Mark Thompson

okay so the ones you absolutely will hear constantly on HF are QSL (i confirm / did you confirm), QRZ (who is calling me), QTH (location), QRM (interference from other stations), QRN (static/natural noise), QSY (change frequency), and QRP (low power). those probably cover like 90% of what you'll actually encounter in normal operation. the rest of them exist and some are used in specific contexts like maritime or military history but on your average ham band you wont hear them much. the 73 thing is completely separate, thats just old telegraph shorthand that got carried over, means best regards basically. 55 is less common, thats more of a CB thing honestly but some hams use it. GM GE GA (good afternoon) are totally standard, everybody uses those, nothing weird about it. on CW and digital modes youll see even more abbreviations like UR for your, ES for and, NR for number, stuff like that. but for SSB phone just focus on the Q codes i listed and youll be fine for a while

your setup is honestly not that far off for a first attempt, especially on digital. the 9 element is going to hurt you a bit but guys have made EME contacts on 2m with as little as a single yagi and 100w using JT65B — its tight but it happens. the bigger issue is the az/el thing you mentioned. fixed elevation really does limit your moon windows, depending on your latitude you might only get the moon within like 5-10 degrees of the horizon a few times a month and you'd need to be watching and ready to jump on it fast. realistically if you want to do this with any regularity you need the az/el rotor situation sorted. a lot of guys use the Yaesu G-5500 combo for this, its not perfect but it works and the software support is solid with stuff like PstRotator or even just the built in tracking in WSJT. some people also just run two yagis stacked to get a bit more gain and that makes a real difference — going from one 9el to two stacked 9el or even 11el is probably the most bang for your buck upgrade before worrying about power. also make sure your preamp is right at the feedpoint, not in the shack. on EME the noise figure of your receive chain is everything, even a couple extra feet of coax between the antenna and preamp will cost you.

so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and mostly been doing VHF/UHF stuff, some APRS, got into DMR a little bit. but ive been hearing a lot about HF and honestly it sounds way more interesting than i expected. a guy at my club was working some station in europe on 20 meters last tuesday and it just looked like a ton of fun. anyway i started looking at the General exam pool and its... a lot. like theres stuff in there about electrical theory and propagation and operating procedures that i really wasnt expecting. i guess my question is does it actually make sense to study for General or should i just push through and go straight for Extra? someone told me you have to pass General first anyway before Extra so i guess that answers that but i wanted to make sure. also what is actually the hardest part of the General exam because the electrical theory stuff is kind of freaking me out a bit

yeah the question pool is literally published, the fcc requires it to be public so you can absolutely study from the actual questions. hamstudy.org is what most people use now, its free and it tracks which questions you're getting wrong so you can focus on those. once you're consistently passing the practice exams on there you're probably ready. the math on the tech exam is pretty minimal honestly, mostly ohms law stuff and a little bit of frequency/wavelength conversion, nothing too brutal. there are only like 5 or 6 math questions in the whole pool and you probably wont even see all of them on your actual test. dont let that part scare you off. gordon west also makes a study guide thats pretty popular if you want something physical to read through, its more conversational than the arrl stuff. took me maybe 3 weeks of casual studying, maybe 30 min a night. your milage will vary but its really not as hard as people make it sound

so i've been half-heartedly monitoring 10 meters for the past few weeks because everyone keeps saying the cycle is picking up but honestly most days it just sounds dead to me. yesterday afternoon though i sat down with a coffee and the band was absolutely alive, worked a handful of Europeans and even snagged a JA station which i wasnt expecting at all on a tuesday afternoon. checked the solar flux index after and it was sitting up around 180 which i guess explains it. my question is — is there a good way to predict when these openings are going to happen or is it mostly just luck and being there at the right time? i've looked at sites like DXmaps and the cluster but half the time by the time i see a spot the opening is already fading. feels like i'm always chasing the tail end of things. also noticed the K index was really low that day which i assume helped. still learning how all this fits together honestly.

