Michael Williams

so ive been a tech for about two years now and i mostly just do 2m and 70cm stuff, some APRS, hit the local repeaters. but lately ive been really curious about HF and everyone keeps telling me to just go get my General already. i downloaded one of those question pool apps and started going through it and honestly some of it is making my head spin. the electrical theory stuff especially, like i can mostly follow the logic but then theres questions about reactance and impedance that just feel like they came out of nowhere compared to what i learned for tech. is the General exam actually as hard as it seems when youre looking at the question pool cold, or does it start to click once you study more? and is it worth just cramming the question pool vs actually trying to understand all the theory? i kind of want to understand what im doing but i also have a job and two kids so time is limited lol. also what HF bands would i even have access to as a General vs waiting to go for Extra, trying to figure out if its worth the effort or if id just be frustrated by the band restrictions anyway

ok so the RMS Relay vs gateway thing confused me too when i set ours up. basically if you want a full internet-connected gateway you want RMS Relay — thats the software that actually registers with the Winlink network and forwards to the CMS servers. Winlink Express can act as a peer-to-peer node but its not the same as a proper gateway on the network map. for your ARES use case you probably want RMS Relay on the pi with the radio hanging off it. on the callsign question — you can use your own call, a lot of people do, but your gateway will show up on the RMS list under that call. some groups use the club call with an SSID. no hard rule i think, just check with your regional coordinator if you have one because some groups like consistency for drills. the SSID thing is fine, -10 works or whatever isnt taken locally. for store-and-forward without internet — this is where it gets a little nuanced. if your gateway is running but has no CMS connectivity it can still accept messages from field stations and hold them in its local store. when connectivity comes back (or another gateway connects via RF) it forwards them. its not automatic peer routing like a packet BBS used to do, so your nodes kinda need to be able to reach the CMS eventually one way or another. for pure offline exercises a lot of groups just pre-stage messages or run a local Winlink Express peer-to-peer session, which sidesteps the whole CMS thing entirely.

so ive been messing with APRS for about three weeks now and i cannot get my position to show up on aprs.fi consistently. sometimes it appears, sometimes it just vanishes for hours. im running a Kenwood TM-D710G with the built in TNC and ive got the SSID set to -9 since im mostly mobile. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard for mobile ops. the radio shows it's transmitting — i can see the TX light flash every 2 minutes like its supposed to — and occasionally ill even hear my own packet come back through a local digi. but aprs.fi just doesnt seem to care half the time. checked my callsign a dozen times, its definitely right. is this a path issue or could it be something with the IGate coverage in my area? i looked up the local digipeaters on the RF coverage map and there seem to be a few around but i dunno if theyre all connected to the internet backbone or whatever. also is there any way to tell if a digi is actually igate-connected short of just watching aprs.fi and hoping?

same boat as you honestly, i upgraded to general pretty quick after realizing how much i was locked out of on HF. the 10m phone thing is real though and when the band is open its actually a lot of fun even with the limited priv. just dont transmit below 28.3 on phone or youll be in general/extra territory and thats a no go

im still pretty new to chasing DX seriously but the split thing confused me for a long time. like i didnt really understand why the DX station transmits on one frequency and listens on a completely different range, took me embarassingly long to figure out i was supposed to transmit up in that range and not on the DX frequency itself. made that mistake a few times before someone on the cluster politely told me to read up on split operation lol. question for you — does the power really not matter that much? i'm only running 100w and a wire antenna so im wondering if im just wasting my time on big pileups or if technique can still get me through sometimes.

