Emily Moore

QRP is my whole thing so i always notice when people dont know that one haha. also wanted to add that QSL can get confusing because it means both confirming a contact verbally on air AND the physical card you send through the mail or via bureau to confirm the contact officially. same code two kinda different uses depending on context. tripped me up early on too. ARRL website has a decent reference page for Q codes if you just google arrl Q code list, thats where i went when i was starting out

so i passed my general last spring and joined our county ARES group maybe 3 months ago. been going to the monthly nets and did one tabletop exercise but this weekend theres an actual activation for the county emergency management drill and im kind of dreading it in a good way i guess. the EC said i'd probably just be handling check-ins at the staging area which doesnt sound too complicated but i keep second guessing myself on the ICS stuff. like i know the basics from the online courses (did ICS 100 and 200) but actually filling out the forms under pressure when people are waiting on you feels different than doing it at home with coffee. anyone been through their first activation and have tips? mostly just looking for reassurance i guess but any practical stuff would help too. i have my go bag mostly sorted, HT and a spare battery, the county simplex and repeater freqs programmed in, printed copy of the local ARES plan. feel like im forgetting something obvious.

so ive been doing sweepstakes CW for a few years now, always single radio, and i keep seeing these ridiculous scores from the SO2R guys and wondering if im leaving way too many points on the table. my station is two K3s, a pair of 2el yagis on 20 and 40 stacked on the same tower, and i do have two amps but i've never actually tried running both radios at the same time in a contest. the interference between the two rigs is what scares me off honestly. i know people use bandpass filters and stuff but i dont really understand how guys are managing to transmit on one radio while listening on the other without just blowing their ears out or desensing everything. do you need the antennas on completely separate towers to make this viable or can you get away with the shared tower setup if the bands are far enough apart? also just the operating itself — like the mental load of keeping a run going on one radio while S&P on the other seems like it would just destroy my rate, at least at first. anyone have a realistic sense of how long it took them to get comfortable with it? i feel like i'd spend the whole contest fumbling around and end up with a worse score than if i'd just stayed single radio.

so ive been a tech for about two years now and i keep thinking about upgrading to general or extra at some point but honestly the thing thats been on my mind more is just learning cw. i know its not required anymore for any license but theres something about it that just appeals to me, like i want to actually be able to use it on the air someday the problem is i have no idea where to start. i downloaded a couple apps and one of them just shows you the dots and dashes visually which i heard is the wrong way to learn? someone at the club mentioned the koch method but i dont really understand what that is or if theres a specific program i should use. also i have no idea what speed i should be aiming for or how long this realistically takes if you practice like 15-20 minutes a day. any advice welcome, im coming in completely from zero

I had almost the exact same thing with my FTM-300 and a similar Diamond antenna when i first installed it. Turned out the issue was the feedline had a little kink where it went through the headliner and down the A-pillar, not a sharp bend but enough apparently. Rerouted it and the 70cm SWR dropped quite a bit. Might not be your issue but worth checking the whole run of coax especially if you tucked it tight anywhere.

not weird at all about the paper cards, i still get a little kick out of pulling them out of the bureau envelope even after 20 years. theres something about holding a card from like a remote island somewhere that just feels different. anyway to actually answer your question — you dont NEED all three but theres reasons to have them. LoTW is run by the ARRL and is what counts for DXCC and a lot of the major awards, so thats the one id prioritize. eQSL is more of a community thing, some people love it, some ignore it entirely. the authenticated member status on eQSL is what makes contacts count toward certain awards through their own system, but its not the same as LoTW for ARRL awards. honestly my advice is keep doing what you're doing with LoTW and the bureau, and only bother with eQSL if you find yourself wanting to chase their specific awards or if you run into a lot of operators who only confirm that way. some dx stations upload to all three just to cover everyone, others only do one. its kind of the wild west still.

i was in exactly your position about 8 months ago, zero background in electronics, felt super lost. I used hamradioprep dot com and paid for the course which was like 25 bucks i think and it walked through everything in a pretty sensible order with little videos. took me about 3 weeks studying maybe 30 mins a night. passed first try with a 32 out of 35 which i was genuinely surprised by. the math questions scared me the most but theres really only a handful of formulas you need and if you just practice those few types of problems it stops being scary pretty quick. good luck, it's worth it

Just got my Tech license and I'm having trouble accessing the local repeaters. I can hear them fine but can't seem to get in. I think it might be a CTCSS tone issue since I keep reading that many newcomers fail to program the tone properly. I've got a Baofeng UV-5R and I think I programmed the tone correctly from the repeater directory, but still nothing. Any tips for troubleshooting this? Also, where can I find reliable tone info for repeaters in my area?

