Carlos Santos

so ive been running a Diamond X50 on the roof for about three years now and its been fine, decent coverage on the local 2m and 70cm repeaters, nothing to complain about really. but i picked up a used 2el yagi at a hamfest last month, M2 i think, and got to thinking about whether pointing it at the main hilltop repeater 40 miles out would actually make a noticeable difference or if im just chasing gain numbers that wont matter in practice. the thing is the repeater is basically due west of me and i dont have much to the east anyway so rotating it probably wouldnt be an issue. my concern is the vertical polarization thing — i know yagis are usually horizontal for weak signal work but most repeaters around here are vertical. i've seen people talk about orienting the yagi vertically but then the boom is horizontal and it starts getting weird with mounting. anyone actually done this and was it worth it over just leaving the collinear up? also wondering if theres a point where the collinear just wins because of the wider pattern for mobile stations checking in. the yagi would obviously null out anything behind it.

I'm trying to wrap my head around the difference between inverting and non-inverting linear transponders, particularly for Doppler correction. Most linear satellites use what are known as 'Inverting Transponders' to reduce the Doppler shift. You transmit lower sideband (LSB) on the uplink and it appears as upper sideband (USB) on the downlink. From what I understand, most linear transponders today are inverting, meaning that as you tune the uplink higher, the downlink will decrease, and vice versa. Can someone explain the technical reasoning behind using inverting transponders and how this affects my tracking software configuration?

congrats on your first activation, those festival events are actually really good training because you get real traffic without it being a life or death situation, good way to get your feet wet. on the ICS 309 thing, from what i've seen most served agencies want you to log anything that was directed traffic, so if someone passed you a message to relay, that counts. routine check-ins and just acknowledging you're on frequency probably dont need to go in there as individual entries but your EC might have a specific way they want it done that's different from what our group does. honestly the best thing is to just ask him when he's not in the middle of something, every ARES group kind of does it slightly different depending on what their county EM wants to see. some are super strict about it and some are pretty relaxed as long as you can reconstruct the timeline if they ever need it. the main thing is you kept a contemporaneous log during the event right, like wrote it down as it happened? that makes filling in the forms after way easier and if there's ever a question about what was said you have it. good job getting out there and doing it, a lot of people sit on the sidelines for way too long.

the 7300 is a great radio but if you ever do go SO2R youll want to think about that setup carefully since the SDR architecture means the frontend can get crushed if your second rig is too close in frequency and your bandpass filters arent doing their job. seen a few guys at our club try it with cheaper filters and just wonder why everything sounds terrible until someone figures out whats going on. but yeah for rate optimization without all that — search and pounce efficiency matters a lot more than people think. like actually logging fast, having your exchange ready before you even call, not fumbling with the keyboard mid-QSO. shaves maybe 3-4 seconds per contact and over a full contest weekend thats not nothing

dont worry you definitely didnt miss an orientation, most of us just kind of figured it out by jumping in and making mistakes. for CQ WW the exchange is pretty simple once you hear it a few times — you send your callsign, they send theirs, then you swap signal reports (59 or 599 on CW) and your CQ zone number. thats it. your zone is printed on most world maps and you can look it up on the ARRL site in about 30 seconds. the IC-7300 is honestly a great radio for contesting, way better than what a lot of people started with. 30 feet isnt ideal but youll still make contacts especially on 40 and 20 meters when the bands are hopping. just get a free copy of N1MM Logger or use the built in logging if you want to keep it simple, set the contest up in there and it basically walks you through the exchange format. and yeah SOTA is a completely different thing, its more about activating summits for points, people chase activators from home. theres a whole separate calendar for SOTA and the alerts system on sota.org tells you whos going out. its a great excuse to go hiking with a radio which i personally love but it doesnt really overlap with the big HF contest weekends in terms of vibe.

welcome to the hobby. my first qso i forgot to say over and just dead keyed for like two seconds before the other guy figured out i was done talking. its a right of passage i think. stick with it, once you get on HF its a whole different world

Hi everyone, KD8XYZ here. Just got my Tech license last month and I'm trying to use the local repeater on 145.370. I programmed the repeater info from RepeaterBook - 145.370 (-600, 103.5 PL). The repeater kerchunks when I key up (I can hear the beep), but when I call for a radio check nobody responds. Am I doing something wrong with the CTCSS setup? I'm using a Baofeng UV-5R and I've double-checked the frequencies. Local activity seems good - I hear conversations regularly. Any ideas what might be causing this issue?

yeah the 40 meter situation trips a lot of people up honestly. so for general class phone you're looking at 7.175 to 7.300 MHz, that's your usable range for SSB voice in the US. the 7.200 thing your buddy mentioned is probably becuase a lot of folks avoid going too close to 7.300 which is the upper band edge -- on USB if you're on 7.300 your actual transmitted signal is extending above that and technically out of the amateur allocation which is a no-no. same idea applies at the bottom edge. so if you're doing USB just give yourself at least a few kHz of breathing room below 7.300. and yeah 7.125 to 7.175 is where extra class gets to play on phone, so as a general you want to stay above 7.175. the ARRL band plan is worth printing out and taping near your rig until it just becomes second nature

okay so i just passed my technician exam last week (finally) and now im trying to figure out what HT to actually buy. i've been reading threads for like two hours and now im more confused than when i started lol. everyone seems to have a strong opinion and half of them contradict each other. my main use case is just getting on local repeaters and maybe doing some simplex stuff at events eventually. a friend mentioned APRS but i dont even really know what that is yet so maybe later. budget is somewhere around $50-150 but i could stretch it a little if there's a really good reason to. i keep seeing the baofeng UV-5R come up and people either love it or act like you insulted their grandmother by mentioning it. then theres the yaesu FT-60 and some newer ones i cant keep straight. is there like a sensible starting point here or is it really just personal preference? i dont want to buy something i'll regret in six months when i actually know what im doing.

so ive been doing morse practice for about 3 months now and im stuck somewhere around 8-9wpm and honestly it feels like a wall. when i started i was moving pretty fast, like went from zero to 5wpm in maybe 2-3 weeks and then got to 8 fairly quickly after that but now its like my brain just stops being able to process anything above that speed and i start missing letters and then i panic and miss more letters and it just snowballs. im using the lcwo website mostly, doing the koch method, and i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day. someone told me i should be copying at higher speeds even if i miss a lot and just let my brain adjust over time? but that feels really frustrating because im sitting there copying maybe 30% of a transmission and feeling like a complete idiot. is that actually how this works or is there a better approach. also does anyone have a sense of realistic timeframes here, like how long before i can actually have a QSO at 13 or so wpm which feels like where most of the activity is on 40m cw