John Peterson

the eu2200i is honestly the right call if you can get your hands on it, the inverter-based output is way cleaner than a conventional generator and with a decent ferrite choke on the power leads you should be fine. i bonded mine to a ground rod at a field day site last year and the noise was basically negligible. the hybrid approach you're describing — charge in the morning, operate on battery — is exactly what our group does for extended deployments and it works really well. you can usually stretch that 100ah lifepo4 a lot further than you'd think if you're not transmitting 100% duty cycle, which on js8call you wont be anyway. on the buddipole question, yeah a vertical on 40 is gonna be a compromise but it's a useable one. the loading coils do their job and if you can stake out a few radials — even just 4 or 5 of them thrown on the ground — it makes a noticeable difference over just the tripod mount alone. the ocf dipole in the trees will outperform it if you can get it up at a decent height, even 25-30 feet makes a big difference on 40. id use the buddipole as your backup or for a different band honestly, maybe set it up on 20 while the dipole covers 40.

okay so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about chasing dx and these various awards and honestly i get a little lost trying to figure out where to even start. like i understand the basic concept — you work stations in different countries or states or zones and then you submit cards or whatever to get credit — but the whole thing feels kind of overwhelming when you actually sit down and look at it. my buddy who got me into the hobby has his basic DXCC and hes always talking about chasing new ones and i think i want to do that too but then i was reading about WAS (worked all states) and that seems maybe more achievable starting out since all 50 states feels more realistic than 100 countries. WAZ im not even sure i fully understand, like the zones thing is confusing to me still. im running a modest station, just a 100 watt radio and a wire dipole up about 30 feet in my backyard. is that enough to actually get anywhere with this stuff or do i need to upgrade before it even makes sense to chase awards. would love to hear from people who started from scratch and actually made progress

so ive been chasing FT5/W for like three weeks now and kept getting nowhere, just wall to wall calling and the DXpedition just wasnt hearing me at all. tried everything i thought i knew and nothing. my signal is decent, running about 500w into a 4-el yagi at 45 feet so its not like im a little pistol station or anything. what finally worked was a combination of things i hadnt really put together before. first i stopped trying to call on or near the freq everyone else was piling on. i started listening really carefully to where the DX was actually coming back to — not just where people were calling, because those two things can be pretty different especially if they're running split and moving their RX around. once i figured out he was consistently pulling guys out from about 3-4 up i just parked there and waited for a gap. second thing was i cut my message down to just my suffix, WB8 and then just my suffix. felt weird but the moment i heard a partial that sounded close i came back fast with full call. also turned off the pre-amp which sounds backwards but i think it was actually helping the noise floor eat some of the weaker return signals i was trying to identify. not sure if that made a difference but i was grasping at straws at that point lol. anyway worked him on 17m CW after like 4 days of trying and it felt pretty great. curious if anyone else has had luck with tricks that arent super obvious

i did a spark plug hole mount on my tacoma and it worked fine, similar situation not wanting to drill. though tbh i eventually just bit the bullet and did a proper NMO in the roof and wish id done it from the start. the signal difference wasnt massive or anything but the antenna sits way better and i stopped worrying about it flying off on the interstate lol

Q65 changed things pretty significantly yeah. I worked my first EME contact about 3 years ago with a single 14 element yagi and a 500w amp, so it's definitely doable on a modest setup. you're not gonna be running up a huge initial contact list fast but it works. the antenna gain is obviously the biggest limiting factor and every dB you can squeeze out matters a lot more on EME than just about anything else in radio. for tracking software most people I know use either WXtrack or MacDoppler depending on platform, but the actual logging and digital mode stuff is WSJT-X which you probably already know from FT8. the JT65 and Q65 modes in there handle the timing and the moonbounce specific stuff is more about getting your az-el mount calibrated properly and feeding it the tracking data. there are interfaces that pipe the tracking output directly to rotator controllers which makes life easier. one thing nobody really tells you upfront is that the moon isnt always at a useful elevation, so your actual operating windows can be pretty short depending on your location and time of year. worth running some simulations before you commit to where you're mounting the antenna because you want as much sky coverage as possible especially to the horizon on the azimuths where the moon tends to sit for your latitude.