the VARA FM free version definitely still works, it just caps your connection speed. for local 2m gateway connections thats usually fine unless the gateway is busy and drops slower connections which some do. so that probably isnt your problem. the audio levels are almost always the culprit when someone says it worked once and then stopped. with the Signalink the TX knob is super sensitive and if you bumped it up you might actually be overdriving the radio. what does your ALC look like when youre transmitting? if the ALC is pegging you need to back off. the sweet spot is usually lower than you think, barely any ALC movement. also check that your Kenwood isnt doing any mic gain processing on the data port, some radios have settings for that that mess with digital modes. as for RMS relay vs gateway, youre basically right. a relay is an intermediate node for when you need to reach a gateway and cant do it directly, like in a terrain challenged area. for your use case just connecting to a local gateway that has internet you dont need to think about relays at all.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me, been meaning to try it for ages after doing a handful of SOTA summits and thinking the parks thing sounded more my speed honestly. no lugging gear up a mountain at least haha set up the KX2 with a random wire thrown into a tree and managed 47 QSOs over about 3 hours which i guess is fine? i wasnt sure what the minimum was, i read somewhere it was 44 but also heard people say different things on here. got spotted on the WWFF logger which helped a lot, the pileup when that happened was honestly a bit chaotic and i wasnt really ready for it my main question is about the reference numbers. the forest i was in had a USFF reference but i also saw it listed under a state parks program too. do i log both or just pick one? and do hunters on the other end get credit for both programs simultaneously? just trying to make sure im doing right by the people who chase these things also curious if anyone has tips for the log submission process, the WWFF portal seems a bit clunky to me but maybe im missing something

LoTW is absolutely fine for DXCC, thats actually the preferred method these days and ARRL accepts it directly. you log into the awards system and it just shows your confirmed entities automatically as they match up. you dont need paper cards unless you want them for other reasons or if a particular station only does paper QSL. the nice thing is a lot of DX stations upload to LoTW pretty regularly now especially after big DXpeditions for DXCC basic it's 100 entities confirmed, and each entity counts once regardless of band for the mixed award. but if you want DXCC on specific bands like 80m or 17m, those are separate endorsements and you need 100 confirmed on that band specifically. so working the same entity on 5 bands gets you credit toward 5 different band endorsements but only counts once for mixed. took me a while to wrap my head around that too Rhode Island on 40 - honestly just takes patience, i worked W1AW/3 during the portable operations a while back and that knocked out a bunch of states. keep an ear on the clusters

oh man i went through the exact same thing when i first got licensed, had no idea CTCSS was even a thing until someone at the club meeting told me. felt pretty dumb but honestly the repeater directory doesnt always make it super obvious. the linked repeater on 940 in my area is on echolink i think, or maybe allstar, i always mix those two up. but yeah theres usually a little pause between transmissions on those because of the audio routing delay so dont jump in too fast or youll walk on whoever is finishing up. i did that once and felt terrible about it lol

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think i might be going down a rabbit hole that doesnt need to be this deep. basically i have 4 antennas — a 40m dipole, a vertical for 20/15/10, a 6m yagi, and a random wire i use for 80m and sometimes 160. right now i just have a manual coax switch and i get up and physically turn it every time i want to change bands which honestly isnt the end of the world but its getting annoying. so i started looking at using an arduino mega to drive some relay modules and read band data from my radio (i have an IC-7300 so it puts out CI-V). the idea is it would just automatically switch to whatever antenna makes sense for the band im on. ive got the CI-V parsing mostly working, it reads the frequency fine. the relay board i got off amazon is one of those 8 channel 5v ones and it seems to trigger fine from the arduino outputs. my question is whether its worth putting a raspberry pi in there too so i can have like a web interface to see whats going on and manually override from my phone. or is that just way too much complexity for something that should be simple. ive built a few arduino projects before so im comfortable there but ive never really done much with pi. anyone done something like this, curious how far down the path you went before you said enough.

so ive been using an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now and honestly its been great for what it is, been doing some aircraft stuff, a bit of NOAA weather sat decoding, general scanning around. but im starting to feel the limits of it especially on HF where the direct sampling mode is just... okay. not terrible but not great either. been looking at upgrading and im kind of torn between the SDRplay RSP1A and just going full send on a HackRF One. price difference is real — RSP1A is what, around $120ish, and the HackRF is pushing $350-400 depending on where you get it. the HackRF can transmit which is cool i guess but im not sure i actually need that. i mostly just want to receive better across a wider range with cleaner noise floor. anyone actually done this comparison or gone from RTL-SDR to either of these? curious what the real world difference feels like in SDRuno or SDR# or whatever youre running. and does the RSP1A actually do 1kHz to 2GHz as cleanly as they advertise or is there fine print i should know about

HamAlert is the one you want for phone notifications, second that. i was in the same situation as you like a year ago and once i set up HamAlert with filters for the entities i still needed it got way easier to actually catch stuff instead of just watching spots scroll by. also dont forget that a lot of spots in the cluster are just wrong, wrong frequency, wrong callsign, busted spot whatever. so always trust your ears over the spot if something seems off.

yeah the chart method doesnt really work for most people, dont feel bad about that. the thing that actually clicked for me was the Koch method — you start with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you dont move on until you can copy them reliably. sounds counterintuitive to start fast but your brain learns the sounds as whole patterns instead of counting dots and dashes. LCWO.net is free and basically built around that method, thats where i started. also honestly just listening to code in the background while youre doing other stuff helps more than you think it would. took me probably 4 months of pretty casual practice before i felt ready to try a real QSO but everyone's different

