stuff one thing that helped me a lot was shadowing the net control operators during a few activations before i took on any independent role. just watching how they prioritize traffic and handle the chaos is way more valuable than any drill. does your group do any kind of mentorship pairing for newer members? ours started doing that last year and it made a big difference

the 40m Extra sub-band is SO worth it, thats what finally pushed me to test last spring. i was in the same spot as you for like three years just sitting on General. the exam wasnt that bad, took me maybe six weeks of studying on my lunch breaks. the oscillator and filter questions tripped me up the most but you start seeing the patterns after a while

Ha, honestly you're doing better than you think just by being aware of it. Most people who cause problems on nets are the ones who DON'T worry about this stuff at all. The traffic thing -- yeah that's a bit confusing at first. Formal traffic in the NTS sense means like radiogram messages, so if you just have a question that's not really what net control is asking for there. Most nets have a time for general comments or questions though, usually toward the end or sometimes net control will just open it up after check-ins. If you're not sure, honestly just ask net control directly when you check in, like say your call and add "with a question for the net" or something similar. Any decent NCS will know how to handle that. The QNI thing -- that's just the Q code for check in, net control is basically saying the net is open for check-ins. You're fine just coming back with your callsign when you hear a pause. Don't overthink it, after another year it'll feel like breathing.

i was in the exact same boat, general for like 4 years and kept putting it off. finally just did it last spring mostly because a friend was taking the test and i figured why not. the amplifier and oscillator theory questions are weird but a lot of them come down to memorizing a handful of formulas and knowing which answer looks right. i wont pretend i fully understood everything i was tested on lol but i passed and now im an extra so the phone subbands you unlock on 75 meters are actually where a lot of the old timers hang out so if you like ragchewing that might matter more than you think

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, been putting it off forever because i kept convincing myself i needed more gear or a better antenna or whatever. finally just threw the KX2 in a bag with my end fed and drove out there. setup took longer than expected because the trees werent cooperating and i ended up with a pretty sad sloping wire that was maybe 20 feet at the high end. got on 40m around 1pm and honestly thought nobody was gonna hear me because my signal felt weak on the built in tuner. started calling CQ POTA and within like 3 minutes i had a small pileup going which was wild. ended up with 22 QSOs in about 40 minutes before the battery started getting low. the part that went sideways was i forgot to actually log the park reference in the notes field for like half the contacts and had to go back and manually edit everything in HAMRS before uploading. also realized after the fact that i was on the wrong frequency for a while, had drifted a bit and didnt notice. but the upload went through fine and it shows as activated now so im not complaining. for anyone whos been on the fence about trying it, just go. the gear doesnt need to be perfect and honestly the hunters are super patient with new activators. had one guy tell me to slow down on my call because i was rushing and he was totally nice about it.

HamSphere and a couple others have tried to do this but honestly for cluster spots specifically the app i keep coming back to is DX Toolkit on android. its not the prettiest thing but it pulls from the telnet clusters directly and you can set it to notify you when spots come in matching your filter — like if you only want 17m or only want certain prefixes. takes a few minutes to get the settings right but once its dialed in its pretty solid. QRZ also has a decent mobile site and their logbook stuff is pretty well integrated but their spot page is still kind of blah on a small screen. i usually have DX Toolkit open on my phone and then confirm on QRZ if i need to look up the entity or check if ive worked it before. that combo works well for me anyway. there's also HRD logbook if you're running that software, it has a built in bandscope/cluster view but thats more of a shack PC thing than a phone thing.

so ive been messing around with remote station stuff for the better part of six months now and honestly the more i dig into it the more confused i get about which direction to go. right now i have a fairly decent HF setup at my house — IC-7300, decent antenna situation, pretty solid internet — and i want to be able to run it from my apartment in the city during the week. ive looked at RemoteHams and the RCForb client stuff and it seems okay but i keep reading about latency issues and the whole SDR-over-internet angle has me curious. like is it actually usable for SSB contacts or are people mostly just SWLing with it remotely? and then theres the whole internet linking piece — ive got a buddy who uses AllStar at his QTH and hes been pushing me to just bridge everything through that but that seems like overkill for what im trying to do. anyone actually running a RemoteHams node at home and accessing it regularly? wondering if the setup time is worth it vs just doing a VPN into the shack PC and running the radio through something like Ham Radio Deluxe remote or even just flrig over the network. dont really need a polished solution just something that works reliably when im sitting in my apartment wanting to chase a DX opening.

so ive been running SSB on 40m mostly and a few guys have told me my audio sounds kinda thin or processed. im running an IC-7300 with the stock mic which i know isnt great but it shouldnt sound that bad. i do have the TX bandwidth set pretty narrow because i read somewhere that 2.4kHz is good for contesting but maybe thats killing my audio quality for regular ragchewing? i messed around with the bass and treble in the menu a bit but honestly there are so many parametric EQ settings in that radio i dont know where to start. also running the compression at like 4-5 which felt about right but maybe thats too much. anyone have a baseline setup they use for just normal conversational SSB that sounds natural without being too wide? also curious if the mic gain interacts with the comp in a weird way because i swear when i turned the gain up to like 60 it sounded worse not better on the audio monitor

i had the same frustration when i first tried it. ended up just going back to FT8 and occasionally PSK31 when i want to actually talk to somebody. RTTY contesting is still a thing if you havent tried that, completely different vibe but theres actually people there at the right times and the exchanges go fast which i find kind of satisfying even though its technically older tech than everything else were talking about.

yeah the last-heard timestamps are kind of sketchy sometimes, i noticed that too. i think it updates based on when the gateway checks in with the CMS servers and not necessarily based on actual RF activity so a gateway can look current but have its radio offline or something. the Winlink sysop mailing list occasionally has posts about gateways going down, thats one way to know but its not exactly real time either. one thing that helped me was just building a short list of like 3 or 4 gateways that i know work reliably from my QTH and just cycling through those manually instead of letting the auto-connect logic pick randomly. takes a bit of trial and error upfront but once you know which ones actually respond to you consistently its way less frustrating.

yeah i ran both for about a year and honestly just ended up committing to N1MM for everything. the ADIF export/import between the two works but youll always find something slightly off, either a band gets mapped wrong or a mode field doesnt come through clean, its just friction you dont need. Log4OM does handle the WSJT-X UDP logging fine though, you set it up basically the same way, point WSJT-X at the Log4OM UDP port in the settings and it just works. took me maybe 10 minutes to figure out. the real issue is when youre mid-contest and you want N1MM running because of the dupe checking and the multiplier tracking and all that, then you gotta decide which log is the master copy and it gets annoying fast. what i eventually did was just keep N1MM as the master log for everything and export a clean ADIF to LoTW and QRZ after each session. not perfect but its one less thing to think about when youre tired and trying to remember if you already worked that VE3 on 40m ssb.

I started with a UV-5R three years ago and still use it regularly. Those 128 channels held all my local repeaters, NOAA weather, and even some aviation frequencies I like to monitor. Once you get comfortable and want to explore more bands or travel frequently, then consider upgrading to something with more memory.