Robert Taylor32

yeah the doppler thing trips everyone up at first. short answer for a linear transponder like AO-73 is you correct on the downlink and let the uplink ride, or at least thats the most common approach people use in practice. the reason is that if everyone tried to perfectly correct uplink you'd still hear yourself drifting around on the downlink anyway because other stations aren't doing the same thing in sync with you. so most guys just tune the downlink to keep their own signal centered and nudge the uplink occasionally if they feel like they're getting too far off as for gpredict dual rig control, i dont think it natively supports two separate rig instances talking to two different radios cleanly, at least not the version ive used. some people run two instances of gpredict which is kind of hacky but it works. honestly though for handheld yagis doing it manually on the uplink isnt that bad once you get a feel for the doppler curve — AO-73 passes aren't long but the rate of change slows down a lot when its near overhead so you really only need to actively correct near AOS and LOS

the 5 wpm thing being bad advice is real, thats the old way where people would count dits and dahs in their head and it becomes a crutch thats really hard to unlearn later. what you want is the Koch method or something close to it, where you learn at a higher character speed like 20 wpm but with longer gaps between the characters so you have time to process. LCWO is actually fine for this, just set character speed high and effective speed low and work through the letters one at a time. the idea is your brain learns to recognize the sound of each letter as a whole sound rather than breaking it into pieces. honestly the biggest thing is just doing a little bit every single day rather than cramming. like 15 minutes daily will get you further than 2 hours on a saturday. it took me probably 6 months of pretty casual practice before i could copy anything on the air and longer before i was comfortable actually making contacts, but it does click eventually

ok so i passed my general a few months ago and ive been mostly sticking to the digital modes but i want to try some SSB phone on 40 meters and im honestly just confused about the whole thing. like i know theres a band plan but is that different from what the FCC actually says i can use? my buddy told me generals cant go below 7.175 or something but then i looked it up and saw different numbers in different places and now im more confused than before. also i keep hearing people say dont operate near the band edge but nobody really explains why or how close is too close. like whats actually going to happen if im at 7.299 or whatever the edge is. is it a legal thing or just a courtesy thing or what

so ive been doing POTA for a while now and someone in my local club mentioned WWFF and honestly i didnt even know it was a thing until like two weeks ago. been reading through the website and its a bit confusing to navigate, at least for me. from what i can tell its basically similar to POTA but more international and the references cover a wider range of protected areas? like nature reserves and wildlife refuges and that kind of thing. anyway i found out theres a WWF reference not too far from me, its a state wildlife management area and it qualifies apparently. planning to head out there next weekend with the KX3 and a wire antenna. my question is mostly around the logging side of things — do i need to pre-announce the activation somewhere specific, and do i upload to a separate database from POTA or is there crossover. also wondering if its worth trying to get spotted on the WWFF cluster or if just using POTA spots works fine for the hunters out there. any advice from people whove done both would be great

so ive been doing a lot of portable VHF operating lately, mostly 2m and 70cm, usually just driving up to a local hilltop and running simplex or hitting a few linked repeaters. right now i have a diamond X50 on a pole strapped to a fence post or whatever i can find and its fine but i keep thinking about whether a yagi would actually be worth it for what im doing. the thing is i dont really have a single direction i care about — its more like i want to cover a wide area around me, so an omni makes sense in theory. but ive had situations where some guy is like 40 miles out and barely making it through and i think well if i had even a 5 element yagi pointed at him itd be a done deal. then again id have to rotate it manually which gets annoying. anyone done both and have an opinion? is there a middle ground or am i just overthinking this. also curious whether a colinear longer than the X50 would actually give me noticably more than what i have or if im already pretty close to the point of diminishing returns on gain with an omni

yeah im planning on going, went last year for the first time and was kinda overwhelmed honestly but ended up finding some good coax and a handful of PL-259s for cheap. my buddy said they might have a bigger vendor section this time around. let me know about the carpool thing that would be great

