James Wilson48

NC-270 is a great first pick, not too exposed at the top so if weather rolls in you have some tree cover. one thing people dont always mention is the activation zone is bigger than you think, you dont have to be standing on the absolute highest rock, just within 25 vertical meters of the summit. so if you find a nice flat spot to set up that isnt the peak itself thats totally fine. also seriously bring more wire than you think you need for your antenna. and a sharpie to mark your summit reference on your log sheet if you go paper. small thing but ive shown up before and blanked on the exact reference number mid-activation which is embarrassing. the sota database has all the details but you want it written down somewhere offline. sounds like you have the basics dialed in honestly. post your SOTAwatch alert and youll probably get a pile-up faster than you expect, chasers are hungry these days especially on weekday activations when there isnt much happening.

Koch method is the way to go honestly, it changed everything for me. the whole idea is you learn the characters at full speed from day one, like 20wpm or whatever, instead of starting slow and then having to retrain your brain later. you only add a new character once you can copy the ones you already know at like 90% accuracy. it feels painfully slow at first because youre sitting there with just K and M for what feels like forever but it really does work. LCWO dot net is the site most people use, its free and you can just jump in. i also used the Morse Toad app for a while when i was commuting, not the most polished thing but it does Koch properly. the big mistake i made early on was trying to count dits and dahs in my head -- you gotta train yourself to hear the rhythm and sound of each letter as a whole sound, not break it down. took me probably 3 or 4 months of practicing maybe 20 minutes a day before i could actually sit down and copy a slow QSO on 40 meters without completely falling apart

the eu2200i RFI issue is real, i had the same problem. what worked for me was getting the generator as far away as possible with a long heavy gauge extension cord and running a toroidal common mode choke right where the cord enters the operating position. also make sure your radio ground and the generator ground are actually bonded together, a lot of people skip that and it makes things way worse. that said for a full day at 50-100w with an IC-7300 you're looking at maybe 20-25Ah in a typical operating session if youre not transmitting constantly. a 100Ah AGM plus a decent panel should honestly do it fine as long as you have decent sun. i ran a similar setup at a public service event last summer, two 100Ah lithium batteries and a single 200w panel and never dropped below 70% all day. the generator sat in the truck the whole time as a backup and we never touched it. the vertical with radials idea is solid for a flat site. even four or six resonant radials on the ground makes a big difference over nothing. sloper off one support point always felt like a compromise to me when you have time to do better.

12 contacts without a counterpoise is actually pretty solid, the EFHW can be kinda forgiving depending on how you string it up. i run mine without sometimes when im lazy and it usually still tunes. congrats on the activation tho, first one is always a little chaotic

oh man i did my first wwff activation like two months ago and felt the exact same way. honestly just go for it, the community is super chill and people are usually happy to work you especially if its a reference that doesnt get activated much. i uploaded my log as a regular adif and it went through fine. the wwff logbook upload page is a little clunky but it works. good luck this weekend, hope you get your 44

I went last year and honestly it was pretty thin on the vendor side but the swap meet itself had some decent stuff if you got there early. Guy was selling a whole box of connectors and coax ends for next to nothing, i grabbed like two handfulls. The talk-in is on the 147.195 repeater I think, same as always.

so i had like an hour to kill last night and just threw on the headphones and tuned around 40 meters not really trying to work anybody just listening. caught some guys doing a roundtable out of the midwest somewhere, couldnt quite make out the third op but the other two were loud and clear. anyway it reminded me why i got into this hobby in the first place, theres just something about picking up a conversation happening hundreds of miles away that never really gets old for me. anybody else do this or am i just weird

the stuff people always forget is exactly what you mentioned — the non-radio stuff. I'd say get a laminated quick-reference card with your local ARES frequencies, any nets you'd be expected to check in on, and the ICS forms you're most likely to need. ICS 213 especially, that's the general message form and you'll use it constantly if you ever actually activate. also a small notebook and multiple pens sounds obvious but I've shown up to exercises before where guys had beautiful radio setups and zero way to write anything down. headlamp with fresh batteries tucked in there too. and honestly a printed copy of your license if you're going somewhere official, some served agency folks will ask for it. the 817 is a solid choice for a go-kit, runs low power and that battery should last you a good while on receive and moderate tx. one thing I'd suggest is making a laminated card for the radio itself too — just the basic operating steps, how to change bands, set the power output, that kind of thing. sounds silly but under stress people forget stuff they've done a thousand times. Pelican 1510 is a good size for what you're describing, fits carry-on if that ever matters. I've seen guys go bigger and regret it when they have to haul it across a parking lot.

