Paul Jackson

oh man this brings back memories of my first activation, I had the wrong park reference and had to re-upload everything. honestly scouting is the biggest thing and you already figured that out yourself. what I do now is look at the satellite view but also switch to the terrain layer, gives you a better idea of the tree situation. also dont underestimate just walking around for 10-15 minutes when you first arrive before you set anything up. ive wasted so much time setting up in a bad spot when a better one was like 200 feet away. also for what its worth, 40m was the right call for a first activation. some people try to chase band conditions on their first time out and it just adds stress. get the 10, go home happy, figure out the fancy stuff later.

congrats on the first one, 23 QSOs is actually a solid debut especially on just 40m with a vertical. some people struggle to get their 10 on a bad day. on the duplicate thing — yeah the pota system does count same callsign on different bands as separate valid QSOs, so if you worked W4ABC on 40 and then again on 20 those both count. what it flags as duplicates is same callsign same band same mode, which is fine it just wont count the second one toward your total but it doesnt penalize you or anything. just leave them in the log when you upload, the system handles it automatically. the self-spot delay is usually pretty minimal in my experience, like under a minute most of the time if you have decent cell signal. the hunters are watching that page constantly trust me, sometimes i swear they show up faster than should be physically possible lol. if you're in a dead zone for cell you can also ask someone to spot you on the POTA discord or just post to the groups.io list before you head out so people know roughly when to expect you.

yeah 40m at night is my go to for just vibing honestly. sometimes i'll hear someone with a really clean signal and just try to figure out what rig they're running from how it sounds. never actually key up lol

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for probably two years now and honestly its been fine for what i do, mostly scanning around HF with an upconverter and poking at airband stuff. but im starting to feel like im hitting the ceiling on dynamic range especially when theres strong broadcast stations nearby that just kinda trash the whole band. been looking at the SDRplay RSP1B and the price isnt insane but its still like 3x what i paid for the dongle setup. tried to read through the SDRuno docs and that software looks like a lot compared to SDR# which i just know at this point. anyone actually made this jump and felt like it was clearly worth it or is this one of those things where the difference only matters in edge cases

so i've been chipping away at this thing for like three months now, mostly weekends when i have time in the shack. it's a basic DC receiver for 40m, pretty much the classic NE602 mixer into an LM386 audio stage design that's been floating around forever. nothing fancy but i wanted to actually build something from scratch instead of just kit stuff. anyway it actually works, which honestly surprised me a little after all the debugging. the sensitivity is decent, i can hear everything my commercial rig hears more or less, though the selectivity is obviously nowhere near the same. audio fidelity is pretty good considering the LM386 has a reputation for being noisy if you dont bypass it properly. spent way too long figuring out that one. main issue i'm still poking at is a low hum that comes and goes, seems related to the local oscillator bleeding somewhere but im not 100% sure. i built the VFO as a colpitts and its drifting maybe 200-300hz over a half hour warmup which is annoying but liveable. wondering if anyone else has dealt with the hum thing in similar builds, like is it RF getting into the audio stage or something with the power supply decoupling? i've got 100uf caps on the rails but maybe that isnt enough

welcome to the rabbit hole haha, fair warning you will never fully climb out. the QCX mini is such a good starter kit honestly, QRP Labs really nailed the price to performance thing on those. for antennas when im out portable i mostly use a simple end fed half wave, you can buy them from a few places or wind your own transformer if youre feeling ambitious after the kit build. pair it with a short piece of paracord and a fishing line throw weight and you can get wire up in trees pretty quickly. for 40m you need about 66 feet of wire which sounds like a lot but it packs down to nothing. battery wise ive been using a 3 cell LiPo that i got from a hobby shop, gives me way more capacity than those little USB power banks and the QCX runs great on it. just watch your voltage, those kits can handle up to about 12v i think but dont push it. some people use the little 4ah sealed lead acid batteries which are heavier but dead simple and you dont have to think about them much.

