David Johnson

im in basically the same boat, got my general a couple months ago and the FCC rules are a lot to absorb. one thing that helped me was the ARRL's band plan page because it kind of translates the legal stuff into plain english. technically Part 97 is the actual law and the ARRL band plan has some stuff that's just gentlemens agreement, not actual rules, so its worth knowing which is which. i got confused about that early on and thought some of the suggested operating practices were actual legal requirements lol

im in kind of the same boat, building a 20m dc rx right now and the image rejection thing is what gets me. i know its a fundamental limitation of the design but still annoying when you hear a strong signal bleeding in from the image. have you looked at the phasing method at all? i was reading about it, basically two mixers 90 degrees out and then you cancel the image in audio but its way more complex to build. might be worth it though. also what did you use for the mixer, ring diode or something active? ive been going back and forth on that

yeah 40 has been rough here too, though i had a decent run last thursday around 0200 utc worked a couple stations in europe which i wasnt expecting. i think a lot of the casual operators just drift in and out depending on whats going on in their lives honestly. summer always seems slower to me, people outside doing stuff instead of sitting in the shack

so i finally got called up for an actual ARES activation last weekend, not just a drill. county OEM needed radio support for a pretty bad flooding situation, couple roads washed out and some cell towers were having issues. i've been through maybe four or five training nets and the SET last fall but nothing had ever actually gone live before. honestly i was nervous as heck driving to the EOC. like i knew the procedures on paper but when the EC handed me a packet log sheet and said 'you're on the hospital net' i kind of blanked for a second. ended up being fine, traffic was mostly welfare checks and some resource requests, nothing too crazy. but there was definitely a moment where i had to ask someone next to me how they wanted me to format the ICS 213 because i'd only ever done it in training and i second guessed myself. anyway just wanted to share because i feel like people dont talk much about what the first real one actually feels like versus the drills. also curious — do most groups do any kind of debrief after activations? ours sort of just... ended. people packed up and left and i never really heard what went well or what didnt.

nice work getting out there. i did my first one earlier this year and was also way overthinking it beforehand. the KX2 is such a good little radio for this stuff, i use mine with a similar setup. one thing i'll add is if you havent already, download the POTA app and look at the alerts feature — hunters can set alerts for specific parks and they'll get notified when someone spots for that park. so if you're going back to the same park or doing a rarer reference you might get a little pile up which is fun. also keep an eye on whether your park has been activated before, if it's a fairly rare one you'll probably have an easier time getting hunters to find you.

so i just passed my general exam last week (finally, after putting it off for like two years lol) and im trying to figure out how the callsign situation works. right now i got assigned a sequential callsign automatically through the FCC and its a 2x3 in my district which is fine i guess but ive been reading about vanity calls and now im wondering if i should just apply for one instead. from what i understand the FCC has a system where they assign calls in a sequential order based on what pool is available in your district, but vanity lets you pick a specific call if its available? or is it more complicated than that. also does it cost money now — i heard something changed recently with fees. i dont really have a specific call in mind, i just kind of want something shorter if possible. my assigned one is fine but a 1x3 or 2x2 would be easier to send in CW honestly. anyway if anyone has gone through this process recently id love to hear how it went

so ive been getting into nets lately and honestly its way more fun than i expected. i started with the local 2m club net on monday nights just to practice my callsign and get comfortable with the mic, but then someone at the club told me about some of the HF nets and now im kind of hooked on those too. right now i check into the Maritime Mobile Service Net on 14.300 when im home in the evenings, and i found a traffic net on 40m that runs on weekday mornings which is cool to listen to even when i dont check in. but i feel like im missing a lot of stuff out there. like i know there are special event stations that pop up and i always seem to find out about them after the fact, which is annoying. is there a good place to keep track of net schedules and special event stuff? ive been using the ARRL website a little but it feels like theres so much going on and i cant figure out where to look. also if anyone has nets they really like or recommend for a general class who just got his ticket about 8 months ago id love to hear about it. doesnt have to be anything fancy, i just like having a reason to get on the air regularly

