Michael Brown79

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the last bad storm season i finally sat down and started actually building out a go-kit. right now i have my FT-857D, a couple of spare fuses, my SignaLink, a tablet with Winlink and APRS stuff loaded up, and a basic dipole i can throw in a tree. power is a 20ah lifepo4 battery and a small 50w panel. thing is i dont really know what i dont know, you know? like i feel like im forgetting something obvious. ive heard people talk about having laminated frequency cards and stuff like that but i also feel like my tablet covers most of that. my local ARES group does drills maybe twice a year but honestly we havent done a full deployment sim so i dont have much to compare against. anyone who has actually deployed for a real event, what was the thing that surprised you or that you wished you had packed? not looking for the obvious stuff like extra coax and adapters, more like the dumb little things you never think about until youre standing in a parking lot at 2am wondering why you forgot it

haha yeah mine was terrible too, i was on a 2m net and the net control asked for check-ins and i just... froze. said my call wrong the first time. these things happen man, nobody cares as much as you think they do. the guys on local repeaters are usually pretty patient with new hams. once you get a few more contacts under your belt it becomes second nature. also dont sweat the baofeng thing, we all started somewhere

1.4:1 is totally fine, dont even worry about it. most rigs these days will happily load into that without the tuner even kicking in. people get way too hung up on chasing 1.0 and honestly unless youre running a linear or something the difference is pretty negligible in terms of power getting to the antenna. the frequency thing is real though. stranded wire has a slightly different velocity factor than solid and the height and angle of the legs affects the electrical length too. if you cut it in free space at the standard formula it usually comes out a bit short of where you want it. just add a couple inches to each leg and resweep, do it gradually. easier to cut off than to add back on. also the wire will sag a tiny bit over time if theres any tension and that can shift things a few khz but probably not enough to matter much.

so we finally got around to doing a proper SET with our county ARES group last saturday and i have to say it was a real eye opener. we had about 14 operators participate which is honestly more than i expected to show up on a cold morning. the scenario was basically a major flood event cutting off the EOC from the hospital and two shelter sites. we were supposed to relay health and welfare traffic and coordinate resource requests using only simplex HF and local VHF since we assumed the repeater infrastructure was down. and that assumption alone caused like half our problems because nobody had practiced net control on simplex in ages. people kept forgetting to ID properly, there was a ton of stepping on each other, and at one point we lost contact with the shelter team for almost 20 minutes because nobody had pre-coordinated a fallback frequency. the lesson that hit me hardest was how much we rely on muscle memory from nets that use repeaters and how badly that breaks down when you yank the infrastructure out. also discovered that two of our members didnt actually have their go-bags ready to deploy — like they had the bag but the batteries were dead and one guy's radio hadn't been turned on in six months. anyway curious if other groups have done similar exercises recently and what tripped you up. we're planning a debrief writeup for the section newsletter but wanted to get some outside perspectives first.

wait 10m was actually open? i had the radio on in the background around that time and didnt notice anything, must have been on the wrong part of the band. what frequency were you around, like 28.3 area or higher up? im still kinda learning where people actually hang out on that band since ive mostly been on 40m since i got my general.

Not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely is confusing when you're starting out. So WAS is Worked All States, that's 50 states confirmed, completely separate from DXCC which is about working 100 or more DXCC entities (countries basically, though not exactly countries — it's complicated). WAZ is Worked All Zones, 40 CQ zones worldwide. They're all independent awards run by different organizations and you can chase them all at once or focus on one, totally up to you. The logging thing your club friend mentioned is real — you want to get on LoTW as soon as you can because a lot of stations upload there and your confirmations start stacking up automatically. For contacts you already made, if the other station is on LoTW and you upload your log, those will match retroactively. Doesn't matter when you made the contact as long as both sides upload. Start there honestly, get your log into LoTW and you might be surprised how many of your 40 states are already confirmed.