Linda Rodriguez

yeah the two-radio doppler thing is a real juggling act at first. what most people settle into is tracking the downlink and just nudging the uplink occasionally, because the passband on a linear transponder is wide enough that small uplink errors mostly just move you around in the passband rather than losing you entirely. the doppler rate on something like AO-73 at low elevation is manageable if you do it every 20-30 seconds or so rather than constantly chasing it. i do use gpredict with CAT on my IC-9700 and once its set up properly it does help a lot, but the initial configuration is genuinely annoying especially if your radio needs specific polling rates. worth doing if you're going to be doing this regularly though. the bigger thing nobody tells beginners is that your antenna pointing matters way more than perfect doppler correction. ive lost passes because i was fiddling with freq instead of keeping the beam on the bird.

so we've got a county ARES exercise coming up in about 6 weeks and i've been tasked with putting together a portable HF/VHF station that can run for roughly 18 hours without resupply. this is basically a standalone comms node at a remote site, no shore power, maybe a picnic shelter if we're lucky. my current thinking is running an IC-7300 for HF and a separate 2m/70cm mobile rig for local nets. the HF antenna situation is what's killing me — we've got a site with decent tree coverage so i was thinking a linked dipole hung as an inverted V, maybe covering 80/40/20. the 2m side would just be a roll-up J-pole or maybe the slim jim i've got sitting in a drawer somewhere. the power question is where i keep going back and forth. i've run a honda eu2200i before and it's quiet enough that you can actually have a conversation next to it. but lugging that thing plus fuel out to a remote site is a pain, and the logistics of fuel resupply over 18 hours is its own headache. the other option is going heavy on lifepo4 — i've got a 100ah battle born and was thinking of adding a second one. at the draw these rigs put out i think i can make it work but havent fully done the math yet. anyone done something similar for a longer deployment? curious what bit you in the backside when you actually got to the field versus what you planned at home.

12 contacts is solid for a first time out, some summits i barely scratch 4 before the weather turns and i have to bail. whats the KX2 running power wise up there? im always curious how people set theirs for battery life vs getting out

So i've been putting off doing a proper mobile install for months and finally did it last weekend. Got a Yaesu FTM-400 in the dash and ran the power cables direct to the battery with a fuse near the battery, pretty standard stuff. The antenna is a NMO mount i drilled into the roof, running a Diamond NR770H. Thing is when i do an SWR check on 146.520 it comes back fine, like 1.2:1 or something close, but on the 70cm side around 446 it's reading closer to 2.5 or 3:1 which seems too high to me. I checked the connector and it looks fine visually but maybe i did something wrong with the PL-259? Or is this normal for a dual band whip and im just overthinking it. The radio works and i can hit the local repeaters on both bands but still bugs me. Anyone dealt with this before or know what to check first

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, W4T/SU-something up near the smokies, took forever to find the actual summit area and by the time i set up it was already getting windy. brought my elecraft kx2 and a linked dipole i made from that sotabeams wire kit. got the antenna up in like 20 min which felt good but then realized i forgot my antenna stake and had to improvise with a stick i found lol ended up with 8 contacts on 40m which i think is enough to qualify? i was shaking the whole time trying to work the pile a little and a guy kept coming back to me asking for a signal report and i kept losing him in the noise. used sota watch to spot myself from my phone which worked great actually. overall pretty stoked but man the wind was something else, my notepad was blowing everywhere trying to log

I did something similar about a year ago but with an Arduino Mega handling the physical side — buttons, rotary encoder, that kind of stuff — and the Pi doing all the network heavy lifting. They talk over serial and it works pretty well once you sort out the baud rate and get some proper handshaking in there. I tried doing everything on the Pi and the GPIO latency for anything timing sensitive was annoying me, so the hybrid approach made more sense for my use case. For the log upload problem honestly look at cloudlog or even just the built in LOTW tqsl command line tool, you can script tqsl directly and it handles duplicate checking on its own. Might save you from having to roll all of that yourself. Though if you're doing it as a learning project then obviously carry on, half the fun is figuring it out the hard way.

