David Anderson74

so we had a pretty serious windstorm roll through the county last weekend and our ARES group got activated for the first time since i joined about 8 months ago. i've been going to the weekly nets and did the ICS-100 and 200 courses online like they asked but honestly nothing really prepares you for the real thing. the EOC called us in around 6pm and i was assigned to a shelter about 12 miles from the main site. just me, my HT, a mag mount on the car, and a clipboard. i had no idea how much time you spend just... waiting. like hours of nothing and then a burst of traffic and you have to have your head in the game immediately. i fumbled my callsign on the first transmission because i was nervous and the net control was super patient about it which i appreciated. anyway overall it went fine, the shelter assignment was manageable and i felt useful at least a little bit. just curious if other people remember their first activation and what caught them off guard. also wondering if there's anything i should add to my go bag — right now it's pretty minimal, just the radio, spare battery, some coax, logbook and snacks basically

so ive been doing POTA for about a year now and someone in my local club mentioned WWFF and i went down a rabbit hole last night trying to figure it out. from what i can tell its basically similar but the references are nature reserves, national parks, wildlife areas etc and its run internationally through a different organization. i found the wwff.cc site and registered but im a bit confused about a few things. first off do i need to preactivate or announce on the WWFF activator list thing before going out? i saw something about that but wasnt sure if its mandatory or just a courtesy thing. also i noticed some of the references near me are also POTA references, is that right? like can i log the same activation for both programs at the same time or is that some kind of violation the park im going to is a state wildlife management area, its listed as KFF-XXXX on the WWFF database. planning to run my 857D into a wire dipole up in a tree, should be fine for 40m and maybe 20m depending on how the bands are. just want to make sure im not missing anything procedurally before i waste a trip

yeah this trips up a lot of newly minted generals, dont feel bad. so the short version is: the FCC part 97 allocations are the law, the ARRL band plan is basically a gentlemen's agreement on top of that. you wont get fined for operating SSB in the middle of the digital segment but people will be annoyed and you might get a call from somebody. for 40m as a general you can run phone starting at 7.175 up to 7.300, thats your legal slice. the band edge thing is real though -- your signal has sidebands and if you're on LSB and you park yourself right at 7.175 your actual transmitted audio is going to bleed below that. common advice is to stay at least 3 khz inside any edge you care about, so like 7.178 or higher to be safe. some guys say 2 khz is fine if you're being careful about audio bandwidth but 3 is a comfortable buffer. your display shows the suppressed carrier frequency so on LSB the audio content is below that, which is why it matters which edge you're near.

ok so i passed my general exam about 3 weeks ago and ive been trying to figure out exactly what frequencies im allowed to operate on. i read through part 97 but honestly some of it is pretty dense and i feel like im still missing something. like i know theres the privileges chart but when i look at 40 meters for example it says general class gets phone from 7.175 to 7.300 but then i saw someone mention something about RTTY and data and i have no idea where that falls for me vs extra class guys. also whats the deal with power limits, is there a situation where i as a general would be limited to less than 1500 watts or is that just an extra class thing? i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere im not supposed to. my elmer just told me to stay above 7.200 on 40 to be safe but i thought id ask here too since he sometimes gives old info

Good question and honestly it trips people up more than you'd think. The FCC rule is just that you identify at the end of each transmission or series of transmissions, and at least every 10 minutes during a long exchange. So yeah, giving your callsign when you check into the net absolutely counts. If net control asks you something quick and you answer in the same breath — like it's all one short back and forth — you should still give your call at the end of your reply just to be clean about it. Most experienced operators do it automatically after a while, you just kind of tack it on without thinking. The saying-your-call-three-times thing is just habit some folks picked up, probably from HF where conditions are rough and you want to make sure net control copied you. On a clear local 2m repeater it's really not necessary, once is fine. Twice if the repeater is being finicky or there's interference. Three times starts to eat up time when you've got a long check-in list. Your net control will let you know if they have a preference, some nets are pretty specific about format.

yeah the linear birds are a whole different world compared to FM sats, took me a while to get my head around it too. the trick i use to find myself is to transmit a short carrier and listen for it in the downlink — but you have to account for the fact that the transponder is inverting, so if youre on the low end of the uplink passband your signal shows up on the high end of the downlink. gpredict should handle most of that if its set up right but i found i still had to manually nudge things a bit during a pass especially near AOS and LOS when the doppler rate is changing fastest. as for the 817, its plenty. im running barefoot into an arrow and getting into AO-73 without much trouble. the transponder isnt super sensitive but its not deaf either. i'd actually say the bigger issue for most people starting out is just antenna pointing — if youre off even a bit on a low elevation pass you lose a lot. dont worry about an amp yet, get the technique down first

haha yeah that happens to everyone at least once. i once drove an hour to a SOTA summit and forgot my coax. just sat up there eating a sandwich and enjoyed the view. now i have a checklist taped inside my go bag so i dont do that again. 12 contacts on 20m isnt bad at all though honestly, thats a solid first activation

yeah what the other person said about HamStudy is spot on. id also add that the Gordon West study book is pretty popular, its written in a way thats easy to follow if youre new to electronics stuff. but plenty of people pass with just the free online resources so dont feel like you have to buy anything. one thing i'll say is dont overthink the studying, the question pool for tech is 426 questions and the test is only 35 of them, pass is 26 correct. once youve been through the pool a couple times it starts clicking. also check the ARRL website for exam sessions near you or use the club finder, some clubs do free license study sessions too which can help a lot if you get stuck on the theory bits

