Rachel Green

honest answer? it took me about 18 months to feel genuinely comfortable at 20wpm for ragchewing, but i wasnt practicing every single day either. the jump from like 8 to 12 was honestly the hardest part for me, felt like i plateaued there forever. what finally helped was stopping the software practice and just getting on the air. like actually calling CQ on 40m at whatever speed i could manage and just dealing with the chaos of real QSOs. people are generally pretty patient especially if you send QRS in your exchange, most guys will slow right down for you. also the thing nobody really tells you — your brain needs time off. if youre drilling every day and not improving, take two or three days completely away from it and come back. i know that sounds counterintuitive but it worked for me more than once. something about sleep consolidating the patterns or whatever. anyway dont give up, 20wpm is absolutely doable and once you get there it feels completely different from grinding through at 8.

yeah JT65 really did change the game for smaller EME stations, your friend was right about that. back before the weak signal modes guys needed like a full 4-yagi array and a kilowatt just to have a prayer of completing a contact. now people are doing it with what they call "minimal" stations, though minimal is relative when you're talking about moonbounce. for 2m EME you realistically want to be thinking in terms of at least 4 long yagis, something in the 9 to 11 element range stacked, and a legal limit amplifier if you can swing it. your 5 ele yagi on a 991A is going to be very rough. the path loss on 144 MHz EME is somewhere around 252 dB which is just a staggering number when you sit and think about it. that said ive seen guys squeak through contacts with 2 yagis and 500 watts using JT65B if conditions are decent and theyre working a big gun station on the other end. wsjt-x is the software you want, its free, just download it and read through the EME section of the help file. the moon tracking is its own thing too, you'll need to look into rotator control software that knows where the moon is. HRD does it, there's also stuff like PstRotator that a lot of EME ops use. definitely get on the ON4KST chat when the moon is up, that's where everyone coordinates skeds, its pretty active

honestly for your first CQ WW i'd just search and pounce to start — that means you tune around, find someone calling CQ contest, work them, log it, move on. way less stressful than trying to hold a run frequency when you're still getting the hang of the exchange. the exchange for CQ WW is pretty simple, just your callsign, signal report, and CQ zone, so get that figured out before the weekend and you'll be fine. your ts-590 into a dipole is totally workable, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. ive seen guys with way less make thousands of contacts. 20 meters on sunday afternoon in the midwest should treat you pretty well depending on the solar conditions that day. just be patient, sometimes youll have to call a station 3 or 4 times before they pull you out of the noise and thats totally normal, dont get discouraged. re: SOTA during contest weekends — yeah it can be rough. some activators go out anyway and just try to find spots between the contest stations, others just skip those weekends entirely. i think it depends on the person honestly. Field Day dates usually get announced pretty early in the year, check the ARRL website, i think it's always the fourth weekend of june so you can probably just block that off now

both pull from the DX cluster network but they dont always show the same spots because it depends on which nodes they're connected to. i've found dxwatch to be a bit more responsive for filtering by band which is handy when i just want to see whats happening on 20m without scrolling through a wall of 40m ft8 spots. the QRZ one is fine if you're already living in the QRZ ecosystem for logging and lookups. for phone apps, clublog has some decent tools and there's also DX Toolkit which i used for a while, it does a bandmap type view. honestly though i just leave a browser tab open with dxwatch filtered to my bands and check it when something sounds interesting on the radio. the real time spots move fast enough that an app update delay can mean you already missed the opening anyway

yeah the antenna thing gets easier once you figure out a good throw line setup. i use a small arborist throw bag with some paracord and it makes getting wire up into trees way faster, like under 5 mins usually. 15 feet is rough but hey you still made the contacts so win. 40m is honestly my go-to for POTA anyway, almost always get quick pile ups there in the afternoon.

the CW latency thing is real, ran into that myself. anything over like 80ms round trip and youre gonna have a bad time trying to key by hand through a remote, even with the good clients. most people doing serious CW remote stuff just use a keyer that lives at the radio end and send speed/message commands rather than trying to pass the actual keying over the network dont overthink the echolink integration tbh, its a completely different beast and the overlap in use cases is pretty small unless youre trying to do linked repeater stuff which is its own rabbit hole

yeah the band edge thing trips a lot of people up. basically on SSB your signal isnt just a single frequency, it has width to it — typically somewhere around 2.4 to 3 kHz depending on your radio and how its set up. so if you're on upper sideband and you tune to say 7.299, your actual signal could be pushing up past 7.300 which would put part of it out of band. thats the part that matters to the FCC, not just where your dial says you are. most people say stay at least 3 kHz inside the band edge to be safe, so on 40m phone that'd mean not going above like 7.297 or so. the 7.175 lower limit for general phone is real, below that is extra class only on that band so yeah dont go there either. honestly just give yourself a comfortable buffer and you'll be fine, nobody's going to come knocking if you're being reasonable about it

congrats on the first one, 23 contacts is a solid debut honestly. for the logging question, yeah the park reference goes on every QSO in your ADIF file, thats how the system matches everything up on the backend. when you upload the log it needs to see the park reference associated with each contact not just as a header. most logging software like HAMRS or even just a spreadsheet export handles that automatically if you set it up right at the start of the activation. for figuring out if a park has trees and access, honestly the best resource ive found is just looking up the park on google satellite view before you go. you can usually tell pretty quickly if its mostly open fields or has wooded areas. some parks also have their own websites with trail maps and that kind of thing. theres also a POTA activators facebook group where people sometimes post notes about specific parks, its worth searching the park name in there before you go. as for SSB vs FT8, both are very active. SSB still feels like the heart of POTA to me, theres something about actually talking to people in a park that fits the whole spirit of it. but FT8 hunters are definitely out there and it can help you rack up contacts fast especially if propagation is rough. i usually start SSB and if things are slow i might switch over just to get the activation confirmed.