the inverted-V angle is almost certainly your problem. when you bring those legs down that steep the feedpoint impedance drops, can end up anywhere from 35 to maybe 45 ohms depending on the angle, so youre never gonna hit a perfect 50 ohm match no matter how much you trim the wire. 1.8:1 honestly isnt bad for that config and your rig should be fine with it, most tuners will clean it up if you really need to. if you want to chase a lower SWR either get the apex higher so the legs are closer to horizontal or accept the mismatch and move on. the asymmetry from going around the garage probably adds a little to it but not as much as you think. also 10 turns of RG-8X on a 31 mix toroid is fine for 40m, that part isnt your issue.

dont overthink the sensor thing, i went through the same rabbit hole. ended up just using a 10-turn pot on the shaft geared down a bit and feeding it into an mcp3008 adc on the pi. way more reliable than counting pulses and you always know your absolute position even after a power cut. only issue is calibrating the pot range to actual degrees but thats just a one-time thing.

congrats on the first activation, 12 contacts for a first time out is totally solid especially if you were just winging the antenna setup. dont stress about that. for logging you can upload an ADIF from pretty much any logging program but yeah if you only have paper you can also enter contacts manually on the POTA site, its a bit tedious but it works fine. a lot of people use HAMRS or Log4OM for field logging because they export clean ADIF files, but plenty of folks still do paper and enter it later. for spotting - the POTA spots page at pota.app is where most hunters are watching, and yeah most people use the POTA app on their phone to self-spot while theyre operating. you just pick your park reference, enter your freq and mode and it pushes the spot out. signal gets way better once youre spotted, like night and day sometimes. some guys set it up so their logging software spots automatically but the app is dead simple once you get the hang of it. if you dont have signal at the park you can also ask someone on the air to spot you, just say something like asking for a spot and usually someone will help out

i did something similar but went with a raspberry pi instead because i wanted to log which antenna was being used alongside my normal logging software. ended up being way more complicated than it needed to be honestly. the pi is overkill for just switching relays, arduino is the right call for that part. though if you ever want to tie it into flrig or something over the network the pi does make that easier. also just a heads up on those SRD relays — they work fine for receive and low power but if youre running anything over like 100 watts be careful, ive seen the contacts arc and get pitted over time. might be worth looking at a proper RF relay like the Tohtsu or Dow-Key stuff if youre running the amp. just something to think about before you build the whole thing around those little boards

the generator noise thing is almost always a grounding issue in my experience. 30 feet of separation sounds like enough but if youre running an extension cord from the genny to your rig that cord is basically acting like a big antenna for whatever the inverter section is spitting out. what i do is put the genny as far as the cord will allow, then use a good line filter right at the rig end not the genny end, and most importantly make sure you have a solid RF ground on the station chassis separate from the power ground. the EU2200i is inverter based so its supposed to be clean but ive seen them get nasty especially when theyre under partial load or the ground bonding isnt great. on the battery question - honestly for 6-8 hours at 100w you need to think about your actual duty cycle. if its an exercise with a lot of listening and occasional transmissions you might burn through 20-30 AH which a decent 100AH AGM handles fine. but if youre doing heavy traffic handling or net control with long overs it adds up fast. id bring two batteries and leave the genny home if you can swing it, way less noise headache and you can focus on operating instead of babysitting a machine.

yeah the net discipline thing is real. i've been doing ARES stuff for probably twelve years now and i still see it fall apart in exercises. the thing is most of our members only ever talk on the repeater in a very casual back and forth way and suddenly asking them to follow strict net protocol under stress is a completely different skill. it genuinely needs to be practiced seperately before you throw people into a simulated EOC activation. the logging issue you mentioned is something we actually fixed in our group by assigning a dedicated logger at net control, not the net control op themselves. sounds obvious but for years our NCS was trying to do both and dropping things. once we split the roles it got way better. worth bringing up in your debrief if you havent already. also dont get discouraged by how messy it felt. a SET that exposes nothing is a waste of time. the whole point is to find the gaps while the stakes are low.

