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.

yeah 17 does that, its kind of infamous for it honestly. you can have the flux looking great and the band just sits there dead as a doornail, then an hour later its wall to wall JAs. the thing about solar flux is it tells you potential, not what the band is actually doing right now. the ionosphere has this lag to it and local conditions like the solar terminator passing through can kick things open fast. the ZL and JA path from north america tends to peak in that window youre describing, roughly late morning to early afternoon UTC depending on the season. europe from the east coast usually wants to be more like 0700-1100 UTC, so if you were listening at 1400 you might have just been catching the tail end or a grey line ghost. i use dxmaps to watch where spots are actually coming from in real time, that plus pskreporter if youre running digital. way more useful than just the SFI number alone once you get a feel for it.

welcome welcome. im pretty new myself, got my ticket about 4 months ago. the baofeng is fine honestly i still use mine even though i also have a yaesu now. study for your general when you get a chance, opens up a lot of HF stuff which is where things get really interesting imo

so we finally got around to doing a proper tabletop sim that turned into a partial field exercise last saturday and honestly it was eye opening in ways i did not expect. the scenario was a major flood event cutting off the county EOC from like three of the outlying towns, we had to establish comms using only what we could carry in our go bags plus whatever was at the fixed stations. first thing that fell apart was the net control situation. our primary NC had a family thing come up last minute and the backup guy, good operator, solid guy, but he hadnt practiced the role in probably eight months and it showed. traffic was getting garbled, people were doubling up on frequency, the whole thing got pretty chaotic for the first 20 minutes or so. once things settled it was fine but man those first 20 minutes felt very real in a bad way. the other thing that got me was how fast batteries died when people were actually transmitting versus just assuming they would last because they tested fine at home. one of our guys had a go bag he said was ready to go and his HT was basically dead after 90 minutes of moderate use. we've been talking about standardizing on battery requirements for a while but this kind of hammered it home. anybody else done sims recently and run into stuff like this? curious what other groups are doing for the NC succession thing especially.

So we ran a county-wide simulated emergency exercise Saturday and I figured I'd write up some thoughts while its still fresh. Overall it went better than last year but there were some pretty glaring gaps that showed up once we actually put stress on the system. The big one for us was net control discipline. We had three different operators rotate through NCS duties during the six hour sim and the handoffs were rough — like really rough. The incoming operator didnt have a complete picture of what traffic had already been passed and we ended up with duplicate messages going to the EOC which caused some confusion on the served agency side. One of the CERT coordinators actually asked us if we had two different nets running because the info she was getting seemed contradictory. The other thing that bit us was everyone defaulting to the repeater even after we specifically briefed that the scenario included a repeater failure at hour two. Old habits I guess. We lost probably 20 minutes of effective communication time while people figured out why nobody was answering on the usual frequency. What I thought went well though — our digital guys were awesome. Winlink traffic was flowing smoothly, the two operators running packet did a fantastic job keeping the message log clean. That was a real bright spot. Anyone else done exercises recently where a specific failure mode surprised you? Curious what other groups are dealing with.

yeah what he said about the lithium math is pretty much right. one thing i'd add — if you do go battery, dont just assume 100ah means 100ah usable. most manufacturers spec them at like a 20-hour discharge rate so if you're pulling harder than that you're not getting the full rated capacity. lithium is way better than lead acid in this regard but still worth knowing. personally i run a 50ah lithium with a 100w panel and a cheap PWM controller and it keeps up fine for a full day of light to moderate operating. wouldnt trust it for continuous high-power digital work but for voice emcomm stuff its been totally fine. generator stays in the truck as a just-in-case.

so ive been trying to get Winlink Express working for a few weeks now and im pulling my hair out. the basic idea seemed simple enough, install the software, configure a soundcard TNC or get a hardware one, point it at a nearby RMS gateway and send email. except nothing is working the way the tutorials say it should. my current setup is a IC-7300 feeding into the built in USB audio, VARA HF as the modem, and im trying to hit a gateway thats supposedly about 80 miles away on 40m. i can see the gateway in the map, it shows active, but when i initiate a session i get a connection attempt and then it just times out or i get a partial handshake and then nothing. checked the frequency offsets, made sure VOX or the CI-V PTT is actually keying the radio (it is, i can see the ALC moving), levels seem okay. not sure if its a propagation thing or something wrong with my config. also im confused about the whole RMS vs Winlink gateway distinction. like is every RMS node also a full gateway to the internet or are some of them just relay points? i thought they all connected back to the CMS servers but maybe im wrong. and do i need to register my callsign somewhere before i can use the network or does it just work once the software is configured? any help appreciated, this is for emcomm work and i'd really like to get it sorted before our next exercise

went last year and yeah the outdoor flea market was smaller than i remembered from like 2018 but still worth it honestly. found a barely used 706 for way less than i expected. the forums and talks inside are hit or miss depending on what youre into but the swap meet alone usually pays for the trip if youre patient and get there early

Getting folks on the air is the important thing - don't feel bad about struggling with manual programming! Start with your most-used local repeater first, then add the 2m and 70cm calling frequencies (146.52 and 446.00). Using CHIRP with a USB cable makes loading a long list of channels much easier.

yeah the "background process" mental model is exactly right and i wish someone had explained it to me that way earlier. i spent way too long trying to do SO2R like i was actually operating two stations and it just doesnt work like that for most people. one thing that helped my rate a lot on the run radio — and this is kind of boring but it works — is getting really disciplined about your exchange. like trimming every unnecessary word. you dont need to say your callsign twice on every contact if the band is decent. develop a feel for when the other station has you and just move on. sounds obvious but in the heat of a contest you slip into habits. for your shared antenna situation, whats your isolation setup? if youre bleeding into yourself on adjacent bands thats gonna kill you. even with band separation you want to know whats actually getting through. i ran a similar mixed rig setup for a few years and the K3's receiver is so good it actually made the problem more obvious because it could hear its own bleedthrough that the older rig would've just masked.

been using RemoteHams for maybe 8 months with a 7300 at a friends tower site about 40 miles away. works pretty well for what i need which is mostly just getting on 40m at night when my HOA situation makes local operating a pain. i havent touched the SDR features at all so cant help you there but the basic rig control and audio is solid once you get the server side configured right, that part took me way longer than it should have. one thing i will say is dont sleep on the PTT latency issue if you plan to do anything other than casual ragchewing. contesting with a remote is its own kind of miserable experience and i say that having tried it. digital modes are way more forgiving obviously