Michael Moore99

Hey welcome to the hobby. So for your situation - you generally only need the transmit tone set, not the receive tone. The receive CTCSS (sometimes called decode) is optional and just filters out what you hear on your end, which honestly most people leave off so they can hear everything coming through. The fact that you're hearing others is a good sign your radio is in the right ballpark. The not hearing yourself come back is worth looking into though. Could be your offset is wrong - most 2m repeaters use a standard -600 kHz offset but not all of them, so double check that against whatever directory you found it in. Also some repeaters have a courtesy beep that comes after you unkey, if you're hearing that then you're definitely hitting it fine and people just might not be around at that time. As for getting on - yeah just key up, say your callsign, and something like "[callsign] monitoring" or "listening" is totally normal. Some people say "for any traffic" which sounds old fashioned but you hear it. Dont overthink it, most repeater regulars are pretty welcoming to new folks.

yeah the compression thing is real. i made the mistake of listening to myself on the monitor output of my own radio for months and thought i sounded great, then got a recording from someone who recorded off the air and it was pretty rough. the monitor doesnt tell you the whole story because its pre a lot of the processing stages depending on the radio honestly the best thing i ever did was ask a local guy i trust to just give me honest feedback while i tweaked settings in real time. not glamorous but it works. took about 20 minutes to get somewhere reasonable

so anyway i finally got it working after like three weekends of messing around. went with a Yaesu FTM-300DR in the truck and honestly the hardest part wasnt the radio itself it was figuring out where to run the power cable without it looking like a disaster in the cab. ended up going under the carpet along the sill and straight to the battery with an inline fuse close to the battery like youre supposed to do. the antenna is a Diamond NR770HNMO on a NMO mount i drilled through the roof of the bed cover which i was kinda nervous about but it worked out fine. SWR came in under 1.5 across most of the 2m band so im calling that a win. the reason it took so long is i kept going back and forth on whether to do a trunk lip mount or just drill. everyone online has opinions and half of them contradict each other. eventually just committed to drilling and im glad i did, no flexing or movement at all compared to my old mag mount situation. if anyones on the fence about the FTM-300DR vs the 500D, i went with the 300 because i didnt need the extra power and the price difference was pretty significant. so far so good, hits all the local repeaters no problem and ive been having fun just driving around monitoring the county ARES net. anyway just wanted to share in case someone is going through the same decision paralysis i was

so we finally ran our big tabletop-turned-actual-exercise last Saturday and I wanted to share how it went because honestly it was way more eye-opening than I expected going in. The scenario was a multi-day severe weather event cutting off the county EOC from the state, and we had to pass health and welfare traffic plus coordinate shelter assignments using just HF and a couple VHF repeaters. The stuff that tripped us up most wasn't the radio part — it was the paperwork and the handoffs. Like someone would pass a message perfectly on the air and then the person on the receiving end at the EOC table would write it down wrong or not at all. We had ICS forms everywhere but nobody was really sure who was supposed to fill out what. Also one of our main guys had a laptop with all the Winlink templates and his battery died about 2 hours in and we hadn't tested whether anyone else had the same setup. Spoiler: we hadn't. The HF side actually held up better than I thought. Got into the state net with my IC-7300 running off a deep cycle and the end-fed seemed fine even with all the people walking around. But there was this one period where we lost the local repeater because somebody forgot to check the backup power at the repeater site before the drill. So that was a fun 20 minutes of scrambling. Anyway curious if others have run exercises like this recently and what lessons came out of it. Feels like every time we do one we find three new things to fix.

so i passed my technician exam last thursday and just got my callsign in the ULS system two days ago. spent the first day just listening on my baofeng (yeah yeah i know) and finally worked up the nerve to key up on the local 2m repeater yesterday afternoon. the net control was super patient with me, i totally fumbled my callsign the first time i tried to give it phonetically, mixed up november and november... wait no i mean i said november twice instead of going to the next letter lol. anyway the guy on the other end just waited and then came back to me like it was totally normal. talked for maybe 3 minutes about signal reports and weather which i know sounds boring but honestly felt like the coolest thing ive done in a while. already studying for general now because i want to get on HF so bad

honestly the best thing I did was just join a local ARES or RACES group and see what everyone else was using before I bought anything. saved me from making a bunch of expensive mistakes. your county emergency coordinator has probably already thought through a lot of this and has preferences about what frequencies and modes the group actually operates on — theres no point building an elaborate HF setup if your local group is all on 2m FM for the first 48 hours of any activation anyway. that said a basic kit with an IC-705 or similar and a decent battery plus a j-pole you can hang somewhere gets you pretty far. dont overthink the antenna situation too much at first, a mag mount on a car roof works fine for a lot of situations.

had a similar setup running for about a year with a 7300, totally worth doing even if the first couple weeks of config is kind of a pain. one thing that tripped me up was the audio routing on the shack PC — you really have to nail down which virtual audio cables are going where or you'll end up with feedback loops or the PTT not keying right. VAC or VB-Cable both work but get that sorted before you even think about the SDR side of things. also worth mentioning, fixed wireless can have latency spikes that come and go depending on tower load and weather. i'd run something like PingPlotter from the shack box out to a server for a few days and see what the jitter looks like before deciding if CW is even viable for you. SSB was totally fine for me even when latency was a bit inconsistent.

