Jessica Moore

so we finally got around to doing a full scale simulated disaster exercise with our county ARES group, been trying to coordinate this for like 6 months and we had maybe 18 operators show up which i thought was pretty good turnout honestly. the scenario was a prolonged power outage combined with flooding that took out several repeaters and most cell infrastructure in the southern part of the county. what i didnt expect was how fast things got confusing with net control. we had two guys both trying to act as NCS at the same time on 2m simplex and it basically turned into a mess for the first 20 minutes. nobody had clearly established who had primary net control authority before things kicked off and we just kind of assumed everyone knew. spoiler: they didnt. the other thing that caught us off guard was how many guys showed up with HTs and nothing else. like no external antenna, no spare batteries, just a stock rubber duck. in a real event those folks would have been pretty limited past maybe a mile or two depending on terrain. we're in a hilly area so line of sight is already tough. anyway posting this because i know a lot of groups are planning spring exercises and thought maybe hearing what went sideways for us might help somebody else. happy to answer questions about what we did and what we'd change.

Every generation thinks the hobby is dying! When I got my license in the 70s, the old timers were complaining about repeaters killing simplex operation. Change is constant in this hobby.

which kit was it exactly? im trying to decide between a few different ones and keep going back and forth. also did you have any trouble with the soldering if you're newer to building stuff, im always worried i'll mess something up

so i've been wanting to do satellite work for a while now and last weekend i finally had a decent pass of AO-7 over my QTH, mode B was active and i figured i'd just go for it with my FT-847 and a pair of yagis on an az-el mount i built from a kit last year. got the tracking going in Gpredict which was pointed at my rotor controller and that part actually worked pretty smoothly, better than i expected honestly. anyway i found the transponder passband and heard a couple QSOs in progress which was pretty exciting, managed to tune around and heard my own downlink which i know sounds dumb but that was kind of a revelation. the thing im struggling with is the doppler compensation. i understand the concept — uplink and downlink shift in opposite directions on a linear transponder — but my actual experience was kind of a mess. i was chasing my own signal around and i think i was overcompensating on one side and not enough on the other. Gpredict has the doppler tuning feature but i couldnt figure out if it was actually controlling both VFOs on the 847 independently or just doing one. does anyone have this actually set up and working? like what does your CAT setup look like for split doppler correction on a linear bird

so ive been watching the solar flux numbers creep up over the past few weeks and honestly wasnt expecting much since we had a few days of geomagnetic disturbance that kind of killed everything but then yesterday afternoon i fired up on 17 meters and just started hearing stations i hadnt heard in months. worked a couple JA stations without much effort and then an OA4 in Peru called me out of nowhere which was pretty exciting for a weekday afternoon. im curious if other people are seeing the same thing or if it was just a lucky window i stumbled into. my antenna situation is nothing special, just a fan dipole up about 30 feet so its not like im running a beam or anything. been checking DXmaps and the cluster but sometimes you just gotta get on and listen i guess. also been trying to understand the K index better — i know lower is generally better for HF but is there a point where even a K of 2 or 3 can still support decent DX or does it really fall off a cliff above 1?

yeah the TX EQ on that radio took me forever to figure out. one thing i noticed that helped my audio a lot was actually the mic position, like how close i was to the PR-40. i was talking kind of off axis because i read that reduces plosives but i think i was too far off and it was making me sound thin and distant. moved back to talking more directly at it from maybe 4-5 inches and suddenly reports got way better. not saying thats your problem but it's worth checking before you go too deep into the menu settings

honestly the mixing of phonetics drives me a little crazy but i get why it happens. i worked a station once where the guy used completely made up words for half his call and i had to ask him to repeat like three times. just use the standard ones, everyone knows them and thats kind of the whole point lol. for nets specifically though a lot of net controls will ask you to phonetic if they didnt catch it, so dont stress too much about it

also worth knowing that the NATO phonetics arent the only ones people use — you'll sometimes hear older ops use things like Baker instead of Bravo or Able instead of Alpha, thats the old ICAO/military alphabet from before they standardized everything in the 50s. doesnt really matter as long as the other person understands you but if your doing any digital voice stuff or working internationally stick to the standard ones

so ive been running SSB for a few years now and every time i get on a net someone's either punching way too hot into their rig or they sound like they're talking through a coffee can and honestly it made me want to put together some thoughts on this, partly because i keep seeing the same mistakes and partly because i made most of them myself the biggest thing i notice is guys running their mic gain way too high. like they think more gain = more audio = better signal and it just doesnt work that way on SSB. you clip the peaks and suddenly you sound like youre transmitting from inside a blender. the ALC meter is your friend here, you want it dancing on peaks not pinned solid. if its pinned youve already lost second thing is the compressor. speech processors and compression can be great but again its easy to overdo it. a little compression brings up the average power and helps with readability especially on marginal paths but crank it too far and you lose all the natural dynamics in your voice and it starts to sound really fatiguing to listen to. ive heard stations running so much compression they literally sound like theyre yelling even when theyre speaking normally mic choice matters too but maybe not as much as people think. a decent dynamic mic positioned correctly will beat an expensive condenser thats right up against your face any day. distance and angle make a huge difference. i keep mine about 2-3 inches away slightly off axis and it cleaned up my audio a lot compared to when i was basically eating the mic anyway curious what other people have found. is there anything that made a noticeable difference for you that maybe isnt talked about much

