Steven Johnson

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has this whole setup in his garage and it looks really cool, he suggested i get licensed before he shows me how to use any of it. i went online and found out there are different levels of licenses but im not really sure which one to go for first or how hard the test actually is. is there like a standard way people study for this? i downloaded some app but it just throws questions at me without really explaining why the answers are right. also how long does it take most people to pass, im not in a rush but kind of want to know what im getting into

oh man this sounds exactly like where i was about a year ago. the mushy sound is almost always a combination of two things — paddle tension being way too light and the keyer weight set wrong. most cheap paddles come from the factory with almost zero tension on the contacts and your fingers end up basically resting on them the whole time which causes all kinds of double-hitting and sloppy spacing. try tightening the tension screws on the paddle — usually they're little hex screws on the side or underneath. you want the paddle to spring back with a little bit of authority. not stiff exactly but it should feel like it actually wants to return to center. and then honestly, slow down a bit before you speed up. i know that sounds annoying to hear but cleaning up your fist at 8 wpm is way more useful than sloppy 12 wpm. the MFJ practice keyers are decent enough to learn on, dont let anyone talk you out of using it.

so i got my technician license a few months ago and ive been reading about CW operation and it honestly sounds really cool to me, like the idea of being able to work dx with low power using just dots and dashes is pretty appealing. but i have no idea how to actually learn it. i downloaded a couple apps but i dont know if im doing it the right way or just wasting time. like do you learn the letters one at a time or what? i feel like ive been staring at charts trying to memorize the patterns visually and i keep reading that thats the wrong approach but then what IS the right approach. also how long did it realistically take you to get to where you could actually use it on the air

same boat as you honestly, i started checking into nets a few months ago and the nervousness does go away. mostly. i still mess up my phonetics sometimes when its a busy frequency and everyone is waiting. but yeah the weekly schedule thing really helps build the habit of actually getting on the air instead of just tinkering with the radio in the shack which is what i was doing before lol

went through the exact same confusion when i got my general lol. one thing that helped me was just listening a lot before transmitting, you start to get a feel for where the activity actually is on the band. the extra class portion below 7.175 you'll notice is usually a bit more crowded with dx and whatnot and if you try calling there on phone someone will usually let you know pretty quick ha. just hang out up around 7.200 area to start, plenty of activity there and youre solidly in general territory

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general) and i feel pretty comfortable on the radio at this point but honestly i still get a little nervous just randomly calling CQ and hoping someone answers. feels awkward when nobody comes back lol. a buddy at my local club mentioned that nets are actually a great way to just get comfortable talking on the air because theres like a structure to it and you know when your turn is coming. that actually makes a lot of sense to me. anyway im wondering if anyone has recommendations for nets that are just... fun? not emergency prep stuff necessarily, just casual conversation or something. i have HF (a kenwood ts-590s that i got used) and i can do 2m/70cm on a baofeng which i know everyone has opinions about but it works fine for local stuff. im in the midwest if that matters. would love to hear what nets people actually enjoy checking into regularly rather than just doing it out of obligation

first qso nerves are real haha. mine was during a net and i keyed up at the wrong time and doubled with someone and just panicked and didn't say anything for like 10 seconds which felt like forever. net control was cool about it though. you'll get used to the rhythm pretty quick. also dont stress about the baofeng stuff people give grief about it online but on a local repeater it does the job fine when youre just starting out

im kind of in the same boat as you lol been meaning to learn for ages. someone in my local club told me to just listen to a lot of cw on the bands even before you can copy it, like just get your ear used to the rhythm of it. not sure if thats actually good advice or not but it seemed to make sense. i downloaded morse mania on my phone which is decent for drilling individual letters but yeah copying actual qsos is a whole other thing i havent gotten there yet either

so i finally dragged myself out to the backyard last weekend with my FT-817 and a pair of arrow antennas and actually made some contacts through AO-73. been wanting to do this for probably two years and just never got around to it. overall it went better than i expected but i have some stuff i cant quite figure out. the doppler correction is what's killing me. im doing it manually which i know is kind of painful but i dont have a rotator setup yet so im just hand holding the antennas anyway. i was using gpredict on my laptop to track the pass and calling out frequencies to myself like an idiot but i kept losing my own downlink signal partway through the pass because i wasnt compensating fast enough on the uplink side. like i'd find myself, then work the doppler on the downlink a bit and then suddenly my uplink is wrong and i've drifted somewhere else in the passband. also -- the inverting transponder thing. i knew about it going in but i still keep getting confused in the moment whether to tune up or down. is there a trick people use to keep this straight in their heads while also trying to track the bird and hold the antenna and watch gpredict? feels like a 4 handed operation sometimes. any tips from people who've been doing this a while would be great.

