Amanda Garcia

honestly the General exam isnt as bad as people make it sound. i was in the same spot you are, had my Tech for like three years before i finally just sat down and did it. the question pool is bigger than Tech but a lot of it overlaps with what you already know from studying for Tech — regs, basic electronics, safety. the stuff thats new is mostly the HF band privileges, some more detailed propagation theory like knowing the difference between ground wave and sky wave and what frequencies work best at what time of day, and a bit more on operating practices. i'd say spend a few weeks going through the HamStudy website, its free and it drills you on the actual pool questions. once you're hitting 85 percent or so consistently you're probably ready. the propagation stuff clicks eventually, just takes a bit of time to wrap your head around the whole ionosphere thing. definitely worth it for HF access, 40m and 20m have been great lately

so i've been licensed for about two years now and finally got around to joining our county ARES group maybe six months ago. did a few of the training nets, got my ICS-100 and 200 done online which honestly wasnt as bad as i thought it'd be, and then last weekend we actually got activated for a pretty serious weather event in our area. i was assigned to one of the local shelters as a liaison operator and man, i was not fully prepared for how much sitting around there is interspersed with moments where everyone suddenly needs something at once. i had my HT and a little roll-up j-pole i threw up in a window which worked way better than i expected for hitting the repeater, and we were passing traffic back to the EOC for most of Saturday night. the part that surprised me was how much of the job is just being a calm presence and knowing your equipment cold. there was a moment where the shelter coordinator was pretty stressed and i just had to stay cool and relay what she needed clearly. nobody warned me that part of emcomm is basically being unflappable even when you've been awake for 18 hours. anyway just wanted to share since i know a lot of people on here are curious about ARES stuff but haven't taken the plunge yet. worth doing if your local group is active. ours has been really welcoming.

Here's the big three to remember: No commercial use (97.113(a)(2)), no broadcasting/music (97.113(b)), and no automatic retransmission except for repeaters/auxiliary stations. The compensation rule has specific exceptions for teachers and club stations doing code practice.

the store and forward question is a good one and honestly the documentation doesnt explain it super clearly. short answer: if the RMS gateway loses its internet connection your message does sit at the gateway temporarily, and yes there is peer-to-peer capability where gateways can exchange messages with each other over RF without needing internet in the middle, but that mode (RMS Relay or sometimes called hybrid networking) has to be specifically configured at those nodes and most public gateways arent set up that way. for most typical usage you pretty much need the gateway to have a working internet connection to the CMS or your message isnt going anywhere until it does. as for picking channels, honestly i dont fully trust the propagation scores either. they pull from VOACAP and the beacon data but conditions change fast. what i usually do is look at the gateway's last heard time in the list, if a gateway hasnt had a successful session in a while thats a yellow flag. also just try connecting and watch your Vara waterfall, youll get a feel pretty quick if the path is any good. sometimes a gateway thats 800 miles away on 40m is cleaner than one thats supposedly closer because of local noise or antenna situation at their end.

one thing that tripped me up when i was new is that the Q codes technically come from old maritime and commercial radio and they were designed so you could use them across language barriers, like you could communicate with someone who didnt speak your language at all. so thats why they're still a thing even though everyone on ham radio mostly speaks english or at least enough of it. CW operators use them a ton because when youre sending morse you want everything as short as possible, typing out interference takes forever compared to just sending QRM. also worth knowing QRP means low power operation, like running 5 watts or less, youll see people say im running QRP when theyre using a little portable radio. and QRO is the opposite, high power. those two come up a lot.

this is making me want to actually try and work some of the harder ones, ive mostly been sticking to regular dx and avoiding the big pileups because they seem kind of chaotic and honestly a little intimidating. how do you even know where to start listening on the split if they dont announce it? i always assumed you just found the listed frequency and that was it but sounds like its more complicated than that

had almost the exact same thing happen on mine about two years back. turned out to be one of the RD70HVF1 finals was leaky — not dead, just degraded enough to pull the whole stage down. the tricky part is a single bad FET in that push-pull config wont always look obviously wrong on a static resistance check, you kinda need to be watching drain current under actual RF drive to see which one is misbehaving. before you do anything else though check the bias trim pots if you havent already. on mine one of them had drifted way out and that alone was causing reduced output. its an easy thing to overlook because everything looks fine on the scope until you actually measure idle current on each device. icom has a service manual floating around with the correct idle current specs, worth grabbing if you dont have it. if the bias checks out then yeah youre probably looking at a bad FET and at that point you either swap them yourself if you're comfortable with RF power stages or just send it in. the icom service centers are actually not too bad turnaround wise in my experience.