i did something similar-ish but way more janky lol. just used a pi 4 for everything including the relay driving through a ULN2803 chip, skipped the arduino entirely. worked until i somehow fried two of the GPIO pins and then spent a weekend figuring out why relay 3 and 6 stopped responding. not saying dont do it that way but the arduino as a dedicated IO controller is probably smarter just for the isolation

SO2R is absolutely worth it once you get the filtering sorted but yeah its not a weekend project, took me probably two contest seasons before i felt like i actually had it dialed in rather than fighting it the whole time. the 4O3A filters are the gold standard but honestly the homebrew W3NQN filters work great if you're handy with a soldering iron, theres a full writeup on his site and the parts from Mouser are maybe $60-80 per band pair. i built a set for 40/15 which is where i spend most of my time in SS and the isolation is plenty good enough. for SO1R rate — your instinct about running vs S&P is right, the best ops usually plant on a good frequency early and defend it. if you're getting 3+ per minute on a run you almost never want to leave it to go search. the multiplier calculus is different in SS than other contests though since you only need each section once so late in the contest you might be S&P hunting mults more aggressively. main thing is just be decisive, a lot of people waste time being indecisive about whether to leave a run freq and that kills rate more than the actual decision either way.

i was in the same spot like 8 months ago lol. ended up getting the baofeng just to have something and it works fine for what it is. only thing id say is get the programming cable with it, trying to program it by hand from the keypad is honestly awful. chirp is free and once you figure it out you can load all the local repeaters in like 10 minutes.

yeah the Baofeng menu for that stuff is a pain, took me forever to figure it out when i first got mine too. one thing i'll add is that some repeaters around here dont actually require a tone at all, they're carrier-squelch only, so its worth double checking the directory listing or the club's website because sometimes the listings are out of date and the tone listed is wrong or the repeater changed. also just a heads up on etiquette -- when you first get on a repeater its kind of nice to just identify yourself and say youre new and testing, people are usually really welcoming and will even help you troubleshoot on the air if needed. better than just keying up a bunch of times with nobody knowing whats going on

Start by setting up your computer to send Morse characters at 20 wpm and at an overall sending speed of at least 15 wpm - that's the Koch method. Learn the character sounds at full speed right from the start. Every minute spent toying with 5 wpm code is irrevocably wasted - Morse at 5 wpm and Morse at 15 or 20 wpm are completely different critters.

ok so i just got my technician back in march and ive been making contacts here and there and people keep mentioning LoTW and eQSL and i honestly have no idea which one i should be using or if i need all of them or what. someone sent me a physical QSL card in the mail last week which was super cool actually, didnt expect that. but then another guy was like 'did you upload to LoTW yet' and i had no idea what he was talking about. so from what i can gather LoTW is run by the ARRL and its for confirming contacts for awards like DXCC? and eQSL is a different thing thats free and more casual? but do i need both? and where do paper cards fit in anymore, is that just a nostalgia thing at this point or do some awards still require physical cards? sorry if this is a dumb question, theres just a lot going on and nobody really explained any of this during my licensing class

so i finally finished my first QRP rig, been putting it off for like two years because i kept telling myself i wasnt ready to build something from scratch. ended up going with the QCX mini kit on 40m and honestly the whole process was way more approachable than i expected. took me two evenings at the kitchen table with a decent iron and some flux and it just... worked. first time i keyed up i was genuinely shocked. been running it portable the last couple weekends, just a random wire up in a tree and the built in ATU on my little KX2 to tune it and im getting contacts into the midwest pretty regularly from the northeast. running about 4-5 watts. i know thats kind of cheating since the KX2 is doing the matching but still. anyway my actual question is about battery runtime. im using a 3ah lipo and it seems like im getting way less time than i thought i would. is that pretty normal for 40m ssb or should i be looking at cw more seriously. i mostly do cw anyway but sometimes i switch over. also curious if anyone has tips for keeping power draw down on receive since thats actually where most of my time goes.

