Daniel Smith

The rate wall around hour 6-8 is usually a band opening question more than an SO2R question in my experience. What bands are you working and what time of the contest does this happen? Because if you're running 15m and it closes on you and your 40m antenna isn't optimized you might just be losing to antenna more than operating strategy. Not saying SO2R isn't useful, it definitely is, but i've seen guys add the complexity and their score didn't really move because the limiting factor was somewhere else. For a tribander at 45ft you might get more bang for your buck from a better low band antenna or even just really nailing your band change timing based on propagation rather than waiting until the rate drops to nothing before you move.

so i've been on HF for about two years now and always ran 100w from a used Icom 718 which is a great radio dont get me wrong but i kept reading about QRP and eventually just ordered a QCX mini kit from QRP Labs because the price was hard to argue with, like 55 bucks or something for a single band 5w CW rig building it took me a weekend afternoon, the instructions are really well written and i'd say anyone who's done basic soldering could handle it. there are a few surface mount parts but they're not tiny tiny, more like medium sized SMD so nothing crazy. got it working first try which honestly surprised me been using it portable mostly, just threw it in a backpack with a 3ah lipo and a linked dipole i made from some wire and it's shockingly capable. worked a station in germany last weekend running 5w to a wire about 20 feet up in a tree. i know thats not a huge deal for some of you but coming from always cranking the power it felt pretty wild the thing i wasnt expecting was how much more i pay attention to propagation now. with 100w you can kind of brute force stuff but at 5w you really have to think about when and where to call. its made me a better operator honestly. anyway just wanted to share, anyone else here doing a lot of QRP portable stuff? curious what rigs or antennas people are using out in the field

the SDR remote mode in RemoteHams does send the IQ stream to the client yeah, but it compresses it pretty aggressively so its not as bad as you'd think on bandwidth. with an IC-7300 you can run it at like 48k or 96k sample rate and the software handles the decimation on the client side. the waterfall does work and its actually one of the nicer things about it versus just piping audio — you can see whats going on in the band and tune around without having to rely on the radio just being parked somewhere. 25 up at the shack end should be more than enough, ive run it on worse. latency is usually fine for SSB and digital, CW gets a little rough if your round trip is over like 150ms or so, just depends on routing. fixed wireless can be weird with jitter sometimes, thats probably worth checking before you commit to CW operating remotely. the linking thing, i think youre conflating two different features. the internet linking in RemoteHams is more for tying into repeater systems and stuff like that, not really for chaining remote sessions. you'd want to look at how the server handles multiple client connections separately if thats what you need.

ok so i passed my technician exam last saturday and the VE team said my paperwork was submitted to the FCC already. im trying to figure out how long this takes and also whether i can actually pick my callsign or if its just assigned to me automatically. ive been reading about vanity calls but honestly the whole thing is confusing. like is a vanity call something i apply for right away or do i have to wait until i have a regular call first? and does the sequential call they give you depend on where you live or is it just whatever is next in line? someone at the session mentioned 1x2 and 2x3 formats and i didnt really understand what that meant either. just trying to get a grip on the process before my call shows up in ULS

yeah the dual-vfo dance on LEOs with linear transponders is genuinely tricky at first, dont feel bad about it. most people struggle for the first dozen passes or so. the thing that helped me most was learning to pre-tune the uplink slightly ahead of where you think you need to be at the start of a pass and then just slowly walk it down as the pass progresses rather than constantly chasing it. AO-73's inverting transponder means if you tune up on uplink the signal goes down in the passband so thats another layer to keep track of. as for which radio on which end, yeah keep your better rig on downlink, 100%. the downlink signals are weak enough that you want every bit of sensitivity you can get. the uplink is more forgiving as long as youre not blasting too much power and you're in the passband. what kind of yagi are you running?

dont overthink it honestly, i spent way too long trying to find the perfect spotting setup when i first got into DX. they're all close enough. the main thing i'd say is make sure whatever you're using lets you filter by band because staring at a wall of 160m spots when youre trying to work 17m is just noise. also some of those mobile apps drain the battery something fierce if you leave them running in the background, just a heads up

i went RTL-SDR v3 -> HackRF and honestly kind of regret not going SDRplay instead for pure receive. the HackRF is cool if you want to transmit or do SDR experimentation stuff but the receive sensitivity is noticeably worse than even a decent RTL dongle in some situations. everyone talks about HackRF like its the ultimate SDR and it kind of is for certain things but straight up lisening its not the best bang for buck. RSP1C is probably the sweet spot for what your describing. the RSPdx has the notch filters and stuff which is nice near AM broadcast stations but probably overkill unless you got a big MW station wiping out half your HF.

