Gary Yamamoto

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly just poking around on aircraft, some weather sat stuff with WXtoImg and the occasional AM broadcast band listening. its been fun and all but i keep running into the noise floor limitations and the dynamic range is just kind of rough especially when theres a strong local FM station nearby that seems to bleed into everything. been looking at upgrading and the two options ive been going back and forth on are the SDRplay RSP1A and the HackRF One. price difference is significant obviously, HackRF is like 3x the cost depending where you get it. i know the HackRF can transmit which is a feature but honestly im not sure i need that right now, i mostly just want cleaner receive performance. the RSP1A specs look really good on paper, 1kHz to 2GHz coverage, 12-bit ADC vs the 8-bit on the RTL-SDR, and SDRuno seems pretty mature as software goes. anyone running either of these day to day? curious if the RSP1A actually delivers on the receive improvement or if im just going to be disappointed again. also wondering about SDRangel vs SDRuno — ive heard SDRangel works with basically everything but the UI is kind of overwhelming at first

ARRL materials explain the 'why' behind answers better, but HamStudy's spaced repetition really helped with memorization. I used both - ARRL book for learning concepts, HamStudy for drilling questions.

honestly for hilltop portable weak signal work the yagi wins pretty much every time in my experience. yeah the omni is convenient but youre leaving a LOT of gain on the table with a collinear, and gain on the receive side is where it really matters for SSB. a 5 el on 2m is maybe 7-8 dBd which sounds like not much until you realize thats like the difference between copying someone and not copying them at all. the size and weight is also not as bad as people think. a 5 el 2m yagi built on a fiberglass boom can be pretty light, M2 makes one thats telescoping i think, or you can look at the Arrow dual band yagis which are pretty popular for portable. ive seen guys haul way bigger stuff up hills. if youre doing SSB specifically you kinda need the directional pattern anyway because youre gonna be hunting for contacts and you want to know where signals are coming from. the collinear is great for repeater access but for weak signal dx it just doesnt make much sense to me.

yeah the tree situation might actually matter more than you think depending on how tall they are and your elevation angle to the moon. i lost like 45 minutes of a window once because the moon was coming up behind a treeline and by the time i had a clean shot my contact window with a station in Japan was basically gone. something to factor in when you plan your first attempts. one thing nobody really mentioned to me when i started was the relay coax switching if youre planning to run any power -- you need to protect that LNA on transmit obviously and the sequencing has to be right or you will blow it. lost one that way. just saying get the sequencer sorted before you key up for the first time.

same boat as you when i upgraded, honestly the best thing i did was just download the actual part 97 text and ctrl+f whatever i was looking for. yeah its dry but its not as bad as like actual legal code. also your club probably has an elmer or two who can just walk you through it, thats honestly faster than reading through the whole thing yourself when youre just starting out

As someone new to POTA, I went with the 705 and haven't looked back. The built-in waterfall helps me find clear frequencies, and I love being able to work 2m FM when HF is slow. Got 47 contacts on my last activation!

the generator noise issue is real and yeah harbor freight inverter gens are hit or miss — some of the newer ones are actually okay but you really cant count on it. what's helped us a lot is just running the radio gear off battery even when a generator is present, use the gen to charge the battery through a decent charger and keep the radio itself isolated from that whole mess. the bioenno 100ah should run your IC-7300 or whatever HF rig youre using for a good 6+ hours at moderate power levels, especially if youre doing mostly receive and occasional transmits on net check-ins rather than ragchewing at 100 watts the whole time. on the antenna question, ive used a buddipole for emcomm before and honestly for a drill where you have some setup time its fine. the linked dipole is faster once you have it pre-cut and labeled but the buddipole gives you more flexibility if the situation changes and you need a different band. if this is just 40m for the regional net id probably pre-build a simple wire dipole with a 1:1 balun, throw it up in an inverted-v config off a mast, and call it done. way less to go wrong.

don't let the big guns intimidate you, honestly a dipole at 25 feet is perfectly workable for CQ WW especially if you focus on S&P (search and pounce) instead of trying to run a frequency. just tune around, find stations you can hear clearly, give them a call and work through the exchange. the exchange for CQ WW is pretty simple -- signal report and your CQ zone, US stations are mostly zone 3, 4, or 5 depending where you are so just look that up beforehand. first couple hours of the contest on Saturday morning can be wild but Sunday afternoon the rates tend to drop and it gets easier to break pile-ups when youre a 100 watt station. honestly even 50-60 contacts your first time is something to be proud of, don't go in expecting to top the scoreboard. and yeah Field Day is a totally different animal. its more of a club social event than a pure contest, way more relaxed, people are grilling food and showing newcomers how everything works. the contest scoring is kind of secondary to just getting people together and practicing emergency-style operating. both are worth doing for sure.

