Jessica Davis21

nice one on getting through, that actually takes more patience than most people have. i remember my first pileup i just gave up after like 20 minutes because i thought my radio was broken or something lol one thing i'd add that nobody told me for a long time is to really listen to how the dx op is working the pile. some of them work by region, like theyll say EU only or NA only for stretches, so if youre calling when its not your turn youre just wasting your time and annoying everybody. also some ops work by number, like theyll say only 4s or 7s, so again just listen honestly the modest station thing is real and theres no magic fix for it but picking the right band conditions helps more than anything. if the band is marginal youre probably not getting through with 100w but if conditions are good you can punch above your weight. ive worked some pretty rare ones with 100w and a wire, it just takes more patience

congrats on the first one man, 12 contacts is a solid activation no matter what. honestly the setup thing just takes repetition, i fumbled around for my first 3 or 4 parks before i had a rhythm going. what i do now is i pre-cut all my counterpoise wire to length and coil it with velcro ties so i can just unroll and stake it down fast, no measuring anything in the field. also if you dont already, throw a small bungee cord or two in the bag for getting the wire up in trees that dont have great branch spacing. and practice the log at home a few times, just do fake QSOs in your living room calling CQ POTA and going through the exchange until it feels automatic. sounds dumb but it actually helps a lot when youre nervous and the pile starts up. once you get your system dialed in you can be on the air in under 15 minutes easy.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, K-4577 for anyone curious. ive been a ham for about 3 years now but just kept putting off doing an actual activation because i was worried about setting up in public and people staring at me while i fumbled with antenna stuff lol. anyway it went pretty well overall, made 12 contacts on 40m with my KX2 and a random wire thrown up in a tree. my question is about the spotting stuff. i spotted myself on the POTA app before i started but i noticed there were a few times where i dropped off the map or the spot went stale. do i need to keep re-spotting myself manually or does someone usually spot you again from the hunters side? also how long do people typically stay on one frequency before moving to another band? i didnt want to hog the spot forever but wasnt sure when it was considered polite to wrap up and try 20m or something. also one random thing -- a guy drove up in his truck while i was operating and asked what i was doing. ended up talking to him for like 20 minutes about ham radio and he seemed genuinely interested so that was a nice surprise. probably the most unexpected part of the whole day honestly.

so ive been running SSB on 40m and 20m for a while now and i keep getting reports that my audio sounds kind of muffled or like im talking through a pillow. its not terrible, people can understand me fine, but ive heard other stations that sound really crisp and present and mine just doesnt compare. im running an IC-7300 with the stock mic, just the hand mic that came in the box, and i havent really touched the audio settings much because honestly the menus kind of intimidate me and i didnt want to break something that was at least partly working. i know the 7300 has parametric EQ built in and also the TX monitor thing where you can hear yourself, but when i tried the monitor it sounded fine to me so i dont really know what to judge against. a friend said i should look at my mic gain and compression settings but i dont really know where to start. is there some kind of baseline people use for voice audio on SSB or is it just totally personal preference and trial and error

so i finally got my wife to agree to let me go this year after missing it for like 3 years in a row, last time i went i picked up a barely used TS-850 for like 200 bucks from some old timer who just wanted it gone, hoping to find something similar in the flea market area this time around. anyone else planning to be there? maybe we can meet up or something, i'll probably be wandering around the outdoor swap area most of saturday morning before it gets too hot

I only got my tech ticket in March so im still figuring out what bands I can even use but someone at my club meeting mentioned 10m is good for technicians too? gonna have to look that up. also didnt know hamvention was a thing until like two weeks ago, is it worth going as a new person or is it mostly for people who already know everything

