Ashley Wilson95

so ive been trying to get winlink going for about two weeks now and im at the point where i just want to throw the laptop out the window. running pat on linux with a signalink usb into my IC-7300, vara fm configured, and i can see the gateway in the map but when i try to connect it just times out every single time. the audio levels look fine to me, the waterfall shows the vara tones going out, but nothing comes back. thing is the RMS gateway i'm trying to hit is only like 12 miles away, line of sight almost, so its not an rf issue. ive double checked the serial port settings and the ptt is definitely keying up the radio, i can see the tx light. not sure if its a vara configuration thing or if maybe that particular RMS node is just down? is there a way to check gateway status somewhere without just blindly trying to connect? also slightly confused about the difference between RMS relay and RMS gateway in terms of what i should actually be targeting as a new winlink user. any help appreciated

honest answer — if you already have the second radio sitting there and you can borrow or buy some bandpass filters, yeah its worth experimenting with, but dont expect it to magically fix your rate. SO2R mostly helps you during the dead spots where your run frequency goes quiet and you can S&P on radio 2 while youre waiting. if you're already running well it can add maybe 10-15% but a lot of that depends on conditions and how smooth your workflow is. the keying interlock issue is real btw. there are a few hardware solutions but a lot of guys just use N1MM with the radio focus stuff set up properly and it handles most of it. you still have to be disciplined about it though, ive def transmitted on the wrong radio more than once in a late night contest moment. the bandpass filters are honestly the bigger deal — running 100w into a tribander on 15 while the other radio is on 20 will destroy your ears and mess with both receivers if you dont have them. Array Solutions or the Dunestar ones are what most people use, not cheap but kinda necessary. your antenna situation is workable for starting out. 40 and 20 are your main contest bands anyway so having separate antennas already is actually decent separation.

the timing thing is really the whole game honestly. took me probably two years of serious DXing before it clicked. what helped me was just spending time listening to big pileups without even transmitting, just watching how the DX op works — some of them have very predictable patterns, like they always come back within a certain window after finishing a log entry, and once you hear that a few times you can start anticipating it. on the tail-ending question, it depends a lot on the op. some DX ops actually appreciate it because you're slipping in right as the previous QSO ends and there's a brief quiet moment before the pile erupts again. but plenty of ops ignore it or it just gets buried anyway. i'd say it works maybe 20-30% of the time in my experience, which is actually not bad compared to just screaming into the pile with everyone else. the guys running split on 17m DXpeditions seem more receptive to it than the big contest-style 15m pileups where everyone is just hammering away. 100w and a 3-el yagi is actually not a bad starting point. ive broken decent pileups with less. the antenna is doing more work than the power in most cases.

could also just be less people on in general, i feel like activity goes in waves. summer always seems slower to me for some reason. also your dipole orientation matters a lot for 40, if youre running it east-west youre gonna miss a chunk of stations. just a thought

yeah the message handling thing is SO real. we did a similar exercise maybe two years ago and our biggest failure was almost identical, people just weren't trained enough on actual NTS formatted traffic to do it under pressure. everyone knows how in a classroom setting and then it all goes sideways when theres noise and stress and someone is standing over your shoulder asking when the medical supply request is going to get relayed what we ended up doing after that was running monthly traffic nets specifically for the ARES members, not just showing up to the regular nets but actually doing practice sessions where we deliberately add distractions and make people handle multiple messages at once. it helped a lot. still not perfect but people are way more comfortable now the coax thing is also something that will never go away i think. doesnt matter how experienced the group is, pre-deployment checklist discipline is really hard to maintain when people are rushing to set up. we literally have a laminated card now that has to be signed off before any antenna goes up at a deployment site. feels a little overkill but after losing time like that during a real activation you start to appreciate the boring stuff

so i finally did my first ever POTA activation yesterday at a state forest about 45 min from me. packed up the ft-891 and my random wire with a 9:1 unun, figured id be set up and making contacts within like 20 minutes. yeah that did not happen lol first the ground was way too rocky to get my stakes in for the antenna, so i ended up just draping the wire over some branches which worked okay i guess. then i realized i forgot the coax adapter i needed so i had to dig through my bag for like 10 minutes to find the backup one i threw in last minute. by the time i was actually on the air it was almost noon and the bands were kind of rough on 40m. managed to squeeze out 11 contacts on 20m before my battery started getting low, so it counts as an activation but barely. still pretty fun though, theres something about just sitting on a rock in the woods making contacts that feels different than operating from home

