David Miller

yeah the timing thing is huge and most people never figure it out because they're too focused on just transmitting as loud as possible. i ran into a guy at a hamfest who had been on one of the VP6 operations and he said the operators can literally hear maybe 3 or 4 calls out of a pileup of hundreds and the ones that get through are almost never the loudest, they're the ones that land in a brief gap. he also mentioned that a lot of experienced DXpedition ops will actually shift their listening frequency slightly every few minutes to give a fresh slice of the pile a chance, so if you're not getting through after like 10-15 minutes try nudging your TX freq a little within the split window. not a lot, maybe 500hz to 1khz on CW. the partial callsign thing works but you gotta be careful with it. some ops specifically ask for full calls and if you're only sending partials they'll skip you even if they hear you. read the DXpedition's operating notes if they posted any, some of the bigger ones actually tell you exactly how they want to be called.

i did my first solo CQ WW maybe three years ago now and honestly just jumping in is the best way to learn it. you will absolutely not work everyone you hear and thats fine, just log what you can and dont stress about your score. the atmosphere on the bands that weekend is unlike anything else, 20 meters is wall to wall signals and even with a dipole youll get answers if you find a spot and call. SOTA kinda preps you for the patience aspect i think, waiting for a pile to calm down is similar energy lol

so ive been chasing a relatively rare entity for the better part of two years now, kept hearing the station but could never crack the pileup and honestly it was driving me nuts. finally got through last week and wanted to share what ended up working because i wasted a lot of time doing the wrong stuff before that. first thing i stopped doing was calling on top of everyone else. sounds obvious but when youre in a massive pileup theres this instinct to just keep transmitting and hope your signal gets through. doesnt work. what i started doing instead was listening to where the DX was actually pulling calls from — most operators on DXpeditions work split and theyre not pulling from the same spot in the passband every time, they drift around a bit and if you can figure out where theyre listening you can sometimes find a less crowded spot and actually get heard. also timed my calls better. the DX would come back to someone, there'd be a brief exchange, and right as they sent their final 73 or TU i'd fire off my call once, maybe twice max. not a long string of dit-dah-ing just my callsign clean and at a comfortable speed. took about 45 minutes of this but eventually i got the QRZ and nearly fell out of my chair. i know a lot of guys swear by high power and big antennas and look i only run 100w into a hex beam so im not exactly pistol station. i think timing and picking your spot in the split really made the difference here more than anything else. anyone else have techniques that work consistently?

yeah the yamaha and honda are both fine on RFI in my experience, the cheap chinese inverter generators are where you can get into trouble. had a buddy bring one to a field day a few years ago and we could hear it on 40m even with it pretty far away, eventually we just shut it off and ran off batteries for the night. one thing i'd add — if you're doing an ARES exercise and there's any chance of running comms for more than like 6 hours seriously consider a second battery. 100Ah sounds like a lot but with that load you described you're probably pulling 15-18A average and that math gets uncomfortable fast especially if you're not fully topping it off between ops. two batteries on a paralleling setup gives you way more breathing room and if one goes weird you still have the other.

From a technical standpoint, FT4's four-tone CPFSK at 23.4 baud with 90 Hz bandwidth trades some sensitivity for speed. The math works out - you're processing more information faster but need stronger signals. Perfect for contest scenarios where band conditions support it.

i did my first activation a few months ago and had almost the exact same experience lol. the pile up dying was the most stressful part for me too, i just kept second guessing whether i should move bands or respot or just keep calling CQ into the void. ended up doing all three in a kind of panic honestly. it gets easier though, my last activation i had a much better sense of the rhythm of it. what park was it if you dont mind me asking

So ive been seeing some chatter on a few other forums about Icom possibly dropping something new in the HF lineup later this year, cant find anything concrete but a couple guys at the club meeting last week were talking about it like it was pretty much confirmed. Anyone else heard anything? I take all the pre-release rumor stuff with a huge grain of salt after the whole IC-705 hype cycle took forever but still its fun to speculate. Also completely separate topic but 17 meters has been absolutely wild this past week. I made contacts into eastern europe and got a pretty solid signal report from a station in ukraine which honestly surprised me given everything going on over there. Those guys are still on the air which I always find kind of remarkable. 10 meters also had a decent opening yesterday afternoon around 1800 UTC if anyone was paying attention, worked a few south american stations without even trying hard. Anyway if anyone has actual info on any upcoming gear releases or heard about any big events coming up id love to know, I feel like I miss half the news unless someone tells me directly because I dont always keep up with the ARRL stuff.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep seeing people talk about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly im not even sure i understand the difference between them. like are these run by the same organization or different ones? and do you have to pay for each one separately? i got my general back in march and ive been doing a lot of HF since then, mostly 20m and 40m, and someone in my club mentioned i might already have enough states worked for WAS without even realizing it. is that how it works, you just log contacts and then apply later? i feel like ive been operating without really tracking anything intentionally which might have been dumb in hindsight. also the DXCC thing — i know it stands for DX century club so you need 100 countries but are territories counted separately? like does hawaii count as a separate entity from the mainland US? i thought i read something about that but wasnt sure if i was reading it right. sorry if this is a basic question, just trying to wrap my head around all of it before i start actually trying to chase these things on purpose

ok so i just passed my general a few weeks ago and got my sequential callsign assigned, which is fine but its kind of a mouthful and id really like something shorter or maybe with my initials if possible. ive been reading about vanity calls on the FCC website and honestly the way they explain it makes my head spin a little. from what i can tell you apply through the FCC ULS and there's like a filing window where everyone who applies during a certain period gets considered at the same time? and then it goes by license class so extra class gets priority over general which gets priority over tech? but im not totally sure if i have that right. also i saw something about a 18 month waiting period if you want a callsign that was previously held by someone who is deceased, is that still a thing or did they change that? also does it cost money now i thought i heard something about a fee being introduced a while back. anyway if anyone has gone through this recently id love to hear how it went for you, the FCC docs are just kind of dense to read through

Force 12 C3 - 20/15/10 7ele interlaced Yagi - 18' boom - lightweight, excellent performance - ideal 'mult' antenna. I've been running a C3 for contest work and it's night and day compared to trap designs. No trap losses, broader bandwidth, and that F/B ratio stays consistent across all three bands. Worth every penny if you're serious about performance.

so ive been using Log4OM for about two years now as my main shack logger and honestly i really like it for day to day stuff, the award tracking and the way it handles LOTW sync is pretty solid once you get it set up right. but every time a contest rolls around i end up fumbling around because Log4OM just isnt really built for that kind of fast paced exchange logging, at least not the way N1MM is. been thinking about just keeping both installed and using N1MM strictly for contests then importing the ADIF into Log4OM afterward but i've heard that can get messy with dupes and the way each program handles things like sent RST and contest specific fields. anyone actually doing this workflow? does the ADIF import from N1MM into Log4OM cause headaches or does it mostly just work. also slightly separate question but does anyone pipe WSJT-X through Log4OM or do you just let WSJT-X log to its own file and deal with it separately. feels like theres a dozen ways to do this and none of them are obviously the right one