David Williams99

so i was up late last night, couldnt sleep, and just threw on the headphones and started scanning around 40m. wasnt planning to call CQ or anything just kind of listening to the QSB and catching bits of conversations from guys i'll never talk to. there was this one station running what sounded like a beautiful signal, maybe from somewhere out west, just chatting with a buddy about their antenna project and i sat there for probably 20 minutes just half listening. didnt even log it or anything. idk there's something weirdly relaxing about just being a passive listener sometimes, like the band is just doing its thing whether you participate or not. anybody else do this or am i weird

Field Day is definitely more relaxed, its more of a club social event that happens to involve a lot of radio operating. good intro but its only once a year so dont wait for that if CQ WW is right around the corner. for CQ WW just do search and pounce your first time through. tune around, find someone calling CQ contest, give them your callsign and exchange. the exchange for CQ WW is just your signal report and your CQ zone, thats it. zone 5 if youre in most of the US. you listen to how other people do it for like 20 minutes and youll have it figured out. nobody is going to be annoyed at you for calling them, thats literally what they want, more contacts. the only way you get in the way is if you try to hold a frequency you cant defend but youre not going to do that your first time out anyway. SOTA is a totally different animal, thats more about the hiking and activating summits, the radio part is almost secondary to some folks. great fun but not really the same as contesting. try CQ WW even if its just for a couple hours saturday afternoon, you dont have to go the whole 48 hours

so ive been noticing for the past couple weeks that 20m seems totally dead in the afternoons when i usually get on, like nothing beyond maybe 1000 miles, and then out of nowhere last tuesday i worked a JA station with a 59 report both ways which just blew my mind because id been hearing nothing for days before that. been checking pskreporter and the spots are all over the place. i know solar flux matters but i honestly dont have a great grasp on how to read it or what numbers actually mean good conditions vs bad. my buddy told me to watch the K index too but im not sure how that plays into DX openings specifically. is there like a rule of thumb people use or do you just kind of get a feel for it over time

so ive been trying to figure out if its worth making the drive this year, last time i went i scored a pretty decent deal on some coax and a few connectors but honestly most of the swap meet tables were kinda picked over by the time i got there. thinking about going early this time if i can get the saturday off work. anyone else from this area planning to head out? would be cool to meet up and hit the flea market tables together, easier to spot good stuff with more eyes

okay so i've been a ham for about 3 years now and i dont think ive ever seen 10 meters behave like this. fired up the rig last Tuesday around noon local time and the band was absolutely wall to wall with signals from europe and south america, like i couldn't even find a clear frequency. worked a couple guys in Brazil and one in Italy just running 100 watts to my dipole which honestly i thought was too low to bother with on that band most of the time. checked the solar flux index and it was sitting around 210 or so which i guess is high? i've seen it mentioned before but i never really paid attention to what the numbers actually mean in practice. is this the kind of thing that just keeps getting better as we approach solar maximum or does it kind of bounce around unpredictably. also does higher flux always mean better DX or is it more complicated than that

welcome to the rabbit hole lol. im about 8 months in now and still feel like a total newbie half the time. HF is great when it works and frustrating when propagation decides to just not cooperate. but yeah just jump in when you're ready, everyone starts somewhere

the UDP thing the other guy mentioned is the way to go for WSJT-X, took me like 20 minutes to figure out the first time but once its running you forget its even there. one thing i'll add — when you import your N1MM contest log into Log4OM afterward just make sure your ADIF fields are mapping correctly, especially the contest exchange fields because sometimes they end up in weird places and your award tracking gets confused about grid squares or whatever honestly for pure day to day logging Log4OM is way nicer to look at and use than N1MM. N1MM is kind of ugly and the learning curve is real but in a contest it just does what it needs to do and gets out of the way. different tools for different jobs i guess

With solar activity expected to decline through 2026, with sunspot numbers dropping from around 130 in January to below 100 by December, what are folks seeing on the bands lately? The current reports show 20m, 17m, and 15m still good during daylight with 10m opening for extended periods thanks to solar flux around 158. Has anyone noticed the gradual change from the peak conditions we had last year? I'm curious how the lower sunspot numbers are affecting your DX hunting and contest activities. Are you adjusting your operating habits as we head into what looks like the decline phase of Solar Cycle 25?

