Kevin O'Connor

so ive been on HF for about three years now running mostly SSB on 40 and 20 and recently started paying way more attention to how im actually sounding on the other end. had a buddy with a good ear do some honest monitoring for me and honestly it was a little humbling. i was peaking way too hard and apparently sounded kind of muffled, which surprised me because i thought i had the mic gain set conservatively. started digging into it and went down this whole rabbit hole of ALC behavior, compression, mic placement, the whole thing. ended up realizing that a lot of what i thought i knew was either wrong or only partially right. like i had no idea how much mic distance actually affects the bass buildup — i was probably 3 or 4 inches away and that was making things worse with my particular mic element. what ive found that actually helps: keeping ALC action minimal during normal speech (like the meter barely twitching, not slamming), backing off the compression more than feels intuitive, and honestly just talking more naturally instead of trying to project into the mic. also switched from the stock mic to a Heil PR-781 and that alone made a noticeable difference but im not sure how much was the mic vs just changing how i positioned things. curious what others have found — especially around compression settings and whether the built-in speech processors in modern rigs are actually worth using or if you're better off going flat and letting the DSP at the other end do the work. my radio is a 7300 if that matters.

oh man same experience here when i did my first one last spring, that moment when the pile dries up and youre just calling CQ into the void is a little nerve wracking lol. what park is K-4829 i dont recognize that one offhand

dont overthink the spotting, honestly. yes just use the exact reference from the database and list your freq and mode, thats all you really need. the system will do the rest and chasers monitor SOTAwatch pretty closely so youll get calls pretty quick once you self-spot. some activators do post an alert a day or two ahead on the site so chasers in different timezones can plan around it, especially if they want an S2S contact, but its not required at all. plenty of people just show up and self-spot and that works fine. the KX2 with a linked dipole is a solid setup for this, ive done a lot of activations with almost exactly that combo. just make sure you get your four contacts to qualify the summit and after that its all gravy. good luck up there, W6 has some really fun summits

ok so ive been running a half wave dipole for 40m for about two years now, center fed with some old 450 ohm ladder line into a tuner, works pretty well, no complaints really. but my neighbor just put up one of those GAP Titan verticals and hes consistently getting better signal reports than me on 40 especially to the west and i cant figure out why. his feedline situation looks like a nightmare honestly, just a bunch of RG8X running along the fence, and i dont think he has a very good ground radial system either, maybe 8 or 10 radials he laid on the ground last spring. my dipole is oriented more or less north-south, broadside east-west, its up about 35 feet which i know isnt ideal but its what the trees allow. i keep reading that a dipole at that height on 40 is basically a cloud warmer, like its putting most of its energy straight up. so maybe thats the issue? like is my dipole just doing NVIS and his vertical is getting more low angle radiation toward the west? im not really looking to tear everything down and start over, just trying to understand whats happening. anyone run both and noticed this kind of difference on 40?

the path you're using is fine for most situations, WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is pretty standard. my first suspicion with what you're describing is actually RF getting back into the TNC somehow — mag mounts on cars can do weird things especially if the ground plane isnt great. the 710 is sensitive to that. one thing worth checking is whether the digipeater is actually hearing you at all. if you have access to a second receiver or can pull up a webSDR near you, monitor 144.390 while you key up and see if your packet even makes it to the digi. if the digi isnt hearing you then it doesnt matter what your path says, nothing gets to the igate. the 8 mile distance with 50W should be totally workable but terrain and that mag mount could be killing you more than you think. also double check your MYCALL is set right in the TNC config, not just in memory — ive seen the 710 where those get out of sync and weird stuff happens with how packets get formed.

