John Anderson78

Consider adding a SignaLink or similar interface for digital modes - Winlink has become really important for emergency messaging. Also pack spare fuses and basic tools. Test everything together before you need it!

What ceramic filter bandwidth are you using? I found 6kHz filters work better than 2.4kHz for SSB work with the MC1350. The narrower filters seemed to make the AGC more sensitive to phase variations.

so ive been licensed since last spring and mostly just done some local ragchewing and a bit of APRS stuff but i keep hearing people talk about contest season and how CQ WW is this huge deal and honestly i dont even know where to begin. like do i need special equipment or can i just jump in with my FT-891 and a wire dipole in the backyard. i dont have a beam or anything fancy. also someone at the club mentioned Field Day isnt technically a contest but then someone else said it kind of is and now im confused about that too. and ive been looking at SOTA a little which seems totally different from contesting but people seem to lump it all together when they talk about operating events. anyway i guess my main question is what would be a good first contest or event to try and is there anything i can do in the next few weeks before CQ WW to sort of practice or get ready. i dont expect to win anything just want to have fun and actually make some contacts instead of just listening

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, been chasing for about 6 months and figured it was time to actually get up on a summit myself. picked W4T/SU-072 because its only like a 2 mile hike and the trail is pretty well marked. brought my KX2 and a 20m EFHW that i've used in the backyard a bunch of times, figured no problem. well. the antenna situation was a disaster. i forgot the actual wire was still sitting on my workbench at home, only had the feedline and the 9:1 unun in my pack. so im standing up there thinking ok what do i do now. ended up just throwing a random length of speaker wire i had in the bottom of my bag over a branch and tuning across like 40 and 20. somehow got 4 contacts including a guy in germany which i still cant believe. logged them in the SOTA spotter app and the alerts went out and people were actually calling me it was kind of wild. my question is does it count even though my setup was basically garbage? i submitted the log and it seems like it went through but i feel like i cheated somehow lol. also the summit reference i used, is SU the right designator for that region or did i mess that up too

tangentially related but if you're doing mods anyway and you haven't replaced the stock mic element you're leaving a lot on the table. i put an electret element in mine and the audio reports went from mediocre to actually good. its a cheap mod, under 5 bucks in parts, and you don't have to touch anything on the radio itself. combined with tweaking the TX EQ in the menu it made a noticeable difference on sideband. just something to consider while you've already got the itch to modify things

yeah that frequency jumping thing sounds familiar. mine was doing that when the pc at the remote site was running low on memory. remotehams can be pretty resource hungry especially if you have other stuff running. might be worth checking task manager next time your at the remote location to see whats eating up cpu cycles

yeah what he said about ALC is the big one. i spent like three weeks convinced my audio was trash before someone finally told me i was overdriving the mic input and the ALC was going crazy trying to compensate. once i got that sorted the difference was pretty immediate. the TX equalizer on that radio is actually pretty decent once you learn it, i boosted a little around 2-3k for presence and rolled off some of the low end because my voice is kind of muddy and it helped a lot with reports on 40m especially.

so i finally passed my tech exam after studying for about 6 weeks and honestly i was kind of terrified to actually key up for the first time. sat there for like 20 minutes just listening to the local repeater before i finally just did it. said my callsign and some guy came back to me right away and we had a solid 10 minute chat, turns out he was in texas running some kind of linked repeater system and could hear me fine. i dont even fully understand how that works yet but it was pretty cool. anyway just wanted to share because i wasnt sure id ever actually work up the nerve to transmit. KD8 something now officially lol

congrats on the first one, 23 contacts at QRP on your first time out is honestly a solid start. the spotting thing trips everyone up at first. yeah you should respot when you move frequencies, the hunters are watching that spot and if you move without updating it youll have people calling on the old freq wondering where you went. some guys respot every 20-30 minutes even if they havent moved just to stay near the top of the list and get a fresh wave of callers. for the pileup etiquette, most activators just work through them one at a time and say QRZ or just their callsign after each QSO. if its a big pileup some people call by region or last letter but for a normal activation just keep it moving and people will wait their turn. the hunters are used to it. the ones who call mid-QSO are kind of breaking the unwritten rules anyway, dont stress about it. 20m can be weird depending on the time of day, i find it really opens up midday but early morning and late afternoon 40m is usually better for regional stuff. good luck on the next one

ok so i finally passed my technician exam last week and now im trying to figure out what handheld to buy. ive been reading forums and watching youtube for like 3 weeks and im more confused now than when i started honestly. everyone says something different. some people say just get a baofeng uv-5r to start and learn on it, other people act like youre committing a crime if you touch one. then theres the yaesu ft-65 and the ft-60 which i keep seeing mentioned but theyre kind of old? and then the wouxun stuff and the anytone d878 which is way more money. i dont even know if i need DMR yet or if i should just start with analog fm. i mostly want to use it for local repeaters and maybe some simplex stuff with a friend who just got licensed too. budget is flexible but i dont want to spend 300 bucks on something i might not even use that much. what would you guys actually recommend for someone just starting out

honestly same boat here not long ago. what helped me was just doing a few passes where I wasnt even trying to make contacts, just listening to the downlink and watching the waterfall in SDR# or whatever to see how the doppler actually looked visually. once you see the curve on a waterfall it kind of makes sense in a way that reading about it doesnt. after that the manual tuning felt way less chaotic. also AO-73 has pretty decent passband strength when the bird is high elevation so if youre really struggling to hear anything on a good pass it might be your yagi pointing, those handheld ones are way more directional than people expect and you lose signal fast if youre even a little off especially near the horizon.

the inverted-V at 35 feet is going to work better than you think for 40m, honestly. the angle isnt perfect but its close enough that youre not losing huge amounts. the main thing people obsess over with inverted-V is the included angle between the legs — try to keep it above 90 degrees if you can, below that and the feedpoint impedance starts doing weird things and your SWR curve flattens out in a bad way. for casual operating and contesting you dont need perfect. ive worked plenty of europe on a 40m inverted-V from a lot not much bigger than yours. the vertical with only a handful of radials is probably going to be noisier too since youre in a city, the dipole tends to be a bit better at rejecting local noise by nature of being balanced. id go dipole, get it up there, and stop worrying about it. you can always mess with the radial system later if youre bored.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, took about 3 hours to get up to W4T/SU-001 which honestly wasnt even that hard of a hike but i was carrying my KX2 plus the end-fed, a small battery, water, food, the whole thing weighed way more than i expected. got up there and realized i hadnt really thought through where to set up the antenna. spent probably 20 minutes just trying to find a decent tree or rock situation to throw the wire over and the wind was not helping. ended up making 7 contacts on 40m which i know is enough to qualify but it felt like pulling teeth. tried 20m for a bit and got two more which was nice. i was running maybe 5 watts. the whole experience was kind of chaotic but also really fun and i definitely want to do it again. just wondering if anyone has tips for the antenna situation specifically, like do you guys pre-rig anything at home or just figure it out on the summit? also is there a better way to alert chasers ahead of time, i posted on SOTAwatch but i dont think i did it right because i barely got any spots.