Steven Wilson

so ive been sitting on this idea for a while now and finally started messing around with it last weekend. basically i want to use an arduino mega to control my old Yaesu G-800 rotator instead of the stock controller, mostly because the stock controller died and a replacement is like $200+ and that seems insane when i have a pile of arduinos and a couple of stepper driver boards sitting in a drawer. the rotator itself uses a simple potentiometer for position feedback which should be easy enough to read with the analog input on the arduino, and ive seen a few write-ups where people used an H-bridge or a relay board to actually drive the motor. what im not sure about is how to handle the calibration — like getting the pot reading to map cleanly to actual degrees without a ton of drift over time. also thinking about adding a small OLED display and maybe serial control so i can eventually tie it into my logging software or maybe hamlib. anyone gone down this road? curious if theres a better approach or if someone already made a library for this kind of thing that i just havent found yet.

honestly for 6-8 contests a year i wouldnt bother with full SO2R unless you just enjoy tinkering with the setup. the rate improvement is real but it only really shows up if you're disciplined enough to keep the run going while your brain handles a second radio, and that skill takes a while to build. most casual guys who try it end up ignoring radio 2 half the time anyway and then wondering why they went through all the trouble. that said, having the 7610 you could start with what some people call assisted SO2R-lite — basically just use the second radio for band monitoring and only switch over when you spot a juicy mult you need. no bandpass filters needed for that, just keep the second radio on a different band with a separate antenna if you can. the bleed-over thing is real though, if you try to actually transmit on both radios anywhere close in frequency without good bandpass filters you're gonna have a bad time. 4O3A makes nice ones, inrad too, but they're not cheap.

so ive been chasing a 3B8 station for like three weeks now, every time i hear him he's got this wall of signals on him and i just cant seem to cut through. tried the usual stuff, calling on his exact frequency, timing it with the tail end of his transmissions, nothing. i was about to give up and just accept it wasnt gonna happen this cycle. finally saturday morning conditions were decent into the indian ocean, i noticed he was working split, listening up 2 to 5. instead of just parking somewhere random in that range i actually listened for a minute or two to figure out where he was actually coming back to. turns out everyone was piling on up 2 and up 3, but he was actually pulling out stations closer to up 4. so i moved up there, waited for him to finish a QSO, and called right at the tail end of his last transmission — not on top of him, like a quarter second after. got him on the third call. i know this is probably obvious stuff to the old timers here but it genuinely clicked for me this time. listening before transmitting, actually tracking where he's hearing people rather than just throwing your call into the crowd. curious what other techniques people use because i feel like there's stuff im still missing, especially for the really rare ones where the pileups are absolutely brutal.

yeah the CTCSS thing trips up a lot of new folks, dont worry about it. so basically the repeater has a little squelch system that ignores any signal that doesnt carry the right tone — it's there to filter out interference and accidental kerchunkers. you only need to worry about the transmit tone on your radio, that's the one you're sending TO the repeater. the receive tone setting is for your radio to squelch itself based on what comes back, most people just leave that one off or set to 0. as for knowing if youre hitting it — key up and just say your callsign and say 'testing' then let go. if the repeater is picking you up youll usually hear a courtesy beep or a tail after you unkey before it drops. some repeaters have a roger beep too. if you hear nothing at all after you transmit then either youre not getting in or the machine is down. also double check your offset direction, that catches people off guard too sometimes. good luck

nice work actually getting it done, most people talk about it forever and never pull the trigger. for the antenna question, i keep a simple 2m/70cm dual band vertical in mine, just a little mag mount whip, its not glamorous but its always ready to go and works fine for most ARES stuff we do around here. the tape measure yagi is great if you know youre going to need directional but for showing up somewhere and getting on the air fast the vertical wins every time in my experience. on the heat thing, yeah dont leave a sealed AGM in a hot car all summer. ive seen them swell up and one of the guys in our group actually had one leak a little. i bring mine in when its not actively needed, keeps the battery healthier longer and it forces me to do a top-off charge every month or so anyway which is good practice. some guys leave the radio in the car and just store the battery inside, thats a reasonable middle ground depending on how fast you need to be able to deploy.

