Linda Wilson

JS8Call never really hit critical mass the way FT8 did unfortunately. the concept is genuinely cool — jason goode based it on FT8's LDPC coding so the sensitivity is in the same ballpark, maybe a few dB worse depending on speed setting you use. there's a slow mode that gets pretty deep but at that point youre waiting forever for each transmission to finish. the problem is just activity. FT8 won because everyone piled on at once and now theres always someone to work. JS8 kind of needs a scheduled sked or a net to really be useful. there are a few nets running on 40 and 80m, think the HF winlink crowd overlaps with it sometimes too. worth checking the JS8Call groups.io list for net schedules before you write it off — i had the same experience just randomly tuning around and finding nothing, but once i joined a net it made a lot more sense as a mode. if you want actual ragchew-style keyboard to keyboard stuff on weak signals PSK31 still has a decent following on 20m around 14.070, and the waterfall is usually pretty active on weekends. not as sensitive as FT8 obviously but you can have a real back and forth without the 15 second timing thing driving you crazy

yeah the sugar thing bugs me too lol. i used to work with a guy on a local net who always said London for Lima and it just. i dunno it never sounded right. i think for everyday ragchewing on a clear frequency most people dont bother with full phonetics every time, but when youre signing off or when someone asks you to repeat your call thats when you definitely want to go full NATO. i mess it up sometimes under pressure honestly, like ill blank on what X is supposed to be. X-ray right? yeah. anyway you'll figure out when it feels natural to use them, it kind of just comes with time on the air

So ive been using WSJT-X for FT8 for about two years now and it logs to its own internal log which i then export to ADIF and import into Log4OM. That part works fine, mostly. But every time contest season rolls around i end up downloading N1MM again and running that separately and then i have this whole mess of trying to merge logs after the fact without creating duplicates. Wondering if anyone has a workflow that actually makes sense here. Like does Log4OM handle contest scoring well enough that i could just drop N1MM entirely, or is N1MM still kind of the gold standard for that. I know some people swear by it for contesting specifically and i get that, the interface is definitely built around running rates and that kind of thing. But maintaining two separate logging systems is driving me a little crazy honestly. Also side question — anyone gotten WSJT-X to log directly into Log4OM in real time? I think theres a UDP thing you can set up but last time i tried it i got double entries and gave up. Running Win10 if that matters.

your gut is actually pretty close on this one. top loading wins on efficiency, base loading loses the most — the current in the lower portion of the antenna below a base coil is higher than the radiating portion above it, which is kind of backwards from what you want. in practical terms though the difference between a well-built base loaded vertical and a center loaded one on 40m is maybe a dB or so, which honestly in real-world conditions with ground losses and everything else is going to get swamped by other factors. i modeled a few variations in EZNEC a while back for basically the same situation and the efficiency numbers were something like top load 78%, center 71%, base 63% if i remember right, but those were idealized. the bigger issue in my experience is that a top-loaded coil is a pain to weatherproof and retune if you want to hit a different part of the band. base loading you can put a big variable cap or a roller inductor down there and actually adjust it without climbing anything. for a fixed frequency install id say center or top, for something you want to play with, base just makes life easier.

welcome to the hobby, dont stress about it too much. a couple things to check — first, on the baofeng you need to make sure youre setting the encode tone not just the decode. there are separate settings for T-CTCS and R-CTCS in the menu, T-CTCS is what you transmit to open the repeater and thats the one that needs to match what repeaterbook lists. a lot of people accidentally set the wrong one and then wonder why nothing happens. also worth knowing, when you key up you should hear the repeater tail — that little kerchunk sound after you let go of the ptt — if youre actually hitting it. if you hear nothing at all after transmitting then youre probably not getting in. could be terrain, could be the tone, could be power output. try going outside and getting some elevation if you can, baofengs arent exactly powerhouses especially on a rubber duck antenna. if you DO hear the tail then youre in and the repeater is just quiet, which happens a lot honestly. lots of repeaters sit silent for hours at a time.

honestly the Extra exam is not as bad as people make it out to be, i studied for maybe 6 weeks using the ARRL handbook and the HamStudy app and passed on the first try. the math portions like the filter Q factor stuff and the reactance calculations, yeah those require a bit more than just memorization but if you work through them a few times they start to click. the oscillator and feedback questions are more conceptual and you can get those down pretty reliably once you understand what positive vs negative feedback is doing in a circuit. as for whether it matters operationally, for casual ragchewing probably not a ton unless you specifically want those Extra-only segments. but on 75m and 40m during a pileup the Extra portion is noticably less crowded, and on 20m the Extra segment at the bottom is where a lot of DX stations park themselves when things get busy. so if you ever catch the DX bug it does matter more than you'd think. i'd say just do it, the test is a means to an end and the studying actually taught me things i use when troubleshooting feedlines and stuff

so we finally got around to doing a full scale simulated emergency exercise with our county ARES group and i wanted to share some stuff that came up because honestly it was eye opening in ways i didnt expect the scenario was a major ice storm knocking out power and cell infrastructure across three counties, we had to set up a net, coordinate with the county EOC, and relay health and welfare traffic for a pretend shelter population. sounded simple enough on paper right biggest lesson for me personally was how bad we are at message handling under pressure. like i thought i knew the ICS-213 format, ive practiced it, but when things started stacking up and the net control was getting buried in check-ins and people were trying to pass traffic at the same time... it got messy fast. we had a few operators just kind of freelancing on the air doing their own thing which was honestly worse than helpful also the interoperability piece caught us off guard. the fire department liaison showed up with a radio that couldnt hit our repeater and we had no simplex fallback plan that everyone actually knew about in advance. spent like 20 minutes sorting that out during what would have been a critical window anyway curious if anyone elses group has done something similar recently and what came up for you. we're trying to build a proper after action review process and id love to steal ideas from people who have figured this out