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general) and just got into chasing DX more seriously the last couple weeks. a buddy at my club mentioned DXwatch and i've been poking around on it but honestly im a little confused about how all the cluster stuff actually works together. like is DXwatch pulling from the same spots as the DX cluster you connect to through logging software or are they totally separate networks? i also have a QRZ account and i see they have spots on there too. are people manually entering those or is that also fed from the cluster network somehow. i dont want to be double-entering spots or missing something obvious that everyone else already knows about. my logging software is Log4OM if that matters, i have it pulling spots from a telnet cluster but then i have DXwatch open in a browser at the same time and sometimes the spots are different or show up at different times which is what got me wondering about all this in the first place

dont sleep on having some kind of portable mast situation. i used to just throw my antenna up in whatever tree was nearby but there have been deployments where there just wasnt a good tree, like a school parking lot or a community center with a big flat lot around it. i ended up getting one of those telescoping fiberglass masts, nothing fancy, and it changed things a lot. fits in the kit fine. also the Baofeng is fine for a backup but yeah if the V71A fits in your budget its worth it especially if your local ARES net uses any tones or does any kind of linked repeater stuff, the Baofeng memory management is kind of a nightmare to deal with in the field. just my two cents anyway.

dont sweat it too much. i've been doing ARES stuff for like 12 years and i still double check my notes before a net. the ICS training you did is honestly more than a lot of people show up with. just listen more than you talk and youll be alright. if you miss something or fumble a transmission just say say again or ask net control to repeat, nobody cares, thats what the protocol is there for.

congrats on taking the plunge, first activation is always the most nerve wracking and then you get back to the car and immediately start planning the next one lol. a couple things i wish someone had told me early on -- double check that your summit reference is actually in the SOTA database and that you know the activation zone boundaries before you go. some peaks the zone is smaller than you'd think and if you set up just outside it the contacts dont count. also bring way more coax than you think you need, finding a good tree or using your trekking poles to get the antenna up always takes more cable than it looks on paper. the spot thing is good, just know that sometimes sotawatch is being weird or you wont have data at the summit, so it helps to post an alert the night before on the sota mapping page so chasers are already watching for you. 40m in the morning should be fantastic for regional contacts and then flip to 20m if you want to try for some dx. honestly with a KX2 and a decent dipole you are way better equipped than a lot of people doing their first one. have fun with it

Your 2m setup looks marginal but workable with Q65. The dual Yagi array gives you about 16dBi gain which combined with 400W should get you into the game. Make sure your preamp has good dynamic range - EME requires excellent weak signal performance without overload from nearby strong signals.

yeah there is a pretty standard list, the Q codes originally came from maritime and commercial telegraphy way back before ham radio was even really a thing, and they got adopted because they work across language barriers since most operators internationally would recognize them. the main ones youll hear constantly are QTH for location, QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is static/natural noise, QSB means the signal is fading, QSL is acknowledgment or confirming a contact, and QRZ means who is calling me basically. there are a ton of them officially but in practice most hams only use maybe a dozen or so regularly. the ARRL website has a full list if you want to go down that rabbit hole. as for 73 thats best regards, been used forever, and 88 means love and kisses which you mostly hear guys sending to their wives or significant others on the radio. some people think 88 is kinda cheesy but its been around forever so whatever. and yeah you are right that on digital modes like FT8 nobody really talks at all so you dont hear much of it there, but on SSB and especially CW the old timers use it all the time and it does make conversations faster once you know what everything means

13 wpm is totally fine, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. honestly the mushy sound is almost certainly the paddle tension and gap rather than the keyer weight settings. when i first started i had the gap way too wide and kept getting doubling on the dits. try closing the gap down a tiny bit at a time until the contacts feel snappy, not sloppy. the MFJ keyers have a little bit of a learning curve on the weight setting but i'd honestly leave that at default for now and just focus on getting the paddle feel right. squeeze keying takes muscle memory and thats not gonna happen overnight so just be patient with yourself. G4FON is great for receiving, i'd also recommend just tuning around 40m around 7.050 or so and just listening to actual QSOs even if you cant copy everything yet. your brain starts picking up patterns without you even realizing it.

this is making me want to push our club to actually do one of these. we talk about it every few months at meetings but it never seems to happen. how did you get the EOC to participate — was that hard to arrange or did they kind of reach out to you first?

