Robert Moore66

just to add one thing about the arrow — when you're holding it and spinning around trying to track the pass, your downlink signal is gonna flutter all over the place and thats completley normal and kind of drives you crazy at first. i spent like three passes thinking my radio was broken before i realized i just kept blocking the antenna with my arm. also AO-73 isnt always on, the operators put it in power safe mode sometimes during certain orbital conditions so if you hear nothing at all on a good pass thats maybe why. the AMSAT status page is worth bookmarking.

Great choice volunteering for GOTA duty! The power limit is 100 watts max, and you log separately but don't count toward your club's contact total. More than 31,000 hams get together with their radio clubs on the fourth weekend in June each year. Focus on getting new and inactive hams on the air - that's the real mission.

400-500ms is rough for phone, not gonna lie. i tried RemoteHams for about a month last year and ended up just going back to RDP into a windows box at the remote site with a local SDR doing the audio — way more latency theoretically but somehow felt more predictable if that makes sense. RemoteHams has gotten better apparently but i havent gone back to test it recently. one thing worth mentioning — if your buddy has that IC-7300 connected, the CI-V control through RemoteHams can occasionally get weird when band conditions change fast and the software is trying to update the panadapter and control the rig at the same time. seen it cause the rig to drop out of remote mode like twice in a contest which was annoying. might be his setup specifically but worth knowing about before you invest a lot of time into it.

Planning my first significant DXpedition activation and studying pileup management techniques. I firmly believe that the pileup is a mirror reflection of the DXpedition operator - if he is successful the pileup will conform and the expedition will be much more successful. The challenge is sometimes a DXpedition operator may not realize how large a pileup he has - it is important to realize that he is likely to have a large pileup and should work split from the beginning. What specific control techniques have proven most effective? I'm considering calling stations by number in the call which will instantly silence 90% of the pile-up - if you call "1"-stations only, the big guns can be worked easily. Issue calling instructions after every QSO: EU UP5 or NA UP 5-10, and minimize pileup width: suggest max 5kHz CW and 15kHz SSB.

Keep the 7300 for home and get a used 891 for field work if budget allows. The menu system on the 891 takes getting used to, but once you memorize the key functions it's fine. The Nifty Mini-Manual helps a lot.

hey welcome to actually getting on the air, that first check-in is always a little nerve wracking. so the short answer on breaking in — it really does vary by net, some nets are pretty formal and you absolutely wait to be recognized, others are more of a roundtable vibe where people jump in pretty naturally. your net control sets the tone. if you ever need to break in urgently (like you have a time-sensitive piece of traffic or an emergency obviously) most nets you'd just say your callsign once clearly and wait for NC to acknowledge you. the "with comment" or "no traffic" thing is just helpful for the net control so they can plan how long the session will run and know who needs airtime. totally fine to just give your call and let NC ask if you have anything, especially as a newer check-in. honestly the best thing is just keep listening like youve been doing and youll pick up the rhythm pretty fast. most net controls are happy to gently correct someone who steps on the wrong spot, nobody's gonna bite your head off for being new

oh nice, KFF references are great. which reserve was it if you dont mind me asking, im always looking for new ones to chase on 40m. and yeah what the other guy said about dual logging is right, ive been doing both for about a year now and once you get the hang of the export formats its pretty easy. WWFF is way bigger internationally than a lot of US hams realize, like the award structure goes pretty deep if you start chasing references from other countries.

yeah i run pretty much exactly that setup and it works fine once you get the import settings dialed in. the key with Log4OM is to set it to skip duplicates on ADIF import, theres a checkbox in the import dialog that most people miss. so after a contest i export the N1MM log as ADIF, do the same from WSJT-X if i worked any FT8 during the contest, and just import both into Log4OM. as long as duplicate checking is on ive never had a problem with double entries. the only annoying part is that N1MM and WSJT-X can both be running UDP logging at the same time and if youre not careful they can step on each other. i actually just let WSJT-X log to its own file and dont bother with the real-time UDP bridge to N1MM during contests, just do the manual ADIF import after. less elegant but zero headaches.

yeah the slot machine thing is exactly how i describe FT8 to people who ask why i dont seem excited about my DXCC numbers anymore. JS8Call scratched that itch for me too, though i'll be honest the activity level is pretty thin outside of a few calling frequencies. 40m around 7078 seems to be where most of the action is in north america at least from what ive seen. as for running both at once, what i do is use two separate instances of audio routing through VB-Cable or VAC depending on your OS and just have the radio in split or use a second SDR as a panadapter to monitor. its not as clean as id like but it works without the alt-tabbing situation. some guys use two separate radios which is obviously the cleaner solution if you have the shack space for it. PSK31 is basically dead here in the midwest, i fire it up occasionally on 20m and might see a handful of signals in a 30 minute window. the guys still running it are diehards and honestly i respect it, there's something satisfying about watching those waterfall traces that FT8 kind of killed off

yeah single yagi EME on 2m is absolutely a thing, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. i ran a 9el M2 for about two years before i went to a 4 yager array and made maybe 60-70 contacts, mostly on JT65B which is what you want to be using. the key thing people dont emphasize enough is your receive setup matters as much or more than the tx power. a good preamp right at the feedpoint, low loss coax or even go to hardline if the run is more than like 20 feet, and a clean RF ground situation. if your noise floor is garbage you wont hear the weak echoes coming back and nobody will hear you either. for the coordination thing, look up the ON4KST chat, basically everyone doing EME is on there calling skeds and posting when theyre on. random CQ does work occasionally especially if you have decent eirp but most contacts especially as a small station happen through sked coordination first. the moon window obviously matters a lot, youre only able to work stations where the moon is above the horizon for both of you simultaneously so planning is kind of essential. N0UK has a good moon tracking page that a lot of guys use. its a rabbit hole but a really satisfying one once you get your first echo back off the moon