Sarah Moore28

I've used EchoLink extensively while traveling in the RV. EchoLink software allows licensed Amateur Radio stations to communicate with one another over the Internet, using voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology. The program allows worldwide connections to be made between stations, or from computer to station, greatly enhancing Amateur Radio's communications capabilities.

nice writeup, this is making me want to finally get off my butt and do one. ive had a reference near me bookmarked for like six months and just havent pulled the trigger. did you pre-spot yourself on the WWFF spotter or did people just find you? im always not sure how much of the traffic is self-spotted vs organic

oh man i went through this like 6 months ago and yeah the ULS interface is not exactly user friendly haha. one thing that tripped me up was making sure my mailing address was current before i filed because apparently that can cause issues. also just double check that the calls you want are actually in an available status and not just unassigned — theres a difference i guess, some calls have a cooling off period after the previous holder lets them go. took me a couple tries to build a good list but i got my vanity on the first attempt so it worked out

just wanted to add — dont stress too much about being slow or making mistakes, literally every contester was a confused newbie once and most people on the air are pretty patient if you're clearly still learning. field day is coming up in june i think, you should look up if any clubs near you are setting up a station, showing up in person is way more fun than just operating solo from home especially your first time.

yeah you do have to go in order, cant just jump to general without getting your tech first. but honestly the technician exam isnt that bad at all, most people are surprised how manageable it is. the question pool is public so what you see on the exam is literally pulled from those exact questions, no surprises i used hamstudy.org when i was studying and it worked great for me. just kept doing practice tests until i was consistently getting like 85% or better and then went and took the real thing. took me maybe 3 weeks of casual studying, maybe 20-30 minutes a night. the arrl book is good if you actually want to understand the material but if you just want to pass the test the flashcard approach on hamstudy is probably faster one thing worth knowing, tech gets you access to VHF and UHF which is most of the local repeater activity, so you can actually do quite a bit with just that license. general is where you get HF priveleges and can start doing the long distance stuff. plenty of people stick with tech for a long time before upgrading

honest answer — at 25 feet your dipole is basically an NVIS antenna for 40m. like its great for regional stuff, talking to guys within a few hundred miles, but the takeoff angle is going to be pretty high and the dx is going to suffer for it. that said ive worked plenty of dx on a dipole at that height, it just takes more patience. the vertical thing is real but the radial situation matters a lot. elevated radials you dont need as many, 4 good radials at a consistent height does a decent job, way better than a crappy ground mounted one with only a handful of buried radials. the difference between a proper vertical and a compromised one is bigger than the difference between a good vertical and a good dipole at decent height imo. if i were in your shoes id try the elevated vertical with like 4-8 radials first before tearing everything down. cheap to experiment with

Your homebrew sounds like it's performing well! Commercial collinears typically give 6dB with 8 half-wave sections, maybe 9dB with 16 sections. The real advantage of commercial units is mechanical reliability and consistent performance - no tuning headaches.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state wildlife management area near me, KFF-something i had to look up the reference number the night before. i was pretty nervous honestly because ive done a handful of POTA activations but WWFF feels a bit different in terms of how hunters actually chase you and log stuff. anyway i set up my KX3 with a linked dipole, conditions on 40m were pretty decent for a saturday morning and i got my 44 contacts in maybe an hour and a half which i was happy with. threw in a few on 20m too just for fun and picked up a couple european stations which was cool. my questions are kind of dumb probably but here goes — do i need to submit logs to both WWFF and POTA separately if the reference is in both programs, and is there a standard way people spot themselves for WWFF specifically because i just used pota.app and wasnt sure if thats the done thing or if there's a WWFF specific spotter i should be using. also noticed some hunters asking for my signal report in a specific way, is there some exchange format i should know about or is it really just casual like POTA

first thing id check is your TXDELAY setting on the TNC. the D710 internal TNC defaults to something like 250ms i think and thats usually fine but ive seen situations where its actually too short or sometimes too long and the digipeater just doesnt decode it cleanly. also worth double checking that youre actually transmitting on 144.390 and not some slightly off frequency — the internal reference can drift a little on older units. the other thing, and this catches people more than youd think, is the SSID. if youre running like KD9XYZ-9 or whatever but the path or something is malformed aprs.fi might just be dropping it silently. pull up a direwolf decode on a laptop with a cheap SDR and actually listen to your own packets, see what youre putting out. that'll tell you real fast if the issue is encoding or path or something else entirely.

congrats on the first one, it gets way easier. for the antenna falling over thing i just use a longer piece of paracord and stake it out more aggressively, like almost at 45 degrees from the mast base. also having a second stake directly at the mast foot helps a ton. wind on summits is no joke especially if youre using a telescoping fiberglass pole. for working faster i spot yourself before you even finish setting up if you can, like throw a self-spot on the app while the radio is still warming up. by the time you key up theres already people waiting. changed everything for me honestly.

