Jessica Williams53

so i've been chasing 3Y0 and a few other rares for a while now and the pileup situation has just been brutal. i know everyone has their tricks but i wanted to hear what's actually been working for people lately because some of the old advice feels pretty outdated now that so many stations are running high power and big antennas. what finally got me through on the FT8 side was just watching the RX window really carefully and timing my TX to avoid the bulk of the callers — like noticing where the DXpedition was actually coming back in the passband and parking just above or below that cluster of stations. on SSB it's a totally different game though. i've been experimenting with just calling once, clearly, and then waiting instead of kerchunking over and over. seems counterintuitive but i've had better luck with that than just hammering away. also curious if anyone has had success with listening to where the op is actually pulling calls from — like if they're working a pattern geographically or just fishing. i've started paying more attention to that and adjusting when i call based on it. anyway what are your techniques, especially for SSB pileups on 40 and 20 where its absolute chaos half the time

so the 10 minute rule is kind of a thing people interpret loosely on nets honestly. technically each station is responsible for IDing, but when net control acknowledges you by call sign that's generally considered sufficient for most practical purposes — though i've seen people debate this endlessly on the forums lol. the real answer is as long as you're IDing when you first transmit and at the end, you're almost certainly fine. the 15-20 minute thing without an ID is probably not great practice but nobody's going to get a notice from the FCC over a local 2m net. just model good behavior yourself, ID clearly when you check in and when you sign off, and don't stress too much about what others are doing. if you ever take a turn as net control you'll start to appreciate how much is going on at once and why sometimes things slip.

yeah im going, been going pretty much every year for the past decade give or take. its always worth it even if you just walk around and look at stuff. the flea market tables alone are worth the trip, picked up a barely used 706 a couple years back for almost nothing from some old timer who was getting out of the hobby. just budget yourself or you will absolutely regret it monday morning when you check your bank account dont think theres an official club carpool this year, at least nothing came across our nets but someone mentioned something at the last meeting so maybe check with the secretary

oh man i did my first one about 6 months ago and made the exact same SOTA vs WWFF confusion haha. yeah its 44 for WWFF, i wrote it on a sticky note and put it on my go-bag until i remembered. your 34 still counts for the hunters though which is cool, those park chasers are dedicated and they appreciate every contact. what linked dipole are you running if you dont mind me asking? im still trying to figure out a good portable antenna setup for hiking stuff

so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and i get it, its great for working new entities and all that, the weak signal stuff is genuinely impressive, i worked ZL on 40m with like 3 watts last winter which still kind of blows my mind. but theres this part of me that misses actual qsos. like i want to actually talk to somebody not just exchange grid squares and signal reports. someone on the local repeater mentioned JS8Call and i set it up last week. its definitely slower and the bands feel quieter on it but i had a legit back and forth conversation with a guy in colorado for maybe 20 minutes yesterday and it reminded me why i got into this hobby in the first place. the SNR performance is supposed to be close to FT8 right? maybe not quite as deep in the noise but close enough for most situations. my question is really whether theres a community there worth investing time in, or is it kind of a ghost town outside of certain hours. i was on 14.078 for a while and saw maybe 8-10 stations. compared to FT8 thats nothing but maybe thats fine if theyre actually there to chat. also does anybody run JS8Call on 40 or 80 for regional stuff, im in the midwest so those bands might be more useful for me than 20m

so ive been following the IC-905 situation for like a year and a half now and it looks like some dealers are actually starting to get units in, at least thats what i saw on one of the facebook groups this morning. anybody here actually received one or know someone who has? im curious how the microwave bands are performing out of the box because thats the whole reason i was interested in the first place, the 10GHz module especially. also kind of unrelated but the 6m opening last tuesday was absolutely wild if you were around for it, i was running barefoot into a cheap yagi i threw up last summer and still worked like 40 states in a few hours. band was just lit up. made me think i should actually pay attention to the propagation alerts more instead of just randomly turning the radio on and hoping something is happening. anyway if anyone has hands-on time with the 905 or knows more about the shipping situation id love to hear it, the wait has been kind of brutal

Welcome to the hobby! I was in the same boat a couple years ago. Set up LoTW first since it's the gold standard for awards, but definitely get an eQSL account too. eQSL is used by many radio amateurs, especially for confirming connections in the digimodes. You can always print out nice-looking eQSL cards if you want something physical for your shack wall!