After reading about successful 70cm EME contacts using just 80W and a 12-15 dBi Yagi with JT65, I'm considering taking the plunge. Currently have an IC-9700 and could build a modest 70cm Yagi setup. Recent advances in digital signal processing have allowed EME contacts to take place with powers in the order of 100 watts and a single Yagi. What's the minimum viable setup for my first moonbounce contact? Should I start with 2m or 70cm for best results?

the CTCSS thing is almost certainly your issue from before, glad you sorted that part out. for the not getting responses bit — a few things. first when you key up are you waiting about a second after pressing PTT before you start talking? the radio needs a moment to open the squelch on the other end and if you start talking right away the first part of your audio gets clipped and people just hear like half your callsign and give up trying to figure out who it is. happens to everyone at first. also just try a short call like your callsign and say youre a new ham looking to make a contact, most people on local repeaters are pretty welcoming. might just be bad timing if the repeater is quiet during the day or whatever. for the linked repeater question — yeah that sounds like it could be IRLP or maybe part of a network like the WIRES-X or AllStar stuff. the etiquette is basically the same as any repeater honestly, just be aware theres potentially a lot more people listening and the roundtables can go on longer so find a good pause before you jump in. some linked systems also have their own CTCSS or you might need to send a DTMF code to connect to a node, depends on how the trustee has it set up. worth just listening for a while before transmitting to get a feel for how that particular group operates.

I had similar issues in Colorado mountains. WIDE1-1 in first position helps low-profile digis pick up weak signals that the big wide digis might miss. Also check your antenna - mobile whips can be marginal for packet. A 5/8 wave or mag mount with better ground plane made huge difference for me.

so ive been at this for about three months now and im stuck somewhere around 9-10wpm and honestly its kind of discouraging. when i first started i was using just.learn morse code app and got to 5wpm pretty fast, felt great, and then hit a wall. a buddy at my club told me to jump straight to copying at 20wpm with farnsworth spacing which i tried for like two weeks and it just felt like chaos honestly. im wondering how long it realistically took people to get comfortable at 20wpm. i know everyone says just listen listen listen but i feel like im spinning my wheels. doing about 20-30 mins a day. using the lcwo site mostly now. should i be doing more? less? different stuff? also wondering if anyone switched from keyboard copying to paper and noticed a difference because i feel like typing takes my attention off actually hearing the code

so ive been doing SS phone and CW for the past few years as SO1R and doing ok, usually somewhere in the middle of the pack for my section. been reading a lot about SO2R lately and wondering if its actually worth getting into or if im just going to spend the whole contest fighting RF getting into my second radio instead of actually making contacts. my current setup is a K3 and i have an old TS-570 sitting on the shelf that i could probably press into service. antennas are a 3 el yagi on 20 and a dipole that does 40 and 80. the feedlines run pretty close together in the shack which is probably going to be a problem. i know the filtering situation gets complicated fast, and BPFs arent cheap. anyway im just wondering if anyone has actually seen a meaningful rate improvement going SO2R or if most of the gain is coming from just being better at running and S&P in general also curious if theres a point in the contest where SO2R really shines vs SO1R — like is it more useful early when rates are high or later when youre hunting for mults

the baofeng thing is fine to start out but once you get comfortable on the repeater you should look into getting your general and trying hf. completely different world. i was only on vhf for maybe two months before i caught the dx bug and now i cant imagine just doing local stuff. not saying vhf is bad just... theres a lot more out there. anyway congrats on the license

yeah 40 has been kinda meh here too, though i did catch a decent pileup last Thursday around 7.195 for some DX station i couldnt quite make out the call. got in there a couple times but no luck. honestly though i think a lot of people have been on FT8 which doesnt exactly fill the band with voice traffic if you know what i mean. your wire situation probably isnt helping either, fix your feedline already haha

Nice work! Center of the roof is the optimal location - you've got the maximum ground plane underneath that antenna now. Should see improved low-angle radiation for better range to distant repeaters too.