35 feet on 40m is pretty low honestly, youre looking at a high angle radiator at that height which is great for NVIS and regional contacts but anything over say 800 miles and the vertical is probably going to smoke it for low angle stuff. your old hustler with even just 4 radials would have a decent low angle lobe that the inverted V at that height just cant really compete with for DX. if you can get the apex up to 50-55 feet it starts to look more competitive. also check your leg angles, closer to 90 degrees between them flattens out the pattern a bit. 45 degree legs basically turns it into a less efficient vertical polarized antenna which is weird middle ground. try pulling the ends out flatter if you have the room, like 120-130 degrees between legs total. might help more than you'd expect on 40.

this is super helpful to read, i'm pretty new (just got my general last year) and i keep seeing people talk about solar flux and K index and i sort of nod along but i dont fully get how it connects to what i actually hear on the radio. like i checked the numbers one day when 15m sounded dead and the SFI was only like 110 and then i checked again a few weeks later when things sounded amazing and it was way higher, so i think i get the basic idea but the geomagnetic stuff still confuses me. is the K index like a bad thing when its high? i think i read that somewhere but then someone else in a different thread seemed to be saying something different and i got confused

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and i got my beacon working fine, shows up on aprs.fi with the right symbol and everything, position looks correct. but whenever i try to send a message through the TM-D710 to another station i never get an ack back and the other guy says he never receives anything. tried a few different people in the area so its not just one station being down or whatever. my path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard for this area. running into a digipeater about 4 miles away that i can see on the map. is there something different about how messages get routed vs just the beacon packets? i feel like i must be missing something obvious here because the beacon clearly goes through fine. also not sure if relevant but im connected to an internet gateway too through the radio, not just doing RF only if that matters at all

N1MM for contests, full stop, dont even think about anything else for that. but for regular logging Log4OM is genuinely pretty good. the cloudlog guys will tell you to use cloudlog instead and i get why but if you dont want a browser based thing Log4OM is solid. the WSJT-X UDP logging has worked for me for about two years now without major issues, you set it up once and forget about it. just make sure you're on a recent version of Log4OM because the older ones had some weird behavior with the UDP listener dropping packets under load which sounds insane but it happened during a contest weekend when i had WSJT-X running on a second radio and it just silently missed like 40 qsos. that was a fun discovery.

yeah the nerves dont fully go away but they do get way more manageable after the first couple times. also just a practical tip — write out your net control script on paper before you go in. like literally your opening announcement, how you're going to handle check-ins, what you'll say when you pass traffic to the EOC liaison. having something physical to look at when your brain decides to go blank is genuinely a lifesaver. i still do this for any activation i havent run before even after years of doing this stuff.

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out the 40m band. ive looked at the arrl band plan and also the fcc part 97 stuff but im getting confused because they dont always match up and i dont really know which one i'm supposed to follow. like the band goes from 7.0 to 7.3 MHz but i keep hearing people say dont get too close to the edges. my radio can tune down to 7.000 but should i actually transmit there? and whats the deal with the CW only portion at the bottom, i thought i saw it was up to 7.025 or something but then someone on the air told me its 7.125 which seems way off. also is there a difference between what the band plan says and what the actual rules are? like if i transmit on a frequency that the band plan says is for CW but i use SSB am i breaking the law or just being rude basically