so i passed my general a few weeks ago and got assigned one of those sequential calls, mine is kind of long and clunky and i've been reading about vanity calls but honestly the FCC website is not the most friendly thing to navigate when you're trying to understand the process from what i can tell you apply through the ULS and there's a 18 day window or something where you list your preferred calls in order and then if nobody else applied for the same one you get it? but i'm not sure if that's still how it works or if something changed recently also do you have to wait a certain amount of time after getting your license before you can apply or can i just do it now? and does it cost anything these days, i remember reading something about the FCC starting to charge a fee but i dont remember the details any help appreciated, just trying to figure out if its worth going through the hassle or if i should just stick with what i have for now

yeah i just did this like two months ago so it's pretty fresh. i used hamstudy like the other guy said and also watched some youtube videos when i hit a concept i didn't understand, there's a channel i forget the name of that explains the electrical stuff in plain english which helped a lot. the test felt easier than the practice exams honestly, i think i psyched myself out studying. just keep doing practice tests until you're consistently hitting like 85% or better and you'll be fine on the real thing

aprs.fi sometimes lags or filters stations it hasnt seen before, i noticed mine took almost a full day to show up the first time even though the igate was picking me up. you can check the raw packets on aprs.fi by going to your callsign page and looking at the raw tab — if the igate is hearing you itll be in there even if the map isnt showing you yet. that would at least tell you if your signal is getting through at all

yeah 10m has been something else lately, i worked ZL2 off a mobile whip in a parking lot last week which I still cant quite believe. conditions have really turned around since the cycle started ramping up. as for the Icom thing, I saw that same thread and honestly the photo looked legit to me but ive been fooled before. if they're doing something in the QRP portable space to compete with the X6100 type market that would be interesting. fingers crossed it doesnt have the same firmware issues some of those newer radios have shipped with

our club is doing a breakfast meetup the morning before if anyones interested, details should be on the repeater net thursday night. not sure about the carpool thing but worth asking around

nice work on the direct battery run, a lot of people skip that and then wonder why everything sounds terrible. i made that mistake with my first mobile install and the noise was awful. one thing i'd add -- if you haven't already, make sure your coax shield is grounded well at the antenna mount. on a roof mount sometimes people forget that the NMO body needs good contact with the vehicle body or you lose efficiency and can get noise issues. i had a similar setup on my jeep and a loose ground there was causing me all kinds of grief before i figured it out. tightened it up and the difference was noticeable.

i just use N1MM for everything tbh. even non-contest stuff. probably not how its meant to be used but i know where everything is so i just keep using it. the WSJT-X logging through it works ok for me, i had it set up at some point and it just logs the FT8 contacts automatically which is really all i need it to do. never tried Log4OM so cant really compare

so i just passed my technician exam last week and im starting to look at handhelds and honestly theres so much stuff out there i dont even know where to start. ive been reading posts for a couple hours now and people seem to have really strong opinions about baofeng vs yaesu vs kenwood and i cant figure out if the cheap ones are actually usable or if ill regret it. main thing i want to do is hit the local repeaters, maybe eventually do some simplex stuff when i go camping. i dont need anything crazy. budget is probably around 50-80 bucks to start but i could stretch if something is really worth it. does the receiver quality actually matter that much for just repeater use around a medium sized city? i see people talk about front end overload but im not sure what that even means in practice for someone like me

so ive been chasing the VK9MA operation on Mellish Reef for like three days and kept getting absolutely nowhere. just wall to wall callers and i couldnt get a single answer out of them. tried for probably 6-7 hours spread across multiple sessions and nothing. starting to think my signal just wasnt cutting it. what finally worked for me was a combination of things. first i stopped transmitting on the most obvious split frequencies. everyone was stacking up around 5 and 10 up so i started throwing my call in at like 7.3 up and 13 up, weird spots that werent as crowded. second thing was i started really listening to the DX station's rhythm, like how long a QSO was taking him and whether he was moving his listening frequency around. this one took me a while to notice but he was definitely drifting up by like half a kHz every few minutes then jumping back down. once i figured that out i just camped ahead of where he was drifting and got a reply on the second call. whole QSO was done in under 20 seconds. 73 and logged. felt good after so many hours of frustration honestly. anyone else have techniques that work consistently or is it always just kind of luck plus timing

yes your old contacts absolutely count as long as the other station uploaded them to LoTW — LoTW matches contacts by date time band and mode so it doesnt matter when you actually signed up. when you uploaded your logs it would have retroactively matched anything already in the system. worth going back and checking your LoTW account, you might be surprised how many you already have confirmed sitting there. as for chasing multiple awards at once, honestly i'd say just go for it. a lot of entities help with WAZ at the same time since the zones kind of spread across the map, and if you're already working DX then WAS almost takes care of itself over time on HF, just make sure you're grabbing stateside contacts when you see them. the main thing is to just keep an eye on the DX cluster and be a bit deliberate about which bands you're working so you dont end up with a bunch of duplicates on the same band when you still need other ones

