Rebecca Martinez

so ive been chasing rare DX for about 4 years now and pileups have always been my weak spot, like i could hear the DX station fine but just could never get through. the VP6 operation last month was the first time i really felt like i knew what i was doing and i wanted to write it up while its still fresh. what finally clicked for me was really listening to where the DX was actually pulling calls from before i transmitted even once. i spent probably 20 minutes just watching the pattern - he was working split obviously, listening up about 3-5 kHz, and he kept coming back to a pretty narrow slice of that range. most guys were just blasting away across the whole spread and honestly that crowd of signals wasnt helping anyone. once i figured out roughly where he was actually digging i put my VFO B there and waited. not in the middle of the pack but slightly above where the density was highest. and i only sent my call once, maybe twice tops, then listened. that part is harder than it sounds when youre excited and just want to key up constantly. also running 500w into a 4-element yagi up at 50 feet pointed dead at Pitcairn probably didnt hurt. but i genuinely think the operating technique made more difference than the power this time. anyone else have stuff that works consistently or is this just always going to be voodoo

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into our local 2m weekly net last tuesday and honestly it did not go the way i hoped. i had my call sign ready, knew the frequency, had the repeater tones programmed in fine, but when the net control called for check-ins i just kind of... blanked. i gave my call and then when he came back to me and asked for my name and location i stumbled over my words and said my city wrong at first then corrected myself and it was just embarrassing. nobody said anything mean or anything but i felt like an idiot. anyway my question is basically - is there like an unwritten script people follow for nets? i know every net is a little different but is there some standard way you're supposed to respond when net control comes back to you? i feel like if i just knew what words to expect and what words to say back it would go a lot smoother. also is it weird to just listen to a bunch of nets before checking in just to get a feel for how it goes? i did that for a few weeks before trying but still wasnt totally prepared i guess

im also thinking about going, maybe we could carpool lol. i need to offload some gear anyway so might just grab a tailgate spot. do you know if they still charge for those or is it included with admission

oh man i remember being exactly where you are, felt like 5wpm was just permanently where i lived. the thing that finally cracked it open for me was switching to character speed training, like using Farnsworth timing where the individual characters are sent at maybe 15 or even 20wpm but the spacing between them is stretched way out so your overall copy speed is still slow enough to follow. the idea is your brain starts learning the sound of each letter as a whole chunk instead of counting individual dits and dahs which is what probably has you stuck right now. once you start hearing K as that dah-dit-dah sound instead of thinking "long short long" youll notice things start clicking faster. also honestly just listening to actual on-air QSOs even if you cant copy them yet, just have it on in the background while youre doing something else. it sounds weird but it helped me get used to real sending rhythms instead of the super clean machine-generated stuff. took me about another four months to get comfortable around 15wpm so dont be too hard on yourself, three months in you're right on track really

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still feel weird about when to use phonetics. like on a clear 2m repeater with a guy i talk to every week i feel dumb going "Kilo Foxtrot Seven" every single time i id. but then on HF i feel like i HAVE to or nobody will hear me right. is there some kind of rule for this or is it just feel? i dont want to sound like im being overly formal when it isnt needed but i also dont wanna be that guy who nobody can copy because i just rattled off my call too fast also does anyone else mix up Whiskey and Yankee when theyre tired lol. asking for a friend

congrats man, that first QSO feeling is real. dont let anyone tell you 2m is boring or whatever, i worked that band for years before i ever touched HF and honestly the local community you build on the repeaters is worth it. find out if there's a local club near you, most of them have elmers who will let you sit in and watch them operate which is how i learned way more than any book taught me the net thing gets easier fast btw, after like 3 or 4 times you wont even think about it

ive missed so many special events because i found out too late lol. someone in my club told me about a railroad anniversary special event station like two days after it ended and i was pretty bummed about that one. i started following a couple ham radio groups on facebook and that actually helps more than i expected, people post about upcoming stuff pretty regularly there. also some of the nets i check into on 2m have a "announcements" section at the end where net control specifically asks if anyone has club news or upcoming events, might be worth sticking around for that part if your net does something similar. the 40m nets ive been on tend to move a little faster so that part gets skipped sometimes when conditions are rough

the doppler thing is almost certainly your issue. on a linear transponder you cant just shift one side independently because the transponder inverts the sideband, so if you're not tracking both ends properly relative to the passband center you're going to be chasing your own tail. what i do with gpredict is set up two separate radio profiles and let it handle the doppler on both simultaneously but you have to make sure the offset is entered correctly for the center frequency of the transponder passband, not just the nominal downlink. also FO-29 has been pretty inconsistent for a while, some passes are great and some the transponder just isnt on or its in a weird mode. the JAMSAT guys post status updates sometimes and that helps know when to bother. 25w to a yagi is fine, honestly i work it with less on a good pass. dont crank it up thinking that'll fix it, you'll just cause intermod issues for everyone else using the transponder at the same time.