yeah this sounds really familiar honestly. we did a similar exercise about three years ago and the antenna and battery stuff is always what gets people. everyone assumes someone else tested the gear. after our drill we put a literal calendar reminder every six months just to power up every go-kit radio and run through a quick checklist. not fancy, just somebody actually does it and signs off on a log sheet. the ICS forms thing is a real gap in a lot of groups i think. knowing how to operate the radio is one thing but the whole point in an actual event is moving information to the right people in the right format. we started doing tabletop exercises separate from the RF exercises, like just sit around a table and practice filling out 213s and 214s for a fake scenario. it sounds boring but it really helped our newer folks get comfortable with the paperwork side before we ever fired up a radio. the message flow structure problem you mentioned is the hardest one to solve. in our experience the only fix is actually writing down who talks to who and about what before the event not during it. we have a simple one page comm plan now that spells out exactly which station is responsible for each served agency link and what the escalation path is if that station goes down. took a few drafts to get right but its been worth it

so ive been trying to figure out if its worth the drive this year, last time i went i picked up a barely used kenwood ts-590 for way under market price so it kind of spoiled me lol. my buddy says the swap meet side of it has gotten smaller over the years but i dunno, i still think theres good deals if you get there early enough. anybody going from around the ohio/indiana area? might try to carpool if someone is heading that way

had similar problems with my ft-8900r last year. turned out the TNC was going bad and would randomly corrupt packets. try connecting to a computer with aprsdroid or something and see if you can monitor what youre actually transmitting. might be sending garbage without realizing it

On a local repeater, you'll often hear someone say "QTH here is Springfield" or "Let's QSY to the .96 machine" and many hams use them on phone as well as in face-to-face conversations. Voice ops definitely use Q-codes! Don't worry about being technically perfect at first.

yeah what he said. also just make sure your EC has your cell number in case the net goes sideways and they need to reach you directly. happened at our last drill, repeater went down for like 45 minutes and half the team was just sitting there confused. simplex fallback frequency should be in your briefing packet if they gave you one. dont overthink the gear situation for an exercise, the vx-6r is plenty capable. worry more about knowing your ICS forms — like at minimum know what an ICS 213 is and how to fill one out because some EMs actually want that done properly even on drills

so ive been trying to work AO-73 for the past couple weeks with mixed results. got a yaesu ft-818 and a pair of m2 antennas on an az/el rotor, doppler correction running through gpredict talking to the radio via hamlib. pass predictions look good, elevation is fine, im getting good arcs most of the time. the problem is when i actually try to make a contact i can hear a ton of signals in the passband but nobody seems to come back to me, or ill get a partial and then lose it. ive read that the transponder compresses when loaded so i try to keep my uplink pretty modest but honestly im not even sure what level im putting in. the inverting passband thing took me a while to wrap my head around too, had my doppler correction backwards for like the first three passes lol. is there a sweet spot for uplink power on this one or is it just that everyone is fighting for space during the better passes? feels like trying to shout in a crowded room sometimes. wondering if other peoples experience is similar or if i have something fundamentally wrong with my setup.

so ive been licensed about 3 years now and just kind of casually worked DX here and there but never really paid attention to which entities i was confirming. looked at my log the other day and realized i probably have like 80-90 confirmed entities already without even trying, so i figured why not actually go for DXCC properly. my confusion is around how the credits actually get submitted. i know you need 100 confirmed but like, does it matter HOW theyre confirmed? ive got a mix of paper QSLs from the old days (well, my old days, like 2021-2022 lol) and a bunch of LoTW confirmations. can you mix those together for the initial application or do you have to pick one method. also started looking at WAS and WAZ too because it seems like some of the contacts overlap and you can kind of chase multiple awards at once which seems efficient. is that actually how people do it or am i thinking about this wrong. WAZ seems harder just because some zones are really tough to find active stations in. anyway any advice from people who have actually gone through the ARRL award submission process would be great, its a bit confusing reading through the rules on the website

the writing thing -- yeah there's a reason people say don't do it. if you train yourself to write every letter as you hear it, your brain gets stuck waiting to write instead of just processing the sound. the goal eventually is to hear "dah dit dah" and just know it's K without thinking. writing creates this extra step in between that you have to unlearn later and that's annoying. Koch method on LCWO is what i used and it genuinely works if you actually stick to it. the trick is you start with just two characters at full speed -- like 20wpm -- and you dont move on until you can copy them at 90% accuracy. sounds brutal but it means your brain actually learns the sounds as sounds instead of as patterns you count. Farnsworth is similar but adds spacing so the letters come fast but there's more time between them, which some people find easier at first. realistic timeline honestly varies a lot. i was at a functional ragchew pace maybe around 5-6 months of daily practice, but i was only doing 10-15 min a day which some people say isn't enough. if you grind it harder probably faster. just dont skip days if you can help it, consistency is like 90% of it

