Jessica Taylor

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly on 40m and some 2m stuff locally. someone at my club mentioned i should be uploading to LoTW and also using eQSL and also sending physical cards and honestly it sounds like a lot of overhead just to confirm a contact happened. like dont the other person and i both know we talked? i guess im trying to figure out what the actual point of each one is and whether i really need to do all three or if picking one is fine. ive heard some awards require specific ones, like DXCC only accepts LoTW or physical cards i think? but i dont really know if im ever going to chase awards so maybe it doesnt matter. just curious what you guys actually do in practice because the club guys made it sound very complicated

same boat as you were not too long ago lol. i just decided to chase DXCC first because the DX side of it felt exciting to me, like each new entity feels like a little win. WAS kind of snuck up on me in the background while i was doing that. just make sure you're uploading to LoTW because you'll want those confirmations and paper QSLs take forever sometimes.

the Winkeyer has a lot of settings that can mess you up if they're not dialed in — the weight adjustment especially can make things sound really compressed or sloppy at higher speeds even if your hand technique is fine. what i'd suggest is record yourself sending and then play it back, sometimes you cant hear your own mistakes in real time but they're really obvious on a recording. also the BY-1 is a solid paddle but the tension and gap adjustments matter a lot, if the contacts are set too close you'll get extra dits sneaking in when you dont want them. try opening the gap up just a hair and see if that cleans things up at speed. honestly though 3 months in and hitting 15wpm? thats actually pretty decent progress. most people take way longer to get comfortable with a paddle after coming from a straight key or whatever. just keep sending, your muscle memory will sort itself out eventually

yeah the dead battery thing is so common it almost should be its own agenda item at every pre-exercise briefing. We have the same problem in our group and honestly the fix we landed on was just making a rule that everyone does a radio check with net control the Tuesday before any drill. Sounds basic but it cut our equipment failures way down. the dead spots thing is a real issue though and I dont think enough groups take it seriously until they're actually in the field. We did a tabletop earlier this year that focused specifically on simplex path planning and it turned out to be one of our more useful sessions. Basically we just pulled up terrain maps and had people volunteer to test paths ahead of time. Took a few weeks of casual testing but now we have a pretty good sense of where the coverage holes are. 60 meters for regional HF is a great call by the way, more groups should have that in their playbook for sure.

so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now, mostly just tracking my truck when im out doing SOTA activations so my wife can see where i am. using a TM-D710G connected to aprs.fi and it works great for that. but lately ive been messing with the path settings and i honestly dont fully understand what im doing. right now im set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i think is the standard recommendation but i read somewhere that if youre in a dense area you should maybe drop it to just WIDE1-1 to avoid congesting the network. im in a mid-size city, not super rural but not downtown manhattan either. theres probably 4 or 5 digipeaters within range of me on a good day. also completely separate question but does anyone actually use the messaging feature on APRS? like the actual two-way text messaging? ive played with it a little but it feels clunky and im not sure if people on the other end even see the messages in real time or if its just stored somewhere.

the Winlink thing is so real and it catches people every single time. we had almost the exact same issue during a drill maybe three years ago and now we have a rule in our group that if youre on the digital team you have to do a test connection the night before and screenshot it or something just to prove everything is working. sounds a little overkill but it saved us at least twice since we started doing it. the simplex fallback thing is something I think almost every group has a blind spot on. everybody assumes the repeater will just work and it usually does but that's not the point. we actually built a laminated quick reference card that has our primary freq, backup repeater, and two simplex channels on it and we hand them out at the start of every activation or drill. still have people who leave it in their car though so I dont know what you do about that honestly. sounds like overall it was a really productive exercise though. the fact that you can identify those gaps now means your next real activation will go way better. do you debrief right after or wait a few days?

the SDR-Console server approach is actually pretty solid for what you're describing. i ran a similar setup for about a year — IC-7300 at a remote site outside of town with an RTL-SDR V3 on a separate antenna port, streaming the SDR piece via SDR-Console's network server on a different port from the RCForb stuff. worked well enough that i could have the panadapter open on one screen and the RCForb client on another and they didnt really interfere with each other much. main thing i'd watch is your upstream bandwidth at the remote site. the SDR stream eats way more than the audio from the transceiver does, especially if you crank the sample rate up. i had to throttle mine down to like 1.024 Msps to keep it comfortable on a 10Mbps upload connection. at that rate the panadapter is still useful, just not covering as wide a chunk of spectrum as you'd want ideally. as for the allstar idea — i mean it's not crazy. people do use remote HF setups tied into linking nodes, the audio routing gets messy though. you'd basically need something like a virtual audio cable setup on the server side pi to route between the two. doable but debugging it when something breaks at 2am remotely is not fun

yeah SOTA is kind of its own world compared to traditional contesting — it's less about speed and points and more about activating summits and making contacts from up a mountain. still really fun but a different vibe entirely. i do both and they scratch totally different itches. for what its worth i did my first Sweepstakes last november as a general and it was a little chaotic but in a good way. the exchange is more complicated than CQ WW (you have to send a serial number plus your section and some other stuff) so maybe start with CQ WW phone like the other guy said. also check if your local club is doing any kind of group contest effort, a lot of clubs set up stations for the big ones and having someone next to you explaining whats happening makes a huge difference when youre new to it.

