Robert Moore

Also double-check your offset direction! A + sign means the repeater listens 600 kHz above the output frequency, while - means below. I've made that mistake before - had the right tone but wrong offset and wondered why I couldn't get in.

yeah the docs are a mess, dont feel bad. i spent like a weekend just figuring out which version of RMS Relay actually worked on a pi without weird mono dependency issues. pretty sure there was a forum thread somewhere about running it under wine vs native but i cant remember if that was resolved one thing that tripped me up — make sure your gateway frequency is registered in the channel list on the Winlink site or field stations wont find it automatically in Winlink Express. you have to add it manually through your sysop account. seems obvious in hindsight but yeah.

That's normal behavior for trapped antennas. In many dual-band designs, the two resonant circuits interact through shared conductors or traps. When you tune the 2-meter section, it changes the electrical length of the antenna, which can slightly alter the 70-centimeter resonance. Always tune VHF first, then UHF.

so we ran a simulated disaster exercise with our local ARES group this past weekend, basically a scenario where a major flood had knocked out all commercial infrastructure in the county and we had to handle welfare traffic and coordinate with the served agencies. i've been licensed about 6 years and done a handful of these but this one was different because the county EOC actually participated and had real staff there, not just our ham guys pretending to be them. what caught me completely off guard was how bad i was at translating what the net control was asking for into something the EOC staff could actually understand. like i knew exactly what was going on on the radio side but when the emergency manager walked over and asked me to explain the situation i kind of stumbled. nobody ever really drills that part i guess. also we had a guy show up with a go-kit that looked amazing, like seriously impressive pelican case setup, but his battery situation was a mess and he was basically dead in the water after about 4 hours. all the fancy gear in the world doesnt help if you havent thought through your power budget. anybody have stories from their own exercises or real events? especially curious if others have run into the communication gap between ham operators and the agency staff they're supposed to be supporting. feels like that's where a lot of groups are weak and we dont talk about it enough.

Just passed General last month using only HamStudy.org and YouTube videos for the concepts I didn't understand. Free practice exams that are exactly like the real license exams helped me identify areas where I needed to focus my studies. Don't overthink it - if you're consistently scoring 85%+ on HamStudy practice tests, you're ready.

might be worth checking the bias on the finals too while youre in there, sometimes they drift and it shows up on certain bands more than others depending on how the drive is distributed. not saying thats definitely it but if youre already in there with a meter you might as well look. what firmware version is it on? i vaguely remember something about a power calibration issue on older firmware but im not sure if that was 40m specific or not, could be totally unrelated.

yeah the battery thing is such a common problem and it always seems to surface at the worst time. we had almost the exact same situation during a winter storm exercise a couple years back. someone showed up with a sealed lead acid that looked fine externally but had basically no capacity left. now our group does a mandatory battery check night about 3 weeks before any scheduled exercise — nothing fancy, just everyone brings their stuff to the club meeting and we load test anything over 18 months old. its added maybe 45 minutes to one meeting a year and we havent had a battery fail in the field since. the winlink/EOC coordination gap is a really good catch though. that's not something you can solve with better gear — it's a people and process problem and those are actually harder. we spent a whole separate session just walking the served agency folks through what a message looks like when it arrives, who clicks what, where it goes. took maybe 2 hours and made a huge difference. the EOC staff turnover is also a thing to watch because you can train someone and then they move on and the institutional knowledge walks out the door with them. sounds like overall it was a worthwhile exercise though, the fact that you found those gaps in a drill and not an actual event is exactly the point

im kind of new to ARES, just joined a few months ago, and reading this is making me realize i probably need to get way more comfortable with message handling before anything like this. i can work the radio fine but the whole formal traffic and ICS forms side of things still feels pretty foreign to me. does your group do any smaller practice sessions for that stuff or is it mostly just the big exercises?

oh man i remember my first activation being kind of a scramble too, i forgot my antenna stakes and had to rig everything to a picnic table with electrical tape lol. but yeah it counts, thats the thing with POTA — they're pretty forgiving as long as you hit the 10. upload the log on the website and youre good. the spotting thing is huge though, seriously makes a night and day difference. i went from barely scraping 10 contacts to sometimes getting 50+ just by spotting myself early. some people even pre-spot before they arrive so hunters know youre coming, though you have to actually show up and activate within a reasonable window or people get annoyed.

