Amanda Anderson50

so i finally did my first summit activation saturday, been putting it off for like a year because i kept convincing myself i needed more gear or a better antenna setup or whatever. ended up just throwing my ft-818 and a random wire in a bag and driving up to a local peak that only needed like a 2 mile hike. made 9 contacts on 20m SSB which i know isnt a lot but for a first time out i was pretty happy with it. the wire just draped over a tree and ran back to the radio on my lap worked way better than i thought it would. only issue was the battery dying faster than expected, i had a little 5ah lipo and it barely lasted the session, prob should have brought a spare. anyway if anyones been on the fence about trying SOTA just do it, you dont need perfect gear

yeah the ICS stuff is pretty standard across most ARES groups, most around here want 100, 200, and then IS-700 which is the NIMS intro. some groups also ask for IS-800 if youre going to work anything at the federal coordination level but honestly for county-level activations the first three are usually enough to get you on the roster. the courses are all free on the FEMA EMI site and 100 and 700 you can knock out in an afternoon if you sit down and focus. 200 takes a bit longer, theres more material. dont stress about the tests too much, theyre open book basically and the passing threshold isnt brutal. once you have the certs just email your EC the completion certificates and they'll add you to the credentialed list. sounds like you found a good group btw, the tabletop exercises are honestly where you learn the most before a real activation comes along. better to make mistakes on paper than during an actual event.

inverted v vs flat top makes a real difference in resonant frequency, the drooping legs effectively make the electrical length longer than a flat dipole at the same height so your antenna is resonating lower than you aimed for. thats why 7.025 is showing high SWR — you're probably resonant somewhere below the band honestly. try trimming a few inches off each leg at a time and recheck, go slow because you cant put wire back once its cut. also 120 degrees is a pretty shallow angle, ideally you want closer to 90-120 with 120 being ok but the shallower it gets the more it behaves like a vertical which changes the whole radiation pattern situation. anyway youre not far off, should be an easy fix.

yeah your instinct is right, higher frequency means the wire is electrically too short, so you'd need to add a bit to each side to pull it down toward 7.15. the 468 formula is a starting point but wire type, insulation, proximity to trees and other objects all affect velocity factor and end up shifting things. stranded insulated wire especially tends to load a bit so you might not need to add as much as the math says. what i usually do is add a few inches at a time to each side and keep checking with the analyzer. tedious but you get a feel for it pretty quick. that said if your tuner handles it fine and you're not running a ton of power or contesting or anything, leave it. plenty of guys just let the tuner do the heavy lifting on a slightly off-resonance dipole and work the world just fine. 1.4:1 with a tuner at 7.15 is not gonna be your problem, your feedline loss and low height are bigger issues to worry about first honestly.

so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero w for a few months now trying to get it to handle some of the tedious stuff during contests. right now im running it headless and using a python script to pull data off my IC-7300 via the USB-serial connection, basically reading the frequency and mode and then pushing that into a simple sqlite database. nothing fancy yet but it works most of the time. the part thats giving me grief is the timing. during a pileup things get hectic and the script sometimes drops a line or gets behind and i end up with duplicate entries or missed contacts. i think its a threading issue but honestly my python is only decent, not great. ive looked at asyncio a little but havent gone down that rabbit hole yet. also thinking about wiring up an arduino nano as kind of a middle layer to handle the keyer input separately so the pi isnt trying to do too much at once. has anyone actually done something like this where the arduino handles the low latency stuff and the pi handles the logging and network side? curious if thats overcomplicating it or if thats actually the right way to split the work.