congrats on the general first of all. ok so the vanity system is not quite a lottery but i can see why it looks that way. the FCC runs application windows and the length of the window depends on what class of call you're going after. 1x2 and 2x1 calls have a longer window, something like 30 days i think, and if more than one person applies for the exact same call during that window then yeah it basically becomes a random selection among those applicants. but if you're the only one who applied for that particular callsign you get it pretty much automatically after the window closes. as for the 1x2 question — those are available to extra class only i believe, at least in most call districts. general class can get a 1x3 call which is still pretty clean looking. you'd want to double check the current rules on the arrl vanity call page, they keep a pretty good breakdown of whats available at each license class. the fcc uls site is rough to navigate i agree, a lot of people use a third party site like ae7q dot com which makes it way easier to search available calls and see whats in the queue.

yeah the calling your dad thing is real, i went through that phase too lol. one thing i'd add is that if you're seriously considering this kind of setup you really want a proper remote power cycle on that end, something like a WiReach or an IP-PDU because no matter how good the software is something will eventually hang and you need a way to cold boot everything without a site visit. learned that one the hard way after a windows update decided to restart the remote PC at 2am and just... sat at a login screen for three days before i noticed

Welcome to the vanity game! The FCC should add code to ULS to catch these errors at the application stage but they don't. For Generals, stick to Group C and D call signs (1x3 and 2x3 formats). Also check if someone filed ahead of you - applications are processed by receipt date, not filing time.

omg yes i noticed this too, im still pretty new to hf (got my general like 8 months ago) and i had no idea what 10m was supposed to sound like so i just kind of assumed it was always quiet. then a few weeks ago i turned it on and there were stations everywhere, it was kind of overwhelming honestly. ended up making my first real dx contact with a station in brazil which was super cool still learning the whole solar flux thing, didnt even know it mattered until someone in another thread mentioned it. gonna look into that prop site you mentioned

nice work man, the first one is always the one where you figure out everything you forgot to bring lol. i always bring way too much paracord now after my second activation where the only thing around was like knee-high brush. also if your fingers are getting cold look into those thin liner gloves, i can still work the paddle with them on no problem

Wire gauge shouldnt matter much for receive but for transmit yeah heavier is usually better especially on 80m where you're pushing some current. I use 12awg for anything 40m and below. But honestly sounds more like your trees are the culprit - leaves falling, branches moving, moisture content changing in the wood. I have an inverted V that does the same thing every fall when the oak trees start dropping leaves. Just retune it and dont worry about it too much unless the swr gets really bad

im in almost the same boat as you, got my ticket like two months ago. ended up getting the baofeng to start and tbh its fine for what i do which is just check into the local net and chat on a couple repeaters. programmed it with chirp which was kinda annoying to figure out but there are youtube videos for literally everything so it wasnt that bad. only thing is the stock antenna that comes with it is pretty mediocre, someone here told me to get a nagoya NA-771 as a replacement and it made a noticable differnece. so factor that in i guess if you go the cheap radio route.

haha yeah the FCC turnaround has been surprisingly quick lately. and same with the family thing, my wife still doesnt understand why i get excited about talking to someone in ohio on hf when i could just call them. but thats not the point is it. anyway welcome, what repeater you on?

so ive been running FT8 for about two years now mostly on 20m and 40m with a dipole in the attic and around 50w, and yeah it works great for getting contacts but lately i feel like its kinda... hollow? like you just exchange grid squares and signal reports and thats it, nobody actually says anything to each other started looking at JS8Call because at least you can have a real conversation and it still has decent weak signal performance, the protocol is built on the same foundation as FT8 basically but slower and you can actually type a sentence. has anyone run both for a while and can tell me if JS8Call is actually usable for ragchewing or is it just too slow to feel natural also curious how it compares on like actual sensitivity, i know FT8 gets down to like -24dB or whatever but does JS8Call get close to that or do you give up a lot there. running WSJT-X for FT8 right now and the waterfall setup is already there so the jump to JS8Call hopefully isnt too bad

New general license holder here and I'm really excited about trying my first major contest! The CQ WW RTTY contest is coming up on the last full weekend of September and draws over 15,000 participants. I've been practicing with FLDIGI but still feel pretty nervous about jumping into such a big contest. Any tips for a complete contest newbie? Should I expect the bands to be absolutely packed? Planning to run 100W into a simple dipole - will that be competitive at all or should I just focus on having fun and learning?

