Sarah Anderson50

I've been working on CW for about 6 months now and I'm solidly comfortable at 15 WPM, but I just can't seem to break through to higher speeds. I keep hearing that to get beyond 15 WPM you need to switch to head copy instead of writing everything down. I'm using G4FON and LCWO for practice, but I feel stuck. I know progress can be up and down with plateaus, but this one feels longer than usual. Has anyone else hit this same wall? What finally helped you break through to 20+ WPM?

this is really interesting to read, im still pretty new (got my general last spring) and ive been thinking about getting involved with ARES but honestly wasnt sure if id be useful at all. do groups usually welcome people who are still learning or is it mostly experienced ops? i dont want to be that guy who slows everything down during an actual activation

yeah 10m has been doing some interesting things lately, we're climbing toward solar max so these openings are gonna get more frequent and more reliable. 150 SFI is a decent rule of thumb for 10m to get interesting but honestly ive worked europe on 10m with flux in the 120s when the conditions just lined up right. the k-index being low matters almost as much as the flux number, geomagnetic noise can kill an otherwise good opening fast. i use the DX cluster religiously now, if you see a bunch of spots suddenly lighting up on 28mhz you just jump on it, by the time you're calculating flux numbers the opening might already be fading. also the greyline can do weird things on 10m, worth paying attention to when sunrise/sunset is hitting the path between you and wherever you're trying to work. sounds like you had a legit opening though, 165 with quiet geo conditions thats pretty solid. dipole at 25 feet will def work europe on 10m in those conditions, not even a question.

so ive been messing around with an arduino uno for the past few weeks trying to get it to automatically switch between my two antennas based on band in use. the rig is an IC-7300 so i can pull the CI-V data off the USB port and theoretically know what band im on at any given time. my plan is to have the arduino parse the CI-V frequency data and then trigger a relay to flip between my 40m dipole and the trap vertical for 20/15/10. got the serial comms working mostly fine, the arduino is receiving the frequency data but im having a weird issue where it seems to miss packets every now and then, like itll switch correctly 8 times out of 10 but then just... not respond. no idea if its a timing issue with how fast CI-V polls or something in my parsing code. im using a simple SoftwareSerial setup which maybe isnt ideal. also the relay im using is just a generic 5v relay module from amazon, wondering if i should be more careful about what relay i use given the currents involved. the coax switch itself is a MFJ-1700C being driven by the relay so its not like im switching RF directly, just the control voltage for the solenoids. anyone done anything similar? would love to see some code if youve got it

same here man, i worked like 14 countries on 10m last weekend and i'm only running a vertical. the South America stuff especially has been coming in super strong in the afternoons. i dont fully understand all the flux stuff either but i just watch the DX cluster and when i see a pile of 10m spots i just get on lol

Check out the overhead sunglasses compartment! I've seen some great installs there with remote head radios. Keeps it hidden but still accessible, plus you can route the cables cleanly behind the headliner.

im still pretty new to chasing but ive been reading everything i can on the reflector and i think the time zone thing is something almost everyone messes up at least once lol. i actually held off on my first activation for weeks because i was paranoid about the log submission screwing up my points that S2S sounds awesome though, i havent managed to work one yet from the chase side, seems like you have to be watching SOTAwatch constantly to catch them before the pile gets too big

so ive been wanting to do this for probably two years now and last weekend i finally just did it. built a bitx40 from scratch, well mostly scratch, took me about three evenings and one very late night with a magnifying glass trying to identify resistor color bands. the soldering on the toroids was honestly the hardest part for me personally, i kept second guessing how many turns i had done. anyway got it all together, did the smoke test, nothing died, and i took it out to the park near my house with a random wire up in a tree and the little tuner i built from a kit a while back. ran it on a 3ah lipo i had kicking around from an RC car project. made four contacts in about two hours, all on 40m, one of them was into ohio which from my QTH is maybe 400 miles? on 5 watts. i know thats not exactly DX but the whole thing felt completely different from sitting at the shack. something about knowing the rig came from a bag of parts and is now talking to someone 400 miles away. hard to explain. the audio is a little bassy and the sidetone is way too loud, i have to tweak that still. but it works. anyone else do park portable QRP? curious what antennas people are using for this kind of thing because the random wire with a tuner feels a bit wasteful of the little power i have

headlamp. i know it sounds dumb but the first time i deployed for a real event i completely forgot a headlamp and was fumbling around in the dark trying to connect coax at like 10pm. had my phone flashlight which was just... not great. also spare fuses. i cannot tell you how many times ive seen someone's whole kit go down because a fuse blew and nobody had a spare. they're tiny, they weigh nothing, just tape a strip of them inside the lid of the case and forget about them. the solar panel thing is worth it by the way. i went with a cheap 50w foldable panel off amazon and a small PWM charge controller and it's been totally fine for maintaining the battery on a 2-3 day deployment. not gonna win any efficiency awards but it works. also think about a notepad and pens, real paper ones, because when things get weird you dont always want to trust a tablet or laptop for logging

