Jennifer Wilson

this is making me want to actually show up to one of our local ARES nets, I joined the group like a year ago but havent really been active in it. keep meaning to go to the monthly meeting and then something comes up. what's the training like, is it mostly just net procedures or do they do other stuff too? our group seems pretty active but i feel like i missed a lot of the foundational stuff already being this late to it

yeah what he said about S&P is right, just tune around and call stations, you dont have to hold a frequency at all. i was terrified my first CQ WW and ended up having a blast. made like 87 contacts which isnt impressive by any measure but i was grinning the whole time. one thing i'll add — check the ARRL contest calendar and also the WA7BNK contest calendar, that second one is really useful for seeing whats coming up. there's always something happening on weekends. oh and for upcoming stuff the ARRL Sweepstakes is coming up which is another good one for US/Canada, the exchange is a little more complicated but its a classic.

yeah that aprs.fi delay thing has burned me before and it wasnt even my setup, one of the IGates in my area had gone offline for like three days and nobody noticed. the map still looked active because there was historical data cached. definitely crosscheck against aprsdirect like the other guy said, or even just key up and watch for your packet to appear in realtime on there — it refreshes way faster than aprs.fi does. also random thought but did you check the PL on your output after the antenna work? i know thats not directly APRS related but if you bumped a connector and youre now running into the digi with weird audio it could cause issues decoding on their end even if your power looks fine locally

yeah the moon window thing is real, i spent like two months trying to catch the moon below 10 degrees on my fixed mount before i just gave up and bought a used Az/El setup off a guy in the club. totally worth it. also the EME2 reflector and the ON4KST chat are where the skeds happen, dont sleep on those if you actually want to make contacts — random calling on 144.120 does work but having a sked lined up with someone who knows youre a small station makes the first contact way less frustrating

yeah i ran basically that exact setup for about a year and the duplicate thing drove me nuts too. what eventually worked for me was just letting WSJT-X log to its own ADIF file and NOT having it push UDP to Log4OM in real time. then after a session i import the ADIF manually into Log4OM with the duplicate check set to strict — callsign, band, mode, and date all have to match before it skips it. a little more manual but i stopped getting the phantom dupes. for N1MM during contests i just keep it totally separate and then do a one-time import into Log4OM after the contest is over. N1MM exports clean ADIF so thats never been a problem. the only thing you lose is real-time dupe checking across all your logs during a contest but honestly during a contest youre only really worried about dupes within that contest anyway so N1MM handles that internally just fine. the three app thing sounds messy but once you get the workflow dialed in it kind of just works. just dont try to run them all piped together at the same time, something always steps on something else

so ive been working on this for probably six months now, a single conversion superhet for 40m, IF at 455kHz using one of those old surplus transformers i got from a hamfest box lot like three years ago. the RF stage is a JFET, mixer is a diode ring i wound myself on a binocular core, and the BFO is just a colpitts off a 2N3904. its all point to point on a piece of copper clad, not manhattan exactly but kind of close. anyway i got to the point where im scared to actually connect it to an antenna and the battery, partly because i spent so much time on it and dont want to see smoke, and partly because i genuinely dont know if my BFO is on the right side of the IF passband. i tuned the BFO trimmer to where it sounds like it should be in my head but i dont have a signal generator to check properly. anyone done this without test gear, like is there a way to sanity check the BFO offset by ear using a known signal on the band or something? also my IF transformer cans are tuned but i wasnt totally sure what i was doing there either, i just peaked them for noise which felt wrong but i couldve sworn i read that somewhere. the whole thing is probably a mess but it actually looks pretty decent physically which counts for something i guess

