Mark Thomas

i had the same thing happen with mine and it turned out one of my solder joints at the center insulator was intermittent, like it would read fine when i checked it on the bench but once it was up in the air and the coax was pulling on it at a slightly different angle it was making a bad connection. worth checking with a multimeter before you start trimming legs. also 14 gauge stranded is fine but make sure you got good strain relief at that center point or it'll work itself loose eventually.

the 1.4 swr without a balun is probably fine for casual use but you might start noticing rf on the coax braid messing with your radio, especially if you're running any real power. common mode current is a real thing and it can cause weird interference patterns and sometimes just makes your audio sound off. a simple 1:1 choke balun wound on a toroid or even just coiling the coax a few times near the feedpoint helps a lot. some guys argue its unnecessary for a basic inverted-v and honestly for qrp it probably doesnt matter much but if you ever go higher power its worth doing right. the weatherproofing though, definitely address that sooner than later. soldered connections exposed to the elements will corrode faster than you'd think especially if you get freezing temps. i use those self-fusing silicone tape wraps plus a layer of vinyl tape over it, and then i'll sometimes put a small plastic project box over the feedpoint if i can manage it. some guys just use a pvc cap glued over it. coax seal putty is another option but its messy. your 25 feet inverted-v is actually pretty reasonable for 40, the angle of the legs affects the radiation pattern some but youre definitely getting out if you made contacts already so dont overthink it.

yeah Q65 changed everything honestly. i worked my first EME contact last year with a single 9el yagi and about 100w, would not have been possible on JT65 let alone SSB. the guy on the other end was running a big array in europe and clearly doing the heavy lifting but it still counts lol. noise figure on your preamp matters way more than people think, i fried my first one by not using a decent sequencer and keying up with the preamp still in line, dont do that. sequencer is not optional if you care about your front end

so ive been licensed about 8 years now and mostly do HF stuff, some 2m weak signal when the band opens up, but ive always been kind of obsessed with the idea of doing EME. like the concept of bouncing a signal off the moon and actually having someone hear it on the other side of the planet is just... i dont know, it scratches a brain itch that nothing else does. anyway i finally have a bit of property to work with and im starting to think about what a realistic starter setup would look like. ive been reading about single yagi EME on 2m and it seems like people do actually make contacts that way with JT65, not a ton but it happens. my question is more about the practical side — what kind of yagi are we talking, like a 9el versus something longer, and do i need a preamp right at the feedpoint or is that more of a nice-to-have situation. also the whole moon tracking thing, do people use manual elevation/azimuth or is that just going to make me want to pull my hair out i know this is a deep rabbit hole. i already have a IC-9700 which i think is a decent starting point. just trying to figure out if this is something i can do without building a full dish setup in my backyard

the chart thing almost never works for most people, you kind of have to hear the characters as sounds not think about dots and dashes at all. that whole approach is what trips beginners up. what you want is the Koch method and honestly just use the LCWO website, its free and its what a lot of people use. it starts you at full speed on just two characters and you dont move on until you can copy them reliably, then it adds one at a time. sounds slow but it actually works because your brain learns the rhythm of each letter instead of counting dots. also just be warned it takes longer than people think. like months of regular practice, not weeks. if you sit down for 15-20 minutes every day you'll get there but skipping days really sets you back. i learned back when the test was still required and even then the guys who passed were the ones who practiced a little bit every single day rather than cramming on weekends.

totally normal to be confused by this stuff at first, dont worry about it. so the CTCSS tone — on most HTs including the Baofeng you want the tone set on transmit only, not receive. the receive side is for if YOU want to squelch out signals that dont have that tone, which honestly most people dont bother with on a handheld. just make sure your TX tone is set to 100.0 and youre good there. the kerchunking thing is basically when someone keys up the repeater really quick just to test if theyre hitting it, without ever saying their callsign. the reason people get annoyed by that is technically every transmission you make is supposed to have your callsign. so if you wanna test if youre getting into the repeater just say something like '[your callsign] testing' and that covers you. its really not a big deal people just like to keep things tidy on a busy machine. also double check your offset is right — 2m repeaters are usually minus 600 kHz. if the offset is wrong youre transmitting on the output frequency and not going into the repeater at all which would explain why nobody hears you.

the short version is the FCC allocation is the legal limit of where you're allowed to be, and the band plan is more of a gentlemen's agreement about what modes go where within that. so for 40m phone as a general you're legally allowed from 7.175 up to 7.300 MHz, anything below that down to 7.025 is your CW/data subband as a general. the band edge thing is real practical advice though not a hard rule. the issue is your transmitter's carrier might be right on 7.300 but your signal has sidebands that extend a few kHz depending on your audio, so if youre doing SSB and you set the dial to 7.300 your actual transmitted signal is probably spilling above the band edge which would put you out of your allocation. most people just stay a few kHz inside to be safe. on LSB your signal extends below your dial frequency so 7.175 you'd want to be at like 7.178 minimum to keep your whole signal inside the band.

