Betty Johnson

i use an app called Ham Radio Deluxe on the laptop which has cluster integration built in and its been pretty solid for me, but i know not everybody wants to go that route. on the phone i tried a couple different ones and they were kinda meh honestly. the DX Toolkit one you mentioned is ok for just checking whats active but i dont think it does much filtering. one thing that actually helped me was joining a local club and they had a net specifically for passing along good DX spots verbally which sounds old school but you get context you dont get from a cluster, like someone saying the signal is weak but workable vs just seeing a spot with no comments

went through this exact thing last year, the AE7Q site the other guy mentioned is seriously the move, I spent like an hour on there just browsing available calls in the 4 district before I even started my application. ended up with my second choice which I was totally fine with one thing nobody told me ahead of time — make sure your FRN account info in the FCC system is all correct before you file because I had an old address in there and it caused a weird delay. probably wouldnt have been a big deal but it stressed me out at the time. good luck with it, getting a call that actually means something to you is pretty satisfying

QRZ is another one that trips people up, it means whos calling me or sometimes people use it at the end of a pileup call to mean next caller go ahead. technically the correct use is whos calling but youll hear it both ways and nobody really corrects anyone anymore lol honestly just hang out on a net for a few weeks and youll absorb like 90 percent of the common ones without even trying

honestly dont stress about it too much. the general exam isnt that bad if you already passed your tech, youve seen a lot of the format before. i used hamstudy.org and just drilled questions every day for maybe 3 weeks, like 20-30 minutes while eating lunch or whatever. the math stuff looks scary but theres really only a handful of actual calculation questions and if you understand the concept behind ohms law and a little about decibels you can usually work through them. the propagation section was actually interesting to me once i started reading about it, like why 40m works great at night and 10m can be dead for months then suddenly open up. give yourself 4-6 weeks of casual studying and you should be fine. the hardest part for most people is just committing to actually sitting down and doing it

yeah that plateau feeling is totally normal, i hit the same wall around the same speed. what helped me was honestly just slowing way down for a few weeks, like uncomfortably slow, and focusing on clean spacing between characters rather than speed. the rhythm has to get into your muscle memory before your brain can relax enough to string together a real QSO. also — and this might sound weird — try sending while you're doing something else like watching TV or just sitting outside. when you stop consciously thinking about each element the sending gets smoother. my elmer called it "getting out of your own way" and i thought he was being corny but he was right. the pileup freeze is a whole separate problem, thats more about operating confidence than keying mechanics. start with some of the slower CW nets to get comfortable sending in a real QSO without pressure. SKCC has some real relaxed on-air activity if you havent checked that out.

so ive been licensed about 3 years now and mostly just done local stuff and some casual HF but lately ive been getting really into DXing and i think i want to actually go for DXCC properly. i've probably worked like 60-70 entities already just messing around but never submitted anything to ARRL or bothered with LoTW much. my question is basically... do i need to have confirmed all those contacts to count them, or is just working them enough to get started tracking? and is there any point in trying to get QSLs from the older contacts or should i just start fresh from here and be more systematic about it going forward. also im confused about whether WAS and WAZ count as totally separate awards you chase at the same time or if most people do one then the other. sorry if these are obvious questions, the ARRL website is kind of overwhelming when you dig into the rules

the 890 guy isnt wrong about the roofing filters, that radio is seriously clean in a crowded band. i had a 7300 before i got my 890S and the difference on 40m during a contest is noticeable. that said the Icom panadapter implementation is smoother to use day to day, the Kenwood waterfall is functional but its not as snappy. if youre not doing serious SO2R stuff i honestly dont know if the 7610 dual watch justifies what theyre asking for it used right now. flex is its own world, great radio but yeah you kind of have to commit to the ecosystem, my buddy spent two weekends just getting his audio routing sorted before he could work a pileup comfortably.

so ive been trying to work AO-73 for a few weeks now and i keep hearing my own downlink but nobody responds and i cant figure out if its my doppler correction thats off or if im just not loud enough on the uplink. running about 5w into a handheld yagi on the 435 uplink and listening on 145 with a separate whip which is probably the problem honestly. the thing that confuses me is the linear transponder is inverting right, so when i tune up on the uplink my signal goes down on the downlink. i get that part. but im using gpredict to track and sometimes the footprint shows me well within range but i still cant hear anything on the downlink at all — not even the beacon. wondering if the satellite is maybe in eclipse or something or if my timing is just off. passes here are short, maybe 8-9 minutes on a good one at maybe 30 degrees max elevation which doesnt help. anyone worked this bird with a modest setup and had luck, or is this one of those satellites where you really need proper crossed yagis to get anywhere

i went through this exact same thing last year. ended up putting up a homebrew vertical on a painters pole in the corner of the yard, about 33 feet of wire with 4 elevated radials at maybe 8 feet. compared to my inverted V which had similar height issues as yours... honestly the vertical felt a bit better for DX but worse for regional stuff which is basically what the books say would happen so not a huge revelation lol. neighbors havent said anything and the HOA hasnt noticed so theres that at least.

