Carol White

yeah you pretty much nailed the main difference - 44 QSOs to get the activation counted in the WWFF log. it sounds like a lot but honestly if you get a decent spot up on the wwff logger and maybe announce it ahead of time on the facebook group or the cluster, you can get a pile going pretty quick especially if there are europeans chasing during their evening. the DX side of WWFF is really active, way more than I expected when i first started doing it. spotting works similar to POTA, you can self spot on the wwff logger directly or just get on psk reporter and people find you. i'd also recommend posting your planned activation a few days early on the wwff activators group, thats where the hunters hang out and theyll put you in their logs if they know youre coming. the KX2 and dipole combo is totally fine, i do most of mine with a similar setup. have fun with it, the international contacts make it feel really different from a regular POTA run

honestly i was confused about this same thing when i started. i just use the standard ones now and it feels natural after a while. took me maybe a couple weeks of actually getting on air before i stopped having to think about it. the weird thing is sometimes i forget a word mid-callsign and just blank on what november or uniform is supposed to sound like lol. so yeah there's that too

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. i looked it up and apparently you need a license to transmit which i didnt really know. i found like three different study sites and i dont know which one is actually good or if i should just buy a book or what. also i dont totally understand the difference between technician and general, like do most people just start with technician and then upgrade later or is there some reason to skip straight to general. i took a practice test on one of the sites and got like a 60% which i think means im not ready but honestly i dont know how hard the real test is or what to expect when i actually show up to take it. any advice would be helpful, i feel like im going in circles reading forums and not getting anywhere

yeah we had almost exactly this situation on a 2m link a few years back. ended up going with a 9 element yagi, M2 i think, and the wind thing was a real concern. what we did was mount it on a short stub boom with a thrust bearing so if it really started flexing it wouldnt torque the mast fitting. honestly it held up better than expected. the element count matters less than how solid the mounting is -- i've seen 5 element yagis shake loose in moderate wind because someone just clamped it to the mast with a single u-bolt and called it done. on the db question, you'd pick up whatever the GP-9 was giving you in gain (probably 8-9 dbi or so) plus all of that gain focused on one direction so youre potentially looking at 12-14 db improvement on that path. that should fix your margin problem pretty decisively. just make sure your coax run gets resealed when you swap it, up there moisture is the killer not wind in my experience.

so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and i keep hearing and seeing all these weird codes like QRM, QSB, 73, 88, and a bunch of others and i honestly have no idea what half of them mean. i know 73 means like best wishes or whatever but thats about it. my elmer told me to just look them up but the lists i find online are like 50 pages long and half of them seem like nobody actually uses them anymore. is there like a short list of the ones people actually use day to day? i feel like im missing half the conversation when im monitoring a net or just listening to ragchews. also whats the difference between QRM and QRN because i keep seeing both and i thought they were the same thing

Our club is actually setting up a table there this year if anybody wants to stop by and say hi. We're mostly doing a recruitment thing and bringing some show and tell stuff, one of the guys is bringing his portable HF setup to demo. I heard they added a license exam session in the afternoon too which should bring some new faces in hopefully.

this'll be my first hamfest actually, been licensed since january and havent made it to one yet. is it weird to go by yourself or do most people come with their club group

yeah the difference is real but whether its worth it depends on your situation honestly. i had the same setup as you, rtl-sdr v3 with the direct sampling and it was fine for casual stuff but once i got the RSP1A the noise floor improvement on HF was immediately obvious. like pulling in WSPR signals and weak SSB stations that just werent there before, or were buried in noise. the overload issue you mentioned is the bigger thing though. the RSP1A has a much better front end and the selectable gain and attenuator settings in SDRuno actually help a lot when youre dealing with strong local signals. the rtl-sdg dongle just kind of falls apart when theres something really strong nearby, you get all kinds of intermod garbage. that said if you mostly do VHF and above and youre not fighting strong interference the gap narrows a bit. for HF its pretty clear cut imo

don't sweat it, everybody does exactly this when they're starting out, myself included. the waiting thing is something you kind of develop a feel for over time but a general rule of thumb is to wait until you're sure the other person has completely finished and then pause maybe a beat or two before keying up. on repeaters there's also the courtesy tone to watch for if your local machine has one — that little beep after someone unkeys basically means the squelch tail is done and now it's safe to key up without stomping on them. as for net control not acknowledging you, yeah sometimes they'll acknowledge every check-in and sometimes on a busy net they'll just log em all and read them back at the end of the roll call. depends on the net and the NCS operator. if you weren't sure whether you got in, most net controls are totally fine if you wait for a pause and ask something like "did you copy my check-in?" — totally normal thing to do and any decent NCS will just confirm or have you try again. just jump back in next week, the regulars on those nets are usually pretty friendly once they get to know your call.