so ive been on HF for maybe 6 months now and i notice some guys use the full NATO phonetics every single time they say their callsign and some guys just say it normally especially on 40m SSB just casually chatting. im not sure when youre actually supposed to use them vs when its overkill. like if im just calling CQ on a clear frequency and someone comes back with a strong signal do i really need to go through the whole alpha bravo charlie thing or can i just say my call normally also i was in a net last week and the net control kept correcting people when they used non-standard words, someone said F as in Frank and net control came back saying the correct phonetic is Foxtrot. is that a hard rule or just that guys preference. genuinely not sure if im missing something here

ive been on the waitlist at gigaparts since like october and still nothing, getting a little impatient honestly. the remote head thing is what sold me on it from the start because my shack situation is kind of awkward and being able to mount the head somewhere else would solve a problem ive been working around for two years. glad to hear the rx audio holds up, that was one thing i was nervous about after reading some early impressions that were kind of mixed on it. how did it handle strong adjacent signals, did you get a chance to test that at all while you were there

cab roof, no question. the ground plane on a bed mount is also sketchy depending on how your bed is constructed, some of those composite beds are basically worthless for RF. on 70cm you really want a solid continuous ground and the cab roof gives you that. the shadow off the back window and cab structure at 440 mhz is noticeable in my experience, probably 3-6dB in the worst case direction which on a marginal path to a repeater thats the difference between quieting the squelch and not.

that's actually a pretty solid starting point honestly, better than what a lot of people show up with to training exercises. the FT-891 is a great go-kit radio, runs efficient on battery and the power draw is manageable if you keep tx power reasonable. the solar panel question depends on what controller is built in — a lot of the cheaper panels dont have a proper charge controller, just a blocking diode, which means you really do want a separate MPPT controller in line, especially with LiFePO4 because the voltage characteristics are different from lead-acid and some controllers dont handle it well. worth checking the docs on whatever battery BMS you have too. as for VHF/UHF — yeah I'd strongly say yes if you're planning on doing any actual ARES work. most of the tactical local stuff at served agencies, hospitals, EOCs, that's all done on VHF. HF is more for regional or state-level nets when infrastructure is down. so your HT covers that base but you might want a mobile rig or at least a dual band portable with a better antenna option than the rubber duck. i use a slim jim rolled up in my kit and it makes a noticeable difference. the other thing I see people forget is a way to charge their phone off grid, a small USB power bank or the ability to run off the main battery. and waterproofing — bag your antenna feedlines and connectors, learned that one the hard way at a flooded EOC exercise

so ive been messing around with this direct conversion receiver for 40m that i breadboarded out over the past few weekends. started from a design i found in EMRFD, modified it a bit because i couldnt source the exact NE602 pinout board someone linked in another thread and ended up using a SA612 which is basically the same thing i think. anyway it works, sort of. im picking up signals fine, mostly SSB and some CW, but theres this really annoying hum that comes and goes. its not 60hz, sounds more like 120 to me but i havent scoped it yet. also the audio stage is way hotter than i expected — i just threw in a LM386 because i had a pile of them in my junk box and it clips pretty bad even with the gain pin left floating. also wondering if anyone has tried winding their own toroids for the bandpass filter ahead of the mixer stage. i did mine on T50-2 cores with what i think is the right number of turns but the thing kind of loads down if i touch a longer piece of wire to the antenna terminal, like resonance is way off. might be my L calculations were off or just sloppy winding. not looking for a kit recommendation, just want to get this thing actually working before i move on to the tx side of the project

not dumb questions at all, this confused me too when i first got into WWFF. so yeah there is a worldwide reference database at wwff.co and you can search it to see what areas qualify in your country — most national parks, nature reserves, wildlife refuges, that kind of thing tend to be listed. the threshold is 44 contacts to get a full activation counted, not 10 like POTA, which threw me off at first. you can still submit fewer but it wont count as a complete activation for the stats. as far as pre-announcing, you dont have to but a lot of activators post a spot or put something on the WWFF Facebook groups ahead of time so hunters know to listen out for you. makes it way easier to hit that 44 count honestly. and yes you should log the reference number (like KFF- for US references or whatever your country prefix is) in your log so it carries through when you upload to the WWFF logger. i use ADIF from my normal logging software and it works fine. have fun out there, the nature refs have way less foot traffic than POTA parks sometimes which is nice

