Emily Davis71

nice work getting out there. im pretty new to POTA myself, only done like 4 activations but ive been hunting a lot more. from the hunter side i'd say just get that spot up as early as you can even if your signal isnt quite perfect yet, because some of us are literally just waiting and watching the page for new parks to pop up. when i see a new spot i jump on it fast so the sooner its up the more hunters you'll probably get. oh also one thing nobody told me until my third activation -- if you can activate the same park on multiple bands in the same outing that counts as separate activations for your log, or at least separate band activations. i dont remember exactly how the rules work but worth looking into on the pota.app site because it might mean youre getting more credit than you think for a single trip out.

the digipeater coverage thing is almost definitely your problem if you moved somewhere rural or even suburban — a lot of areas have terrible APRS infrastructure and people just dont realize it til they check the RF coverage map on aprs.fi. go to aprs.fi, hit the coverage layer, and zoom into your area. if you're in a gap between digis you might just not have coverage at all no matter how good your setup is. that said, the audio level stuff on the D710 is worth checking too. from memory i think its buried in the TNC menu somewhere, theres a deviation or audio input level setting and if its too high your packets come out splattered and nobody decodes them right. there used to be a thread on the tapr mailing list about this specific radio having hot audio from the internal TNC. might be worth searching for that. the squelch noise triggering thing can actually kill you for APRS because if the radio is trying to decode noise as a packet it wont transmit when it needs to. set squelch a little tighter than you normally would for voice.

congrats on your first activation! yeah the logging can be tricky at first. you'll want to upload your log to the WWFF logsearch database - theres a link on the main wwff site. for the reference format dont worry too much, you can always correct it before you submit. as for QSLs most people do eQSL or LOTW these days but some still like the paper cards. what park did you activate?

so ive been studying for the technician exam for about three weeks now and honestly im not sure if im going about it the right way. i bought one of those study guides, the gordon west one i think, and ive been reading through it but some of it just doesnt stick. like the electrical stuff and ohms law i get fine but then theres all this stuff about band plans and frequencies and i keep mixing up which frequencies you can use on which bands as a tech. i also found the hamstudy.org site which has the actual question pool and ive been doing practice tests on there. im passing most of them but i get tripped up on the same handful of questions every time. is there anything specific people remember being on the exam that i should really drill down on? or should i just keep hammering the practice tests until i consistently score high? test is in about two weeks.

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general) and i keep seeing people mention checking into nets but i honestly have no idea what the process looks like in real time. like i know the basic idea, you call in, the net control takes your call sign and that's... it? is there more to it than that? do you have to say anything specific or is it pretty informal theres a local 2m net on tuesday nights and i've been lurking on the frequency for a couple weeks just listening and it seems pretty relaxed but i dont want to sound like an idiot when i finally key up. also i noticed they sometimes have a what they called a "traffic" portion at the end — whats that about, do i need to do anything for that or can i just check in for the regular part also totally separate but i saw something about a special event station for a state park anniversary next weekend, is that something you just try to work like any other station or is there like a specific window you're supposed to call them in

Remember that the test isn't designed to keep people from getting licensed - it's there to ensure you know how to responsibly use the technology. You have access to all possible questions beforehand through the NCVEC question pool, so if you've been scoring well on practice tests, you're ready. Trust your preparation!

I've been running an RSP1A for about two years now and had the exact same issue initially. The key is understanding that the RSP1A has quite a bit more dynamic range than most people realize, but you need to set the RF gain much lower than you'd think - try starting around 20-24dB max and adjust from there.

i literally just passed my tech exam like 6 weeks ago so i can tell you from fresh experience lol. hamstudy was basically all i used, did it on my phone during lunch breaks mostly. the actual test felt easier than the practice tests which surprised me. just dont stress it too much, the questions arent trying to trick you or anything. my test session was run by a local club and everyone was super friendly about the whole thing

I drilled my Tacoma about four years ago and honestly I wish I'd done it sooner. The mag mount always had that slight lossy connection at the base and on 70cm you really do notice it — the band is just less forgiving of impedance weirdness. Did a quick A/B test when I switched over using a handheld as a reference and the NMO mount with a decent Larsen antenna was clearly cleaner, not night and day dramatic but consistent. The trunk lid thing is real though. You want the antenna as close to center of the roof as you can get for an even pattern, trunk lid puts a big chunk of metal asymmetrically around the feedpoint and it shows in the radiation pattern, especially on UHF. For just hitting repeaters in town you might never care but if you're doing any simplex work or trying to hit something marginal it matters. My suggestion, find a used vehicle you like and just commit to the drill. Or if you're dead set against it at least move the mag mount to the roof center and see if that alone helps your 440 situation.