so we've got a county-wide ARES exercise coming up and i've been tasked with setting up a portable communications node at the EOC backup site which is basically a parking lot behind the old fairgrounds. No shore power available, they're still arguing about whether the county will bring a generator or if we have to provide our own, classic. my current plan is to run an IC-7300 off a 100ah lifepo4 battery with a 30a anderson powerpole setup, and throw up either a buddipole or my end-fed halfwave with a 9:1 unun depending on what bands we actually need to work. HF for any interop stuff, and i've got a 2m/70cm vertical for local simplex. the EFHW is probably easier to get in the air quick with just a painter's pole and some paracord. my concern is runtime. if im running digital modes, maybe js8call or winlink, the draw is a lot more manageable than voice but i still want to have margin. anyone run a setup like this for 8-10 hours and have a sense of how far a 100ah lifepo4 actually gets you in practice? and if we do end up needing a generator, what are you all using for field exercises — something like a honda eu2200i or are people going with something cheaper? i dont want to spend $1100 on a honda if a champion or westinghouse does the job for emcomm purposes

oh man yes it absolutely gets easier, dont even stress about it. my first contact i forgot to say over and just sat there breathing into the mic for like 5 seconds before the other guy said uh go ahead. and i had been studying for months. the thing is everybody on the repeater has been there, they all did the same thing, nobody cares. just get on there and do it again today, seriously dont wait. the more you wait the more it builds up in your head. also yeah memorize your call, write it on a sticky note and put it on the radio until it sticks

yeah the 6m opening was real, i caught the tail end of it around 9pm local and managed to snag a YV5 which was a new one for me on that band. been licensed for about three years now and never really paid attention to 6m but this summer has kinda converted me. what antenna you running? im just using a simple dipole in the attic which probably isnt ideal but it got the job done last night surprisingly. on the IC-905 stuff, i looked it up and it seems like the accessory theyre talking about is basically just a better weatherproofing kit for the remote head unit. still interesting if youre doing any kind of hilltop portable operating i guess. that radio is way out of my budget anyway so im mostly just window shopping on that one.

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and i thought i had a pretty good handle on it but something is driving me crazy. my position beacons are showing up on aprs.fi when i check from my phone but they're coming through other digipeaters in the area, not my own setup. i have a TNC-Pi running on a raspberry pi connected to my old IC-2300H and i configured Direwolf as the iGate and digipeater combo. the path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be pretty standard. the weird part is i can see OTHER stations getting iGated through my station just fine, packets are flowing, the logs look normal. but my own transmitted packets never seem to come through my iGate. i vaguely remember reading something about how iGates are supposed to filter out their own heard packets or something to avoid duplication on the APRS-IS network but i cant remember if thats a Direwolf setting or just how the protocol works. anyone dealt with this before? been digging through the Direwolf user guide for an hour and my eyes are glazing over

that symptom pattern with no fault indication and no thermal shutdown points me toward the driver stage before the finals honestly. on a lot of these radios when one final goes soft you still get some output but you lose the full swing. 28-32 watts with the knob maxed is actually kind of a classic sign that the drive level is making it to the finals okay but something in the PA chain isnt amplifying correctly. before you start probing around in there id check if Icom has any service bulletins for that serial number range, some early 7300s had known issues. also worth pulling the bottom cover and just looking for anything obvious - scorched components, a cap that looks like it bulged, cold solder joint on the PA board connector. ive seen cold joints cause exactly this kind of degraded output with no other symptoms. if you have a scope you can probe the drive signal going into the finals and compare it to what you should see in the service manual, that'll tell you pretty quick if the problem is upstream or in the PA itself.

