Sarah Thomas43

The new ARRL courses replace the previous EC-001 and EC-016 programs, and the Basic and Intermediate EmComm courses are available to anyone with a free arrl.org account. I'd recommend taking the new Basic EmComm course first - it gives you a good foundation before tackling the FEMA stuff. Welcome to ARES!

The smaller batteries can last longer between charges with QRP rigs, but efficiency varies a lot between models. Try checking your actual current draw with a meter - you might be surprised. Also consider the KX2's DSP is pretty power-hungry compared to analog designs.

short answer: there's no FCC rule that says you have to use phonetics, it's just a convention. part 97 just says you have to ID with your callsign, doesn't specify how you say it. phonetics are really just a tool for clarity, especially when signals are weak or there's QRM. on a clear local repeater with good audio nobody's gonna care if you just say your call normally. where it really matters is HF, especially if you're doing any kind of contest or DX pile-up situation where someone across the world is trying to copy your call through noise. you'll hear guys use non-standard phonetics sometimes too like "New York" for N or whatever just because it cuts through better. the NATO standard is a good baseline but operators adapt. don't stress about being embarrassed, everyone's figuring this stuff out. the person who asked you to use phonetics was probably just having trouble copying you, not criticizing you.

Been testing SDR++ 1.2.0 against GQRX 2.17 on my Ryzen 7 system with various SDR hardware (RTL-SDR v4, HackRF One, RSP1A). Interesting findings on CPU utilization and waterfall performance. SDR++ advantages: Lower CPU usage (~15% vs 25% in GQRX), smoother waterfall on wide spans, better plugin ecosystem developing. The new Low-IF mode fixed the center spike issues I had with SDRplay units. GQRX advantages: More mature, better AGC implementation, superior noise blanker, rock-solid stability. Remote control capabilities are excellent. For casual monitoring and weak signal work, still preferring GQRX. But SDR++ is impressive for spectrum analysis and multiple VFO monitoring. Anyone else doing similar comparisons? Particularly interested in experiences with GNU Radio integration differences.

yeah the hiking part always gets me too lol. which summit did you do? i'm new to sota myself but been chasing for a few months now and notice some activators have much stronger signals than others even with same power levels one thing ive heard is antenna height really matters - get that thing as high as you can even if its just throwing the wire over a tree branch or something. also check your swr, bad match will kill your signal fast with only 5 watts to work with

so ive been licensed about 3 years now and just kind of did casual operating, worked a bunch of countries here and there without really thinking about it. then last month i sat down and actually loaded everything into LOTW and holy cow i already have like 87 confirmed entities. so now im actually motivated to go chase this thing properly. my question is about how the credits actually work because im a little confused. like i have some QSLs via bureau that i never submitted anywhere — do those count toward DXCC or do they have to be in LOTW? and whats the deal with WAZ, is that completely separate from ARRL or does it tie in somehow. also WAS seems way simpler but i heard some states are harder than others which makes sense i guess. basically im just trying to figure out where to focus first. i have a modest station, trap vertical in the backyard, 100w, nothing fancy. some of the rarer entities are probably out of reach for me for a while but 100 basic DXCC feels doable.

so i've been running a ft-7900r in my truck for about 3 months now and i think i finally have it mostly dialed in but there's a couple things still bugging me. the radio itself is great, no complaints there, but i'm still not 100% happy with the antenna situation. right now i have a nmo mount drilled through the roof near the rear passenger side and im using a diamond mr77 which is a decent dual band whip but i feel like im losing some signal compared to when i had the same radio in my old car with a mag mount stuck on the trunk lid. i know mag mounts arent ideal but the ground plane on that trunk lid must have been better than i thought? or maybe the roof mount placement isnt great idk. the nmo connection looks solid and the cable run through the headliner seems fine, no sharp bends or anything. swr on 2m is like 1.4:1 which im not thrilled about but i read that's acceptable. also been thinking about adding a 70cm antenna separately for aprs since i run a mobilinkd connected to my phone but not sure if that's overkill when the mr77 already does dual band. anyone done a dedicated aprs antenna just for 70cm? or am i overthinking this

the thing that always bites people is the little stuff, not the radio gear. like adapters. SO-239 to BNC, BNC to SMA, whatever random connector the situation throws at you. I keep a small ziplock bag with probably eight different coax adapters and I've used at least four of them in actual deployments. also a short 6 inch patch cable because sometimes you're connecting two pieces of gear that are literally right next to each other and your shortest coax is still six feet long and it's just a mess. on the VHF/UHF question — yes, get something in there. a cheap Baofeng or even an older HT you have laying around. HF is great but when you're doing local served agency stuff or coordinating with a hospital or EOC, everyone's on 2m. the 891 doing 6m helps for some things but it's not the same. I run a little Yaesu FT-65 in a side pouch just for local coordination and it's paid for itself a dozen times over in terms of not fumbling with the main rig. one more thing — food and water. not for the radio, for you. sounds dumb but I've sat at a deployment for 11 hours once and the only thing I had was a granola bar I found in my jacket pocket. pack some snacks, a water bottle, maybe a headlamp if you don't already have one in there. you'll thank yourself.