honestly you're overthinking it, and i mean that in the nicest way possible. stepping on someone occasionally happens to everyone, even operators who've been doing this for decades. the fact that net control acknowledged you means you got through fine. doubling is just part of VHF net life, especially when there's a big check-in rush. on the timing question — yeah it really is just a feel thing that comes with time. generally you want to wait about a beat after net control finishes their last syllable, not a full second pause, more like just enough that they're clearly done. if you wait too long you'll overlap with someone else jumping in from a different part of the coverage area. some nets the NCS will pause deliberately to invite check-ins, others are more free-for-all. as for full call vs suffix, honestly both are fine and it varies by net culture. some NCS actually prefer full calls for the log. i'd say just keep doing full call, it's never wrong and it's good habit especially if you're ever somewhere people don't know you. you did fine, just keep showing up and it'll click

first thing id check is whether your transmit audio is actually hitting the right levels in VARA. a lot of people get the Signalink set up fine for something like fldigi and then assume its good for VARA but the drive level is totally different. VARA wants a pretty clean unclipped signal and if youre overdriving it even a little the gateway will see garbage and just drop you. there should be a calibration thing in VARA where you can run a test tone and watch the ALC on your rig — you basically want the ALC to barely be moving, not pegged. also worth double checking the PTT settings in Winlink Express itself vs what VARA thinks is handling PTT. ive seen people have it set in two places and they conflict. if the Signalink VOX is handling PTT then make sure Express isnt also trying to key the rig via CAT or something because the timing gets weird.

so i've been putting this off for literally two years but last month i finally sat down and built a Rockmite 40 from the kit i had sitting in a drawer. took me a few evenings spread across a couple weekends, nothing fancy, just my old Weller iron and a magnifying glass because these eyes aint what they used to be. honestly i was expecting more trouble but it fired right up first try which almost never happens with me. got about 500mW out which i know is not a lot but i took it to the state park last saturday with a wire strung up in a tree and worked a guy in Tennessee from here in Wisconsin. like 700 miles on half a watt. i know thats not crazy rare but it still kinda blew my mind after years of running 100W on HF. anyway im sort of hooked now. thinking about building a larger DC40 or maybe one of the QCX kits from QRP Labs. anyone here running the QCX mini for portable ops? curious how the filtering compares to the rockmiite, the rockmite is pretty bare bones in that department from what i can tell. also does anyone bother with a battery pack specifically optimized for QRP or just use whatever lithium pack you have around

I just got my general last month so I'm still figuring out what I can even do on HF but I saw someone at my club mention the 7760 and now I'm kind of falling down that rabbit hole even though I definitely can't afford it right now. my first HF rig is gonna be something way more used and beat up I'm sure. but it's cool to follow the new stuff anyway. the 10 meter thing is exciting to me because my Tech license lets me do some stuff up there and I've just been hearing noise mostly so maybe I should try again soon.

okay so i just passed my technician exam last week and everyone keeps telling me to just get a baofeng to start and thats fine but then i went down a rabbit hole and now im looking at yaesu FT-60s and the wouxun kg-uv9g and honestly i have no idea what im doing anymore. my buddy at the club said get something with NOAA weather alerts built in which makes sense because we get some nasty storms here in the fall. what i dont really understand is if the more expensive HTs are actually worth it for someone just starting out or if i should just grab a cheap one and see if i even like the hobby first. i mostly want to hit the local repeaters and maybe do some SOTA hiking stuff eventually. battery life matters a lot to me because i do long day hikes. im not in a huge hurry to buy but would love to hear what people actually use day to day rather than just reading spec sheets

the SDR panadapter question is actually pretty reasonable — i run an Airspy HF+ Discovery on the same machine as my remote node and it doesnt really interact with the control latency at all because theyre separate data streams. the SDR IQ data is going out over its own connection, RCForb handles the rig control and audio separately. what you might run into is just raw bandwidth, especially if youre on a mediocre upload at the shack end. SDR data at higher sample rates eats bandwidth fast. i dropped my Airspy down to 192kHz and it was fine on a 10Mbps upload but anything above that was getting choppy during busy band conditions. the Echolink bridging thing though, i honestly dont know if that gets weird with Part 97. you can monitor no problem but if your buddy is keying up through Echolink and it somehow gets routed back out on HF youre in a gray area maybe. id just set him up a read-only listener account in RCForb, think there might be an option for that, been a while since i dug into the settings.