so ive been doing contests for maybe 3 years now, mostly phone, some cw, usually single op single radio and i do alright. top 10 in my section a couple times which im happy with for a guy running 100w and a wire. but i keep reading about SO2R and how much it can improve your rate and i honestly cant tell if its something a normal person can actually pull off or if its one of those things thats only practical if you have a dedicated station with filters and interlocks and all that sorted out already. my current setup is an IC-7300 and ive got a spare FT-891 sitting around doing not much. the antenna situation is a 40m dipole and a vertical that covers everything else more or less. i know the main issue is keeping radio 2 from blowing up radio 1 when theyre close in frequency but i dont really understand how people manage that without spending a fortune on bandpass filters. like the steppIR guys with separate antennas per band have an easier time right? or am i missing something about how this actually works in practice. also just curious if anyone has thoughts on whether its even worth trying to learn SO2R mid-contest or if you just end up making more mistakes than youre saving time on. ive heard the learning curve is rough and your rate can actually go down at first

i had the exact same whine in my silverado with a 2730 and it drove me nuts for like two months. turned out the coax was just too close to a bundle of engine harness wires that ran through the firewall grommet. rerouted it maybe six inches away and it was like 80% better. the rest went away when i added a bonding strap from the engine block to the firewall, pretty cheap fix honestly. also just double check that your antenna mount actually has good contact with the metal. sometimes theres paint or powder coat under there and the ground path is basically nothing. i scraped mine down a bit and it helped a lot.

same boat as you like six months ago lol. i was so confused. what finally clicked for me was realizing LoTW is basically just for award chasing and eQSL is more social if that makes sense. i mostly just upload to LoTW after every session now and let it do its thing, occasionally i log into eQSL to look at the cards people sent which is actually kinda fun. the german card thing is neat, i got one from japan early on and it was sitting on my desk for weeks. i did end up ordering a small batch of cards from one of the online printers to send back when people send me physical ones, wasnt that expensive for like 100 cards but the postage adds up quick if your sending direct internationally

ok so ive been trying to figure this out for a while and i keep getting different answers depending on what website i look at. im a general class and i want to operate phone on 40 meters but im not sure exactly where i can go. i know theres something about the band edges being dangerous or whatever but i dont really understand why you cant just go right up to 7.300 or whatever the edge is. also somebody at my club said dont go below 7.175 as a general but then i looked at the arrl band plan and it seemed like maybe i could go a bit lower than that? im just trying to figure out where to park for a normal sso contact without accidentally doing something wrong or stepping on extras only territory

welcome to the rabbit hole haha, fair warning you may never come out. the short answer is yeah you can absolutely build up to DXCC over time, you don't have to have everything confirmed before you apply. once you hit 100 confirmed entities on lotw you just submit the application through the ARRL and pay the fee and they process it. after that you can apply for endorsements as you confirm more — so like at 150, 200, whatever. its actually a pretty nice system because you get that milestone at 100 and then keep going. WAS and WAZ are totally separate programs. WAS is all 50 states confirmed, WAZ is the 40 CQ zones. the logging itself overlaps in the sense that a single contact can count toward all of them if it qualifies, but they're tracked and applied for independently. just make sure lotw is set up correctly with your station location and the mode for each contact and you're mostly fine. the ARRL and CQ have slightly different systems for their respective awards but lotw handles most of it. for your situation i'd honestly just focus on mixed DXCC first and not overthink the phone vs cw splits until you're further along. with 100w and a wire you'll be surprised what you can work, especially if you're patient and learn when the bands are open to different parts of the world.

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into the local 2m net last night and i think i made a mess of it. i keyed up when someone was still finishing their transmission i think because i couldnt quite tell if they were done, and then when i gave my callsign i said it wrong order somehow and the net control had to ask me to repeat. just felt really dumb about the whole thing. been licensed about 3 months and ive been listening to the net for like 6 weeks before trying to actually check in, so its not like i jumped in blind. but listening and actually doing it are pretty different things apparently. is there like a standard way you're supposed to time your transmissions so you dont step on people? i know about the pause before keying but how long is long enough