so ive been messing around with this idea for a while now and finally started putting something together. basically i want the raspberry pi zero w to pull data from my FT-991A over USB, parse the CAT commands, and automatically log contacts into a sqlite database without me having to touch a keyboard mid-QSO. the rig control part is mostly working using rigctld but im running into issues where it just drops the connection randomly after like 20 minutes or so. not sure if its a USB power issue with the zero or something in my hamlib config. ive also got an arduino nano sitting on the desk that im thinking of wiring up to handle the keyer side of things since i do mostly CW and i dont really want to bog down the pi with that too. the plan is to have them talk over serial but honestly im not 100% sure how to structure that yet. has anyone done something similar or am i overcomplicating this whole thing

so i just passed my technician exam last week (finally lol) and now im trying to figure out what handheld to get. everyone keeps telling me different things and im just going in circles at this point. some guys at the club said get a baofeng to start since its cheap and if i break it no big deal, but then someone else said i should just save up and get a yaesu or kenwood from the start because the baofengs are junk and ill regret it. i really dont know who to listen to here. my main use would be local repeaters, maybe some simplex at club events, and i heard you can do APRS with some of them which sounds really cool even though i dont fully understand it yet. budget is probably around 100-150 bucks but i could stretch a bit if it really makes sense to. anyone have thoughts? been looking at the yaesu ft-65 and also the wouxun kg-uv9g but honestly have no idea what separates them in real world use

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. i looked it up online and found out you need a license but theres like three different levels? im not sure which one to go for first or if i even need to know morse code still. a friend told me theres an app to study but i cant remember which one he said. basically i just want to know the process for getting started, like do i have to go somewhere to take a test or can i do it online now. any help appreciated, im pretty clueless about all this

i did my first EME contact about two years ago on 2m, was using a single M2 2MXP28 yagi and a 500w amp, preamp was an ATF531P8 based unit mounted right at the boom. honestly the hardest part wasnt the RF side it was getting the antenna on an az/el mount that could actually track the moon accurately enough. if your elevation rotor has any slop in it youre gonna lose a lot of signal right at moonrise and moonset which is actually when the path is sometimes more favorable depending on geometry. JT65B is pretty much the mode unless youre building a serious array. i made maybe 40 contacts that first year running that setup, mix of European and US stations, even got JA once which i was pretty stoked about. the EME2 software or just watching the ON4KST chat is almost essential for coordinating skeds especially when youre getting started because random CQ on EME can feel like shouting into a void until you build up some contacts who know your call.

Not a dumb question at all, honestly the whole awards ecosystem is a bit confusing at first. So DXCC, WAS and WAZ are completely separate programs run by different organizations — DXCC and WAS are ARRL programs, WAZ is CQ magazine. But yeah contacts can absolutely count toward multiple things at the same time, same QSO can get you credit on all three if it qualifies for each. For basic DXCC you need 100 confirmed contacts with 100 different DXCC entities, and at the entry level it doesnt matter what band or mode. Once you have that basic award you can then go after endorsements — like mixed, phone, CW, digital, and then per-band awards which is where it gets really addicting. A contact on 20m CW with say ZL counts separately from the same entity on 40m SSB for band/mode endorsements even though its the same country. LoTW is absolutely the way to go now. Most serious DXpedition operators upload to LoTW pretty quickly after they get home and it saves you a ton of hassle with paper cards. That said some rare entities only confirm via direct QSL so dont delete your card collection or anything. Get your log uploaded to LoTW and then cross-reference against the DXCC entity list — you might be surprised how many you already have sitting in there.

so i passed my technician exam last tuesday and spent the whole week trying to figure out my baofeng and programming cables and chirp and all that stuff. finally got on 2m last night and keyed up on the local repeater. completely blanked on my callsign for like 3 seconds which felt like forever, said my call wrong once, then someone came back to me and i had no idea what to do next. the guy was super patient though and we talked for maybe 5 minutes about nothing really, just signal reports and weather. i was sweating the whole time. anyway just wanted to share because this forum helped me study and i figured id post here now that im actually licensed. KD9 something something, you'll see me around

oh man SOTA and contesting are such different worlds right, i do both and sometimes i forget which mode im in haha. i was on a summit last spring during the start of a major contest weekend and the bands were just wall to wall signals, made it really hard to get my activator QSOs because everyone was running contest exchanges and got confused when i called CQ SOTA. still got the activation but it took way longer than usual. congrats on the first contest though, 380 is nothing to sneeze at with a simple antenna setup. what logging software were you using? i keep going back and forth between n1mm and log4om for contests, n1mm is probably more standard for contesting but i just never took the time to really learn it properly.

