John Mitchell

Excellent reference! One important note: Never say "many 73s" or "best 73s" - always use them in singular form without additions that make it sound plural. Same goes for 88. It's just "73" and "88" - these combinations are already complete!

honestly dont stress too much about this one, any of those radios will get you on the repeaters and let you start making contacts. that said i do think the baofeng hate is a little overblown for a first radio — yeah the build quality isnt great and programming it without chirp is a nightmare, but plenty of people learned the basics on one and then upgraded once they knew what they actually wanted. its not like youre gonna be doing anything that requires a $300 HT right out of the gate. that said if you can stretch the budget a bit the ft-60r is genuinely a solid radio, tougher than it looks, audio is way clearer on the receive side which matters more than people admit. the vx-6r is nice too but submersible rating and all those extra features might be overkill if youre just hitting local repeaters. dual band is worth having just because a lot of areas have both 2m and 70cm repeaters and youll want the flexibility eventually even if you mostly live on 2m at first. good luck and welcome to the hobby

yeah the listening thing is genuinely the most underrated skill. i've watched guys with kilowatt amplifiers and full size yagis sit in a pileup for an hour because they're just robotically sending their call every 10 seconds regardless of what the DX is doing. meanwhile i've worked stations with 100w and a wire that obviously paid attention to the operating pattern and slipped right through. one thing i'd add is paying attention to what the DX operator is actually doing for flow control. some of them work by region, some work by number, some will call QRZ and then only come back to whoever finishes their call last before the pile collapses for a second. you kinda have to read the rhythm. the really experienced DXpedition operators from groups like WRTC alumni or the big DXpedition clubs have a very deliberate cadence and once you hear it you can time your single call to land in the right window instead of competing with the peak of the pile. also on modest power — honestly 100w is often fine if everything else is right. clean signal, good timing, correct frequency offset. those matter more than a lot of people realize.

so ive been sitting on this idea for a while and finally started messing with it last weekend. basically i have an old prop pitch rotator that works fine mechanically but the controller died years ago and replacements are stupid expensive. figured i could just roll my own controller using an arduino mega and a couple of IBT-2 motor driver boards since those can handle the current. got it mostly working actually, the PID loop is tuning the position feedback from a 10-turn pot geared to the rotator shaft and im reading the voltage with the analog pins. accuracy is pretty decent, maybe plus or minus 2 degrees which is fine for anything above like 50mhz. the part im struggling with is the PC interface. i want to talk to it over serial using the Yaesu GS-232 protocol so it'll just work with existing logging software like N1MM or Ham Radio Deluxe without needing custom drivers or whatever. anyone done this before? i found a few old github repos but most of them are like 5 years old and either abandoned or written by someone who clearly just learned arduino the week before. wondering if theres a cleaner implementation out there or if i should just write it from scratch at this point

$25 seems reasonable if your venue is good. Our club went from $15 to $20 last year and only lost 2-3 vendors. The key is providing good facilities - tables, power, decent lighting, and parking.

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and i keep telling myself im going to get a proper go-kit together and then just... never do it. last week there was a pretty bad storm in our county and the ARES group got activated and i showed up with basically nothing useful — just my HT and a charger. felt kind of embarrassed honestly. so im actually doing it this time. ive got a Yaesu FT-857D that i want to make the main radio for it, thinking i can do HF and VHF/UHF out of one box which seems smart. but i dont even know what container to put everything in, like do people use those Pelican cases or just a rugged plastic tote from hardware store or what. and power is confusing me too — should i start with a LiFePO4 battery or just grab a regular deep cycle AGM for now. the LiFePO4 stuff is expensive but i keep seeing people say it's worth it. also what do people actually use these things for in a real deployment, like are you mostly doing voice nets or is digital stuff like Winlink more common now. genuinely curious what the emcomm folks here are running.

im kind of in the same boat, been at it 6 months and just cracked 10wpm last week finally. what helped me was the G4FON trainer with farnsworth method like the other guy said, and also just getting on the air and making actual contacts even when its terrifying. there's a slow speed net on 80m near me, 5wpm QRS stuff, and hearing a real person send to you is completely different from the computer. you care more so you focus more i guess. also don't practice more than 30 min at a stretch, i read somewhere your brain needs time to consolidate and i think thats actually true. i was doing hour long sessions and it wasnt helping nearly as much as shorter ones spread through the day

yeah i went through the same thing when i first started checking into nets. what helped me was actually listening to a net for a couple weeks before i ever checked in, just to hear how it flowed. every net has its own little culture almost. the Wednesday night one i check into is pretty relaxed, the Sunday morning one is really formal and the NCS runs it by the book. you kind of have to learn each one separately which is a bit annoying but it is what it is.

