Emily Taylor

oh man dont worry about it at all, we've all done stuff like that when we were new. honestly even some guys who've been licensed for years still fumble net procedures sometimes. the safest thing to do is just wait. if net control missed you they'll usually do a second round or ask if theres anyone they missed before closing. most nets have that built in. if you're really not sure you heard your call you can wait for a pause and just say something like "[your callsign], did you copy me?" or something short like that. net control will figure it out. the thing is net control is usually listening for exactly this kind of confusion and a good one will sort it out without making anyone feel bad. sounds like yours did alright. keep checking in, you'll get the flow of it pretty quick.

I made my first real DX contact. Like, not just a domestic contact that happens to be far away. An actual across-the-ocean, different-continent, holy-cow-did-that-just-happen contact. I'm still kind of buzzing about it. The Setup (Such As It Is) I should explain what I'm working with so this makes sense. My station is pretty modest. I've got a used mid-range HF transceiver that I picked up locally, running about 80 watts, and my antenna is a 40-meter dipole that I hung between two trees in my backyard. It's not fancy. One end is a little lower than I'd like because the tree on that side isn't as tall, so it's kind of a slanted dipole situation, which I've read is fine but I'm never totally sure how much it affects things. I also have a simple random wire that I've been experimenting with on 20 meters but the feedline situation is messy and I keep meaning to fix it. My noise floor is not great either. I live in a suburban neighborhood and there's some kind of switching power supply or LED driver nearby that puts a hash on certain parts of the bands. I've learned to live with it mostly. What Actually Happened So I'd been casually checking 20 meters in the evenings after work. I know that 20 meters is supposed to be the workhorse DX band, and I'd been reading about how propagation was improving as we move deeper into Solar Cycle 25. The solar flux numbers have been higher lately and I'd been watching the DX cluster on my laptop while listening, just trying to learn what good propagation actually sounds like. Last Tuesday around 7pm local time I tuned across 14.200 and something was different. The band sounded alive in a way I hadn't really experienced before. Signals were just cleaner, stronger, with that kind of presence where you can tell something is working right. I noticed a pile-up happening a bit further up and spun over to listen. Somebody was working a station in Europe — I caught the exchange enough to understand what was going on — and the European station's signal was honestly just remarkable. S7, S8 at times, coming in clear and full sounding. I sat there for probably twenty minutes just listening. The pile-up thinned out eventually and I thought, okay, this is the moment. I'm going to try. I waited for a gap, called once, and nothing. Called again. And then — I heard my suffix come back through the noise. He was asking for the full callsign. I gave it. He came back with a full exchange. Signal report and everything. I almost knocked my microphone off the desk. The whole QSO was maybe ninety seconds. But it was real. What I Learned (And Got Wrong) Here's the thing though. I almost missed the opening entirely because I didn't understand what I was looking at propagation-wise. I'd been checking the bands earlier that afternoon around 3pm and 20 meters seemed pretty flat to me — I was hearing some domestic stuff but nothing exciting. I almost didn't bother going back. What I didn't fully appreciate until I started reading more afterward is how different the band can sound at different times of day depending on where you're trying to reach. Transatlantic paths on 20 meters in my part of the country tend to open up in the late afternoon and into the evening, when the gray line and the ionosphere geometry are working in your favor. Checking at 3pm and giving up was almost a mistake that cost me the opening. I also didn't understand the solar flux index as well as I thought. I'd seen people talking about SFI numbers online but I was treating it kind of abstractly. Now I actually check it every day on one of the propagation sites. That week the SFI was up in the 180s which is pretty high, and there was low geomagnetic activity — the K-index was sitting at 1 or 2. I've since learned that combination is basically the recipe for good DX, especially on the higher HF bands. High flux, quiet magnetics. Simple enough, but nobody really spelled it out for me before. I had to kind of piece it together from forum posts and YouTube videos. The other thing I got humbled by: I tried again the next evening thinking lightning would strike twice. The SFI had dropped a little and the K-index had crept up to 3. Twenty meters was there but it wasn't the same. I heard Europe but weakly, and I didn't manage to get through any pile-ups. It was a good reminder that propagation is a moving target and you can't just bank on yesterday's conditions. Things I Want to Try Next I really want to try 17 meters now. From what I've been reading, 17 is kind of like 20's quieter cousin — less crowded, often good propagation during the same conditions, and because it's a WARC band there are no contests allowed so the pace is more relaxed. That feels more my speed while I'm still getting comfortable with DX operating. I've also been thinking about 15 meters. When the flux is high like it has been lately, 15 can apparently open up really well, and paths to Asia and the Pacific are possible in ways that 20 meters doesn't always offer from my location. I need to do more reading on that. And honestly I need to fix my antenna situation. A better dipole, maybe a fan dipole so I can cover multiple bands without retuning constantly, would make this all a lot less friction-y. Right now switching bands feels like a project. I want it to feel easy. Wrapping Up I know this is kind of a rambling first post. I mostly wanted to write it down while it was still fresh. If you're reading this and you're also newer to HF and feeling like DX is this intimidating mysterious thing — it kind of is, but it's also more accessible than I thought. Watch the propagation numbers, learn what the bands sound like when they're open versus when they're dead, and just actually transmit. That last part was the hardest for me. More to come when I have something worth sharing. Thanks for reading.

