Kevin O'Brien

okay so ive been trying to get Winlink working for about two weeks now and im pretty sure i have the basic concept down but the actual setup is just not clicking for me. i have Winlink Express installed and i can see RMS stations in the list when i do a session but when i try to connect nothing happens, just times out every time. im using a Yaesu FT-991A into a Signalink USB, running Vara HF for the modem software. i think the audio levels might be off but i ran the calibration thing in Vara and it said it was fine. my question is mainly about whether i need to configure the RMS gateway separately or if Winlink Express handles all of that automatically when it connects. also do i need to specifically be a sysop to use an RMS or can i just connect to one as a regular user? i feel like i might be fundamentally misunderstanding what an RMS actually is here. also tried on VHF with a TM-V71A and a packet TNC but that just never worked at all so i gave up on that for now and focused on HF. any help would be appreciated, this is for emcomm stuff and id really like to get it working before our next ARES meeting.

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly i think im ready to try for general. been doing a lot of VHF/UHF stuff and some satellite which has been awesome but i really want to get on HF and actually talk to people further away. my buddy works 40m all the time and it sounds like so much fun. anyway i started looking at the question pool and some of it is pretty confusing. like the electrical stuff makes sense to me more or less but the regulations sections have me turned around. is it worth just grinding the question pool or do i need to actually understand all of it? i used qrz.com to practice for my tech and it worked fine but im not sure if general is harder in a different way or just more of the same. also once i actually pass, what HF privileges do i get right away? like can i just jump on 40m SSB or do i have to wait for the license to update in the system or something. i know there are some band portions i still wont have access to but i got confused reading the chart on the arrl site

congrats on the first one, 23 QSOs is totally solid especially if you're new to portable ops. the log upload — you've got a few days, i think technically its pretty flexible but most people try to do it within a day or two while everything is fresh. just go to the POTA website, create an account if you havent already and there's an upload section, it takes ADIF format which most logging programs export automatically. for spotting, the easiest thing is the POTA Spots app or just go to pota.app and you can self-spot right from there. put in your callsign, the park reference, your frequency and mode and boom, hunters can see you. a lot of people also announce on the POTA facebook group or the subreddit the day before if they want a bigger pileup. once you get comfortable with it you can also ask someone to spot you via a QSO which is handy if your phone signal is bad out there. sounds like you had a great time, that random wire setup works way better than people expect

yeah totally, i do this all the time actually. sometimes i just want the noise in the background while im doing other stuff around the shack. its almost like radio as ambient sound? my wife thinks im weird for leaving the rig on and walking away but theres something about knowing the bands are alive even when im not actively doing anything 40m evenings are great for that. you get everything from ragchewers to nets to the occasional weird propagation skip and you never quite know what youll hear next

yeah i passed my technician like four months ago after studying for maybe two and a half weeks, used hamstudy.org mostly and just did practice tests over and over until i was consistently getting above 80%. the actual test felt easier than the practice ones honestly. the math scared me too but its like two or three questions and if you learn the formula for ohms law youre basically fine

So i finally pulled the trigger on a FT-7900R and got it mounted in the cab of my F-150 last weekend. Overall pretty happy with how it turned out but i have a couple things bugging me still. First off the antenna — i went with a Tram 1185 on a mag mount for now just to get on the air while i figure out a permanent solution. I know mag mounts arent ideal but honestly the reception seems fine so far, been hitting all the local repeaters no problem. My question is about the coax routing. Right now im just running it through the door seal which i know isnt great long term. Has anyone done a clean install with a proper grommet through the firewall or somewhere else that doesnt look terrible? I have zero experience drilling into vehicles and im a little nervous about hitting something. Second thing — the radio is pulling power direct from the battery with 12 gauge wire fused at both ends like i read everywhere to do. But i notice when i key up on high power the voltmeter on the radio dips a little, like down to maybe 13.2 or so. Truck is running. Is that normal or should i be concerned? The previous owner had some kind of aftermarket stereo system in there and i wonder if there might be some other draw happening. Anyway mostly just excited to be mobile finally. Been operating from home for two years and its a completely different experience, so many more people on during commute times.