yeah the activity gap is real, JS8Call never really hit the critical mass that FT8 did and i think thats partly because WSJT-X has such a polished workflow. JS8Call feels a little rough around the edges still. that said i keep a window open on 40m around 14.078 and there are regulars on there most evenings, you just have to be patient. the HF capability is genuinely impressive for what it is though, ive seen it decode stations that were completely buried in noise that i never would have pulled out manually. for what its worth PSK31 still has a little life left in it if you want keyboard to keyboard contacts with better activity levels than JS8, especially on 20m around 14.070. not as efficient signal wise but the community is more conversational by nature. might be worth poking around there too depending on what youre after.

so this has been driving me nuts for a couple weeks now. picked up a used 7300 off a local ham who said it was working fine, and maybe it was, but when i got it home and threw it on the dummy load the power output is just sad. ALC looks normal-ish on the meter, all bands affected, no smoke smell or anything obvious. gets warm in the usual spots but not like its thermal shutting down or anything. pulled the cover and did a visual, nothing obviously cooked. im thinking driver stage but honestly i dont have a ton of experience digging into these SDR rigs vs the older stuff where you could kinda trace signal path more intuitively. anyone gone into one of these for a similar symptom? wondering if its worth pulling the finals to check or start somewhere upstream first. i do have a scope and a decent RF probe if that helps narrow down where to look.

dude same experience here. i was half asleep saturday morning and turned the radio on kind of by accident and ended up staying on for 3 hours because i kept hearing new prefixes. worked a JA station with like 50 watts which i still dont fully believe happened lol. my antenna is a dipole in the attic so that makes it even weirder. i dont really understand all the solar flux stuff yet tbh but i downloaded the DX toolkit app and it shows like a little propagation forecast which has been pretty accurate for me so far. probably oversimplified but its a start

yeah most of us end up with like four tabs open at some point, dont feel bad about that. what a lot of people do is just route the cluster feed directly into their logging program — like if you're using Log4OM or DXKeeper or whatever, you can set up a telnet connection to a cluster node and spots just pop right into your bandmap automatically. totally changes the workflow because you're not tab-hopping anymore, the spot shows up and you can just click it and your radio jumps to the freq. takes maybe 20 minutes to configure once you figure out what node to connect to, and there are lists all over the place of reliable nodes. as for DXwatch vs DX Summit — they're pulling from the same DX Spider and AR-Cluster networks mostly, so the spots are largely the same but the filtering and display is different. DXwatch has some nicer filtering options i think. QRZ's logbook integration is separate from that whole ecosystem though, that's more for after the fact confirmation stuff.

Been using both services for contest prep and DXpedition tracking. DXWatch seems to have more responsive filtering but occasionally shows "spots list don't show" errors. QRZ's cluster appears more stable but the interface feels dated. Has anyone done any analysis on spot accuracy or latency between these services? Analysis of multiple DX cluster messages can indicate propagation conditions, so reliability really matters for serious DXing. DXWatch: Modern interface, good mobile supportQRZ: Rock solid uptime, integrated with callsign lookupsWhat's been your experience?

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and figured id just ask. i'm about 23 miles from the main repeater i use on 2m and its mostly flat terrain between me and it, maybe one small ridge but nothing serious. right now i have a diamond x50a up about 25 feet on a pushup mast and it works fine most of the time but when conditions are even slightly off i start getting into the repeater with audio that apparently sounds pretty rough on the other end. a buddy of mine swears i should just put up a yagi pointed at the repeater and be done with it. like a 5 or 6 element job on a fixed mount. makes sense to me on paper but then i lose the ability to hit any other repeaters or work simplex in different directions which i do occasionally for things like ARES nets. honestly i dont know if the gain from a yagi would even make that much difference vs just getting the collinear up higher. im at about the limit of what my current mast can do so getting a taller tower isnt really in the cards right now. has anyone actually swapped from a omni to a directional for this kind of situation and was it worth it

dont sleep on the slim jim over the roll-up jpole for 2m, ive found it works noticeably better when youre trying to get into a repeater that isnt quite line of sight. minor thing but in a real deployment those little margins matter. for 18 hours on lifepo4 just make sure your second battery is actually the same cell chemistry and not a different brand that claims lifepo4 but isnt spec'd the same way. had a weird situation where two supposedly compatible packs werent playing nice with a shared charge controller and one was always running lower than the other. probably a BMS thing but it was annoying to diagnose in the field.