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and working DX i never thought id touch with my 100w and a wire antenna in the backyard. but its basically just exchanging signal reports and grid squares right, theres not really a conversation happening there. i started poking around with JS8Call after seeing it mentioned on here a few times and i think i understand what its trying to do but im having trouble finding anyone to actually talk to on it. been monitoring 14.078 and a couple other spots and mostly silence or like one or two guys doing relay stuff. my question is — is JS8Call just kind of dead in terms of activity or am i doing something wrong with timing or freq selection. also does the heartbeat feature actually work well for just leaving it running passively. i dont want to just go back to FT8 clicking through log4om all day, i actually want to use this stuff to communicate not just collect grid squares. any thoughts appreciated, running an IC-7300 into a fan dipole if that matters

so i've been licensed for about 14 months now and have been doing a lot of listening and the occasional QSO but nothing serious contest-wise. a buddy from my local club keeps telling me i should jump into CQ WW this october and honestly it sounds kind of intimidating but also really fun. i run a Yaesu FT-891 into a random wire up in a tree, nothing fancy. mostly operate on 40 and 20m. i've done Field Day twice now with the club which i guess counts as contest experience but CQ WW feels like a whole different animal. the pile-ups i hear on those weekends are just insane. is there a good way to ease into it without completely embarrassing myself? should i try search and pounce first instead of running a frequency? also wondering if there are any logging programs people recommend that arent too complicated to set up the night before lol. any tips appreciated, been lurking on this forum for months and you all seem to know your stuff

so my buddy kept bugging me to join him for CQ WW SSB last october and i finally caved and set up in his shack for a few hours on saturday afternoon. i had no idea what i was doing honestly, he just handed me the mic and said work as many stations as you can and log them. we were running 100w into a tribander and i was pulling in stations from europe, south america, all over the place. it was honestly kind of overwhelming at first because the pileups are nothing like the casual contacts i'm used to on 40m in the evenings. anyway im hooked now and CQ WW SSB is coming up again at the end of october and this time i want to actually prepare. im planning to set up my own station for it, i have an IC-7300 and a wire dipole for 40 and 20m so nothing fancy. do people actually do okay in these big contests with modest setups or is it mostly the guys with towers and amps that rack up the big scores? also is there like a good resource for understanding the exchange format before i jump in, i kept screwing it up last year lol also heard Field Day is kind of a different animal, more of a club social thing? we have a local club that does it every june and ive been thinking about volunteering to help but wasnt sure if its worth doing if youre trying to actually learn contesting skills or if theyre pretty different beasts

yeah im running a pretty similar setup in my Tacoma with the same antenna actually and mine reads like 1.3 across most of 2m so something is a bit off on yours. that said i drove around for months with a 1.7 reading before i figured out my coax had a little nick in it from a sharp edge under the headliner. the radio still worked fine the whole time but i felt better fixing it. hitting repeaters fine is a good sign at least, you're not dumping a ton of power into a dummy load or anything. might just start by remaking that connector like the other guy said, that's the cheapest and easiest thing to rule out first

your list is actually a pretty solid starting point honestly, most people forget way more basic stuff. the thing that gets overlooked constantly is power -- like you need to think about how long you can actually run that 891 and off what. do you have a battery sorted out? a good sealed AGM or lifepo4 with enough amp hours to run a few hours at moderate power makes a huge difference. and a way to charge it in the field, even a small solar panel strapped to the outside of the case. other stuff i'd throw in: SWR meter or at least an antenna analyzer if you have one, because you might end up using a random antenna someone else threw up and you want to know what you're dealing with. extra fuses, always extra fuses. a headlamp cause you will end up operating in the dark at some point. hand sanitizer and snacks sounds dumb but when you're deployed for 6 hours at a shelter you'll be glad you have them. oh and make sure those written frequencies include your local ARES/RACES nets plus some backup simplex channels because repeaters go down when you need them most. honestly the best thing you can do is just deploy it once in your backyard or something and see what you wish you had brought.