Make sure your coax drops down in a wide loop away from the boom - odd multiples of 1/4 lambda can definitely mess with your SWR readings. Try ferrite cores on the feedline first - I've seen SWR drop from 1.15 to 1.08 on 2m just from adding one Grade 31 ferrite.

yeah the interlocking thing tripped me up for longer than i want to admit. ran my first SO2R attempt at FD a couple years back and managed to key both radios into the same antenna for about 30 seconds before i realized what was happening. nothing blew up but i got lucky. do the interlocking first, seriously, everything else is just software config. one thing nobody really mentions — band conditions during the actual contest matter a lot for whether SO2R pays off. if 15m is dead and 40m is wall to wall, having a second radio parked on 15m doing nothing is just noise in your ear. the real benefit is when you can run on one band and hunt mults on another thats actually active. so in something like CQ WW when multiple bands are open it makes way more sense than a domestic sprint where everyones crammed onto like two bands anyway.

so ive been messing with winlink express for a few weeks now and i think i mostly have it working but im not totally sure im doing things the right way. my setup is a IC-7300 running into a signalink and im using vara HF for the modem. connecting to gateways seems to hit or miss, sometimes i connect fine and sometimes it just times out after like 30 seconds of trying. my main question is about how RMS gateway selection actually works. when i open the channel selector it shows me a bunch of gateways sorted by distance but i dont really know if i should just pick the closest one or if theres something else i should be looking at. like does frequency matter more than distance? and also some of them show as having recent activity and some dont, is that telling me theyre actually on the air right now or just that someone used them recently. also i noticed some messages ive sent seem to sit in the outbox for a long time. is that normal or am i missing something about how message handling works on the winlink side. i thought it was supposed to be more or less instant once you connect.

so ive been trying to get Winlink going for a few weeks now and i think i mostly have it working but theres a few things im still not clear on. background: im running an IC-7300 into a SignaLink USB, running Vara HF. i can connect to some gateways just fine but others time out and i dont really understand why some work and others dont. the main thing thats bugging me is how the RMS relay stuff works. like i get that theres the CMS (central message server) up in the cloud somewhere and then the RMS gateways are the local radio nodes that connect to it, but what i dont understand is what happens if the internet is down at the gateway end. does my message just sit in the gateway until it comes back up? or is there some store-and-forward thing happening over RF between gateways? ive read conflicting things about this. also when im picking channels in Winlink it shows propagation scores and all that, should i just trust those or is there a better way to figure out which gateway to hit? sometimes the one it suggests is terrible and one further down the list works great. not sure if im missing something obvious here.

the timeout thing happened to me constantly when i first set up VARA HF and honestly it was my audio levels causing most of it. the SignaLink is great but you really have to dial in the drive level carefully — i had mine cranked too high and the TX was just splattering all over and the receiving gateway couldnt decode it properly. try turning the SignaLink drive knob way down, like almost minimum, and then slowly bring it up while watching your ALC on the radio. you want basically zero ALC movement. also make sure youre not running more than like 25-30 watts for VARA, its a digital mode and the duty cycle will cook your finals if you go too high anyway but more importantly the gateways seem to handle weaker cleaner signals better than loud dirty ones in my experience. also double check that your clock is synced. Winlink is picky about time and if your PC clock is off by more than a minute or two sessions will drop for seemingly no reason. theres a setting in Winlink Express to sync to internet time, just do that before every session if youre not sure.

