Steven Clark

field day is honestly more chaotic than CQ WW in my experience just because of all the club politics and people tripping over cables lol. dont let that scare you off doing your own thing. i did my first solo contest attempt from my apartment with a magnetic loop and still made like 80 contacts, it was a blast even with the terrible antenna situation.
one thing i'd say is download N1MM+ before the contest if you havent already and spend a weekend just getting familiar with the interface. logging software makes a huge difference and you dont want to be figuring out the software at the same time as trying to actually operate. the learning curve isnt bad but its better to do it before not during.

so ive been chasing LEO satellites for a few months now mostly just FM birds like SO-50 and PO-101, got pretty comfortable with that whole thing. decided to jump into the linear transponder world with AO-73 last week and man its a whole different beast.
my main issue is that i keep losing my own signal during the pass. i know about the doppler shift obviously and ive got gpredict running on my laptop feeding corrected frequencies to my IC-9700 but somewhere in the middle of the pass i just... lose myself. i can hear other stations fine, the transponder is clearly working, but i cant find my own downlink anymore. im transmitting SSB on the uplink and listening on the downlink passband and i just drift off apparently.
is this a case where i need to be manually tweaking the RX frequency even with doppler correction running? i thought gpredict handled all that but maybe im missing something in the rig control setup. or is this more of an antenna issue, im running a pair of yagis on an az-el mount that i built last year. any ideas would be appreciated, this has been frustrating me for a few passes now.

ok so i passed my technician exam about 3 months ago and ive been mostly on 2m and 70cm doing local stuff but i keep reading that techs can do some HF too and i honestly cannot figure out from the FCC part 97 stuff what exactly im allowed to do. like i tried reading the actual rules and it just made me more confused not less.
i know theres something about 10m and maybe 15m? or maybe its just certain parts of those bands i dont know. and what about power limits, is it different for techs on HF vs general class operators. sorry if this is a dumb question i just cant get a straight answer from googling it

I had similar issues after updating. The solution was to run volk_profile utility before running gqrx - this detects and enables processor-specific optimizations and gives significant performance boost. Same principle applies to GNU Radio - the VOLK kernels need optimization after major updates.

ok so ive been doing SO-50 passes for a few months now with a handheld and a cheap arrow antenna and that part i mostly have figured out. but i keep reading about linear transponder birds like AO-73 and FO-29 and i guess im confused about the fundamental difference in how you actually operate them vs a straight FM repeater like SO-50.
with SO-50 i just dial in the uplink and downlink, correct for doppler manually as best i can and key up. simple enough. but from what i understand with a linear transponder youre putting in SSB and the whole passband can have multiple QSOs happening at once? and you have to track your own downlink and adjust? i tried a FO-29 pass last week with my FT-817 and a yagi i threw together and i could hear what sounded like two guys talking but i couldnt figure out what i was supposed to be transmitting on to even try to get in there. doppler was all over the place and i kept losing them.
is there a good way to get started with this or should i just stick to FM birds until i get better tracking software sorted out. im running gpredict right now on a linux box which works ok for predicting passes but i havent figured out how to get it to drive the radio for doppler correction automatically yet.

i went through the same exact debate lol. ended up with the 7300 and zero regrets but i also just bought a cheap baofeng brick for the occasional 2m net so that kinda solved the problem. the 7300 SDR architecture really does make a difference once you start operating on crowded band conditions, the panadapter alone changes how you find activity. anyway the 991A isnt a bad radio at all, i just think for home base HF the 7300 is purpose built for that and it shows

same boat as you like six months ago lol. what helped me was the ARRL handbook has a section that kinda summarizes the important parts of 97 without all the legal language. also there are some youtube videos that walk through it pretty clearly. the wattage stuff confused me too for a while but for HF as a tech you mostly just need to worry about not going over 200 watts on certain bands i think, or was it specific frequencies... anyway someone will correct me on that. the main thing is just dont transmit where youre not supposed to and keep your station ID every 10 minutes during a contact and at the end