yeah a 7 element on 70cm will absolutely make a difference over an omni at 40 miles, youre talking maybe 10-11 dBd of gain vs whatever the X50 gives you on 440 which i think is like 6.5 dBi or somewhere in that neighborhood. so youre picking up real signal, not just a couple db. the question is whether the path is actually workable at all — if theres a ridge in the way no amount of antenna is going to fix that. the dual feedline and coax switch approach is the right call if you want to keep the omni for local stuff. i ran a similar setup for a while with an M2 on 70cm and a vertical for 2m, had a cheap relay switch box and it worked fine. just keep the feedlines short and use decent coax, LMR400 or equivalent, because 70cm really punishes you on loss especially if the run is long.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i mostly do HF, some 40m and 20m. when i first got my ticket i kind of drilled the phonetic alphabet thinking it was like required by law or FCC rules or something. but then i got on the air and heard people saying all kinds of random stuff like "S for sugar" or "N for Nancy" and some guy the other day said "W for Whiskey... or Washington, take your pick" which made me laugh but also confused me a bit. so whats the actual deal? is NATO phonetics required or is it just the standard that everyone kind of agrees to use? i dont want to be correcting people on the air or anything i just want to understand what im actually supposed to be doing when i give my callsign

so ive been noticing 10m and 12m doing some really strange things this past week or so. like monday evening i worked a JA station on 10m with a dipole and maybe 50 watts, pretty solid copy, and then tuesday the same band was completely dead, couldn't even hear the beacon network. checked my antenna thinking something came loose but everything looked fine. been watching the solar flux numbers on spaceweather.com and they were sitting around 180-something last week and now its dropped back down to like 145 or so. does that kind of drop actually happen that fast? i guess i always assumed solar flux kind of drifted slowly but maybe not. also there was some geomagnetic activity a few days ago, kp index got up to 5 or 6 which i know isnt great for HF but i thought that mostly messed with 40 and 80 more than 10. anyway if anyone has been watching conditions lately and has thoughts id appreciate it. im relatively new to actually paying attention to this stuff, been licensed about 3 years but mostly done local stuff until recently getting the itch for DX.

What ferrite material did you use for the choke? I was advised to use Grade 31 ferrite for VHF and found that one was sufficient during testing. The SWR improvement was modest but noticeable on my 5-element beam.

so i passed my technician exam last tuesday and got my callsign friday. spent the weekend just listening on the local repeater and honestly was too nervous to key up for like two days. finally just did it saturday afternoon, said my callsign and someone came back to me within like 30 seconds. guy named Ron, KD9 something, super friendly, we talked for maybe 10 minutes about nothing really, just the weather and what radio i was using. i have a baofeng uv-5r which i know everyone has opinions about but it was $25 and it works so whatever. anyway just wanted to say hi to the forum, been lurking here for a few months while i was studying. still figuring out how everything works but its way more fun than i expected once you actually get on the air

The most common usage for this Q-signal is to ask if a frequency is in use before beginning to call CQ or another station. Send "QRL?" before calling CQ - it's good etiquette. If someone responds with "QRL" or just "C" then the frequency is busy. This was my first Q-code lesson as a new CW op!

so ive been trying to get Winlink working for a few weeks now and i think i finally understand most of it but the gateway stuff is still kind of confusing me. basically i set up Winlink Express on my laptop, got it talking to my IC-7300 through a SignaLink USB, and i can see the waterfall in Vara HF and it looks fine. the problem is when i try to actually connect to an RMS gateway it either times out or i get a partial session and then it drops. i checked the gateway list and im targeting ones that show green or recently active, and im in the midwest so there should be decent propagation to at least a few of them. tried 20m and 40m at different times of day. sometimes the handshake starts and i can see VARA doing its thing but then it just falls apart maybe 30 seconds in. the message i was trying to send is pretty small, just a test message to my own callsign basically. is this a common thing when youre first starting out or am i missing something in the configuration. also not totally sure if my RMS hybrid settings are set right, i kind of just left those at default. any ideas would be appreciated, been banging my head on this for a while now.

yeah what he said about the preamp is true, i was running a single 11el M2 yagi with a SSB Electronics preamp and worked a couple stations in Europe on JT65B, took forever and i had to catch them at just the right moon window but it happened. that said i was pretty miserable with the contact rate until i added a second yagi and got a Lunar Link amp. the kW really does open things up. i think the honest answer is minimum viable for regular contacts is probably 2x yagis stacked and 500w+, below that you're relying heavily on the other station having a massive array which limits who you can work. also dont sleep on polarity — horizontal vs vertical and cross-pol losses will bite you if youre not thinking about it, the moon rotates the polarization and some guys run circular pol arrays for that reason

Make sure you have 'CI-V transceive' enabled in your TRX settings and consider implementing a state machine for collision protection. I've seen bus conflicts cause exactly the symptoms you describe.

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