Robert Moore

i did the same thing like 6 months ago. went from tech to general and yeah qrz practice exams are fine, i just ran through them over and over untill i was getting like 90% consistently and then went and took it. passed first try. the regs stuff does take a little more reading but its not that bad. honestly the thing nobody told me was that once i got on HF i had no idea how to actually use my radio for SSB, like i knew the theory but tuning around and finding a clear frequency and not stepping on someone, all that took a while to figure out. thats almost harder than the exam lol

so ive been doing single op for a few years now and keep seeing the top scores from guys running SO2R and im wondering if its actually making that big a difference or if im just leaving points on the table with bad operating habits in general my current setup is a k3 on the main radio and i have an older ic-7300 just sitting there doing basically nothing. i know the basics of SO2R — run on one radio, S&P on the other, swap when the rate drops — but reading about it and actually implementing it seem pretty different. the interlocking and audio routing alone looks like a rabbit hole i might not come back from anyone actually gone through the transition from SO1R to SO2R and can say whether their scores jumped noticeably or was it more of a marginal thing unless you're already a really clean operator? also curious what people use for SO2R controllers, ive seen the microham stuff mentioned a lot but thats not cheap

yeah the tail-ending thing is real and i think a lot of people dont figure it out until theyve worked a bunch of pileups. the op needs to hear the end of your call clearly and if youre stepping on his last dit youre already dead. timing is honestly more important than power in most situations, at least on the upper HF bands. on your question about reading the split window, what i do is just listen for a full minute or two before i even key up. most ops will have a pattern even if they dont announce it. some guys walk up the band slowly, some jump around, some plant themselves in one spot. if you can figure out where they came back two or three times in a row thats probably their comfort zone. thats where i try to sit, maybe 100-200 hz above the cluster of callers there. also depends a lot on propagation. on 17m with a decent opening the pile can be enormous and the op might be hearing a wall of noise, so anything that makes your signal stand out tonally or timing-wise helps. i run about 500w into a 3el yagi and even then it aint guaranteed. worked a ZL7 myself a few years back, took me the better part of an afternoon.

so ive been licensed for about two years now and i keep hearing about CQ WW being this massive event and honestly i always kind of avoided it because it seemed overwhelming. like the band is just wall to wall signals and i didnt know where to even start. but this year im actually gonna try it, at least for a few hours on sunday afternoon. i run a pretty modest station, ts-590 into a dipole up about 30 feet, nothing fancy. im in the midwest so propagation should be decent i think. mostly gonna try 20 meters to start. my question is really just — do i start by calling CQ contest or is it better to just tune around and answer other peoples CQ calls? and also does SOTA activity slow way down during big weekends like this or do people still activating summits during contest weekends? i know some activators kind of hate contests because they cant find a clear frequency also completely unrelated but does anyone know if ARRL Field Day date has been announced yet for next year, i want to get it on the calendar early this time

congrats on the upgrade, the 7300 is a solid rig. that hum on 80 is almost certainly not the radio — ive seen this come up a bunch and it's almost always either a grounding loop somewhere in the shack or RFI getting in through the feedline. ladder line can pick up all kinds of junk depending on how it's routed and what's near it. do you have a common mode choke at the feedpoint? if not thats probably where i'd start. also check if the hum changes at all when you touch the coax shield or the chassis of the tuner, sometimes you can feel/hear a difference that tells you something about where the noise is coupling in. the menu system on the 7300 really does take a while, i basically kept the manual open on a tablet next to the rig for the first month. once you find the roofing filter settings and the NR/NB adjustments it gets a lot more useful.

nah you're not weird, i do this all the time especially on nights when the band is just opening up nice. 40 is great for that kind of thing around sunset. sometimes i'll just park on a frequency and just see whats drifting through. caught a maritime mobile once that way which was cool, guy was somewhere in the gulf i think.

the rf from the generator thing is almost always coming through the power line, not radiated directly from the genset itself unless you're sitting right next to it. common mode choke on the feedline is your first fix, and yeah ferrites on the charger cable help too but you might need quite a few of them to actually make a dent. i use a home brew 1:1 choke balun right at the feedpoint on my dipole and that cleaned up probably 80% of my generator noise issues when i was running a similar setup. on the extension cord length question, longer is actually better in your case, more impedance between the genset and your gear. i run about 50ft of 12awg out to my eu1000i and the noise floor is pretty manageable. the honda inverter gens are cleaner than a lot of the chinese units anyway so youre probably fine there. just keep the charger and generator side stuff on a separate circuit if you can, meaning dont run the charger off the same power strip as the rig.