yeah i had something close to this on an older 706 years back, turned out to be a cracked solder joint right at one of the driver transistors. the symptoms are almost exactly what you're describing — intermittent, not thermal in any obvious way, no clear pattern. the thing with those kinds of joints is they can look fine under a regular light but if you get a loupe on them and flex the board slightly you'll sometimes see it open right up. on the 7300 specifically though i'd be curious whether the protection circuit is kicking in for some reason. icom has that built in and sometimes it trips on something that isnt immediately obvious from the front panel. there's a service menu you can get into — i forget the exact button combo off the top of my head but it's documented in the full service manual which you can find online — and it'll show you some internal flags that the normal display doesnt. might tell you if the rig thinks something is out of spec even when you dont see it on the ALC meter. worth checking before you start reflowing anything.

so ive been using WSJT-X for FT8 for a while now and it logs to its own file which is fine but i want something that actually ties everything together — like a proper shack log that handles my SSB contacts, the digital stuff, and also doesnt completely fall apart when i want to do a contest on the weekend right now im bouncing between N1MM for contests because everyone says thats what you use, and then some guys in my club were pushing Log4OM for day to day logging and it does look pretty nice with the DX cluster integration and the awards tracking and stuff. but the problem is im ending up with contacts scattered across like three different places and WSJT-X wont just magically sync to Log4OM in real time without some fiddling has anyone actually got a clean workflow going where WSJT-X feeds into Log4OM and then you can also jump into N1MM for a contest weekend without it being a total mess to reconcile everything afterward? or is there some other way people are handling this that im missing. i feel like im overcomplicating it but the duplicate checking alone is giving me a headache

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just did local stuff and some contests here and there, but lately ive really gotten into DXing and i think i want to actually go for DXCC. i have probably 60-something countries confirmed in LoTW already from just casual operating and i didnt even realize i was this close to having a real foundation to work from. my question is how do credits actually work when you submit — like do you have to submit all at once or can you keep adding as you go? and does it matter which band or mode or is mixed the easiest starting point to go for first? also i keep hearing people talk about WAS and WAZ in the same breath as DXCC, are those totally separate submissions or does any of the paperwork overlap sorry if this is basic stuff, i tried reading the ARRL award page and it kind of made my head spin a little

so ive been trying to wrap my head around winlink for a few weeks now and i think i mostly get it but theres one thing thats still tripping me up. when i connect to an RMS gateway vs doing a direct P2P session, where exactly do the messages end up? like if i send to another ham via an RMS gateway does it go up to the CMS servers and then they pull it down next time they connect, or is it more like it gets relayed immediately somehow also i got Winlink Express set up and managed to connect to a local gateway on VHF which felt like a win, but i tried sending a test message to my own winlink address and it showed sent but never actually received it on the other end (i was checking via webmail on the winlink.org site). not sure if i did something wrong in the message composition or if theres a delay im not accounting for. my gateway connection said it completed successfully so im not sure whats happening running a TM-V71A into a signalink for the audio and using VARA FM if that matters. been using 144.990 which i think is the standard simplex frequency for this around here but honestly not 100% sure thats right for my area

Check your Windows firewall settings - it might be blocking the UDP traffic on port 2237. I had to add explicit rules for both N1MM+ and WSJT-X executables to allow local UDP communication.

