Rachel Kim

so ive been at this for about three weeks now, got myself a cheap single lever paddle off ebay and hooked it up to an old MFJ keyer i borrowed from a club member. practicing maybe 20-30 minutes a day with the koch method on LCWO dot net. my receiving is actually coming along okay, im up to like 12 wpm on letters but my sending is a mess. the characters sound uneven, sometimes my dits run together or i get a weird extra space in the middle of a word. i dont know if its my paddle technique or if im fighting the keyer settings or both. the guy who lent me the keyer said the weight and speed were already set for him so maybe thats part of it. is this just something you have to grind through or is there something specific i should be checking? i really dont want to build bad habits this early.

yeah i went through almost the exact same thing when i first set up direwolf. the APRS-IS connection failures can be really quiet about dying, i ended up writing a little watchdog script that checks if the last packet was more than like 10 minutes ago and restarts the service if not. probably overkill but it gives me peace of mind. one thing to double check - what are you using for your callsign SSID on the igate? if youre using -10 or something non-standard some servers get picky. i use -10 personally and it works fine but ive heard of weirdness. also make sure your beacon interval isnt set too aggressive or youll get filtered by some servers.

yeah the BS170 is def more of a QRP thing, i built a pixie clone with one ages ago and it does maybe 500mW on a good day. for your power level the IRF510 is the right call, most of the popular homebrew designs use it. i actually just finished a 20m rig loosely based on the NorCal 40A circuit and had similar harmonic issues early on. turned out one of my toroid windings was a bit sloppy and i was getting coupling i didnt expect. rewound it and things cleaned up noticeably. also double check your filter board layout, any RF getting back in from ground loops or whatever can make your analyzer reading look worse than the actual output. just something to rule out.

yeah what he said about Gpredict, that's what i started with and still use. one thing that tripped me up early on is that for linear transponder birds you need to think about the doppler on BOTH the uplink and the downlink separately, they're on different bands so the shift is different in Hz. the software handles all that if you set the mode correctly in the satellite config but if you're doing it manually just be aware it's not the same correction number on both ends. caught me off guard the first few passes and i couldnt figure out why i kept missing my own downlink signal. also AO-73 has been in and out of eclipse mode lately so check its current status before planning a session around it

so i passed my technician exam last tuesday and just been listening on the local repeater trying to get the nerve up to actually key up. finally did it this afternoon, just a quick check-in on a net and this guy from texas came back to me and we chatted for maybe 10 minutes about antennas and whatever. nothing special but honestly it felt really cool, like the whole thing finally clicked that this is actually a two way thing not just listening been using a baofeng uv-5r that my brother in law gave me, i know i know everyone has opinions about those but it works fine for now. probably gonna look into a better radio once i figure out what i actually want to do with the hobby. anyone else remember their first real qso? was it as weirdly exciting as mine felt lol

so i finally pulled the trigger on building one of those QFT-series kits ive been eyeing for like two years. took me three evenings to put it together, which probably says more about my soldering speed than anything else. the build itself wasnt too bad, instructions were pretty clear except for one part where they had you install two caps before the toroid winding which i think is backwards from how most kits do it but whatever it worked out. first contact was last tuesday on 40m, just a casual SSB exchange with a guy about 300 miles away running 5 watts. nothing crazy but i was genuinely surprised how well it held up. ive been running barefoot HF for years but theres something different about knowing youre doing it with barely any power. feels more like an accomplishment somehow. one thing im wondering about — does anyone actually run these things portable regularly? like backpacking or parks on the air type stuff? i keep reading about people doing it but curious how practical it really is day to day. battery life, antenna setup time, all that. im thinking about a SOTA activation this summer and want to know if a 5w rig is actually realistic or if im setting myself up for frustration

