Linda Thompson

so i've been in ARES for about 8 months now, mostly just showing up to the monthly nets and doing the occasional SET exercise but nothing real. last weekend there was a pretty bad ice storm that knocked out power to a chunk of the county and the county emergency manager actually called us up to provide comms support at two of the warming centers they opened up. honestly i wasnt sure what to expect. i've done all the ICS training, got my NIMS certs, been to probably 6 or 7 training nets, but there's something different about the real thing. our EC had us set up a simplex link between the two warming centers and report headcounts every hour to the EOC. nothing technically complicated but it felt like it mattered, you know? the part that surprised me most was how much of it was just... waiting around and then suddenly needing to pass a message clearly and accurately. all that traffic handling practice on the weekly nets actually made a difference. i stumbled a little on my first message but after that it felt pretty natural. anyway if you're in ARES and you've been on the fence about really committing to the training side of it, i'd say do it. you dont really know if any of it sunk in until you're actually deployed. curious if others had similar experiences on their first activation or if mine was pretty typical

the counterpoise thing will kill you every time, ive done the same thing. i just keep a couple of wires coiled up inside the antenna bag now so theyre always there. as for weight, honestly the biggest gains are usually the battery and the mast. a lot of guys go to lithium cells and a painters pole instead of anything fancy and that alone can drop like 4-5 lbs easy. the radio is rarely the heavy part once you start looking at everything else.

had almost the exact same thing on mine, turned out to be one of the driver transistors was intermittent. not fully dead just kinda... tired i guess. output was like 18-22w depending on band and temperature. the finals themselves tested okay when i pulled them. ended up replacing both driver transistors while i was in there since they were cheap enough and didnt want to do it twice. icom's service manual has the bias setup procedure, its not too bad if you have a power meter handy. good luck with it, these are nice radios when they're working right.

the noise issue with the eu2200i is almost definitely a grounding thing, those inverter gennys are usually pretty clean but if whoever set it up didnt bond the frame ground properly youll get all kinds of garbage on the lower bands. worth checking before you just abandon the generator for HF entirely. run a dedicated ground rod and bond the genny frame to it and youll probably be surprised how much cleaner it gets. on the battery math — 100ah lifepo4 at the 7300s actual draw which is more like 20-22 amps at 100w output, call it maybe 15 at 50w, youre looking at somewhere around 6 hours of actual transmit time if you figure maybe 30-40% duty cycle on a voice net. probably fine for 8 hours honestly but id still keep the genny as a backup float charger option. dont paint yourself into a corner on a real deployment. efhw matchboxes are fine, i use one regularly. not as flat as a dipole across the band but for emcomm you're usually working a pretty narrow chunk of 40 anyway so tune it once and leave it. 9:1 unun into about 67ft of wire gets you on 40 and you can squeeze 20 out of it too with the tuner. way faster to throw up than a linked dipole no question

your 2x yagi setup is actually not a bad starting point, honestly more people get into it that way than you'd think. the real game changer was Q65 and before that JT65 because the path loss to the moon and back is something like 252 dB on 2m, which is just a brutal number, but the digital modes let you pull contacts out of what sounds like pure noise. before that era you basically needed the big arrays or forget it. the thing that matters as much as antenna gain is your system noise figure. like if you have a mediocre preamp 10 feet of coax away from the feedpoint you're throwing away so much of what your antenna is doing. a good relay-switched LNA right at the feedpoint, something with a noise figure under 0.5 dB ideally, that's where you want to spend money first in my opinion. even more important than adding a third yagi. for scheduling and finding activity the EME2 reflector is still the main spot and people post their operating windows based on moon position, it's all coordinated around moonrise/moonset windows when the geometry works for both stations. there's also the WSJT-X software built around this stuff, grab that and start monitoring 144.120 when the moon's up and you'll hear activity pretty quick. 500w and a pair of yagis with a good LNA you could absolutely make contacts, might need patience but it's doable.

