Emily Williams

So I finally did my first ever POTA activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from me (K-4861 if anyone's curious) and honestly I was not prepared for how much fun it was. Set up my KX2 with a 40m end fed wire thrown up into a pine tree, maybe 20 feet of height, nothing fancy at all. Got my 10 contacts in about 35 minutes which I know isn't blazing fast but for a first time out I was pretty happy. Mostly 40m SSB with a couple guys on 20m toward the end. A few people spotted me on the POTA app and that definitely helped the pile up situation, small as it was lol. Anyway my question is about park references — when I upload my log do I just put the one park number in? I was right on the edge of the park boundary and there was another unit of the same state park system maybe a half mile down the road but I didnt actually operate from that trailhead. Can you count it? And also how strict are they about the boundary thing, like is GPS required or just a reasonable effort to be inside the park? Already planning my next one. Thinking about doing a two-fer if I can find parks close enough together to do in one day.

Finally taking the plunge and heading up to Mount Monadnock (W1/HA-001) tomorrow morning with my KX2 and random wire. I've got my alert posted and gear checked, but I'm honestly a bit nervous about the whole thing. Any seasoned activators have tips for a SOTA newbie? How long should I plan to operate to get my 4 contacts? I'm worried about getting skunked on my first summit! Planning to start on 20m around 1400z if propagation cooperates.

welcome to the hobby, dont stress too much about the CTCSS stuff, it clicks pretty fast once you get it sorted. so basically the tone in the repeater directory is usually right but sometimes those listings are outdated — your best bet is to check if the club or group that runs that repeater has a website, they usually list the correct PL tone there. also double check that your radio is actually set to encode the tone on transmit, not just decode it on receive. the baofeng menus can be a little confusing about that, its easy to set one and not the other. as for joining a conversation — yeah what you saw was the right move. just wait for a pause between transmissions and say your callsign, something like just "KD9XYZ" and thats usually enough for the folks in the QSO to acknowledge you and let you in. most people on local repeaters are pretty welcoming especially if you mention youre new. dont overthink it, honestly the first time you just key up and say something is the hardest part and then it gets way easier after that.

congrats on the ticket first of all. ok so here's my honest take after going through basically the same thing a few years back -- the baofeng hate is a little overblown but it's not totally wrong either. they work, they just require more patience to program and the audio quality can be a bit rough on some units. if you're comfortable tinkering and don't mind spending an afternoon with chirp figuring things out, a UV-5R or UV-82 will get you on the air for like $25-30 and then you can decide later what you actually want in a radio once you know more about how you operate. that said if your budget is $100-150 i'd honestly point you at the yaesu FT-65. it's dual band, sturdy, sounds noticeably better on receive than the cheap stuff, and chirp supports it fine. the menus are a little weird at first but you get used to it. the FT-60 is great too but it's single band 2m/70cm meaning it IS dual band but older style -- anyway it's good but harder to find new these days. for APRS down the road you'd want something like the VX-8DR or one of the Kenwood TH-D series but those are way outside your budget right now so don't worry about it yet. get on the air first and figure out what you actually use before spending more money.

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of newer folks. the short version is there's no law that says you have to use NATO phonetics specifically, the FCC just says you should use a phonetic alphabet when spelling things out, it doesnt mandate which one. but NATO is the standard everyone expects so sticking to it avoids confusion especially on HF or any kind of weak signal work. on a local repeater doing a casual ragchew, yeah most people dont bother phoneting every letter of their callsign every single time they talk. youll say it phonetically when you first ID or if someone asks you to repeat, but mid conversation when everyone already knows who you are its pretty normal to just say the letters. on HF especially DX or contest stuff you pretty much always go full phonetics because conditions can be rough and one wrong letter in a callsign is a busted contact. the washington vs whiskey thing — whiskey is correct NATO, washington is one of those old ARRL phonetics from decades ago. youll still hear older hams using those, things like new york for N or sugar for S. it works fine but if youre talking to someone overseas or in a pile-up the NATO ones are way less likely to cause a misunderstanding

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now mostly doing aircraft stuff and some amateur band monitoring and honestly its been fine for what it is but im starting to feel the limitations especially on HF below 25 MHz where the direct sampling mode is just kind of mediocre at best been looking at either picking up a HackRF One or jumping straight to the SDRplay RSPdx and the price difference is pretty significant, HackRF is around $300-ish for the real one (not the clones which i hear are hit or miss) and the RSPdx is like $200 but obviously they do completely different things my main use case is honestly just HF monitoring, shortwave broadcast, some 40m and 80m listening, maybe poking around on 630m if i ever get a decent antenna for it. not really interested in transmitting so the HackRF's TX capability doesnt mean much to me. just want better sensitivity and dynamic range than what im getting now anyone running the RSPdx with SDRuno or maybe SDR++ and have opinions? also does the RSPdx actually handle strong local broadcast stations without totally collapsing or do you still need external filtering

yeah what youre describing is totally normal, dont let it discourage you. the Koch method is basically just a way of learning where you start with only 2 characters at full speed (like 20wpm) and you dont move on to adding a new character until you can copy those two at like 90% accuracy or whatever threshold you set. the idea is your brain learns the sound as a whole instead of counting dots and dashes. that counting thing is actually what trips most people up early on. LCWO dot net is the site most people use for Koch training, its free and its pretty much the standard recommendation around here. just set it to 20wpm character speed with maybe 10wpm effective speed to give yourself gaps between characters at first. i know it feels weird sending that slow but keeping the character speed up is the whole point. as for a key, honestly you can start learning to copy without one, reading and sending are kind of separate skills anyway. plenty of people spend the first month or two just doing receive practice before they ever touch a key. but when you are ready a cheap straight key is fine to start, no need to jump straight into paddles and a keyer until you have some feel for it.