so ive been running a center-fed dipole for 40m for about two years now, got it up about 30 feet in an inverted-V config and its been decent enough but ive always wondered if a vertical would do better for DX. the dipole obviously has some nice gain broadside but the low angle radiation on a vertical theoretically should beat it for skip distances right? anyway my buddy lent me his old trap vertical, one of those MFJ jobs, and i put it up in the backyard on a 4 foot ground rod and ran maybe 8 radials out at various lengths because thats all the wire i had. did some comparisons on 40 at night and honestly the vertical sounds noisier, like noticeably more noise floor, but the DX signals on it seem maybe a hair stronger? hard to tell because band conditions were jumping around all evening and i wasnt being scientific about it at all. curious if anyone has actually done a real A/B comparison on 40m between a decent dipole up at like 0.3 wavelengths versus a vertical with a proper radial field. i know the radials are key and 8 is not enough but even with that caveat wondering what your experience has been

So i joined my county ARES group about four months ago after getting my general and ive been going to the monthly nets and the occasional training session but next weekend theres an actual activation for a county-level emergency management exercise and im kind of nervous about it. Like i know the basics, i can operate HF and VHF fine, i have my go bag mostly sorted out, but i dont really know what the flow is like when you actually show up to something like this. Is it pretty chaotic or do they usually have someone directing traffic and telling you where to go and what frequency to monitor? My EC seems pretty organized but ive never seen him actually run an activation before. Also do i need to bring my own radio or do they usually have stuff set up at the EOC? I have a Yaesu FT-857D and a roll up jpole in my bag but im not sure if thats what they want or if i should just show up and wait to be assigned something. Any veterans of this stuff who can give me a feel for what the day might look like would be great. Dont want to show up and be that guy who doesnt know what hes doing and gets in the way.

yeah the split setup is pretty much what everyone does once they get serious about contesting. N1MM is just in a different league for that stuff, the bandmap alone makes it worth the switch during a contest weekend. the WSJT-X integration actually works pretty well with N1MM, you run them both and N1MM picks up the logged contacts automatically over UDP same way Log4OM does. you do have to make sure they're not both listening on the same port at the same time though or things get weird fast. for merging after the fact i just export the N1MM log as ADIF after the contest and import into Log4OM, takes maybe five minutes and ive never had a duplicate issue if you let Log4OM handle the dupe checking on import. the key is dont try to run both logging programs simultaneously during normal operating, pick one and stick with it for whatever session youre in.

yeah the chart approach really doesnt work, at least not for most people. the whole thing with morse is you want to hear the letters as sounds not think about dots and dashes at all. if you're decoding dots and dashes in your head you'll always be too slow. LCWO is definitely the place to start, its free and it uses the Koch method which basically means you start with just two characters and once you can copy those reliably it adds another one. sounds tedious but it actually works because your brain starts recognizing the sound patterns instead of counting. the key thing people get wrong is they set the character speed too slow -- you want to run characters at like 20wpm even if the overall spacing is slower (thats what Farnsworth timing is). if you learn at 5wpm youll have to unlearn all those habits later. just do 15-20 minutes a day consistently, dont try to cram. took me about 4 months of that before i made my first real CW contact and honestly it was worth every minute of it

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working DX and filling the log but honestly it feels kind of hollow after a while, like you're just exchanging signal reports with a robot. someone at my local club mentioned JS8Call as a way to actually have a QSO without being there at the keyboard every 15 seconds hitting transmit. i set it up last weekend and poked around on 40m for a few hours. found a couple guys chatting but it was hard to follow who was talking to who, the interface confused me at first. i do like the idea of store-and-forward messaging though, left a couple msgs at a relay node which was kinda cool. battery backed node at some guy's QTH in Vermont picked it up even though he wasnt online. my question is more like — is there actually an active community using it or is it kind of a ghost town most of the time? and does the weak signal performance really hold up as well as FT8 or is that kind of oversold. i tried calling CQ a few times and just got nothing back, could be band conditions though, 40m was pretty noisy that afternoon. also still have WSJT-X running on the same machine so wondering if there's any issue with both trying to use the soundcard at the same time, im on windows 10 using a SignaLink USB.