Great question! The rules do allow compensation in specific situations like teaching positions and control operator duties for club stations. Emergency volunteer work is typically fine since you're not being paid for the radio operation itself.

so ive been running APRS for a few months now, mostly just for position tracking when i go out portable, and that part works fine — i can see my callsign popping up on aprs.fi no problem. but i tried sending a message to another local ham yesterday and he never got it, and i also tried sending one to my own station from aprsdroid on my phone and nothing showed up in my TNC log. my setup is a kenwood d72 going into a kantronics KPC-3+ and then into a 2m antenna, running 25w. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was standard. i can see my beacons digipeating through the local fill-in digi and hitting the igate so its definitely getting to the internet side. just the messaging piece that seems broken. anybody dealt with this before? wondering if its a config thing on the TNC or something with the d72 settings. didnt change anything recently that i know of.

ok so ive been licensed about 4 months now (general) and i finally worked up the courage to check into a local 2m net last tuesday. it went fine i think but i have no idea if i did everything right. like when the net control calls for check-ins, do you just say your callsign once and wait? i said mine twice because i wasnt sure if they heard me the first time and then felt kind of dumb when they came back to me after the second one. also the net had a "traffic" portion and i had no idea what that meant so i just stayed quiet. someone passed a message to another station and it sounded very formal, like they were reading it out loud word for word. is that NTS stuff? i downloaded some info about it but honestly it was a bit confusing. and one more thing -- after the net closed, a couple guys just started ragchewing and i wasnt sure if it was ok to just jump in or if you wait to be invited somehow. i ended up just listening because i didnt want to step on anyone. any tips from people who actually do this regularly would be great, im still figuring out the whole on-air culture thing

yeah i was the same way when i first started, sat there listening for like 4 nets in a row before i actually keyed up lol. the thing that helped me was finding out our local net actually posts the check-in format right on the club website so i printed it out and just read from it the first few times. felt a little silly but nobody cares, everyone was a beginner once. now i just do it without thinking about it. the special event thing — do you know which one it is? theres a few going on this month i think. if its the one im thinking of they might have a specific frequency listed on the QRZ page for the event callsign, worth checking there first before you go hunting for them

so after like three weekends of messing around i finally made my first contact through AO-73 last sunday, which was pretty satisfying after all the frustration. but honestly the doppler correction is still giving me more grief than i expected. im using gpredict on a linux box tied into my ft-818 via hamlib and most of the time it works fine but every now and then the freq correction just seems to stop updating mid-pass and i lose the downlink completely. not sure if its a hamlib timeout or something with my usb-serial adapter flaking out. the pass was only like 8 minutes to begin with so losing 90 seconds of it is pretty annoying. also wondering if anyone has tips on actually finding the linear transponder passband when youre new to this. i kept hunting around and occasionally heard voices but couldnt always tell if i was hearing my own signal in the downlink or someone else. the inverting transponder thing messes with my head a bit still — so if i tune up on uplink my signal goes down on downlink, right? i think i have that correct but during an actual pass its easy to second-guess yourself. anyway just wanted to share that it actually works and see if anyone has dealt with the gpredict/hamlib dropout thing before

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and ive been having a blast making contacts but the whole QSL confirmation thing is kind of overwhelming me. like i understand the basic concept, you confirm the contact happened, but theres so many ways to do it now and i cant figure out if i need to use all of them or just pick one. i signed up for LoTW because my elmer said thats the one that counts for DXCC and stuff, and i uploaded a few logs but honestly i dont really understand the whole TQSL certificate process, it took me forever to get that set up. then someone in a pileup told me to also get on eQSL which i did but it seems like a totally different thing? and then some older ops keep asking me for physical cards through the bureau and i dont even know how the bureau works yet. do most people use all three or is it common to just stick with LoTW? i dont have any particular awards im chasing right now, just enjoying operating. also does it cost money to send cards through the bureau because i've heard mixed things about that

I had the same experience last Thursday. Ended up drifting over to 17m and actually had a decent run for about 20 minutes before it fell apart. Sometimes its worth just spinning the dial instead of waiting around on one frequency, at least thats what I've started doing when 40 goes dead on me.

so ive been messing with Winlink for about three weeks now and i think im close but something is off with how im connecting to the RMS gateways. running Winlink Express on a windows 10 box, got a Signalink USB going into a Kenwood TS-590SG on 40m mostly. the software sees my soundcard fine and i can watch the waterfall pick up activity on the Winlink frequencies no problem. the issue is when i try to actually connect to a gateway i get partway through the handshake and then it just dies. not every time but like 60% of the time. ive tried a few different gateways, the closest one to me geographically seems worse than one about 200 miles out which seems backwards. also not sure if im setting my dial frequency right — i know Winlink uses specific channel frequencies but the offsets and the actual dial setting kinda confuse me when youre using USB vs center frequency logic. the Winlink Express help docs are not exactly written for someone who's still figuring this stuff out. is there a standard troubleshooting flow for this or is it just trial and error until something sticks? also does the time of day matter a lot for 40m gateway connects, i assume yes because 40 but curious how much.

