Michelle Davis

honestly this is the kind of post i needed like two years ago. im still pretty new to chasing DX and pileups are intimidating as heck. i tried working a VP8 last winter and just gave up after like 45 minutes of getting nowhere. didnt even know what split operating really meant at the time, had to look it up, and by the time i figured out i was probably transmitting on the wrong freq the DX was gone lol. gonna save this thread. the timing thing you mentioned makes a lot of sense intuitively, gonna try that next time theres something good on.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 mins from my house. been meaning to do this for like two years and just kept putting it off. threw my KX2 in a backpack with my end fed halfwave and a little tripod thing i made out of some fiberglass poles i had laying around. got there early saturday morning figuring id beat the crowds and just found a picnic table near the edge of the park away from the parking lot. honestly wasnt sure id even get 10 contacts but ended up with like 34 over about 90 minutes mostly on 40m with a few on 20m when 40 started getting weird around 10am. the pile kind of surprised me, i spotted myself on the POTA app and within like 3 minutes had a small pile going. nobody told me it would be that fun. already planning the next one

Start with the driver stage - no point checking finals if they're not getting drive. Signal Tracing. Signal Injection. Use an RF probe to trace signal from the exciter through each stage. The 2SC2498 drivers often fail before the 2SC2879 finals in these rigs.

I just passed my Extra last month after being a General for like 5 years of dragging my feet so I feel this post. Honestly the thing that finally got me was just deciding to stop overthinking it and treat the pool like a project. I didnt try to deeply understand every single question, some of the RF safety and regulations stuff I just flat memorized because the theory behind the exact numbers doesnt really matter for operating. The advanced theory sections like the reactance and Q factor stuff I did actually try to learn for real because there were enough questions touching on the same concepts that memorizing each one separately felt harder than just getting it. Your mileage may vary on that approach but it worked for me. Took the test at a local club session and passed with a few wrong, probably the operating procedures section tripped me up a bit. Whether the privileges matter depends on what you do I guess. I was excited about it but then realized my antenna situation limits me more than my license class ever did, so there's that.

welcome to the CW rabbit hole, you're not getting out now haha. im in a similar spot actually, been at it about six months and the numbers thing bugged me forever. what finally helped me was just making a tiny cheat sheet and taping it next to my radio until they were in my head. felt like cheating but i dont think it matters when youre copying. also the Bencher BY-1 is a solid paddle to learn on, good choice. just make sure the contact gap is set right, theres some adjustment screws on the sides and if the gap is too wide you'll have to push too hard which messes up your timing. someone on here told me that a while back and it made a big difference for me.

the honda eu2200i is actually one of the cleaner inverter generators out there in terms of RF, the issue youre probably running into is grounding and maybe the way its bonded to your radio chassis. what worked for me was running a dedicated ground rod right at the generator, bonding the frame to it, and also making sure the radio chassis and the coax shield are all on the same ground reference. ferrite chokes on the power leads going into the radio helped a lot too, i use a mix-31 toroid wound about 8 turns, that killed most of the noise i was seeing. also worth checking if the RFI is actually coming from the generator itself or from switching noise in whatever charge controller or DC-DC converter youre running in between. ive been burned by a cheap dc-dc buck converter that was an absolute RF nightmare, replaced it with a linear regulated supply and the noise floor dropped like 20dB. for the battery question, honestly for a 6 hour exercise with an ic-7300 if youre not running 100% transmit you could probably get away with a second 40ah battery in parallel and leave the generator as backup. or bring both. no shame in having options at an exercise, thats basically the point.

congrats on the first one man. i just started doing POTA this spring and im addicted. the people stopping by thing is so real, i set up a little laminated card that explains what im doing now and just point at it, saves so much time haha

Started doing manual programming when I got my first UV-5R, but switched to CHIRP after adding my 10th repeater. The ability to backup and restore configurations is priceless - especially when you accidentally factory reset your radio! Now I keep separate files for local, travel, and emergency frequencies.

the mushy timing thing is almost always the iambic mode and your keyer settings fighting each other. most beginners dont realize theres a huge difference between Mode A and Mode B on iambic keyers and one of them will absolutely wreck your timing if youre not used to it. try switching modes and see if it feels any different. also 12-13 wpm is kind of an awkward speed — you might actually do better bumping up to 15 and letting your brain catch up rather than slowing down and overthinking every element. the straight key idea isnt a bad one honestly. a lot of old timers swear by going back to the bug or straight key when you feel like your fist is getting sloppy. builds up the muscle memory in a different way. but dont give up on the paddles just yet, the Bencher is a solid paddle and tension really does matter — i run mine pretty snug, tighter than most people would expect, just experiment with it.

oh man i remember my first activation, i also waited too long to spot myself and just sat there calling CQ into the void lol. spot early is definitely the move. one thing i'll add that nobody told me until my like 4th or 5th activation — if you can, try to get on a frequency thats already somewhat clear before you spot, because once that spot goes out you get a pretty immediate pileup and if theres already someone nearby on the band you'll have a bad time. i learned that the hard way at a park in michigan last fall, had a net running like 3 kHz down and i had no idea until people started complaining.