yeah the drifting issue is super common when you're starting out, dont feel bad about it. what most people figure out eventually is you want to anchor yourself to the downlink, not the uplink. like let the downlink frequency stay fixed in your head and adjust the uplink to chase it. if you set up hamlib right it should be doing most of that work but there's always a little residual error especially near AOS and LOS when the doppler rate is changing fastest. also worth checking your VFO step size. if hamlib is correcting in big jumps it can sound fine on the waterfall but feel choppy. 100hz steps or smaller makes a big difference on a linear bird. AO-73 is pretty forgiving compared to some of the others, so if you're already making contacts on your second pass you're doing better than a lot of people who take weeks to get their first one.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly im not totally sure i understand the difference or which one makes sense to start working toward. i got my general back in april and ive been making contacts on 20m mostly, got a pretty modest station — IC-7300 and a dipole up about 30 feet. so from what i can tell WAS is working all 50 states which seems more achievable than chasing entities all over the world? and DXCC is 100 confirmed entities, WAZ is the 40 zones thing. but i dont really understand how the confirmations work now with LoTW. like do i just upload my log and the credits happen automatically or is there paperwork involved or what. also does it matter what band you submit for or is it all mixed together for the basic award. someone at my local club said to just focus on WAS first since the entities will come naturally as you chase states anyway but i dunno, DX is kind of what got me excited about this hobby in the first place so maybe i should just go after DXCC. anyway any advice from people who have been through this would be great

so i finally did my first activation last weekend on W4T/SU-064, been meaning to do one for like two years and just never got around to it. packed up the KX2 and a random wire, hiked up saturday morning, weather was fine when i left the car well by the time i got to the summit it was getting pretty gusty and i was having a heck of a time getting the antenna up in anything resembling a useful configuration. ended up just kind of draping it over some rocks and honestly expected nothing. fired up on 40m and called CQ SOTA for maybe 10 minutes, nothing. switched to 20m and immediately got three QSOs in like five minutes which i was not expecting at all only made 4 contacts total which i know is the minimum for the activation to count, just barely squeaked by. logged it on sotawatch when i got home and it showed up fine. my question is does anyone else find that 40m is just kind of dead during the day for SOTA or am i doing something wrong with my antenna situation? and also is there some trick to getting chasers to find you, like do i need to be better about posting a spot ahead of time

yeah the 80m thing is always the problem with portable ops, nobody wants to lug around a full size antenna but that's kind of what 80m asks for. i've had decent luck with a shortened loaded vertical for 80 -- not super efficient but gets the job done for close-in nets which is usually what ARES stuff is anyway. you're not trying to work japan, you're trying to hit a repeater or net control 30 miles away. on the power thing, 30w of solar in october or whatever -- what's the weather like where you are? because even a 100w panel barely keeps up with a rig running at moderate power on a cloudy day and a 30w panel in marginal conditions is basically not even worth the hassle of setting it up. i'd honestly just bring the honda. yes it makes noise but so does every other piece of equipment at a real activation site and at least you know you're not going to be scrounging for power at hour 14.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months and just got around to actually building something instead of using the whip on my HT. decided to throw up a basic 40m half wave dipole in the backyard, cut it to length using the 468/f formula, ended up with about 33 feet per side. fed it with 50 ohm coax through a SO-239 connector i salvaged off an old rig. heres where im not sure i did it right — i just twisted the center conductor to one leg and the shield braid to the other, wrapped everything in self-amalgamating tape and called it a day. been using it for a couple weeks and it seems to work, SWR is around 1.8:1 at the bottom of the band which honestly seems fine, but i keep reading about chokes and baluns and now im second guessing myself. do i actually need a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint or is what ive got good enough for general use? not doing contests or anything, just ragchewing and some SSB. the antenna is about 25 feet up inverted-V style with the apex at the top of my fence post and the ends drooping down at maybe 45 degrees.

