Thomas Anderson

yeah what he said. i checked into my first net like a month after i got licensed and i was so nervous i fumbled my callsign lol. net control just asked me to repeat and that was it, no big deal. just go for it honestly

yeah i was in the same boat not that long ago. what clicked for me was thinking of them as just different systems that dont really talk to each other, so a confirmation in eQSL doesnt automatically show up in LoTW or anything like that. i use WSJT-X for FT8 and it can upload to LoTW automatically after each contact which is pretty nice once you configure it, saved me a lot of manual work. for SSB i just log everything in my logging software and do a batch upload every few weeks. the paper card thing i honestly havent gotten into yet but i did receive one in the mail from a guy in Japan which was really cool, wasnt expecting it at all

So ive been playing around with a few different apps and websites for spotting and im kind of overwhelmed honestly. Started with QRZ just to look up callsigns which is obviously great, but then someone at the club mentioned DXwatch and now ive got like four tabs open at any given time and im not even sure what im looking at half the time. The cluster spots are cool in theory — I can see when somethings spotted on a band and try to jump on it, but man there is SO much noise in there. Spotted stations that are already gone by the time I tune around, dupes, spots from halfway across the world that don't really apply to me here in the midwest. Is there a way to filter it down to stuff that's actually workable from my region or am I just doing this wrong? Also tried DX Toolkit on my phone and it seems decent but wondering what other people are actually using day to day. Feels like theres gotta be a better workflow than just having a bunch of tabs open.

one thing that helped me a ton when i started with the linear birds was to just listen for a whole pass without transmitting at all. like just hear what the band sounds like, find signals, see how the pitch shifts as it goes over. then next pass actually try working someone. jumping straight to transmitting when you dont know what youre supposed to be hearing just adds confusion on top of confusion. also gpredict is great but the az/el display is the part you actually want to look at not the map, at least when youre hand holding the yagi

oh man i remember feeling exactly like this when i first started lol. i just kept a little cheat sheet next to my radio for like the first year honestly. QSY means change frequency which i kept forgetting. also people say things like OM which means old man but its not rude its just what you call another ham, and YL means young lady which is used for any female operator regardless of age. theres also stuff like DE which means from in CW, so when you hear a callsign DE another callsign thats just station one calling station two basically. the phonetic alphabet is another whole thing too but you probably already know that part. honestly just hang around on the bands and you'll start recognizing patterns pretty fast, thats how i learned most of it

dont overthink the pi vs arduino thing too much, i spent like three weeks going back and forth on that for my own rotator project and honestly just pick one and go. i went pure raspberry pi, python script, little motor driver board off amazon, done. the web interface thing is totally doable, flask makes it pretty easy even if you dont know much python. the latency isnt really a problem for antenna pointing unless your doing something really fast moving which a ham-m aint gonna do anyway lol

same thing happened to me my first few check-ins lol. i accidentally kerchunked the repeater right as someone was wrapping up and just kind of froze. the club guys were super nice about it though. i think most nets are pretty forgiving especially if they can tell you're new. some of them the NCS will even give a shoutout to new hams checking in for the first time which is kind of cool

honestly same boat as you, i get excited every time the flux goes above 170 and then i sit there on 28.400 for an hour hearing basically nothing lol. i did have a crazy opening to japan last month, like out of nowhere at around 9am local and it lasted maybe 45 minutes. worked 4 JAs and then poof. i think a lot of it really is just being on at the right moment, the band doesnt announce itself

yeah the hunters are super active, especially on weekends. i was surprised too my first time. the end fed is basically the perfect portable antenna imo, i use a similar setup except i bring a short mast just in case theres no good trees. 40m and 20m is usually all you need unless your doing a long day and want to chase band openings for SOTA just check the peakery site and filter by easy or moderate, theres usually a few that are basically just a short walk from a parking lot. dont let the point value fool you, a 1 pointer can still be a great activation