the 7610 dual watch is actually pretty useful for a quasi-SO2R lite approach even without full SO2R, i use mine to monitor a second band passively while running on the main VFO. you wont be transmitting on two radios obviously but you can at least be watching for openings or lining up a mult on the second band before you actually QSY. it saved me a bunch of time in the last CQWW finding EU on 10 when i was mostly running NA on 15. on your running vs S&P question — honestly i think a lot of people overthink the exact rate threshold. the way i approach it is if i call CQ three or four times and get nothing, or the rate drops below like 60/hr sustained, i go hunting. but if im in a good run i try to ride it way longer than feels comfortable because the instinct to go chase mults will kill a run that maybe had another hour left in it. the mults will still be there. a hot run frequency might not be.

same boat as you were a few months ago lol. i just focused on WAS first because it felt more manageable and i was mostly on 40m anyway. got it confirmed on lotw in about 5 months, which i was pretty happy with. DXCC took longer but once you hit like 50 entities it kind of gets addictive and you start actually paying attention to which zones you're missing for WAZ too. they all kind of overlap once you get going

yeah 252 dB one-way is pretty close, its actually more like 252.6 on a good day depending on perigee vs apogee distance which matters more than people realize — moon at perigee vs apogee is something like 2dB difference and that actually makes or breaks some marginal contacts. two long yagis is workable honestly, especially with Q65. Q65-60A has changed the game for small stations, i know guys running single yagis making initials now which wouldve been unthinkable even 5 years ago. that said its still easier when youre not begging the other station to carry all the link budget. with your ACOM and 2 x 2M5WL youre probably looking at something like 13-14 dBd gain from the antenna side which is a bit on the low end but not hopeless. the amp putting out close to 1500W helps. main thing people underestimate beyond gain is the feed system and coax losses. if youre losing 1.5dB in your feed before you even get to the yagi you're throwing away a significant chunk of your effective radiated power. low noise preamp right at the feedpoint is also critical, your system noise figure matters a lot on receive since the moon signal is buried way down in the noise. something like an SSB Electronics or a good homebrew unit with a quality ATF-54143 based design, get that coax noise figure down under 0.4dB if you can. also make sure your tracking is solid. EME isnt like parking on a DX frequency, the moon moves fast enough that if your azimuth is off even a few degrees on a long yagi you're losing gain at the worst possible time

I've done exactly this project! The ESP32 has multiple hardware serial ports - try using Serial2 for CAT while keeping Serial for debugging. Also check your baud rate settings, the IC-718 can be picky about timing.

I just passed my Tech exam about two months ago so this is pretty fresh for me. Honestly it was way less scary than I expected. I used hamstudy for maybe three weeks, doing like 20-30 questions a night while watching tv, and by the end I was consistently hitting 85-90% on the practice exams so I felt okay going in. The actual test has 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass. Some of the electrical theory stuff tripped me up at first but you dont really need to deeply understand all of it, you can mostly pattern match your way through those questions. The regulations and operating procedures questions are actually pretty straightforward once you read through them a couple times. Oh and check the ARRL website for exam sessions near you, or there are also online remote sessions now if thats easier depending on where you live.

yeah the ALC thing is real, i burned a lot of time on that with my old 746. one other thing -- make sure you have the right mode set on the radio, needs to be USB-D or just USB depending on how your rig labels it. PKT mode on some icom rigs does weird things to the receive audio filtering that can mess up decoding on that end even if your TX looks fine also when you say the gateway shows up in the list, did you check when it was last heard? sometimes those listings are stale and the gateway is actually down or the sysop changed freq. the RMS channel list in express has a last-heard timestamp if you look at it, anything older than a day or two i'd be skeptical of

I had almost the exact same situation on a Silverado a few years back. Moved my antenna to avoid a toll booth arm that I kept forgetting about and my SWR went from basically flat to hovering around 2.0. Never fully solved it but adding a ground strap helped a little. Honestly for everyday FM and local repeater work it just didnt matter enough for me to keep chasing it.