I've used dual HackRF setups for similar projects - it's doable but requires careful timing coordination in GNU Radio. The BladeRF route is cleaner but more expensive. Have you considered the ADALM-Pluto? ADALM-Pluto is designed as a portable RF lab for students and self-learners and supports full-duplex operation.

so ive been trying to get my APRS setup working for about two weeks now and im starting to wonder if im just doing something fundamentally dumb. running a Mobilinkd TNC3 into my FT-65 on 144.390 and i can hear packets coming through fine on the radio, SDR shows traffic on the freq, but nothing i send ever shows up on aprs.fi. i've got the path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area right? there's a digipeater maybe 8 miles out that i can see on the map picking up other stations. the TNC is synced and i can see it transmitting, the PTT fires, the radio keys up. i even checked the audio levels and they look reasonable in the Mobilinkd app. the only thing i havent ruled out is the deviation being off — maybe the signal is too narrow and the digi just isnt decoding it? or maybe my callsign isnt set right in the config. honestly at this point ive gone through the settings so many times they've all blurred together. anyone dealt with this before? im in a semi-rural area if that matters, Kansas, not super dense digipeater coverage but there should be enough to hit something.

ok so ive been interested in ham radio for like two years now but keep putting off actually doing anything about it. my neighbor has a big antenna setup and got me curious. i guess my question is just... where do you even start? like do i need to study a lot or is the technician test pretty easy to pass if you just look stuff over for a bit. i found some website called hamstudy or something like that but wasnt sure if thats the right resource or if there are better ones. also is there anything that trips people up on the test that i should pay extra attention to

yeah 4 contacts is the minimum so it totally counts, you're in the log. i did my first one about a year ago and had the same antenna panic moment. honestly just getting up there and making it work with what you have is kind of the whole point i think. the antenna stuff gets easier as you figure out what works for you. welcome to the addiction, it gets expensive lol

honestly the General exam isnt that much worse than Tech, like maybe a step up in difficulty but nothing crazy. i did it about two years ago and i'd say the biggest difference is theres more actual theory stuff you need to at least kinda understand — propagation, some extra electrical formulas, operating procedures for HF. but hamstudy works just as well for General, just grind the question pool and youll be fine in a couple weeks. as for what you can do after, its a pretty big jump. you get chunks of 40m, 20m, 15m, 10m and a few others. 20m is probably where you'll spend most of your time at first, its almost always open to somewhere and theres tons of activity. 40m gets good in the evenings especially for domestic stuff. honestly just get the ticket and then figure out the HF radio situation, thats its own rabbit hole

yeah done almost exactly this about two years ago, its totally doable and honestly not that complicated once you wrap your head around the feedback loop. the pot linearity thing is real but in practice if you calibrate at like 4 or 5 known headings and do a simple interpolation in the code its more than good enough for anything except serious weak signal work. i used a 10-turn pot geared down to match the rotation range and it was pretty stable. one thing that bit me early on was the motor coasting past the target when i just cut power, so i added a braking relay that shorts the motor leads momentarily when it gets close to the target heading. works way better than just switching off. took me an afternoon of head scratching to figure out why it kept overshooting by like 15 degrees every time. the GS-232 stuff is actually worth implementing even if you dont need the precision because then you can use it with logging software and things like that down the road. its not that much extra code and you can just add it on top of whatever you build. but yeah for manual use a small OLED and a rotary encoder input is all you really need honestly.

congrats on the first one, those are always fun. so the threshold for a valid activation is 44 QSOs with unique callsigns, yeah. doesnt matter if you run 3 hours or 30 minutes as long as you hit 44. if you only got 38 you can still upload the log and it goes on record but the reference wont show as activated by you until you either go back and top it up or... well you'd have to go back basically. on your question about hunters who are also activating at the same time — yeah those count normally from your end, you just log them like any other contact. the fact that theyre sitting in their own reference doesnt change anything for your log. where it gets interesting is THEY can count the contact as a hunter QSO for their own stats while also getting activator credit for their own ref at the same time, so its kind of a win-win when that happens. i love when that comes up in a pileup and someone mentions it over the air. the wwff.net site is a mess honestly, most of the good info is floating around in Facebook groups or the WWFF reflector. stick with it though, once you get a few activations under your belt it becomes second nature

so ive been trying to get into CW for about three months now and i finally passed my element 1 back when that was still a thing... wait no i mean i just wanted to learn it for fun, no test needed anymore obviously. anyway i built up enough courage to actually get on the air last week and it was kind of a disaster honestly. im using a Bencher BY-1 paddle that i picked up used and a Yaesu FT-991A with the built in keyer. the problem is my dits and dahs just dont feel right when im sending. like i know what i want to send but by the time my hand does it the letters come out mushed together or i get extra dits i didnt mean to send. i have the speed set around 15 wpm which is where i can copy okay but sending at that speed feels way harder than i expected. is this a tension adjustment thing on the paddle or am i just not practiced enough yet? i fiddled with the screws a little bit but i honestly dont know what im doing with that. the gap feels about like a business card thick on each side which is what someone told me but maybe thats wrong for my hand. any advice from people who actually got through this frustrating phase would be great