Christine Lee

I was in the same boat maybe 8 months ago. I used hamstudy AND the ARRL technician book together and I think that combo helped because the book explained the why behind stuff, like why certain frequencies behave the way they do, which made the questions stick better instead of just memorizing. took me about 3 weeks studying maybe 20-30 minutes a night the ohms law stuff really isnt bad once you do a few practice problems, the exam questions basically give you two of the three values and ask for the third so if you can rearrange a simple equation youre fine. what helped me was just doing the hamstudy practice exams over and over until i was consistently hitting like 85 percent or better, then i went and took the real thing and passed with room to spare

so i've been lurking on this forum for probably two years now reading about QRP and always thinking 'yeah someday i'll try that' and last month i finally just did it. built a Michigan Mighty Mite from a kit i found, took me three evenings of fumbling around with the soldering iron but got it together and it actually works. first time i keyed it up i honestly expected nothing to happen because my solder joints looked pretty rough in a few spots but the thing fired right up, maybe 500mw or so on 40m. spent a few nights just listening and calling CQ and nothing, starting to think i'd made a mistake. then last thursday night around 8pm local i got a response from a guy in Tennessee, im in Ohio so not a huge distance but honestly it felt like i'd worked DX. we had a solid little QSO, signal reports were decent considering im running less than a watt into a dipole in my backyard. anyway i guess im just posting because i wanted to share it with people who would actually appreciate it, my wife was happy for me but i could tell she had no idea why i was so excited about talking to someone in Tennessee with a radio i built myself. anyone else remember their first QRP contact? does it get more addictive from here because im already looking at the 4state QRP group kits

im sort of in the same boat, been at CW for about 6 months now. one thing that helped me a lot was the G4FON trainer software, its free and you can set it to do Koch method which builds letters up gradually. way better than trying to learn the whole alphabet at once and then wondering why nothing sticks. also dont sleep on just copying callsigns off the DX clusters and trying to send them back on the keyer. sounds weird but practicing real callsigns is different than practicing random letters and it starts to feel more like actual operating

im in basically the same boat as you, started using DXwatch a few months ago. one app i found that helps is the DX Toolkit app on Android, it pulls cluster data and lets you filter by band and mode which is way easier on the eyes than staring at the raw stream. not sure if thats helpful if youre desktop only but just throwing it out there

so ive been using WSJT-X for FT8 stuff for about a year now and it logs to its own internal log fine but ive been wanting something that handles everything in one place, like when i do the occasional contest plus my regular HF work plus the digital modes. right now my setup is kind of a mess -- WSJT-X logs to its adif file, i manually import that into Log4OM every week or so when i remember, and then for contests i fire up N1MM because thats what our club uses and i kind of just live with having duplicate entries or missing stuff. anyway i was talking to a guy at the club meeting last thursday and he said just pick one and stick with it but that doesnt really help because N1MM is clearly better for contest ops but Log4OM has the nicer interface for everyday logging and LoTW sync and all that. does anyone have a workflow that actually works here or am i just overthinking this. also does Log4OM play nice with N1MM exports after a contest, ive had issues with duplicate QSOs when i try to merge the adif files

oh man the Echolink nets are actually underrated for this exact thing if you havent tried those yet. but if you want straight HF, the 75 meter morning nets can be a blast depending on your mood — fair warning though 75m gets... colorful sometimes haha. for something more structured and friendly id honestly point you toward the OMISS nets, they do 10-80m at various times and the net control operators are usually real patient with newer folks. you just wait for NCS to call for check-ins, give your callsign phonetically, and thats literally it. easy as it gets. also keep an eye on the ARRL website, they have a net directory that you can search by band and time. i used that thing constantly when i was first getting comfortable on HF. once you check into a few you realize its honestly not nerve-wracking at all, most net control guys are happy to hear a new callsign

the EU2200i is genuinely pretty clean in my experience, way better than the old style generators. i ran my 7300 off one for about 8 hours at a simulated emergency exercise last year and didnt really have noise problems, but i did run a good 50 feet of extension cord and kept the genny downwind. the bigger thing honestly is the grounding — i drove a short ground rod at my operating position and bonded everything together and that cleaned up a lot more than moving the generator did. for your antenna situation the EFHW is fine, honestly for a single-band exercise where you just need reliable 40m copy i wouldnt overthink it. the only time id say bring something more flexible is if the net control frequency changes or if you end up needing 80m for closer stations, which happens more than people expect in my area. maybe throw an 80m resonant wire in your bag just in case, costs you nothing in weight. one thing that bit me — make sure your battery and the generator arent both connected trying to charge and supply simultaneously unless you know your charging setup handles that cleanly. i had a weird voltage fluctuation issue that turned out to be exactly that.