so our ARES group has a county-level exercise coming up in about three weeks and im trying to figure out the best way to handle power for a longer deployment. we're looking at maybe 12-14 hours of continuous ops, not overnight but close to it, running two HF stations and one VHF/UHF packet node. the HF rigs are both IC-7300s so they pull maybe 20-22A at full TX, realistically probably averaging out around 8-10A each if we're not transmitting constantly. the packet node is just a TM-V71 with a raspberry pi so that's pretty light. but still, doing the rough math that's a lot of amp-hours if we want margin. we've been going back and forth on whether to bring a generator and run everything off that with some battery backup, or just bring a bunch of AGM batteries and call it a day. the site we're going to has no shore power and its a fairly exposed hilltop so RF noise from a genny is a real concern. last time we used a cheap honda knockoff and the HF noise floor was rough, like S4-5 on 40m which basically killed us. anyone run extended field comms with a clean generator setup, or is LiFePO4 the answer here and i should just buy a couple 100Ah cells and stop worrying about it

CQ WW SSB is honestly one of the best contests to jump into as a newer op, dont let the size of it scare you. yeah theres like 35,000 logs submitted or something ridiculous but that just means the bands are absolutely packed and its actually easier to find people to work. you dont have to be competitive about it, just set a modest goal like work 50 countries or something and have fun with it. your ic-7300 and a dipole will do just fine for S&P (search and pounce) which is really all you need to do starting out. just tune around, find a strong station calling CQ contest, throw your call out, get the exchange, log it and move on. the exchange for CQ WW is pretty simple too, just signal report and your CQ zone. for North America thats zone 5 usually, look it up for your specific location though. as for cw vs phone — do SSB for your first one, get comfortable with the flow of it. plenty of time to work the cw weekends later once you feel like you know what youre doing. good luck and seriously just get on the air, worst that can happen is you have a weird weekend and eat too much coffee

yeah LoTW is pretty much the backbone of all this now, the days of mailing paper QSLs for every contact are kind of fading out though some guys still do it especially for rare DX where the operator might not be on LoTW. i went through all this same stuff about two years ago and honestly WAS ended up being harder for me than DXCC because some states are just dead quiet, like Rhode Island i swear i almost never hear anyone from there. just something to keep in mind if you go down that road, WAZ was actually easier imo once you figure out the zone map.

yeah the ICS forms thing trips up almost everybody the first time, dont feel bad. we ran a similar exercise about two years ago and honestly the forms were the least of our problems — it was the net control discipline that nearly fell apart. people want to be helpful so they start transmitting over each other and then net control loses the thread entirely. what really helped us was doing shorter tabletop exercises in between the big ones. like just getting 5 or 6 people in a room with handhelds and running a 45 minute message passing drill with no fancy scenario, just here's a message, pass it to this station, get a receipt, log it. sounds boring but that muscle memory is what you fall back on when things get chaotic for real. we also started requiring everyone to do at least a few weeks on the local traffic net before they could participate in the exercises, which helped a lot with the radiogram format stuff. the off-frequency thing is a real problem and its usually a radio that's been sitting in someone's car getting bumped. worth building a comms check protocol right at the start of any activation where everyone verifies they're actually where they think they are on the dial.

so ive been going down the QRP rabbit hole for about three months now and i finally finished my first scratch build — a 40m CW rig loosely based on the NorCal 40 design but i kind of went my own direction with the PA stage. running about 4 watts out which im pretty happy with considering where i started. my question is about efficiency. im measuring somewhere around 60-65% from the PA and i keep reading that good Class E designs can hit 90% or better but honestly i dont know if thats a realistic target for a beginner build or if those numbers are more like theoretical best case. the rig gets warm but not hot, battery drain feels reasonable on my 3ah lipo pack, and ive made contacts out to about 800 miles on it which felt amazing. should i even be chasing better efficiency at this point or is 60% fine for casual portable use. i mostly do parks stuff and occasional backpacking trips so battery life does matter to me but im not sure its worth tearing into the PA again if the gain is marginal in real world use.

so ive been kind of obsessed with checking DXMaps and the solar flux index lately because 10 meters has been basically dead for me for like the past few weeks and then yesterday afternoon out of nowhere i started hearing European stations coming in strong, like genuinely S7-S8 on some of them, and I managed to work a couple of Italian stations and one from Spain before it just kind of faded out again maybe 45 minutes later. the SFI was sitting around 145 when i checked it that morning which isnt crazy high but not bad either, and the K index was low which probably helped. im just wondering if this is a sign that things are actually picking up or if it was just a random fluke. i know the solar cycle is supposed to be ramping up toward solar max but honestly the bands have felt pretty inconsistent to me, some days 10m is alive and other days it might as well not exist. anyone else notice more openings lately or have a better sense of whats actually going on with the cycle right now? im still fairly new to chasing DX and trying to get a feel for how to predict when its worth even bothering to tune around up there

