James Wilson46

that first real activation is something you dont forget. i remember mine from years back, different situation but same feeling of not knowing exactly where to fit in until someone pointed you at a task. sounds like your EC runs a tight group which makes all the difference honestly. the ICS forms thing trips up a lot of people who are new to working with served agencies. if you havent already it might be worth asking your EC if the group can do a tabletop exercise specifically around ICS integration, 214s, 213s, that kind of thing. we did one last spring and it cleared up a lot of confusion for our newer members. ARRL has some material on it too but nothing beats just sitting down with the actual forms and walking through a scenario. glad the training clicked for you. thats the whole point of those weekly nets even when they feel a little repetitive.

oh man the spotting system is kind of the whole game for POTA lol. i did my second activation last month and forgot to re-spot myself when i switched from 40 to 20 and the contacts just dried up completely for like 15 minutes before i figured out what happened. always re-spot when you change bands or mode, the hunters are literally watching that screen and wont find you otherwise. also someone told me early morning on weekends is when the hunters are most active, something about people sitting with coffee and the radio on. i havent totally confirmed that but my best contact rates do seem to be before noon

yeah the wall you're hitting around 5-7 wpm is super common and there's actually a reason for it — at those speeds your brain has just enough time to sound out each dit-dah pattern consciously, but once you go faster that strategy completely breaks down and you have to rewire how you're processing it. the trick that got me through it was the Farnsworth method but used kind of aggressively. i'd set the character speed to like 18-20wpm but the word spacing way out so i had extra time between characters. that way your ear learns what the letter actually sounds like at real speed but you still have a moment to write it down. also honestly the biggest thing for me was just copying real QSOs off the air, even when i was only getting maybe 30-40% of it. there's something about real operators sending with natural rhythm and the occasional mistake that trains your ear differently than any software. tune around 40m in the evenings around 7.050-7.125 and just copy whatever you can, dont stress about what you miss. after a few weeks of that i noticed my brain starting to just know the characters without thinking about it, which is exactly what you want. patience is the main thing though, it really does just click one day and then you wonder what you were struggling with

yeah WIDE1-1 is specifically meant to hit low-power fill-in digipeaters, the kind that dont have the full WIDE infrastructure but still retransmit to help mobile stations. if youre in an area with good coverage from full-height digis you probably dont even need it and youre just adding an extra hop that wastes channel time. WIDE2-1 alone gets you into the main network fine in most places. the general rule of thumb ive heard is if youre mobile use WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 because youre low to the ground and might need the help. if youre a home station or somewhere with good digi coverage drop it to just WIDE2-1. running WIDE2-2 is kind of frowned on unless youre out in the boonies, it floods the channel. for checking if it's working aprs.fi has a station detail view that shows which digipeaters heard you and what path was actually used. thats way more useful than just seeing your icon on the map. also aprsdirect.com sometimes shows more raw packet data if you wanna dig into it.

first thing id check is your audio levels out of the radio into direwolf. too hot and the decoder will work fine receiving but your transmitted audio will be distorted and the digi wont decode it cleanly even if it hears you. there's a really easy way to test this — beacon a few times and see if you can get someone nearby to tell you what your signal sounds like, or use a websdr if theres one close enough. direwolf has a calibration mode too that helps dial in the levels. also double check your TX delay setting. some radios need a bit more preamble before the data starts, especially the kenwood rigs in my experience. try bumping TXDELAY up to like 350ms if its set lower than that and see if it makes a difference. the TNC-X guys used to recommend something like that and it fixed a lot of intermittent issues on similar setups.

the audio thing is personal but most serious SO2R ops end up going mono in one ear for the run radio and just use the other ear kind of passively for the S&P side. takes a while to get used to but your brain stops trying to process both as equal priority. you basically want the run station to be almost automatic so the cognitive load is on the second radio doing the searching. as for when to break — there's no perfect rule but the general thing i've heard from guys way better at this than me is that you dont leave a hot run for anything less than a needed mult, and even then you gotta be quick. if you're running 120/hr you probably shouldnt be leaving at all, you let the S&P radio just sit on a frequency and snag stuff passively. its when the rate drops under like 80 or so that actively hunting on radio 2 starts to make more sense mathematically. honestly though the real thing is just doing it over and over. i ran like 6 or 7 full weekend contests before SO2R felt even a little natural and i still make dumb decisions mid-contest all the time