Hi, pretty new here (got my general back in March) and just wanted to say I had no idea 6 meters could do stuff like that. I thought it was kind of a dead band most of the time? I have an FT-991A that covers it but I've barely touched that part of the dial. Is there a good way to know when an opening is happening so I can actually be there for it? I keep missing things because I don't know what to watch for.

honestly for your use case i'd probably say go with the Yaesu FT-65 if you can stretch to it. it's not dramatically more complicated than the baofengs but the receiver is noticeably better and you wont be fighting desensitization issues as much near strong signals. the build feels more solid too, dropped mine a few times and it still works fine. that said i dont want to pile on the baofengs too hard — i started with a UV-5R back when i first got licensed and it got me on the air and talking to people, which is the whole point. the programming can be a bit of a pain and chirp is basically required, but once its set up it works. the receiver isnt great in busy RF environments but if your area isnt super congested it probably wont matter much. the wouxun is a step up from baofeng but in that price range i'd lean yaesu personally. or if you want to spend a little more the FT-60 is an older model but its built like a tank and has a really good receiver for the price, you can find them used pretty reasonably. either way just get something and get on the air, you can always upgrade later when you know more about what you actually want.

so i finally did it, been studying for like 2 months and passed the technician exam last thursday. got my callsign in the system a few days later which was faster than i expected honestly. anyway today i borrowed my buddy's handheld baofeng and managed to get into a local 2m repeater and someone actually came back to me. i fumbled through the whole exchange like an idiot but the guy on the other end was super patient and walked me through it. i dont even remember half of what i said i was so nervous lol. just wanted to share because i dont really know anyone else who does this hobby and felt like telling somebody

so i finally did my first summit activation last weekend, took the ft-818 and a wire antenna up to a local peak thats only like a 2 mile hike, nothing crazy. was honestly kind of nervous i wouldnt make the 4 contacts needed but ended up with like 14 in the log in about 40 minutes which surprised me. the summit to summit contacts are so fun, worked a guy in colorado while i was sitting on a rock in vermont eating a granola bar. hard to beat that honestly. the 20m band was a little rough early on but once i switched to 40 it just started pouring in. only real issue was my squid pole kept wanting to fall over because the ground was so rocky up there, ended up wedging it in a crack which worked fine but felt sketchy. definitely doing this again, already looking at a few more summits in the area

yeah this is actually pretty common with the D710, the audio level for the internal TNC can be finicky. what i'd do first is grab a copy of Direwolf on a laptop and just listen to 144.390 for a while — if your local digis are up you'll start seeing decode attempts in the log and can tell right away if the signal is being heard. if your own packets show up decoded in Direwolf then the problem is downstream, probably an igate configuration or your packets are getting digi'd but the igate is filtering them for some reason. also double check you have a comment or status text in the beacon, some igates are weird about gating packets with empty fields, probably not the issue but worth ruling out. and make sure your SSID isnt already in use on another station nearby, had a buddy who had his handheld set to the same SSID as his mobile and aprs.fi was only showing one of them.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and just kind of puttered around doing local stuff and the occasional contest but never really chased DX in any organized way. got maybe 40-50 entities confirmed just from random contacts over the years but never actually submitted anything to ARRL or even logged seriously with award tracking in mind. decided this year im finally gonna go for DXCC and maybe WAS on the side since i already have most states worked, just not confirmed. couple things im confused about though — do the QSLs i already have in my drawer count if i can match them up in my log? some of those cards go back to 2018 and i wasnt super careful about logging band and mode. also whats the deal with LoTW vs paper cards, do you need a certain mix or can you do all electronic? i know ARRL runs LoTW but im not totally clear on how credits actually get applied toward the award. also worth going for WAZ at the same time or is that a totally separate rabbit hole. just trying to figure out how to not make this more complicated than it needs to be

Having problems with APRS message delivery on 144.390 MHz. APRS is not a vehicle tracking system. It is a two-way tactical real-time digital communications system but I can't seem to get messages through reliably. My position beacons are working fine and show up on aprs.fi, but when I send messages to other stations they never get acknowledged. Path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1. TNC is a Kantronics KPC-3+ with standard UIDIGI firmware. Has anyone seen similar issues with message acks getting lost?

the Canary Islands one is a good get actually, EA8 counts as its own entity which trips up a lot of people. one thing that helped me early on was just downloading the DXCC entity list as a PDF and keeping it open while i was logging, that way you can cross reference as you go. also get on LoTW as soon as you can if youre not already, some DX stations only confirm via LoTW and you dont want to be scrambling for QSLs later when you're trying to apply for the award. club log is worth looking at too, a lot of the big DX expeditions upload there first