so i dont know if everyone caught the announcement but Icom put out some info about a new HF rig that supposedly addresses some of the complaints people had about the 7300 price point, havent seen the full specs yet but the chatter on a couple other forums has been pretty enthusiastic. take that with a grain of salt obviously since we've been burned before by pre-release hype. anyway thats almost secondary to what ive been experiencing on 10 meters this past week. the band has just been absolutely open in a way i havent seen in maybe a couple years, worked a bunch of south american stations yesterday afternoon with pretty modest power, like 50 watts into a dipole and guys were coming back to me like i was running a kw. solar flux has been climbing and it shows. anyone else noticing propagation improving across the higher HF bands? feels like we might actually be getting somewhere interesting with this solar cycle. curious what others are hearing out there.

so ive been doing SO2R for a few years now but i still feel like im leaving a ton of points on the table especially during the middle hours of a contest when propagation is shifting and i cant decide whether to keep running on 20 or start hunting on 40. the two radio setup itself isnt really the problem anymore, got the interlocks sorted out and the audio routing is mostly fine, but its more the mental side of it — like knowing when to actually pull the trigger and start a run on radio 2 versus just S&P'ing around while radio 1 holds the frequency. anyone have a system for this? i feel like the rate meter is lying to me half the time. running at 80/hr looks great until you realize 15 opened up and you missed the whole thing because you were babysitting a dying 20m run. also curious if anyone has opinions on when to just abandon a frequency and go full S&P on both radios. feels wasteful but sometimes it just makes sense. using wintest btw if that matters, and my second radio is just a backup rig so the keying overlap stuff is still a bit janky

i did basically the same install last year, 2019 F-150 with a 2meter mobile. ended up going through the back of the cab where the rear window is — there's a rubber channel there and i just tucked the coax along it and down the B-pillar. not the shortest route but zero drilling and its been solid through a whole summer and winter now. radio still hits the repeater 40 miles out on a good day so no complaints from me about signal loss.

honestly the exam itself is kind of a mix. some of it is real theory that you'll actually use if you homebrew anything or start messing with antennas seriously — the stuff on impedance matching and transmission lines clicked for me in a way it never did before just because i had to sit down and actually work through it. but yeah theres also a chunk that feels like pure memorization, like some of the regulatory stuff about who can be a volunteer examiner or whatever. what i found helped was not just using a flashcard app but actually reading the ARRL Extra Class manual alongside it. slower but i felt like i understood what i was answering instead of just recognizing the right word pattern. the privileges are nice too, 160m and the extra portions on 40 and 20 open up in ways you dont realize until youre suddenly able to work a station that all the generals cant touch. so yeah i think its worth it, just go in expecting it to take a few months if you want to actually learn it rather than just pass.

Don't use QN signals on phone nets - they're special ARRL signals for CW nets only, not casual conversation. Say it with words on phone. Stick to the common Q-codes and regular abbreviations for voice work.

the EFHW over rocks thing actually works better than you'd think sometimes. i activated a summit in colorado last fall, couldnt get anything up in a tree, basically had the wire running along the ground at like a 15 degree angle and still worked EU on 20m. antennas are magic and also terrible and i dont fully understand them. congrats on getting out there though, first one is always the hardest part

curious which specific mod you followed, there are like three different versions floating around and i think some of them are for earlier hardware revisions and might not even apply to the later boards. i started going down this road a few months ago and kinda got lost in conflicting info. did you use the eham writeup or was it from one of the SDR forums?