Try tech tutorials on hot topics like SDR. Our club does hands-on nights where everyone brings their laptop and we work through something together. Fox hunts are also great for getting people out of the meeting room.

ok so the by sound not by sight thing is actually really important and took me a while to get. basically if you learn it by memorizing dots and dashes on a chart, youll always be mentally translating like dash dot dash = K in your head and that slows you way down. the idea is to learn it the same way you learned to read, where you just hear the sound and your brain knows the letter without thinking about it consciously. i used the Koch method when i started, theres a free program called LCWO.net that walks you through it. starts you with just two characters at a relatively fast speed and drills them until you know them, then adds more. sounds tedious but it works way better than trying to learn all 26 letters at once. i messed around with apps first and wasted probably a month before someone on here pointed me to that site. honestly just 10-15 minutes a day is enough, more than that and your brain kind of stops absorbing it. took me maybe 3 months to get comfortable enough to actually make a QSO on the air which felt pretty great ngl

I've been experimenting with different EFHW transformers for portable QRP ops and noticed some interesting efficiency differences. Wise men say the more cores the better the transformer. I am not entirely convinced, but there is merit to the argument that if more copper is inside the core, the magnetic linkage is better. On that basis I chose to build my EFHW transformer using 2 stacked FT140-43 cores. I also built one with a single FT80-43 "wedding ring" core for ultralight POTA. Both work, but I'm curious about real-world efficiency comparisons. It's important to use a quality 100pf cap… those cheapies you got off of Amazon 250 for $10 will not cut it… TDK from Digi-key. If you really are qrp even a 500v silver mica would work. Anyone done actual measurements?

honestly for 2m into local repeaters with 50 watts youre probably not gonna notice much difference. the repeaters arent that far and you've got plenty of power. now if you were doing simplex over longer distances or trying to hit a far away machine on 70cm it might matter more. trunk lip mounts do have a compromised ground plane but the antenna still works, its not like youre running a rubber duck. the mag mount scratching thing is real by the way, i put a thin microfiber cloth under mine and it helped but still left some swirl marks after a year. if youre staying put id just leave the trunk lip alone tbh, two years with no complaints is a pretty good track record

so ive been a General for about 3 years now and honestly I get by fine on the HF bands with what I have access to. but lately I keep running into situations where I want to operate on a frequency and I cant because of the privileges thing. happened again last weekend on 40m, wanted to join a net and the frequency was in the Extra portion and I just had to sit out. anyway I started looking at the Extra exam and honestly some of that theory stuff is way over my head. like the questions about filter design and impedance matching and whatever, I passed the General without really understanding half of it but the Extra seems like a whole other level. is it actually that hard or does it just look scary? and do most people actually understand the material or are they just memorizing the pool? also kind of wondering if the extra privileges are even that much of a difference in practice, like day to day would I actually notice

honestly just get on the air. i know that sounds scary when you feel like youre not ready but even just calling CQ slowly and having a real QSO where you have to copy in real time with no rewind button did more for me in two weeks than months of practice software. the adrenaline or whatever it is makes your brain pay attention differently. check out the slow speed nets like the slow net on 3.530 or the SKCC stuff, people there are super patient and expect people to be learning.