yeah i did something almost identical about two years ago with a regular pi 3 and an old TV rotator. the drift problem you're describing sounds like it might be debounce issues on the hall sensor — those cheap sensors can give you phantom pulses especially if your motor is generating any electrical noise on the supply lines, which prop pitch motors definitely can. i ended up putting a small cap across the sensor output and it cleaned things up a lot, maybe 100nf or so just to smooth the transitions. hamlib integration is actually not bad once you get the rotctld daemon running, you can set up a custom rotator model and it shows up just like any other in wsjtx or whatever. took me an afternoon to figure out the config file syntax but once its going it just works. the python side i actually scrapped and rewrote in C because the timing was too inconsistent with python for the pulse counting but that might just be my code.

so ive been hunting POTA for a few months now and finally decided i want to do my first activation at a state park thats about 20 minutes from my house. its listed as K-4839 i think, maybe K-4841, i always mix those two up. anyway the park is pretty small, just a day use area with a picnic shelter and a pond basically. my plan is to bring my KX3 and a 40m EFHW strung up between two trees if i can find a good enough setup. maybe throw a 20m counterpoise or something, im still fuzzy on that part. i know i need 10 QSOs to count as an activated and ive heard SSB is faster for getting contacts but i mostly do CW so im thinking ill try CW first and switch if it gets slow. is there anything i totally missed or that catches people off guard the first time? also do i need to spot myself on the pota.app or does someone usually do that for me if i post on the clusters? i dont really want to fumble with my phone and the radio at the same time

so ive been using an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now mostly for monitoring aircraft and some HF stuff through the direct sampling mode and its fine for what it is but i keep bumping into the limits especially on HF where the noise floor is just rough. been looking at either the HackRF One or an SDRplay RSP1B and theyre both kind of in the same ballpark price wise depending on where you get them but they feel like really different tools. the HackRF does TX which is cool in theory but i dont actually need to transmit anything right now, and from what ive read the receiver performance isnt as good as the RSP1B which has better dynamic range and actually has multiple antenna ports for different bands. but the HackRF has that wider tuning range and you can do all kinds of weird stuff with it. the SDRplay software situation also used to be kind of annoying with the proprietary driver thing but i think thats gotten better? just wondering if anyone has run both or compared them side by side for general shortwave and amateur band monitoring. im running SDR++ mostly, tried gqrx, not really a fan of SDRuno if im honest

yeah i had almost the exact same thing when i put a radio in my jeep last year. turned out for me it was the ground wire — i thought the seat bolt was fine but apparently there was some paint or coating under there that was killing the connection. ran a dedicated ground strap straight to the chassis sheet metal with a star washer to bite through any coating and it made a huge difference. still had a tiny bit of noise but nothing that bothered anyone on the other end. also just curious, are you running the radio off a fused direct connection to the battery or through the truck's existing wiring? that matters a lot more than people think

yeah the band has been something else lately. i worked JA on 10m with my little vertical last weekend and just about fell out of my chair. hadnt heard Japan on that band in years. solar flux has been consistently high and the predictions are looking good through at least the next few months from what spaceweather.com is showing. on the icom thing, ive heard the same rumors floating around. somebody on eham was saying there was something spotted at a Japanese trade show but i cant find a source for that so who knows. icom tends to keep things pretty close to the vest until they're ready to announce. id love to see something with better built in decoding or a wider dynamic range but honestly the 7300 is already a tough act to follow at that price point.

JS8Call is genuinely different from FT8 in a way that took me a while to appreciate. FT8 is basically just automated signal reporting with a contact tacked on, but JS8Call is actual messaging, like you can have a real back and forth conversation at -20dB or whatever. the relay feature is where it gets interesting, other stations can pass your message along if the path isnt direct which is kind of wild when it works. that said yeah the community is thinner than FT8, no question. 40m seems most active in my experience, usually some traffic around 7.078 depending on time of day. its not dead but you gotta be patient. i use it mostly for checking in with a few guys during poor propagation when nothing else gets through. if youre expecting the wall to wall activity of FT8 you'll be dissapointed but for what it is, actual weak signal chat, its pretty solid. worth installing just to poke around honestly, not like it conflicts with your existing setup

so ive been calling CQ on 7.250 for like the past three evenings and just... nothing. maybe a few russian stations but they fade out before we can finish an exchange. i dunno if its the band conditions or if people just arent on as much anymore. my antenna situation hasnt changed, still running the same old dipole ive had up since 2019, so i dont think its me. just feels quieter than usual lately and i cant tell if im imagining it. anyone else noticing this or is it just my part of the country