The QN signals (q-codes) are special ARRL signals for use in amateur cw nets only. They are not for use in casual amateur conversation. Do not use QN signals on phone nets. Say it with words. There's definitely a place for proper usage, especially in formal traffic nets where precision matters for message handling.

so we finally did a proper simulated emergency exercise with our local ARES group, been planning it for like three months and honestly i wasnt sure what to expect. the scenario was a major flooding event cutting off the county EOC from the hospital and two shelters, and we had to establish net control and pass traffic between all the sites using only our HF and VHF assets since we assumed internet and cell was down. what surprised me the most was how fast things got confusing when multiple operators started checking in at once. we had practiced individual skills but nobody really drilled on net discipline and it showed — people were doubling, talking over each other, and one guy kept giving long ragchew-style status reports when a short formatted message would have done the job. we ended up losing about 20 minutes just sorting out who was on frequency and what priority each message had. also learned that written message forms matter way more than i thought. we had one operator at the shelter improvising his traffic off the top of his head and by the time it got relayed to EOC some of the details had shifted. like a telephone game. ICS 213 forms exist for a reason and we were kinda sloppy about enforcing them at the start. anyway overall it was really valuable and kind of humbling. would love to hear if others have done similar exercises and what tripped them up — especially curious if anyone has tips for training newer operators on net control procedures before they get thrown in during an actual event.

honestly the koch method is what most people swear by these days and theres a reason for that. the idea is you learn each character at full speed from the start, like 20wpm, so your brain learns to recognize the sound as a whole thing instead of counting dits and dahs. if you learn it slow youll have to unlearn that later when you want to actually use it at speed and that process is painful, ask me how i know lol. lcwo.net is free and does the whole koch progression, i used that for a while. just do like 10-15 minutes a day consistently, that matters way more than doing an hour once a week. dont expect it to click fast either, i felt like i was getting nowhere for the first few weeks and then something just kind of shifted and it started coming together. also dont skip head copy practice once you get a few letters down, meaning dont try to write everything down, just listen and try to hold it in your head. that habit early on will save you a lot of grief later

There's no hard rule that says you MUST use NATO phonetics in casual conversation on repeaters or whatever, but the whole point of them is to reduce confusion when conditions are bad or the other station can't quite copy you. Like W and Y can sound really similar if there's any noise on the frequency. On HF especially when youre dealing with someone whos maybe not a native English speaker or theres QRM, going full phonetic just makes sense. The "Washington" thing is totally normal, you'll hear older hams use stuff like that all the time. Before NATO standardized everything people used all kinds of regional phonetics and some folks just never switched. It's not wrong exactly but it can cause confusion if the other person doesn't know what word you're using. Heard a guy use "Europe" for E once and it took me a second to figure out what he was saying. For your callsign specifically, most people go phonetic at least on first contact or when theyre signing, then drop to just letters once you've established comms. That's just how it tends to go in practice.

so ive been using N1MM for a while now mostly because thats what everyone told me to use when i got into contesting and it works fine for that, no complaints there. but for day to day logging its kind of a pain, like its not really built for just casually logging a few QSOs on a weekend afternoon without setting up a whole contest profile or whatever. started messing around with Log4OM a few months back and honestly its way nicer for general use, the interface doesnt make me feel like im launching a space shuttle every time i want to log a contact. the logbook features and the QSL management stuff is actually useful. but then contest weekend rolls around and im back to N1MM anyway because nothing really touches it for that. now the thing thats been bugging me lately is WSJT-X. i have it set up to log to Log4OM via UDP and that mostly works but i had a weird thing happen last weekend where some FT8 contacts werent showing up and i couldnt figure out if it was a UDP port conflict or Log4OM just decided to stop listening or what. anyone dealt with this? also curious if anyone just gave up and went full N1MM for everything including FT8 and just lives with the clunky daily logging

Just finished modeling a 6-element DK7ZB design in EZNEC and comparing the predicted bandwidth to actual measurements. The modeled SWR curve showed flat response from 144-148 MHz, but real-world testing revealed some interesting differences. Using a NanoVNA to sweep the entire 2m band, I found the antenna's resonant point had shifted about 500 kHz higher than predicted. SWR changed from around 1.15 down to 1.08 and showed almost constant response across the entire band. Adding a single ferrite choke made a noticeable improvement. For anyone building yagis, don't just check SWR at one frequency. It's far better to look at the SWR at multiple frequencies across the amateur band and check it closely across the band. The bandwidth characteristics can surprise you.

