John Williams99

honestly the theory stuff looks scarier than it is. i was in the same boat and kind of dreaded the filter and transmission line questions but if you spend a few weeks with the ARRL extra class manual and just grind through the question pool it starts to click. the pool isnt that huge and a lot of questions are testing the same underlying concept in slightly different ways so once you actually understand why the answer is what it is you stop having to memorize as much.
the math isnt calculus or anything, its mostly algebra and knowing a few formulas cold. i used hamstudy.org basically every day for like six weeks and went in feeling pretty solid. took me maybe three months of casual studying total. the cw portions of the bands are genuinely nicer once you have access, less qrm at least in my experience, and the 60m situation alone made it worth it for me since i do a lot of portable ops. just do it, worst case you learn a ton even if you dont pass the first time

so ive been going back and forth on this for a couple months now and figured id just ask. my lot is pretty small, maybe 60 feet wide, and i've got some decent trees but nothing that lines up perfectly for a full half wave dipole on 40. i can get close — maybe 62 or 63 feet of horizontal run if i really stretch it — but one end would be drooping pretty bad because the anchor tree is shorter than i'd like.
the other option i keep coming back to is a vertical. i know they have that low angle radiation thing going for them which sounds great for dx, but everyone keeps telling me ground radials are a whole project in themselves and i rent so i really cant be burying a bunch of wire. was thinking maybe a elevated radial setup with like 4 radials, has anyone done this on 40 specifically and how much of a pain was it to get the feedpoint impedance somewhere usable
mostly interested in working dx when conditions allow but i also ragchew a fair bit regionally so its not purely a dx antenna situation. just want something that actually works and doesn't drive my neighbors crazy

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

so i joined my local ARES group about four months ago and have been going to the monthly nets and training sessions but this weekend theres an actual activation for a county-level flood watch that got upgraded to a warning overnight. my EC called me this morning and asked if i could staff the EOC for a few hours tomorrow and i said yes before i even really thought about what that means
i know the basics, ive done the ICS-100 and ICS-700 online courses and i passed my general last year. but like, what does it actually look like when you show up? do i just bring my HT or do they have equipment at the EOC already? and is there some kind of check-in procedure or does the EC just tell you where to stand? i dont want to look like an idiot showing up not knowing anything
any advice from people who've done real activations would be really appreciated, even just like what to bring in terms of snacks and stuff because i have no idea how long ill be there

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

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.

honestly the frequency issue you described is 100% operator discipline, SO2R wouldnt have saved you there. like if youre leaving a run frequency for 20 minutes chasing mults thats just... thats a rate killer regardless of how many radios you have. the whole point of SO2R is you keep one radio locked on your run freq and use the second radio to work mults during your QSB gaps and turnaround time. you never actually leave the run.
that said setting up SO2R properly is a real project. the RF isolation between the two radios is the thing that bites everyone. i blew a front end on my old FT-1000MP because i thought a bandpass filter was enough and it wasnt, needed proper antenna switching interlock too. if youre on a trapped vertical for one band and the yagi for another you might actually have decent isolation already just by virtue of the antennas being on different bands but youd want to measure it.
for sweepstakes specifically at 100w SO2R probably adds maybe 10-15% to your score if youre disciplined. the bigger gains are usually just from knowing when to run vs S&P and keeping your CQ rate fast. whats your exchange time averaging right now?

so ive been trying to get back into CW after maybe a 15 year break and i picked up a used Bencher paddle and hooked it to my K3 internal keyer and honestly the dits and dahs just sound... off? like not crisp. i know my fist was never great but this sounds worse than i remember. been practicing with the built in sidetone and something about the spacing between characters feels wrong but i cant put my finger on it exactly. been running around 15-16 wpm which is slower than i used to operate but i figured id work back up gradually.
is this a keyer weight setting thing? i messed with the weight adjustment a little but honestly i dont fully understand what that does. or could it be the paddle tension/gap? the paddle feels a little loose maybe, the previous owner might have had it set different from what im used to. just wondering if anyone else went through this kind of re-learning thing and what helped

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

not to pile on but also check where the mic is physically positioned relative to your mouth. i had a similar thing going on and it turned out i was talking directly into the PR-40 head-on at close range and getting a ton of proximity effect pileup on the low end. moved it off to about a 45 degree angle maybe 4-6 inches away and it got way better without even touching the EQ settings. people dont always mention the physical stuff when they talk about SSB audio but it matters a lot with condenser-style mics

Check your HRD linear transponder settings. These satellites receive a specific range of frequencies (typically 40 - 100 kHz) in one band, convert them to another band and amplify the converted signal for transmission back to your planet. The converted signal is inverted - LSB becomes USB etc. - this is known as an inverting transponder. Make sure the inverting option is checked for MO-122.

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