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i thought i had a decent handle on part 97 but then someone at our club meeting brought up third party traffic and i realized i have no idea what the actual rules are here. like i know you cant just let randos talk on your radio but when CAN someone else use your mic? my friend wanted to say hi to someone i was in contact with and i just kind of froze up and said no because i wasnt sure. was that even the right call? and does it matter if its a domestic contact vs someone overseas? i feel like i remember reading something about third party agreements but i dont fully understand what that means in practice. im not trying to memorize the whole rulebook just want to know the practical version of when this is and isnt okay

welcome welcome, congrats on passing. that first time keying up on a repeater is genuinely nerve wracking, i remember standing in my driveway for like 20 minutes before i finally said anything. Jerry sounds like good people, theres a lot of elmers on 2m who make it real easy for new hams. study for general sooner rather than later, the HF bands are where it really opens up. 40m is probably where id start if i were doing it again, lots of activity and signals carry well

congrats on the activation. yeah 11 is totally valid dont stress about it. i had one last month where i only got 10 and it was a whole ordeal, pile of clouds came in and i thought the rain was gonna end it early. the POTA community is super chill about hunters helping you out when you self spot so lean on that, people literally sit there waiting for new spots to pop up.

For DX work, I run minimal processing with bandwidth set narrow. My mic gain is only at 5% yet I get full 100W PEP with average hovering around 35% exactly where it should be. It's all about proper gain structure, not cranking everything up.

so i've been chasing 3Y0J for what feels like forever and kept getting nowhere, just wall of noise every time i tried to work them. been licensed about 6 years and honestly pileups are still the thing i feel least confident about. anyway last weekend i finally had a decent run at a similar situation working some rare african station and something finally clicked for me. what i ended up doing was listening way more carefully to where the DX was actually pulling calls from, like really tracking the split they were working. they were running 5-10 up and i noticed they kept coming back to stations a bit higher in the spread, maybe around 7-8 up, so i just parked there and waited for a gap instead of just calling constantly. took about 20 minutes of just listening before i even transmitted. also cut my callsign down to just the last two letters a few times when the op seemed to be going fast, not sure if that helped or hurt honestly. i know some people say never do that and others say it's fine in a fast pileup. curious what others actually do in practice because everything i read online contradicts itself

so i finally stopped procrastinating and just built a simple half wave dipole for 40m out of some 14awg stranded wire i had lying around in the garage. cut each leg to about 33.5 feet based on the 468/f formula and hung it in an inverted V config off a 25 foot mast in the backyard. center fed it with some PL-259 coax i had, used a SO-239 chassis connector in a small electrical box as the feedpoint and just twisted the wire ends to the terminals with a bit of solder. thing is i havent put an analyzer on it yet, the MFJ-259 is borrowed from my buddy and he's dropping it off tuesday. but i fired up the rig anyway just to listen and i was picking up stations pretty clearly on 40m last night so something is working at least. my question is basically, what SWR should i realistically expect to see when i do check it, assuming the length is in the right ballpark? and if its off, is shortening or lengthening each leg the right approach or is there some other way people usually do it. also wondering if i should be worried about the inverted V angle, the legs drop off at probably 120 degrees which i think is pretty wide but i wasnt sure if that affects resonance much or just the pattern. anyway first homebrew antenna so go easy on me lol

so Icom dropped some info about the IC-7760 at Hamvention this year and i dont know whether to be excited or just sad about my wallet lol. the remote head design looks really clever for mobile or shack setups where you dont have a ton of desk space, and the specs they're showing look impressive but honestly we've seen that before and then the actual radio shows up and it's like... fine, not groundbreaking. anyone else following this? i keep going back and forth between saving up for it or just grabbing a used IC-7300 for like $700 and calling it a day. been running a Yaesu FT-991A for the past couple years and it's been solid but i want to get into more serious HF operating and the 991A always felt a little cramped with the menus. curious what the more experienced folks here think about timing on new releases — is it usually worth waiting for the first production run or should you let other people find the bugs first

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and honestly kind of embarrassed that i dont have a proper go-kit put together yet. every time there's a weather event or something i scramble around grabbing stuff and it's just a mess. finally decided to actually do this right. right now i have a Yaesu FT-817 that i was thinking of making the centerpiece of it since its already pretty portable. got a decent 40Ah LiFePO4 battery and a little 30w solar panel. been thinking about antennas and thats where im kind of lost — do i just throw in an EFHW and call it good or do i need more options than that? i do mostly HF but obviously for local stuff id want VHF/UHF capability too so maybe i need a second radio. also curious what people actually put in the non-radio stuff. like logbooks, coax, adapters, headphones, i assume all that. but is there a list somewhere of the stuff you dont think about until you actually need it and then its not there. the random small stuff is what gets me every time.