John Williams99

yeah that adjustment period is real and honestly pretty normal. when i went from a straight key to iambic it took me probably two or three weeks before things felt automatic again. the Begali is a much lighter touch than most budget paddles so your hands are probably still squeezing too hard out of habit, which messes with the timing especially on squeeze keying. one thing that helped me was dropping way back — like 12 or 13 wpm — and just running the alphabet over and over until the new paddle felt like an extension of my hand. not glamorous but it works. also check if you're doing mode A or mode B iambic on your K3, some people find one feels more natural depending on how they learned. the weight setting being off can definately cause the runon dits you're describing so sounds like you already found part of the issue there.

i tried js8call for like a month last winter and couldnt really get into it tbh. the interface felt clunky to me and i never quite knew when someone was done transmitting vs still going. maybe i just didnt spend enough time with it. went back to ft8 and ft4 mostly. ft4 doesnt get enough love by the way, faster exchange than ft8 and the decoding is still really solid even when signals are rough, i use it a lot during contests when the pileups on ft8 get stupid slow.

so i finally got activated for a real event last weekend, our county ARES group got called in to support the local marathon and i was pretty nervous going in. ive only been licensed about 8 months and done maybe 3 or 4 training nets but this was the actual thing with served agencies and everything. it went fine overall but man there were a few moments where i felt totally lost. like when the EC asked me to move to the shadow frequency i had to ask him to repeat and i could tell a couple of the more experienced guys were a bit impatient. nobody was rude or anything just... i could tell. also the ICS stuff, i understood the basics from the IS-100 course but in practice trying to figure out the actual chain of command on the fly while also monitoring traffic was more than i expected. anyway curious if anyone else felt like this the first time and whether it gets easier. also wondering how long it typically takes before you feel like you actually know what youre doing at one of these. still really glad i did it though, learned more in those 6 hours than in months of just doing nets.

Be sure to say exactly what you mean. THINK BEFORE YOU SPEAK! Write down your format beforehand - opening, check-ins, closing. Most folks are very understanding of new NCS operators. We've all been there!

same boat as you were like a year ago haha. what finally clicked for me was realizing theyre kind of serving different communities even though theres overlap. i use Log4OM and it pushes to LoTW and eQSL at the same time which is nice. the physical cards i only send when someone requests direct or if i worked someone on a really memorable qso, i designed my own card on vistaprint for like 30 bucks for 500 cards and its been totally worth it just for the fun of it. the bureau thing at the ARRL is worth joining if youre going to be active for a while, incoming cards are basically free and you just get a random envelope of cards every few months which is kinda fun actually

yeah i did the mars mod on mine about a year ago, same experience, no big deal. one thing i'll say is make sure you documented which jumper you moved because i almost forgot and had a mild panic moment when i was thinking about sending it in for the display issue i had later. icom service would have flagged it immediately. for the noise problem honestly have you tried a bandpass filter on the input? i know its not a rig mod exactly but i threw a 40m BPF in line when i was having similar issues from some switching supply in my own shack and it cleaned things up more than anything i did in the menu settings. just a thought.

oh man i didnt even know there was a swap meet component, i thought it was just the main vendor floor. this would be my first Dayton if i go, is it worth the drive from like 3 hours out

i tried Log4OM for contesting for about three weekends and gave up honestly. its a solid program and the interface is nicer looking than N1MM thats for sure, but N1MM is just so dialed in for contest operating that switching felt like trying to drive with the wrong hand. the function key macros, the way it handles dupes, S&P vs run mode switching — its all muscle memory at this point and Log4OM just doesnt feel the same even after you get it configured keep Log4OM for your everyday logging and DX chasing, thats where it shines. just export from N1MM after each contest and import it over, takes maybe five minutes and then your master log stays clean in Log4OM. thats what i do anyway

ive been eyeing the 7300 for a while but keep talking myself out of it cause my 7200 still works fine. how does the receiver hold up on 40m at night when its crowded, thats always where i feel like my setup falls apart with strong adjacent signals

the generator noise thing is almost always coming in through the power line not radiated — at least in my experience with inverter gens. i had the same issue with a yamaha ef2000is and adding a common mode choke on the DC feed between the power supply and the radio killed like 90% of it. just wound the coax or DC cable through a big mix31 toroid a few turns and that was basically that. also worth making sure your power supply ground and your antenna system ground are actually bonded together, that caught me out for way longer than i want to admit. on the charge question — running the EU2200 through a quality power supply into the lifepo4 is fine but watch what voltage the supply is putting out. a lot of the cheap 13.8v supplies wont fully charge a lifepo4 since those like to see more like 14.4-14.6v to hit full capacity. if you have a proper lifepo4 charger just use that off the AC side of the genny and keep the radio running off the battery, simpler and the radio never sees genny noise at all.

