Emily Thomas17

wait so higher solar flux is generally better for dx on the high bands? i'm pretty new to all this and i keep seeing people talk about SFI numbers but i was never totally sure what i should be hoping for. my tech license only lets me on a small slice of HF right now but im studying for general and trying to understand propagation before i upgrade. does the K index matter as much as the flux or is one more important than the other

Just picked up my first dual-lever paddle (a nice used Bencher BY-1) and I'm struggling with the iambic settings on my FT-991A. The radio has both Iambic Mode A and B options, and I'm trying to understand which one is better for learning. I've been practicing slow to feel the rhythm of each character, but I'm wondering if I should start with Mode A or jump right into Mode B. Any suggestions from experienced CW ops would be much appreciated!

yeah Es season is really starting to kick in, usually late may through july is the peak but ive seen it start earlier some years. the solar flux being up in the 150s hasnt hurt things either for the higher HF bands. i worked a ZB2 on 6m last thursday morning which was a new one for me, caught it almost by accident because i was just running a quick check before work. if you want a heads up on when things are popping, dxmaps.com is great for seeing real time 6m spots and you can kind of anticipate where the sporadic-e clouds are forming. also worth joining the 6m reflector on groups.io if you havent, people post openings there pretty fast.

honestly if budget is a consideration at all i'd look at the HackRF before the RSP1B, different use case obviously since its transmit capable and way wider frequency range, but for just monitoring HF the RSPdx might actually be the better SDRplay to consider over the RSP1B. little more money but the notch filters for broadcast AM are genuinely useful. im probably not the best to ask though because i went way down the rabbit hole and now i have three different SDRs on my desk and my wife has questions

the phone notes thing is totally fine for logging in the field, i use an app called hamlog or sometimes just voice memos and transcribe later. as long as you get the calls and times you're good for submission. congrats on the activation though, it gets way easier once you figure out what you actually need vs what you thought you needed

im kind of in the same boat actually, around 14wpm right now. one thing that helped me a little was switching from just doing random character groups on lcwo to copying actual words and common QSO phrases. like my brain started recognizing "599" and "73" and "QTH" as whole chunks instead of individual letters and that freed up some processing power i guess? i dunno if thats real or just placebo but the numbers especially used to kill me and now they're mostly fine. still struggle with punctuation though lol

the lifepo4 should be fine honestly. 100ah at 12.8v nominal is about 1280wh and even running the 7300 at 100w output youre probably drawing somewhere around 20-22 amps so call it maybe 250-270 watts at the wall. that gives you maybe 4 hours at full tilt before youre down to like 20% which is where you want to stop pulling on lifepo4. but if you're doing actual field comms you probably arent transmitting continuously, more like 20-30% duty cycle, so realistically that battery could carry you through a pretty long day. i dropped the generator for most of my activations last year and havent missed it. the eu2200i is great but youre right about the noise and honestly the setup and teardown time adds up. only time i'd bring it now is if we knew it was going to be a multi-day thing or if we had multiple stations running. on the efhw question yes absolutely simpler to deploy than the buddipole for most bands. throw a line over a branch and your up in like 5 minutes. the 9:1 unun works fine, some people prefer the 49:1 for a true end fed half wave configuration but i honestly cant tell a huge difference in my results on 40 and 20.

three months at 20-30 mins a day and youre already at 9-10wpm, that's actually not bad at all. the jump from 10 to 15 was the hardest part for me personally, took longer than going from 0 to 10. what finally clicked for me was stopping trying to count dits and dahs and just learning to hear whole words as sounds. like the word "the" or "and" just becomes one sound eventually instead of four separate characters. on the paper vs keyboard thing — yeah switch to paper, at least some of the time. when you type you're thinking about where the keys are and that pulls you out of the flow. paper you just scribble and keep moving even when you miss something, which is important because one of the big skills is learning to not panic when you miss a letter and just catch the next one. also maybe try just listening to actual qso recordings without copying anything sometimes, just let it wash over you. sounds weird but it helped me a lot around the 10wpm stage.

yeah the 12 out of 200 thing is totally normal, dont panic. LoTW only shows confirmed when the OTHER station has also uploaded their log and your qso details match up — date, time, band, mode, callsign all have to line up within a certain tolerance. a lot of people take weeks or months to upload, some never do. i've got contacts from years ago that suddenly confirmed because someone finally got around to uploading their log. as for which system to use, honestly most active hams use at least LoTW and eQSL, and some still do paper too. they're kind of for different things. LoTW is what the ARRL uses for DXCC and WAS and stuff like that so if you ever want to chase those awards you'll need it. eQSL is more casual, it's not accepted for ARRL awards but some other awards programs use it and a lot of people just like getting the little graphic cards. paper cards are absolutely still a thing especially for rare DX — some guys will go out of their way to send a bureau card if they worked something special. for the tqsl setup, make sure your station location has the right grid square and that the callsign on the location matches what you were actually operating under. that trips up a lot of people early on