the inverting transponder thing trips everybody up at first, dont feel bad. basically if you hear yourself too high on the downlink you need to tune your uplink frequency DOWN, not up. its counterintuitive because your instinct is to chase the signal in the same direction but with an inverting transponder it works backwards. once that clicks in your head it becomes second nature. for the doppler the 847 will do split doppler correction if you set it up right in gpredict under the radio control settings, you need to tell it which VFO is uplink and which is down and it handles the compensation on both sides. if you just had it correcting one side thats probably why you were losing yourself. took me a while to figure that out too, the gpredict documentation isnt super clear about it. on the TLE thing yeah 30 seconds difference between sources is pretty common, depends on how fresh the elements are and which source they pulled from. spacetrack.org is usually the most current, i update mine every few days when im planning a session. for a low bird 30 seconds can mean the difference between having the rotators pointed at the right spot or staring at empty sky at AOS so its worth keeping them fresh.

yeah the outdated websites thing is so real lol. i went through the same thing. what finally worked for me was just asking in my local club's facebook group and someone immediately sent me like four or five active nets with current times and frequencies. sometimes the best database is just other hams honestly. also if you have echolink or are interested in DMR there are nets on those that are super easy to find because they post schedules in the linked groups and stuff. not the same as HF but a good way to get comfortable checking in before you do it on a real frequency i guess

im kind of in the same boat as you honestly, been licensed about a year and a half and the whole cluster ecosystem confused me for a while. one thing i found helpful was also looking at pskreporter if youre doing any digital modes because it shows you propagation in a visual way that the text-based clusters just cant do. not exactly the same thing but it kind of helped me understand what bands were actually open before i went hunting spots. for the 160m noise on dxwatch — yeah just filter it out, you can do that. once you get your filter settings where you want them it gets a lot more usable

went through this whole thing like six months ago. the ae7q site someone will probably mention is your best friend, i spent like an hour just browsing available calls in my district before i settled on one. the actual filing through ULS wasnt too bad once i figured out which form to use (its the 605 i think). biggest thing that tripped me up was making sure my mailing address in the system was current before i applied because i got paranoid about missing any correspondence lol. anyway mine came through no problem after the window closed, got a nice short 2x3 and im happy with it.

the path thing is almost certainly not your problem if you're already getting into digis in town — WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is pretty much the standard and anything beyond that is just network abuse honestly. what i'd look at first is whether that ridge digi is actually on the air. you can check it on aprs.fi directly, just search for the digi's callsign and see when it last heard anything or transmitted. if it hasnt shown activity in a while it might be down or somebody just hasn't maintained it. happens a lot with volunteer-maintained infrastructure out in rural areas, nobody notices for months sometimes. also 60 seconds is actually on the longer side for mobile. a lot of guys run 30 seconds or even use SmartBeaconing so the rate adapts to speed and direction changes. wont help if theres no digi to hit but its worth tweaking once you sort the infrastructure side.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (General) and finally decided to stop just watching other people do POTA activations on youtube and actually go do one myself. picked out a state park about 45 minutes from me, K-2847 i think, and im planning to head out saturday morning. my question is kind of embarrassing but here goes — do i need to pre-register the activation somewhere or just show up and operate? i saw something on the pota.app website about logging activations but it wasnt super clear to me whether thats something you do beforehand or just when you upload your log afterward. also not sure if i need to notify the park or get some kind of permit, or if people just set up at a picnic table and start operating without talking to anyone official. planning to bring my ft-891 and a end fed wire antenna, run it up a tree if i can find a good branch. probably just 40m and maybe some 20m if propagation cooperates. any tips from people who have actually done this would be really appreciated, im kind of nervous about the whole thing honestly

pretty much yeah, its situational. on a clear local repeater with good signal most people just rattle off their call without phonetics because everyone copies it fine. where phonetics really matter is on HF, especially DX contacts or when conditions are rough and letters start sounding alike — B and D and E and G and P and T can all blur together in static or under QRM. the classic example is saying "Victor" vs just "V" when someones trying to log your call through a pile-up, theres no guessing that way. the mixing thing you noticed, numbers normal and letters phonetic, yeah thats totally common and makes sense if you think about it. numbers are pretty distinct sounding already, zero one two three whatever, they dont really get confused with each other the same way letters do. so a lot of guys dont bother phonetic-ing the numbers unless conditions are really bad.

4 states in an hour at 5 watts is solid, dont sell yourself short. i tried QRP last summer and struggled at first but i think i was just picking bad times to operate. the bands were rough all of June around here. what time of day were you running and was it 40m the whole time? im curious because ive heard 20m can be really productive for QRP especially if you want to stretch the range a bit but i havent tried it myself yet with low power