honestly the baofeng will work fine for hitting local repeaters, especially just starting out. yeah there are legitimate complaints about harmonic emissions and the programming software is kind of a pain, but for learning the ropes and checking into nets it does the job. i started on one and used it for almost a year before i felt like i needed something better. that said if you can swing the FT-60R i do think its a nicer radio, the receiver is noticeably cleaner in areas with a lot of RF noise, and the build quality is just better. feels solid in the hand. if you're in a busy metro area with a lot of signals floating around the better front end on the yaesu will actually matter. for simplex 8 miles in suburban terrain youll probably want a decent rubber duck antenna or a slim jim hung in a window regardless of which radio you get, thats gonna matter more than which HT you pick honestly.

so i've been putting off doing any homebrew stuff for years, always figured it was beyond me or i'd need a proper lab setup or whatever. finally just said forget it and threw together a simple direct conversion receiver for 40m using the ugly/manhattan style construction on a piece of copper clad. grabbed a NE602 and an LM386 off ebay, followed the EMRFD design pretty closely but made a few mods because i didnt have all the exact capacitor values. anyway it actually works. like, it actually pulls in SSB signals on 40m at night which is kind of wild to me because i built it. the audio is a bit rough and there's some hum i cant chase down — probably a grounding thing or maybe my audio chain is picking up 60hz somewhere. also the LO is drifting a fair bit when it first warms up, maybe 200-300hz over the first few minutes, which makes SSB pretty annoying until it settles. anyone else gone through the LO drift thing on a first build? i'm using a colpitts oscillator and i suspect the capacitors i used are not great — just whatever ceramics i had in the junk box. would swapping to NPO/C0G caps actually make that much difference or is there something else i should be looking at first?

ran an inverted V for about three years on 40 before i switched to a vertical with a decent radial field and honestly the difference for DX was noticeable but maybe not as dramatic as the internet makes it sound. the inverted V was pulling in Europe fine most mornings during good conditions, the vertical just did it a little more consistently and with less noise weirdly enough. the thing people dont tell you about verticals is the radials really do matter a lot. i put down 16 quarter wave radials when i first set it up and it was okay, then i went to 32 and it was better. if youre on a small lot and cant do buried radials, elevated radials at like 6-8 feet can work really well too and you need fewer of them, maybe 4-6. but they have to be resonant. anyway if i was in your situation with that 35 foot tree id probably just hang the inverted V and call it good, 35 feet is a respectable height for 40m and itll work a lot better than people give it credit for.

so i've been kind of casually watching the solar flux numbers for the past few months and something seems to be clicking lately. yesterday afternoon i just had 10m cranked up on the FT8 waterfall kind of as background noise while i was doing other stuff and suddenly there were signals absolutely everywhere. worked a bunch of stations in South America, a couple in Europe, even heard what sounded like JA calling but couldn't pull him out of the noise. i know we're supposedly climbing toward the solar maximum but i honestly didn't expect 10m to be this alive. last cycle i barely got on HF before the bands went flat so im kind of new to what a real solar peak looks like in practice. the SFI was up around 180 something when i checked, is that considered high or is it gonna get even better? feels like i should be spending more time at the radio right now instead of just using it as wallpaper

im kind of in the same boat as you lol, been at it for maybe 6 weeks now. the Morse Mania app on my phone helped me get the letters down at least. its not perfect but its something i can do while commuting or whatever. what really helped me was just listening to slow CW nets on the air even before i could copy anything, just to get used to what it actually sounds like outside of a practice program also W1AW broadcasts code practice sessions at different speeds, thats an actual thing you can tune into or download from the ARRL site i think. a lot of people use those

So after about three months of hemming and hawing i finally pulled the trigger on a Yaesu FTM-300DR and got it mounted in my truck last weekend. overall pretty happy with it but there's a couple things bugging me and im not sure if its normal or if i did something wrong. First the antenna situation — i went with a Diamond NR770HNMO on a lip mount on the hatch of my SUV. seems to work fine, hitting the local repeaters no problem, but i keep reading that trunk lip mounts are not ideal and now im second guessing myself. the feedline is just run through the door seal which i also read is bad but i honestly dont know where else to run it without drilling a hole and i really dont want to do that to my truck. Second thing, the radio is doing this thing where it sometimes displays a low voltage warning when i start the engine. i ran the power direct to the battery with 12awg wire and a fuse close to the battery so i thought that would be fine. maybe the wire isnt heavy enough? its not a super long run, maybe 8 feet total. anyway if anyone has dealt with either of these things id love to hear what you did. been licensed about a year now, mostly just doing local stuff on 2m and 440.

yeah the actual text of Part 97 reads like its written by lawyers for lawyers lol. one thing i'd add is dont stress too much about memorizing every little rule at first — the ARRL has a summary of tech privileges that's way more readable than the actual CFR text. just google arrl technician privileges and you'll find a chart. also if you ever genuinely aren't sure about something before transmitting, just dont do it until you look it up. thats honestly the safest approach and nobody's gonna come after you for being cautious