By taking the tuner through all the bands, you train it for when you return to that band. It memorizes the settings. However, your 8 ohm impedance is probably below the Z-11's matching range. Consider a 4:1 balun instead of 9:1 - might bring that impedance into a more workable range around 32 ohms.

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into a local 2m net last tuesday and i think i maybe did it wrong? the net control acknowledged me and everything was fine but afterwards one of the guys pulled me aside on a different frequency and said i should have waited until net control asked for check-ins before i transmitted. but i swear i heard other people just jumping in and the net control was already running through callsigns so i figured it was okay to just throw my call in there. i've been licensed about 4 months (general) and this was only my second time on a net. i don't really have a mentor or anything local so most of what i know i kind of pieced together from youtube and the arrl handbook. is there like a standard way nets are supposed to run or does every net do it differently? i dont want to be that guy who annoys everyone by doing stuff wrong.

ok so i passed my general a few weeks ago and ive been trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i know technicians are limited but i cant quite figure out where my privileges start and end. like i see people saying dont go below 7.125 for phone but then i also see stuff about 7.175 and honestly the arrl band plan chart i printed out is a little confusing because it shows recommended vs actual fcc allocations and i dont know which one to actually follow. also someone on a net told me to stay away from the band edges which makes sense i guess but how far away are we talking, like 7.125 exactly or should i leave some buffer. sorry if this is a dumb question im still getting my bearings

so ive been licensed about 3 months now (tech class) and ive just been using my elmers old radio to check into the local 2m net but i really need to get my own HT at some point. i went on one of the big ham radio sites and just got completely lost. theres like a hundred different ones and i dont even know what features actually matter vs what's just marketing fluff. my main use case is probably just local repeaters, maybe some simplex if theres anyone around here to talk to, and i want to be able to program it without too much headache. budget is somewhere in the $60-150 range i guess. someone at the club meeting mentioned the baofeng uv-5r but then someone else kind of made a face when they said it and i wasnt sure if that was like a quality thing or just a snobbery thing lol. would really appreciate any thoughts from people who actually use these things day to day

so ive been at this CW thing for about three months now and im stuck somewhere around 8-9wpm and honestly its starting to feel like a wall. when i first started i was using the Koch method with LCWO and made really fast progress from zero up to around 5-6wpm, felt great, but now the gains have really slowed down and im wondering if im doing something wrong or if this is just... normal. my practice routine is roughly 20-30 minutes a day, mostly just doing the LCWO lessons and sometimes listening to QSOs on 40m which i can barely follow at all honestly. someone at my local club told me i should be sending more, not just receiving, but i only have a straight key and my fist is pretty terrible so i feel like im reinforcing bad habits. not sure if i should get a paddle or just push through with the straight key for now. for those of you who went through this process — how long did it realistically take to get to 20wpm, and was there a specific thing that clicked for you or did it just gradually happen over time?

so ive been at this for almost a year now and i started from zero, got up to about 13wpm pretty comfortably but now i just feel like im hitting a wall. my copying falls apart when i push past that speed and i get this weird panic thing where i start trying to write every letter as it comes in and then i miss the next one and everything kind of cascades from there. i know the goal is supposed to be head copying but honestly i dont even know how to practice that specifically. right now i mostly use the W1AW code practice files and some random QSO generators online. im going for the 20wpm extra class eventually but at this point 20 feels pretty far off. anybody gone through this and gotten past it? what actually worked for you

yeah what he said about the sequencer is no joke, i fried a preamp once because i was too casual about the TX/RX switching. cost me like $180 and a lot of embarrassment. now i use a proper sequencer and everything keys in the right order, preamp bypass first then PTT then PA, and reverse on the way out. one thing i'd add is dont overlook the coax. if you run 50 feet of mediocre coax from the feedpoint to the shack youre basically throwing away half the reason you bought a good LNA. LMR-400 minimum, a lot of EME guys go straight to hardline or use a short jumper of LMR-600 at least. its not cheap but neither is spending a weekend chasing the moon and hearing nothing because your feed line is lossy.

