Thomas Bradley

yeah the listening thing is so underrated, most people in a pileup are just transmitting into a wall and hoping. ive worked a lot of rare stuff from a pretty modest station - 100w and a dipole at 35 feet - and the times i get through it's almost always because i did exactly what you described, found the rhythm of where the DX op is actually working and just slid in there at the right moment. one thing i'd add is tail-ending can work really well when the conditions are right. if you catch the very tail end of the previous QSO and come in right as the DX is about to call QRZ youre sometimes in a quieter moment before the full pileup crashes back in. takes some practice to not step on the previous guy though, thats a quick way to get some not-so-friendly comments on the cluster. the split discipline thing is real. i've heard ops working 5 up and the whole pileup is sitting on 5 so theres no point. try 7 or 8 up sometimes, especially later in a pileup when most casual ops have given up and wandered off. the serious dx chasers thin out the competition naturally over time.

omg yes my first activation was a disaster too, i forgot my feedline adapter and had to pack up and go home without making a single contact haha so 14 sounds amazing to me. i have done 3 now and it gets way less stressful each time once you build kind of a checklist for yourself of what to bring. i keep mine in the notes app on my phone now.

yeah this is super common when you're pushing speed and the Winkeyer weight setting trips people up all the time. the weight control adjusts the dit/dah ratio slightly — if you're getting smooshed dits at higher speeds try backing the weight down a notch or two from default. default is usually 50 and i'd try 47 or 48 and see if that cleans things up. also honestly the Bencher BY-1 is a decent paddle but the tension and gap adjustments are pretty finicky on those. i'd spend some time really dialing in the gap — should be about the thickness of a business card on each side, maybe a hair less. too much gap and your fingers are traveling too far, especially when you're trying to go fast. it adds up. try slowing back down to where you sound clean, get the paddle perfectly adjusted there, then creep the speed up incrementally. dont jump 5 wpm at a time, go up 1 wpm and sit there until it feels automatic.

im sort of in the same boat as you, been chasing DXCC for about 6 months now and sitting at 67 confirmed on LoTW. one thing nobody told me when i started was to make sure you're uploading your own logs to LoTW too because the matching only happens when both sides have uploaded. sounds obvious but i wasn't doing it for like the first month and lost some potential confirmations probably. also the ARRL has this thing called the DXCC desk and if you have a really rare entity on a paper card you can actually mail it in for credit even now. i havent done that yet but i looked into it for a P5 card i got from a friend who worked them years ago, turns out its complicated with that one specifically but the process exists for others

thats awesome congrats. i just got my ticket last year and QRP is actually what got me into ham radio in the first place, watching youtube videos of people operating from mountain tops with tiny rigs. im still on the fence about building vs buying something like a used FT-817 to start, feels like building might be biting off more than i can chew right now but posts like yours make me think maybe i should just try it

so i finally dragged myself up W4C/SM-003 last weekend with the KX2 and a linked dipole i built from a youtube video. got to the summit and realized i forgot the counterpoise for my end fed. spent like 20 minutes trying to figure out if i could just use a tree branch or something before i just said forget it and set up the linked dipole instead which actually worked fine. only made 6 contacts before a storm rolled in and i had to pack up fast. still counts right? wasnt the epic pile up i imagined but at least i got the activation. already planning the next one, gonna make a checklist this time

im in the same boat as you, been licensed about a year and just started messing with DX clusters a couple months ago. the 15 minute delay thing drove me crazy too until i realized i had the auto-refresh turned off on DXwatch. theres a little settings thing at the top where you can set it to refresh every 30 seconds or whatever, that helped me a lot. still not instant but way better than i was getting before. the QRZ one is actually pretty decent i think for casual use, i usually have both open in different tabs and just glance between them. probably not the most efficient workflow but it works for me when im just trying to catch a new one on 20m or whatever.