CQ WW is a great one to cut your teeth on, especially SSB since like you said its easier to get comfortable with the exchange when you can actually hear the words. the exchange for CQ WW is just signal report and CQ zone so its pretty simple once you get the rhythm down. N1MM Logger+ is what most people use and its free, takes a little setup but there are youtube walkthroughs that are actually pretty decent. definitely submit your log even if its small, it helps with log checking for everyone else and you get a participation certificate which hey its something. as far as category just enter single op low power and dont stress about it. nobody is judging a first timer on score. the whole point your first time is just to make contacts and figure out how the flow works. after about an hour itll start clicking. SOTA is kind of its own world, its about activating summits and getting points, some overlap with contests in terms of logging but theyre pretty separate ecosystems. worth getting into eventually though, gets you outside which is never bad.

yeah i did something similar on mine, though i went down a bit of a rabbit hole because the service manual revision i had didnt match where the component actually was on the board. took me longer to find it than to actually do the mod. the cap swap does open up the low end noticeably, my signal reports went from people saying it sounded like i was talking into a soup can to actually sounding like a real voice lol. i dont think it pushes you outside regs because youre still filtering at the IF stage, the mod is more about the mic input chain before that, but honestly dont quote me on that because i never actually measured it. i just went by what guys were hearing on the air. if you have a service monitor or know someone who does, worth checking the spectral plot before and after just to be sure.

so ive been thinking about getting into cw for a while now and i finally decided to just try and do it but i honestly dont even know where to start. i downloaded like three different apps and they all seem kind of different in how they teach it and i dont know which approach is actually right. one of them does the whole alphabet in order starting with A and another one throws random letters at you right away which felt really overwhelming but someone online said thats actually better? i think its called the koch method or something like that anyway i guess my question is how did you guys actually do it, like what actually worked. im not in a huge hurry i just dont want to spend months doing it wrong and then have to start over. also does it matter what speed you learn at from the start because ive heard conflicting stuff about that too

congrats man that ohio contact on 5w is no joke, especially with a random wire. QRP has this way of making every contact feel like you actually earned it, which is kind of addictive honestly. for portable antennas i've been using a linked dipole for a few years now and i really like it for hiking situations. you can cut it for a couple bands and just clip in or out sections depending on where you want to operate. the whole thing including the feedline rolls up pretty small. an EFHW with a little matchbox works great too and some people prefer it because you only need one end in the air, which can be easier in the woods when good trees are in weird spots. i've had good luck with both but the linked dipole feels a bit more predictable to me personally. the QCX Mini is a solid little rig btw, hans does good work. enjoy it.

the fan mod alone is worth it imo. i did mine about two years ago and cant imagine going back. noctua fans are overkill in the best possible way, thing runs cool and quiet now. i used a pwm adapter so the speed still ramps up under load which is nice. on the audio side i think youre hearing a real difference, not placebo. the stock speaker in that radio is genuinely mediocre, icom kind of phoned it in there. some guys do the whole external speaker route but if youre doing internal replacement thats a cleaner solution. i went the opposite direction and just plugged into a little external monitor speaker i had sitting around, works great but the cable management is annoying. for front end stuff ive seen some people add a preamp bypass relay for strong signal environments, basically let you switch out the preamp on 40m and 80m when the band is loud and it gets a little less intermodulation. never did it myself but the thread on eham a while back seemed legit. might be worth digging up.

yeah that first one is always a bit of a shock no matter how many drills you've done. the drills are great but they cant really simulate the fact that real EOC staff are stressed and not necessarily focused on making sure you know what to do. ive been doing ARES stuff for probably 12 years now and i still see that pattern every time - first hour is always a little rough until the EC gets situated and the served agencies figure out how to use us. the welfare traffic relay work is actually really important even if it doesnt feel exciting. thats exactly the kind of thing where amateur radio fills a gap that nothing else does as well during infrastructure outages. sounds like you handled it well honestly, filling a notepad with traffic is no small thing. did your group do an after action review? those are worth their weight in gold if your EC runs them properly