yeah the listening thing is so underrated. i used to just jump in blind and wonder why i never got picked. took me embarassingly long to realize that watching the op's pattern is basically the whole game. some ops work very predictably — like they'll go up 2, up 2, up 2, then jump — and once you see it a few times you can get almost ahead of them. for SSB specifically the one thing that helped me the most was working on my audio. ran a bit of compression through my TS-890 and got my processing dialed in so my signal sounds clean and punchy without being over-processed garbage. a lot of guys in pileups sound like a fax machine because they've cranked the mic gain up into the red. DX ops hear clean audio all day and it does make a difference i think, at least for standing out when the pileup thins. the partial call thing on CW is pretty standard practice honestly. most serious ops will tell you sending your suffix is fine when the pile is dense — just makes sense to not clog up the freq with six character calls when everyone's doing it simultaneously

yeah what he said about the coax loss at UHF is pretty accurate. i ran RG-8X up about 50 feet to a jpole years ago and it was fine for 2m but 440 was noticeably worse than my buddy running LMR from the same area. not scientific but you could hear the difference. the tile roof thing -- honestly i'd just hire someone if you're not comfortable up there, those roofs crack so easy and a cracked tile turns into a leak turns into a whole thing. i know that's probably not what you want to hear but ive seen guys spend more fixing the roof than the antenna cost in the first place

yeah totally normal to feel lost at first, there's a LOT of them and honestly most operators only use like 10-15 regularly. the ones you'll hear most are QSL (confirmed / copy that), QRM which is interference from other stations, QRN is natural static like lightning crashes, QSB is when the signal is fading up and down, QTH is your location, QRZ means who is calling me or sometimes just asking who's there. and yeah 73 just means best regards, its been around since like the telegraph days, same with 88 which means love and kisses so dont send that to random people haha. there's an ITU official list online and the ARRL has a good condensed version. after a while it just clicks, you stop thinking about what they mean and just use them

okay so i just passed my general exam last week, super excited, and my sequential callsign already showed up in the ULS — got a pretty standard 2x3 which is fine honestly but ive been reading about the vanity callsign system and im kind of lost on how it all works. from what i can tell you have to wait some period of time before applying for a vanity? or is that only for certain call districts? i saw something about a 18 month wait but then someone else said thats not a thing anymore and i dont know what to believe. also do you have to be a certain license class to get a 1x2 or 2x1 call or is it just about availability and what region youre in? i basically just want to understand the actual process before i go filling anything out wrong and messing something up. any help appreciated, been lurking here for a while and you all seem to know your stuff

so i finally took the plunge and dragged myself out to a local park with my KX2 and a random wire antenna i threw together the night before. honestly had no idea what to expect — ive been a ham for about 3 years but mostly just sit at the shack and rag chew on 40m with the full 100w setup. figured id try something different. got maybe 6 contacts in about 2 hours which i know isnt amazing but it felt incredible given i was running like 5 watts into a wire draped over a tree branch. made it to a station in Georgia which was cool, im in Ohio. anyway a couple things im wondering about — first, is there a rule of thumb for matching your antenna to QRP power levels or does it just not matter as much as antenna placement? and second, is there a big difference in efficiency between a dedicated QRP rig like the KX2 versus just turning down a regular 100w radio? feels like it should matter but im not sure why also the whole experience was just... really different from shack operating. like genuinely more satisfying somehow. anyway yeah those are my main questions if anyone has thoughts

Don't overthink it honestly. For most local nets you just wait for net control to call for check-ins — they'll usually say something like "all stations wishing to check in please call now" and then you just key up and give your callsign phonetically. Some nets want you to add your name and location, some just want the call. Best thing to do is listen to a full net cycle before you ever try to check in so you get a feel for the pacing. The pauses between stations can be really short on busy nets so it helps to already have your hand on the PTT and ready to go. For the special event station, that's just a regular contact — call them like any other station, give your call, wait for them to come back to you. They're usually very patient because they expect a pile-up and a lot of new folks calling in. The W1AW portable operations or anniversary events are pretty forgiving. Just go for it, worst case they ask you to repeat yourself.