haha yeah that first qso feeling is real, i remember mine pretty clearly and that was like 12 years ago. i was so nervous i forgot to give a signal report and the other guy had to ask me twice. dont worry it gets more natural fast, give it a week or two on the repeater and youll be chatting away without even thinking about it. welcome to the hobby

omg i totally missed that opening, was out doing yard work and didnt even have the scanner on. this is why i need to set up some kind of alert for when propagation gets good lol. do people actually use like DX cluster alerts for that or is there an app that does something similar? im still pretty new to HF, just got my general in june and im still figuring out when to actually be sitting at the radio vs not bothering. also had no idea there was a Rochester hamfest coming up, might try to make it out if its on a sunday, where do you usually find the schedule for those things, is it on the ARRL site?

yeah gain staging is probably 80% of it honestly. ive heard guys with $300 mics sound like they're transmitting through a coffee can because their mic gain is cranked and the ALC is slamming constantly. the ALC indicator should barely be moving on normal speech peaks, if its pegged you're already in trouble regardless of what mic you're using. the compression thing is a whole other rabbit hole. a little compression helps with readability especially on noisy bands, but ive heard people with so much compression its basically just a loud buzz, all the natural speech dynamics get destroyed and it actually becomes harder to copy not easier. the radio's built in compression on most modern rigs is fine if you dial it back to like 4-6 dB of actual compression, beyond that youre usually hurting yourself. one thing i do think matters more than people admit is where your voice sits in the SSB passband. if you have a real bassy voice and youre not rolling off some of that low end, a lot of your energy is just sitting below where the radio is actually passing it efficiently. bumping presence around 2-3kHz does more for intelligibility than any mic swap ive ever done.

CQ WW was actually my introduction to contesting three years ago and got me hooked. From 160 to 10 meters, you hear the world wake up and go to sleep as the bands open and close. You learn where signals bend, which paths open at grayline. Start with manageable goals and have fun!

so ive been a general for about 3 years now and honestly i keep putting off the extra exam because every time i look at the question pool i just kind of close the browser and go operate instead. the electrical theory stuff especially, like the resonant circuits and the transmission line questions, i took physics in college like 15 years ago and most of it is gone at this point. i guess my question is whether its actually worth grinding through all that theory or if people mostly just memorize the pool and move on. i hear the privilege thing is nice for the lower portions of HF bands but im not even sure how much id actually use it. someone at my club said the 80 meter and 40 meter extra segments are way less crowded during contests which honestly sounds appealing. is that actually true or was he just trying to talk me into upgrading also does the extra license actually change anything practically for most people or is it more of a personal achievement thing at this point

so i was just doing my usual evening listening session yesterday and stumbled onto 28.400 or so and the band was absolutely packed. like i havent heard 10m like this in probably 8 or 9 years, maybe longer. was working stations in south america, europe, even caught a JA briefly before he faded out. running maybe 50 watts into a dipole up about 25 feet and i was getting 59 reports from places i wouldnt normally dream of hitting. i know solar cycle 25 has been running hotter than predicted but this felt different, like genuinely surprising. also saw some chatter that there might be a new icom release coming sometime this fall, something in the mid-range HF market but i havent seen anything confirmed yet. just rumors at this point i think. anyway anyone been taking advantage of the current conditions? feels like a good time to dust off whatever antenna projects you had sitting on the back burner

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from me, K-4839 if anyone knows it, and wow i did not realize how much i had underestimated the whole thing. i brought my FT-891 and a end-fed halfwave strung up between two trees and it took me like 40 minutes just to get the antenna up because one of the trees was way further than i thought and i kept running out of paracord. anyway i finally got on the air around 11am on 40m and started calling CQ POTA and honestly i was kind of nervous, first time doing this in the field and there were hikers walking by giving me looks. got my 10 contacts though, took maybe 25 minutes once i actually got going, and a few of the hunters were super patient with me when i fumbled the exchange. one guy had to ask me for my park reference twice because i forgot to say it the first time lol. logged it all on paper and then uploaded to the app when i got home. is that normal to just paper log in the field? i saw some people use phones or tablets but i feel like paper is more reliable when youre out there. anyway just wanted to share, it was a blast even though it was kind of chaotic. already planning the next one.

so ive been running FT8 for a while now and honestly love it for working new grid squares and chasing DX but it gets a bit hollow after a while, like youre just exchanging signal reports and thats it. someone on a local net mentioned JS8Call and said it was basically built for actual conversations on weak signal, which sounds interesting but i cant quite figure out if its worth the learning curve or if the bands are just dead on it most of the time my setup is pretty modest, ic-7300 into a fan dipole up about 30 feet, so weak signal stuff is kind of important to me since im not running a kilowatt into a yagi or anything. i tried firing up JS8Call last weekend on 40m and heard maybe 3 or 4 stations but wasnt sure if i was decoding right or what. the interface is a little different from WSJT-X and i may have had the audio levels off also curious if anyone still runs PSK31 with any regularity because i learned that years ago and it was kind of fun being able to actually type back and forth in near real time, just feels like nobody is on anymore. or am i looking in the wrong places