dude i just started doing QRP stuff too and the park thing is so much more fun than i expected. i was kind of skeptical that 5 watts would actually do anything but i worked a guy in tennessee last month and felt like i had just climbed a mountain lol. what kit did you end up going with btw? im debating between a few options and cant really decide

honestly for CQ WPX id just fire up N1MM for that weekend and use something else the rest of the time, thats kind of what a lot of people do. N1MM is free and you can just have it installed without it being your everyday logger. the duplicate QSO thing between loggers is annoying but most people just do a careful ADIF merge after the contest and call it done. not elegant but it works

so ive been wanting to do this for probably two years and last weekend i finally just did it. built a little 40m CW transceiver from a kit — one of those pixie-style things, nothing fancy — and took it out to a picnic table at the state park about 20 minutes from my house. ran it off a 3s lipo i had from an old rc car project and just threw a wire up into a tree with a rock tied to some paracord. honestly expected to just hear noise and maybe make a fool of myself but i ended up working a guy in ohio and another one down in tennessee, both solid copy, running maybe 500mw. i know thats not impressive to people who do this all the time but for me it was kind of a revelation. like i genuinely understood for the first time why people get so into this mode of operating. the kit itself was pretty straightforward, only took me an afternoon to put together. i did have one solder bridge that took me forever to find but once i fixed that it fired right up. my only complaint is the frequency drift when it first warms up, takes maybe 5 minutes to settle down. is that normal for these little direct conversion jobs or is there something i can do about it? and also curious what people use for keyers when portable, i was just using my old straight key taped to a piece of wood which worked but felt ridiculous

the gordon west book is fine but its not really necessary anymore tbh. i used it back when i tested maybe 8 years ago and it was helpful for explaining the why behind things but if youre just trying to pass the exam hamstudy is probably all you need. one thing that tripped me up was the questions about RF safety, like the MPE stuff. those felt kind of random and i hadnt focused on them at all. might be worth making sure you know at least the general concepts there.

yeah the continuous callers drive me insane too. like congrats you are actively making yourself harder to copy AND annoying everyone else in the pile. i dont have anything super sophisticated, just a 100w ic-7300 and a wire, so breaking big pileups is mostly not happening for me but i've had decent luck on the smaller expeditions by just being really precise with my call and timing it well. sometimes running a bit of power helps but honestly i think clean audio and good timing beat raw power a lot of the time. had a pile on a T30 last spring and i worked him second call, guy next to me was running an amp and calling constantly and never got through the whole time i was listening. theres definitely something to just being disciplined about it

DX Summit is another good one, similar to dxwatch but some people find the interface a little easier to read. I tend to have both open honestly, sometimes one catches a spot a few minutes before the other. If you're on a phone a lot, the Ham Radio DX app on android pulls cluster data and you can set alerts for specific entities which is pretty handy when you're away from the shack. I got an alert for a rare one while i was at the grocery store once, ran home and actually got it which was ridiculous but hey it worked. The QRZ dx alert thing you mentioned is underrated, most people dont even know its there. Also worth poking around in clublog if you havent already, the propagation charts and league stats on there are genuinely useful once you get into chasing entities.

okay so ive been licensed for about three months now (tech class) and i finally got a decent HT, a Baofeng UV-5R which i know everyone has opinions about but its what i could afford. anyway i've been trying to get into the local 2m repeater that's listed in the repeaterbook app and it says the input tone is 100.0 Hz. so i programmed that in but when i key up nobody responds and i cant even hear myself in the repeater output. here's the thing though — sometimes i can hear other people having conversations on the output frequency just fine. so the repeater is definitely active. but when i try to transmit it's like im not getting into it at all. my friend who's been a ham for years says maybe im transmitting the wrong tone or the offset is wrong but i honestly dont fully understand how offsets work yet. im in a pretty flat area so maybe it's just a coverage thing? or is there something else im missing with the CTCSS setup? any help would be great

yeah the bandpass filter cost is the thing that stopped me too for a while. i ended up going with the 4O3A filters eventually and they work well but it was a commitment. one thing i'll say though is even a crude SO2R setup where you're just using the second radio to listen on another band while you transmit on the first can teach you a lot about the workflow before you invest in the full filtering setup. you obviously cant transmit on both at the same time without the filters but just having it there to spot mults passively is something. for the running vs SandP question i think the band conditions matter more than people give credit for. early in the contest when rates are high almost everyone should be running if they can hold a freq. later when the pileups thin out sometimes aggressive SandP on the second day is actually better for your score depending on the contest. SS is a bit different since its all domestic but in WW knowing when to go hunt europe vs stay on a freq is kind of an art honestly

so i've been on HF for about two years now running 100w with a borrowed icom and last month i finally decided to take the plunge and build one of those QMX kits from QRP Labs. took me about three evenings spread over a week and honestly the hardest part was just the surface mount stuff near the audio section, my eyes arent what they used to be lol. anyway got it running last weekend and made my first contact with it on 40m into ohio from indiana running about 5 watts. guy gave me a 579 which i was pretty happy with honestly. the whole thing just fits in my shirt pocket which is kind of wild when you think about it. i guess my question is more for people who run QRP regularly — do you find certain bands or times of day just work better for low power? feels like i need to be more strategic now compared to just cranking the power. also thinking about building a simple end fed for portable use with it, any thoughts on that vs a small dipole?

yeah the inverting transponder thing trips everyone up the first time. AO-73 is an inverting linear transponder so if you tune your uplink higher your downlink comes down in frequency — its counterintuitive but thats just how it works. so you have to tune your rigs in opposite directions when chasing doppler or a qso partner. once that clicks it starts making more sense. the doppler management honestly gets easier with CAT control, gpredict can drive both radios if they're both connected and it'll handle the correction automatically based on the TLE data. that said plenty of people work LEO sats without it, you just kind of develop a feel for pre-tuning ahead of the pass. AO-73 has a relatively slow doppler shift compared to some of the faster lower birds so its not the worst one to learn on. one thing that helped me early on — park your downlink rx at a fixed frequency you're pretty confident about and tune your uplink to find yourself. that way you're only chasing one thing at a time. and honestly hand-tracking with a yagi isnt that bad for low-elevation passes if you know where to look, the high-elevation ones are the painful ones where you're spinning constantly.