OpenWebRX is the move like the other guy said. i tried piping raw IQ back over the WAN once and it was a disaster on anything less than fiber, the buffer underruns were constant. the browser-based approach is just more practical for most home connections one thing to watch out for with the RRC-1258 boxes and a separate SDR running on the same remote PC — make sure your USB power situation is solid over there. ive had RSPs do weird things when sharing a USB hub with other stuff, had one that would just drop off randomly and i spent like two weekends thinking it was a software issue before i realized it was just a crappy hub losing power under load. dumb problem but it'll drive you crazy

Just started using Ham2K PoLo for POTA activations after seeing all the buzz. The app alerts me when I've worked a station before and immediately shows if a callsign exists in my historical logs which is great for dupe checking. However, I'm having intermittent issues with QRZ lookups timing out in poor cell coverage areas. The app can pull from several data sources but I use QRZ since I maintain a subscription. Anyone else experiencing QRZ API issues with PoLo lately? Wondering if there are better offline alternatives for name/location data when operating remote.

Welcome to linear transponder operation! Finding yourself is a challenge often met with frustration by novice satellite users trying to score their very first contact on a linear transponder. Here are some basics to consider: Understand the relationship between inverting and non-inverting transponders. I recommend starting with a strong satellite like RS-44 for your first attempts.

Class E is fascinating but for portable work I want reliability over maximum efficiency. 37dBm...TX Draw:800mA shows you can get good results with straightforward designs. My 2N3553 PA gives me 5W at 65% efficiency and never fails in the field.

so ive been sitting on 40m most evenings this week and its just... dead. like i can hear a few guys down around 7.200 doing their usual ragchew thing but compared to even a few months ago it feels like half the band disappeared. not sure if its propagation, everyone switched to FT8, or just the time of year doing its thing. probably all three honestly. been a ham for about 12 years now and i dont remember it being this quiet in the fall. usually this is when things start picking up again. anyway just curious if others are noticing the same or if its just my location messing with me, im up in the upper midwest if that matters

so ive been trying to work FO-29 for a few weeks now and i can hear signals on the downlink just fine, pretty clear when the pass is decent elevation, but i cannot for the life of me find my own uplink signal in the passband. running about 5 watts into a pair of hand-held yagis, uplink on 145.9xx and listening down around 435.8xx depending on doppler. i know the transponder is inverting so USB up means LSB down or whatever but i keep second-guessing myself mid-pass and then the satellite is already gone my bigger problem is probably the doppler correction honestly. im just doing it manually by ear which i know is kind of a mess. i have gpredict running on the laptop but im not feeding it to the radio, just glancing at it while trying to hold the antennas and tune and talk all at once. its a lot. is there a way to simplify this or am i just in for a rough learning curve until i get muscle memory for it also not sure if my uplink power is even close to enough, i see people say 5w is fine but then also see people say you need a yagi with decent gain or youre wasting your time. mine are the arrow antenna so at least thats sorted i think

the antenna isolation thing will bite you if you dont plan it out. i tried a ghetto SO2R setup a while back without filters and yeah, totally stomped my own S-meter on the second rig every time i keyed up. not fun. bandpass filters arent optional if both radios are anywhere near each other frequency wise. one thing nobody really talks about enough is the logging software side of it — N1MM+ handles SO2R pretty well with the right configuration but you gotta set it up properly or it'll just log everything to the wrong radio and your dupe checking gets all confused. spent like two hours before a contest once figuring out why my second radio entries weren't showing up right. also if you're doing phone contesting and not CW the SO2R thing is even harder imo because you can't just let a macro handle your run transmission while you tune around, you actually have to talk and that kind of splits your attention in a messy way.

yeah the gateway list in the channel selector is not always real time, some of those entries can be hours old depending on when the RMS relay'd its last heartbeat to the winlink servers. the propagation map thing is a rough estimate too, not gospel. best thing to do is check winlink.org directly and look at the gateway status page, you can sort by last heard and see which ones were actually active in the last hour or so. audio levels with vara are pretty critical and definitely not the same ballpark as what you'd set for psk31. vara HF wants a clean signal without any clipping, i usually run my signalink output low and then bring up the radio power a bit rather than driving it hard from the pc side. there's a built in calibration thing in vara HF if you haven't found it yet, run that before you try connecting again. also make sure your IC-7300 is in USB-D mode not just USB or you might get some weird filtering that steps on the vara bandwidth.