that quiet period thing is so real and nobody talks about it enough in training. every exercise is kind of go go go but a real activation can have these long dead spots and yeah you gotta stay disciplined. what i usually do is use that time to double check my gear, make sure my antenna connections are still solid, review any messages that came through, keep my paper log current even if nothings happening. basically give yourself small tasks so your brain doesnt wander too far. also 11 hours on your first real one is no joke. good on you for sticking through it. the paper log backup thing your EC pushed for is exactly right, ive seen digital setups fail at the worst times and if youre not keeping parallel records you can end up in a real mess trying to reconstruct a comms log after the fact. sounds like you've got a solid group.

so i finally finished my first scratch built QRP rig, been working on it for about 3 months on and off. its a single band 40m CW rig loosely based on the Pixie design but i made some changes along the way mostly because i couldnt find the exact parts. ended up with somewhere around 500mw output which i know isnt much but i was honestly just happy it made any RF at all when i first keyed it up. got my first contact with it last weekend, guy in ohio, im in michigan so not a huge distance but man it felt like i worked dxcc or something. the whole thing runs off a 9v battery and i took it out to a park with my end fed wire and just sat there for a couple hours calling CQ and working a few stations. couple things im not sure about tho. my sidetone sounds a little weak and i cant figure out if thats a component value issue or something else. also im getting what sounds like a slight chirp on my signal, had one guy mention it. i think its a power supply stability thing but im not sure. anyone dealt with chirp on a homebrew rig before and found a fix that actually worked? dont want to add a ton of complexity but also dont want to be that guy with the ugly signal

lcwo.net if you havent tried it already. i was in the exact same spot last year and switching to that site helped a lot, plus theres a whole community of people tracking their progress which kept me motivated. also honestly just getting on the air even when you feel like youre not ready -- there's a slow net on 40m that runs weeknights and everyone there is super patient. copying real QSOs is different from copying practice files in a way thats hard to explain but it really does help

yeah i dont have experience with RemoteHams specifically but the sharing-an-SDR-with-the-club thing is something we looked into a while back. we ended up going with OpenWebRX running on a local server at the club station and just punching a hole through the firewall for club members, which sounds scarier than it is if you lock it down properly. worked great for letting people monitor 20m and 40m without giving them actual transmit access, which was the whole point the internet linking question kind of depends what you mean by linking, if you mean tying it into like an Allstar node or something that's a whole different rabbit hole and probably overkill for HF monitoring purposes

not going to lie the commercial band decoders are pretty decent and not that expensive if you shop around. microHAM makes a nice one and theres some eastern european stuff on ebay that people seem to like. but building it yourself is half the fun right so dont let me talk you out of it. one thing i will say — if you go the Pi route, look at a Pi Zero 2W instead of a full Pi 4 or whatever, way less overkill for something that just needs to read a voltage and flip some relays. and you can run a little flask app on it and have a webpage showing your current antenna state which is kinda neat for shack monitoring. i did something like that for my rotor controller and it works surprisingly well.

so ive been messing around with an arduino uno i had sitting in a drawer for like two years and finally found a use for it in the shack. the idea is pretty simple — i want it to handle PTT keying for some digital modes and maybe eventually tie in a relay board to switch antennas based on band conditions. im running an IC-7300 and the USB CAT control is already working fine in WSJT-X, but i want to do some more custom automation stuff that doesnt fit neatly into whatever the software offers. right now ive got a basic sketch going that just monitors a serial command and triggers a relay to pull the PTT line low. its working but the timing feels a little sloppy, like theres a noticeable lag before it actually keys up. not sure if thats a software timing thing or the relay itself being slow. using one of those cheap SRD-05VDC-SL-C relays from a board i got off amazon. wondering if i should switch to a solid state relay or maybe just a transistor circuit instead. also thinking about adding a Raspberry Pi to the mix to run like a headless logging server or something. has anyone bridged arduino and pi over serial or I2C for a ham project? feels like it could get complicated fast but im curious if its worth the rabbit hole.

honestly you just absorb them, thats really it. after a while QRM just means interference from other stations the same way a regular word would, you stop thinking about what the letters stand for. the ones that come up constantly on HF are QRM (interference from other signals), QRN (static/natural noise), QSB (fading, like your signal going up and down), QRZ (who is calling me, or sometimes used wrong as like 'is the frequency in use' which bugs some people), QRT means shutting down, QRX means standby, QTH location, QSL confirmed. those probably cover like 80% of what youll hear day to day. the voice thing youre noticing is real, some guys do use them kind of performatively on phone. purists will tell you Q codes were designed for CW and written communication so using them on voice is technically redundant since you could just say the words, but its so ingrained in the hobby at this point nobody really cares. just dont let anyone make you feel weird about it either way.

near the fence might actually be fine depending on what the fence is made of, chain link is obviously going to cause issues but wood or vinyl should be okay. i ran my vertical about 8 feet from a wooden fence for a year with no real problems. the radial thing is the real pain though yeah. i did like 20 radials cut to about 33 feet each and just laid them on the ground, stapled down eventually got buried by the grass. took an afternoon but it wasnt that bad. made a real difference compared to when i only had like 6 radials in there. 40m DX definitely opened up for me after that. worked JA regularly which i almost never did with the dipole.