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now mostly doing aircraft stuff with dump1090 and some wideband scanning just to see whats out there. its been great for the price honestly but im starting to feel the limits of it, particularly on HF where the direct sampling mod only gets you so far and the noise floor is pretty rough. been looking at either the HackRF One or the SDRplay RSP1A and i cant quite decide. the HackRF has the transmit capability which is appealing even though i have no specific use case for it right now, and the RSP1A seems like it would actually be a noticeable step up for receive quality. budget is somewhere around $150-200 range so either one fits. anybody gone from RTL-SDR to one of these and actually felt the difference day to day? or is it one of those things where you spend the money and then realize the antenna was the problem all along

yeah what he said about LoTW is spot on. i was in the same boat maybe two years ago and honestly logging into LoTW for the first time and seeing i already had like 45 confirmed entities was a nice surprise. the ARRL interface isnt the prettiest but once you figure out the award credit submission process it's not too bad. one thing i'll add — dont stress too much about chasing WAZ until you've got a decent antenna situation. some of those zones are genuinely hard to work if you're running modest power or a compromised antenna, zone 23 and some of the polar zones can be real pain in the neck depending on the bands and season. WAS is way more achievable early on and keeps you motivated while you're building up entity count for DXCC. just my experience anyway

Don't sweat it too much, honestly. First activations feel way more stressful than they end up being. The POTA community is super active and once you spot yourself on pota.app the hunters will find you pretty fast, especially on 40m during morning hours. Just make sure your callsign and the park reference come through clearly every few calls so hunters can log you correctly, that trips up a lot of first timers who forget to say the park number out loud. One thing i always tell people is to listen on the frequency for like 30 seconds before you start calling CQ POTA, just to make sure its actually clear. And if contacts start drying up on 40 dont be shy about moving to 20, sometimes 40 gets noisy mid-morning and 20 opens up nicely. You got this, 10 contacts usually happens faster than you'd expect once the spot goes out.

welcome to the hobby, youre definitely on the right track asking this stuff early. so CTCSS (some people call it PL tone, which is a Motorola trademark that just kind of stuck) is basically a continuous low frequency tone your radio sends along with your voice when you transmit. the repeater's receiver filters for that specific tone and wont open up unless it hears it — keeps random interference and other signals from keying the machine up accidentally. for finding the right tone, the repeater directory on repeaterbook.com is usually pretty solid, just search your area and it should show the input/output frequencies and the required PL tone right there. you only need to set it on your transmit side, not receive, unless the repeater is also sending a tone back and you specifically want your radio to squelch on that — most people dont bother with the receive CTCSS setting. as for etiquette, yeah your elmer was right. after someone finishes a transmission there's usually a short pause — like a beat or two — before the next person keys up. that gap lets the repeater's courtesy tone beep (lots of machines have that) and it also lets someone break in if they need to. just listen for a while before jumping in, get a feel for how that particular repeater runs, they all have their own little culture sort of.

yeah what he said about T-CTCS is right. i had the exact same problem when i started, sat there wondering why nobody could hear me for like two weeks lol. one other thing — make sure your offset is right too, most 2m repeaters use a 600 kHz offset and if the offset is wrong direction you wont get in even with the right tone. repeaterbook usually shows a + or - next to the frequency for that. welcome to the hobby btw, repeaters are fun once you get it sorted out

so this is maybe a weird thing to admit but sometimes after dinner i just throw on the headphones and tune around 40m and just... listen. dont transmit, dont log anything, just kind of zone out listening to ragchews and the occasional DX pile up. its weirdly relaxing. had a net going out of somewhere in the midwest last night and i just sat there for probably 45 minutes listening to these guys talk about their grandkids and antenna projects and stuff. didnt feel like interrupting honestly. anyway curious if anyone else does this or if im just being weird about it

so ive been doing contests semi-seriously for a few years now, mostly CQWW and SS, and im always reading about SO2R and how the serious guys use it to basically never have dead air. but every time i start looking into it seriously i get overwhelmed by the station engineering side of things — the filtering, the antenna isolation, the keying interlocks, all of it. my current setup is a 7300 and a 991A collecting dust and im wondering if just throwing them together with some band decoders and a decent filter setup is actually worth it for a guy doing maybe 8-10 hours of a 24 hour contest, not going all out for a score. like my rate on a good run is maybe 120-130/hr on phone and a bit less on CW, and im not sure if the complexity of SO2R would even net me anything meaningful at that rate vs. just working S&P more aggressively on the second radio sitting there doing nothing. does anyone actually do SO2R at a casual level or is it one of those things that only pays off if youre committed to the whole setup and the operating discipline that goes with it