okay so the biggest mistake most people make is exactly what you did -- trying to memorize the dots and dashes visually. like A is dot dash, that kind of thing. that approach will absolutely wreck you once you try to copy anything at speed because your brain ends up translating the sounds into symbols and then into letters and by then youve missed the next three characters what you want to do is learn the sounds as sounds. each letter has its own rhythm and you need to learn to hear B as its sound, not as dash dot dot dot. the Koch method is what most people recommend and theres a free program called LCWO.net that does exactly this -- it starts you with just two characters, K and M i think, and you have to get like 90% accuracy before it introduces another one. its slow at first but you end up actually knowing the code instead of just recognizing it also and this is important, learn at a speed faster than you think you can handle. like 15 or 20 wpm character speed even if the words are spaced out slow. if you learn at 5 wpm you will have to relearn everything later. Farnsworth spacing is what that technique is called, the characters themselves are fast but theres extra space between them so you have time to think dont bother buying a key until you can at least copy a few letters reliably, sending can come later and you dont need hardware to start

congrats on the first one, 44 is exactly right for a valid activation so you're good there. for the submission yeah it's just an ADIF upload through the WWFF logbook portal, you'll need to create an account if you haven't already and then there's a submit log option. it usually takes a few days to show up confirmed. the spotting thing -- yeah the WWFF spotting network or even just posting to pota.app if its a KFF reference works fine, a lot of hunters monitor both. next time try to self spot before you even start calling, makes a huge difference in how fast the pile starts. 40m was a good call for daytime if you were doing shorter skip, some folks swear by 20m for WWFF because you can get the European hunters logging you from over there and that counts toward their award totals too. might be worth trying next time if conditions cooperate.

oh man the WAZ zones thing confused me too when i was starting out. basically the world is divided into 40 Callsign zones by the CQ magazine system and you need to work one station from each zone. some of them are pretty easy to get, others are a real pain because the zones cover really remote areas. like zone 23 is central siberia and good luck with that one on a weekday afternoon lol honestly with 30+ countries and 35 states already in the log i'd say just keep doing what youre doing and let the awards kind of happen naturally. WAS might actually come together fastest for you since youre already most of the way there. set up LoTW though seriously, a lot of stations especially in the US only confirm via LoTW now and you might already have confirmations waiting. ARRL has a walkthrough on their site for setting it up, its a bit of a pain with the certificates but worth doing once

honestly the ft-65 is a solid first radio, dont overthink it. ive handed them to new hams at our club and they hold up fine, audio is decent, the menu isnt a nightmare like some other radios ive used. you dont need APRS right out of the gate unless you specifically want to do that kind of thing and even then you can always add a cheap tracker later or upgrade when you actually know what you want. the th-d74 is a great radio but its kind of overkill if youre just trying to hit a local repeater. its also D-STAR capable which adds another layer of stuff to learn. get something simple first, actually use it for a few months, then you'll have a much better idea what you wish it could do — thats usually when upgrading makes sense. welcome to the hobby by the way, three weeks in is a fun time

i was in the same spot last year and just decided to go for it. failed my first attempt by like 2 questions which was annoying but passed the second time. the oscillator and amplifier theory sections tripped me up the most, that and some of the amateur satellite stuff which i have zero practical interest in but whatever you gotta know it anyway. the extra band privileges honestly havent changed my life dramatically but i do like being able to work the whole band without thinking about where my license lets me operate. theres something kind of freeing about it even if youre not constantly using those extra segments

Impressive build! I'm curious about your mechanical filter choice for 9 MHz IF. Are you using surplus Collins filters or something more modern? The selectivity characteristics make a huge difference in receiver performance, especially for contest work.

yeah the clipboard thing is real, learned that one the hard way too. i use a cheap plastic one from the dollar store and just binder clip the paper. also if its windy enough i just log on my phone now with hamlog or whatever. took me a few activations to figure out what i actually needed vs what i thought i needed. sounds like you did great for a first one though, 9 contacts is solid especially if you were only on one band

yeah southern california has tons of summits, look at the SOTA database theres like hundreds in the W6 association. i do a lot of POTA too and sometimes you can combine both if the park boundaries overlap with a summit which is kinda fun to log both at once. nice work on getting out there

yeah what he said, also dont sleep on PSK31 if you havent messed with it. not as weak-signal capable as FT8 obviously but theres something satisfying about having a real keyboard QSO where you can actually type out a sentence and get one back. ive had some decent dx on 20m PSK31 with pretty mediocre antennas. and RTTY still has a following especially during contests, RTTY contests can actually be really fun if you get into that kind of thing. but for your situation with a modest antenna and wanting to maximize contacts, yeah FT8 is probably doing exactly what you need it to do already.