Sarah Johnson

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about nets and checking in and whatnot but honestly i still feel pretty lost about how the whole thing works. like i know theres scheduled nets on certain frequencies and times but i cant always find good info on when they actually are and what the procedure is when you check in. i found the ARRL net directory and it lists a bunch but a lot of the times seem off or the net just wasnt there when i tuned in. do they move around or get cancelled without notice? and for special event stations, how do you even know when those are happening ahead of time? i stumbled on one last month completely by accident and had no idea what was going on until someone explained it to me mid qso which was kind of embarassing honestly. anyway if anyone has tips for finding active nets in my area (im in the midwest, ohio) or good ways to track special events im all ears. still trying to get more comfortable just getting on the air regularly

honestly i got my ticket like 8 months ago and ive probably spent more time listening than transmitting lol. still kind of nervous to just jump into a qso out of nowhere but hearing how other people do it helps a lot i think

ok so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local FM repeater but half the time nobody responds and im not sure if its a me problem or just nobody is around. the repeater is listed in the directory with a 100hz PL tone and i programmed that into my baofeng but honestly im not 100% sure i did it right because the menus on that thing are a nightmare. also i notice sometimes when i key up i can hear the repeater come up but then it drops like a second after i stop talking, is that normal? i thought there was supposed to be some kind of tail or courtesy tone or something. and is there any kind of etiquette i should know about before i just start calling out on a busy repeater? i dont want to step on anyone or come across as rude. thanks in advance

went through the same thing last year. general for like 3 years and kept putting it off. what finally got me to do it was someone mentioning you can operate as a volunteer examiner once you have your extra which i thought was kinda cool, like giving back a little. the exam itself, some of it i actually found interesting once i slowed down and tried to understand it rather than just memorize. the transmission line stuff clicked for me when i started thinking about it in terms of what was actually happening on my feedline. some of it is defintely just pass the test material though not gonna lie

the listening first thing is huge and almost nobody does it. i spent years just firing my call into the mess before i finally slowed down and actually studied how a DX op works a pileup. some of them are super predictable, like they have a rhythm, and once you lock onto it you can almost anticipate the exact second they come back to your part of the spread. on the power question, yeah it matters but probably not as much as timing and discipline. ive broken some pretty savage pileups running 100w into a decent antenna while guys with amps were getting stomped because they were transmitting at the wrong moment or on top of each other. the real killer is when 8 or 10 guys all send at exactly the same time and just create a wall of noise. if you can be the only one sending in a half second window you dont need the extra power as much. that said if your signal is genuinely weak at the other end then yeah, 500w vs 100w can be the difference between readable and not. the frequency drift pattern thing you described is real, some operators do that intentionally to thin out the crowd at any one spot. good catch on noticing it.

honestly for where you're starting the baofeng UV-5R gets way more hate than it deserves. ive handed them to brand new hams at our club and they work fine for exactly what you're describing — hitting repeaters, talking to a buddy on simplex. the audio isnt going to win any awards but its perfectly usable. CHIRP is pretty much essential once you have more than like 5 repeaters to program, doing it manually is technically possible but you'll age 10 years doing it. just grab the cable when you order the radio, saves a headache later. if you want to spend a bit more the BF-F8HP has better tx power options which can matter if you're in a hilly area. but honestly start cheap, see if you actually like HT operating, and upgrade later when you know what you actually want.

honestly just chase whatever contacts sound fun and let the awards take care of themselves, thats kind of how i ended up with DXCC without really planning it. i was just on every morning before work working whatever was spotted on the cluster and after like a year and a half i had enough confirmed to submit. the submission process through ARRL isnt that scary, you basically just request the credits in LoTW once you have 100 confirmed entities and pay the fee and they send you the certificate. one thing i will say — dont sleep on the CQ WPX award either if you like operating, its basically unlimited in scope and you can work toward it without even thinking about it. different strokes though, some people really like having a specific goal to chase

so ive been messing with Winlink Express for about three weeks now and i cant get a full session to complete without it cutting out. running a KAM XL connected to an IC-7300, the frequency is solid, im hearing the pactor handshake start up fine and it even shows connecting to the RMS but then somewhere around 60-70% of the message transfer it just drops. tried two different gateways, same result roughly the same point in the transfer each time. my RF levels look okay, im not seeing the ALC light up crazy or anything, and the audio into the TNC is sitting around where it should be. did a cable check, everything's tight. i wonder if its a timing issue with the TNC config or maybe something in Winlink Express settings i havent touched yet. the default session timeout maybe? not sure where to even start digging honestly. anyone run into this kind of consistent dropout at the same percentage point? it almost seems like its triggered by something in the message itself or maybe the handshake response isnt coming back fast enough. running Pactor 2 right now, dont have the P3/P4 license for the KAM.