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general) and i keep hearing people talk about checking into nets but i honestly havent done it yet. i got on the air a few times during field day and that was awesome but regular nets seem like a good way to actually practice and maybe meet some people on the air. my setup is pretty modest, just a ic-7300 into a vertical in the backyard, so i can do hf fine but i dont have great antenna situation for anything too low. whats a good net to start with? im in the midwest if that matters. i see there are digital nets too but im not sure im ready for that yet, i just want to do regular voice for now. also is there like a master schedule somewhere or do you just have to know? i found some stuff on arrl.net but it felt a bit overwhelming and i wasnt sure what was active vs dead listings

73 is technically not a Q code but people always lump it in with that stuff, means best regards or best wishes. and 88 is love and kisses which you hear occasionally. also some guys use abbreviations like OM (old man, just means fellow ham), YL for younger or any female operator, XYL is wife. its a whole vocabulary honestly. took me a few months of just listening before it all clicked. dont worry about it too much, context fills in the gaps pretty fast once you start actually making contacts

done almost exactly this with a cheap chinese rotator that came with a basically useless controller. used a nano instead of a mega since i didnt need the extra pins but same concept. the IBT-2 is a solid choice, i used a BTS7960 based one same thing really, just make sure you put a decent flyback diode setup in there or you'll get weird resets when the motor kicks off, learned that the hard way after about two weeks of head scratching. the rotctld integration is actually not that bad once you understand what its expecting. you write a simple sketch that listens on serial for the hamlib ROT commands, basically just P for position set and p for position get, and return the azimuth in the format it wants. theres a github repo by someone called ok2cqr or something close to that which has a pretty complete implementation you can adapt. the pi zero is overkill for just the serial bridge but if youre already planning to have it there for other stuff then sure, i run mine headless and just ssh in when something breaks. one thing i wish id done differently is add some software end stop limits early on rather than relying on the mechanical ones, just a few lines of code but saves you from a bad day if something in the position feedback drifts.

The flea market area is where the real treasures are. I've found some incredible vintage gear there that the sellers didn't even know what they had. Also check out the forums - great way to learn new techniques.

I checked into my first net about two months ago and felt exactly the same way haha. I just listened for like a month before actually doing it. When I finally did check in I just said my callsign phonetically and my first name and that was totally fine. The net control repeated my call back to confirm which was reassuring. one thing nobody told me before my first time — if net control doesn't acknowledge you right away dont just keep transmitting, wait and try again when they ask for any additional check-ins or late check-ins. a lot of nets will ask again at the end

so we finally got around to doing a proper tabletop plus on-air exercise with our county ARES group and honestly it was a real eye opener. the scenario was a major bridge collapse cutting off a chunk of the county from emergency services, and we had to establish comms between a simulated EOC, two shelter sites, and a mobile unit acting as the incident command post. things that went wrong pretty fast: one of our guys showed up with a handheld that hadnt been charged since the last meeting (six weeks ago), another operator couldnt remember the secondary frequency we'd agreed on because it was only written down in an email nobody printed out, and our simplex fallback completely fell apart because we hadnt actually tested propagation between those two shelter sites before — turns out a hill blocks the signal almost entirely. the stuff that worked surprisingly well was our net control operator who just kept his cool and ran traffic methodically even when three people were trying to check in at once. also having physical ICS-213 forms ready to go made a huge difference because when we simulated the internet going down a couple guys were totally lost without being able to look stuff up on their phones. anyway curious if other groups have done similar exercises and what kind of surprises came up for you. we're planning a follow-up drill that actually involves some served agencies and im wondering how much harder that makes the coordination side of things.

so ive been trying to get APRS working for like 3 weeks now and im losing my mind a little. running a Kenwood TM-D710G with the built-in TNC, 144.390 which i know is correct for north america, and my callsign with SSID -9 set in the radio. i can hear packets coming in fine, the radio is decoding them and showing stuff on the display, but when i key up and beacon my own position it never shows up on aprs.fi. at least not from my own transmissions. i checked the path and i have it set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine. power is 50 watts into a vertical on the roof so its not an RF issue. i even drove past the local igate last week and watched the screen, i can see other stations being picked up by it no problem. wondering if maybe theres a timing issue with my beacon interval or the smart beaconing settings are doing something weird. or maybe the SSID is the problem somehow? i honestly dont know where else to look at this point

the UTC thing yeah i did the exact same thing my first couple times out lol. also accidentally logged the wrong summit reference once because i had two tabs open on sotawatch and clicked the wrong one for my spot. the activation still counted but i had to email the MT to get it sorted which was kind of embarrassing. chasers are so enthusiastic though right, like its really motivating when someone comes back to you immediately because they saw your alert. i had one guy who chased me on 3 different bands in like 20 minutes on my second activation which was wild to me. makes you want to go out every weekend honestly

Don't forget to post a SOTA alert beforehand so chasers know you're coming! The elevation advantage really helps on VHF - you'll be surprised how far you can reach with just that little handheld.