I'll second hamstudy but I'd also suggest grabbing the ARRL Technician manual if you can find it at a library or cheap used copy, not because you need to read the whole thing but it explains the why behind a lot of the questions which honestly made the material stick way better for me. I'm the kind of person who has trouble memorizing things without context so knowing what a repeater actually does and why the 600khz offset exists made those questions trivial instead of just another thing to cram. One month is plenty of time, I've seen people pass with a week of studying. The electrical theory section trips some people up but for tech class it really only goes so deep — basic Ohm's law, a little about antennas, nothing too brutal. If you get stuck on something just post here or search the forums, someone has definitely asked about whatever's confusing you before.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and mostly do HF stuff, some 2m SSB when the band opens up nicely, but ive always been kind of obsessed with the idea of EME. like the concept that you can bounce a signal off the freaking moon and have someone on the other side of the planet hear it is just wild to me even after all this time. anyway i started actually looking into what it would take and i have to say the rabbit hole goes deep. i know the basic math, path loss on 2m EME is something like 252 dB which is just an insane number when you think about it. so clearly you need serious antenna gain and a decent power amp. ive been reading about people running 4x yagi arrays which seems more realistic than a big dish for my situation, im in a suburban lot and the HOA is already not thrilled with my existing 2el for 2m. what im confused about is the receive side. i know a lot of guys run a separate preamp right at the feedpoint which makes sense, but im reading conflicting things about how critical the feedline run is and whether i need to actually get into cryogenic LNA territory or if a good quality low noise preamp like the SSB Electronics ones is sufficient for making some initial contacts. also is JT65 the mode everyone is using now or has that changed? i see some references to Q65 which i think is newer? basically just trying to figure out if this is even doable without a farm and a 30 foot dish

yeah what he said about the tones is right. I was in the same boat when i started and spent way too long thinking i was doing something wrong because i had receive tone squelch on and kept missing the first half second of audio when someone keyed up. ended up just turning the receive tone decode off and leaving it open so i hear everything. works fine. the etiquette thing honestly just depends on the repeater and the group, some repeaters have pretty established nets or regular guys who kind of own the thing informally lol, but most places around here at least will welcome you jumping in. worst case they finish their QSO and then you can say hi after. you wont get yelled at for trying

so ive had my technician for about 8 months now and honestly i mostly just do local repeaters and the occasional satellite pass but i keep hearing people talk about HF and working DX and i think i want to get into that. a buddy at my club said i should just go ahead and take the General exam but i dont really know where to start studying or how hard it actually is compared to the tech exam. i remember the tech exam being kind of tricky in spots, mostly the electrical theory stuff. is General a lot harder than that or about the same? and is it worth it even if i dont have an HF rig yet, like should i get the license first and then figure out the equipment situation or the other way around also someone mentioned there are certain bands i can already use as a tech on HF, is that right? i tried looking it up and got confused by the charts

dont overlook power cables and having the right adapters. sounds obvious but i showed up to my first activation with my radio and battery and realized i had the wrong connector and spent like 20 minutes digging around in my car. now i keep a little ziplock bag with anderson powerpole adapters and a couple of fused leads in different configurations. also a multimeter fits in any kit and has saved me more than once trying to figure out why something wasnt working. the FT-857 is a solid choice btw, had mine for years and its been everywhere with me. only thing i'll say is the menus are kinda deep so make sure you really know the radio before you need it in a hurry because fumbling through menus under stress is rough.

Ha, don't worry you're definitely not alone in being confused by all this at first, it took me a while to sort it out too. So here's the basic deal — LoTW (Logbook of the World) is run by the ARRL and it's the one that counts for the big awards like DXCC. It's free to use but you do need to get a certificate from them first which is a little bit of a process, they mail you a postcard to verify your address and then you download the certificate file. Worth doing though because a lot of DX stations upload to it and your confirmed contacts just accumulate over time without you having to do anything. eQSL is a separate thing, totally different organization, and it works for some awards but not DXCC. Some people use both. The physical QSL card through the bureau is the old school way — your national society (ARRL if you're in the US) runs a bureau where you can send and receive cards for cheap, but it's slow, like sometimes months or even a year or more before you get cards back. Direct mail is faster but you have to put a couple dollars or a SAE in the envelope for return postage and it adds up. For your Japan contact, id just upload to LoTW and see if he confirms there, that's probably your easiest path. Congrats on the DX by the way, JA on 20m is a great first one.