that nervousness honestly never fully goes away for me and ive been doing emcomm stuff for close to 12 years now. i think it's actually a sign youre taking it seriously, the guys who show up completely relaxed and overconfident are usually the ones who make mistakes under pressure. you adapt though, after a few activations the muscle memory kicks in and the procedures just flow without you having to think as hard. the go-bag thing is a real problem in a lot of ARES groups unfortunately. our EC made it a requirement that people actually do a go-bag check at one of the quarterly meetings, like physically open the bag and show youve got your basics covered. cut down on that kind of thing a lot. worth suggesting to your group if they dont already do it.

so i decided i finally want to get my technician license after years of just being curious about ham radio. my neighbor has been into it forever and keeps telling me to just do it. anyway i bought one of those study guides off amazon, i think its the ARRL one, but honestly i kind of opened it and got a little overwhelmed. theres so much stuff in there and i dont even know if i need to read the whole thing or if i can just focus on certain sections. someone told me the question pool is public and you can just memorize the answers which sounds almost too easy? but then i looked at it and some of the questions have answers that look really similar to each other and i cant always tell which one is right even after reading them a few times. especially the electrical stuff, ohms law and all that. is there a better way to study for this than just going through the book cover to cover? or do most people just use one of those online practice test sites

JS8Call is definitely alive but yeah you kinda have to know when to look. there are nets, the HF Winlink crowd sometimes overlaps, and there's a reasonably active group on 40m in the evenings at least in north america. the heartbeat feature helps a lot once you understand it — your station just beacons out every so often and other JS8Call stations log hearing you even if nobody responds directly. the store and forward thing is actually pretty cool for emcomm purposes, some of the ARES groups around here have been experimenting with it as a backup when normal channels are down. it aint fast but it works when bands are garbage. i get what you mean about FT8 feeling like a video game. i still use it for DX but i turned off the auto-sequencer because at least manually clicking feels like im doing something. PSK31 is another one worth revisiting if you want actual ragchew over digital, though you need a slightly better signal than FT8 obviously.

so I just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but nobody ever seems to hear me. I can hear other people talking just fine on 147.255 but when I key up nothing happens, no courtesy tone, nobody responds. I looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it says the tone is 100.0 Hz so I programmed that into my baofeng but still nothing. my buddy who got his license a few years ago said maybe I have the tone set to transmit only when I need it on both TX and RX? not sure what that means exactly. also is there some kind of protocol for just jumping into a conversation or do you just wait? I dont want to step on anyone or be rude about it. still learning all this stuff

so this has been driving me crazy for a few weeks now. my 7300 runs fine on rx and even on low power tx, but if i push it past like 50 watts on 40m for any length of time it eventually throws the PA protection and drops to basically nothing. sometimes it recovers after a minute, sometimes i have to cycle power. other bands seem fine, or at least i havent been able to reproduce it on 20m or 17m. SWR looks clean so its not a load issue, ive got a good dummy load and tested that way too. pulled the covers and nothing looks obviously scorched or swollen. been poking around with a DMM but honestly not sure what im looking for exactly. i read somewhere the final transistors on these can develop a soft failure mode where they only act up when hot but i dont know how to actually confirm that without just replacing them and hoping. anybody dealt with this before or have a systematic way to chase this down?

yeah im planning on it, went last year and honestly the flea market part is still great even if some of the big vendor booths feel like they're just selling the same stuff you can find on amazon. picked up a barely used hf rig for way less than i expected so definitely worth going early if you can swing it. the parking thing hasnt really gotten better lol just show up before 7 if you dont want to deal with it

we ran into the exact same genny noise thing at a SET two years ago. turned out it was a cheap extension cord acting like an antenna and coupling into the feedline. swapped it for a properly shielded cord and added a ferrite choke right at the radio end and it got way better. sometimes its not the generator at all its just everything being too close together with no attention to RF layout. i'd also say dont underestimate how much the laptop alone will trash your noise floor if it's sitting on the same table as the radio running off the same power strip. seen that bite people more than once

haha yeah the first one is always a bit of a mess, dont stress about the SWR too much the internal tuner on those rigs handles a lot. i did my first SOTA summit last spring and forgot to bring any water, did the whole thing dehydrated and then had to pack up fast because thunderstorms rolled in. still got my 4 contacts though so it activated. just getting out there is honestly 90% of it