yeah the timing thing is real and i dont think people talk about it enough. what i do is try to call right at the tail end of the DX station's transmission, like almost before they finish sending the last character. a lot of guys wait until they hear the full callsign or the 599 exchange and then start calling, which means you're already late. if you can anticipate when they're about to go QRZ or come back up, and you're already transmitting right in that window, you just stand out from the guys who are half a second behind. the other thing that helped me a ton was really dialing in my audio. had a buddy tell me my signal sounded muddy on SSB and i never knew — got the mic EQ sorted, bumped the presence a bit, and suddenly i was getting through more often. clean punchy audio on a 100w radio will beat a sloppy kW signal more often than people think. especially on the more experienced DXpedition ops who are running fast and just picking out the clearest signals.

So ive been messing with RemoteHams for a few months now trying to get a proper remote setup going at my QTH in the mountains, the idea being i can run the station from work or when im traveling. Got a decent SDR front end tied into the system and for the most part it works but the audio just drops out randomly, sometimes every few minutes sometimes ill go 20 minutes without a hiccup then it falls apart completely. The internet connection at the remote site is DSL, not great, somewhere around 6 down and maybe 0.8 up on a good day. I know thats not ideal but it was working better before I added the SDR piece into the chain. Before that I was just doing straight rig control through RemoteHams and the audio was stable enough for casual use. Now with the SDR side of things I feel like the upstream bandwidth is just getting killed. Anyone dealt with this? Im running the RCForb client on the local end and honestly not sure if the problem is on the server side config or something with how my router at the remote site is handling QoS. Theres also some echolink stuff running on the same machine which maybe is competing for bandwidth but I wasnt changing anything there when the drops started happening. Would love to know what codec settings people are using for low bandwidth links — I feel like there must be a sweet spot I'm missing.

i was in the exact same spot like two years ago and honestly i just do LoTW and eQSL and skip the paper cards for the most part. occasionally if somone specifically asks for a direct card i'll send one but i dont actively do the bureau thing, just feels like a lot of effort for confirmations that dont really count toward anything i care about. some people really love the physical cards as like a collection thing though so i get why its still a thing. the TQSL setup is annoying but once its done its pretty much set and forget, just upload your log every now and then and youre good. one thing nobody told me early on — make sure your callsign certificate in TQSL actually matches the date range of your contacts or they wont match up right on the other end, burned me once with some contacts from right after i got licensed

so ive been wanting to do this for like two years and last weekend i finally just did it. built a pixie kit, yeah i know its super basic but i figured start somewhere right. took maybe 3 hours to solder up and honestly most of that was me second guessing myself and looking at the schematic way too many times. anyway threw it in a bag with my little notebook and a wire antenna i cut for 40m, drove out to the state park about 20 minutes away and just set up on a picnic table. running maybe 500mw into a random wire i had draped over a tree branch. wasnt expecting much honestly. made contact with a guy in ohio, im in virginia, so thats like 400 miles on half a watt. i just sat there kind of dumbfounded for a minute. the whole setup cost me under 25 bucks and fit in a small backpack. i get it now, i totally get why people are obsessed with QRP. theres something completely different about it compared to just cranking up the power and making contacts. the efficiency thing really clicked for me out there. anyone else remember their first QRP contact? also curious what people think about stepping up from a pixie — whats a reasonable next build that isnt gonna be a nightmare for someone whos decent at soldering but not an expert by any means

so ive been doing terrestrial VHF/UHF for a few years now and finally decided to take the plunge on satellite ops. picked up a used FT-817 and cobbled together a pair of yagis for 2m and 70cm, nothing fancy, hand-rotated for now. been using Gpredict for tracking and honestly that part has been easier than i expected. my question is about the linear transponders on something like AO-73 or FO-29. i get the basic concept — inverting transponder, USB on uplink becomes LSB on downlink or whatever — but im struggling with the doppler compensation. like do i need to be correcting for both uplinks AND downlinks simultaneously or is just tracking the downlink close enough? ive read conflicting stuff about this. some guys say just chase the downlink beacon and let the uplink drift a little, others say you need to correct both or youll walk all over other stations on the passband. also is there a way to practice this without actually keying up and potentially causing problems? feel bad just throwing RF at a transponder when i still dont fully know what im doing