the thing most people forget is the boring stuff honestly. like a good headlamp, some way to take notes in the dark, extra batteries for anything that takes AA or AAA. you'd be amazed how many times ive been at a served agency event and somebody needs a flashlight and everybody just stares at each other. for powerpole stuff yeah just commit to it, anderson powerpoles are basically the standard now and once your whole kit is wired up the same way everything just clicks together without drama. get a decent crimper though, dont cheap out on that part. on the digital modes question, i actually went with a used panasonic toughbook because theyre cheap now and built for field use. but i know guys who swear by the raspberry pi plus a signalink setup and it works fine for winlink and js8call. the laptop just feels more flexible to me for logging and everything else. depends how minimalist you want to go i guess. one other thing, make sure you actually deploy the kit a few times before you need it for real. i cant stress that enough. i thought mine was dialed in and then the first time i actually set it all up in the field i found like four problems immediately.

yeah that workflow is pretty much what i did when i started getting into dx chasing. nothing wrong with it honestly. if you want something more integrated though, have you tried HRD or just DX Atlas for the mapping side of things. i ended up settling on Log4OM because it has a built in cluster window that you can filter by band and mode and it pings you when something shows up that you need for a new entity. saves a lot of tab switching. the QRZ integration in Log4OM is decent too, auto populates the log entry when you click a spot which is nice. the free clusters like dxwatch and dx.qsl.net are totally fine for the spotting data itself, theyre all pulling from the same telnet nodes more or less anyway. its really just about how you want to consume that data.

oh man i went through this exact thing last year. one thing i totally overlooked was food and water for myself — like i had this beautifully organized radio kit and then realized if I'm actually deployed somewhere for 12 hours im going to be starving and useless. some granola bars and a water bottle sounds dumb but it matters. also a spare fuse kit. the little blade fuse kit from any auto parts store. i blew a fuse once and had to borrow one from somebody's car which was embarrassing. and if your battery has anderson powerpole connectors already great, if not thats worth doing now rather than in the field with cold fingers. your instinct about not going overboard is right though. i've seen guys show up to exercises with basically a rack mount server situation and they spend the first hour setting up instead of actually being useful.

yeah that advice about turning off iambic for a while is pretty solid actually, at least for building your basic muscle memory. i did the same thing when i was learning, spent probably two months just doing straight key before i even touched a paddle, which some people think is old fashioned but i dont regret it at all. the squeeze keying thing will click eventually, you just dont want to be fighting two learning curves at once if you can help it. one thing that really helped me with timing was slowing way back down and using something like the Koch method if you havent already, like go back to 8 or 9 wpm and really nail clean characters before creeping the speed back up. also check your paddle tension and gap settings, sometimes a little adjustment makes a huge difference, too loose and you get accidental contacts, too tight and your hand cramps up after a few minutes. takes some fiddling to find the sweet spot for your particular hands.

JS8Call is genuinely underrated imo. yeah the user base is smaller than FT8 but that almost makes it better for actual ragchewing because the people on there actually want to talk. ive had 20 minute back and forth conversations on 40m that would have been completely impossible on FT8. the heartbeat feature where your station can auto-respond even when youre not at the radio is kind of wild once you get it configured right. the emcomm angle is real but its also kind of slow going in terms of adoption. our local ARES group has been talking about it for two years and we did one net with it that went okay but nothing systematic. the store-and-forward relay stuff is theoretically great for passing traffic through intermediary stations but you need enough nodes for it to work well and thats the chicken-and-egg problem. i think it has a real future but its not there yet for anything mission critical in my area anyway. your 7300 and SignaLink setup is perfectly fine for it, same config as FT8 basically. just watch your audio levels, JS8Call seems a little more sensitive to overdrive than WSJT-X in my experience, or maybe i just noticed it more because i was paying closer attention.

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i know there are portions for technicians and extra class and whatever but every chart i look at seems slightly different and some of them are from like 2009 so i dont know if theyre still accurate. my main confusion is around the phone portion — like i know 7.175 to 7.300 is supposed to be where general class phone is but then someone at the club said something about staying away from the band edges and i didnt really understand why. is there some rule about not transmitting right at 7.300 or is that just like an informal thing people do? and what about digital modes, where does that fit in on 40

so ive been running my FT-817ND for like six years now and the frequency drift on cold mornings has always bugged me especially on digital modes where being even 20-30hz off can mess up a decode. finally bit the bullet and ordered one of those TCXO-9 replacement units and did the swap last weekend. install itself wasnt too bad if you've done any SMD work before, main thing is not rushing the reflow on those tiny pads. took me maybe 45 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself and looking at the service manual like three times. anyway the difference is actually noticeable — fired it up this morning at about 55 degrees in the shack and it came up rock solid where before id see it wander maybe 50-60hz before settling. wsjtx is a lot happier now. curious if anyone else has done any other mods on the 817 that are actually worth the time, not just the usual "mod it for mars" nonsense. i've seen some stuff about the PA transistor swap for slightly more output but not sure its worth the risk on a radio this old