yeah the visual dots and dashes thing is basically a trap, dont do that, youll just end up translating in your head which slows you way down. the Koch method is what most people actually recommend now, theres a program called LCWO dot net that walks you through it for free. basically you start with just 2 characters at a relatively high speed, like 20wpm character speed, and you dont move on until you can copy them at like 90% accuracy. the idea is you learn the sound of each letter as a whole thing instead of counting dits and dahs. it feels slow at first but it builds the right muscle memory. i spent about 15 minutes a day for maybe 3 months before i felt comfortable enough to actually try a QSO and even then it was brutal but possible. the farnsworth timing thing helps too where the characters are fast but theres extra space between them, gives your brain time to process without teaching you to rely on slow character speed. just dont skip ahead when youre tempted to, that was my mistake the first time i tried to learn

so the band plan vs actual FCC rules thing trips up a lot of people. the short version is the ARRL band plan is voluntary, but Part 97 itself has actual legally binding frequency allocations based on license class. for general on 40m you can operate phone from 7.175 to 7.300, and CW and digital from 7.025 up. so JS8call would fall under the digital/data allocation and youd generally be fine in that lower portion. the thing your friend might be thinking of is the gentlemans agreement that keeps digital stuff below like 7.125 or so to avoid stepping on phone ops, but thats not an FCC rule, thats just how the community operates. 97.305 is the section you want to look at for emission privileges by license class, that one actually lays out what modes are allowed where. worth bookmarking the actual part 97 document honestly, its not as dense as it looks once you get used to how its written as for accidentally transmitting somewhere you shouldnt — one time is not gonna bring the FCC down on you, they have way bigger fish to fry. repeat intentional violations are another story but an honest mistake is an honest mistake

oh man this is such a common thing and honestly the net control guys are used to it, they dont mind at all. when they acknowledge you just say your callsign, your name, your location, and whether you have any traffic or announcements. something like "KD9whatever, this is Mike in Springfield, no traffic" and thats literally it. youre done. net control will say thanks and move on. nobody expects you to give a speech. for the mobile thing, absolutely tell them upfront. most nets have a "mobile and portables" check in round specifically for people who might drop. you just say youre mobile when you check in and any decent net control will note that and not be surprised if you disappear. i did nets for like two years before i felt comfortable and now i net control occasionally and i promise we are rooting for new folks to check in, it makes the net feel alive instead of just the same 6 guys every week.

yeah i went through this same thing about eight months ago. i ended up using an app called Morse-It and also just listened to a lot of slow CW on the bands even before i could copy anything, just to get used to the sound of it i guess. probably didnt hurt. the main thing that tripped me up was i was counting dits and dahs for way too long instead of just hearing the letters as sounds and that slowed me down for a while. still working on getting my speed up but im making contacts so thats something

yeah the analogRead noise on unos is a known thing, the AREF pin is just not great for precision work. one thing that helped me a lot was switching to an external voltage reference — wire a clean 5v reference like an LM4040 or TL431 to AREF and connect it in software with analogReference(EXTERNAL). makes a noticeable difference. also make sure your pot wiper line isnt running near anything switching, even short runs near the H-bridge wires can inject garbage. for the averaging thing, look at exponential moving average instead of a simple rolling average. its basically newValue = alpha * reading + (1-alpha) * lastValue and you tune alpha between 0 and 1. small alpha = smoother but slower, big alpha = faster but noisier. i use something like 0.1 or 0.15 for rotator stuff and it tracks well without being jerky. way less code than storing a ring buffer too. the L298N getting warm is expected honestly, those things drop like 2v across the outputs so theyre burning off a bunch as heat. if you want something cleaner look at the DRV8871 or even just a pair of BTS7960 modules which can handle higher current and run way cooler. depends on what your prop pitch motor actually needs but worth checking.

ok so i just passed my technician exam like two weeks ago and im trying to figure out exactly what the rules are for what i can do. i understand i have HF privileges on 10m and some on 40m i think? but i keep reading different things online and the actual Part 97 document is kind of hard to parse if youre not used to reading legal stuff. my main question is basically around voice vs digital vs CW and where exactly i can operate. also someone at my local club mentioned something about a CSCE and using privileges you havent gotten your actual license for yet and i didnt really understand that. is that a real thing or was he pulling my leg i dont want to transmit somewhere i shouldnt, thats kind of stressing me out honestly