honestly same boat as you not too long ago. what helped me was just listening to actual QSOs on the air even when i couldnt copy anything, just kind of having it on in the background while doing other stuff. probably not the most scientific approach lol but i felt like it helped me get used to the rhythm of it before i could even decode individual letters. i use an app called Morse Mania on my phone and just do it while commuting or whatever. im still pretty slow maybe 8-10wpm on a good day but its way better than nothing and its actually kinda fun once something starts clicking

dont forget to check if your particular unit has the MARS/CAP mod already done from a previous owner, some of the used ones floating around have it and some dont and its not always obvious unless you actually test outside the ham bands. found that out the hard way when i bought mine secondhand and assumed it was stock.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, K-4872 if anyone's curious, and honestly i was kind of a nervous wreck going in. i'd been hunting from home for a few months and thought i had a decent handle on how it all worked but actually being the one calling CQ POTA is a completely different animal. i brought my FT-891 and a random wire up in a tree, maybe 25 feet at the apex, fed with a 9:1 unun, and was running off a 20ah lifepo4 battery. setup took me maybe 30 minutes which i thought was pretty good for a first time. started on 40 meters around 1pm local and the pile got real deep real fast which i did not expect at all. had a few hunters come back to me on 20 as well once i spotted myself on the POTA app. managed 47 QSOs total which qualifies it fine. the part i wasnt ready for is how fast you have to log when its busy, i use hamrs on my phone and it kept up ok but i was definitely dropping calls and asking for repeats more than i wanted to. anyone have tips for managing a pile up as a new activator? like do you just slow down and work them one at a time or is there some trick to it

yeah what he said about Field Day. i was nervous showing up to my club's site the first year but everyone was so cool about it. they handed me a mic within like 20 minutes and just said go for it. made my first ever CW contact that weekend because one of the elmers sat with me and walked me through it. one thing i'd add — for CQ WW just spend the first hour or so listening before you jump in. tune around, hear how people are doing exchanges, figure out what the rhythm is. the exchange for CQ WW is signal report and your CQ zone which for most of us in the US is zone 3 or 4 or 5 depending on where you are. once you hear it a few times it clicks pretty fast. dont stress about rate or multipliers your first time, just have fun and work whoever you can.

I'm a big fan of CW Morse's $45 US 3D-Printed Pocket Paddle. I find it to be remarkably robust and I've never had one break. I also appreciate how easily adjustable it is in the field. For a beginner, adjustability is key - you'll be tweaking spacing and tension as your muscle memory develops. Don't overthink the exotic materials yet.

went last year and yeah its definitely picked up, there was a guy selling a whole table of Yaesu gear, some of it looked pretty well kept. also ran into someone from my old club i hadnt seen in like 3 years so that was cool. the VE session filled up fast though so make sure you pre-register if you can.

i dont know man, been licensed for about 6 years now and lately ive just been sitting down at the radio and then just... not really doing anything. like ill turn it on, spin the dial a bit, maybe catch a few exchanges on 40m and then wander off to do something else. not sure if its burnout or what. had a really good run last winter doing some POTA stuff and even picked up a few new states on 17m which felt great at the time but now its just kind of flat. anybody else go through phases like this or is it just me

honestly the theory looks scarier than it is once you actually sit down with it. i had the same feeling going in, zero engineering background, just a guy who likes messing with antennas. the smith chart stuff specifically tripped me up at first but there are a few videos out there that explain it in a way that actually makes sense and once it clicks it clicks. the filter questions are mostly pattern recognition after a while. i used the hamstudy site pretty heavily and just kept grinding the pool until i was hitting 90 percent or better consistently. took me about three months of studying maybe an hour a night. the extra class bands are absolutely worth it, that lower chunk of 20 has a completely different feel, way less qrm on a lot of weekends.

congrats on the first one, that feeling after you get your qualifying contacts is pretty great. i remember mine, completely fumbled the exchange on the first call because i was nervous and out of breath from the hike lol. 20m has been pretty inconsistent for me too in the afternoons, i usually try to hit it in the morning now before like 1pm local and it seems way better. also if you dont already have it, the SOTA spotter app is huge for chasing your own activation, get someone to spot you before you even start calling CQ and the pile comes to you

Consider the FT-891 if you want Yaesu reliability in that price range. I've worked 100+ countries on 100 watts with mine. The IC-7300's waterfall is nice but not essential for casual HF operation - either radio will serve you well for years.