Jessica Wilson66

It is common for DX and contest stations to give out "rubber stamp" signal reports. Basically, they are trying to work as many stations as fast as possible and don't want to be bothered with accurate signal reports, so everyone gets a 59 or 599 report. In contests, everything is 599 or 5NN!

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and keep telling myself ill get a proper go-kit together and just... never do. well after the storms we had last month knocked out power for 4 days i figured i really need to stop procrastinating on this. our local ARES group has been bugging me about it too. right now i basically have nothing organized. my HF rig is a Yaesu FT-891 that i run at home off a linear supply, and i have a cheap BaoFeng UV-5R for VHF/UHF which i know isnt ideal but it works. i do have a deep cycle marine battery in the garage that i use for camping sometimes. so thats something i guess. my question is really like, where do you even start? do i get a big Pelican case and cram everything in or is there a better way to organize it. i saw somebody at a hamfest with this really slick setup in a wheeled toolbox from Home Depot and it looked amazing but i dont know if that was overkill or what. also what do people actually bring for antennas in a go situation, i have an EFHW that works great at home but its a pain to deploy. just kind of feeling overwhelmed by the whole thing and wanted to hear how other people approached this.

The CTCSS thing trips up a lot of new folks so dont feel bad about it. What you want is to set the transmit tone (sometimes labeled T-CTCSS or just TX tone on the Baofeng) to 100.0 Hz. You generally dont need to set a receive tone unless you specifically want your radio to squelch out everything that doesnt come in with that tone — most people just leave the RX tone off and let the radio open up for any signal. On the Baofeng the menu item you're looking for is probably item 13 (T-DCS/CTCSS) if i remember right, been a while since i messed with one of those. Make sure you save the channel after you change it or it wont stick. As for joining a conversation, just wait for a pause between exchanges and say your callsign. Something like just keying up and saying your call is totally normal. Most regulars on a good repeater will welcome a new voice, especially if you mention you just got licensed. Dont overthink it.

the SDR piece in RemoteHams is kind of optional depending on how you set it up. if you have a real radio with a CAT interface at the remote end you configure that as the primary control path and the SDR part is more of a panadapter/monitoring thing rather than the actual transmit path. at least thats how mine works — IC-9700 at the remote end, RCForb client on my laptop here, and i have an SDRplay hanging off the same machine for the bandscope view. they dont really talk to each other natively but its workable. on the NAT thing yes it does handle traversal through their relay servers, you dont need open ports which was honestly the thing that sold me on it over just running VNC plus some audio bridge. the relay adds a tiny bit of overhead but for SSB you really wont notice. CW i find anything under 50ms round trip is fine for me but some guys are more sensitive to it than i am.

so we have a county-level exercise coming up in about 6 weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before then. last time we ran a generator the whole time and it was honestly more trouble than it was worth — noise on the rx was terrible, had to keep moving the thing to get away from the exhaust, and somebody let it run dry which killed it mid-op. not a great look. this time i'm leaning toward lithium battery bank for the primary station with a small genny as backup only. running an IC-7300 as the main rig, probably 50-60w output to keep consumption reasonable. i've been looking at the bioenno 50ah lifepo4 and at that draw rate it should get me most of a full day without needing to touch the generator at all. antenna-wise i'm thinking the linked dipole i built last year plus maybe a vertical if we need to work more than one band simultaneously. anybody done something similar for an actual deployment not just a SOTA trip or whatever? the main thing im not sure about is whether the 7300's receive current draw is gonna eat into that 50ah more than i'm calculating. also curious if people run their antennas off portable masts or if you just find a tree and throw a line over it. trees arent always available at the sites we end up at.