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general) and just starting to get into DX chasing a bit. everyone keeps mentioning the cluster and DXwatch and QRZ spotting and honestly i wasnt sure if these were all the same thing or totally different tools doing different things spent a couple evenings poking around and i think i get the basic idea now — someone hears a rare station, they post a spot, and that propogates out to whatever network youre connected to. but the part that confuses me is whether QRZ.com's logbook spot feed and DXwatch are pulling from the same underlying cluster data or if theyre separate networks. sometimes i see spots on one that dont show up on the other for a few minutes also is there a way to filter by band on DXwatch? i only run HF and mostly 20m and 40m right now so scrolling through a wall of spots that include 6m and stuff i cant work yet gets a little overwhelming. might be missing something obvious in the settings anyway if anyone has a good explainer on how the whole spotting ecosystem actually works id love to hear it, i kind of learn better from someone just talking through it than reading documentation

so i finally did my first summit activation last weekend, took the ft-818 and a end fed half wave up to a local hill and just threw the wire over a tree branch. wasnt expecting much but managed to get like 14 contacts in maybe 45 minutes which i guess is enough to count. signal reports were all over the place but whatever, people could hear me so thats good enough for a first time the hard part was getting the antenna situated, the tree i wanted to use had all these low branches and i ended up with the wire at kind of a weird angle but it still loaded up fine on 20m. brought way too much stuff in my pack too, definitely leaving the spare battery home next time since the 818 barely touched the internal one anyone else do a lot of local summits? curious what antennas people are running for lightweight stuff

the guy at your club was probably right but also kinda depends on how busy your local digi is. out here in the middle of nowhere nobody cares if i beacon every 20 seconds lol. but yeah in a metro area with a lot of stations on the network you can cause some real collisions and it gets annoying on the RF side. i run SmartBeaconing on my VX-8DR and it works pretty well. one thing tho -- even with SmartBeaconing on you still want to sanity check what its actually transmitting by watching aprs.fi for a bit. sometimes the settings are weird out of the box

im kind of in the same boat as you so take this with a grain of salt but i switched to straight key practice on jscwlib in the evenings and it actually helped my paddle sending weirdly enough. also i found that just copying code off the air even when i cant decode most of it helps my ear get used to the rhythm. W1AW still does code practice sessions and theres a schedule on the ARRL site.

honestly for 5-6 contests a year SO2R is probably overkill unless you just enjoy the technical side of it, which some people do and thats totally valid. the antenna isolation problem alone is enough to drive you crazy — you need like 60-70dB between radios minimum if you're running both on HF simultaneously and that doesn't happen by accident. if you're hitting 100-110/hr and want to push higher the bigger gains i've seen for most operators come from mult hunting discipline more than raw SO2R. like being really intentional about when you leave a run frequency, how long you're willing to S&P before going back to run, stuff like that. also if youre doing SSB phone contesting your audio chain matters a ton — a processed mic signal can make a surprising difference in how fast people copy you which directly affects your rate. CW is a bit more forgiving there but still, clean keying and good timing helps. SO2R really starts making sense when you're trying to work every mult the second it shows up on the second radio while keeping the run going on the first. but getting there takes a lot of seat time just to not make mistakes with it under pressure.

im pretty much in the same boat as you, been licensed about a year and a half and still figuring out the cluster stuff. one thing i found helpful was just picking one and sticking with it for a while instead of trying to watch three things at once. i mostly use DXwatch now because someone on here recommended it and it seems fine, gets the job done. havent really compared it scientifically to anything else lol

so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before then. last time we did one of these i ended up borrowing a honda eu2200i from a club member and it worked fine but i felt like i was just winging it the whole day and i'd rather actually have a plan this time. our setup is going to be a IC-7300 for HF and a couple of Kenwood TM-V71As on VHF/UHF, plus a raspberry pi running winlink and probably a laptop for ics-213 stuff. rough estimate puts me somewhere around 30-35 amps average draw if the HF rig is transmitting at maybe 60% duty cycle, which honestly is probably conservative for how these exercises go. my question is whether i should just commit to a dedicated generator setup or if a good LiFePO4 battery bank could handle a 6-8 hour exercise without a recharge. ive been looking at the bioenno 100ah 12v batteries and theoretically the math works out but theory and a parking lot in july are two different things. also the antenna situation — we have a resonant dipole cut for 40m that i can throw up pretty quick but im debating whether to bring a buddipole as a backup or if thats just extra weight. parking lot deployments are annoying for radials and ground planes if we end up on VHF simplex with a vertical. anybody done extended field operations and have opinions on the generator vs battery debate for this kind of load? not trying to run a full EOC out of my car, just solid portable ops for most of a day.