so i finally did it after putting it off for like two years lol. passed my technician exam yesterday at the library, the VE team was super nice and one of them let me use his HT to try calling on the local repeater right there in the parking lot. got a response from some guy about 12 miles away who gave me a 59 and we chatted for maybe 5 minutes. honestly didnt expect it to work that fast and i kind of froze up forgetting my callsign halfway through but he was patient about it. anyway just wanted to say hi i guess. been lurking here for months reading about all this stuff and now im actually licensed. got a baofeng uv-5r coming from amazon which i know everyone has opinions about but its what i can afford right now. any tips for a brand new tech would be great

honestly the RemoteHams SDR integration has always been a bit finicky in my experience compared to just running something like SDR-Console with a direct connection to the hardware. i know that defeats the whole point of using their platform for the internet linking side but the third party SDR bridging they do adds another layer of stuff that can go wrong. what SDR hardware are you actually using on the remote end? if its an RTL-SDR or something in that family those can have USB dropout issues that look exactly like a network problem but its actually the SDR itself hiccuping and then the stream just never recovers cleanly.

nice, i've been wanting to try POTA forever but keep putting it off. did you need any special permission from the park or just show up? thats been one of the things holding me back, not sure about the rules for setting up an antenna at a public park.

so we finally got the local ARES group together for a tabletop exercise, scenario was a major flood event cutting off the county EOC from surrounding shelters. nothing super fancy, just printed maps and a whiteboard but man it exposed some stuff I really wasn't prepared for. biggest thing that jumped out at me was how fast everyone defaulted to their cell phones even in a simulated comms-out scenario. like we had to keep reminding people that in the scenario the cell towers are down, stop texting. that alone was kind of eye opening because these are licensed hams who have been around for years, muscle memory is a real thing I guess. we also realized pretty quick that our net control guy (who is great, dont get me wrong) was the only one who really knew how to run formal traffic. everyone else kind of fumbled with message format and a couple people had never actually sent an ICS-213 over the air before. we practice ragchewing and contesting but structured emergency traffic is a whole different headache. anyway wondering if other groups have run similar exercises and what suprised you the most when things went sideways. also curious if anyone has a good template for escalating complexity in these scenarios, we want to do a full simulated deployment next quarter and I have no idea how to structure the inject schedule

i went 7300 -> 7610 and the dual watch thing sounds cooler than it actually is in day to day use tbh. i mean it's nice but i dont use it as much as i thought. what I do notice is the band scope is faster and the overall feel of the radio is more solid but man the price difference is hard to justify if your antenna situation is limiting you more than the radio is, which at 30 feet with a fan dipole it probably is no offense

so ive been doing contests seriously for maybe 3 years now and im pretty comfortable with single radio operating, usually pulling decent numbers in things like CQWW and sweepstakes. but i keep reading about SO2R and watching some of the top scores and wondering if i should even bother going down that road or if its just one of those things that sounds better than it actually is for someone not running a full station my current setup is an IC-7610 which obviously has the dual receiver built in so i already do some S&P on the sub while running on the main, but actual SO2R with two radios and all the band switching and audio management seems like a completely different animal. ive talked to a couple guys at the club who do it and they say the learning curve is pretty brutal and it actually tanks your rate initially before it gets better anybody gone through this transition and have thoughts on whether the juice is worth the squeeze for someone doing maybe 10-15 contests a year but not trying to win any plaques or anything, just trying to improve

so ive been chasing DX seriously for about three years now and i still feel like im just guessing half the time when it comes to pileups. like i know the basics, listen for the DX station's pattern, figure out where he's listening if he's working split, tail-end when you can. but there's so much conflicting advice out there it's hard to know whats actually effective vs what's just cargo cult stuff people repeat. had a situation last week with a pretty rare one, wasn't a full DXpedition but a semi-rare entity that doesn't get activated that often. guy was working split, calling up 5, and the pileup was absolutely brutal. i tried for almost two hours and only got through once in that whole window. what i noticed is the stations that kept getting through weren't necessarily the loudest — there were a few guys who were clearly running a kilowatt and a big antenna but they were calling on the exact same frequency as everyone else and just getting stomped. meanwhile some stations were slipping through that probably weren't running anything crazy. so what's the actual technique here? timing? picking your spot in the split range more carefully? i run a K3 into a 3 element yagi at about 50 feet so im not working with a compromise setup or anything, just feel like im missing something in the operating skill department. anyone who's been on the DXpedition side of this want to chime in too, curious what actually catches your ear from that end.