so ive been licensed for about 8 years now mostly doing HF stuff, some 2m weak signal when conditions are good, but ive always been kind of obsessed with the idea of bouncing signals off the moon. like the concept just blows my mind every time i think about it. anyway i finally have a yard situation where i could put up a decent array and im trying to figure out what the bare minimum realistic setup looks like for actually making contacts, not just hearing signals. from what ive read it seems like 2m EME is the most common entry point, and a lot of people are doing JT65 now which supposedly makes it way more accessible than the old days. i have an IC-9700 already so the radio side might be okay? but the antenna situation is really where im lost. ive seen people running 4 yagis, 8 yagis, single big yagis, and i honestly cant tell what the minimum viable setup looks like. also no idea what power levels are realistic, i could maybe do a kilowatt amplifier if it actually matters. anyone here actually doing EME regularly? would love to hear what your station looks like and what the first contact was like

the thing that got me the first time i deployed was not having a way to charge the battery if the situation went on longer than expected. you've got a 40ah pack which is solid, but if you're running HF for a few days that goes fast. a small folding solar panel takes up almost no room and has saved me more than once. even a 50 watt panel folded up in a bag is enough to keep you topped off during daylight. also — and this sounds dumb but trust me — bring more pens and notepads than you think you need. like way more. ICS forms, message traffic logs, random notes to yourself. you will go through them faster than you expect especially if you end up supporting an actual served agency and their paperwork needs. i've shown up with what i thought was plenty and been scrounging paper from a church secretary by day two. your kit actually sounds pretty well thought out honestly, the dipole is smart, a lot of guys show up with just an HT and wonder why they cant reach anybody useful.

I've been using my Baofeng BF-F8HP for about six months now, mostly programming frequencies manually through the keypad. It's getting tedious, especially when I want to update CTCSS tones or add new repeaters I discover. For those using programming software: What's your typical workflow? Do you use CHIRP, manufacturer software, or something else? How often do you reprogram your radio, and is the time investment in learning the software worth it? I'm particularly curious about the zone features in newer Baofeng models - seems like it could make navigation much easier than scrolling through a long list of channels.

the latency spikes with wireguard over residential internet are almost always a QoS issue on one end or the other. if youre going through a standard cable or fiber modem/router the upstream is usually the bottleneck and when something else on the network decides to upload a backup or whatever it just murders your audio. worth looking at whether you can enable QoS on the router at the shack end and prioritize UDP traffic to the wireguard port. made a huge difference for me. on the RemoteHams side specifically theres a jitter buffer setting in RCForb that i had set too aggressively low for a while thinking it would help with latency but it actually made the spikes worse because it had no headroom. bumping it up a little smoothed things out considerably even if nominal latency went up slightly. 200ms steady beats 150ms that randomly blows up to 500. as for mixing it with echolink or allstar, yeah people do that, but id honestly keep them as separate logical paths. trying to route HF audio through an allstar node introduces its own codec artifacts and the latency stacks. echolink especially tends to add another 200ms+ depending on the node. if you just want to monitor a local repeater while working HF just get a cheap baofeng running on battery at the shack and point a microphone at it, not joking

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the ice storm last month knocked out power for four days in my neighborhood i finally stopped procrastinating and started actually building a real go-kit instead of just mentally planning one right now i have my FT-857D, a 40ah LiFePO4 battery, a SignaLink for digital, some coax and a buddistick, and im throwing in a binder with laminated frequency sheets for all the local repeaters and simplex channels plus ARES activation info. also a small DC distribution block so i can run multiple things off the battery without a rats nest of wires. thing is i keep second-guessing myself on what else to include without the kit becoming too heavy to actually take anywhere. im not trying to build a go-box for a fixed site deployment, more like something i can throw in my car and operate from pretty much anywhere on short notice. does anyone have stuff in their kit they were really glad they had during an actual activation, or things they thought they needed but ended up never touching

I've been wrestling with my Mobilinkd TNC3 connected to a Yaesu FT-60R for the past week and can't get the audio levels right. I start with TX AUDIO at minimum, slowly increase while monitoring signal strength until it stops increasing, then back off slightly, but I'm still getting decode errors on the other end. My beacons show up on APRS-IS intermittently, suggesting the audio chain isn't optimized. Anyone have experience with this specific radio/TNC combination? Should I be using the mic jack or the dedicated TNC port?