the suffix-only thing is situational and it really depends on the dx op. some of them hate it and will specifically say 'full calls only' but yeah on a huge pileup with a competent op it can work. i think the bigger skill is just timing honestly. theres this rhythm to how a good dx op works a pileup and once you hear it you start to feel when the window is. hard to describe but after you work enough dx it just clicks. what i do on 40 and 80 especially is i'll let the pileup rage for the first 10-15 minutes and just study it. where is he listening, what's the pattern, is he doing anything obvious like working by number or region. you can usually figure out the pattern pretty quick if you actually pay attention instead of just keying up. then when i think i understand it i'll make maybe 3-4 really well-timed attempts and if nothing happens i go back to listening. people who just hammer their call for 45 minutes straight are just making it worse for everyone and they're not gonna get through anyway. also honestly a decent antenna helps more than any technique. i know thats not the exciting answer but going from a vertical to a 2-el yagi on 20m made more difference in breaking pileups than anything i ever read about operating technique

yeah generator RFI is a real pain. what brand was it? some of the harbor freight predator units are surprisingly quiet electrically, others are terrible, same with some of the hondas depending on the model and age. the inverter type generators are generally better than conventional but even then you need to be carefull about grounding. i ground my genny frame to a short stake and then bond that to my station ground and it made a noticeable difference. honestly though for anything under like 6-8 hours i just run off battery now. 100ah lifepo4 and a 30 amp dc-dc charger from the car if i need to top it off. way less hassle than messing with fuel and oil and the noise thing. only break out the generator for multi-day stuff or if im running higher power and need to sustain it.

im pretty new to all this and just started using these tools last month, didnt even know dxwatch existed until someone on my local club mentioned it at a meeting. the whole cluster concept kind of blew my mind honestly, like the idea that hams all over the world are basically crowdsourcing band conditions in real time is really cool one app i stumbled on that i havent seen mentioned much is Ham Radio Deluxe's bandscope thing but im not sure thats quite the same as what youre talking about. still figuring out whats what

I did the same mod on mine about a year ago and yeah the drift improvement is real, not placebo. I actually logged some WSPR spots before and after and the frequency stability was measurably better. The stock oscillator on those radios is decent but it's spec'd at something like +-0.5ppm which sounds fine until you're doing two-way coherent digital stuff or trying to run WSPR unattended overnight while temps change in the shack. Your buddy's radio might just be a better sample from the factory, there's definitely unit to unit variation. Or he's not looking closely enough. Either way the TCXO is cheap insurance for digital ops and I'd do it again without hesitation. Also if you haven't already, worth checking whether your CAT control polling rate is adding any timing jitter on top of everything — took me forever to figure out that was messing with my JS8Call decodes more than the oscillator was.

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, W4T/SU-001, not a hard summit but i figured id start easy since i had no idea what to expect with the setup. packed the KX2, a 40m EFHW, and way too much food apparently because my pack was like 30 lbs by the time i added water and layers. anyway the antenna situation was a mess because the trees at the summit were not cooperating and i ended up with the wire at this weird angle that probably killed my takeoff angle pretty bad but whatever. still managed 6 QSOs on 40m SSB before a storm rolled in and i had to pack up fast. got my 4 contacts so it counts as an activation but man i was expecting it to be smoother than that. also the KX2 battery died faster than i thought it would running 10w, need to look into that. anyone else find their first activation was kind of a learning experience in what NOT to do

I've been running Log4OM for about two years for general logging and it works really well with WSJT-X, you just point WSJT-X at it via UDP and contacts come in automatically, pretty seamless. The ADIF import from N1MM worked fine for me, had maybe a dozen duplicate issues i had to clean up manually but nothing major. For contests though I still fire up N1MM. Log4OM has some contest support but its pretty limited compared to N1MM and honestly for anything serious like a major CW or SSB contest you'd be doing yourself a disservice not using N1MM. So yeah i do run both but the workflow isnt that bad once you get used to it, WSJT-X logs to Log4OM day to day and then when a contest weekend comes around i switch the UDP port over to N1MM and back again after. Takes like 30 seconds.

honest question — does split even matter if you're running like 100w and a wire? asking because i've tried all this stuff and i still feel like i basically never break anything above maybe a zone 26 or 27. starting to think its just a power game at some point

so ive been at this for about three months now and i just cannot get iambic mode to feel natural. im using a Begali Traveler paddle into a keyer built into my radio (Elecraft K3) and i keep getting extra dits or dahs squeezed in where i dont want them. like ill try to send a letter and get half of the next one tagged on automatically. i know theres mode A and mode B and ive tried both and honestly cant tell the difference in practice. my sending speed is somewhere around 15 wpm which is probably not fast enough for iambic to really shine i guess? i watched a bunch of youtube videos and everyone makes it look so effortless. my elmers all learned on straight keys so they just tell me to go back to basics which i get but i feel like im so close to figuring this out. does anyone have tips for getting the muscle memory right or is this just a thing where you have to put in hundreds of hours before it clicks? also how much does paddle tension and gap setting actually matter - mine are still basically at factory defaults