Robert Moore

so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up and im trying to nail down a solid portable setup that doesnt fall apart when things get weird. last exercise we had some real headaches with power and i want to get ahead of it this time. running an IC-7300 as my main HF rig and a TM-V71A for local VHF/UHF coordination. the 7300 pulls around 22A at full power which isnt insane but when you add the V71A and a laptop for logging plus a little LED work light it starts to add up fast. last time i was running everything off a 100Ah AGM and by hour four i was watching that voltage drop and sweating a little. thinking about adding a small generator to the mix this time, maybe a Honda EU2200i or the Yamaha EF2000iS. both are inverter types so the clean power shouldnt mess with the radio but ive heard some guys say they still get RFI from certain generators even the inverter ones. anybody actually noticed that with either of those brands specifically. also wondering if its worth running the generator just to top off the battery rather than powering the radio directly — like keep the battery as a buffer between the generator and the rig. for antennas im planning a 40/20/15/10 fan dipole up in whatever trees i can find, center fed with some 450 ohm ladder line into a 4:1 balun and then coax to the shack. its worked okay before but the feedline run is usually kind of a mess and i feel like im leaving signal on the table. open to suggestions if anybody has a slicker field antenna solution that doesnt take forever to deploy.

so i finally did my first park activation yesterday, been putting it off for months because i kept telling myself i needed more gear or more practice or whatever excuse i could come up with. went out to a state park about 45 minutes from home, nothing fancy, just my KX2 and a random wire up in a tree, maybe 20 feet high at the apex which honestly wasnt great but it worked. set up around 10am and started calling CQ POTA on 40m, wasnt expecting much but within maybe 3 minutes i had my first contact and then things just kind of snowballed from there. got my 10 contacts in about 25 minutes which i know isnt a huge pile but for a first time out i was pretty happy. stayed on for another hour and worked maybe another 20 stations, a lot of them hunters who clearly knew what they were doing way better than me. the weird part was i had one guy come back to me like four times on slightly different frequencies and i couldnt figure out if he was trying to tell me something or just had a weird radio situation going on. also wasnt sure about logging on the go, i was using HAMRS on my phone which seemed fine but i fumbled a few exchanges because i was trying to type and hold the mic at the same time. anyone else use a physical notepad first and then enter into the app later? feels like that might be cleaner for me personally. also do you always need to spot yourself or will hunters find you anyway?

New General class here (KD9XYZ), just worked some nice DX and want to get my confirmations squared away. I've heard LoTW is the way to go for DXCC but the setup process looks pretty intimidating. Anyone have advice for a newcomer? What are the gotchas I should watch out for? Also wondering - is it worth setting up eQSL too, or should I focus on one system first?

so ive been on HF for about two years now mostly doing digital but lately ive been getting into phone more and every time i get a signal report the other station says my audio sounds kind of muddy or muffled. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 through the 8-pin mic connector and i feel like i did everything right but clearly something is off. ive played with the TX bandwidth settings in the menu and tried different compression levels but honestly the more i tweak the worse it seems to get. right now i have the low cut at like 100hz and high cut at 2800hz which seemed reasonable based on stuff i read but maybe thats wrong? i also have ALC bouncing around pretty good when i talk which i suspect might be part of the problem. anyone dealt with this on the 7300 specifically or just SSB audio in general, what should i actually be prioritizing here

1000wh should technically get you there if you're disciplined about it but the problem is you rarely are when you're also dealing with everything else going on at an exercise. somebody plugs in a phone charger, you run the radio higher than you meant to, whatever. i'd size up if you can. the jackery stuff works but the discharge rate limits can bite you if you're also running something with a surge draw. check what it actually allows at continuous load before you commit. for the antenna the spiderpole linked dipole is probably the least of your worries honestly, that setup just works. what feedline are you running, RG-8X or something lighter? just asking because on a long activation the loss adds up if you're going to 80m late at night and actually need the power to count

so ive been using Log4OM for general logging for about two years now and honestly its pretty good for day to day stuff, QSL management, looking up DX entities, all that. but every time contest season rolls around i fire up N1MM and its like switching between a bicycle and a race car. the SO2R support alone in N1MM is just on another level and the band map integration with my radio is so much tighter. the thing thats been bugging me lately is the workflow when i want to log a mix of casual FT8 via WSJT-X and then jump into like a CW sprint or something. WSJT-X logs to its own ADIF file and then i have to import into Log4OM and sometimes the dupes dont get flagged right because the timestamps are slightly off or whatever. its not a disaster but its annoying enough that ive been wondering if just running everything through N1MM full time makes more sense. does N1MM handle WSJT-X UDP logging cleanly these days? last time i tried that was maybe 2021 and it was kinda flaky. not really looking to abandon Log4OM entirely because the award tracking stuff is genuinely better there IMO. just wondering how other people handle this split-personality logging situation

the antenna question is a real one and honestly depends on what nets you expect to work. for midwest storm/flood response you're probably looking at mostly 40m for regional stuff and maybe 2m/70cm for local coordination, so a linked dipole sounds reasonable but kind of a pain to deploy fast when things are chaotic. i ended up going with a homebrew NVIS antenna, just a wire dipole cut for 40m and kept low to the ground, because it covers the region really well without needing a big mast situation. one thing i totally overlooked when i built mine was documentation. like i had all this gear and no written record of frequencies, net schedules, ctcss tones for local repeaters, ICS form templates, nothing. now i keep a laminated quick-reference sheet in the lid of the case. sounds dumb but when its 2am and youre setting up in a parking lot you will thank yourself. also extra fuses. i cannot stress that enough, i blew one at exactly the wrong moment during a drill and felt like an idiot.