GET ON THE AIR! Copying an over-the-air signal is much different than code practice. Get on the air! This is exactly what I tell everyone. Practice software is great for character recognition, but real QSOs teach you to deal with imperfect conditions. Congratulations on the breakthrough!

tx bandwidth is something i think about a lot actually. ran some tests a while back logging received signal reports on pskreporter and just general on-air feedback and yeah narrower TX does seem to get through when the band is busy even if it sounds a little more AM-radio-ish to people on the other end. the trade off is real. one thing i dont see people talk about enough is ALC behavior. if your ALC is pumping you can do everything else right and your audio is still gonna sound compressed and weird. keep an eye on that meter when you're talking — ideally it should just barely flicker on voice peaks, not be slamming up near the top the whole time. took me embarassingly long to figure that out when i first got into HF.

I've been running both modes for the past year. Q65 may replace JT65 for EME use over time, but currently JT65 still has much more activity. The 1-3dB sensitivity advantage of Q65 is real, but on a well-designed EME station it's often not the limiting factor - libration fading and polarization rotation dominate.

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, tech class, and ive been trying to get into my local 2 meter repeater. i programmed in the frequency and offset just fine and i can hear people talking on it no problem but when i key up nobody seems to hear me or at least nobody responds. did some reading and found out about CTCSS tones but im not totally sure i understand how they work. like do I need to transmit a tone, receive one, or both? my radio is a baofeng uv-5r (yeah yeah i know) and ive been messing around in the menu but honestly the menus on that thing are a nightmare to navigate. also related question — is there like an etiquette thing for breaking into a repeater conversation? i dont want to be rude but i also dont know what the norms are. someone mentioned saying your callsign between overs but im not sure when exactly to do that. any help appreciated, been lurking here for a while and you all seem to know your stuff

i looked at the 7300 for a while but ended up going with a used 7610 instead, the dual receivers sold me on it. for contest weekends its really nice to be able to monitor two bands at once. cost more obviously but i found a clean one for a price i couldnt walk away from. not saying the 7300 is a bad choice at all, for most operating its probably more than enough.

honestly hamstudy is the way to go, just keep hammering the practice tests until you're consistently hitting like 85% or above and you'll be fine. the real test pulls straight from the pool so yeah memorizing works, dont let anyone make you feel bad about that. everyone does it to some extent. the concepts will start making more sense once you actually get on the air anyway. i'd pay a little extra attention to the operating rules and frequency stuff because thats where a lot of people get tripped up, like which bands techs can actually use and what modes are allowed where. that stuff matters day one when you get your callsign. the math questions you can mostly figure out with just basic formulas and they only ask a few of them. good luck, its not as hard as it looks right now

honestly the suffix only thing i've gone back and forth on. logically it makes sense since the op is just trying to pull a partial call out of the mud and complete it, but ive also seen ops specifically ask for full calls on their spotting page and then people still just send suffixes and the op gets frustrated and starts calling for full calls over and over which just slows everything down. so i guess read the dxpedition's operating notes if they post them. 3 hours though, thats commitment. ive given up after way less than that and just waited for a better band opening or a less insane time of day. sometimes the overnight hours in the US on 40m when the eu crowd has gone to bed thins the pileup out considerably and if your path works its way easier pickings

so i joined my local ARES group about 4 months ago after getting my general and the EC has been great about getting me up to speed on everything. ive been to a few of the monthly nets and even did the ICS-100 and 200 online courses like they asked. well last week he emails the group saying theres going to be an actual activation this weekend — county emergency management is running a full scale disaster drill and they want amateur radio operators to handle backup comms between the EOC and a couple of the shelter sites. im pretty excited but also kind of nervous. like i know the theory and ive practiced on the nets but this is different. i guess my question is what should i actually bring and what should i expect when i show up? i have my HT and a j-pole i built, and my EC mentioned something about bringing a go bag but i wasnt 100% sure what that meant in terms of actual gear versus just being prepared to be there a while. any tips from people who have done this before would be really helpful

oh man yes totally been there. took about 6 months off CW a few years back and coming back felt like learning from scratch. the muscle memory thing is real, your brain remembers the patterns but your hands have kind of forgotten the feel of it. on the weight setting -- that controls the ratio of dit length to the space between elements, basically if you crank it too high your dits start bleeding into the spaces and everything sounds mushy. i'd back it off to the middle position and work from there. the MFJ keyers can be a little touchy with that pot too so try going slowly. honestly the thing that helped me most was just running Koch method again on the computer like i was a total beginner. felt embarrassing but after a couple weeks my copy came back way faster than my sending did. just stick with it, 12 wpm is fine, nobody cares about speed on the air as much as people think