i went through exactly this like two years ago. spent three passes hearing absolutely nothing and then on the fourth one i finally caught my own signal coming back and it was one of the coolest moments ive had in ham radio honestly. the key thing nobody told me early on is that the linear transponder passband is only like 40khz wide on AO-73 so if youre even slightly off youre just gone. and with manual doppler tracking that window moves fast especially near AOS and LOS when the rate of change is highest. also are you accounting for your own local oscillator drift on the SDR? cheap SDRs can wander a bit especially when they first warm up and that adds another layer of confusion on top of the doppler. might be worth letting it run for 10-15 minutes before the pass so it stabilizes. once you get one clean contact through a linear bird youll be hooked, fair warning.

congrats man that first contact is something you dont forget. mine was on a 2m repeater too, some old timer who could tell i was nervous and just kept the conversation going which was nice. welcome to the hobby, it gets a lot deeper from here if you want it to

lighthouse weekend is a blast, you basically just tune around and work as many of the lighthouse special event stations as you can, they're usually running from actual lighthouse locations with portable setups. some of them are just regular hams doing a special event callsign for the weekend. you can find the list of participating lighthouses on the ILLW website ahead of time which helps a lot for planning. for nets on 40m, the traffic nets are really good practice if you want something with a bit more structure. ARRL has a net directory on their site that lets you search by band and time which i use all the time when im traveling and want to find something local. the NTS nets run pretty much like clockwork so you always know what youre getting. my personal favorite is just finding a ragchew net honestly, way more relaxed than a formal traffic net and you actually get to have a conversation instead of just giving your call and signal report and disappearing.

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and the tracking side works fine, i can see my position on aprs.fi no problem, digipeater is picking me up and everything looks good on that end. but when someone tries to send me a message through the network i never actually receive it on my radio. like the message shows up on aprs.fi as delivered but my HT just never beeps or shows anything. im running a TM-D72A so its got the built in TNC, not using any external stuff. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i know is probably more than i need in a city but i figured it wouldnt hurt. the igate nearby is showing my packets so i know its hearing me. just cant figure out why inbound messages arent making it to the radio. anyone dealt with this? feels like the igate isnt injecting the return path or something but im not sure how to confirm that. the D72 manual is not exactly helpful on this stuff.

yeah RF into the arduino is a classic problem, been there. the foil helps a little but what really fixed it for me was bypassing the power leads going into the relay board with some 0.1uF caps right at the board, and putting a ferrite on the USB cable close to the arduino end. also make sure you have flyback diodes across each relay coil if your relay board doesnt already have them, the voltage spike when the relay opens can reset the thing. separate power supplies for the arduino and the relay coils helped too. i was powering both from the same 5v line and that was causing all kinds of weirdness. once i split them and added a small cap on the arduino Vcc it got much more stable. for just reading a voltage and switching relays the arduino is totally the right tool, pi is overkill unless you want logging or a web interface or something like that

not dumb at all, congrats on the first one. the spotting thing is actually really important and yeah self-spotting absolutely works, hunters check the pota.app website and the spots show up there in real time so when you spotted yourself people should have been able to find you. sometimes it takes a few minutes for the pile to start, depends on band conditions and time of day too. for hunting, most people just watch pota.app or use the POTA logger app on their phone which shows live spots with frequency and park info. you can filter by band, country, whatever. way easier than just tuning around blind. some guys run reverse beacon network too to see if activators are getting spotted automatically but honestly just bookmark the spots page and youre set. on the park reference — yes it matters when you log, you want to make sure the right K-number is in your log before you upload. the adif field is called SIG_INFO and it should have the park ref like K-1234. if youre using the POTA logger app it handles most of that automatically but if youre logging on paper and then doing a manual adif edit just double check that field. the POTA team is pretty good about catching errors but its easier to get it right from the start.