Michael Brown79

so the short version is the FCC part 97 stuff is what you legally have to stay within, and for general on 40m phone that means 7.175 to 7.300 MHz. the band plan stuff from ARRL is just a coordination thing, nobody is going to come after you legally for ignoring it but you might annoy people if you park on a frequency that everyone kind of expects to be used for something else. the band edge thing your club guy mentioned is real though. your radio's displayed frequency is usually the suppressed carrier, and with SSB the actual signal extends a few kHz above that (for USB) or below (for LSB). so if you tune to exactly 7.300 and transmit USB, part of your signal is technically outside the allocation. most people leave at least 3kHz of margin from the edge just to be safe. some guys are more careful than others about it but its good practice especially when you're newer and still learning how your rig behaves. 7.125 to 7.175 is technically within your privileges as a general for phone but by convention that chunk tends to get used a lot for digital and some CW activity depending on what part of the day it is. you can technically operate there but expect it to be busy and occasionally someone will tell you youre in the wrong spot even if youre not legally out of bounds.

so ive been trying to hit the local 2m machine on 146.73 for weeks now and cant get in. i can hear it fine but when i key up nothing happens. i checked my offset and frequency about 10 times, even tried different radios. finally someone at the club meeting last night said i need the pl tone but nobody knew what it was. the repeater book says 103.5 but when i program that in i still cant get it to key up. tried 107.2 and 100.0 as well since those seem popular around here. am i missing something obvious? ive never had to use tones before on the other repeaters in the area. maybe the book is wrong or outdated? this is driving me nuts lol. my kenwood th-d74 is set to encode the tone and the frequency/offset are definitely correct.

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.

Good data points. For emergency communications, that 0.7 dB could mean the difference between reliable contact and missed traffic. We always recommend permanent mounts for ARES/RACES vehicles for exactly this reason.

so ive been running N1MM for contests for years now and it does that job fine honestly, but for everyday logging and digital modes its kind of a pain to deal with. the interface is clearly built around contesting and when im just sitting down to work some FT8 on a random tuesday evening it feels like overkill and half the fields dont even apply. started poking around Log4OM a few weeks ago and its got a totally different feel to it, more like a general logbook that you bolt other stuff onto. WSJT-X integration actually works pretty cleanly once you get the UDP port sorted out, took me maybe 20 minutes to figure out why it wasnt auto-logging and it turned out i just had the wrong port number in the WSJT-X settings, classic. my question is whether anyone runs both side by side — like N1MM for when a contest weekend comes up and Log4OM as the daily driver. do you bother syncing the logs between them or just keep them totally separate? i feel like having two separate logs is gonna drive me crazy eventually but maybe thats just how people do it

Key point you mentioned about tracking patterns - I use the waterfall religiously but you still need to listen as more often than not I will still see several on the waterfall after the DX station calls someone. The visual helps narrow down quickly, but audio confirmation is critical for identifying the actual worked station versus continued callers.

i went through this exact same thing lol. ended up with the 7300 about 8 months ago and zero regrets. the panadapter display is addictive, like i just sit there watching signals pop up on 20m. for digital stuff like FT8 it works really well too, setup with wsjt-x wasnt too bad once i figured out the audio routing. only thing i'll say is budget for a decent antenna cause the radio wont matter much if youre on a compromised antenna. learned that the hard way.

Gpredict user here with FT-991A. The CAT Doppler compensation works much better than SatPC32 in my experience, especially for linear birds. The interface takes getting used to but the tracking accuracy is noticeably tighter.

yeah the QSL thing is genuinely confusing at first, dont worry about it. basically the short answer is you dont HAVE to use all of them but if you want to maximize confirmed contacts it helps to at least do LoTW and eQSL since they're free and easy once you get the hang of uploading logs. LoTW is what counts for DXCC and most of the big ARRL awards so that one's probably the most important if you're thinking long term. the reason you're only seeing a few confirmations is just that not everyone uploads regularly — some people batch upload once a month, some once a year, some never. totally normal. your contacts are in there they just haven't confirmed yet. eQSL is a bit more casual and you'll usually get confirmations faster because people tend to upload there more often. and then physical cards are kind of their own thing, some people love them and collect them, some DX stations still require a paper card for certain awards. a QSL manager is just someone who handles the card mailing for a DX station that doesnt want to deal with postage from wherever they are, usually you send your card to the manager's address instead. honestly just keep uploading to LoTW after every session and maybe sign up for eQSL too, and over time the confirmations will pile up. it's kind of a slow burn hobby within the hobby.

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

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.

i passed mine about 8 months ago just using hamstudy and maybe 3 weeks of studying on and off, like 20 mins a day on my lunch break. got a 85% on the actual exam. the book is kinda long tbh. if you just want to get licensed and start operating i wouldnt overthink it, you learn way more once you actually have a radio in your hand and start making contacts. the ohms law stuff and the circuit diagrams freaked me out at first but there are like only a handful of those questions and they show up exactly as they are in the pool so