ok so i just upgraded from tech to general last month and im trying to figure out the 40 meter band. i know theres a chart somewhere but every time i look at it i get more confused not less. like the arrl band plan shows different things than what i see people actually operating on and then theres the band edges thing which everyone says to stay away from but nobody really explains why or how close is too close. also somebody at my club told me that the lower part of 40m is only for CW but then i heard ssb down there too so now im not sure what to believe. is there like a simple breakdown of this or am i just overthinking it

honestly hamstudy by itself got me through it no problem, i just drilled the questions every day for like two weeks and passed with only missing two. that said the way i did it was i went through each subelement in order rather than just random mode, at least the first time through, so i had some sense of what topics were grouped together the math stuff like ohms law only shows up a handful of times and the formulas are always the same so once you do those questions a few times you kind of just remember the pattern. dont stress too much about really deeply understanding antenna theory for the tech exam, the questions they actually ask are pretty surface level as for the question pool i think the current one is good through mid 2026 or somewhere around there, you can check the ARRL or NCVEC site to confirm. you definitely have time if you just started

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, just got my general a few months ago and been trying to figure all this out. one thing that helped me was the pskreporter site which isnt exactly the same thing but you can see whos hearing who in realtime which is pretty cool for figuring out if a band is even open before you start hunting around. not sure if that helps with the lag problem but its another tool to have open i guess

i took mine last spring and i think i overstudied tbh. spent like 3 months on it and probably could have done it in half that. the math questions look intimidating but theres only so many ways they can ask about reactance and impedance matching before you start recognizing the pattern. just do the practice exams until youre consistently hitting 85% or better and you'll be fine on test day.

yeah what the previous guy said about telnet is right. i use it mostly just to pre-position messages before i head out somewhere remote, like i'll draft everything and send via telnet, then when i get out there and connect via RF the outbox is already cleared. saves airtime. one thing i'll add -- if you want to see the status of a message after upload you can log into winlink.org with your callsign and check the account there. it shows sent messages and you can see if they got picked up. doesnt give you a full delivery receipt or anything but at least you know it made it to the CMS. also check your RMS frequency list in the software and make sure you have the right tones set, ive seen people set up on a gateway frequency that technically shows as available but the actual node hasnt been active in months.

i went RTL-SDR to HackRF and kind of skipped the SDRplay stuff entirely, different use case i know since the HackRF does TX too but just my experience — the jump from the dongle to something with proper front end filtering is real and noticeable, especially below 30 mhz where the cheap dongle is just sort of doing its best if you're staying receive-only the RSP lineup is probaly the smarter call over HackRF anyway since the receive performance is actually better and you dont pay for transmit capability you wont use. gqrx on linux works fine with SDRplay stuff through the sdrplay driver plugin for gnu radio, took me a bit to get working but its solid once its set up

so ive been trying to get Winlink Express set up for a while now and i keep running into the same wall. i can see the local RMS gateway in the list, it shows up fine, frequency looks right, i set the dial freq in the software and everything but when i actually try to connect it just sits there and then times out. im using a KAM XL for the TNC and its been working fine for regular packet stuff so i dont think thats the issue my radio is a 706 mk2g and i have it set to 1200 baud, the gateway supposedly accepts 1200 too based on the winlink.org gateway listing. i ran the audio levels through the soundcard stuff in express and they look okay but honestly im not 100% sure what im looking at. the waterfall shows... something when i key up but i dunno if its actually a proper bell 202 tone pair or just noise has anyone been through this before. is there some obvious thing im missing with the RMS gateway setup or the way express talks to the TNC. feels like im close but just missing one thing

im in almost the exact same boat lol, 14 wpm here and feels like a wall. ive heard the Koch method is good but i keep jumping around between different practice tools and probably not helping myself by doing that. curious what other people think about those straight key vs paddle arguments too — my uncle who got me into ham radio swears a straight key first builds better rhythm but idk seems old fashioned maybe

so ive been chasing for about 3 months now and finally decided to just do it and activate a local summit this weekend. its only a 2 pointer but whatever gotta start somewhere right. my question is kind of dumb but i want to make sure i get credit — do i need to register the summit reference on the SOTA database before i go up or just log it after? i looked at the sotawatch site and it was a little confusing to me about the self spot thing vs having someone else spot you. also im bringing my ft-818 and a linked dipole i made from a kit, planning to work 40 and 20 meters. the activation zone is pretty clear from what i can tell on the topo map but im a little unsure if im reading the elevation correctly. the summit is W4T/SU-064 if anyone knows it. any advice appreciated, first time jitters and all that