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

yeah the geomagnetic stuff a few days ago definitely stirred things up. i saw the Kp hit 4 or 5 at one point and that tends to mess with the higher latitude paths for a day or two even after it settles down. the JA opening you caught on 15m actually makes sense timing wise, around that part of the day the greyline does some interesting things depending on the season. honestly 145 SFI is pretty decent these days so the bands should be cooperating more than they are, i'd just keep an eye on the K index and give it another day or so. the solar cycle is ramping up but its not a smooth ride by any means.

might also wanna look at physical layout, like how close is your audio wiring running to the carrier oscillator or any of the RF stuff? even in a steel box you can get enough coupling to cause grief if a mic lead is running parallel to something hot. i had a similar thing on a 20m rig i built years ago and it turned out one of the audio leads was literally draped over the VFO can. moved it like 2 inches and the problem went away completely. also -45dB carrier null is pretty solid for a first build, mine was embarrassing when i first fired it up

congrats on the first activation, 44 QSOs for a first time out is actually solid especially if you were just running SSB on one or two bands. dont stress too hard about the reference number thing — the WWFF system does ask you to self certify basically but its a good idea to double check against the official WWFF finder before you submit the log. if you go to the activator page you can pull up the reference and it usually has a map overlay or at least a description of the park boundaries. just compare that to where you were operating and youre probably fine. most state parks are big enough that if you were clearly inside the park you wont have any issues. the hunter community for WWFF is pretty active, especially the folks chasing awards like the Flora Fauna Century Club or whatever its called. some of them are logging pretty seriously so they do appreciate when activators post their spots to the WWFF cluster or POTA spots app since apparently those cross over sometimes. makes a big difference for pile up size in my experience.

hamstudy is the go-to yeah. there's also the ARRL technician manual if you want an actual book that explains the why behind the answers, not just the questions themselves. some people skip that and just memorize the pool which works fine for passing but you end up understanding basically nothing about how anything works. up to you depending on what your goal is i guess. one thing nobody tells you is to look up where VE sessions are in your area before you even start studying, some places only do them once a month and it's annoying to be ready and have to wait around. the ARRL website has a session finder, just plug in your zip code

yeah the gateway selection thing trips a lot of people up at first. Winlink Express will actually scan and find available gateways automatically when you hit the update button in the channel selection window — you dont have to pick one manually every time, though you can if you want to force it. the list sorted by distance is just a starting point, doesnt mean those are the ones actually hearing you right now. propagation matters way more than distance on HF. the hybrid vs full RMS thing — basically a hybrid gateway is one that has both RF and internet connectivity and does the store-and-forward itself, while a full peer-to-peer setup is a bit different. for most people just trying to send and receive messages through the winlink system a hybrid gateway is exactly what you want and thats what most of the public ones are. dont overthink that part. VARA HF is the right call over WINMOR or Pactor if you dont have a hardware TNC, the performance is pretty decent. with an endfed at 30 feet youll probably be hitting stuff within a few hundred miles fine on 40m, maybe further on 20m depending on time of day. just let the auto-scan run, pick a gateway showing good signal and low traffic, and give it a try. first successful connection it all kind of clicks.

your read is pretty much right. if you just want to receive and you want it to actually work well out of the box, the RSPdx is going to frustrate you way less. the HackRF is cool but its a 8-bit ADC and you really do feel that in crowded band conditions. the SDRplay units use a proper 14-bit frontend and the difference in dynamic range is noticeable, especially anywhere near broadcast AM or any strong local signals. i had a HackRF for about 8 months before i got an RSP2 and honestly the HackRF just collected dust after that except when i needed the TX side for something. for pure monitoring the SDRplay wins without question in my opinion. SDRuno is the native software and its gotten a lot better, kind of cluttered interface but once you learn where everything is its fine. you can also use it with HDSDR or CubicSDR if you prefer those.

the wind thing is real, i use a small bungee cord now to hold the feedpoint to a trekking pole and it helps a lot. also ran 1 watt for half an activation before too so dont feel bad lol

yeah what he said about decoding locally is the move. also just to throw this out there — aprs.fi can sometimes take a few minutes to show a new station, especially if youve never beaconed from that callsign before. but two weeks obviously rules that out lol. one thing i dont see you mention is whether youve heard or seen any digipeaters actually picking you up. if you have a second radio you can throw on 144.390 and just listen, when a digi repeats a packet you usually hear it come back. if youre transmitting fine but no digi is relaying you then the problem is probably audio levels or timing. WIDE1-1 is supposed to hit fill-in digis first so theres probably a few of those in EN52. might also try just WIDE2-2 temporarily to see if that changes anything, sometimes path config in APRSdroid is finicky about how you type it in.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and finally starting to get into chasing DX a bit more seriously. i downloaded the QRZ app and been using DXwatch on my laptop while im operating and honestly its kind of overwhelming at first but i think im starting to get the hang of it my question is really about how people actually use the cluster in practice. like do you just scroll through the spots and tune to whatever looks interesting, or is there a smarter way to filter things down. i have the band filter set to 20m most of the time because thats where i spend most of my time but i still feel like im missing stuff or not really understanding what im looking at half the time also is DXwatch basically the same data as what shows up in logging programs? i use log4om and i think it pulls spots too but i wasnt sure if they were pulling from the same network or different ones. sorry if this is a dumb question just trying to figure out the workflow here

yeah ive been at it for about 6 months now and honestly the just do it approach works better than overthinking the method imo. i used the app called Morse Mania for a while and then switched to just listening to actual QSOs on like 14.025 or wherever and trying to copy what i could even if it was only one or two words. felt dumb at first but it starts clicking eventually. still not great but i can get through a basic exchange now without panicking too bad