so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been messing around on 2m and 70cm with my local repeaters which is fine but honestly im starting to feel like im missing out on the whole HF thing. everyone at my club keeps talking about working DX and 40m and whatever and i kind of just nod along like i know what theyre saying lol anyway i picked up a copy of the ARRL General study guide and flipped through it and honestly some of it looks pretty intimidating. the electrical theory sections especially, like i remember doing some of this in school but that was a long time ago. is there a certain part of the exam that trips people up the most? and is HamStudy actually worth using or should i just stick with the book also not sure if this matters but im not planning on buying an HF rig right away, i just want the license first so i can use the club station. does that change anything about how i should study or what i should focus on

honestly the thing that helped me most was just picking a box and starting. i spent like a year planning the perfect kit and then one of the older guys in my club basically said just put what you have in a rubbermaid and go from there. he was right lol. the kit evolves once you actually use it because you figure out fast what you grab and what just sits there. also dont underestimate having a laminated quick-reference sheet in there. frequencies for your local repeaters, your ARES net info, ICS forms if you do served agency stuff — i printed mine out and laminated it at the library for like fifty cents and its been in the kit ever since. when youre tired or stressed at 2am its nice to not have to remember everything.

So ive been licensed about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF DX, some 2m weak signal stuff, and im starting to get the moonbounce itch. I know its not exactly a plug and play kind of thing but ive been reading up and honestly the more i read the more i feel like i dont fully understand the scope of what this takes equipment wise. Right now i have a FT-991A and a decent 2m setup — M2 5WL yagi on a light az/el mount i built for satellite work. I know that antenna is way too small for serious EME but i keep seeing people say you can do JT65B contacts with a single yagi if your power is there. How much power are we actually talking? I have an old Mirage brick that does maybe 160w out but i feel like thats not even close. Also what are people actually using for az/el control because my satellite mount is pretty slow and im not sure itd track the moon well enough. Anyway not looking to spend 50k on a dish setup, just want to understand if there's a realistic path in with what i have or close to it.

So ive been messing around with remote station control for about a year now and finally got to a point where things mostly work but its kind of a patchwork of stuff. I have a Pi running rigctld, a separate audio path through mumble, and then some custom scripts to handle the antenna switching. It works but its fragile and every time something reboots in the wrong order the whole thing needs to be babied back to life. A buddy at the club was showing me RemoteHams and the SDR remote side of things and honestly it looked pretty polished compared to what im running. But I'm not sure if its worth switching over or if id just be trading one set of headaches for another. The internet linking part is what im most curious about — does anyone actually use it for serious HF work or is it mostly casual listening and ragchewing. Like can you run a contest remotely through it or is the latency too painful for that kind of thing. Also curious if anyone has tried mixing SDR remote for receive monitoring with a traditional transceiver on the transmit side. Seems like that could work but idk if the RemoteHams client handles that kind of hybrid setup gracefully.

so i finally pulled the trigger on one of those QSK kits ive been eyeing for like two years, ended up going with a bitx40 variant that a guy in our club had leftover parts for. took me about three weekends to get it together, mostly because i kept second-guessing my solder joints and had to reflow a few of the toroids which was honestly kind of a pain but also kind of satisfying once it worked. first contact was a guy in ohio, im in new mexico, running maybe 4 watts into a wire i threw up in a tree. i know thats not that impressive for some people but i was pretty floored honestly. just the idea that this little thing i built with my own hands was making it that far. been doing ham radio for about six years but mostly just running a 100 watt rig into a yagi so this felt totally different. anyway wondering if anyone else here has done the QRP kit thing and what your experience was. also curious if people mostly stick to CW for this or if SSB QRP is worth bothering with. ive heard mixed things

just went through this myself like 6 months ago, got to 20wpm in december finally. honestly what helped me more than anything was the CW academy, its free and you work with a group which sounds weird but it really keeps you accountable. also just sending more helped me, i had been mostly receiving and my sending was sloppy which i think was messing with how i heard code in my head if that makes sense.

The training might seem like a lot, but it's designed to prepare you for real emergencies. Level 1 is for those new to emergency communications, and your local ARES group will adapt the training to meet local needs. Attend a few nets first to get comfortable with radio procedures, then tackle the online courses.

im pretty new to all this but i noticed the same thing from my end, just got my general a few months ago and ive been trying to make contacts on 40 most evenings. some nights its great and some nights i cant raise anybody. somebody told me it has to do with the solar flux or something, i dont really fully understand it yet but i downloaded one of those propagation apps and try to check it before i sit down at the radio now

same boat here a while back. ended up just building a 40m vertical out of some aluminum tubing i got from a hardware store, maybe 33 feet total with a loading coil to shorten it a bit cause i couldnt get full height. threw down about 20 radials and it was fine but not amazing. the dipole still beat it into europe most nights if im being honest. vertical did seem a bit better into asia and the pacific though so i guess it depends where youre trying to work. probably just keep both if you can.