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into the local 2m Tuesday night net last week. ive been licensed for about 4 months now and just been sitting on the frequency listening for like two months before that trying to figure out the whole procedure. anyway when net control called for check-ins i keyed up and said my callsign and... nothing. waited. said it again. turns out i was slightly off frequency and they couldnt hear me well, net control was super patient about it but i felt like an idiot. got it sorted out and they welcomed me in, everyone was really nice after. but it made me wonder -- is there like a standard way people do check-ins on most nets? i know some have you say your callsign and location and others want traffic or priority info first. also when do you actually talk vs just listen? i was confused about when to respond to the net control asking questions vs just staying quiet. probably a dumb question but i figured id ask here since you all seem to know this stuff way better than i do.

so its like 9pm local and i figured id spin the dial on 40 for a bit, maybe catch some dx or at least a ragchew or something. absolutely nothing going on. couple of digital stations doing their thing but voice is just dead. not even a net that i can find. maybe im just tuning the wrong part of the band but it feels like nobody's on anymore on weeknights. used to be way more activity a few years back or maybe im just remembering wrong. anyway if anyones out there give me a shout, im running about 50 watts into a dipole up maybe 30 feet so nothing fancy but it gets out ok most nights.

so i stumbled onto WWFF kind of by accident a few months ago, was reading about POTA and then someone mentioned WWFF and i figured they were basically the same thing but they're really not, or at least not exactly. anyway i finally got off my butt and drove out to a state wildlife management area near me last weekend that has a KGFF reference number and set up my little portable kit. ran about 40 contacts over a couple hours on 40 and 20, mostly SSB with a bit of FT8 near the end when the band went quiet. conditions were kind of rough honestly but i got my 44 contacts which i think is what you need to count as a full activation in WWFF. the logging side of things is a bit confusing to me still, like i uploaded to wwff.us but im not totally sure if that automatically syncs to the global database or if i have to do something else. also noticed there are hunter awards too which i didnt really know about before. does anyone here actively chase WWFF references or is most of the activity in north america still kind of POTA-focused? just curious what the community is like compared to POTA which feels massive now.

Contest QSOs come in waves - one right after another, then nothing for several minutes before the next wave arrives. I struggle with knowing when to abandon a run frequency that's gone quiet versus waiting it out. During last weekend's NAQP CW, I got on 80M early when there was only one other station, had my pick of frequencies, and as more operators came down to the band, my rate shot through the roof while my frequency remained clear. But I've also wasted time on dead frequencies. My logging software shows the frequency sounds clear on my end, but it may not be clear in many other locations. What's your rule of thumb for CQ timeout periods? I've seen rate meters hit 250+ QSOs per hour during peak conditions - how do you maximize those golden opportunities?

so ive been scratching my head on this one for a couple weeks now. my 857 is running full 100w on 20, 15, 10, no problem, even 80m is fine. but 40m it drops to maybe 30-35w max no matter what i do. menu settings look right, ALC seems to swing normally. tried different antennas thinking maybe its a tuner thing but it does it straight into a dummy load too so its definitely the radio not the feedline or anything external. i pulled the manual and started poking around the PA section a little, the finals look ok visually, no obvious burning or anything on the board. i'm wondering if this might be one of the driver transistors being weak on that band specifically? or maybe a filter cap somewhere in the LPF board. anyone dealt with this before on the 857 or the 897 which i think shares the same PA design more or less. not in a huge rush to fix it since i mostly run 20m for DX anyway but it's annoying me and i'd rather figure it out than just leave it.