This will be my third CQ WW and I'm still learning something new each time! If you know a new operator, invite them over for an hour at the mic. Even a few hours on the air will teach you something. Planning to run my IC-7300 and dipole - nothing fancy but it works.

Yeah I was wondering the same thing when I started. Got my tech last year and felt really self conscious about it at first but now i just do whatever feels right for the situation. One thing that helped was listening to how other ops handle it - some will give their call regular first then phonetic if needed. Also learned the hard way that saying "B as in boy" instead of "bravo" just confuses people lol

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, W4V/SH-001, not super high but figured it was a good starter summit. packed up my KX2, a 20m EFHW, and my trekking poles to hold the antenna up. the hike wasnt bad at all maybe 2 miles in. problem was i totally forgot to check if there was tree cover at the top and yeah... no trees. just rock and low scrub. spent like 20 minutes trying to figure out how to hang the wire using just the poles and some paracord. ended up with a weird slanted thing that probably wasnt resonant at all but whatever. still made 4 contacts on 20m SSB which technically counts for the activation so im calling it a win. CW probably wouldve been smarter, i know i know. anyway just wanted to share because all the youtube videos make it look way easier than it is

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and been doing HF mostly, some VHF contest stuff, but EME has always been in the back of my head as this crazy goal. talked to a guy at the club last year who works 2m EME with a single yagi and JT65 and honestly that blew my mind because i always assumed you needed like a massive dish and a kilowatt just to even attempt it. so i started reading around and now im more confused than before. some guys say you need at least a 2x8 yagi array, others say a single long yagi with 500 watts is doable on 2m if you pick the right window. i have an IC-9700 which i think handles the IF shift and doppler stuff okay but i genuinely dont know if thats true or if i need some external SDR setup. also the preamp situation — i keep reading about low noise preamps but nobody really explains where you mount them, like at the antenna feedpoint or in the shack. not really asking for a shopping list just trying to get a sense of what a realistic first EME setup looks like for someone who isnt going to build a 10 meter dish in their backyard

ok so i just upgraded from tech to general last month and im trying to figure out the 40m band. i know i have more privileges now but honestly the band plan stuff is confusing me. like i keep seeing people say "dont operate near the band edge" but what does that even mean exactly, is it 100hz away, 1khz, more? and i was looking at the arrl band plan vs the actual fcc allocation and they dont seem to match up perfectly which is making my head hurt. also someone at my club said something about the lower part of 40m being mostly CW and the phone portion starting higher up but i cant find a clear simple explanation of where the cutoffs are. i was just trying to call CQ on 7.245 and some guy came on after and said i was "too close to the edge" which i thought was weird because i looked it up and i thought generals could go down to like 7.175 for phone. did i misunderstand something or was that guy just being weird about it

oh man K-4522, i hunted someone there like two months ago on 20m i think. small world. welcome to the rabbit hole by the way, fair warning POTA is kind of addicting and now youre going to start looking at every road trip as a potential activation opportunity lol the HAMRS to ADIF workflow is exactly what i do too. one thing i'd add is double check that your timestamps are in UTC in the log before you submit, that tripped me up on my second activation and i had to resubmit. nothing major but just saves a headache.

so ive been putting this off for like two years but i finally cracked open the 857D last weekend to do the extended TX mod. you know the one where you move the diodes on the main board to open up the transmit range. wasnt as scary as i thought honestly, just needed a steady hand and decent soldering iron. i used my Hakko and it went fine. anyway the reason i finally did it is i picked up an EMCOMM deployment kit from the club and they wanted the radio to be able to hit MARS/CAP frequencies so that was the push i needed. got my MARS license sorted a few months back so its all legit. what i didnt expect was how much the mod also seemed to improve receive on some of the upper HF bands, or maybe im just imagining things. could be placebo. the radio does feel a bit more responsive on 10m but i have no way to actually measure that so take it with a grain of salt. anyone else done this and noticed anything weird after? also debating whether to do the Collins filter mod next, ive heard that makes a real difference on SSB but also ive heard it makes almost no difference depending on who you ask.