Mark Thompson

So ive been doing POTA for about a year now and someone at the club mentioned WWFF and i went down a rabbit hole last night reading about it. Looks like there's a nature reserve about 20 minutes from my house that's a valid reference, ONFF-something, and im thinking of heading out this weekend with the FT-891 and a linked dipole thrown in a tree. My question is mainly about logging — do i need to use a specific app or logger for WWFF or can i just use paper and upload later? And does the contact count toward POTA too if the park overlaps? I think this one might be a dual reference situation but im not 100% sure how that works. Any help appreciated, dont want to show up and realize ive done something wrong halfway through the activation.

GAS is real man. i went through the same thing with my shack last winter. ended up buying a 7610 and dont regret it but i also cant tell you the 7300 was the limiting factor in anything i was doing. the panadapter on the 7610 is wider and smoother which i do appreciate, especially on 40m when its busy. but my honest take is if you have a good amp and a good antenna system thats where the money does more work

so yeah i passed my technician exam last tuesday and been listening on the local repeater for a few days before i worked up the nerve to actually key up. finally did it yesterday morning and had a quick QSO with a guy named Jerry who was super patient with me when i fumbled through my callsign like three times lol. he gave me a 59 report which i guess is good? anyway just wanted to introduce myself here, been lurking for a while reading posts. im KD9 something, dont want to type the whole thing out right now. planning to study for general next so i can get on HF, thats really why i got into this whole thing in the first place

good write up. i never thought about timing it to when the pileup thins, i always just jump in right away when i hear a new one spotted and of course so does everyone else lol. gonna try waiting it out next time one thing that helped me on a recent one was using my second radio just to monitor where the DX was transmitting so i wasnt constantly flipping VFO back and forth trying to find where he was working. kept one radio locked on his TX and hunted the split with the other. makes it way easier to track where hes pulling from in real time instead of guessing after the fact

11 QSOs absolutely counts, you activated the park fair and square. the minimum is 10 so youre good. honestly your first solo is always a little chaotic, thats just how it goes. i remember my first one i forgot to bring a pen and had to log everything on my phone which was a whole other mess. one thing that helped me a lot was self-spotting as soon as i get set up, even before i start calling CQ. just throw yourself on the POTA app or pota.app right away and the hunters will find you pretty fast. 40 meters can be weird mid-morning depending on the season, a lot of guys do 20 in the morning and drop to 40 later in the afternoon when it opens back up. sounds like you figured that out on your own though. keep going, it gets way more comfortable after a few activations.

late to this but one thing nobody mentions enough — TX equalizer settings. the 7300 has a parametric EQ in the menu and the defaults are pretty flat which sounds okay but if your mic or your voice has a lot of low mid energy it can come across as muddy through a narrow SSB passband. i boosted around 2khz slightly and cut a bit around 300-400hz and people started commenting my audio sounded much cleaner. took maybe 20 minutes of back and forth with a buddy on 40m to dial it in.

oh man i went through the exact same thing when i first got into CW last year. i kept thinking something was wrong with my keyer but it turned out i was just squeezing the paddle too hard and getting all these extra dits. somebody on here told me to relax my grip and it actually helped a lot more than i expected. also i started using the Koch method practice software to train my ear which helped me notice my own mistakes better. not sure if thats useful for someone coming back to it vs learning from scratch but figured id mention it

Check your parity settings - standard TAPR TNCs need PARITY 0, but some like the KAM need PARITY 4. Also make sure HEADERLINE is set to OFF if your data isn't appearing on the same line as the header. The TNC-X can be finicky about KISS mode initialization.

so last weekend we had an actual activation for the flooding that hit the county over near the fairgrounds area and it was my first real one not just a drill and wow. i've been to like four or five RACES exercises and thought i was pretty prepared but there's just something different when its actually happening and people are stressed and the EC is on the radio every five minutes asking for status updates. my assignment was just to be a liaison at the secondary EOC which sounds easy but the net control kept switching frequencies on me and i didnt have the backup simplex frequencies written down anywhere because i assumed my HT memory channels had everything. spoiler: they did not. lesson learned there for sure. the actual comms worked out fine in the end, we passed a lot of welfare traffic and i got to work with a couple guys ive only ever seen at the monthly meetings. but i keep thinking about all the small stuff i wasnt ready for, like how long the shifts actually go and not having enough food, and just the general chaos of people walking up to you asking questions you have no idea how to answer because youre just the radio guy. anyone else remember their first activation and feeling kind of overwhelmed? does it get easier or do you just get better at faking it

so ive been doing this thing lately where i just sit down with a coffee in the evening and spin through 40m and 20m without really trying to work anyone, just listening. heard some interesting stuff last night, couple guys doing a net i didnt recognize, some dx i probably couldve worked but was feeling lazy. its a weird kind of satisfying just being in the background i guess. anyone else do this or am i just getting old and weird about the hobby lol

morse trainer app on the phone is what i used, just kind of messed around with it during lunch breaks. took me way longer than 4 months lol but i also wasnt very disciplined about it. the main thing i wish someone told me earlier is that there's a huge difference between recognizing letters in practice and actually copying a real signal with QRM and fading and someone who doesnt space things out nicely. so like even when you feel ready, the real thing still feels hard at first and thats normal i think.

so ive been messing around with remote station stuff for about 6 months now and I'm at this crossroads where I don't know if I should just commit to the RemoteHams ecosystem or keep trying to roll my own thing. Right now I have a Kenwood TS-590SG at the home QTH and I've been getting into it with hamlib over a VPN tunnel, works fine when it works but the latency kills me on SSB and forget about CW at anything above like 15 WPM. So I started looking at RemoteHams and their SDR remote setup and honestly it looks pretty slick. The RCForb client seems to handle the audio compression decently and I've seen people say the latency is way more manageable. But im not sure if the SDR remote piece integrates cleanly or if thats a separate thing entirely. Like does the SDR remote in RemoteHams actually let you tune around and see a panadapter or is it more like just remote PTT and audio basically. Also has anyone tried bridging RemoteHams into like an Allstar node or EchoLink link for internet linking stuff? I know thats kind of mixing two different worlds but I had this half-baked idea about accessing a local repeater remotely through the same setup. Probably overthinking it but curious if anyone's done something weird like that.

yeah i went through the same thing last year. my go kit ended up being way heavier than i wanted lol. one thing though — dont sleep on a simple headlamp and maybe a small usb hub or charging brick for your phone. its not glamorous but when you're deployed and your phone dies and thats your connection to whoever's running the EOC it matters. also if you're on ics stuff at all, having a few printed ICS-213 forms already in the case is something people forget about until they need one.

so ive been on HF for maybe 8 months now and i keep getting reports that my audio sounds muffled or like im talking through a sock. running an IC-7300 with the stock hand mic and i know thats probably part of the problem but ive heard guys running the same setup sound totally fine so im not sure where to start. ive messed around with the TX bandwidth and the treble/bass settings in the menu but honestly i dont really understand what im doing, just kind of turning knobs and hoping for the better. compression is set to like 4 out of 8 which i picked randomly. i also noticed my ALC is bouncing around a lot when i talk, not sure if thats normal or if im overdriving something. anybody have a baseline setup for SSB voice that actually works? or tips on mic technique because maybe im just doing it wrong from the start