Sarah Johnson

so ive been a ham for about 8 months now (general class) and ive been watching youtube videos of people doing SOTA activations and it looks like exactly the kind of thing i want to do. i love hiking anyway so combining that with radio just seems perfect. i registered on sotawatch and got my callsign set up but im a little confused about a few things. like when people say they need 4 contacts to qualify a summit, do all 4 have to be on different bands or can they all be on 2m? and do the chasers have to be in a certain distance away or anything like that? i feel like ive read conflicting things online. also i was thinking of starting with a summit thats only like a 2 mile hike, W4T/SU-something i think, not totally sure of the reference yet. is it bad form to just show up without posting an alert first? i have a baofeng and a little HF rig (the xiegu g90) so i was thinking 40m would probably get me the most contacts. anyway any advice from people who have actually done this would be great, im probably overthinking it

so our ARES group is doing a simulated emergency exercise next month and im trying to figure out the best way to power everything for what could be an 8-10 hour deployment. we're running an IC-7300 as the main HF station, a VX-6R on the side for local coordination, and probably a laptop for logging and maybe some winlink traffic. my current thinking is a honda eu2200i paired with a 100ah lithium battery as a buffer — basically run the genny for a few hours in the morning to top everything off, then run quiet on battery for the afternoon when we're closer to the residential area. noise-wise the honda is pretty tame but still, you know how it goes at these things, someone always complains. antenna side im probably going to throw up a linked dipole on a 31ft jackite pole, got it tuned pretty well for 40 and 20. might try to get a 15m link in there too if I have time before the exercise. the challenge is the site has some decent trees but ground is really soft from all the rain we got this spring so guying anything vertical is going to be a pain. anyone done something similar for a full day ARES or RACES deployment where you needed to stay quiet but still have enough juice? curious if the battery buffer approach actually works in practice or if im overcomplicating it.

made that exact switch about 18 months ago and yeah the difference on HF is pretty noticeable, not like night and day dramatic but the noise floor is definitely cleaner and you stop getting the intermod garbage you get on the RTL when theres a strong broadcast station nearby. the 10 MHz coverage at once thing is nice too if you do any spectrum monitoring. SDR++ works fine with it, you just install the SDRplay API separately and then it shows up in the source dropdown. took me maybe 10 minutes total including driver install on windows. the SDRplay SDRuno software is okay but honestly SDR++ is just better for general use so i dont even bother with it anymore. only time i use SDRuno is when i want to use the IF bandwidth settings that SDR++ doesnt expose. if you're doing a lot of HF the upgrade is worth it imo. if you're mostly VHF/UHF you might not notice as much since the RTL is actually pretty decent up there.

oh nice i was just looking at wwff last week wondering if its worth getting into alongside POTA. did you find the chasers were different people or mostly the same crowd? im curious if its a seperate community or if everyone kind of does both

okay so ive been licensed about 4 months now and i still feel weird about this. like i know the NATO phonetics, alpha bravo charlie etc, but im never sure when im supposed to use them vs just saying the letter. like if someones asking for my callsign on a net do i always spell it out phonetically or is it situational? i was on a local 2m repeater last week and said my call just normally and the net control asked me to say it again phonetically and i felt kinda dumb. but then i hear people on there sometimes just rattling off letters without phonetics and nobody says anything. is there an actual rule or is it just like... a feel thing you develop over time