This is really interesting to read about, I'm still pretty new and haven't been part of any ARES exercises yet but I've been wanting to get involved. The part about operators fumbling message passing is kind of reassuring honestly because I've been nervous about exactly that — like I've read the ARRL handbook sections on NTS format but reading about something and doing it while someone's waiting on you are very different things. Is there a good way to practice before jumping into an actual drill? I dont want to be the person slowing things down when it counts.

made almost this exact move about 18 months ago, went from a 7300 to the 7610 and honestly for contesting it made a real difference. the independent receivers are the main thing, you can actually work a second band while keeping an ear on your run frequency and once you get used to that workflow going back feels limiting. the noise floor on the 7610 also seemed a touch better to me but im not sure how much of that was real vs placebo, hard to do a rigorous comparison when youre swapping rigs not just swapping antennas. if CW is your main thing though i keep hearing that the 890 roofing filters are genuinely ahead of both Icom options at 500hz and tighter. never owned one myself so cant speak from experience but the guys in the CW skimmers group seem pretty unanimous on it. if budget is a factor the 7610 usually comes in a bit lower street price than the 890S last time i checked.

Ham Radio Deluxe has a DX cluster built in if you're on windows but for android the one i keep coming back to is DX Toolkit. its not super pretty but it pulls spots from the cluster network and you can filter by band which is really the main thing you want. also check out the web version of DXwatch on your phone browser, it actually works pretty decent as a mobile page and you can set it to auto refresh every couple minutes so you dont miss stuff. the QRZ tools are fine for what they are but yeah for live spots you need something feeding directly from the telnet cluster nodes. once you get that going it changes the whole DX experience honestly, suddenly you realize how much activity there is that you were just never seeing.

the dupe checking in Log4OM contest mode has always felt a bit half baked to me too, not sure if theyve improved it in the newer versions but i stopped relying on it a while back. N1MM is kind of the gold standard for contesting theres not really much debate there, the callsign entry speed and the super check partial alone make it worth using when youre in a real pile or trying to run a frequency. one thing i'll mention on the wsjtx side — make sure you have the UDP server set to only send to one application at a time or you can get weird behavior. i think wsjtx only supports one udp listener properly and if you have both N1MM and Log4OM trying to grab the packets at the same time thats probably where your silent drops are coming from. not 100% sure thats your situation but worth checking.

i did the tx mod on mine too but i bricked the display doing something unrelated lol so take that as a cautionary tale about messing around inside while youre already in there. dont get overconfident and start poking at connectors that have nothing to do with what youre trying to do no idea on the ATU thing sorry, i just run a manual tuner and deal with it

welcome to the hobby, dont sweat it this trips up basically everyone at first. so the transmit tone is the one that matters for getting into the repeater — thats the subaudible tone your radio sends along with your voice so the repeater knows to open up. the receive tone (sometimes called decode or rx tone) is different, thats just telling your radio to only unmute when it hears that tone coming back at you. for getting onto the repeater you only need the tx tone set correctly. 100.0 hz is a pretty common one so you're probably programmed right. a few things worth checking though — make sure you have the right offset set, on 2m that's usually minus 600 khz but some repeaters are different. and double check you have the correct input frequency programmed, not just the output. if you're hearing the repeater you're on the right output frequency at least so that part sounds good. honestly your best bet is just to try calling again at different times of day. a lot of repeaters have active nets in the evenings, like maybe check if theres a monday night net or something listed on their website. people are way more likely to respond during a net than random times. good luck, youll get it sorted.

js8call has a mode called turbo or something that speeds up the exchange if both stations support it, might help with the latency issue youre describing. i only tried it once and couldnt get it working right so i cant really say how well it works in practice but its there

WAZ took me forever to wrap my head around too honestly, basically the world is divided into 40 CQ zones and you need a confirmed contact from each one. Some zones are genuinely hard to get because not many operators are active there or the propagation just doesnt work well from your location depending on where you are in the world. Zone 1 up in the arctic regions is one people struggle with for example. one thing i'll say is just start logging everything from day one and upload to lotw as you go, future you will thank you. i spent like two years casually working stations before i realized i was already most of the way to basic DXCC and didn't even know it because i wasn't paying attention

so ive been trying to get more into DX chasing lately and everyone keeps saying to watch the cluster spots but honestly the whole thing is a bit confusing to me still. i've been using DXwatch in my browser and also the QRZ logbook has that little spot feed on the side, are these pulling from the same network or are they separate? sometimes i see a spot on one that doesnt show up on the other for like 10 minutes and i cant tell if its a propagation thing or just the sites being slow to update. also is there a better app for this on android? i downloaded one called DX Toolkit i think but it seems kinda clunky and hasnt been updated in a while. just want something that will ping me when there's a new one on 17 or 12 meters since those are my favorite bands right now. been licensed about 8 months so still figuring all this out.

