Michelle Davis

so we finally got around to doing a full-scale simulated disaster exercise with our county ARES group, something we'd been talking about doing for like two years and kept putting off. the scenario was a major earthquake that knocked out most of the repeater infrastructure plus commercial power, and we had to coordinate simulated shelter operations across four sites using only simplex and a couple of HF links back to the EOC. I've been licensed about six years and thought I honestly had a pretty decent handle on how this stuff works in theory. what I wasn't prepared for was how quickly things broke down when people started actually trying to pass traffic under a little bit of pressure. nothing crazy, just the exercise coordinator throwing in curveballs like "repeater on 146.940 is now down" or "net control is unavailable, someone else take over" and you could just hear people kind of freeze up on the air. the biggest thing i took away is that we need to practice net control handoff WAY more. we also had a few guys show up with gear that hadn't been tested in months, one radio had a dead battery pack that nobody caught until he needed it, and we had one station that couldn't make reliable simplex contact from his location even though on paper the path looked fine. anyway curious if other groups have done exercises like this recently and what caught you off guard. we're trying to figure out what to work on before we do another one in the fall.

so we had our first real activation last weekend, not just a drill but an actual callout for the county EOC because of the flooding situation up near the reservoir. ive been with our ARES group for about eight months now and done maybe four or five SET exercises and a couple of the weekly nets but nothing real. honestly i was kind of nervous going in. i wasnt sure if my logging would be fast enough or if id freeze up on the radio when it actually mattered. we were running Winlink and also keeping a paper log as backup which the EC was pretty insistent on and im glad he was because the laptop did a weird thing around hour six and we lost about 20 minutes before we got it sorted. the thing that surprised me most was how much of the job is just... waiting. and staying ready. and not cluttering up the frequency with chit chat. which sounds obvious but when youre sitting there for three hours and nothing is coming through you kind of have to fight the urge to key up just to feel useful. the experienced guys were really calm about it and that helped a lot. anyway we were there about 11 hours total and it went okay i think. the served agency folks seemed genuinely appreciative which felt good. just wanted to share i guess, and also ask if anyone has tips for staying sharp mentally during those long quiet stretches?

congrats on the first one. i only have like 4 activations myself so im not exactly an expert but the thing that helped me most was joining the SOTA reflector and also just reading trip reports from other activators on the same summit before going up. sometimes people mention specific tree placement or where to set up that makes the antenna situation way easier. also have you tried posting a spot to SOTAwatch before you go up even if youre not sure exactly when youll be ready? the chasers are super patient and will keep an eye out. made a huge difference for me getting contacts faster once i actually got on the air.

the noise floor thing is almost certainly the vertical being unbalanced and picking up all the local junk — rf from switching power supplies, led drivers, all that garbage. a dipole especially an inverted V fed with a decent balun will usually be noticeably quieter on receive, at least in a typical suburban setup. doesnt mean it transmits better necessarily but if you cant hear through the noise it doesnt matter how good your signal is on the other end. 30 feet apex is fine for 40m, not ideal but workable. just make sure your feedpoint impedance isnt completely off — at that height and angle the impedance can shift quite a bit from the textbook 73 ohms so the balun helps but you might still want to run it through a tuner. i ran an inverted V for years at about 25 feet apex and worked plenty of dx on 40, nothing exotic but it got the job done.

One thing that helped me a lot was running the Winlink channel selector and actually looking at what frequencies the nearby RMS gateways are posting activity on recently. Theres a timestamp in there and some of those gateways that show up havent had a connection in weeks, so vara will just sit there spinning trying to connect and youre wasting time. Also make sure your Vara HF is calibrated — if your levels are off it'll connect sometimes and not others and you'll think its a gateway problem when its actually just your audio chain. I had the Signalink drive set too hot and was getting a lot of failed sessions before i figured that out. The waterfall in Vara will show you if youre clipping.

the theory isnt as bad as it looks at first honestly. yeah there's some filter stuff and the odd smith chart question but if you sit down with the ARRL Extra Class License Manual it walks through all of it in plain english. i was dreading the impedance matching section and it turned out to be like two evenings of reading before it clicked. as for memorizing vs understanding, i'd say do both. understand the concepts well enough that you can sanity check your memorized answers, because some of the questions are written to trip you up if you're just pattern matching. the question pool is public so you can absolutely pass on memorization alone but you'll probably retain none of it which is kind of a waste. the privileges are real though. getting into the CW portions of 40 and 80 especially is worth it if you do any contesting or DX work, a lot of the rare stuff sits right down there and as a General you're just locked out watching

so i went ahead and did the Collins filter mod on my 7300 a few months back, basically swapping out the stock roofing filter situation for better adjacent channel rejection. found the writeup on eham and a couple youtube vids that made it look pretty straightforward. and i mean, it mostly was, except i think i either got a bad filter or i nicked something on the board because now i'm getting this weird artifact around 7.150 that wasn't there before. like a faint birdies situation, hard to describe. doesnt show up on the waterfall unless im really cranked up on the RF gain. anyway the actual performance improvement for contesting was real, i could tell immediately on a crowded 40m band. pulling out signals that were just getting buried before. so the mod itself works, im not saying dont do it. just wondering if anyone else ran into weird birdies after doing board-level work on these rigs. makes me wonder if i introduced some grounding issue or maybe there was a solder bridge i missed somewhere. going to pull the cover again this weekend and have another look. also while im in there thinking about doing the TX mod to open up the transmit range, not for anything sketchy just want to be able to use it on 60m without the weird power dropoff. anyone done both at the same time or have opinions on doing one before the other?

