Michael Rodriguez

so ive been running a flat 40m dipole at about 35 feet for the last couple years, fed with coax through a 1:1 balun, oriented roughly northeast to southwest. works okay but ive always wondered if i was leaving something on the table by not going inverted V. the thing is my center support is a tree thats maybe 45 feet up and i could probably get the ends down to about 10 feet off the ground if i let them slope, which feels low but ive heard guys say it doesnt matter much. the reason im even thinking about this is my buddy runs an inverted V on the same band and swears it works better, but he's also got a better location than me, less RF noise, not surrounded by houses. so hard to compare really. i did some modeling in EZNEC a while back and the flat dipole showed a slightly lower takeoff angle which should be better for DX but honestly i rarely work DX on 40, mostly regional stuff 500-1500 miles. anyone actually done a side by side with these two configurations and noticed a real difference? or is this one of those things where the answer is always 'it depends' and i should just leave well enough alone

So I finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, been meaning to try it for months. Picked a local summit here in the Appalachians, only worth 2 points but I figured start small right. The hike up wasn't bad, maybe 45 minutes, but I was carrying way more than I needed to — brought the full KX2 setup plus a spare battery pack, extra coax, my backup HT, food for like a full day trip when I was probably up there for 3 hours total. Classic overpack. Anyway got the linked dipole up in a tree pretty quick and started calling on 40m. First 15 minutes — nothing. I was starting to wonder if I'd forgotten to self-spot or something. Checked sotawatch and yeah I'd spotted myself fine. Eventually got a couple S2S contacts which was honestly really cool, some guy in W6 land was also activating and we worked each other on 20m which I wasn't expecting. Ended up with 7 contacts total, made the 4 needed for the activation to count so mission accomplished I guess. The descent was where it got interesting because I slipped on some wet leaves coming down and took out my knee a little. Nothing serious but I was limping for a couple days. Lesson learned — trekking poles next time. Anyone have tips for speeding up the deployment when you get to the summit? I felt like I was fumbling around too long before getting on air.

the D710 has a separate setting for message retry count and I think by default it might be set pretty low, or in some firmware versions it kinda just doesnt retry aggressively enough. check your APRS menu and look for the message settings specifically, not just the beacon ones. also double check that your callsign in the radio matches exactly what you think it is including the SSID — ive seen people have the beacon going out as NOCALL or something weird because the radio wasnt fully programmed even though position was transmitting fine somehow. also worth asking — is the other station using RF or are they connected via IGate? if hes on RF only and theres no digipeater between you two that can handle message traffic specifically, sometimes they just get lost. messaging in APRS is more two-way dependent than beaconing is.