so i've been licensed for about 8 months now and a guy from my local club keeps telling me i need to try CQ WW this october. i finally looked it up and wow the scale of this thing is just... a lot. like millions of contacts worldwide over a weekend? i barely know how to work a pile-up and now he wants me to jump into the biggest contest of the year lol i'm running a Yaesu FT-891 into a vertical in the backyard, nothing fancy. i dont have any logging software set up yet either which i understand is kind of essential for contesting. been hearing about N1MM but also saw some people mention Log4OM. is one of these better for a first timer or does it even matter that much also is Field Day different enough from CQ WW that doing one helps you prep for the other? my club did Field Day in june and i helped out but mostly just watched and handed people coffee so i didnt really learn much from that. anyway any advice welcome, trying not to completely embarass myself

congrats on the activation, 32 contacts is a solid first run honestly. and yeah the pile up thing catches everyone off guard at first. what helped me was being really deliberate about saying the last two letters of who i want after every contact, like "going back for stations ending in romeo tango" or whatever. slows things down a bit but you stop the chaos of everyone just screaming their callsign at once. on the boundary question — you do need to be within the official park boundary for it to count. the POTA rules are pretty clear on that. most state parks are fine because the trailheads and picnic areas are obviously inside, but its worth pulling up the park map beforehand just to be sure. ive seen people get caught out when the parking lot is technically outside the designated park area. the POTA website has the reference maps linked for most parks which helps. also try 20m if 40 is noisy, sometimes mid morning 20 is wide open and youll pull in contacts from way further out which is fun

man this is exactly the conversation our net had a few weeks back. I've been doing ARES activations for maybe 12 years and the thing i always tell newer folks is that your go-kit should fit what you can personally carry for a quarter mile without stopping. everything else is wishful thinking. what i actually never leave without: the radio obviously (ft-891 these days), a roll of coax with connectors already on it, my log book and at least three pens because pens disappear, a small power strip, and a cheap headlamp. the headlamp sounds dumb but i cant tell you how many times ive been setting up in the dark or in a building with bad lighting. oh and snacks honestly. you might be there for 8 hours and the red cross table runs out of granola bars fast. what i eventually took out: the second HT backup to my backup, a full roll of electrical tape (just carry a small piece wrapped around something), and honestly my fancy logging laptop. i do paper logs now unless the served agency specifically needs digital. way faster to set up and nothing to crash.

the tone squelch vs just TX tone thing got me too when i was starting out, took me forever to figure out why i could hear everything but my radio would randomly go quiet lol. anyway yeah what the other guy said is right, TX only is what you want. one thing i'll add on the etiquette side — some repeaters have a courtesy beep that happens after someone unkeys, kind of a short tone. that's actually your signal that it's okay to transmit. if you key up before that beep you might step on the tail of the previous transmission and the repeater might reset or act weird depending on how it's set up. not a huge deal but worth knowing. took me a while to get the rhythm of it

so ive been messing with Winlink for about two weeks now and i cant get a stable connection to save my life. background: im running Winlink Express on a windows 10 machine, connected to a Signalink USB for the audio interface, and using a Kenwood TS-590SG on 40m. trying to hit a local RMS gateway about 30 miles away that I know is active because other guys in the club use it fine. the session starts, i can see the handshake happening in the log window, it gets partway through the VARA FM negotiation (yeah i know i should probably try VARA HF but thats another rabbit hole) and then just... drops. sometimes it'll actually connect and start pulling messages then die halfway through. the partial messages dont show up in my inbox either which is annoying. ive checked my audio levels like four times and they look okay in the waterfall, not clipping, not too low. anyone dealt with this kind of thing? wondering if its a timing issue or maybe the gateway itself has problems, or if my Signalink settings are just off in a way i cant see. the AGC on the radio is off already before anyone asks.

the fan mod is worth it, did mine probably three years ago. i actually went a slightly different route and put in a small temp-controlled circuit so it still ramps up with heat rather than running flat out all the time. used one of those little LM35 sensor boards and a basic PWM controller, total cost like four bucks off aliexpress. the 857 runs so much better on JS8Call now, i used to dread anything over an hour of solid operation. on the CAT timeout thing — im pretty sure thats actually on the fldigi side, not the radio. theres a setting buried somewhere in the rig control config for polling interval and there might also be a keep-alive option depending on your version. i had the same issue and fixing the polling interval in fldigi sorted it without touching the radio at all. check that first before you go digging around in the hardware again.

