Angela Turner

so ive been doing single op for a few years now and consistently placing mid pack in my section for sweepstakes and cqww. i keep reading about guys doing SO2R and the rate improvements sound pretty dramatic but every time i look into it i get overwhelmed with the station engineering side of it — the filtering, the antenna isolation, all that. my antennas arent great to begin with (tribander at 35ft and a 40m dipole) so im wondering if the interference problems are gonna be worse than the benefit.
also just practically speaking, how long did it take you guys to actually get comfortable enough with it that your rate went UP instead of down? i tried running a second radio during the last sprint just casually monitoring and i felt like i was making more mistakes on the run frequency than usual. felt like rubbing my belly and patting my head at the same time.
is there a smart way to ease into this without rebuilding the whole station first

one thing i'd add is that the drift issue is real and worth paying attention to. some rigs especially older ones or anything that hasnt warmed up can be off by a khz or more. i got dinged at a club meeting once (not by the FCC just an old timer) for parking too close to 7.300 on a cold morning. wasnt over the edge but it was close enough that he could tell my rig hadnt stabalised yet. just let it warm up 10-15 min before you get on and you'll probably be fine. also honestly 40m is so busy that hanging out near the band edges is annoying anyway, theres usually pileups and weird stuff happening there.

so ive been lurking on this forum for like 6 months while studying for my technician exam and i passed last tuesday, got my callsign thursday which was way faster than i expected honestly
anyway i was just messing around on 2m with my baofeng plugged into a mag mount on the car and someone came back to me on the local repeater and we actually talked for like 10 minutes. the guy was in ohio which isnt far from me but still it felt kind of surreal that i was just talking to a random stranger through a radio i bought for 30 bucks
idk i just wanted to share that somewhere because my family doesnt really get it. my wife was like "thats nice" and went back to her book lol. anybody remember their first contact? did it feel weird to you too at first

oh man i had the same problem when i first started chasing DX, was constantly refreshing DXwatch on my laptop like a crazy person lol. someone at a hamfest pointed me toward the telnet clusters and i didnt even realize you could just connect directly with a terminal if you wanted to, like telnet to a node and see the raw spots fly by which is kind of fun in a nerdy way but not practical when youre actually trying to work someone.
for android i think there was one called Ham DX Cluster or something like that, i dont remember the exact name but if you just search cluster in the play store a few pop up. the trick is finding one that lets you filter because otherwise its just a firehose of spots and you cant keep up

so ive been putting off building a wire antenna for probably two years now because i kept telling myself id just buy something decent eventually. anyway last weekend i finally just grabbed some 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had in the garage and cut two legs for 40 meters using the standard 468/f formula, came out to about 33.something feet per side. center connector is just a SO-239 i pulled off an old project, soldered the two legs on, threw it up in an inverted V config with the apex maybe 25 feet off the ground off my chimney bracket.
problem is the SWR at the feed point is reading around 2.1 at 7.150 and i was kind of hoping for better than that. i know 2.1 isnt the end of the world but i was expecting closer to 1.5 or so. did i screw up the formula or is the inverted V configuration just naturally going to push the impedance around? i trimmed a tiny bit off one leg experimentally and it didnt seem to change much. running it into an IC-7300 with the built in tuner engaged it plays fine but still curious why the base SWR is where it is before the tuner.
also the legs are not symmetric in terms of the angle, one side has more droop than the other because of where my anchor points ended up. could that be throwing things off or is it not that sensitive to that

so i've been a ham for about 3 years now mostly just doing HF with my Icom 7300 and never really thought about QRP stuff because honestly i figured why would i want less power right. but my buddy kept talking about his little MTR trail friendly rig and i got curious and ended up ordering a QCX mini kit from QRP Labs a few months back and just finally sat down and built the thing last weekend.
it took me probably 6 or 7 hours total and i had to reflow a couple solder joints that were giving me grief on the toroid winding section but got it going and took it out to the park yesterday with a random wire antenna up in a tree and worked a station in Ohio from Pennsylvania on 40m running 5 watts CW. i know thats not some huge DX accomplishment but something about it just felt different, like more satisfying than any contact ive had with the big rig. hard to explain really.
anyway im kind of hooked now and wondering if anyone has suggestions for what to build or try next in the QRP world. im thinking maybe a 20m EFHW antenna to make the portable setup a bit easier. also curious if anyone runs QRP on digital modes like FT8, does the low power thing still feel rewarding on digital or is it kind of cheating since the software does all the heavy lifting

yeah the inverting transponder thing trips up a lot of people coming from FM birds. basically on a linear transponder the passband is inverted so LSB up means LSB down but the doppler correction goes in opposite directions for uplink vs downlink. gpredict handles this but you have to make sure you have the transponder configured correctly in the satellite database, specifically that the inversion flag is set. if its not set it'll shift both vfos the same direction which is wrong.
the way i think about it is — the transponder passband is fixed relative to the satellite. so as the sat comes toward you, your downlink frequency appears higher (positive doppler) but because the passband is inverted, your uplink signal needs to go lower to stay in the same spot in the passband. gpredict should handle all of this automatically if the transponder data is right. check that you have the correct center frequencies loaded and that inversion is ticked. also make sure your CAT control is actually talking to both vfos and not just main.
FO-29 has been a bit iffy lately with its schedule but AO-73 is pretty solid for practice passes