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i can kind of follow along when people are talking on HF but theres so much shorthand being thrown around that i lose track of whats actually being said. like i know QSL means confirmed and QTH is your location but then someone said something was QRM and i had no idea if that was bad or what i should do about it. and then theres all the abbreviations that arent even Q codes, like 73 and 88 and OM and YL and it just kind of piles up fast. is there like a good way to learn all of these or do you just kind of pick them up over time. i tried googling a list but honestly looking at 200 Q codes all at once is overwhelming and i dont know which ones people actually use vs which ones are just technically in the standard somewhere. any advice from people who actually got through this phase would be helpful

ok so ive been a general for about 3 months now and i keep second guessing myself every time i sit down at the radio. i know generals have more privileges than technicians but im not totally clear on like, where the cutoff is on 40 meters. i hear people talking all over the place and then sometimes i tune around and hear stuff that sounds like its pretty close to the band edge and i dont know if im allowed to be there or not. like is there a hard rule about staying away from the band edges? i think i read something about keeping your signal within the allocation meaning if youre doing ssb you have to account for the bandwidth so your carrier frequency needs to be a few khz in from the edge? or did i misread that. and also whats the deal with the lower part of 40, i thought i heard digital modes down there but sometimes there's ssb too and i get confused about what the band plan actually means vs what the actual license rules say sorry if this is a dumb question just want to make sure im not accidentally transmitting somewhere i shouldnt be

so i finally got activated for real last weekend, not just a drill. there was some pretty bad flooding in the county over and we had our ARES group called up to support the EOC and a couple of the Red Cross shelters. ive been doing the monthly nets and a few SET exercises but nothing prepared me for how different it feels when its actually happening and people are depending on the comms. the thing that surprised me most was how much waiting around there is, like you show up and get assigned a position and then just kind of sit there monitoring for long stretches and then suddenly everything gets busy at once. also the ICS stuff they drilled into us actually mattered — when i handed off my position to the next operator i knew exactly what info to pass along which felt good. anyway just wanted to share since ive seen a few people on here asking what real activations are like vs the training exercises. the training really does help but its hard to describe the difference in feel. also bring snacks because nobody thinks about that

ARRL website has a decent list, also if you search for like a Q code reference chart you can print one out. i had the same problem when i started and what actually helped me was just doing a lot of listening before i talked much. after a while your brain just starts to recognize the patterns. also 59 not 5 by 9, the signal report thing is called an RS or RST report, readability and signal strength, so 59 means youre perfectly readable and very strong. on CW theres a third number for tone. most of the time on phone people just say 59 to everyone even when the signal is terrible which is kind of a running joke among hams honestly

yeah what he said about ALC is spot on. one thing i'll add is that the inconsistency you're hearing might also just be band conditions and the other stations receiver, honestly SSB is so dependent on whats happening at both ends that its hard to know whos at fault. i spent like two weeks convinced my audio was garbage and turned out my buddy had a dirty IF filter in his old 756. that said i did find with my mic that keeping it about 6 inches away and slightly off-axis helped a lot with plosives and room noise, closer you get the more bass buildup you get from proximity effect and that just muddies everything up on SSB where bandwidth is already limited. dont obsess too much over it, get a couple honest signal reports from different directions and go from there

omg i was wondering the same thing last weekend. i heard a guy on 10m working japan and i thought my radio was broken when i tried to call and got nothing lol. turned out the opening was super narrow and by the time i tuned around for a bit it was already gone. dx openings on 10m especially can close SO fast, way faster than like 20m. i downloaded an app called HF propagation or something like that and it shows the solar data but tbh i dont totally understand half the numbers either. my elmer told me to just spin the dial and see whats there honestly, which sounds dumb but actually works pretty well

congrats on the ticket. okay so the baofeng thing is kind of nuanced -- they're not terrible radios for hitting repeaters and learning the hobby, the main issues are the wide deviation on transmit which can annoy people on certain repeaters, and the programming software is kind of a headache. but plenty of new hams start with them and they're fine. that said if you can swing the extra money the yaesu ft-65r is a solid step up and honestly not that much more expensive. better audio, better build quality, and yaesu's had their act together for decades. i have one in my bag as a backup and its held up really well. the wouxun stuff is decent too, i had a kg-uvd1p years ago and it worked fine but i havent kept up with their newer stuff so i cant speak to the uv9g specifically. honestly at your stage any of those will get you on the air and that's what matters. just get something and start talking to people, the gear obsession can wait until you know what you actually want to do in the hobby