so we have a county ARES exercise coming up and im basically being asked to run a standalone field station this time, no shack access, no shore power, nothing. which is fine i've done portable stuff before but always kind of winged it and this time the served agency actually wants us to document our setup and have it be somewhat repeatable so i need to actually think it through properly. running an IC-7300 which i know isnt exactly the lightest field radio but its what i have and im comfortable with it. planning to run maybe 50-100w on HF, probably 40m and maybe some 80m in the evening if the exercise goes that long. for antenna ive been going back and forth between throwing up a end fed halfwave with a 9:1 unun versus just doing a simple dipole with a 4:1 balun. the EFHW is faster to deploy but ive had mixed results with it depending on the site and how much wire i can actually fit. power is honestly the part im most unsure about. thinking about running a 100ah LiFePO4 battery with a small generator as backup, maybe a 2000w inverter unit. the 7300 pulls what, like 20-21 amps at full output? so realistically at 50w im probably looking at somewhere in the 10-12 amp range more or less. trying to figure out if i even need the genny or if the battery can carry me through a 6-8 hour op period without stressing it too much. anyone done similar setups and have thoughts on the antenna choice or power math? also curious about grounding, last time i had some RF in the shack on 80m and im not sure if it was antenna or just the feedline being too close to everything

the split positioning thing is real and way more people should pay attention to it. ive watched ops on dxpeditions who have a very distinct pattern -- some work up the band, some bounce around pseudo-randomly, some have a tell where they come back to the same spot every few minutes. if you can decode that youre way ahead of the guy just blindly calling on 5 up. one thing id add for low band stuff since you mentioned it -- 40 and 80m pileups are a completely different beast because propagation is doing weird things and the op might be hearing entirely different parts of the world than you think. ive had good luck on 40m waiting until the DX is maybe 20-30 min past their sunrise when the path is still open but some of the eu stations are starting to fade out. less competition and sometimes the op is actually listening harder because the pileup thinned a bit. timing the grayline stuff properly matters a lot more down there than on 20 where everybody's workable at the same time. also your point about power is interesting. ive heard that argument before and i go back and forth on it. cleaner signal probably does help but i think the bigger thing is just not splattering. if your rig or amp is not clean youre literally making noise across the split and ops learn to ignore that region. seen it happen.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me, KFF-1234 if anyone knows it, and honestly it went way better than i expected but i have some questions for folks whove done more of these. i set up a simple endfed with my KX2 and just started calling on 40m, picked up maybe 14 contacts in about an hour and a half before the bugs got too bad and i had to pack up. logged everything on paper because my phone was almost dead and i hadn't thought to bring a portable battery for it, which is something ill fix next time for sure. anyway my main question is about the log upload — do i just go to the WWFF website directly or is there some other way people submit their logs? i saw something about using ADIF files but im not totally sure my logging software exports in exactly the right format they want. also does it matter if some of my contacts didn't give me a signal report, a few people just gave their callsign and moved on, which i get, chasers are busy. oh and is 14 contacts enough to actually validate the activation? i thought i read somewhere that you need 44 but then someone in another thread said thats for SOTA and WWFF is different. getting confused between the programs honestly

so i've been meaning to do this for like two years and i finally just sat down this weekend and started pulling stuff together for a proper go-kit. i'm an extra class, been licensed about six years, but honestly i've never done any real emcomm activations, mostly just contest operating from home. figured with how things have been lately it's probably smart to have something ready to grab if things go sideways. what i have so far: IC-7300 (yeah i know it's probably overkill for a go-kit but it's what i have), a 40ah lifepo4 battery i picked up last year, a random wire antenna with a 9:1 unun, some coax, my log book, a few basic tools. i threw it all in a plastic tote from the hardware store which is fine i guess but it's not exactly organized. i feel like im definitely missing stuff but i cant figure out what. like i know theres gonna be that moment where im set up somewhere and i go "oh i forgot the thing" — that always happens. anyone been doing this a while and can tell me what the obvious stuff is that i'll kick myself for forgetting?