went through basically the exact same thing when i got my UV-5R lol. the menu labeling is really confusing. what worked for me was just using CHIRP to program it from the computer, way easier than fighting through the menus manually. you can download the repeater info straight from repeaterbook and set the tones correctly there. saved me a ton of headaches honestly. once i got it sorted out i was hitting three or four repeaters in my area no problem

i had almost the exact same situation with a repeater over a ridge from me and went the fixed yagi route. used a cheap arrow antenna 2m 5 element, just strapped it to a piece of 1 inch conduit zip tied to my existing mast and aimed it roughly toward the repeater. took like 20 minutes. works way better than my old vertical ever did on that path. honestly the x50a is a solid antenna i wouldnt get rid of it for general use. just run both if you can.

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals honestly. so the FCC allocation for general on 40m phone starts at 7.225 MHz going up to 7.300, and for CW/digital you get 7.025 to 7.125. everything below 7.025 on CW is extra class only. the thing about band edges is you really dont want your signal to actually be AT 7.000 because even a tiny bit of carrier or sideband energy can spill outside the allocation and thats a rules violation. most people leave at least a couple kHz of cushion. so like 7.003 at the absolute closest for CW if youre an extra, but realistically most operators stay well inside. on phone the upper edge 7.300 is the same deal, your whole signal needs to fit within the band so on USB your carrier would actually need to be a bit below 7.300 to keep the sidebands inside. its one of those things that makes more sense once you think about it from a signal bandwidth perspective rather than just a single frequency

25 feet on 40m isnt ideal but honestly its not as bad as people make it sound. a dipole at that height is gonna have a higher radiation angle than you want for DX but itll still work, and the big thing you already figured out yourself is the noise. verticals really do pick up more local garbage in a lot of suburban setups. ive run both and the dipole at modest height usually wins for me just because im not fighting the noise floor the whole time. on the radials question — 16 to 20 on the ground will get you most of the way there. theres some NEC modeling work that shows the improvement from 16 to 60 radials is maybe 1-2 dB at best, so unless youre a contester obsessing over every tenth of a dB its not really worth the extra wire and work. get them down, make them at least a quarter wave long, and youre fine. id still probably try the dipole first just because its cheaper and you can always add the vertical later.

so i know solar cycle 25 has been ramping up for a while now but the last few weeks on 10 meters have just been something else. im seeing dx from south america, europe, even some pacific stations on FT8 pretty much all day long. been a while since the band felt this alive honestly. grabbed a few new entities i'd been waiting on for years. also heard that Icom is supposedly dropping something new at the Hamvention this year, some kind of mid range HF rig, nothing confirmed yet but there's been chatter on a couple other forums. anyone got more details on that or is it just rumor mill stuff at this point. every year there's like 5 rumors and maybe one of them pans out lol. either way if you havent been on 10m lately you're really missing out. even running 50 watts into my old vertical ive been working stuff i normally wouldnt touch with a kilo.

ok so ive been checking into a few local nets lately and im still a little fuzzy on the ID thing. like i know you have to identify every 10 minutes and at the end of a transmission but on a net when the NCS is running things pretty fast, do you ID every single time you come back to answer someone or is just saying your callsign when you check in good enough for a while? last week i was on the Tuesday night 2m net and someone came back to me after i passed traffic and they were like "please ID" and i felt kinda bad but i honestly wasnt sure if i was doing it wrong or if they were being overly strict about it. the NCS didnt say anything so i dont know who was right. been licensed about 8 months so still figuring out the unwritten stuff too not just the rules in part 97

yeah the ALC thing tripped me up for the longest time too. I had mine way too hot for probably the first six months and didnt even know it. what finally helped me was getting a friend on a nearby repeater to give me honest reports while I adjusted in real time, way better than trying to figure it out from the TX monitor alone because the monitor has a slight delay and you can't really trust your own ear on your own voice anyway. one other thing I'll throw out there — if you're operating in the shack with any kind of fan noise or PC noise near the mic that can also contribute to sounding muddy or distant to people. I had a desk fan running and didnt realize how much it was bleeding in until someone finally pointed it out. switched to a boom mic with a cardioid pattern and most of that went away.