what antenna setup were you using exactly, just a random wire end-fed or like a linked dipole or what. trying to figure out what to bring for my first one next month

yeah the short timer thing got me too when i first started lol. i actually said "i dont know what that means" on the air and everyone was really nice about it, net control just explained it real quick and moved on. no big deal. special event stations are genuinely fun, i worked one last summer for a state park anniversary and they sent a really cool card like 6 weeks later. just make sure you log the date and frequency and their callsign so you can confirm the contact on lotw or whatever if they upload it. some of them do, some dont, just depends on the club running it.

oh man the casusal chat at the end of a net is genuinely confusing at first, you're not alone in that. the safest rule of thumb is if net control hasn't formally closed the net, you still go through them. some NCS's are really laid back and will basically just wave people in but others run a tight ship even during the wind-down. just listen to how that particular net operates for a few sessions and you'll start to get a feel for it. as for the doubling situation, happens to everyone. honestly the best thing you can do is pause just a beat longer than feels natural before keying up. like a full second after you hear the squelch tail. you'd be amazed how many doubles get avoided that way. and if you do walk on somebody just say "sorry for the double" and let them finish, net control will sort it out. nobody who's been doing this for any amount of time is going to hold it against you.

so ive been thinking about finally trying to learn CW for a while now. i got my general last year and keep hearing people talk about how great it is for weak signal stuff and honestly it just seems cool. but i have no idea where to start. like do you just memorize all the dots and dashes on paper or is there some better way to do it i tried printing out one of those charts and staring at it for a few days but nothing is sticking. feels like im trying to learn a new alphabet but slower. someone at my local club mentioned something called the Koch method but i dont really understand what that means or if its better than just... learning it the normal way i guess. are there any apps or websites that actually work or is it one of those things where you just have to grind it out for months

the EU2200i is what I run and honestly the RFI has been a non-issue for me. I do keep it at least 50 feet from the operating position and run the power cable away from antenna feedlines, that stuff matters more than people think. the one time I got noise it turned out to be a cheap extension cord I grabbed last minute — replaced it with a decent 12 gauge cord and it went away. your idea of using the battery as a buffer is actually solid, a lot of EMCOMM guys do exactly that. generator charges the battery, radio runs from the battery, you get clean power and the generator doesnt have to run constantly either which is nice for fuel economy and noise at the site. on the antenna side — fan dipoles are fine but for quick deploy I've been really happy with a simple EFHW with a 49:1 UNUN. one wire, one support, done. not as clean as a dipole probably but when you're trying to get on the air in 20 minutes it's hard to beat. I use a Chameleon MPAS Lite as a backup option if the site doesnt have good trees, telescoping mast gets it up fast.

Finally got my HackRF One from overseas and I'm seeing significantly worse RX performance compared to my RTL-SDR V3. Using GQRX on both devices, the RTL-SDR shows much cleaner signals and better SNR across VHF/UHF bands. Has anyone else experienced this? I've tried adjusting gain settings and sample rates but the HackRF seems to have a much higher noise floor. For the price difference (~$300 vs $30), I expected better receive performance even accounting for the TX capability.

also worth checking if the repeater is even linked to anything or if it goes through a controller that requires a specific access tone — some around here need you to send the tone for like a full second before it opens up. i had the same problem when i first started and it turned out the repeater i was trying to hit was part of an IRLP node and had slightly different access requirements than what repeaterbook showed. the listing wasnt totally up to date. if you can find a local club associated with the repeater thats usually the best way to get the actual current info straight from the trustee

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me, KFF reference, and honestly it went way better than i thought it would. i was kind of nervous because ive done a few POTA activations before but WWFF feels a bit different in terms of how the logging works and who's actually hunting out there. ended up running about 40 contacts over a couple hours on 40m SSB, threw in a few on 20m toward the end when 40 started getting noisy. the spot i picked was a small clearing near a creek which was honestly just beautiful, that alone made it worth doing even if i'd had zero contacts. anyway my questions are kind of scattered so bear with me. first, do WWFF activations count toward POTA at the same time if the reference overlaps? i think ive heard yes but i want to make sure before i submit the log. second, is there a standard way people announce activations ahead of time for WWFF specifically, like is there a spotting system similar to pota.app or do most people just use the DX cluster and hope for the best? i posted on a local facebook group and got maybe 3 or 4 hunters that way but felt like i was leaving contacts on the table. also the logging software situation is a little confusing to me still, i was just using a paper log and plan to convert it, is WWFF Logger the go-to or do people use other stuff? sorry for the scattered questions, still figuring all this out