so ive been using Log4OM for general logging for about two years now and i really like it for day to day stuff, the cloudlog sync works great and the DX cluster integration is solid. but every time contest season rolls around i end up switching back to N1MM and it feels like i lose half my brain trying to remember where everything is again. the thing is i tried setting up WSJT-X to feed into Log4OM during the ARRL DX contest last month and it was a mess. like the QSOs were coming in fine through the UDP broadcast but dupe checking was just not keeping up, or at least i dont think it was — maybe i had something misconfigured. ended up missing a few obvious dupes and then had to clean up the log afterward which is not fun. N1MM handles the WSJT-X stuff fine obviously, FT8 QSOs just pop in and the dupe checking is instant, but the interface outside of contest mode feels so clunky for anything else. does anyone run Log4OM through serious contests and actually trust it or is N1MM just the answer here and i should stop fighting it

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech) and just got my first HT, a Baofeng UV-5R, and i've been trying to get into the local 2m repeater. the repeater directory shows it as 146.820 with a minus offset and the CTCSS tone listed is 100.0 Hz. i programmed it in but half the time it seems like nobody responds when i call and other times i can hear people talking fine but they cant hear me or something? not sure if im even hitting the repeater at all. also someone on there the other night said i should wait for a pause before transmitting and i kind of knew that but i guess i was jumping in too fast. is there like an unwritten rule about how long you wait? feels awkward just sitting there in silence before saying your callsign. any help appreciated, pretty new to all this and dont want to step on anyone

the generator vs battery thing really comes down to how much you want to haul and whether the site has noise issues. i ran a eu2000i for years and yeah the RFI is manageable with a good line filter but you still get some hash on 40m if conditions are marginal. switched to a 100ah lithium setup with a 200w solar panel on a fold-out stand and honestly for most single-day exercises it works fine unless were doing a lot of transmitting back to back. on the antenna question — ive used the MPAS Lite a bunch and 40m is totally workable but you really need to lay out at least 4 or 5 radials even if theyre short, like 16 feet each. in a gravel lot i just tape them down with whatever i have. without radials the feedpoint impedance goes weird and the tuner in the 7300 can usually find a match but efficiency tanks. for traffic nets where youre not trying to work dx its usually fine though, especially if the other end has a decent antenna. whats your expected comms distance for the exercise? if its mostly intra-county stuff you might be fine on 2m simplex or a local repeater and not even need HF pushing hard, which changes the power equation a lot.

honestly both are solid radios and you cant really go wrong, but since you said your main thing is HF and you already mentioned 40/20 SSB, id lean toward the 7300. the receiver really is noticeably better in crowded band conditions, not just a spec sheet thing. ive used both and the difference on a busy 40m evening is real. the waterfall alone will teach you more about propagation in your first year than almost anything else. the 991A is great if you genuinely need that VHF/UHF capability now, but if you've got a handheld or plan to get one separately, its kind of redundant. the 7300 is just a more focused radio and it shows. also the menus on the 991A drove me slightly insane at first, though you get used to it.

i dont do many contests but i had the same WSJT-X integration question a while back. the UDP logging works but i remeber reading somewhere that for FT8 sprint type contests N1MM doesnt always decode the exchange fields correctly from the WSJT-X UDP messages and you end up having to hand edit some QSOs. might have been fixed by now, that was maybe 18 months ago i read that thread on the N1MM reflector personally i just kept everything in Log4OM and accepted that my contest scores werent optimized, but im not exactly trying to win anything so it doesnt bother me much

so i've only had my ticket for about 4 months and i finally worked up the nerve to check in to our local 2m net last night. i've been listening for weeks just to get a feel for how it works before jumping in. anyway i checked in fine, net control acknowledged me, but then later when they asked if anyone had traffic or announcements i keyed up at kind of a weird time and i think i stepped on somebody. i couldn't really tell because all i heard was a weird scratchy noise and then silence and then net control said something like "please identify" and i wasn't sure if that was directed at me or someone else so i just... didn't say anything. and then the net moved on. i felt terrible about it honestly. should i have keyed up and apologized? is there like a standard thing you're supposed to do when that happens? i also wasn't totally sure about the pause timing — how long do you actually wait before keying up to make sure someone is done talking? i feel like my radio might have a slight delay or something but also i'm probably just impatient. any advice would be appreciated, dont want to be that guy who ruins the net lol

so i was just doing some casual scanning on 10m around 2pm local time yesterday and suddenly i started hearing stations from south america coming in super strong, like s7-s8 on a few of them. i havent really used 10m much since i got my ticket because everyone kept telling me it was dead but wow that was something else i checked pskreporter after and there were spots going everywhere, even some eu stations were making it over here in the midwest. is this normal now? ive been watching the solar flux numbers and they were up around 180 or so this week which i guess is high? i honestly dont fully understand how that all connects to what i was hearing. is there a good way to predict when these openings are going to happen or is it mostly just luck and checking in regularly