Congrats on the ticket first of all. Okay so here's my honest take — the UV-5R is fine for what you're describing. I know some guys act like they're radioactive but if you just want to hit a local repeater and chat with your friend on simplex, it'll do exactly that without any drama. The audio is a little rough and the menus are genuinely confusing at first but once you figure it out it works. That said, if you can stretch to maybe $100-130 the Yaesu FT-65 is a noticeable step up in terms of build quality and the receiver is just cleaner — less stuff bleeding in from nearby frequencies. I went the cheap route first and ended up buying a Yaesu six months later anyway so in hindsight I probably shouldve just done that from the start. But I dont regret the Baofeng either because messing around with it taught me a lot about how these radios actually work. Either way youre not gonna break anything by starting with what fits your budget. Just grab a copy of the chirp software if you go the baofeng route, programming it by hand is a bit of a nightmare.

CM-059 is a nice one, good choice for a first activation. dont stress too much about the spot timing honestly, most people post it the morning of and then update it once they're actually on frequency. some folks put an alert up a day or two ahead and then post the actual spot when they summit and get set up. the alert lets chasers know you're coming, the spot is what gets people to actually tune in. and yeah 5 watts on 40m should be plenty if you get a decent antenna up, i've done hundreds of activations with qrp and almost never struggle to get 4 contacts once i'm spotted. the random wire will work fine, just get it as high as you can. if conditions are weird try calling on 14.285 or watch the cluster for where the pile is. good luck and dont forget to log everything on sotadata when you get home, thats the part i always forget

WIDE2-2 without the WIDE1-1 in front is actually what some guys run out here in sparse areas, gives you two hops off a proper digipeater without relying on fill-in digis. the WIDE1-1 part is specifically for hitting those low-power fill-in digis that a lot of rural areas have deployed, so if you dont have any near you its kind of wasted. worth checking the APRS map overlays on aprs.fi to see what digipeaters are actually in your area and what paths they're honoring, some of the older ones wont relay WIDE2-2 at all depending on their config. the 20-30 minute gaps sound like you might just be in a dead zone, not much you can do about that unless someone puts up a digi or igate. i had the same issue driving through the mountains and eventually just accepted it. your 2 minute beacon rate is fine, going faster usually just creates more collisions and still doesnt fix coverage holes.

im pretty much in the same boat as you lol, sitting around 8wpm right now and the lcwo lessons feel like they've slowed way down for me too. one thing that helped me recently was just grabbing a bunch of old QST magazines and having my computer send me the text as morse while i follow along with my eyes. kind of like cheating but it helped my brain start recognizing the rhythm of whole words instead of individual letters, at least thats how it feels to me also someone on here told me about the word "paris" being used to measure wpm and i went down a rabbit hole about that for like an hour instead of actually practicing haha

so ive been sitting at around 5wpm for like three months now and i feel like im stuck. i can copy most letters if i really concentrate and the sending is slow enough but anything faster than maybe 6 or 7 wpm and my brain just completely falls apart. i miss a letter and then im trying to remember what i missed while the next letter is coming in and then i miss that one too and it just snowballs. i started with the koch method on lcwo.net and i got through most of the characters but somewhere around character 30 or so i just kind of stalled out. ive been doing maybe 20 minutes a day. is that enough? should i be doing more? a guy at my club said he learned by just jumping on the air at 20wpm and copying what he could but that sounds absolutely terrifying to me right now. anyway just wondering what worked for people. i really want to get to at least 20wpm eventually, i dont need to be a contest operator or anything but i want to be comfortable ragchewing on 40m cw