Once you are set up for split, all you need to do is press and hold a button and the radio switches the audio from the DX station to the pileup. Then you tune the pileup to figure out whom the DX is working. I use my IC-7610 sub receiver for this - took some practice but now it's second nature.

honest answer - SO2R doesnt really pay off until you've got the single radio discipline locked down pretty solid. like if youre still mentally working hard to find mults and manage your run frequency on one radio, adding a second one just splits your attention in a bad way and your rate on BOTH goes down. ive seen guys do worse in contests after adding the second radio because they were fighting the setup the whole time. the way i think about it is radio 2 should basically run itself while youre doing real work on radio 1. so during a run on 20m, radio 2 is scanning for a new mult on 15 or whatever, and you only really touch it when something interesting pops up. N1MM has the SO2R assistant stuff and if you get the bandmap working right with a decent cluster feed it helps a lot. but yeah the audio thing is rough at first - i run headphones with SO2R audio in each ear and it took me probably 5 or 6 serious contest weekends before my brain stopped fighting it. the filtering issue with the 7300 and 590 together is real btw. if your antennas are on the same band you need good bandpass filters or youre going to have a bad time. i use the Array Solutions stuff but its not cheap. for two different bands simultaneously its way more manageable.

im in basically the same boat as you, been back about 6 months and just started using paddles in the last couple weeks. what helped me a lot was just slowing the keyer way down, like embarrassingly slow, and really focusing on making clean characters instead of trying to go fast. my elmer told me 5 wpm clean beats 12 wpm sloppy every time and i think hes right also theres this website called lcwo.net that i use for receive practice and you can set it to random characters or words at whatever speed you want. its way less pressure than copying a real transmission

Had the exact same problem with my Z-11 Pro on 80m EFHW. You must apply power to the tuner for it to tune - try AM mode at 20W and hold transmit for the full cycle. Also make sure your RF power is adequate - these auto-tuners need juice to work properly.

so ive been trying to figure out the best way to run coax from my trunk mount nmo to the radio up front and its driving me nuts. the obvious route would be under the car but im worried about rocks and stuff, plus accessing it later if something goes wrong. thought about going through the cabin but that means drilling through the firewall or finding some existing grommet that wont mess up the seal anyone done this on a 2018 accord? really dont want to screw this up since its my daily driver and the xyl will kill me if i mess up her car lol

welcome to WWFF, you're gonna love it especially coming from SOTA. the big difference you'll notice pretty quick is the vibe is a bit more relaxed in terms of summit-chasing urgency, people are generally just happy to work parks and nature areas. so to answer your questions - yes you can post a spot ahead of time, most activators use the wwff.us site for north american activations (KFF references) and there's also pota.app which a lot of people use since POTA and WWFF overlap quite a bit in the US. posting a self-spot or an alert the day before or morning of really helps get people listening for you. the WWFF facebook groups are active too but the app/website alerts are probably more effective for getting chasers tuned in. for logs yes standard ADIF works fine, just upload after you get home. and on the minimum contacts - its 44 for a valid activation, not 10 like SOTA. that trips up a lot of people coming from SOTA. 44 unique callsigns in the log. it sounds like a lot but honestly once you're spotted you'll usually hit it within 30-45 minutes on a decent band, sometimes way faster. good luck out there, post a trip report when you get back

yeah the timing thing is huge and most people completely ignore it. ive worked a bunch of rare ones over the years and honestly the single biggest mistake i see is guys who just kerchunk their call over and over like the op is gonna magically hear them through the wall of RF. it doesnt work that way. one thing i'll add — learn to recognize how the op is working the pile. some of them work by number, some work geographically, some just grab whoever they can copy cleanest. if they call QRZ and then come back to a W6 and then a W4 and then another W6, theres a decent chance theyre not working by number and you can just try your luck. but if you hear a run of 1s and 2s youre probably wasting your time until they rotate. also on low bands, if you have any directional antenna at all, try to get a feel for which direction the pile is coming from and see if theres any way you can reduce the interference you're hearing. i know thats not always possible but a beverage or some kind of receive antenna really changes the game when you can actually hear what the DX is saying instead of just guessing. my 160m game got way better after i put up a simple flag antenna for receive.