JS8Call has a pretty small but dedicated user base compared to FT8, that's just the reality of it. the thing people miss at first is that its not really designed like FT8 where you just call CQ and wait for a response in a structured sequence. its more like a store-and-forward mesh chat thing, so a lot of the activity is asynchronous. people leave their stations running and messages get relayed, sometimes you'll come back an hour later and have replies queued up. for actually getting responses in real time you want to watch for the heartbeat beacons and reply to those, or hang out in the @ALLCALL group messages. also 40m JS8 activity tends to cluster around 7078 kHz give or take, make sure you're parked in the right spot. the offset in WSJT-X and JS8Call can bite you if you're not careful about where your dial frequency is vs where the activity actually is. PSK31 yeah its quieter than it used to be, not dead though. 14070 on 20m still has some life especially on weekends, and if you catch a contest like the PSK31 Speedtest there's actually a decent pileup. RTTY contesting still draws people to digital too which is nice.

yeah what he said. i was in the same boat when i first got licensed and the net on our repeater was honestly how i learned most of this stuff just by lurking for a while first. one thing i'd add is that if you're ever unsure you can always just ask the net control after the net closes -- most of them are happy to chat and they genuinely dont mind explaining things. the couple times ive asked "hey did i do that right" afterwards i got really helpful answers and nobody made me feel dumb about it

so my buddy at the club keeps telling me i need to try CQ WW this october and i finally caved and said sure why not. ive done a couple of smaller contests before, worked Field Day twice with the club and did a SOTA activation back in the spring which was awesome, but nothing like a full on worldwide contest on my own. i run a pretty modest station, IC-7300 into a dipole up about 30 feet, nothing fancy. what i dont really get is the zone multiplier system. like i understand DX contacts count more or whatever but the way people explain the zones always loses me halfway through. also is it realistic to even make a dent in CQ WW SSB running barefoot or am i just gonna sit there calling CQ into a void for 48 hours. genuinely asking, not trying to be self deprecating or whatever also curious if anyone has tips for prepping logging software ahead of time because last Field Day i had N1MM crash on me right in the middle of a run and i almost threw my keyboard

so i've been wanting to get into LEO satellite operation for probably two years now and last weekend i finally just did it. setup is nothing fancy, just a FT-818 for the uplink on 70cm and an old IC-821H i borrowed from a club member for the downlink on 2m, running into a pair of hand-aimed arrow antennas. tracking with gpredict which i've been messing with for a few weeks getting the pass predictions dialed in. AO-73 was my target because i kept reading it was good for beginners and the linear transponder makes more sense to me than FM birds since i'm mostly an HF SSB guy. pass was about 8 minutes from my location, elevation peaked around 34 degrees which i figured was pretty decent. i could hear the downlink clearly once it got above maybe 12 degrees, heard a couple stations working each other which was cool. here's where it got weird though — i could never quite find my own uplink signal on the downlink. i know you have to account for doppler and the inverting transponder means you tune opposite directions on tx vs rx, i had read all that. but in practice i was completely lost trying to chase it in real time. gpredict was handling the rig doppler correction through hamlib but i dont think it was actually talking to both radios correctly, maybe just one of them. ended up just listening the whole pass which was still fun but frustrating. is there a trick to initially finding your own signal on a linear bird? do most people set up some kind of split tracking or just manually tune until they hear themselves? feels like im missing something obvious.