I've been monitoring my own signal with an SDR and notice my SSB transmission extends well beyond the expected 3 kHz bandwidth. An ideal SSB signal shows spectrum of about 70 Hz to 2700 Hz that's rather flat in strength throughout the passband, with no energy outside the passband. At more than 6 kHz separation the distortion energy level should be at least -40 dB compared to the pass band signal. My signal appears to have significant energy at -30 dB up to 8 kHz from center frequency. Running a TS-590SG with built-in processor on level 3, external Behringer compressor, and Shure SM58. This type of spectrum usage is not considerate regarding fellow contesters and could be subject to disqualification. What's the most effective approach to identify and eliminate the source of these spurious emissions? Should I start by bypassing the external processor entirely?

went through almost exactly this same thing last year. what finally fixed it for me was realizing the RMS gateways i was picking were just... not that active. some of them show up in the list but they havent had a successful session in days. there's a gateway status page on the Winlink website where you can actually see recent activity and when a station last had a connection, worth checking that before you spend an hour trying to dial into something that might be offline or just in a bad location relative to you. also VARA HF vs VARA FM matters a lot -- if you're trying to hit a local gateway on VHF you need VARA FM and a different port config, they're not interchangeable. that tripped me up for a while too.

so i've been pretty frustrated with conditions lately, been mostly sitting on 40m and 20m just doing the usual local stuff because every time i try 10m it's just dead air. yesterday afternoon i figured i'd throw a signal out there anyway just to see what happens and holy cow it was absolutely packed. worked a bunch of south america, a couple stations in europe, even had a brief contact with someone in japan which i honestly wasn't expecting at all. checked the solar flux index after and it was up around 180 which i guess explains it, was sitting in the 130s most of last week. i know we're supposed to be heading toward solar max but i didn't realize we were already seeing numbers like that. curious if anyone else caught this opening or if i just got lucky with timing. also wondering if anyone has a good way to predict when these openings are likely to happen, i've been using dxmaps but by the time i see a cluster pop up the opening is sometimes already fading

yeah the trunk lid placement is probably doing you more harm than the mag vs NMO question honestly. i ran a mag mount centered on the roof of my jeep for like a year and it worked totally fine, better than my buddy's fancy NMO on his quarter panel which is arguably even worse than trunk lid. ground plane geometry matters a lot on uhf. that said once i finally did the NMO install i did notice the SWR was just cleaner across the band, like rock solid 1.1 on 2m and pretty good on 70 too. the mag mount was reading fine on the meter but something about a proper mount just feels more solid. if you're worried about the hole just do it at the headliner area near the dome light, thats where i ran mine, easy cable routing and you barely even see the connector from inside.

oh man i just did my second activation a few weeks ago and had the same confusion about the 44 contacts thing lol. ended up just making sure i had way more than 44 just to be safe. the park to park thing is cool though i didnt even realize that was a thing until someone explained it to me after the fact. what end-fed were you running? im still trying to figure out the best portable antenna situation

so ive been chasing this for like three weeks now and im at my wits end. my 7300 will just randomly drop out mid transmission, like the power drops to zero for a second or two and then comes back. sometimes it happens every few minutes sometimes it'll go an hour without doing it. no pattern i can figure out with band or mode or anything like that. first thing i checked was the power supply — im running an astron RS-35M and the voltage looks rock solid on my meter, no sag under load. tried a different coax, different antenna, same thing. ran it with the lid off for a bit thinking maybe thermal but it does it cold too so probably not that. the weird thing is the display stays on the whole time, just the RF output drops, ALC meter goes to nothing during the glitch. i was thinking maybe something in the PA section or the ALC circuit itself going wonky. anybody dealt with this before? im halfway considering sending it to Icom but thats a whole thing and probably expensive.

so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im stuck somewhere around 10-11 wpm and it feels like a wall. i started with the Koch method using LCWO and got through all the characters pretty quick but now the speed building part is just... brutal. i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day which i know isnt a ton but its what i can fit in. my main problem is i still have to think about some of the letters, like the less common ones Q and Z and Y, my brain just doesn't fire fast enough on those. everything else is getting better but those stragglers slow me down because i hesitate and then i lose the next character while im still processing the last one. i guess my question is for people who made it to 20wpm — how long did it take, was there a point where it just clicked, and did you do anything different that actually worked. ive read a bunch of the usual advice but hearing real experiences would help. also wondering if i should just push the speed up and struggle through it or stay at a comfortable speed longer

so ive been chasing DX seriously for about two years now and i just confirmed my 100th entity on LoTW last week which feels pretty surreal honestly. been working towards this since i got my general and upgraded to extra last spring. anyway im at the point where i want to actually apply for the DXCC award and im a little confused about the process. i know you submit through the ARRL and it costs something like 12 bucks for members but im not totally sure what counts as a valid confirmation these days. like i have a mix of LoTW confirmations and actual paper QSLs from the bureau and a handful i paid direct QSL for. do they all count the same way or does LoTW carry more weight somehow? also while im at it — should i be working on WAS and WAZ at the same time? ive got probably 35 or 40 states confirmed already just from normal operating so WAS might not be that far off. WAZ zones confuse me a little though, some zones seem almost impossible to work from my location in the midwest. zone 2 especially i never hear anything from up there.