Jennifer Williams

yeah repeaterbook is the go-to. one thing i'll add is that some repeaters around here are linked into systems like IRLP or Allstar and those can have their own quirks — like sometimes a linked repeater is in the middle of a net happening on another node and you have no idea because you can only hear your local side. kind of caught me off guard the first few times. anyway welcome to the hobby, repeaters are a great way to get comfortable before you venture onto HF or whatever

yeah the activity thing is the frustrating part honestly. i check in on JS8Call maybe once a week and sometimes its hopping and sometimes its dead. theres a net on HF that uses it, i forget which one, but that might be worth looking up if you want guaranteed activity at a specific time rather than just hoping someone is around. FT8 kind of ate everything else for casual weak-signal stuff which is a shame. WSPR at least has a clear purpose and people run it all the time but the middle ground modes like JS8 and Olivia just sort of struggle for users. not saying give up on it, just that expectations matter.

ok so i just got my technician license like three weeks ago and ive been listening to a lot of repeater traffic in my area trying to get comfortable before i actually key up. sometimes people spell out their callsigns using the nato phonetic alphabet and sometimes they just say the letters normally. im trying to figure out if theres like a rule about when you have to do it or if its just a preference thing. i dont want to sound like an idiot when i finally transmit but i also dont want to over do it and sound like im trying too hard. my callsign has a couple letters that sound similar so i guess that might matter too. anyone know the actual deal here

congrats on the first build and first QRP contact, that 559 at 5w is genuinely solid especially with a random wire. the battery warmth is probably fine honestly, lipos do get a bit warm under load and as long as its not hot to the touch or swelling you're likely okay. the main thing with lipos is keeping an eye on the voltage -- if it drops too low during TX that can cause all kinds of weirdness with the finals. a simple cell voltage checker from amazon is like 3 bucks and super handy. for getting more contacts on low power the biggest thing i'd say is patience and timing. find a relatively clear frequency, listen for a while, and call CQ when the band sounds like its in decent shape. early morning on 40m can be magic with QRP. also if you havent tried FT8 yet, that mode was basically made for low power situations -- you can work DX with 5w that would be near impossible on SSB. some purists don't like it but hey, a contact is a contact when you're learning

so ive been on FT8 for a while now and yeah its great for working new entities and all that but honestly after a while it feels like youre just clicking buttons and watching a waterfall. theres no real communication happening, just signal reports and 73 and done. heard about JS8Call and that it was built on the same weak signal foundation as FT8 but lets you actually type messages back and forth. been thinking about switching over for some of my HF time but dont really know anyone running it in my area. also curious how the timing/sequencing works compared to FT8 — i know FT8 is locked to 15 second slots and JS8Call has a few different speed modes? my radio is an IC-7300 going into WSJT-X right now with VARA and stuff already set up for winlink so i dont think the hardware side is a problem. just wondering if its worth learning another piece of software and if theres actually activity on JS8 or if its kind of a ghost town these days compared to FT8

yeah what he said about LoTW is right. i went through the paper QSL route years ago before LoTW was really a thing and it was honestly kind of a pain, keeping cards organized, getting them all sorted by entity, mailing them in... LoTW is just so much cleaner even if setting it up the first time is a little confusing with the certificates and all that. one thing nobody told me starting out - keep a separate log or at least a notes column for which entities you still need vs which ones you have confirmed. i spent a bunch of time chasing stuff i already had confirmed because i wasnt tracking it properly. DXKeeper or even just a spreadsheet does the job fine

honestly the best thing i ever did was slow way way down. like embarrassingly slow. i know 15 wpm feels right because thats kind of where you want to end up but your hands and brain arent there yet and you're just reinforcing bad muscle memory by pushing it. drop to 10 or even 8 and focus on making every character sound clean and crisp before you speed back up. on the iambic A vs B thing — most people cant tell the difference either and it genuinely doesnt matter that much when you're starting out. what does matter is getting the weight set right on your keyer. on the 7300 i think its in the keyer menu, try bumping the weight up just a tiny bit if your dits are sounding too light or getting clipped. and honestly the sidetone pitch makes a bigger difference to how comfortable it feels than people give it credit for — try somewhere around 600-700hz if you havent already, some people like it higher but that range works for most ears. the good news is the BY-1 is a solid paddle and wont hold you back at all. keep at it, three months in and actually getting on the air is further than a lot of people get.