the lip mount ground plane thing is real but honestly for FM repeater work its not gonna kill you. youre not trying to work EME here. ive had a comet lip mount on my silverado for probably 4 years and it works fine for everyday use, SWR is a little higher than id like on 70cm but 2m is totally flat. the SG7900 is a decent antenna so as long as your feedline losses arent crazy you wont notice much difference vs a perfect ground plane situation that said if youre planning to keep the truck a while just drill the hole. NMO through roof is the right way to do it, done it on 3 trucks now. use a good grommet, apply some self etching primer to the bare metal before you put the mount in, and youll be fine. i use the comet M-24M mount which is a nice low profile unit. resale hit is basically nothing if you plug it with the cap when you sell

same thing happened to me last tuesday, i was just about to give up on 10m completely and then i randomly heard a ZL station coming in like he was next door. worked him, then a JA, then a couple VKs all within like 20 minutes and then it was gone. total grey line magic i think but honestly i dont fully understand why it happened when it did either so you're not alone lol i started following W6LEN on one of the facebook groups and he posts daily propagation summaries that are actually written in plain english which helps me a lot more than just staring at numbers

for the NOAA and meteor M2 passes an rtl-sdr with a decent QFH or turnstile antenna honestly does fine, just saying dont sleep on what you already have. i was getting pretty clean meteor images before i upgraded anything. the bigger difference for me was the antenna not the dongle that said i do run an RSP2 now and the two antenna ports plus the MW/HF coverage without an upconverter is really nice. the notch filters help a lot near broadcast stations which sounds like your actual problem

the SDR side of this — yeah RemoteHams doesnt really do native SDR panadapter stuff in any clean way last time i checked, what most people do is run SDR-Console server on the same machine and then connect to that separately on the client end, its a bit clunky having two windows open but it actually works pretty well once you get the PPM correction dialed in on the RTL stick so its frequency accurate against the main rig Airspy HF+ is worth the extra money if you want the dynamic range to match anything close to the 7300s receiver, the cheap RTL dongles are fine for casual panadapter use but if youre on 40m during a contest the thing gets overloaded and its kind of useless on your Echolink vs remote HF question thats kind of apples and oranges honestly, Echolink and IRLP are fundamentally VHF/UHF linking with phone patch over internet, youre not actually operating HF youre just accessing a repeater remotely, RemoteHams gives you actual third-party-control of the rig which is a completely different thing and for HF rag chewing theres really no comparison, RemoteHams wins easily if the latency is manageable

the mode A vs mode B thing trips up a lot of people starting out honestly. the short version is they differ in how the keyer handles the last element when you release the paddle - mode B will add one more element if you were squeezing both paddles, mode A doesnt. most people end up preferring one or the other after a while but when youre just starting out it really doesnt matter much. just pick one and stick with it until the sending becomes more automatic. the mush problem is almost certainly tension. new paddle users tend to death-grip the thing and your timing goes right out the window. try to use just your fingertips and let the spring do the work of returning, dont force it back yourself. also your paddle spacing might be too wide or too narrow which makes a huge difference. i spent two weeks thinking i was just bad at it before i realized my contact gap was way off. the other thing i always tell people is dont practice sending until your receiving is solid at that speed. your brain needs to know what correct CW sounds like before your hands can reproduce it. G4FON's koch trainer is free and it genuinely works if you put in 15 minutes a day consistently.

just chiming in because im in almost the exact same boat lol, sitting at about 11-12wpm and have been for a while. one thing i started doing recently is the word training on lcwo instead of just random character strings and it feels way different. like my brain wants to find words and when it does it just kinda locks in. might be worth trying if you havent. also heard good things about the CW academy run by CWOPS but i havent signed up yet, the schedule hasnt worked for me

so ive been on the air for about 6 months now and i still feel kind of awkward about when to use phonetics vs just saying the letter normally. like if someone asks me to confirm a callsign do i spell out every single letter with nato phonetics every time or is that overkill in some situations i was on a local repeater last week and someone asked for my call after a contact and i just said each letter individually without the nato words and the guy came back and asked me to repeat it with phonetics because he couldnt make it out. so i guess that answered my question a little bit but i still dont fully get the etiquette around it. is there like a rule or do people just develop a feel for it over time also sometimes i hear people use non-nato phonetics, like they'll say something other than the standard words, is that a problem or does it not matter as long as its clear

so im pretty sure its the third weekend of next month, saw a flyer at the club meeting but forgot to grab one. last year they had a pretty decent swap meet section, picked up an old Kenwood for like 40 bucks that needed a little work but ended up being fine. wondering if its worth making the drive again or if anyone knows if theres gonna be more vendors this time around