Take your first practice test with no time constraints and study materials handy, focus on applying strategies you've learned. On exam day, scan the entire exam first to get an overview and mark questions to revisit. Don't second-guess yourself too much!

dont worry about it too much, you didnt do anything wrong really. ragchew nets are usually pretty forgiving especially for newer hams. the traffic thing is mostly relevant to NTS-style nets where people are actually passing written messages — on a casual ragchew net just saying your call and name is totally fine in most cases. honestly the best thing to do is just listen a few times first and follow along with what the regulars say, every net kind of develops its own little customs. some net controls will tell you upfront what they want to hear, and if yours doesnt you can always email or reach out to the net manager. they're almost always happy to explain it. you did the hard part which is actually keying up, dont second guess yourself

so ive been putting together a go-kit style setup for some ARES activations we have coming up and i keep going back and forth on the power question. right now i have a 100ah lifepo4 and a 30w solar panel but the event coordinator is talking about running things for potentially 18+ hours straight including an HF station, a crossband repeater setup, and some VHF packet. i dont think the battery alone cuts it for that kind of runtime especially if its cloudy. the option on the table is someone in the group has a Honda EU2200i they're willing to bring but ive never really run my rigs directly off a generator and im a little nervous about it. heard some people say the inverter generators are clean enough but i also heard you want to condition the power before it hits anything sensitive. running a rigrunner off it with a good inline filter should be fine right? or do i need something more between the genny and the equipment. also the antenna situation - we're deploying at a pretty exposed hilltop site, thinking a linked dipole for HF and an arrow yagi for the VHF/UHF satellite passes that one guy wants to do. anybody run a similar combo at a field site and have thoughts on mast height vs guy wire setup for wind? last time we did something like this the mast went over in about 20mph gusts and that was embarrassing

yeah the hand fatigue thing is almost always a grip issue, took me forever to figure that out. you really want to be resting your fingers on the paddles with almost no pressure, just enough to make contact. sounds weird but try practicing really slowly with the keyer turned way down in speed, like 8 or 10 wpm, and focus only on the touch. not the code itself, just how light you can make the contact. the muscle memory will build from there and your timing will clean up on its own once you're not fighting your own hand. also the MFJ keyers are fine but some of them have a bit of slop in the iambic behavior that can make things feel weird when you're learning. if you're not already try switching it to mode A and see if that feels more predictable. mode B trips up a lot of people starting out.

honestly the question pool method works fine for a lot of people but i'd say dont just grind the questions without understanding at least some of the why behind the answers, especially the electrical stuff. if you just memorize answers you'll pass but then you get on HF and have no idea what you're doing lol for the band privileges thing -- yeah so as a general you do get HF access but not full access like an extra class. you'll have portions of 40m, 20m, 15m, 10m and some others but there are parts of those bands that are extra only. its laid out in the part 97 stuff and honestly the exam question pool covers it so if you study you'll learn it. HF is absolutely worth it though, 20m on a decent afternoon and you can work europe without even trying hard.

timing is everything honestly. ive spent years watching how different ops run pileups and the ones who are really good at it have a very predictable cadence once you lock onto it. you learn to send your call so it ends right in the window, not during it. the suffix-only thing works sometimes but some dxpedition operators actually hate that and will deliberately skip you, depends on the op. the frequency selection thing you mentioned is real too. most of the pileup is lazy and just parks where everyone else is. shifting up a bit especially if the op has been creeping upward is a solid move. i also listen to see if the op comes back with a partial call — if they did that the previous two or three times in roughly the same area of the split, thats a hint about where theyre actually hearing well. one thing that made a big difference for me personally was cleaning up my keying. i run a keyer and had my weight set a bit heavy which made my dits kind of soft at speed. cleaner cw just cuts through better in a mess of signals, seems obvious but i ignored it for years.

yeah the 13wpm wall is real lol, i hit it too. one thing someone told me was to make sure youre not counting dits and dahs anymore — if you still hear R as dit-dah-dit instead of just... R, then that might be part of whats slowing you down at speed. at 20wpm the characters come too fast to count anything. not sure how to fix it exactly other than just forcing yourself to go faster and accepting youll miss stuff for a while until it clicks

so i finally got my general last spring and ive been listening to a lot of contests but never really jumped in with both feet. Field Day i did with my club which was great but that felt more relaxed, people were helping me log and stuff. CQ WW feels way more serious and i honestly dont know where to start. like do i just pick a band and start calling CQ or should i be search and pouncing the whole time? ive got a pretty modest setup, ts-590 and a dipole up about 30 feet so im not gonna be running a kilowatt pile-up or anything. also is 15m even going to be open this late in the season or should i just camp on 40m the whole weekend. and the exchange, im still a little fuzzy on the zone thing, i know im in zone 5 but do i send that every time or just when they ask. any advice welcome, even if its just like go slow and dont panic lol