oh man i remember my first HF net checkin, i was so nervous i forgot my own grid square lol. you'll get it down fast trust me. one thing i'll add is that a lot of nets post their format on their club website or sometimes in the QRZ listing for the net control operator's call. worth looking up before you tune in so you know if they want signal reports or traffic or whatever. some nets are super formal and some are basically just a casual roundtable so they can be pretty different from each other.

ive been doing the echolink + remote HF thing for a while, different software stack than you though. i use a raspberry pi at the remote site running both the RRC stuff and a separate echolink node and they basically just coexist on the same internet connection. never really tried to integrate them in any deep way, just kind of run parallel. RemoteHams has some hooks for linking i think but i never went down that path. if you figure out something clever there let us know, there might be some interesting stuff you could do for emcomm applications where you want VHF linking and HF capability from one remote site.

i did the ref oscillator swap on my 7300 about 8 months ago and i honestly cant tell you if it made a practical difference day to day, like the radio just works and everything seems fine. did a bunch of FT8 before and after and the decode rates looked similar. maybe i was hoping for some obvious improvement that wasnt really there for my use case. the fan mod though yeah that one you feel immediately, its a totally different radio to sit next to for a 2 hour pileup session.

im basically in the same boat as you passed my tech in the spring and spent way too long trying to read the actual FCC rules lol. what helped me was finding one of those band plan graphics that shows everything visually, the ARRL one is good but i also found one on some guys personal site that color coded it by license class which made it click for me finally. good luck with it

yeah the bands have been pretty inconsistent this month, youre not imagining it. the SFI being high doesnt automatically mean great conditions because you also have to watch the K-index and Kp numbers. had a day two weeks ago where SFI was pushing 190 but a geomagnetic storm rolled in and basically killed everything above 40m for most of the day. frustrating as anything. for 10m and 12m i usually start getting excited when SFI is consistently above 150 and the Kp is sitting at 2 or below. thats when i start checking the DX clusters more obsessively. the ZL thing you mentioned is probably a long path opening, they happen more around dawn and dusk and can be really surprising if you're not expecting it. worth checking what time sunrise was at your QTH versus Auckland, sometimes the math lines up in a way that makes those paths pop open for like a 20-30 minute window. i use a site called VOACAP online to model paths, takes a bit of learning but once you get the hang of it its pretty useful for planning when to actually sit at the radio.

yeah the activity thing is the real issue tbh. i tried it last winter and could never find anyone to actually have a conversation with on 40, just a bunch of beacons and automated stations. maybe i was on at the wrong times idk. FT4 is kinda in between if you just want something faster than FT8 but it has the same problem where theres no room for actual words if you want real text conversations PSK31 still has some life left in it, theres usually activity around 14.070 on 20m and its weirdly satisfying to just type at someone in real time. RTTY is fun too if you want to feel like its 1985

the thing that gets people most often is adapters and connectors. you show up somewhere and your coax connector doesnt match what they have, or you need a BNC to PL-259 and its sitting on your workbench at home. i basically have a whole small ziplock just stuffed with random adapters now and it has saved me probably three or four times at actual served agency events. also a short roll of electrical tape and some small zip ties weigh nothing and you'll use them constantly. another one — write down your radio's basic programming steps on a laminated card and stick it in the case. sounds dumb but if someone else needs to operate your rig and youre busy or indisposed they shouldnt have to guess. ive been doing emcomm stuff for about 12 years and you'd be surprised how often that kind of low tech documentation matters more than the fancy gear.

so i just got my technician license back in october and ive been sitting on my baofeng for like two months just listening and being too scared to actually key up lol. yesterday i finally just did it on the local 2m repeater and some guy named Larry came back to me right away and we talked for like 15 minutes about antennas and he was super patient when i fumbled through my callsign twice. anyway just wanted to share that. if anyone else is lurking and scared to transmit just do it, nobody bit my head off and everyone seemed genuinely happy to hear a new call. still cant believe i have an actual license after studying for like 3 weeks straight

yeah the chasers move fast, i was confused by that too my first couple activations. some of them are really experienced and have like hundreds or thousands of chases logged so they have a whole routine. once you get a few more under your belt and start pre-alerting on sotawatch it gets way more fun because you actually have people waiting for you when you summit. also dont sleep on 2m if you have a handheld, sometimes if 40 is being weird a quick CQ on 146.52 will get you a local chaser especially if theres anyone within line of sight of the summit. saved me once when my antenna situation was a mess and i just needed that 5th contact to qualify.