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so i passed my technician exam on the 14th after studying for like 3 weeks solid and honestly i was kind of nervous to actually key up on anything for a while. just sat there listening to the local 2m repeater for a few days trying to figure out how people talk on these things. finally worked up the nerve tuesday evening, threw out a quick call and this older guy came back to me right away and we talked for like 20 minutes about his setup and where i was transmitting from. i was using a cheap baofeng i got off amazon which i know everybody has opinions about but it was fine for my first contact. he gave me a solid signal report and walked me through the whole exchange. i dont even remember half of what i said i was so nervous but i logged it and everything. anyway just wanted to introduce myself, been lurking here forever and figured id finally post something. kb3... well my new callsign lol

the part 97.301 table is what youre looking for, thats where it breaks down privileges by license class. its dense but once you find the right table it actually makes sense. i remember being in the same boat as you not that long ago lol

so ive been wanting to get into CW for a while now and i finally decided to just start trying to learn morse code but honestly i dont even know where to begin. ive looked at a few charts online and tried to memorize the letters but it feels like it isnt sticking at all. i can sort of remember S and O because of SOS but everything else just falls out of my head. is there like a method that actually works or do people just sit there and drill the alphabet over and over until it clicks? ive heard some people say dont learn from the chart at all and to use your ears instead but i dont totally understand what that means in practice. any apps or websites people have actually used and found helpful would be great, im not in any rush to get on the air but id like to at least be able to copy something simple eventually

honestly the theory stuff looks scarier than it is when youre just staring at the question pool cold. once you start working through the actual concepts behind the questions a lot of it starts making sense together, like the filter and impedance matching stuff connects once you understand why its there. i used the hamstudy site basically every day for about six weeks and just kept at it until my weak spots filled in the Smith chart questions tripped me up too at first but theres a couple good youtube videos that walk through how to actually read one and after that the exam questions on it were pretty manageable. i wouldnt say you need an engineering degree, just patience and willingness to sit with something confusing for a bit before it clicks as for the privileges, the extra portions of the cw bands especially on 40 are noticeably less crowded and yeah the dx windows matter more than i expected. its not night and day but its real

short timer just means you need to leave the net early, so net control knows to call on you sooner in the rotation instead of making you wait around. nothing embarrassing about not knowing, honestly half the stuff in net procedures is unwritten and you just pick it up over time. for check-ins with no traffic most nets just want you to say something like "[callsign], no traffic, just checking in" or whatever the net control asks for. every net does it a little different so just listen to how other people phrase it for a few weeks and you'll get the pattern. some nets are pretty formal about it and others are really relaxed, sounds like yours might be on the friendlier side which is great for getting started. and yes absolutely do the special event station contact. some of them send out really nice QSL cards and certificates and its just a fun reason to get on the air. check the ARRL special event page, they list most of them with frequencies and times. the operators at those events are usually happy to work anybody who calls in, thats kind of the whole point.

so i finally got around to trying some LEO satellite work after reading about it for probably two years. been doing terrestrial VHF/UHF for a while and figured how hard can it be right. very hard apparently. my setup is a yaesu ft-991a and a pair of arrow antennas, the handheld dual band one most people use for this. been using gpredict on the laptop to track passes and that part actually works really well, can see the doppler curve and everything ahead of time which is nice. the problem im running into is the linear transponder on AO-73 — i get that you need to do the doppler correction manually or at least account for it, and i understand conceptually that if youre on the uplink in one direction the downlink shifts the other way. but actually doing that in real time while also trying to hold a QSO and point the antenna is just... a lot. i feel like i need three hands minimum. heard someone else on a pass yesterday but by the time i found my own downlink signal i had completely lost where they were. is there some trick to this that im missing or does it just take practice. also not sure if my uplink power is too high, im running maybe 5 watts which i thought was fine but someone in a youtube video said even that can be too much on a linear sat. using the inverting transponder correctly i think but honestly not 100% sure on that part either.

so ive been meaning to put together a proper go-kit for probably two years now and i keep putting it off because every time i start researching it i end up with a list thats like 47 things long and i dont even know where to start. my club does ARES stuff and theyve been nudging me to get something ready but honestly i just dont know what the bare minimum is vs what is nice to have. right now i literally have nothing organized. i have an FT-857D that i use at home and a handheld, some coax, whatever. but if i had to grab something and go to an EOC or shelter i wouldnt even know what bag to throw stuff in. do you guys just use a pelican case or like a backpack or what. and what about power — do i need to bring my own or do they usually have power at those places. sorry if these are dumb questions im a general class been licensed about 18 months

the theory stuff on General isnt as scary as people make it out to be honestly. there are some impedance calculations and stuff with decibels that look intimidating but if you just work through the question pool a few times it starts to click. i used hamstudy dot org again same as tech and i think i studied maybe three weeks on and off before i felt comfortable. took the test and passed with only a couple wrong. propagation is one of those things that gets way clearer once you actually start operating. like reading about 10 meters being open means nothing until you turn on a radio and hear stations from europe rolling in. as for gear yeah youll need an HF radio unless you already have something, most tech licensees dont bother with one. a used Icom 718 or a Yaesu FT-450 or something like that is a pretty common starting point and you can find them reasonable on qrz dot com classifieds or on the swap nets. dont go buying a brand new radio until you know what you actually want to do on HF because there are a lot of different directions you can go