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i mostly hang around on 2m FM doing local repeater stuff. every time i key up i give my callsign and sometimes i say it phonetically and sometimes i dont, just depends on how the qso is going i guess. but ive been hearing some guys on there who ALWAYS do full NATO phonetics every single time no matter what, even on a clear quiet repeater where everyone can hear fine. like they'll say their call and then spell the whole thing out phonetically even if they just talked 30 seconds ago. is that actually required or is it just a habit some people have? i looked at part 97 and couldnt really find anything specific about phonetics being mandatory. feels like overkill sometimes but i dont want to be doing something wrong either. also on HF is it different? i havent gotten on HF yet but planning to once i get my general.

yeah the gateway thing tripped me up too when i first started. So the RMS gateway is basically just a relay — it receives your message over RF, then it has an internet connection on the backend and pushes it up to the Winlink CMS servers. The CMS is kind of the hub of everything, it holds messages until the recipient connects and picks them up. So no, you dont need to be connected at the same time as the other person, the CMS holds it. That two day delay was almost certainly just you not hitting a gateway that was actually on the air and working — some of the listed gateways in the channel selector are just not active or the sysop has it turned off. Try sorting by distance and activity and pick ones that have had recent connections. The peer to peer thing is specifically for when you have NO infrastructure, like a real go-bag situation where theres no internet anywhere. Both stations do need to be available close enough in time for the handshake to happen, but it stores on the receiving end once connected. Honestly for just getting started i wouldnt worry about p2p yet, get your CMS flow working solid first.

yeah the Q codes go way back to telegraph days, most of them anyway, and a lot of them are technically maritime or aviation stuff that hams just kind of adopted over the years. the ones you'll actually hear all the time are QRM which is interference from other stations, QRN is atmospheric noise like static crashes from lightning, QSB is fading where the signal goes up and down, QSY means change frequency, QRZ is asking who's calling, and QTH is your location. QSL is indeed confirmation, either the card or just confirming you copied something. the number stuff like 73 means best regards and 88 is love and kisses which is typically sent to or from a YL which is young lady, though really it just means any female ham. OM is old man, which again just means any male ham regardless of age, and it's not rude at all, just tradition. DX means distant station or long distance contact. there's probably 20 or 30 more you'll pick up just from operating but those are the ones that come up constantly.

yeah this is pretty much exactly why we do the drills honestly. our group had a similar situation a few years back where we thought we had solid coverage across the county and then the exercise revealed this giant dead zone right where one of the main shelters was supposed to be. we ended up having to relay everything through a third station which worked but added latency and confusion to the net. after that we actually drove around with a handheld and mapped out the problem areas before the next exercise. the go-kit thing is real too. I keep a laminated checklist inside mine now because I kept forgetting small stuff. not glamorous but it works. the other thing I'd say is if your group doesnt do a formal debrief after every exercise, push for one. even just 20-30 minutes of everyone talking through what went wrong without it turning into a blame session is incredibly valuable. thats where the real learning happens in my experience.

the 10 minute rule is a minimum not a maximum, so technically giving your call more often is never wrong. that said on a lot of informal nets the understood convention is that your check-in call counts and as long as youre not going more than 10 minutes between transmissions youre covered. the traffic nets are more formal and yeah they tend to want a callsign on every exchange just because it keeps the log clean and there's an actual record being kept. for getting missed during roll call — most net controls worth their salt will do a "any late or missed check-ins" pass at the end before they close the net. just wait for that and then say your call clearly. if they close without it just key up right before they say 73 and give your call, most NCS will catch it. ive never seen anyone get irritated about that, it happens all the time especially on busy repeaters with some overlap.

passed mine like 8 months ago, used hamstudy almost exclusively and got a 32 out of 35. the only thing id add is do timed practice exams toward the end of your studying, like simulate the actual test conditions because some of the wording on certain questions is a little tricky and you dont want to second guess yourself when its real. good luck with it

congrats on the 7300, i made the same jump a couple years ago from an older rig and yeah the learning curve on the touchscreen menus is real but you get used to it fast. one thing i wish someone told me early on is go into the settings and mess with the RF/SQL knob behavior because the defaults felt weird to me. also the receive audio really does slap compared to what most people expect from a radio in that price range, not just you.