rubbermaid tote guy here lol, dont let anyone tell you it has to be fancy. mine is a big blue tote from walmart and it works fine. i did put some foam in the bottom for the radio and taped a little pouch inside the lid for adapters and fuses and stuff. the one thing i'd really say is whatever you build, actually deploy it in your backyard or driveway a few times before you need it for real. i thought my kit was solid until i set it up one afternoon just to practice and realized my power cable was too short to reach the battery with everything positioned the way i wanted, and i had the wrong connector for my antenna anyway. took like an hour to sort out all the little dumb stuff that seemed obvious when i was packing it at home.

yeah every net really does have its own culture and the best thing you can do is just listen for a few sessions before jumping in, which sounds like you already did so youre ahead of most people honestly. the FCC requires you to ID at least every 10 minutes during a transmission and at the end of your last transmission, but beyond that its really up to the net structure. some nets are very formal, especially traffic nets running NTS procedures, and they want the whole nine yards — call, location, whether you have traffic. others are just a casual ragchew check-in and throwing your call out is plenty. as for someone talking over an active net — yeah that's generally considered pretty bad form. could be they didn't know the freq was in use, could be they just didn't care. happens more than it should. if it keeps happening you can just note it and maybe mention it to the net control afterward, they usually like to know.

so ive been chasing rare DX for about 6 years now and i feel like i finally had a breakthrough moment last week working the Kerguelen expedition. figured id write up what actually got me through because a lot of the advice you read online is either too vague or just doesnt hold up in a real pileup situation. first thing — i stopped calling on top of everyone else in the traditional sense. the expedition was running split, 5 up, and i noticed most guys were clustering right at the announced offset. i went about 3 khz higher than the main cluster and just waited for a gap in the rhythm. took me maybe 20 minutes of listening to figure out the operators pattern. he was clearly doing a sweep from low to high, spending maybe 2-3 seconds at each spot before moving. once i clocked that i timed my single call to land when he'd be in my frequency neighborhood and kept it short — just my callsign once, maybe twice. the other thing that made a huge difference was dropping power slightly. i know that sounds backwards but i was running 600w into my yagi and i think i was actually causing splatter that was burying me. dropped to around 400 and my signal cleaned up noticeably on the panadapter. anyway got him on 17m SSB after maybe 40 minutes total which for Kerguelen felt like a miracle. curious what techniques other folks have settled on because i know everyone has their own approach to this stuff.

hamstudy is fine for passing but honestly for general i'd recommend at least skimming the ARRL General Class book or even just some youtube videos on propagation because it actually makes a difference when you're trying to figure out why 20m is dead at midnight or whatever. the question pool isnt that bad, probably took me 3 weeks of maybe 20-30 minutes a day before i felt solid on it. as for embarrassing yourself on HF, dont worry about it too much. just listen a lot before you transmit. like seriously just sit on 40m for a few evenings and get a feel for how people operate, when to call CQ, how contacts usually go. most people are pretty patient with newer operators and the ones who arent, well they're like that with everyone. the privileges open up a lot once you pass, you get most of 40m, a chunk of 20m, 15m, some others. definitely worth doing.

ok so ive been licensed about 3 months now (tech) and i finally got my first HT, a Baofeng UV-5R, and i've been trying to get into the local 2m repeater. i programmed in the frequency and offset no problem but nobody seems to hear me when i key up. looked it up in the repeater directory and it says the input tone is 100.0 Hz so i put that in but still nothing. talked to a guy at the club meeting and he said something about making sure the tone is set on transmit not receive but honestly i wasnt sure what he meant and didnt want to seem dumb asking again. is there a difference? and do i need to set a tone to hear the repeater too or just to get through to it? also is there like... a proper way to call on a repeater or do you just start talking? i dont want to step on anyone

That SWR on 70cm isn't unusual honestly, a lot of those dual band whips are kind of optimized for 2m and the UHF side is more of a compromise. That said 3:1 is a little on the high side and worth looking at. First thing i'd do is check how much of the antenna base is actually in contact with the roof — if theres a gap or the NMO mount isnt fully torqued down you can get weird readings. Also look at the coax connection at the radio end, sometimes the center pin on a PL-259 doesn't seat right in the SO-239 and it reads fine at low power but the SWR looks off on the meter. If you made the PL-259 yourself with solder that's another place to look. I've botched more connectors than i care to admit. Just resolder it or use one of the crimp type connectors if you have the tools.