congrats on the first contact that's awesome. i just want to say the Michigan Mighty Mite was my first build too like three years ago and i had the exact same drift thing going on and kind of panicked thinking i did something wrong. you didnt. its just how that circuit behaves. once it warms up its actually pretty stable for what it is. i cant really speak to the EFHW stuff yet im still figuring out antennas myself but i will say i upgraded from random wire to a simple dipole cut for 40 and it made a noticeable difference even at QRP levels so any improvement you make to the antenna will probably pay off fast

the arrow antenna with an 818 is basically the classic setup, good choice. one thing i never see people mention is how much holding the antenna affects things physically, like if your arm gets tired mid pass and the antenna droops a bit you lose a couple db right when the pass is getting good. i started using a cheap camera tripod with an az/el mount i cobbled together and it helped way more than i expected even if it means running to repoint it every 30 seconds or so during a high elevation pass. anyway sounds like youre on the right track

yeah RF and arduinos in the shack is a classic headache. the relay board is probably the culprit more than the arduino itself — those cheap chinese boards have no isolation to speak of and the relay coil switching can couple noise back into the logic side too. what i did on mine was add a 100ohm resistor in series on every input line plus a small cap to ground right at the arduino pin, like 100pf or so. made a huge difference. also make sure your relay board has its own power supply and shares ground with the arduino but not through the USB — i was powering mine off the arduino 5v rail and that was causing all kinds of weirdness. the other thing worth checking is whether your band voltage lines are shielded. even a few inches of unshielded wire near the coax can pick up enough to confuse the analog read. i ended up running mine through a small RC lowpass filter before the ADC pin and the chatter went away completely. as for pi vs arduino for this kind of thing — arduino is honestly fine, the pi is way overkill for relay switching and you have to deal with linux boot times and SD card corruption if power goes out mid-contest which is no fun

I've been using the new QRV app on my iPhone for the past month, and it's completely changed how I chase DX. QRV (I am ready) is your essential ham radio multitool built for DX success and maximum operating efficiency. It pulls spots from multiple sources, has great QRZ integration, and the notifications actually work reliably. Before this, I was juggling between DXwatch.com on my phone browser, separate QRZ lookups, and trying to keep track of everything. Anyone else made the switch from traditional cluster websites to mobile apps? What's been your experience? The live spots from PSK Reporter feature is particularly impressive - much faster than refreshing web pages constantly.

yeah nets definitely vary a lot depending on who's running them and what kind of net it is. a traffic net is pretty different from a casual ragchew net or an ARES check-in net. for most of the informal local 2m nets around here the format is pretty simple — net control calls for check-ins, you give your callsign phonetically, they acknowledge you and either move on or ask if you have traffic or comments. some nets have you give your location too, especially if its a wide area net covering multiple counties. the pause you experienced was probably net control writing down callsigns, they sometimes get a bunch of stations calling at once and have to work through them. you did exactly the right thing waiting. as for special event stations, most of them post their frequencies on their club website or on QRZ, and a lot show up on the DX clusters too even if theyre domestic. the ARRL website also has a special event station listing that gets updated pretty regularly, thats usually my first stop when im looking for something specific.

oh man i had no idea this was coming up, thanks for posting. ive been looking for a decent antenna tuner and figured a swap meet would be the cheapest way to find one. do people usually take offers or is everyone pretty firm on prices at these things

yeah the compression thing confused me for ages too. what finally clicked for me was actually recording myself — i use the built in USB audio on my 7300 to record a transmission and play it back, and man it was eye opening. i had way too much mic gain and thought i sounded great but it was actually overdriving things a bit and causing splatter i couldnt hear on my own end. one thing nobody mentioned to me for a long time is where you're talking relative to the mic. like talking off to the side vs directly into it changes the character a lot. and background noise in the shack gets picked up more than you'd think, had a box fan running last summer and someone finally told me i sounded like i was broadcasting from inside a turbine engine lol

TCXO is one of those mods where people either swear by it or say they cant tell the difference, i think it really depends how drafty or temperature-variable your shack is. mine stays pretty climate controlled year round so i never bothered but i could see it mattering a lot in a garage setup or something like that. good to hear the install wasnt a nightmare, icom docs for the 7300 are generally decent from what ive seen.

so ive been meaning to do this for probably two years now and kept putting it off but after the storms we had last month and the power being out for almost four days i figured i really cant keep procrastinating on this. currently i have my FT-857D which i love but its kind of a pain to pack up since all the cables are just loose in a drawer, a 40ah LiFePO4 battery i picked up last spring, and a random wire antenna i made from a youtube video that actually works surprisingly well on 40m. what i dont really have figured out yet is how to keep it all organized and ready to grab fast. like right now it would take me probably 20-30 minutes to find everything and pack it, which kind of defeats the purpose. ive been looking at those harbor freight cases and also pelican knockoffs. anyone using those? also wondering if i should have a dedicated logging setup or if a notepad is fine for ARES stuff, havent been to a meeting in a while so i dont know what they expect. also not sure if i need a second radio for VHF/UHF or if i can get away with the 857 for everything. figured id ask here before i spent money on something i dont need.