yeah cycle 25 has really surprised a lot of people honestly, they were predicting it would be a moderate cycle but its been tracking above predictions for a while now. the flux being up in the 200s is genuinely exciting especially for those of us who had to suffer through the bottom of cycle 24 when 10m was basically a dead band for like 3 years. the reason it dies even on high flux days comes down to a few things but the big one is geomagnetic activity. check the K-index and A-index alongside the SFI, if the K is above 3 or 4 you can have great solar conditions but the ionosphere gets disturbed and propagation goes to pieces especially on the higher bands. a solar flare can also cause a sudden ionospheric disturbance that basically blackouts HF for a few hours even in the middle of what should be a great day. DXMaps and the NOAA space weather site are worth bookmarking if you havent already, I check them before I even turn the radio on most mornings.

yeah ive had the same feeling honestly. though i think part of it is solar conditions being weird right now, band openings are just unpredictable. i did catch a pretty decent ragchew on 7.245 last thursday around 8pm local but that was the first real activity ive heard in like two weeks. try checking a bit lower in the band, sometimes the action moves around depending on whos on

200 QSOs on your first CQ WW is actually pretty solid depending on your setup, dont sell yourself short. the zone thing trips everyone up at first, just tape a zone map to the wall next to the radio and youre good. i still glance at mine occasionally when a station gives me a zone that doesnt match what i expect and i want to double check. for a contest calendar the WA7BNM contest calendar is basically the gold standard, pretty much everyone i know uses it. you can filter by mode and band which is handy. as for ARRL Sweepstakes, i personally think CW SS is way more fun than phone but im biased because i find phone contesting kind of exhausting after a few hours. the exchange in SS is a lot to copy at speed though, section precedence call check number, it takes some practice so if your code isnt super solid yet maybe run a few practice sessions on RBN or just listen to the SS pileups beforehand to get the rhythm of it. either way just get on and operate, thats how you get better at all of it.

yeah ssb pileups are brutal compared to cw, no contest there. on cw the DX op can at least pull a partial call out of the noise but on phone it's just a wall of voices and whoever has the loudest / cleanest signal usually wins which feels kind of unfair sometimes. one thing i've noticed after chasing dx for probably 15 years now is that the DXpedition operators have very different styles and you really have to adapt to each one. some guys work strictly by numbers and they mean it, others say they're working by number but then grab whoever sounds loudest, so you have to watch for that. also listening to when the op is getting fatigued — not in a bad way, but late in an operation when they've been in the chair for hours they sometimes start working a little faster and the pileup discipline loosens up a bit. that can be a good window. the suffix-only trick you mentioned is solid and most experienced ops prefer it. sending your full callsign twice at full power just makes you part of the mud. one clean send of just the suffix, timed right, that's the play. i also try to listen for what phonetics the op is using when he sends a partial — if he says he got a november something, and my call has an N in the right spot, i go. otherwise i wait. a lot of people just keep calling regardless which is kind of pointless.

Been tracking the solar data and noticed SFI has dropped from around 160 in December to 135 this month, with sunspot numbers also declining from 124 to around 80. Still decent numbers, but the trend has me wondering about contest season. For those with more cycles under their belt - how much impact does a 25-point SFI drop typically have on the higher bands during major contests? Should we be adjusting our band plans for CQWW CW later this year?

yeah the antenna switching thing gets old pretty quick, i did it for about a year with an AR-270 and a 9 element M2 yagi before i just committed to the yagi full time and accepted id miss some repeater coverage in certain directions. honestly for weak signal 2m the difference is not subtle at all — the collinear just doesnt cut it when youre trying to pull someone out of the noise on SSB. gain is gain but more importantly the yagi actually rejects noise from other directions which matters a lot in my situation with all the city RF garbage around here. if repeaters are still important to you the cleanest solution is probably a triplexer or at minimum a good coax switch you can reach from the shack. some guys run two separate rigs dedicated to each antenna too but thats its own rabbit hole. the X50 is a solid antenna btw, nothing wrong with it for what it was designed for

so i finally got my general ticket a few months ago and ive been hunting POTA contacts for a while now just to get comfortable with hf, and tomorrow im doing my first actual activation at a state park about 45 minutes from the house. im bringing my ft-891 and a random wire antenna i've been practicing with in the backyard, planning to set up in a picnic area near the parking lot. i know the basics i think — log everything, spot yourself on the POTA app, call CQ POTA on a clear frequency — but honestly i'm kinda nervous. what do i wish i'd known before my first activation? anything that catches people off guard? i have no idea how long it'll take to get my 10 contacts or if the bands will cooperate

