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.

so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and i think i finally have a decent handle on it but the SDR side of things is still driving me a little nuts. my main rig at the remote site is an IC-7300 hooked up through RCForb server and that part works fine, latency is manageable even on my mediocre upload speed at that location, maybe 4-5 mbps up which isnt great but workable for SSB. the part i cant quite nail is integrating an SDR panadapter view for the remote clients. ive got an RTL-SDR dongle attached to a spare tap off the antenna feedline and i was trying to get that data streaming alongside the audio. some guys on the RemoteHams network seem to have this running smooth but whenever i ask they give kind of vague answers about it, like yeah it just works which isnt super helpful. also tangentially related — has anyone tied this kind of setup into any internet linking stuff like linking it to an echolink node or ILINK so local club members could at least listen in on what the remote is doing even if they cant transmit? i know thats kind of a weird hybrid use case but the club has been asking about it and im not sure if its even practical or just a bad idea architecturally. any thoughts appreciated, been at this a while and feel like im close but missing something obvious

anyone else notice JS8Call taking forever to decode signals the past few weeks? im running 2.2.0 on win10 and it used to be pretty snappy but now it sits there for like 30-40 seconds before showing anything. tried rebooting, checked cpu usage seems normal. running it with wsjt-x at the same time and wsjt decodes FT8 just fine so i dont think its my rig maybe something with the latest windows update? or did i mess up a setting somewhere

i was in basically your exact situation about 8 months ago and ended up going with the baofeng just to save money and honestly i kind of wish i hadnt. its not that it doesnt work, it does, but i had a lot of trouble getting it programmed right and a few times people on the repeater said my audio sounded kind of muddy. upgraded to a yaesu ft-65r a few months later and the difference was noticeable right away. both to me and apparently to the people i was talking to. so yeah if you can swing the extra 30-40 bucks over the baofeng price i think its worth it. also check if your local club does any kind of loaner equipment or if theres a hamfest coming up near you, sometimes you can snag a decent used HT for way less than retail and that would let you spend more on other stuff

so i finally finished the QCX mini kit i've been picking at for like two months and took it out to the state park saturday. ran it off a 3ah lipo i had from an old drone project and just threw a random wire up in a tree, nothing fancy. worked a guy in ohio from virginia on 20m with 5 watts which honestly felt incredible considering i'm used to running 100w from the shack and thinking that's somehow still not enough power. the whole setup fit in a small bag, radio, paddle, battery, some coax, antenna wire and a couple of fishing weights i use to throw the line over branches. maybe 3 lbs total? i dunno i didnt weigh it. but it was so light compared to hauling my kenwood out which i did once and never again. anyway if anyone is on the fence about building one of these kits i'd say just do it. i'm not a great builder by any means, took me forever and i had to reflow like 4 or 5 joints that were giving me grief, but it works and it works well. curious if anyone else has done the sota or pota thing with the QCX because i'm thinking about starting to activate some parks now that i have a portable setup that doesnt make my back hurt

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly i mostly just mess around on 2m and the local repeaters but ive been reading about HF and it sounds really interesting. a guy at my club keeps talking about working dx and i kind of want to get into that but obviously i need the general ticket first. my question is i guess how hard is the general exam compared to tech? i remember the tech exam wasnt too bad, i used hamstudy for a couple weeks and passed fine. is general a big jump? i looked at some of the question pool and some of the electrical stuff looks a little intimidating, like the stuff about reactance and impedance and i honestly dont remember much from high school physics. also once i pass, what can i actually do on HF as a general? i know there are some portions of the bands that are still extra class only but i dont know exactly which ones. is there enough room on the general portions to actually have fun or do you end up running into a wall pretty quick

so i've been chasing DX for about two years now and im running a modest station, IC-7300 into a trapped vertical, nothing fancy. last weekend there was a 3B8 on 17m and i spent probably 45 minutes in the pileup before i finally got through. felt great but also kind of exhausted me honestly. the thing is i still dont really have a system for working split pileups. i kind of just tune around above the DX frequency and throw my call out when i hear a gap but i feel like there has to be a smarter way to do this. i noticed some guys seem to get through way faster than me and im running 100w which isnt nothing. is it all just timing or is there some actual technique to it? also how do you even know where in the split to transmit — like is there a convention for how far up you go or does it just depend on where the DX is listening? would love to hear from anyone who does a lot of DXpedition chasing especially on the low bands where i assume it gets even more chaotic

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about chasing DX and getting credits toward different awards but honestly the whole thing is kind of overwhelming. like i understand the basic idea — you work stations in different countries or states or zones or whatever and you submit logs and eventually get a certificate. but theres so many different ones and i dont really know where to start or what makes the most sense for someone at my level. right now i have a decent HF setup, a Yaesu FT-891 running into a G5RV up about 30 feet, nothing fancy. ive been making contacts pretty regularly on 20 and 40m and im logging everything in WSJT-X plus some SSB. some of my contacts are definitely outside the US. i just havent been doing anything intentional about chasing specific entities or zones. so my question is basically — should i just pick one award and focus on it, or does working toward one naturally help with the others? and is DXCC even realistic for someone who isnt running big power and a beam? i see guys on here talking about 300 confirmed entities and i feel like thats a different universe from where i am lol

so this has been bugging me for a couple weeks now and im at the point where im just gonna ask because i cant figure it out. running a Mobilinkd TNC3 into my phone with APRSDroid, callsign is set correctly with the SSID (-9 for mobile), path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. the TNC connects, i can see it decoding packets from other stations just fine, and when i key up it shows the little TX indicator in the app. but when i go to aprs.fi and search my callsign theres just nothing there. not even old packets. checked the RF output on my 857D and its definitely transmitting, the SWR is fine. i did notice that when i watch the received packets i can sometimes see digipeaters near me so theres coverage in my area for sure. one thing i should mention is i changed the comment field recently, not sure if that matters. also been using it on 144.390 obviously. anybody run into this before or have ideas what to check next?

honestly i just picked most of it up from listening for a few months before i ever transmitted. QRN bugged me for a while because i kept confusing it with QRM but eventually it just clicked. one thing nobody told me early on was that a lot of hams also use abbreviations that arent technically Q codes at all, like OM means old man which is just any male ham, YL is young lady for any female operator regardless of age, and XYL is ex-young-lady meaning wife lol. also FB means fine business like thats good or great, and de is just the word from in CW usage so like if someone says W1XYZ de K5ABC theyre saying this is K5ABC calling W1XYZ. its a lot at first but dont stress it too much, you pick it up faster than you think once youre actually in QSOs

yeah the first few passes are just a mess, dont get discouraged. SO-50 is FM so the doppler correction is actually pretty forgiving compared to working a linear transponder, you dont need to be super precise, maybe just nudge the downlink every 30 seconds or so during the pass and you'll be fine. the uplink you barely need to touch honestly. the polarization thing though — try rotating the arrow as you go, most guys do a kind of slow twist during the pass. the signal fades in and out with polarization and you can really tell the difference when you hit the right angle. gpredict is worth getting set up with CAT control eventually but for SO-50 just do it by hand first and get a feel for the pass geometry before you add more variables. once you hear a contact come back to you youll wonder why you thought it was hard