oh man yes absolutely, i remember my first QSO on 2m and i fumbled my callsign twice. just completely blanked on it even though ive known my own callsign for like months at that point. you get used to it real fast though, after maybe 20 or 30 contacts it starts feeling normal. dont worry about the baofeng either, everyones got one when they start out, nothing wrong with it for hitting local repeaters and simplex. welcome to the hobby

went through this exact same thing about 8 months ago haha. i was so confused too. i just let the sequential one come in and honestly ended up liking it fine, didnt bother with a vanity. but a few guys at my club went the vanity route pretty quickly after getting licensed and it wasnt that complicated from what they described. there are some websites that let you search available callsigns which is kinda fun to play with even if you end up not applying for anything

so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and yeah its great for getting contacts logged especially when the bands are being weird but honestly the 15 second sequence thing gets old when you just want to have an actual conversation with somebody. heard about JS8Call a while back and finally installed it last weekend and i gotta say the learning curve is steeper than i expected. my question is really whether people actually use it regularly for like actual back and forth conversation or is it mostly just empty frequencies with the occasional beacon. i can see the appeal in theory — basically PSK31 speeds but with the weak signal performance closer to FT8, right? or am i misunderstanding how it works under the hood. for context im running an ic-7300 into a trapped vertical, usually on 40m or 20m, and my noise floor at the home QTH is pretty rough so weak signal stuff matters a lot to me. tried PSK31 years ago and loved the conversational aspect but even with a decent signal it felt fragile compared to what FT8 does in the mud. so anyway is JS8Call actually being used or did everyone just go back to FT8 and call it a day

yeah the ref osc trim is one of those things you dont realize makes a difference until you do it. i did mine after noticing i was always slightly off on FT8 and once i trimmed it up everything just locked in cleaner. did you check it on 2m and 70cm too or just HF? mine drifted a bit differently on VHF and took a second pass to get it where i wanted. on the collins filter question — honestly if youre mostly doing SSB voice and digital i wouldnt bother. the difference is noticeable on CW in a crowded contest environment but for general use the stock filters are fine. id put that money toward a good external preamp or a better antenna before touching the IF stage.

yeah same thing happened to me on our county ARES net haha. i asked something about ICS forms and the net control kind of just said "great question, lets take that off net" and moved on. felt awkward for a second but honestly that was the right call on his part, nets have a flow and going too deep into a topic stalls everything out. doesnt mean you did anything wrong though

so ive been chasing 3Y0 and a few other rare ones for a while now and last weekend there was a decent DXpedition active on 17m and i finally managed to crack a pretty nasty pileup after about 45 minutes of trying. thought id share what actually worked for me since most of the advice i see online is pretty generic. first thing i noticed is that the DX station was working split and a lot of guys were just tuning to the exact frequency they heard someone else get a contact on, which means everyone piles up in the same 2-3 kHz window. what i did was listen to where the DX was actually coming back and try to figure out the pattern — he seemed to be favoring the upper end of his listening range, so i parked about 4 up from where the main crowd was and just waited for the right moment. timing matters way more than power in my experience. i run about 500w into a 4-el yagi at 50ft so im not exactly a pistol but im not running barefoot into a vertical either. the key was waiting until the pile thinned out a little, usually right after the op gets a good run going and then fumbles a callsign — thats when you send your call once, cleanly, and wait. not twice, not three times, once. half the guys in the pile are just constantly transmitting and the op literally cannot copy anything through that mess. anyway it worked. got the contact, added it to the log. curious if others have specific techniques that work for them, especially on low bands where conditions are all over the place.

the cap swap thing — ive heard mixed results honestly. did it on mine about a year ago following the mod that was posted over on radioreference i think, and i did notice a slight difference in audio but nothing dramatic. the bigger improvement i got was just adjusting the TX EQ in the menu and tweaking the mic gain. probably got 80% of the same result without touching any hardware. that said the caps are cheap and if youre comfortable with a soldering iron its not a scary job, just cramped in there. the TCXO though, yeah do it. the drift thing you're describing is exactly why i did mine. went with the Icom unit, dropped right in, no fuss. the third party ones i looked at were either the same price or not really designed for the slot so i didnt bother. after the install my 7300 is rock solid on FT8, no more creeping off frequency during the first QSOs of a session.