nice work on the activation. im pretty new to chasing myself and i can tell you i absolutely just tune around looking for CQ SOTA, i check sotawatch but half the time the alerts are wrong or the activator is already done by the time i see it lol. so yeah dont be surprised when chasers appear out of nowhere, thats just how it goes.

im in basically the same situation lol, been trying to get AO-73 contacts for a couple months. one thing that helped me was just listening for a while before trying to transmit, like really getting a feel for where signals are sitting in the passband and how theyre moving. also i found that if i tune my downlink receiver to a beacon or a signal i know and keep that stable, then my uplink is probably in roughly the right place too. its a bit by ear but it works when you cant automate everything. the inverting thing the other guy mentioned is real and it messed me up a lot at first. i kept tuning the wrong direction and chasing my own signal further off frequency.

so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just done casual operating, ragchews, some local nets, that kind of thing. but lately ive been getting really into DX and i started logging everything carefully with the intent of actually going for DXCC at some point. i hit 100 confirmed on LoTW last week which i guess technically means i can apply, but im confused about a few things. first — do the contacts have to all be on the same band or mode or is it just any 100 entities confirmed? ive got mine spread across 40m, 20m, 17m, and a handful on 10m from when the band was open last fall. also whats the deal with deleted entities? i see some old timers talking about contacts with places that arent on the current list anymore and whether those count. not that i have any of those, just curious how that works. and WAS — is that totally separate from DXCC? i have maybe 35 states confirmed and wasnt sure if i should be focusing on one or the other or just work everything and sort it out later. feels like i should have a strategy but honestly i might just be overthinking it.

yeah dont stress too much about it, the tech exam really isnt that bad. i remember being in your exact position and thinking i needed to know everything about electronics theory and propagation and all that. you really dont, at least not for the exam. the question pool is public and the test is pulled directly from it so what you see in practice is literally what you get. one thing i'd add is to not just memorize the answers blindly if you can help it — understanding even a little bit of why the answer is correct makes it stick way better and also just makes you a better operator down the road. but if youre really crunched for time, pure memorization gets people through it every day. good luck, the hobby is worth it

yeah same thing confused me when i was starting out. the charts people post online sometimes mix up the FCC allocations with the ARRL suggested band plan and they're not the same thing at all. one is legal and one is just kind of a gentlemans agreement type thing. i just bookmarked the actual part 97 page and that cleared a lot of it up for me, even though its not exactly fun reading lol

JT65 changed everything for EME, honestly. before that you basically needed a big array and a ton of power just to have a shot at it, now people are making contacts with setups that would have been considered laughable back in the analog days. that said your single yagi is still probably going to be a real limiting factor even with digital modes — not impossible but youre going to be working the biggest stations only and your schedule fill rate will be frustrating. the 4-yagi array thing is pretty much the sweet spot for a serious but manageable home station in my opinion. four 17el or similar antennas with a proper power combiner and a good H-frame mount, get your coax losses down as low as you can, and run whatever power your radio and amp can put out legally. noise figure matters a lot on EME, like a 0.5dB improvement in your system NF actually makes a noticeable difference in what you can decode, so dont cheap out on the preamp or the coax between it and the antenna. sequencer too, you absolutely need a sequencer or youll blow the preamp eventually during transmit. CW is still happening but its mostly the big guns running kilowatt-class amps and large arrays talking to each other. if you want to actually build up a respectable EME initial count without losing your mind, JT65 on 144 is where the activity is.

yeah what he said about radials is real, i learned that the hard way lol. put up a buddistick type thing a few years back thinking id work everything and it was pretty underwhelming until i actually laid out a proper radial field. then it got a lot better but still not magical or anything. one thing worth mentioning — if you go inverted-V and the ends are kinda low, like under 10ft off the ground, you might get some pattern weirdness and detuning from the ground. not a dealbreaker but something to be aware of. try to get those ends up a bit if you can even if its just rope to a fence post or whatever. your 35ft mast should be fine for the apex on 40m.

yeah 10m has been something else this week. i was just casually spinning the dial tuesday evening not expecting much and ran into a pileup on 28.495 that turned out to be a station in Argentina, jumped in and got him on like the third call which honestly never happens to me. my antenna situation is nothing special either, just a vertical with a mediocre ground plane. the Icom thing im cautiously interested in. if they can get something competitive under $1000 that doesnt feel like they cut every corner it would shake things up a bit. the 7300 was already a game changer when it came out so i trust them to at least make something solid. but yeah, wait and see i guess.