yeah what he said about the preamp. i made the mistake on my first EME attempt of running like 10 feet of LMR400 from the feedpoint to the preamp because i thought it would be fine and my noise figure went to garbage. moved the preamp to the boom and suddenly the difference was obvious on the waterfall. seems obvious in hindsight but nobody really emphasizes how critical that is when youre first reading about it. also just want to throw out that the EME2 reflector and the online logging at PE1ITR's site are worth bookmarking. you can see whos active, when moon windows line up, and theres usually someone willing to do a sked if you post that youre trying to get your first contact. dont be shy about asking, the EME community is pretty welcoming to new stations especially if you put in the effort on your antenna setup.

2m is almost certainly where you want to start, the activity level is just way higher and you'll actually find people to work. on 70cm you need significantly more antenna gain to compensate for the additional path loss and the equipment gets pricier fast. for a realistic starting point on 2m with JT65B, a lot of guys are doing single yagi EME now with something in the 9-12 dBd range and running whatever legal limit they can manage. the WSJT software has made this completely viable compared to what it took back in the CW-only days. you'll want low noise preamp right at the feedpoint, like a 0.3 dB or better NF unit, because that coax run back to the shack will kill you otherwise. the DB6NT and SSB Electronics preamps are popular choices, or you can build one if youre into that sort of thing. honestly the biggest thing people underestimate isnt the antenna, its the station noise floor. even a modest antenna with a really clean receive chain will outperform a bigger antenna with a mediocre preamp bolted to the back of the radio. scheduling still happens on the EME2 reflector and also on the ON4KST chat, which is honestly where most of the real-time coordination happens these days. you'll want to get on there before a session and announce yourself, people are generally pretty helpful with new EME stations.

honestly the question pool grind is probably the most efficient way if youre not going for deep understanding, but i'd say the theory stuff isnt as scary as people make it out to be. i studied for maybe 6 weeks using the HamStudy app every morning before work and passed with room to spare. the filter questions and the transmission line stuff did trip me up at first but once you see the same questions enough times the patterns click. the main thing the extra gets you that actually matters in practice is the sub-bands — being able to work CW on 80 meters down in the extra portion, and the phone privileges on 75 and 15 especially. during contests its noticeable. also 60 meters has some extra only stuff i think. anyway dont overthink it, if you can pass general you can pass extra, the curve isnt as steep as the jump from tech to general was for me at least

oh man i remember drilling that first hole in my roof, i stood there with the drill for probably 20 minutes before i actually did it lol. looks so much better than a mag mount though once its done. i have the same antenna actually and mine reads about 1.8 on 440 which i was also a little worried about but its been working totally fine for like a year and a half hitting repeaters all over the place so i think its just kinda how that antenna is. maybe someone who knows more can say for sure but im not stressing it

Had similar issues with painted surfaces. Use a multimeter to check resistance between mount and vehicle frame - poor grounding causes high SWR and terrible performance. Sometimes a star washer under the mount cuts through paint enough to get decent contact without major modifications.

yeah 10m has been really rewarding lately, good time to be a ham honestly. the rough rule i use is once SFI gets above about 150 or so 10m starts waking up, and once you're pushing 180+ you can pretty much count on a trans-atlantic or transpacific opening happening somewhere during the day depending on your location and time of year. the trick is that the band doesn't care about YOUR schedule so you kind of have to just check it opportunistically. dxmaps is great but i find the wwv/wwnpn solar data combined with a quick look at the cluster spots is usually enough for me to decide if its worth sitting down. if you see a bunch of 10m spots coming in from europe around 14-17z and you're on the east coast, just get on and call CQ. sometimes it takes a few minutes but the band will surprize you. also dont sleep on 12 and 15m, when 10 is open those bands are usually doing something interesting too. canary islands is a nice get by the way, EA8 counts as africa for most awards which is a good continent to have in the log early on

congrats on the first one, that feeling of the first pileup is pretty hard to beat. for rocky ground i usually bring a couple of those small sandbags or just fill a stuff sack with rocks once i get up there and hang it off the base of the pole. takes like 30 seconds and you dont have to carry the weight up. some guys use a tripod base too but that adds bulk. honestly leaning against a tree is fine, ive done whole activations that way

yeah the ALC thing is huge and most new SSB ops dont know about it. i made that mistake for like six months before somebody finally gave me a honest signal report on 40m and told me i sounded terrible lol. also worth mentioning — make sure youre speaking across the mic not directly into it, most of those desk mics are way more sensitive than people expect and breathing directly into them sounds awful on the receiving end. small thing but it made a noticeable difference for me.