honestly the jump from tech to general felt bigger to me when i was studying but when i actually sat down and took the test it wasnt as scary as everyone made it sound. the electrical theory questions look intimidating but you really only need to understand the concepts at a surface level, you dont have to be an engineer. the ones about impedance and reactance and all that, just learn enough to recognize the right answer and move on. the band privileges thing is actually pretty straightforward once you look at an actual band plan chart. as a general you get most of HF with some portions of 80, 40, 20 and 15 meters reserved for extra class on the phone portions. 17 and 12 meters you get full access which is nice. honestly just print out the ARRL band plan and stare at it for a while, it clicks faster than trying to memorize the question pool answers about it hamstudy is great for drilling but i also went through the gordon west study guide which helped me understand the why behind the answers rather than just memorizing. made a difference for me at least. you got this, the test really isnt bad

yeah i was in your exact spot about two years ago, felt totally lost for the first few months if im honest. one thing that really helped me was just showing up to the in-person meetings when they have them because a lot of the stuff that sounds confusing on a net makes way more sense when someone draws it out on a whiteboard or whatever. our group does a monthly meeting at the EOC and thats where i actually learned what all the ICS positions mean and how we fit into the bigger picture with the served agencies. also dont stress too much about not knowing everything right away. ive seen plenty of new hams become really solid ARES operators within a year just by showing up consistently and volunteering for the smaller stuff like public service events before diving into actual emergency activations. the public service stuff like marathons or parades is genuinely great practice for learning how to communicate clearly under a little bit of pressure without it being a real emergency situation.

yeah dont overcomplicate this. if he just wants to listen just point him at a websdr, there are tons of them and they require zero setup on your end. globaltuners or the university websdr sites cover pretty much every band. saves you the headache of figuring out the legality and you dont have to babysit your own server for his curiosity sessions lol

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals, dont feel bad. so the short version is the FCC allocation is the legal boundary, for general class on 40m SSB you can operate from 7.175 to 7.300 MHz. thats the hard limit, you cross below 7.175 on phone and youre technically out of your privileges even if nobody is going to come knock on your door about it most of the time. the band plan stuff is more like gentlemens agreements, the ARRL publishes one and it says where different modes tend to congregate but none of that is law. 7.150 used to be more active years ago but the band plan shifted and now most SSB activity on 40 in north america is up around 7.200 and above, sometimes lower on weekends during contests but thats a whole other thing. the band edge thing is real though, if your radio isnt perfectly calibrated or you drift a little while talking, you can end up outside your authorized segment without meaning to. most people stay at least a few kHz inside the edge just to be safe. so if your lower limit is 7.175 dont just park right on 7.175, give yourself some room

been on a 7300 for about two years now, coming from an FT-450D. the USB audio thing is huge, i remember fighting with virtual audio cable and all that mess on the old setup. now its just plug in and it works basically. the receive audio took me a while to dial in to my liking but once i got the treble and bass settings where i wanted them its really pleasant to listen to for long periods.

honestly just listen to a lot of cw even when youre not actively trying to copy it. like i had the radio on in the background while doing other stuff and i think that helped my brain just get used to the rhythm of it. also lcwo.net has a really good word training mode once you get past individual characters, worth trying if you havent already. the breakthrough does come, just sort of one day you realize youre copying without thinking about it. hang in there

RSP1B is the obvious answer if you just want to receive better. the HackRF is a neat toy but the ADC resolution is genuinely worse than the SDRplay and it shows on HF especially. ive got both and the RSP1A i had before (basically same receiver as the 1B) wiped the floor with the HackRF for anything below 30 MHz. strong station nearby? the HackRF gets stomped, you'll see IMD artifacts all over the place without good filtering in front of it. that said, the HackRF transmit capability is cool for things like signal gen work, testing stuff, poking at digital modes in a lab kind of setup. but if youre just monitoring and doing sat stuff and HF, save the money and get the RSP. you'll also want to try SDRuno which is SDRplays own software, its a bit of a resource hog but the IF filtering and the noise reduction stuff actually works. SDR++ works great with it too if you want something lighter.

been doing cw for about 6 months now with my old vibroplex bug and honestly im getting frustrated. everyone keeps telling me to get a paddle and keyer but i dont really understand what the big deal is. isnt morse code supposed to be about developing good timing and rhythm? feels like using a keyer is kind of cheating or something. maybe im just old fashioned but my granddad worked the world with a straight key back in the day anyway just curious what you guys think, am i missing something obvious here or should i stick with what im doing