The iambic A vs B thing trips up a lot of people starting out, honestly just try both and see which one feels less weird to you. Some folks never use iambic at all and just use single lever squeeze which is totally valid, dont let anyone tell you theres one right way. On the paddle quality thing though — yeah it does matter more than people admit. Not saying you need to go spend $300 on a Begali or anything but if the tension is inconsistent or the contacts are bouncy it really does mess with your timing in a way thats hard to diagnose when youre still learning. if the spring tension is adjustable on that loaner try tightening it up a bit and see if the mushy dots clean up. sometimes thats all it is. Keep at the lcwo stuff, 15wpm copy is actually solid for three weeks in. The sending will catch up, it just takes longer than people expect.

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now doing mostly airband and some weather sat stuff with WXtoImg and it works fine for what it is but ive been wanting to get into more serious HF monitoring, like shortwave broadcasts, some utility stuff, maybe WSPR decoding just to see whats bouncing around. someone at the club mentioned the RSP1A and honestly the price jump isnt that crazy but i dunno if its actually worth it or if im just gonna end up with the same frustrations i have now. main thing i notice with the RTL-SDR on HF using the direct sampling mode is just how noisy everything feels. like i can hear stuff but its buried and i find myself cranking gain until its a mess. running SDR# on windows and ive tried SDR++ which i actually like better but same hardware limitations obviously. does the RSP1A genuinely clean things up that much or is a chunk of that just my antenna situation. running a random wire out the window which i know isnt ideal. also curious if anyone has tried running SDRangel with either of these, i messed with it briefly and got confused by the interface but maybe im missing something

I made the same jump about a year ago, different starting point though — was on an FT-857 before so the jump to a proper base rig felt massive. The scope alone was worth it for me honestly. I spent probably a week just watching band openings on 10 and 15 without even transmitting, just seeing what propagation was actually doing visually made a lot of things click that I'd read about but never really internalized. One menu thing that helped me — dig into the NR settings. The noise reduction on the 7300 is actually decent when conditions are rough, not perfect but better than I expected from DSP NR in that price range. Dont crank it to max though, it starts eating consonants on SSB voices which gets fatiguing fast. I usually sit around 5-7 on the NR level and leave it there.

might be worth looking at whether a raspberry pi would serve you better here depending on how fancy you want to get with the automation. i built an antenna switcher controller on a pi zero and since it runs linux i can expose a little web interface and switch antennas from my phone or from the logging software via a network call. arduino is totally fine for what youre describing but once you start wanting more integration it can get messy. just something to think about, not saying your approach is wrong at all.

Before you ship it anywhere I'd pull the top cover and just look around. Four years of daily use can cook a few things. On the 7300 the frontend is pretty robust but I've seen the TCXO area get a little flaky and cause weird noise behavior, though usually that manifests differently than what you're describing. The 40/80 thing being specific to those bands and not the higher ones is actually a useful clue. Those bands share some frontend filtering paths that differ from the higher bands. If you have a scope or even a cheap SDR you could use as a secondary receiver, try listening to the IF output on the 7300 while you poke around — sometimes you can localize it that way. Also worth checking the band pass filter board connections, the ribbon cables on that radio can develop intermittent contact after a few years of thermal cycling. Just reseat everything gently. Might be nothing but its a 10 minute job before you box it up.

had basically the same thing happen to mine after i dropped it, don't ask. turned out one of the shield cans on the RF board had gotten slightly bent and was intermittently grounding something it wasnt supposed to. probably not your issue since yours sounds more consistent but worth just eyeballing everything carefully with good light before you go chasing caps. these rigs are packed in there pretty tight and stuff moves around.

I was in the exact same spot like 8 months ago lol. I ended up getting the Baofeng just to save money and honestly I kind of wish id spent a bit more from the start. It works but programming it was a huge headache and the battery drains faster than I expected. My elmer eventually loaned me his old Kenwood TH-D74 to try and oh man the difference in receive quality alone was shocking. obviously that radio is way out of your budget but just saying the cheaper ones do have real tradeoffs. whatever you get just make sure you grab the Chirp software, its free and makes memory programming way less painful.