same boat as you, been licensed two years and propagation still kind of mystifies me lol. what helped me a lot was just leaving a websdr receiver open in like the UK or Germany while im doing other stuff. if i can hear signals there, i know the path is open even before i fire up my rig. its not a perfect system but it gave me a feel for when things are actually moving. also the solar cycle 25 has been way more active than anyone predicted so theres that i guess, means more good days but also more sudden shutdowns when theres a big flare or whatever

so we finally got around to doing a full scale simulated disaster exercise with our county ARES group, something we'd been putting off for like two years honestly. the scenario was a major flood event that took out the repeater infrastructure and we had to coordinate between the EOC, two shelters, and a mobile command post using only simplex HF and some VHF simplex on 146.52. i want to share what went wrong because i think thats more useful than the stuff that worked. first — and this is embarrassing — half our operators showed up not knowing their go-kit battery situation. like they assumed everything was charged from whenever they last used it. we had one station that was basically dead within 45 minutes. second thing, net control kept reverting to using jargon and abbreviations that the newer operators just didnt understand, which caused some real confusion when we were trying to pass simulated health and welfare traffic. the HF side actually went better than i expected. we had solid winlink connectivity through a distant RMS gateway when local stuff was unavailable, which was the whole point of the exercise. but getting people comfortable with that ahead of time is crucial, a few folks had never actually sent a real winlink message before the drill which... yeah. anyway curious if others have run similar exercises and what surprised you. also wondering how other groups handle training for the operators who only show up occasionally — thats our biggest headache right now.

yeah i was thinking about it, last time i went to one of these i ended up spending way more than i planned because somebody had a whole box of BNC adapters and coax runs for practically nothing. my xyl was not thrilled. the club is also doing a foxhunt in the afternoon i think, saw something about it on the repeater net tuesday night but i missed part of the announcement so not totally sure on the details

33.3 feet per side sounds close but honestly the thing to check first is whether the coax braid is acting as part of the antenna. without a choke or balun at the feedpoint the common mode current on the outside of the coax can do all kinds of weird stuff to your pattern and SWR. a lot of guys just wrap 8-10 turns of coax into a coil at the feedpoint and tape it off, acts as a decent choke balun. might not fix everything but its usually the first thing to rule out. also 3:1 at the high end of 40m on a dipole cut for the low end isnt that surprising honestly. the band is pretty wide and a half wave resonant antenna is going to have higher SWR away from resonance. if your rig can handle 3:1 or you have a tuner you might just leave it.

you'll be fine, honestly the 4 contact minimum sounds scary until you realize there are chasers literally sitting by their radios waiting for alerts to pop up. if you posted on SOTAwatch you should get spotted pretty quick, especially if you self-spot from the summit using the SOTA Spotter app once you're set up. that changes everything — before i figured out self-spotting i was calling CQ into the void, after that i had a pileup within a minute or two. reference format looks right to me, W4T is Tennessee right? the association/region/summit number format is standard so dont sweat that part. one thing i'd add — dont forget to write down the exact summit name and reference in your paper log if you're keeping one, i forgot to do that on my second activation and had to look it up later when i was entering contacts into the database. small thing but annoying. and yes bring the HT, 2m FM is totally legit for getting your 4 and theres usually a local or two who'll come back to you if you call on 146.52. have a good hike, post back and let us know how it went

yeah that sounds like a ground loop to me honestly. if your arduino and the radio are on separate supplies and you dont have a common ground between them youll get exactly that kind of garbage on the audio. i had the same thing happen with a raspberry pi zero i was using to control my old 857. what fixed it for me was running a single wire from the arduino ground to the radio chassis ground, not through the USB supply, just directly. the 2N2222 should be fine for PTT switching as long as you have a pulldown on the base, which im assuming you do. the other thing worth checking is whether the CI-V and PTT are fighting each other timing-wise. if PTT fires like 5ms before the CI-V transaction finishes you can get some weird startup artifacts. i added a 50ms delay in my sketch after the CI-V command before actually pulling PTT low and that cleaned things up a lot.