im sort of in the opposite situation where i started with Log4OM and then had to learn N1MM when i started doing more contests and honestly N1MM still kind of confuses me outside of contest mode lol. like i fired it up once just to log a casual CW contact and couldnt even figure out where to put notes or check my DXCC status without digging through menus for 10 minutes the WSJT-X thing is a real pain if you dont get the UDP setup right though, i had it double logging for a while before i figured out what was going on, Log4OM has a setting somewhere in the preferences for the WSJT-X listener port and if you also have JTAlert running it can get weird with all three talking to each other at once. took me an afternoon to sort out but once its right it just works

yeah what he said but also on 2m simplex and repeaters people are way more casual about it and half the time they dont bother at all if conditions are decent. HF is where you really need it especially on the lower bands when propagation gets weird and signals start sounding like they're coming through a tin can full of gravel lol i messed up a callsign exchange in a contest once because the other op used some random phonetic i didn't recognize and wrote down the wrong letter. cost me a dupe check issue. just use the standard ones and life gets easier for everyone

repeaters listen on one frequency and transmit on another - thats the whole point so multiple people can talk through them. on 2m the input is usually lower than the output by 600khz. so if the repeater outputs on 146.52 it listens on 145.92. just remember "input is lower" and you'll get most of those questions right

i had the same feeling about FT8 honestly. worked like 140 countries in a year and then just kind of... stopped caring? felt like watching a machine do it for me. tried PSK31 for a while which is more conversational but you really need decent conditions for it, the moment the band gets choppy its rough. JS8Call sits in a weird middle ground but i think thats actually what makes it interesting. havent tried 80m JS8 but i imagine itd be good for regional evening stuff, might fire it up this weekend and see whats happening on there

so ive been on HF for about 6 years now and lately ive been getting really interested in trying EME on 2m. i know the basics conceptually, signal goes up, bounces off the moon, comes back down, path loss is insane, you need either a big dish or a yagi array, and everyone uses JT65B or Q65 now. but actually sitting down and figuring out what i need to do a first contact is kind of overwhelming. right now i have a IC-9700 which i know is popular for weak signal stuff, and a single 9el yagi on a push-up mast that i use for local ssb. is that even in the ballpark or am i way off? i see guys talking about stacked arrays of like 4x9 or 4x11 el yagis and moonbounce dishes and i dont know if thats what you NEED or if thats what the serious guys run. also is there a minimum power level or is it really just about the antenna gain? any pointers would be appreciated, i feel like ive been reading about this for months and still feel lost

js8call kind of clicked for me when i stopped thinking of it as slow FT8 and started thinking of it as like... asynchronous radio texting almost. i leave it running sometimes when im doing other stuff and check back to see if anyone left a message. the store and forward stuff is hit or miss but the direct conversations work fine once both sides are patient with the timing. one thing that tripped me up early on was dial frequency, make sure youre on the right one for your region or youll just be sitting there wondering why nobody responds. theres a handful of calling frequencies that have actual activity and everything else is pretty dead.

so i've been noticing 10m and 12m actually opening up a bit more in the afternoons these past few weeks and i wasnt sure if i was imagining it or if the solar flux has genuinely been climbing. checked DXwatch this morning and there were spots all over the place for europe, which i havent seen reliably in a long time from my QTH in the midwest. i know we're climbing toward solar max and all that but i honestly wasnt expecting things to pick up this noticeably this fast. worked a couple of EA stations yesterday on 10m with just my dipole running 100w and both were solid 59 contacts which felt almost surreal after years of that band being basically dead. anyone else seeing good openings lately or is my part of the country just getting lucky right now? also curious how people track solar flux day to day — i've been using the NOAA site but wondering if there's something better or more real-time