this is making me want to finally try it, ive been a tech for two years and just upgraded to general last month so i can actually use HF now. been kind of intimidated by operating in the field but the way you describe it it doesnt sound as complicated as i thought. does the 705 handle field conditions ok? im looking at either that or the KX2 and cant really decide

so i finally did my first activation last weekend up on a local summit here in the Appalachians, W4V/SH-001 if anyone knows it, and honestly it went way smoother than i was expecting. got my 4 contacts pretty quick on 40m, even had a guy from Ohio chase me on 20m which was cool. but i have some questions because ive been reading the rules and im a little confused about a couple things. first, does the summit reference have to be in the callsign area you're licensed in? like if i drove to a summit in a different state would i just use that summit's reference and alert on SOTAwatch? i think the answer is yes but i want to make sure before i plan a trip. also my signal reports were all over the place, some guys said i was 59 but a few said they could barely hear me. i was running about 10 watts into a linked dipole i threw up in a nearby tree, wind was picking up around the time i was operating so maybe that was it. also do chasers generally prefer CW or phone, because i noticed my spots got more responses once i switched to 14.285 from 40m. anyway it was a great experience and already looking at my next summit, probably something with a harder hike just to make it more interesting

morse code hasnt been required for any license level since like 2007 so dont worry about that. the Technician license is where everyone starts and honestly the test is not bad at all, its 35 questions multiple choice and you need 26 right to pass. the question pool is public, like the actual questions that can appear on the exam are all available for free, so you're essentially studying the test which makes it a lot more manageable. HamStudy.org is what i usually point people to first, it's free and it has flashcards and tracks what you're getting wrong so you can focus on the weak spots. some people also use the Gordon West book if they want something physical to read through but honestly the website is probably enough if you're putting in maybe 30-45 minutes a day. most people i've seen study for like 2-3 weeks and pass no problem. the General and Extra licenses are separate tests you can take later if you want more HF privileges but you dont need them right away, Technician gets you on VHF and UHF which is plenty to get started and figure out if this hobby is actually for you.

So ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the storms we had last month I finally got off my butt and started building a proper go-kit. Right now I have my FT-857D, a 40ah LiFePO4 battery, a roll of coax, my SignaLink for digital, and I threw in a cheap SWR meter I had on the shelf. Oh and a headlamp because obviously. What I'm not sure about is the antenna situation. I have a PAC-12 which I love for portable but I'm wondering if I should have a backup or something more omni for VHF since most of the local ARES nets run on 2m. I dont really have a handheld that I trust for anything serious — my Baofeng is fine but I wouldnt want to depend on it if things got hairy. Also not sure how to organize all this. Right now it lives in a rubbermaid tub which is fine but when I opened it last week half the connectors were tangled up and I couldnt find my PL-259 adapter for like ten minutes. Probably not ideal if im supposed to be set up and on the air in under 15 minutes which is what our ARES group expects. Any advice from folks who have done this seriously? What did you end up putting in yours that you didnt think of at first?

the NVIS comment caught my eye — what antenna were you running for that? we've been trying to figure out a good portable NVIS option for our group and keep going back and forth on whether a simple dipole at low height is enough or if we need something fancier. our county is pretty spread out so repeater-only coverage has always been a weak point for us during actual events when infrastructure takes hits.

As someone just starting out, LCWO has been perfect for learning the basics with Koch method. Engage with the community: Take advantage of LCWO's community features to connect with other learners, share tips, and stay motivated. Track your progress: Use the platform's progress tracking tools to monitor your improvement The community aspect really helps keep me motivated when progress feels slow.

im in basically the same boat lol been sitting at 10wpm for like two months. tried bumping up to 13 and it just felt impossible. someone on reddit suggested just copying one word at a time and not worrying about getting the whole sentence, which actually helped a little bit for me. also LCWO has this word training thing where you can do common English words and that felt less stressful than random letters. anyway no real advice just solidarity i guess, its hard