Looking to upgrade my 2m EME setup from JT65 to Q65 and wondering about the real-world performance improvement. Currently running 4 x 17 element Yagis with 1kW and typically copy JT65 signals down to about -23dB SNR. Q65 specifications claim 1-3dB better sensitivity than JT65 - has anyone done side-by-side comparisons? Particularly interested in whether Q65-60 delivers the promised improvement for weak signal work and if the shorter sequence modes like Q65-30 are practical for regular EME operation.

tail-ending actually works more than people admit, the trick is doing it right. you slip in right as the DX finishes copying the previous station, before the next wave of callers really gets going. tiny window but it's real. got a few rare ones that way. also people massively underestimate how much audio quality matters. a clean punchy signal that sounds like it came from a broadcast transmitter cuts through way better than a distorted overdriven mess, even if the distorted one is technically louder. get your mic gain set right, maybe run a little compression but not slammed, and that can honestly do more than another 200 watts would.

so ive been running FT8 on 20m pretty regularly for the last couple years and lately it feels like my decode count is down noticeably compared to say 18 months ago. same setup, IC-7300 into a dipole at about 30ft, WSJT-X 2.6.1, audio going through the USB cable. nothing changed on my end as far as i can tell. im wondering if its band conditions obviously but i was also reading something about the overall noise floor on 20m getting worse as more people run higher power into it. not sure if thats a real thing or just forum noise (heh). decode count on a decent evening used to be like 40-50 stations in a single cycle and now im seeing more like 20-25 on the same band. granted the solar stuff has been weird this cycle. anyone else noticing this or do i need to go back and check my setup more carefully. i did recently move my router closer to the shack which i know isnt ideal but i didnt think it would matter that much at HF

The SignaLink USB is hard to beat for clean audio interfaces. Keeping well within the linear zone and clear of harder ALC onset minimizes splatter and maximizes decode reliability. I run mine at about 40% drive level with my IC-7300 and get excellent results on both FT8 and FT4.

so i finally got around to building a dipole instead of just buying one, figured it couldnt be that hard and honestly it wasnt but i do have a few questions now that its up in the air. i used some 14 gauge solid copper wire i had laying around from an old house project, cut it to half wave for 40m which came out to about 66 feet total, and hung it inverted-V style from a tree in the backyard with the apex at maybe 35 feet up. the SWR is reading around 1.4:1 at the frequency i want which seems decent but im wondering if thats the wire or the feed point setup. i just used a choke balun i wound myself out of like 10 turns of RG-8X on a PVC form, not sure if thats sufficient or if i should be using a proper 1:1 current balun. also the legs arent perfectly equal in length, one side might be a foot shorter because of where the tree branches are, could that be throwing off the match or is a foot not a big deal at 40m? anyway the thing actually works, made a few contacts into the midwest from here in the northeast last night which was cool, just want to tighten it up a bit before i call it done

Planning to deploy an RMS Packet gateway supporting both VARA FM and packet on 145.050 MHz using a single Yaesu FTM-400XD. Running dual mode on one radio can be tricky with timing issues using KISS driver, but AGWPE doesn't have these collision problems. Currently considering Masters Communications DRA-50 vs SignaLink USB for the audio interface. The DRA interfaces are specifically designed as digital radio adapters with fast PTT response that VARA FM recognizes. What are your experiences with audio level calibration and PTT reliability on dual-mode setups?

yeah what he said about the ALC is spot on. i went through the exact same thing when i first set up winlink and spent like two weeks thinking it was the gateways being flaky when the whole time i was just cooking my audio. one thing i'll add -- in vara HF settings there's a bandwidth setting and if youre on a busy band and you've got it set to 2300hz you might be stepping on other signals or getting interference that kills the session. dropping to 500hz is slower but way more reliable when conditions are marginal. also the gateway showing busy isnt necessarily your fault, some of the popular RMS gateways only handle one session at a time and if someone else connects right when youre mid-transfer it can be weird. the propagation checker in winlink express is actually pretty useful for finding gateways that are likely to have a clear path at that time of day. takes a minute to learn but worth it.

so ive been doing POTA for about a year now and someone in my local club mentioned WWFF and I went down a rabbit hole last night trying to figure out how it all works. seems like a lot of the same idea but with a bigger international focus? anyway I found a nature reserve about 20 minutes from my house that has a WWFF reference (ONF-something, im in Ontario) and im thinking of heading out there this weekend with the KX2 and a random wire thrown up in a tree. my main questions are - do I log it the same way as POTA or is there a separate system for uploading logs? I found the wwff.cc site but honestly it was a bit confusing to navigate. also does the 44 QSO minimum apply the same way or is that just a POTA thing. and one more thing - can I claim both a POTA activation AND a WWFF activation if the park happens to be listed in both programs, because I think this reserve might qualify for both sorry for all the questions, just want to make sure I do it right before I drive out there