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i finally have something that kind of works but im not sure if im making it way harder than it needs to be. basically i have 4 antennas on the roof — a yagi for 2m, a dipole for 40m, a vertical for 20m/15m/10m, and a random wire i use for 80m on nights when conditions are weird. switching between them manually was driving me nuts especially during contests when im jumping bands every few minutes. so i grabbed an arduino mega i had sitting in a drawer from an old project and wired it up to a bank of relay modules, the 8-channel 5v ones you can get off amazon for like 8 bucks. the idea is to have it talk to the PC over serial and the logging software sends a band change command and the arduino switches the right relay. ive got the basic serial parsing working and the relays click when i send the right bytes but im running into issues with the relay coils causing noise on receive. like i can hear it in the audio when a relay switches, little click or sometimes a buzz if the relay is chattering. i put some flyback diodes on the coil pins which helped a little but its still there. wondering if anyone has done something similar and whether i put the relay board too close to the rig or if its an RFI thing getting into the audio chain. the arduino and relay board are sitting about 18 inches from the IC-7300 right now. also the ground wiring is kind of a mess at the moment if im being honest.

This is exactly what I needed! I have an IC-745 collecting dust because I assumed it wouldn't work well for digital modes without CAT control. Sorry, we have to give that one up on the IC-745. It just was not made with serial control in mind, but the sound card interface is definitely doable. Heading to the shack this weekend!

yeah 10m has definitely been showing some life lately. I worked into Japan last Thursday on 10m SSB which I haven't done in a couple years, just stumbled across an opening while scanning around. the gray line stuff in the morning has been pretty good too if you catch it right. 12m is absolutely worth watching, honestly it's kind of an underrated band during rising solar conditions. it tends to stay open a bit longer into the evening than 10m does and the noise floor is usually pretty decent. i'd suggest just leaving a radio parked there while you're doing other things and see what pops up. DXmaps and the cluster will tell you pretty fast when something interesting is happening. with the cycle where it is right now i'd expect more of this through the next year or two so good time to have a decent antenna up for the high bands if you don't already.

our club is renting a van and driving up together which should be fun. never been to hamvention before so mostly just excited to see what its all about. not really looking for anything specific just want to browse and maybe find some cheap connectors and coax stuff. is there usually a lot of beginner friendly stuff or is it mostly higher end equipment

feedline is probably killing you more than the antenna choice tbh. whats the run length and what coax are you using up there? i spent months thinking my portable antenna sucked and it was just that i had like 15 feet of rg58 with a couple connectors that hadnt been sealed properly. swapped to a short run of lmr240 and suddenly things made a lot more sense.

i went through this exact same confusion when i got my general last year haha. ended up just going for a vanity 2x2 in my district and honestly the AE7Q website is your best friend for figuring out whats available. i spent like two evenings just browsing calls before i found one i liked that wasnt already taken or in a weird pending state. one thing nobody told me — if the call you want has been recently cancelled or the previous holder is a silent key, there can be a waiting period before its available for vanity applications. something like 30 days i think? so if you find a call you want and it shows as recently cancelled just keep an eye on it and don't assume you missed it.

the door pillar thing is super common and kinda annoying to deal with honestly. what i did on my f150 was use those little plastic wire clips that snap into the existing holes in the pillar — most trucks have them already, ford especially. you peel back the plastic trim panel and there are these small holes where you can route wire and clip it in place and then just snap the trim back. the coax isnt really visible at all once you put the panel back. only thing is you want to make sure youre not pinching the coax too tight against anything metal because over time that can cause issues with the shield. also the straight to battery mod was the right move. i see people fighting RF problems for months and it almost always comes back to power leads and grounding. glad you sorted it out