Robert Moore

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?