35 feet of LMR-400 at 2m is totally fine, you're not losing sleep over anything real there. the whole hardline argument makes sense when you're talking 50+ foot runs or running 70cm and up where the loss per foot actually starts to add up. at 144 your numbers sound right, maybe a touch better even depending on connector quality. did you use PL-259 or N connectors on that run? because honestly a bad PL-259 crimp can eat more than the whole feedline run anyway. i switched to N-type on everything above 2m a couple years back and never looked back.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely trips people up. so yeah techs do get a small chunk of 10 meters — 28.000 to 28.300 MHz but its CW only below 28.300, and then there's a sliver from 28.300 to 28.500 where you can do SSB phone. so your club friend was partially right but not entirely. the ARRL band plan page lays it out pretty clearly if you just want a visual. as for third party traffic that's a whole separate rabbit hole, basically its about whether you can have a non-ham talk through your station to someone else, and it depends a lot on what country is involved. most of the time in normal domestic operation you wont even think about it. just get on 2 meters and VHF stuff first while you're getting comfortable and worry about HF once you maybe upgrade to general

honestly hamstudy.org is where most people end up and it works pretty well once you get used to it. the thing about the question pool is that a lot of the questions are kind of grouped by topic so if you understand one the others start making sense. like all the questions about operating privileges and frequencies kind of follow a pattern once you realize the band plan logic. three weeks is plenty of time if you do maybe 30-45 minutes a day. i passed mine after like two weeks of casual studying. the site tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and focuses on those which helps a lot. for the stuff you genuinely dont understand, gordon west has some study guides that explain the why behind things a bit more than just drilling. some people swear by them. the electrical theory questions tripped me up at first but once someone explained ohms law with a simple example it clicked. dont overthink it, the tech exam isnt that hard if you put in a little consistent time

this is the kind of stuff I wish someone had told me before I got involved with our local group. I just got my general a few months ago and joined ARES thinking it would mostly be about the radio stuff but theres so much more to it than that. like the coordination and procedures and knowing who talks to who. do you think its worth it for a newer guy to try to take on a net control role in a drill just to get the experience, or is that the kind of thing you should wait on until you've been around longer? asking genuinely because i dont want to be the person who makes the drill go sideways but i also feel like i wont learn if i never try.

yeah 10m has been genuinely good, probably the best stretch i've seen in a few years. we're climbing pretty well into solar cycle 25 and honestly it's exceeded a lot of the predictions they made a couple years ago. when SFI is above 150 and geomagnetic activity stays quiet, 10m and even 6m can do some crazy things. to answer your question -- yeah i do check the numbers pretty much every day, not obsessively but i'll glance at spaceweather.com or the NOAA forecast before i sit down for a session. K-index under 2 is where you really want it for DX work, anything above 4 and the higher bands tend to go to mush, especially on polar paths. the flux number tells you about ionospheric ionization in general but K-index is what tells you if a geomagnetic storm is messing things up. enjoy it while it's cooking. we should have another year or two of good conditions before things start tapering off. get on 15m too if you haven't -- sometimes 15 stays open even later in the evening when 10 has faded.

Another vote for the FT5DR here - I've used mine for ARES work and the rugged design with waterproofing has saved me during field operations. The APRS functionality is fantastic for emergency work. Check RepeaterBook.com to see what digital modes are active in your area before committing to any specific format though.

so ive been messing with RemoteHams for about three weeks now trying to get my home station accessible from work and honestly its mostly working but the audio latency is driving me nuts. like there's probably 600-800ms of delay which makes SSB basically unusable, CW is just... not happening. i run a IC-7300 at home with a pretty decent upload, around 25 meg up on a cable connection, and the client side at work is on a corporate network which is probably the issue but i cant prove it. has anyone had luck tuning the buffer settings in the RemoteHams client to get latency down? i saw something about changing the audio buffer size but every time i mess with it i either get dropouts or it makes no difference at all. also wondering if this is even the right tool for what im trying to do or if i should look at something like SDR-control with an SDRplay hanging off the home machine instead, at least for receive monitoring. the full TX control would be nice but honestly right now id settle for just being able to listen to 40m during lunch without it sounding like im talking to someone underwater any thoughts appreciated, been a ham for about 12 years but remote ops is new territory for me

that 818 is a great little rig for sota, ive used mine probably 30 times in the field and it just keeps working. the battery life is what surprised me the most when i switched from running a bigger radio. what wire setup were you using, end fed or just a dipole thrown up there?