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech class) and i finally got my baofeng programmed to hit the local 2m repeater, or at least i think i did. sometimes it kerchunks and i hear the tail, other times nothing happens at all. i looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it shows a PL tone of 100.0 hz but i honestly wasnt sure if that goes in the transmit tone field or the receive tone field on the radio. i just put it in both because i didnt know what else to do. also i noticed some people just say their call and go silent waiting for someone to respond, and other people launch straight into a full conversation like someone is already listening. is one of those more correct than the other? i dont want to step on anyone or come across as rude. been lurking on the repeater for about two weeks before i tried transmitting and it seems pretty active in the evenings but i wasnt sure about the daytime. anyway any help would be appreciated, still figuring all this out

yeah 10m has been treating me really well this cycle, honestly better than i expected when we were in the depths of the last solar minimum. i remember barely being able to work anything on that band for like two or three years so this is a nice change. ran a pile up on 28.450 last weekend for maybe an hour, mostly EU and a few JA stations snuck in there near the end. propagation was holding up way longer into the afternoon than usual too. on the Icom thing, i think what you might be thinking of is the rumors floating around about something to compete with the IC-705 but slightly bigger, like a portable but with more power. i havent seen anything confirmed though, just speculation at this point. wouldnt suprise me if they announced something at tokyo hamfair or maybe at the dayton hamvention next year. guess we'll see.

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and im at the point where i either need help or need to just accept i dont know enough python to make this work properly. basically the idea is to have a raspberry pi zero w sitting between my logging software and the rotator controller, parsing the AZ commands from ham radio deluxe and then sending the right voltage signals out through a little MCP4725 DAC board to the rotator's analog input. the hardware side actually went smoother than i expected, i got the i2c talking to the DAC no problem and i can move the antenna manually by just writing values to the register from the terminal. the issue is the software side — when HRD sends a new azimuth command the pi sometimes just misses it entirely or processes it late and the antenna ends up like 15 degrees off where it should be. i think its a threading issue in my script but honestly im not sure. also running this over wifi feels kinda sketchy, wondering if i should just hardwire it with ethernet or use a small pi 3 instead of the zero. anyone done something similar? doesnt have to be rotator specific, just curious if theres a better way to handle serial parsing on these things without it getting flakey.

yeah what he said basically. i'll add that during any kind of formal net like an emcomm activation or a traffic net youre expected to use phonetics for your call every time, no exceptions really. ARRL traffic nets especially, the net control will just ask you to say it again phonetically if you dont. but casual stuff on a local repeater, i probably only bust out full phonetics maybe 20% of the time. the thing that trips new hams up is thinking there's one rule for everything and there just isnt. read the room is kinda the best advice. oh and the NATO standard is what everyone uses, dont go inventing your own like ive heard people do sometimes, saying stuff like "A for Apple" just causes more confusion not less

so ive been chasing rare DX for probably 6 years now and for the longest time i just could not break a pileup to save my life. VP6 last year, 3Y before that, just wall after wall of stations and i'd be sitting there calling for 45 minutes getting nowhere. i know the basics everyone says — listen first, find the DX station's pattern, work split properly — but actually doing it under pressure is a whole different thing. what finally clicked for me was really committing to listening before i ever key up. like actually listening for 10-15 minutes minimum to figure out where the DX is actually listening vs where everyone THINKS they're listening. theres usually a sweet spot maybe 2-3 kHz up from where the crowd is hammering and the DX keeps coming back to it, and if you put yourself just above or below that you suddenly exist to them. also started running a bit more power when i got the amp sorted out, but honestly i think the timing thing matters way more than the signal. ive heard guys with kW setups call forever and little pistols crack through because they were just landing at the right moment. anyone else have techniques that actually worked for them? curious if the split listening approach is consistent or if i just got lucky a couple times

so ive been going to hamvention on and off for like 12 years but missed the last two because of work stuff and im finally thinking about making the trip again this year. mostly just want to walk the flea market honestly, never been a huge indoor vendor guy but i always end up spending way too much on random coax fittings and old handhelds i dont need lol anyone else from the midwest planning on going? also curious if the swap meet area is still as big as it used to be, heard they kind of shuffled things around after covid and i dont know what to expect anymore