yeah the pot noise thing is super common with these old rotators. before you start rewiring everything i'd check if you have a good star ground between the arduino ground and the rotator controller ground — i burnt probably two weekends on a similar project before i realized my arduino was floating relative to everything else. a 0.1uf cap right at the ADC pin to ground helped me more than putting it across the pot itself, worth trying if you havent already. also you can do some software filtering on the arduino side, just average the last N readings and throw out anything more than X degrees from the running average. not elegant but it works fine for this kind of application. for a yagi on 70cm you'd probably want the window pretty tight but for now while you're testing just getting stable readings matters more than accuracy. the encoder swap isnt as bad as it sounds btw if your rotator has a shaft you can access. i did mine with a cheap optical encoder from aliexpress and some 3d printed brackets, took an afternoon. much cleaner than dealing with pot drift and wear.

so our ARES group finally did a full simulated exercise last saturday, kind of a tabletop turned into an actual go situation where we pretended the EOC had lost all normal comms and we had to relay health-and-welfare traffic plus resource requests between three different served agencies. i volunteered to be one of the net control stations which sounded fine in my head but man it got chaotic fast. the thing nobody really warned me about was how much message traffic piles up when you have people who dont really know ICS form 213 format trying to pass messages over the air. we had a couple folks who kept wanting to give long verbal explanations instead of the actual formatted message and i wasnt sure when to cut them off or ask them to reformat vs just deal with it and move on to keep the net flowing. ended up with a backlog within like 20 minutes. also our backup frequency plan had never actually been tested and when we tried to switch to the secondary after simulating a repeater failure, two of our field operators didnt have it programmed in. just a thing that seems obvious in hindsight but when youre doing live ops that kind of gap really stands out. anyway curious if others have run into similar stuff, especially the message formatting issue. do you just practice the forms more beforehand or is there a better way to run NCS when traffic is heavy and not everyone knows what theyre doing

oh man i remember that feeling exactly. first time i checked into a net i completely blanked on my own callsign for like two seconds and just sat there. net control was super patient though and honestly most nets are pretty forgiving especially local ones. checking in with no traffic is totally normal, thats like 90% of check-ins on a typical club net. just say your callsign phonetically, your name, and something like "no traffic, just checking in" and youre done. net control will acknowledge you and move on. the whole thing takes maybe 15 seconds. the nets i run on are happy just to know someones listening and participating even if you dont have anything to say. one thing that helped me early on was writing out what i was going to say on a notepad before i keyed up. sounds silly but it really does help until it becomes second nature. after a few weeks you wont even think about it

honestly the rate gains from SO2R are real but i think people undersell how much setup time goes into making it actually work reliably. i watched a video of one of the top contesters walking through their station and it looked like more of an engineering project than a radio hobby lol. for a lot of guys doing regional or club contests the mental overhead might genuinely not be worth it vs just focusing on operating better on one radio — better CQ frequency selection, knowing when to S&P vs run, that kind of stuff. i got pretty competitive scores for a while before i went SO2R just by being smarter about band transitions and not sitting on a dead frequency too long

Homebrew nights are fantastic, especially if you recognize new hams with special categories. We also started doing club POTA challenges which got people excited about getting on the air together.

yeah same thing happened to me lol. honestly the freezing up thing goes away fast, after like 3 or 4 check-ins it starts feeling totally normal. one thing that helped me was just writing my callsign and name on a sticky note next to the radio so i had something to look at. sounds dumb but when youre nervous your brain just goes blank and having it written down helps. also dont worry about passing traffic until you understand whats going on, just check in as "no traffic" or however your net handles it and thats totally fine