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly i thought i kind of understood them but the more i read the more confused i get. like i know DXCC is working 100 countries and WAS is all 50 states but then theres mixed mode and phone only and digital only versions of all of them and then WAZ is zones which i didnt even know was a thing until last week my question is basically — where do you even start? do most people just pick one and focus on it or are you kind of working toward all of them at once just by operating normally? ive got about 47 states confirmed on lotw already just from ragchewing and the occasional contest and i didnt even know i was that close to WAS until someone pointed it out to me. so maybe i should just finish that first? also do alaska and hawaii count as states for WAS or are they entities or whatever for DXCC purposes — i always get that mixed up sorry if this is a dumb question, everyone here always seems like they have it all figured out

this is really interesting to read, im a newer ham and just joined our local ARES group a couple months ago so haven't been through a full exercise yet. the part about people stepping on each other is something i've been wondering about — like in a real event how do you even know when the frequency is clear if everybodys trying to get through at once? is there a protocol for that or does net control just have to be really firm about it

Few things to check - first make sure you're actually running VARA FM and not the regular VARA HF modem, they're separate installs and i've seen people mix them up. Also the audio levels thing is really important, the soundcard calibration tool in Winlink Express will tell you if you're overdriving it but even if it says okay sometimes the actual TX audio into the radio is too hot and it's just splattering everywhere. Try turning the SignaLink TX knob down a fair bit and see if anything changes. Also worth checking - some gateways are running Winlink but with specific timeout settings, and if your path is marginal and frames are getting through but with errors it'll just spin. Do you have any way to hear if the gateway is actually responding at all, like can you put a second radio on the frequency to monitor? Sometimes the gateway acks but your RX audio is off so Winlink Express never sees it.

yeah wind on summits is no joke, ive had the same thing happen with EFHWs. what worked for me was switching to a linked dipole with a shorter overall span so theres less surface area catching the wind, also i stake the feedpoint down low and angle the wire more steeply rather than trying to get a flat run between two trees. takes some practice to find a configuration that holds up. also 4 contacts is 4 contacts man, activation is an activation, dont sweat it

had almost the exact same thing happen to a friends ft-991 after a storm, turned out to be a cap on the audio board that had gone leaky. not totally dead just... wrong. took forever to find because everything kinda sorta worked. if you have access to a scope and can probe around the audio chain while keyed up on a dummy load you might see it pretty fast, the waveform will look ugly right at the bad component. also just worth asking — have you tried doing a full factory reset on the radio first? i know it sounds dumb but sometimes a near strike can corrupt settings in ways that are really non-obvious and a reset costs you nothing. probably not your problem but takes 30 seconds so.

Add "Know your equipment's actual frequency accuracy" to the list. I've seen older rigs drift enough to put operators outside their allocated segments, especially on 60 meters where hams must transmit on specific channel center frequencies. A frequency counter is a good investment for serious operators.

im kind of in the same boat as you so maybe not the most useful reply lol but i found the Koch method on LCWO helped me more than anything else once i stopped cheating and actually kept the speed set high. i kept dropping it down when i got frustrated which i think just made things worse. my elmer told me to sit with the discomfort of missing stuff and thats been better advice than i expected honestly. also the Just Learn Morse Code app has some decent word practice if youre tired of random character groups, copying actual words felt way more motivating to me than QSO practice strings

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think im overcomplicating it but here goes. i have an old prop pitch rotator that i picked up at a hamfest and the controller that came with it is pretty much toast, the pot inside reads all over the place and i dont trust it for anything more than rough positioning. anyway i got to thinking that an arduino mega with a couple of relays and a good analog read on the feedback pot might do the job better than buying a replacement controller which honestly the aftermarket stuff for these is not cheap. the basic idea is just read the pot voltage, do some math to convert that to degrees, compare it to a target heading sent over serial from ham radio deluxe or whatever, and then drive the relay board to run the motor CW or CCW until its close enough. ive got the serial comms working and the relay switching is fine but im having trouble with the pot readings being noisy — like plus or minus 8 degrees of bounce even when the antenna isnt moving. tried a 100uf cap across the wiper but it helped maybe a little. running 5v reference off the arduino which is probably part of the problem i guess. has anyone gone down this road with a rotator project or something similar where youre reading a noisy analog signal and trying to get clean position data out of it. wondering if i should just switch to an external aref or maybe do some software averaging. the raspberry pi version of this might be cleaner but i really prefer keeping the control logic on something that just boots instantly and doesnt need an OS