gpredict is still what most people use and honestly its pretty solid once you get it configured with fresh keps. the doppler correction plugin can actually talk to some rigs directly over CAT if you want to go that route, makes it a lot less hectic. i run it on a raspberry pi with a small screen velcroed to my tripod so i can see az/el and doppler all at once without fumbling with a phone three contacts on your first pass is genuinely decent btw, a lot of people get nothing first time out because theyre not ready for how fast everything moves. the two radio thing does get easier, some guys use a small mixer board or just tape the ht to the yagi boom which frees up a hand. FO-29 is worth trying too when its behaving, similar linear transponder and sometimes less crowded than AO-73

honestly the memorization approach works fine for passing the test, plenty of people do it that way. hamstudy.org is probably the best free resource out there, it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and focuses on those. if you keep grinding it until you're consistently hitting like 85-90% on the practice tests you'll be in good shape for the real thing. that said if you actually want to understand what youre doing on the air, gordon west's technician study guide is worth flipping through. its not a huge book and he explains the why behind most of the questions. the math stuff is really just a handful of formulas and once you see how ohms law works even once it kind of clicks. E=IR and thats basically it for most of the tech exam math.

yeah im going, drove up from Tennessee last year and it was totally worth it. the flea market is honestly the best part if you ask me, indoor vendor stuff is cool but the real deals are outside with the tailgaters. get there early though like seriously early, all the good stuff gets picked over fast and by 10am most of the decent rigs are gone. also bring cash, a lot of the guys dont want to deal with paypal or venmo

first thing id check honestly is whether the TX bandwidth setting got changed somehow, on the 7300 you can set it under the mode settings and if it got bumped to narrow or something like that it would absolutely kill your highs and make you sound like you're in a fish tank. go into the set menu and look at the tx filter settings, bet thats it. firmware updates on icom have been known to reset some of that stuff to defaults. if thats not it then yeah could be hardware, ive seen electrolytic caps on the mic amp board cause exactly the kind of degraded audio you're describing, especially on rigs that are a few years old and run warm. but start with the software stuff first before you crack it open, save yourself the headache

So we ran a simulated disaster exercise through our county ARES group this past Saturday, kind of a mock earthquake scenario where the assumption was all repeaters down, no internet, no cell service. Just HF and some simplex VHF work between net control and the various EOC check-in points scattered around the county. I've been licensed about 11 years now and I thought I was pretty well prepared but honestly this drill humbled me a bit. My go-bag radio had a battery I hadn't topped off in like 4 months and it was showing it. Got maybe 90 minutes out of it before I was scrambling. Also realized my written frequency list was from 2019 and two of the simplex channels we were supposed to use had changed. Nobody told me, or maybe they did and I missed the email, but either way I was that guy on the net asking for a repeat of the working frequency which felt pretty embarrassing in a real scenario context. The bigger lesson for me was message handling. We did some basic ICS-213 traffic and I have not practiced that in probably two years. My forms were a mess and the NCS had to ask me to retransmit twice. All stuff that would be genuinely bad in a real activation. Anyone else do exercises recently and have that kind of oh-no moment? Curious what trips people up most. Feels like the stuff that gets you is always the basics not the fancy gear.

so i've been pretty frustrated with HF for the past few weeks, just dead quiet on most everything, and then yesterday afternoon i just happened to have the radio on while doing other stuff and 10 meters was absolutely wild. worked a bunch of stations in South America and even got a ZL2 in there which honestly shocked me because i haven't heard anything from that direction in ages. checked the solar flux after and it was up around 180 or so, which is way higher than it's been lately. is that what caused it or is it just coincidence? i'm still trying to wrap my head around how all this propagation stuff actually works. like i get the basics — sunspots, ionosphere, blah blah — but i dont really understand why some days are great and others you cant even hear the beacon a few hundred miles away. also noticed 12m had some life in it too, barely touched that band before. anyone else seeing this or was i just lucky with timing?

okay so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and i just need someone to tell me to stop agonizing over it. currently running a 40m dipole at about 25 feet, fed with coax, works fine, gets me contacts, whatever. but ive been reading about verticals and how they have a lower angle of radiation which is supposedly better for DX and now im second guessing everything. my yard is not huge. i can fit a vertical easier than i can get a dipole any higher than it already is. the thing is, i keep reading that verticals need a really good ground radial system to be efficient and that sounds like a lot of work to bury a bunch of wire. is the low angle of radiation actually going to make a noticeable difference in real world use or is this one of those things that only matters on paper? i mostly work SSB, some digital, mostly stateside but would love to work europe more consistently. not trying to start a dipole vs vertical holy war, i know people have strong feelings about this lol, just genuinely trying to figure out if its worth the project