i was in the exact same spot like a year ago and honestly i just kind of picked one and went with it lol. i do LoTW for anything i care about for awards and i set up eQSL too because why not, takes like two minutes to upload once you have your log exported. some guys on the clusters specifically mention they're on eQSL in their spots so its worth having the account active. the paper bureau thing is kind of its own whole world. i staretd sending cards through the ARRL outgoing bureau and its cheap but slow, like you might wait months before someone on the other end actually gets it. direct mail is faster but gets expensive for DX. some people just dont bother with paper at all anymore which is kind of sad but i get it

hey welcome to the hobby, dont be nervous about checking in, everyone doubles at some point including people who've been doing this for 20 years. on most local 2m nets when net control asks for check-ins you just wait for them to finish talking, make sure the repeater tail drops, then give your callsign. some nets want phonetics, some dont, just listen to how other people are doing it the first couple times and copy that. you're right about doubling, that's when two stations transmit simultaneously and the repeater catches both and it just sounds like noise. if it happens net control will usually just ask for the stations to try again and nobody cares. the main thing is just listen before you transmit and you'll be fine. honestly just jump in next tuesday, the worst that happens is you have to say your call again.

so our ARES group finally did a full scale exercise last saturday, simulating a major flood event cutting off the county EOC from most of the repeater infrastructure. we'd been talking about doing this for like two years and we finally just committed and did it. honestly it went better than i expected in some ways and way worse in others. the stuff that worked fine was basically all the stuff we'd practiced a dozen times before — net control, check-ins, passing formal traffic. no surprises there. what completely fell apart was anything that required people to improvise. we had two operators who just kind of froze when the simulated repeater went down and they had to switch to simplex. one of them had never actually made a simplex contact in the field before, like ever, and it showed. the other thing that bit us was battery backup. one operator showed up with a radio that had been sitting in his car for three months and the battery was basically dead. which, yeah, in a real event that's just game over for that station. we ended up adding a monthly battery check to our prep checklist after the fact but it felt like the kind of thing we should have already been doing. anyone else run exercises like this and find stuff that surprised them? curious what other groups have found to be the weak points because im pretty sure our group isnt unique here

yeah your friend is right, 35 questions from the pool, you need 26 correct to pass so theres actually more wiggle room than people think. the math on the tech exam is honestly pretty minimal, were talking like ohms law basics and maybe a decibel question or two. nothing that would stop you from passing if youre weak on math. hamstudy is fine but personally i like the way gordon west study guide lays things out if you want actual context instead of just drilling flash cards. some people pass just memorizing answers but then they get on the air and dont know what anything means so id recommend at least skimming the explanations for the sections you dont understand. the electrical safety and FCC rules stuff is a big chunk of the exam so dont sleep on that. good luck, its honestly not a hard test once you sit down with it for a few weekends

so this has been driving me nuts for about three weeks now. my ic-7300 will be mid-transmission and the tx just... stops. power meter drops to zero, rx comes back immediately, no error on screen, ALC looks normal right up until the moment it cuts out. sometimes it happens after 30 seconds, sometimes i can run a whole pile-up session no problem and then it'll do it twice in a row on the next contact. i already swapped the coax thinking maybe i had a intermittent short somewhere but that wasnt it. PTT is via the rear ACC connector, foot switch, not the mic button, so i kinda ruled that out too but honestly im not 100% sure i should have. temperature doesnt seem to matter, happens when the rig is cold and after its been on for an hour. anybody dealt with this before or have an idea where to poke first? i dont want to just start reflowing solder joints randomly, i'd rather actually diagnose it if possible.

so we had our quarterly ARES exercise last weekend and i finally got to deploy the full field kit ive been building up over the past year or so. overall it went pretty well but man the generator situation was a nightmare and i wanted to see if anyone else has dealt with this. running a Honda EU2200i which i know is supposed to be inverter-quiet but i was still getting hash all over 40m and some on 80m too. tried moving it about 30 feet away from the operating position, ran the power cable along the ground away from the antenna feedline, still getting it. the antenna is a trapped vertical, nothing exotic. grounding the genny frame helped a tiny bit but not enough to actually work the net cleanly. i ended up switching over to the LiFePO4 battery pack for the radio and just used the honda to trickle charge it through a small inverter charger, keeping the genny completely out of the DC loop for the radio itself. that actually cleaned things up a lot but now im worried about runtime if were ever deployed for more than like 6-8 hours. anyone running a similar setup for extended ops? curious what people are doing for power management when you need both reliable runtime AND clean RF. also open to thoughts on whether a different antenna would be less susceptible to that kind of noise — the vertical pickup pattern is pretty omni which is great for nets but maybe a dipole up in the trees would reject more of the local noise?

so ive been running a diamond x50a on my roof for maybe three years now and its been fine for hitting the local 2m and 70cm repeaters but theres one repeater about 45 miles out that i can barely scratch into and only when conditions are decent. a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just throw up a yagi and be done with it but i dunno, im not trying to point an antenna every time i want to ragchew, that seems like a pain. my current setup is the x50a on a j-pipe mount off the chimney, maybe 22 feet above ground, feeding into a kenwood TM-V71A with about 18 feet of LMR-400. the terrain between me and that far repeater is pretty flat with some tree cover but nothing ridiculous. i keep thinking maybe if i just got a taller collinear with more gain i could close the gap but then i also know vertical gain works differently than horizontal and i might just be chasing my tail here. has anyone actually done a back to back comparison on something like this? like swapped between a high gain collinear and even a fixed-point yagi on the same path? curious if the difference is as dramatic as people say or if its one of those things that looks better on paper than it actually is in practice.