yeah the CW latency thing is a real problem with any of the hosted remote solutions. what i ended up doing was moving away from RemoteHams for anything serious and just running my own setup with a raspberry pi at the home end, hamlib over a VPN tunnel, and then audio through something like mumble which you can tune the jitter buffer on. gets the round trip down quite a bit if your home connection isnt garbage. still not the same as sitting in the shack but CW is at least workable now, i run maybe 15-18wpm remotely without wanting to throw something. on the SDR alongside the main rig idea - i actually do exactly this. RSP1A sitting on a wideband antenna at home, running SDR-Console server mode, and i just connect to it from wherever i am. super useful for spotting before i commit the main rig to a frequency. the bandwidth overhead is nothing if you keep the sample rate reasonable, i run 2mhz wide and its fine on a 20mbps connection. only downside is you gotta keep another machine running at home which adds to the points of failure.

so we finally got around to doing a full scale simulated disaster exercise with our county ARES group and honestly it was a real eye opener. the scenario was a major flooding event that knocked out all the repeaters in the southern part of the county and we had to establish comms from scratch using nothing but simplex HF and a couple of portable VHF setups. first thing that went wrong — and i mean within like the first 20 minutes — was that nobody could agree on what frequencies we were supposed to fall back to. we had a plan on paper but half the guys hadnt looked at it since we updated it six months ago. so we basically spent the first half hour just sorting out who was on what and whether everybody had the right PL tones loaded. meanwhile in a real disaster that half hour is everything. the other big thing was battery life. we kind of assumed everybody showed up with charged gear and yeah, that was a bad assumption. one of our most experienced guys showed up with a radio that had maybe 2 hours of runtime on it. again, in a real event that would have been a serious problem. anyway we learned a lot and i think the exercise was worth every bit of the chaos. curious if anyone else has done similar drills recently and what kind of stuff caught you off guard. seems like the lessons are always the same but you still have to live through them yourself to really internalize it i guess.

I've used the Elk on satellites for a couple years and it's genuinely decent for that purpose but if you're going for terrestrial weak signal stuff on 2m it's a bit underwhelming honestly. The gain just isn't in the same league as even a 5 element yagi. That said for SOTA where you're probably working SSB or FM to other stations not that far away and you want something that fits in a pack, the Elk is hard to beat for convenience. The Arrow is better gain-wise but it's a bit more awkward to transport — not terrible, just something to think about. Personally for summits I ended up just building a simple 3 element tape measure yagi for 2m and leaving the collinear at home. Took maybe an afternoon to put together and it actually outperforms the Elk noticeably. Cheap too. If you're handy at all its worth looking up the ARRL tape measure yagi design, theres a few variations floating around online.

I went two years ago and honestly wasnt super impressed but the flea market part outside was where it was at. got there right when they opened the doors and still almost missed the good stuff. if you go definitely dont bother with the inside vendor tables unless you like paying retail for connectors lol, the real deals are the guys with blankets on the ground

I did my first WWFF activation earlier this year and was in the same boat as you coming from POTA. Honestly the biggest difference I noticed on the air is that WWFF seems to have a stronger European presence so if you're on HF and conditions are decent you might get some surprise DX contacts which is pretty cool for a park activation. The 44 QSO thing tripped me up too but once you get going it's not as daunting as it sounds, especially if you spot yourself on the WWFF spotter network. That site gets traffic from hunters specifically looking for WWFF references so the pileup can come pretty quick once you're spotted.

I was in the exact same spot maybe a year ago so I get it. What helped me was just focusing on LoTW first since thats the one with the most weight for awards and a lot of serious DX operators upload to it regularly. The TQSL software is a little clunky but once you get your certificate set up and figure out the upload process it kind of just becomes routine after a while. eQSL I mostly use for contacts where the other person specifically mentions it or for the occasional domestic contact where neither of us is really chasing DXCC. and honestly getting a physical QSL card in the mail from somewhere like Japan or South America is one of my favorite parts of the hobby, theres something about holding that little cardboard piece that a person on the other side of the world touched and mailed to you. worth the small effort of sending some back imo

I've been studying for months and feel ready to take my Technician exam, but I'm nervous about the actual test session. What's the process like? Do I need to bring anything special besides ID and the exam fee? How long does it take, and what happens if I pass? Should I arrive early?Can I take multiple exams in one session?How soon will I get my callsign?