so i got my general back in the spring and ive been mostly just doing ragchews on 40m and some digital stuff but a buddy at the club keeps telling me i need to try contesting and honestly i think hes right. i looked at the calendar and theres just so much going on between now and the end of the year it's kind of overwhelming. CQ WW is obviously the big one everyone talks about, and i know ARRL Field Day happened already (missed it this year, still kinda bummed about that) but from what i understand theres a whole bunch of stuff between now and december. someone mentioned the ARRL Sweepstakes and some state QSO parties and then theres the 10m contest in december i think. i guess my question is do i just jump into CQ WW as a first contest or is that like showing up to your first 5k and running a marathon instead. also i do a little SOTA stuff and i know some people combine that somehow with contests but i have no idea how that works exactly. my setup is pretty modest, just a dipole up about 25 feet and a 100w radio so i dont know if thats even competitive or if ill just be spinning my wheels calling CQ and getting nothing back. any advice from people who actually do this stuff regularly would be great

yeah the linked repeater etiquette thing tripped me up too when I first started. the one near me goes to a whole statewide system and I had no idea there were like 15 other repeaters all tied together listening when I did my first radio check lol. felt a bit weird knowing that but people were nice about it. one thing I'll add — some repeaters have a specific node number you have to DTMF in to connect to IRLP or Echolink, it's not always automatic. might be worth checking the repeater's club page or trustee info on repeaterbook to see if there's a user guide. a lot of clubs post one and it'll have all the tones, link commands, and local customs in one place.

so ive been eyeing satellite operation for a while now and last weekend i finally had a clear pass over my QTH with AO-73 at a decent elevation, think it peaked around 52 degrees which is pretty good for me. been using gpredict for tracking and honestly that part worked way better than i expected, doppler corrections were pretty smooth once i got the CAT interface sorted with my 817. anyway the linear transponder stuff is where i got confused in practice. i understood the theory — you transmit on the uplink passband and your signal comes back on the downlink inverted, so LSB up means USB down or whatever. but i kept chasing my own signal all over the place. like i'd tune to where i thought i was and by the time i got there it had drifted again. not sure if that was doppler not being compensated fast enough or if i was just overdriving the transponder and causing the AGC to squish everything. also heard what sounded like a few other stations on there but couldnt really pull any callsigns out, the passband seemed pretty busy for a weekday afternoon. is that normal for AO-73 or was i just in a bad geometry for the footprint? i didnt end up making any contacts but i got my own downlink signal which i guess counts for something. any tips from people who actually work these things regularly would be great.

the RSP1A is a pretty decent jump for HF honestly. the direct sampling hack on the RTL is always gonna be a compromise, theres just a lot of noise getting in because the dongle wasnt designed for it. the RSP1A has actual front end filtering and a proper ADC for those frequencies so yeah you will notice a difference especially on the lower HF bands. that said your random wire is doing a lot of work against you. ive run both and with a bad antenna the RSP1A still picks up all the local garbage you'd expect. if you can get even a basic end fed halfwave up with a decent choke at the feedpoint youll probably be more impressed by the upgrade. i run mine with SDR++ now and its pretty solid, SDRangel is powerful but the UI genuinely takes some getting used to, i gave up twice before it clicked

Yeah the gateway map can be misleading because stations do show up even if they havent been heard from in a while. The GIS map on winlink.org updates but I've seen nodes sitting there that havent actually been active in weeks. First thing I'd do is check the last activity timestamp on the gateway — if it hasnt made a connection in the last day or two I'd skip it and try another one even if its further away. Also Vara HF needs to be calibrated properly for your soundcard, the drive level matters a lot more than people realize. What's your signal report looking like on your end, is Vara actually decoding anything back?