yeah the "always use them to build habit" advice is solid but honestly in practice nobody does that on a clear local repeater. youll sound a bit robotic. most people just say their call sign normally and phonetics come out when theres any doubt or someone asks you to say again. the NATO ones are technically the standard — alfa, bravo, charlie all the way through — and they were specifically chosen because they work across different languages and accents which is the whole point. so november is correct and nancy is old school, probably a guy who learned back when there were a few different systems floating around. the old ARRL phonetics used names like that. its not wrong exactly but NATO is what everyone expects now and mixing them mid QSO is definitely a little weird on HF just use NATO every time for your call, no question. on a local FM repeater do what feels natural but knowing the NATO set cold means you never hesitate when you actually need them

the America Boston thing drives me a little crazy not gonna lie, i know its not worth getting worked up over but when im in a busy contest or a pileup and someone throws out a weird phonetic i have to actually stop and parse it instead of it just clicking automatically. thats kind of the whole point of having a standard set right for your question about when to use them, i basically default to always using them for my callsign the first time i say it in any exchange and then judge from there depending on how clean the copy is

the serial dropout thing is almost definitely a USB power issue on the zero, those things are notoriously fussy about current especially if youre running wifi at the same time. try adding a small powered hub or just tape a 100uf cap across the 5v rail on the adapter and see if that helps. also worth wrapping your pyserial reads in a try/except and having it automatically re-open the port — i do something like that for my IC-7300 and it just silently reconnects in like half a second, barely noticeable. for what youre describing the zero will probably struggle once you start adding the cluster parsing on top of everything else. i moved to a pi 3B+ for my logging stuff and it just feels more comfortable, not maxing out the cpu all the time. the zero is fine for like one focused task but juggling serial, wifi, a database write loop and then eventually http requests to pull spot data is going to start getting messy.

Got my Tech license a few weeks ago and picked up a Baofeng UV-5R to get started. I can hear my local repeater crystal clear - 146.82 with a minus offset. But when I try to transmit, nothing happens - the repeater doesn't key up at all. Am I missing something obvious here? I've triple checked the frequencies and offset. Maybe it's the PL tone? The repeater directory shows 110.9 Hz but I'm not sure how to set that on this radio. Any help would be appreciated - feeling pretty dumb right about now!

Your modeling aligns with my practical experience. I've run both configurations at my QTH and the vertical dipole consistently shows better signal reports. The elimination of ground loss is significant, especially on poor soil.

yeah done almost exactly this with a 7300 and an uno a couple years back. the CI-V decoding is pretty straightforward once you get the baud rate sorted, there's libraries that handle most of the heavy lifting. for the relays i just used a cheap 8-channel 5v relay board from amazon, nothing fancy, and it's been rock solid. the RF doesnt go anywhere near the arduino like you said so interference hasnt been a problem. one thing i did learn the hard way — put a flyback diode across each relay coil if you're driving them directly from arduino pins, found that out after i fried a pin on my first uno. the relay boards usually have them built in but worth checking. as for pi zero vs arduino, honestly for just switching i think the arduino is the right call. simpler, boots instantly, doesnt need an OS to babysit. i use a pi 4 for logging and rig control software but the switching is all arduino. keeps things modular too if something breaks

Great checklist! I'd add "Monitor before transmitting" - even if you're in the right segment, listen first to avoid QRMing ongoing QSOs. Also keep current band plans handy since there may be updates to the ARRL Band Plan in 2024 to improve efficiency and reduce interference.

so i've been licensed about 6 years now and for probably the first 4 of those i just couldn't break pileups to save my life. like i'd hear a rare one, get excited, throw my call in maybe a dozen times and then just give up and go do something else. figured it was always the guys with the big linears and stacked yagis that got through and there was nothing i could do with my 100w and a trapped vertical. anyway a buddy of mine who's worked almost every entity on the list sat down with me during the 3Y0J operation a while back and basically watched me operate for like 20 minutes before pointing out everything i was doing wrong. turns out i was transmitting on the DX's transmit frequency like an idiot, not listening for where they were actually coming back, tail-ending when i shouldnt have been, and my timing was completely off. also apparently i was calling way too long — he said two calls max and then listen, and i was going like 5-6 times before shutting up. since then ive been working split properly, really listening hard for the DX's pattern before jumping in, trying to send just my suffix when the pileup is really thick, and my hit rate has gone way up even with modest power. worked a couple legit rare ones this past season that i never would have gotten before. curious what other techniques people use, especially for the really brutal ones where it feels like a wall of noise

im in kind of the same boat so following this thread. i looked at the extra question pool last month and closed the tab pretty fast lol. the impedance matching stuff and all the oscillator circuit questions felt like engineering school