yeah the repeater going down thing catches everyone off guard even when they know it's coming in an exercise, which is kind of the whole point right. our group went through something similar a few years back and what actually helped was we started doing a short 20 minute simplex-only net every month, nothing fancy just check ins and passing a short message, so people are comfortable operating that way before they need to do it under stress. the laminated card idea is solid by the way, we have them and they do get used. but honestly the bigger thing for us was just making sure every single operator had the backup freqs programmed in their radio with a consistent naming scheme before any exercise. our EC basically made it a requirement and it cut down on a lot of confusion. the tabletop idea before a full exercise is really worth doing too, we found it surfaces a lot of procedural gaps that you dont want to discover when the served agency is watching.

the ALC thing is huge and you're right that nobody talks about it enough. i spent probably six months wondering why i sounded mediocre and it was literally just mic gain too high. the ALC meter is not a VU meter, you're not supposed to be pegging it on every word. once i understood that everything clicked. on compression — i use it but lightly. maybe 4-6dB on the speech processor and thats it. the temptation is to crank it because your audio sounds louder to you in the shack but what it sounds like on the other end with heavy compression is this kind of pumping distorted mess especially if theres any background noise getting in. a little goes a long way. if someone in a pileup tells me they can hear me fine im not touching anything. one thing i havent seen mentioned is the equalizer if your radio has one. my 756 pro has a basic tx EQ and boosting just a little around 2-3kHz does more for intelligibility than anything else ive tried. voice cuts through noise way better without actually sounding processed.

yeah the difference is real and honestly pretty dramatic when you first make the switch. i ran a 5/8 over 5/8 collinear for years thinking it was fine, threw up a 13el M2 yagi and it was like someone turned the noise floor down and the signals up at the same time. the collinear radiates in all directions which is great for repeater work but on weak signal ssb you're basically throwing most of your power into the horizon and beyond in directions you don't care about. the yagi focuses everything into one direction and when you're pointed at a station 200 miles away that extra 6-8dB of real world gain over a decent collinear is absolutely the difference between a solid 59 and barely pulling someone out of the noise. if you're doing 144.200 at all seriously just get the yagi, even something modest like a 6 or 7 element will be a noticeable step up. you'll probably want an elevation rotor eventually too if you start chasing tropo or Es openings but that's a whole other rabbit hole.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been slowly logging contacts and someone at the club mentioned I should be working toward DXCC but then another guy said WAZ is more satisfying for HF newcomers and honestly im just kind of lost about the whole thing. like i understand the basic concept — work a certain number of entities or states or zones — but i dont really understand how the credit submission works or whether I need to get QSLs from every single contact or just the ones i submit. also is there a difference between having a contact count and actually having confirmed credits? because my logging software shows like 47 countries worked but i only have maybe 12 physical QSL cards and a handful of LoTW confirmations. do those LoTW ones count toward the actual award application or do i still need paper cards for everything. sorry if this is a really basic question, the ARRL website kind of goes in circles when i try to read through it

yeah the ULS vanity process looks intimidating at first but its actually pretty straightforward once you do it once. basically you go into the ULS system and file a modification to your existing license, and you can list up to 25 callsigns in order of preference. the FCC then runs these filing windows — i think its like every few days — and if one of your picks is available and nobody with higher preference (like a close relative of a previous holder) applied for the same one during that window, you get it. your current callsign doesnt just disappear while you're waiting, you keep using it until the vanity is actually granted. and once the new one is issued you have a short period where both show up in the system but really you just start using the new one. the whole thing took about two weeks for me back when i did it, though i've heard it can vary. just make sure the format you want is actually available for your license class — generals cant get 1x2 calls, those are extra class only. there's a site called ae7q dot com that lets you search available calls and even shows you the filing windows, that thing is super useful.

QRT means you're shutting down your station, going off the air. so yeah basically signing off. 73 is just best wishes, like saying goodbye to someone but you could say 73 and keep talking to other people. QRT means you're done for the session