So ive had my FT-7900R sitting in a cup holder tray for about six months now and honestly its fine but every time i reach for a drink i knock the mic off and it just slides around and i hate it. Was thinking about doing a proper mount under the dash or maybe one of those RAM mount setups but i drive a 2019 Tacoma and the under-dash space is basically nonexistent with all the airbag warning stickers everywhere. The remote head option looks clean but i'm nervous about running the separation cable and then having the main unit crammed under the seat. Anyone done this in a pickup? How bad is the heat situation under the seat in the summer? I'm in Arizona so it gets genuinely hot in here. Also not sure if i should just ditch the 7900 and get something newer with built in bluetooth or whatever but that feels like overkill for what i do which is mostly just local repeaters and some simplex when i'm driving around the valley.

so ive been messing around with an arduino uno for the past few weeks trying to get it to control my old CDE Ham-M rotator and honestly its been a bit of a rabbit hole. the rotator controller itself still works fine but the pot feedback is all over the place and i thought hey why not just replace the whole control box logic with something i can actually program. right now ive got the arduino reading the pot voltage through analog pin A0 and its doing okay but im getting like plus or minus 8 degrees of wobble which is way more than id like. not sure if thats a grounding issue or just the pot being worn out after 30 years. im running 5v to the pot and reading it through a voltage divider but maybe i should be using a 10-turn pot as a replacement instead of the original. anyway the bigger question is whether anyone has gone the raspberry pi route instead for something like this — i was thinking a Pi would let me just run a web interface to control it from the shack PC or even remotely which would be pretty sweet for when im doing some satellite work. but then again its probably overkill just for turning an antenna. thoughts?

took mine last spring. the impedance matching and transmission line questions tripped me up the most during practice but on the actual exam i felt like it was a bit more straightforward than some of the harder practice ones. go figure. i used the ARRL Extra Class License Manual and it was pretty dense but thorough. some people skip the book entirely and just do the question pool memorization route which works fine too if you just want to pass. if you actually want to understand the material the book is worth it tho

honest question — how do you even know where the dx op is listening if they dont announce it? im still pretty new to this and every time i try to work a big pileup i have no idea whats happening. like is there software that helps or do you just kind of develop an ear for it over time

ok so i passed my tech a few months ago and ive been listening to a lot of nets and just random QSOs on the local repeater and im noticing that what the rulebook says and what people actually do seems pretty different sometimes. like the FCC says every 10 minutes and at the end of a transmission but i hear people going back and forth for a while without saying their callsign every single time. is that actually fine or are those guys just being sloppy? i dont want to be the guy who does it wrong but i also dont want to be weirdly formal about it if thats not how anyone really operates. also related — on a net, do you ID when you check in and then again when you talk or just when you check in? the net control on our local ARES net seems to handle it differently each week depending on who's running it and its making me more confused not less lol

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now mostly doing HF stuff and some weak signal VHF but ive always had this thing about EME in the back of my head. like the idea of bouncing a signal off the moon and actually making a contact just seems insane to me in the best possible way. anyway i started reading about it and now im more confused than before. i have a 15 element yagi for 2m that i built last summer and a IC-9700 which i know can do digital modes. from what i understand JT65 or Q65 are basically the way to do this now for smaller stations? i saw some old posts about people running massive dish arrays but is any of that even necessary anymore with the digital modes or am i misunderstanding what those modes actually do for you also the preamp situation is confusing me. i keep seeing LNA this relay that and i dont really know what kind of noise figure im actually targeting here. my yagi feedline is about 40 feet of LMR400 which i assume is not ideal but its what i have. any pointers would be appreciated, ive been going in circles reading old threads and the moonbouncers.com stuff for like two weeks now

so im pretty new, got my general last spring and ive been mostly just doing ragchews on 40m and some digital stuff on FT8. but a buddy at the club keeps telling me i need to try contesting and honestly the more i read about it the more curious i get. problem is there are SO many of them and i dont really know where to start or which ones are friendly to newer ops. ive heard of CQ WW obviously, everyone seems to do that one, and ARRL Field Day which i think is coming up again next summer? also been reading a bit about SOTA which i know isnt technically a contest but people talk about it in the same breath sometimes. anyway i guess my question is just — if you had to pick one big event to do as your first real contest experience what would it be and why. i have a modest station, just a 100w rig and a dipole up about 30 feet, nothing fancy.