honestly the technician test isnt bad at all, i was super worried about the electronics questions too but most of it is pretty straightforward once you go through the material a few times. i used hamstudy.org basically exclusively and passed no problem. what it does is show you the actual pool questions and track which ones you keep getting wrong so you can focus on those. the pool is public so the exact questions on your test come from it, nothing surprises you. i think i studied maybe two weeks on and off, maybe an hour a night. the hardest parts for me were the ohms law stuff and some of the regulations around operating privileges but even those click after a while. find a local club too if you can, a lot of them hold exam sessions and some even do free licensing classes which helps a ton if you like learning with people around

i went through the same thing when i upgraded. what helped me was just keeping a frequency reference open on my phone for the first few months. the technician to general jump on HF is honestly a bigger deal than people make it out to be because suddenly youve got all these new bands and each one has little sub-segments carved out for different modes and license classes and it takes a while for it to click. dont stress too much about 14.200 specifically thats generally a calling frequency area and lots of activity there from all classes. the person who said that to you might have just been having a bad day or misheard something

Don't feel bad, this trips up a lot of new hams. First thing I'd double check is whether the repeater requires a tone to access it or if it's carrier squelch open — some clubs list the tone as what you'll hear on the output but don't actually require it for access. That said 100hz is 100.0 Hz PL which on the Baofeng is sometimes labeled differently in the menu so worth going through that again carefully. Also and this is something people forget — make sure your radio is actually transmitting. On the UV-5R the LED should go red when you key up. If you can get a friend or family member to listen on a scanner or another radio nearby while you transmit you'll know real quick if RF is actually coming out. Six miles is nothing for a 2m repeater with a decent antenna on a hilltop so range probably isnt your issue. Just take it slow and don't give up, we've all been there fumbling with a new radio trying to figure out why nothing works.

yeah i'll be there, me and a couple guys from the repeater group are carpooling up saturday morning. they definitely still do the tailgate swap outside, or at least they did last year. i scored a whole box of coax connectors and some random crimping tools for basically nothing. bring cash though cause half those guys dont do venmo or whatever

yeah the Q codes go way back, like telegraph era stuff, so theres a lot of them. the ones you'll hear most on HF are QSL which just means confirmed or acknowledged, QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural static/noise, QTH is your location, QRZ means who is calling me, and QSY means change frequency. OM just means old man, its how hams refer to other male hams, not rude at all, its kind of a term of respect in a weird way. YL is young lady for female operators. there IS an official ITU list of all the Q codes but honestly you dont need to memorize all of them, just learn the 10-15 common ones and you'll follow most conversations fine. 73 is best regards basically, and 88 is love and kisses which you mostly hear people send to YLs. oh and if someone says QRO they want more power, QRP means low power operation which is a whole hobby unto itself.

im kind of in the same boat as you, been at DXCC for about a year now and sitting at 87 confirmed on LoTW. the zone thing tripped me up too — i just keep a CQ zone reference sheet bookmarked and check it before i log anything for WAZ tracking. most logging software like Log4OM or DXKeeper will actually show you the zone automatically when you enter the callsign prefix so that helps a lot. also worth knowing that some entities that count for DXCC are in the same CQ zone as a dozen other places, so WAZ actually gets easier in some ways once youve worked a bunch of DXCC stuff. the hard zones for me have been like zone 2 and some of the pacific ones. 73

honestly 4-5 watts out of an IRF510 on 40m is pretty decent for a first build. dont get too hung up on what the phone spectrum analyzer says, those things are not exactly calibrated test equipment and can show artifacts that arent really there. i would trust the scope more and even then your probe ground lead being too long can introduce ringing artifacts that look like they're part of the signal. try shorting your scope probe ground lead as short as physically possible and see if that shoulder changes. i spent like a whole weekend diagnosing a problem that was just my probe clip flopping around.

the encryption thing is pretty clear actually, part 97.113 says you cant use codes or ciphers to obscure the meaning of your transmissions. the exception people sometimes bring up is things like space telecommand or some specific narrow cases, but for everyday operating on HF or VHF you just cant do it. plain and simple. people conflate this with digital modes sometimes but like FT8 or PSK31 arent encrypted, theyre just encoding, totally different thing and completely legal. as for enforcement, the FCC honestly doesnt have a ton of resources dedicated to ham radio monitoring these days. that doesnt mean you should push it though. the ham community itself does a lot of the policing through things like the ARRL volunteer monitor program and honestly just other hams on the bands. getting a bad reputation in a local repeater community is probably a more immediate consequence than an FCC notice of violation for most people. that said the FCC absolutely can and does act on complaints, ive seen forfeitures issued for things like operating outside your license class privileges. just know your band plan and your license class limits and youll be fine 99% of the time