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. currently running an inverted-V dipole for 40m, center at about 35 feet with the ends drooping down to maybe 8 feet off the ground. works okay but i feel like im missing stuff, especially to the east and west since the pattern obviously favors north/south broadside. a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just put up a vertical with a decent radial field and call it a day. says his 40m vertical with like 16 radials walks all over his old dipole for DX. but i dont know, ive read a lot of conflicting stuff about ground losses eating up vertical efficiency unless you really go nuts with the radials, like 60+ to get it close to ideal. my yard situation is not great — suburban lot, maybe 60x100 feet, so a full size 40m vertical would need the radials crammed in pretty tight. wondering if anyone has actually done a real comparison on the same band with similar conditions, not just theoretical stuff from the antenna handbook

so ive been messing with this for probably three weekends now and figured id write up what i found since there wasnt a ton of practical info when i was searching around started with the standard approach, cut three dipoles for each band and hung them all from the same center insulator fanned out at maybe 30 degrees or so between each element. the 40m one is about 66 feet total, 20m around 33, and i cut the 15m one a bit long intentionally to tune it down first issue was the feedpoint — i was using a really cheap SO-239 chassis mount and the solder joint let go after the first rainstorm. switched to a proper weatherproofed center insulator i got from a local club member and that fixed the mechanical side of things SWR on 40 came in nice, around 1.4:1 at the bottom of the band where i mostly operate. 20m was trickier because the elements from 40 were interacting and i ended up having to spread the fan angle a bit more to get it below 2:1 across the whole band. 15m honestly just kinda worked, maybe got lucky with the cut length feeding it all with RG-8X through a 1:1 choke balun wound on a FT-240-43 toroid, about 10 turns. common mode noise dropped noticeably after adding that, which honestly surprised me a bit even though i knew it should help overall pretty happy with it. not a beam obviously but for a wire antenna its been solid on 20m into europe in the evenings. anyone else run a fan dipole and have tips on reducing the inter-element interaction on the middle bands

so ive been doing SOTA for about a year now and someone at my local club mentioned WWFF and i kind of went down a rabbit hole this past weekend reading about it. seems really cool honestly, you get to operate from nature parks and reserves and there are references for all kinds of protected areas not just mountain summits which is great because i live in a pretty flat area and the nearest SOTA summit is like 3 hours away. anyway i found a KFF reference for a state wildlife management area thats literally 20 minutes from my house which is awesome. im planning my first activation for next weekend. i've done enough SOTA to know the basics of portable ops but i wanted to ask a few things specific to WWFF before i go out there. first - do i need to pre-spot on a cluster or announce it somewhere before i go? with WWFF i keep seeing mentions of the WWFF facebook group and also wwff.us for north america but i wasnt sure if there was a standard way people announce activations ahead of time. second question is about the log submission - do i just upload an ADIF to the wwff.us site after? and does it have to be a specific format or does any standard ADIF work? last thing - minimum contacts is 44 right, same as a normal SOTA activation? wait no that doesnt sound right. i think ive confused myself. someone please set me straight on this lol

yeah i went through the same thing when i got my 7300. one thing nobody told me was that the mic placement matters way more than i thought — like if youre holding it six inches away from your face and off to the side youre gonna sound weak and roomy. get it closer, maybe 2-3 inches, speak across it not directly into it to avoid plosives. also random thing but check if your power is sagging when you transmit, i had a cheap power supply that was drooping under load and it was doing weird things to my audio apparently. anyway probably not your issue but worth mentioning

yeah 10 meters has been nuts, i worked a ZL station last Tuesday with like 25 watts and a dipole in my attic. my attic dipole. i literally laughed out loud sitting there. havent seen conditions like this since i got licensed back when the last cycle was peaking and even then i dont think i was paying enough attention to appreciate it. if youre a newer ham and you have anything that covers 28mhz just get on there and call CQ or spin the dial, you will not be disappointed right now. on the Icom thing im cautiously interested. the ID-52 is already a really solid radio and i use mine constantly for local D-STAR linking stuff so if they improve on it ill probably eventually cave and upgrade. depends on price obviously, last thing i need is another expensive radio sitting on my desk justifying itself to my wife lol