the weight adjustment changes the dot to dash ratio basically — heavier weight means your dots get a tiny bit longer relative to standard timing, lighter makes them shorter. most people find somewhere around 50 is fine but it really depends on the keyer. the 590 keyer is actually pretty decent so i wouldnt blame that. cheap paddles with a lot of wobble are a real problem though, that could definately be part of it. the contact gap and tension settings matter a lot more than people realize when youre starting out. try tightening the tension a bit and see if that helps you feel more in control. and honestly just slow way down when your sending feels sloppy — like go down to 8 wpm if you have to — and record yourself again. its tedious but thats how you find out where the muscle memory is breaking down. i spent like three weeks just doing the alphabet over and over at 10 wpm before it started to click for me.

oh man the special event thing yes i feel that, i missed the whole set of stations for a big anniversary thing last year because i only found out like two days before it ended. someone mentioned it in passing on a local repeater and i scrambled to work a couple of them but missed most of it. now i follow a few ham radio guys on social media just because they tend to post about that stuff and it actually helps more than i expected. theres one account that basically just reposts special event and DXpedition news and its been pretty useful

yeah the FT8 video game thing is real lol. i still run it because DXCC isnt gonna fill itself but i get what you mean. tried JS8Call twice and both times i just sat there watching the waterfall with nobody responding so i gave up probably too early. might try again on 40m like the other guy said. one thing i will say is that for actual weak signal work if you havent tried FT4 during contests its surprisingly useful, faster than FT8 and still pulls stuff out of the noise that SSB would never touch. ran it during a state QSO party and it was kind of a revelation for low power operation.

so ive been messing around on 17 and 20 meters the past couple weeks and the band conditions have just been all over the place. one evening ill work a station in japan no problem and then the next day i cant even hear europe and i'm in the midwest. checked the solar flux index and its been bouncing around between like 150 and 190 which i thought would be good but honestly i cant predict whats gonna happen anymore been doing this about 4 years now and i feel like the bands have a personality of their own lately. had a wild opening to south america last tuesday around 1800z that lasted maybe 45 minutes and then just gone. like someone pulled a plug. my buddy in iowa didnt hear any of it. is this kind of thing normal during rising solar cycle or am i just lucky/unlucky with timing also been checking DXmaps and pskreporter obsessively which probably isnt helping my sanity. anyone else riding the solar rollercoaster right now

So I finally decided to just go do it. Been hunting for about three months now and figured it was time to actually get out there and activate something. Im heading to a state park about 45 minutes from me, K-4892 I think, never seen anyone else activate it so maybe that'll help with the pileup situation or whatever. Bringing my KX3 and a 40m EFHW that I've used in the backyard a few times, should be fine I think. Planning to hit 40m and maybe try 20m if conditions look good. My question is mostly around the logging — do I really need to self spot on the POTA app or will people just find me on the RBN? And how strict are they about the 10 contact minimum, like what happens if I only get 8 and have to leave? Also not sure how early to post on the activator schedule thing. I've seen some activations pop up the morning of, some a few days before. Does it matter much for a relatively rare park?

the SDR side of RemoteHams is kind of a separate beast honestly. last time i dug into it they had the RCForb client handling most of the conventional rig stuff and then there was a different SDR mode that felt bolted on. i ran an SDRplay RSP1A at my remote QTH for a while feeding into it and the latency was... acceptable is probably the word. not great. anything more than about 150ms round trip and trying to actually tune around feels sluggish enough to be annoying. your AllStar idea isnt crazy but i think youre describing two different problems that dont actually overlap much. AllStar is great for linking repeaters and doing phone patches and whatever but its not gonna help you with HF remote control in any direct way. unless youre thinking of using the VOIP side to carry audio somehow, which people have done in weird janky ways but i wouldnt recommend it when you have a proper internet connection already. whats your upstream bandwidth like at the remote site, thats usually where people hit the wall

congrats on the first one, those are always fun. so yeah the 44 contacts thing is for the full Flora Fauna Diploma credit, but 10 is all you need to count the activation as valid for the reference itself. you did fine with 18. for logging you basically upload your adif to the WWFF log submission — there's a spot on the wwff.us site or the global one depending on which program you're working through since there's a North American group too. the field you want in the adif is SIG and SIG_INFO, so SIG would be WWFF and then SIG_INFO is the actual reference like KFF-1234 or whatever yours was. a lot of the standard logging programs have added this but phone apps can be hit or miss. i usually just edit the adif manually in a text editor before submitting, takes like two minutes once you know what youre looking for. LOTW is separate and doesnt really handle the WWFF references natively so that upload is mostly just for regular qsl purposes. the WWFF database is its own thing.