so ive been playing around with online cluster tools for maybe the past month or so and im not totally sure im using them the right way. mostly been on DXwatch and checking the spots page on QRZ when im looking for dx activity. what i do is just sort by band and then try to tune to whatever shows up but half the time by the time i get there the station is gone or buried in a pileup i cant break through with my 100w and a dipole. is there a better way to filter these things? like i noticed DXwatch has some filter options but i dont fully understand what all of them do. and is there a way to know if a spot is actually still active or if its 20 minutes old and useless at that point. also someone told me there are phone apps that do the same thing, maybe even better? ive been using the browser on my laptop which is fine but it would be nice to have something on my phone while im at the radio. any tips appreciated, still pretty new to chasing dx and trying to figure out the workflow here

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep seeing people talk about confirming contacts and i honestly dont fully understand the whole system. like i get the basic idea, you worked someone and you want proof of it, but theres LoTW which is the ARRL thing, and then theres eQSL which seems totally separate, and then people still send paper cards through the bureau or direct and im just trying to figure out if i need to be doing all of these or just pick one. i set up my LoTW account when i got my license because someone told me to but i havent really done much with it. i think i uploaded like two logs and thats it. i dont even know if the confirmations came through because i cant really figure out the interface that well. and then eQSL i made an account but it seems like a different crowd uses it? someone told me a lot of the european stations prefer it but i dont know if thats actually true. and paper cards, i did get a couple in the mail which was really cool honestly, i wasnt expecting to enjoy that as much as i did. but i have no idea how the bureau works or if i should be sending cards back. somebody sent me a card and i felt bad that i couldnt send one back because i dont even have cards printed yet. anyway if someone could just explain how these all fit together that would be great, or even just tell me which ones are worth bothering with

dude Japan on 100w through an attic antenna is legit, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. i had a tribander at 40 feet for my first CQ WW and barely pulled more than that first time out one thing i'll mention since you're looking at upcoming stuff - if you haven't tried SOTA activations in between the big contests it's kind of a good way to keep your operating sharp without the pressure. totally different vibe but you're still making contacts under weird conditions and figuring out your radio. some of the best CW practice i got was calling CQ from a summit with a compromised antenna

the baofeng will get you started but dont get too attached lol. i went down that rabbit hole and six months later i had a proper vhf rig anyway. whats your old call or did you get a new one

the mast setup with the MPAS is pretty much what i run too, that antenna is underrated for how fast you can get it up. i did an emcomm drill last spring and had a decent 40m signal going in like 8 minutes from pulling up which was nice. on the generator noise thing -- some guys in our group have started using those jackery or bluetti power stations as a kind of buffer. you run the generator to charge the power station and the radio runs off the power station, and you can actually shut the genny off for periods when you dont need to recharge. means you're not running it constantly which helps a lot with noise and fuel. obivously its adding another piece of equipment but for a fixed site deployment it works out okay

this is making me want to try one, ive been doing POTA for about a year and never really looked into WWFF properly. is it pretty much the same deal or are there things that are totally different about how it works? like do you need special equipment or is it just the 44 QSO thing you mentioned

honestly same boat as you were not that long ago lol. what helped me was just listening to a lot of W1AW code practice, they send at like 5 10 13 15 and 20wpm and you can grab the text from the arrl site afterward to check yourself. something about knowing the answer was available made me less stressed about missing stuff. also i found that 20 mins a day every single day beats doing an hour on saturday and nothing all week, at least for me. the consistency thing is real even when it doesnt feel like youre improving.

yeah 40 has been rough lately from my qth too. i wonder if its the season changing or just bad luck. also your comment about not wanting to turn the rig off — thats basically every night for me haha. sometimes i fall asleep in the chair and the radio is just going in the background. not recomending that but it happens

Your setup should work fine for Q65-60C on 144 MHz! 80W into 4x17el yagis gives you about the minimum threshold for EME contacts. Make sure you have a good preamp at the antenna feed point - 0.5-0.8dB NF is critical for weak signal work. Start by scheduling with established big gun stations who can help pull you through.

went through this same thing last year lol. one thing that helped me was just uploading everything to LoTW first and seeing what i already had confirmed, you might be surprised. i thought i had way less than i did and turned out i already had 84 confirmed entities just from casual operating. also check if the DX stations you worked are active on LoTW before you go hunting down paper QSLs, a lot of the common ones are already there

yeah i'll probably be there, been meaning to unload some of my extra gear anyway. got a spare tuner and a couple handhelds just sitting in the shack doing nothing. the swap meet is always worth the drive even if you dont end up buying anything, just good to see people in person for once instead of on the repeater