great question and honestly more people should be asking this before they need it rather than after. i went through about three iterations of my go-kit before landing on something i was actually happy with. first thing id say is figure out what your primary mission is — are you supporting ARES/RACES activations, or is this more personal preparedness, or both? that changes what you pack pretty significantly. for power i made the jump to LiFePO4 about a year ago and i dont regret it at all. heavier upfront cost but the weight savings and the way they hold voltage under load is just better. i run a 30ah Battle Born in my main kit and a smaller 10ah for the lightweight bag. the 857 is a solid radio but yeah its a chunky boy for a go-kit — have you looked at the FT-891? roughly same capability, way more packable. lots of guys in our group run those. the stuff people forget is never the radio — its the cables. have adapters, have fuses, have a way to charge the battery from a car AND from solar if you can swing it. and i always keep a laminated card with my freqs, my served agency contacts, and the regional nets because when things go sideways you dont want to be scrolling through your phone trying to remember stuff.

So I passed my general about 3 weeks ago and got my sequential callsign assigned, which is fine, but I've been looking into applying for a vanity call and honestly the FCC ULS system is kind of a mess to navigate. I put in the application like 8 days ago and it still just says "pending" or whatever. Is that normal? I read somewhere that there's a 18 day window for vanity applications where other people can apply for the same call before it gets assigned to anyone, is that still how it works or did they change it? Also I was looking at a 1x2 call in my district because I live in the 4 area but the call I want is technically a 4 area suffix so I think I qualify but im not 100% sure. My current call is KO4 something. The whole sequential vs vanity thing is a little confusing to me still. Anyone been through this recently?

yeah the userbase thing is the real problem with JS8Call. the mode itself is genuinely clever — KN4CRD did good work on it — but youre fighting the network effect. everyone is on FT8 because everyone is on FT8. i check 40m around 14.078 sometimes on weekends and theres usually some activity but its nothing like the FT8 pileups obviously. that said i think youre asking the right question about what you actually want from operating. if its entities and awards then FT8 is basically unbeatable. if you want something that feels more like actual communication, JS8Call scratches that itch way better. ive had some genuinely fun exchanges on there, like slow texting over HF, which sounds dumb but is kind of satisfying when the band is marginal and it still gets through. also the store-and-forward relay stuff is interesting if youre into emcomm type scenarios. PSK31 is another option if you want a real QSO feel, the bands are quieter than they used to be but theres still a community especially on 20m around 14.070. old school but it works and fldigi makes it easy.

the placebo thing on RX is real, i swear it happens every time i do any work inside a rig. open it up, change something completely unrelated to receive, and suddenly it sounds better. i think its just that you start paying more attention to it for a few days after. i did the mars mod on my 7300 a while back which is different obviously but same general idea. that one you just hold a button sequence on powerup which is way less scary than touching SMD components. the 857 being older analog-ish design means theres more to actually physically change which i kind of respect even if its nerve wracking. good iron and flux is the right call, i use chisel tip for anything SMD these days, the fine conical tips always felt worse to me for small pads.

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into the local 2m net last tuesday and i think i messed up a few things. first off i gave my callsign once and then just waited and the net control asked me to repeat it which was a little embarrassing. then when they asked if i had any traffic i wasnt sure what that meant exactly so i just said no which i think was right? but then afterward someone came on and said their name and location and i didnt do that and im not sure if thats expected or optional. also the whole thing felt really fast, like net control was moving through check-ins quick and i felt rushed. is there like an unwritten script people follow or do you just pick it up over time? nobody was rude or anything i just felt like i was winging it while everyone else knew exactly what to do.

this is actually really helpful to read, im pretty new and just got my general a few months ago so ive been trying to figure out all the propagation stuff. i downloaded one of the solar weather apps and i see the SFI number but honestly wasnt sure what counts as good vs bad. so like 180+ is really solid? i've only been on 20m so far because everyone said thats the reliable one but maybe i should try 15m. does the band just sound dead when conditions are bad or is there a way to tell before you start spinning the dial