i was the same way for like my first two months lol. what finally got me to check in was realizing i could just listen for what other people said and copy them. for special event stations its a bit different, sometimes they want a signal report or they're running a specific exchange for whatever the event is but the station usually announces that stuff. there was a special event last year for some lighthouse weekend thing and i had no idea what was going on at first but the operator was really patient and just told me what he needed. just go for it tuesday, seriously the nervousness goes away fast

im pretty much in the same boat as you, tried my first satellite pass a few months ago and the doppler surprised me too. what helped me was just doing a few passes where i only listened and practiced correcting the doppler on the downlink without even trying to transmit. after a couple passes i had a better feel for how fast it was moving at different points and then when i actually tried to get on i wasn't as panicky about it. also gpredict has that radio control interface where it can supposedly tune your rig automatically via CAT if your 817 is connected to the laptop — never got it fully working myself but i've seen people say it helps a lot with the doppler tracking, takes one thing off your plate anyway

Be careful with the final stage mods - those SMD components are tiny and the thermal management is already pretty tight in that little radio. I'd suggest external filtering instead of internal modifications unless you have serious SMD rework experience.

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and I thought I had a decent understanding of how paths work but apparently not. Running a Kenwood TM-D710G with the internal TNC, set to transmit every 2 minutes on 144.390, path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which is what everyone seems to recommend for mobile but my beacon just isnt showing up consistently on aprs.fi. Sometimes I see it, sometimes nothing for like 45 minutes even when im driving through an area that definitely has digis. The weird thing is I can see other stations hitting those same digis just fine so its not a coverage issue. I checked my callsign and SSID setup probably a dozen times. Running -9 for mobile which should be right. Symbol is set to car. Honestly not sure if its a TNC config thing or if im just not understanding how the path actually propagates through the network. Anyone dealt with this? Is there something in the TM-D710 setup specifically that bites people? I did update the firmware a while back but I dont remember if that changed anything with the TNC behavior.

X is indeed Xray, dont feel bad about blanking on it, most people do because its rarely used. the ones people mess up are usually X, Q (Quebec) and sometimes Y (Yankee gets confused with other stuff). as for your actual question — on a busy repeater or when conditions are decent and your call is short, a lot of operators just say it normally and thats fine. phonetics really shine when theres QRM, weak signals, or youre working someone who doesnt know your call yet. HF is where you'll use them almost every single time because propagation does weird things to audio. on a local VHF net with clear signals half the guys dont bother spelling it out phonetically unless asked. the unwritten rule is basically: if theres any chance of confusion, use phonetics. if conditions are perfect and the other op clearly got your call, dont bother. you'll develop a feel for it pretty quickly. and if someone says "say again" just go full phonetic, which it sounds like you already figured out on your own anyway

The tangled coax and adapters problem is real and honestly it'll drive you crazy at the worst moment. What worked for me was getting one of those small tackle boxes — the kind with adjustable dividers — just for connectors and adapters. Every PL-259, BNC, SMA adapter, everything gets its own little spot. Takes maybe five minutes to sort out and then you never dig through a bag again. I also velcro a laminated checklist to the inside of the lid of my case so I can run through it before I leave the house. On the antenna question, I'd honestly get a decent dual-band whip for a mobile radio or even a small yagi if you're doing anything like acting as a relay or working a specific site. The PAC-12 is great for HF but yeah for 2m you want something purpose-built. And I know people hate on Baofengs but for backup comms they're fine, just program it properly and test the battery before you need it for real.