not a dumb question at all, this confuses a lot of new generals. so the FCC allocation is your legal limit — 7.225 is technically where your phone privileges start, you CAN transmit there. the reason people say avoid band edges is mostly practical. your signal has sidebands that extend a few kHz on either side depending on your audio, so if you're sitting right on 7.225 your lower sideband could technically be going into a part of the band you dont have privileges for. on 40m we use LSB so the sideband goes DOWN from your dial frequency, which means at 7.225 you could be splashing into the CW/digital portion below it. as a rule of thumb most people say give yourself at least 3 kHz of breathing room from any edge, so something like 7.228 or higher gives you a little margin. the band plan stuff like where SSB "should" start is just convention, not law, but most experienced ops follow it to keep things organized. 7.250 is crowded yeah, try up around 7.260 or 7.270 on a weekday afternoon, usually a bit more room.

so ive been chasing VP6R for what feels like forever and kept getting absolutely nowhere. like i'd hear the DX station come back to someone, the pileup would thin out just a tiny bit, and i'd throw my call in and just... nothing. happens every single time and it was driving me insane. what finally clicked for me after reading some stuff and just experimenting was working split properly. i mean i knew about split operation obviously but i wasnt really thinking about WHERE i was transmitting in the split range. i was just picking a random freq 5 up and calling like everyone else. the thing is if you listen to where the DX is actually coming back, you can kind of hear a pattern — like he's sweeping through a range, or favoring one end. once i started placing myself where he seemed to be moving TOWARD rather than where he just was, my hit rate went way up. also stopped tail-ending completely. i used to think jumping in right after he finished his QSO was smart but i think it just buries your call in the worst part of the noise. waiting a half beat and letting the initial wave crash before sending my call seemed to help a lot. could be coincidence but ive now busted through 3 pileups in the last two weeks that way so maybe not. anyone else have techniques that actually work vs the stuff that sounds good in theory? curious if the partial call thing is worth doing — like only sending the last two letters — ive heard mixed opinions

so ive been putting off doing a proper mobile install for like two years now and finally got around to it last weekend. threw a Yaesu FT-7900R in the dash and ran the power direct to the battery with a fuse holder, that part i feel pretty good about. the antenna is where im second guessing myself. i mounted a NMO mag mount on the roof but i couldnt get it dead center because of the sunroof, so its sitting maybe 8 inches off center toward the passenger side. been reading that you want it centered for a good ground plane but honestly i dont really know how much that matters in practice. the antenna itself is just a cheap Tram 1185 dual bander, nothing fancy. radio seems to be working fine, hitting the local 2m repeater no problem and even got into one about 40 miles out on 70cm which i thought was pretty decent. SWR checked out okay with my buddies meter. just wondering if anyone else has done an off-center mount and if its actually causing any pattern issues or if im overthinking this whole thing

so ive been putting off building my own antenna for probably two years now, always just figured id buy something but the prices for a decent trapped vertical are getting stupid and honestly how hard can a dipole be right anyway i pulled out some 14 gauge stranded wire i had in the garage, not sure if its copper clad or solid copper, the insulation is like a reddish color if that helps anyone identify it. my plan is to cut it for 40 meters, feed it with some RG-8X i have leftover from a mobile install, and hang it in an inverted-V configuration off my garage peak which puts the feedpoint at maybe 22 feet. the legs would slope down to about 8 feet on each end tied off to fence posts. my questions are basically — does the wire type matter that much, is 22 feet high enough for the inverted V to do anything useful on 40, and do i need a 1:1 balun at the feedpoint or can i just solder the coax directly and call it good. ive read like four different things about baluns and im more confused now than before i started reading