yeah there's a ton of them but honestly you only really need to know maybe 20 or so for everyday use. QSL is yeah confirmation, QTH is your location, QRM is man-made interference (like from another station), QRN is natural static like lightning crashes, QRZ means "who is calling me" which you hear constantly on SSB, QSY means change frequency, QRT means shutting down, QRX means stand by basically. oh and QSO just means a contact or conversation. people use them on voice out of habit more than anything, technically they were designed for CW to save time but they stuck around. theres a full ITU list online if you want all of them but most of the obscure ones you'll probably never hear in the wild. just listen and context usually makes it obvious what they mean

ok so i just got my technician license like three weeks ago and ive been trying to get into the local 146.940 repeater but nobody ever seems to hear me. i can hear other people just fine, they come in clear and everything, but when i key up nobody responds and i never hear my own audio come back through. my buddy at the club said i probably need to set a CTCSS tone but i honestly dont fully understand what that is or how to figure out which one to use. i looked it up and i get that its like a sub-audible tone that opens the repeater but how do i find out what tone that specific repeater needs? is there a database or something? and do i just program it into my radio as the transmit tone or both transmit and receive? also kind of a separate thing — when i do eventually get on there, is there like a standard way to announce yourself or check in or whatever? i dont want to step on anyone or do something rude without knowing it. the guys at the elmer session mentioned something about waiting for a pause before keying up but i wasnt totally sure what they meant by that.

Congrats on the first one, that feeling when the pileup starts is something else right? I remember my first activation i was so flustered i forgot to log like 4 contacts and had to piece them together from memory afterwards. Now i use a voice keyer for my CQ call and it makes a huge difference, lets me actually focus on writing down calls instead of talking constantly. One thing that helped me a lot early on was activating less popular parks first — like not the big well-known ones — because you get a steadier slower rate of callers which is way easier to manage when youre still getting the hang of things. The reference number thing you mentioned is super important too, some people forget that and their log gets rejected or doesnt match up right. ADIF files from most logging apps will handle it if you set the park reference in the right field before you export.

So ive been doing POTA for about a year now and someone at the club mentioned WWFF and honestly i fell down a rabbit hole reading about it last night. Looks like there's a nature reserve about 20 minutes from my house that has a reference number already assigned to it, KFF or whatever the US equivalent is called, so im thinking i'll head out there saturday morning with the ft-891 and the buddistick and see what happens. My question is really about the logging side of things. With POTA i just use the app and upload to the website after, is WWFF similar? Do i need to pre-announce on a specific spot or cluster? And does it matter if i work the same station twice on different bands, i read something about that but cant find it again. Any help appreciated, dont want to show up and realize ive done something wrong after the fact.

so ive been putting this off for like two years but i finally opened up the 857 and did the extended TX mod. for those who dont know theres a diode on the main board — D2101 i think, or maybe D2103, i had to look it up twice — that when removed opens up the transmit range significantly outside the normal ham bands. obviously you need to actually be licensed for whatever youre doing with it but theres legit reasons to want this like MARS/CAP work or just testing into a dummy load across frequencies. anyway the procedure itself isnt bad at all, the diode is surface mount so i was a little nervous but with decent iron and flux it came off clean. i also did the 1200hz shift mod for the internal keyer while i was in there because why not. the thing that surprised me is the radio actually feels a little more responsive on receive after all this, which makes zero sense and is probably just placebo, but whatever it feels better. the only thing i messed with that i wish i hadnt is i tried to adjust the SSB TX bandwidth following some guide online and i think i made it slightly worse actually. not terrible but not quite right. might go back in and reset that to factory. anyone else done the audio bandwidth tweaks on this rig and had better luck?

the farnsworth thing your buddy mentioned is actually solid advice, dont give up on it. the whole point is to get your brain hearing characters as sounds instead of dashes and dots, and if you slow down the character speed your brain starts counting instead of recognizing. i spent way too long at 13wpm because i kept practicing at a comfortable pace instead of pushing the character speed up even when it hurt. what really unstuck me was doing what some people call head copy practice - you just listen and dont write anything down, try to get whole words in your head before they fade. sounds counterintuitive but copying by hand was actually slowing me down because i was falling behind and then panicking. once i let go of the pencil things started clicking a lot faster. also just kept the farnsworth spacing wide for a while, like character speed at 20 and word spacing way out at 8 or 10, then slowly brought the word spacing in over a few months. it took probably a year total to get comfortably around 20 but it did happen.