so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra. like i use HF pretty regularly, mostly 40 and 20 meters, some 10 when the band cooperates, and honestly i rarely feel like im hitting a wall with what general lets me do. but then sometimes ill be spinning the dial and ill hear something really good happening just outside where i can transmit and it gets annoying. the theory stuff on the extra exam looks pretty intimidating honestly. like the impedance matching and the filter stuff and all the propagation math i never really had to learn for general. is that stuff actually useful day to day or is it more just trivia you memorize to pass and then forget. i genuinely cant tell from looking at the question pool whether its stuff that will make me a better operator or just gatekeeping. not trying to be negative about it just curious what people who actually went through it think

Practice a little often, preferably each day - far better than a large amount once a week. Persistence is needed as it takes time. I recommend setting aside 10-15 minutes daily with something like LCWO.net - the Morse Machine setting is very repetitious and only goes at your speed.

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new generals. so the short version is the FCC allocation is the legal part, that's what part 97 actually says you can use. the ARRL band plan is more of a gentlemens agreement on top of that, it's not law but most operators follow it to keep things organized. on 40m as a general you can do phone from 7.175 to 7.300 MHz, that's your legal range. the band edge thing is important because your signal has a certain bandwidth. if you're running SSB and you set your dial to say 7.299 you might actually have audio components pushing above 7.300 which would put you out of your allocation. most people say stay at least 3 kHz inside the edge to be safe, so 7.297 or below on the upper end. some rigs also have calibration drift so theres a little buffer built in for that too. just something to keep in mind, the frequency on your display isnt always 100% spot on

So ive had my IC-7300 for about three years now and honestly its been a great radio, no real complaints, but i keep finding myself looking at the 7610 and trying to justify it. The dual watch thing is the main thing pulling me honestly, i do a lot of SO2R-adjacent stuff where im hunting DX on one band while running a pileup on another and right now im doing that with the 7300 and an old FT-857 which works but the 857 is just... not great on HF anymore, something weird going on with the front end i think. Anyway the question is basically — if youre already happy with the 7300 does moving to the 7610 feel like a real upgrade or does it just feel like spending $1500 more for a slightly bigger screen and dual receive. I see a lot of people rave about the 7610 but i wonder how much of that is just new radio excitement. The roofing filter situation on the 7610 is supposed to be noticeably better but in real-world operating would I actually notice that or is it more of a spec sheet thing

congrats on the ticket first of all. honestly you are overthinking it a little but thats completely normal when youre just starting out. the ft-60 is a solid choice and yeah its older but thats kind of the point — yaesu has been making that radio for a long time because it just works. the receiver is noticeably better than the baofengs in my experience, especially if you have any strong signals near your local repeater frequencies that might cause desensitization issues. that said if youre on a tight budget theres nothing wrong with starting on a baofeng uv-5r just to get on the air and learn how things work. ive seen plenty of elmers recommend that route, just get chirp and program it properly. the 1.25m thing on the btech is neat but unless you know theres traffic on 220 in your area its probably not going to see much use, id check repeaterbook first before that factors into your decision at all. if i were doing it over i probably would have spent the extra money upfront for something like the ft-60 or even the wouxun kg-uv9d but thats easy to say in hindsight. either way just get something and get on the air, thats the actual goal here

omg yes i had no idea 10m could even do that, im pretty new and my elmer told me 10 was basically dead for years so i never really paid attention to it. i threw my antenna up there yesterday after reading your post and managed to get like three contacts in an hour which for me is actually a lot lol. this hobby keeps surprising me

that SWR spread sounds totally normal for a 40m dipole, dont sweat it. a 2:1 at the band edge is pretty much expected, most tuners handle that no problem and your rig's internal tuner if it has one definitely will. the 1.4 at the bottom is actually pretty good for a first build without any trimming. on the balun thing — you're probably fine for now but you might start noticing weirdness eventually, especially if you run more power or if the feedline runs near metal stuff. common mode current on the coax can cause all kinds of subtle problems, not always the tingly hand thing, sometimes its more like pattern distortion or picking up RFI from the house wiring. a simple choke wound from the coax itself works fine, just google W2DU choke or ferrite bead balun and you can throw one together cheap. i use 10-12 turns of the coax through a couple of mix 31 toroids and its been solid for years. dry clay soil does shift the resonant point a bit, usually makes the antenna look shorter electrically so you might need to add a little wire rather than trim. but honestly at 1.4:1 i wouldnt touch it, thats plenty good.