I built a similar yagi a few years back and went through basically the same thing. ended up being my balun honestly. the binocular core wound baluns are fine but if the impedance transformation is off even a little bit it shifts everything and makes the SWR curve do weird stuff. i'd try disconnecting the balun and just connecting coax directly (unbalanced, i know) just as a sanity check to see if the resonance point moves. if it does then the balun is your culprit not the elements.

so i finally pulled the trigger and tried my first activation on Saturday. been chasing for about 6 months and figured how hard can it really be right. picked a 1 point summit close to home, W4T/SU-099 if anyone knows it, the hike wasnt bad at all maybe 45 minutes up. brought my KX2 and a linked dipole i built from the sotabeams kit and my phone for the reflector. everything was going fine until i got to the top and realized i forgot to spot myself before losing cell service about halfway up. so im up there calling CQ on 40 and 20 for like 20 minutes getting nothing. a couple QRM situations but no actual contacts. eventually someone came back to me on 20 but i couldnt pull their call out of the noise at all, was really frustrating. ended up sitting there for almost an hour and only got 2 contacts total, didnt qualify the summit. not giving up though. i think i need to either prespot before i lose signal or figure out the SMS spotting thing. also wondering if my dipole was even resonant up there, i tuned it at home but the feedpoint height was way different on the actual summit. anyway just wanted to share, felt like a bit of a failure but i know these things happen

so i finally got around to finishing this DC receiver ive been breadboarding for about 3 months now. its based loosely on the Neophyte design but i swapped out the detector stage with a pair of 1N4148s in a ring configuration and im running the LO off a si5351 module i had lying around from another project. overall its working way better than i expected honestly, pulling in signals on 40 pretty well considering its just a cardboard box chassis right now lol but heres the thing thats bugging me — im getting noticeable LO leakage out the antenna port. like if i put my SDR dongle near the antenna lead i can see the carrier sitting right there at whatever frequency the si5351 is putting out. i know DC receivers are inherently going to have some of this but is there a standard approach people use to knock it down? i was thinking about adding a low pass filter on the RF input but i dont know if thats really the right tool here or if im better off just improving the shielding on the LO side. the cardboard chassis isnt exactly helping i imagine also as a side note the audio chain sounds a little muddy on SSB — running it into an LM386 amp which i know isnt ideal but its what i had. wondering if thats a filter issue or just the LM386 being the LM386

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF DX, some VHF contesting here and there, but EME has always been this thing in the back of my mind that seemed completely out of reach. lately ive been reading more about it and with JT65 and the weak signal stuff it seems like maybe its not as insane as it used to be. i mean people are doing it on 2m with a single yagi now right? at least thats what someone told me at a club meeting. my main question is about the antenna. i have about half an acre and could probably put up something decent but im not sure what the minimum viable setup looks like for actually making contacts vs just hearing signals. i keep seeing people talk about 4 yagis or 8 yagis in arrays but then others say they worked the moon with a single long yagi and a good preamp. whats realistic for a first attempt? running an IC-9700 and have a decent station otherwise, shack is about 100 feet from where the antenna would go so coax loss is a factor too. also is there a good time of year when the moon is in better geometry for north america or does it not really matter that much

so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just done local stuff and some contests here and there but lately ive really gotten into chasing DX and someone at the club mentioned i should start tracking my QSOs toward DXCC and i kind of nodded along like i knew what they meant but honestly im still fuzzy on how it all works like i understand the basic concept, 100 confirmed entities and you get the basic award, but what i dont get is the difference between worked and confirmed. does a QSO in my log count toward anything until i get it confirmed through LoTW or a card? and if i already have like 80 something entities logged from the past couple years do those count or do i have to have started tracking from some specific date also someone mentioned WAS and WAZ and i sort of want to chase all of them eventually but should i just focus on DXCC first or is there a smart order to go after these things. any advice from people who have done this would be great, im running a modest station, just a tribander at about 35 feet so nothing crazy

so ive been licensed about 6 years now and done a fair amount of HF DX, some 6m sporadic-e stuff, and lately been messing around on 2m SSB trying to work stations out to maybe 1200km or so via tropo. but EME has always been this thing in the back of my head that seemed completely out of reach for normal people with normal budgets. then i started reading about the JT65 mode and how people are apparently doing single yagi EME on 2m and actually making contacts and i dont know if thats real or if those posts are from like 2005 and things have moved on. are people actually doing this with modest stations or is it still basically the big dish crowd making all the contacts and everyone else just hearing noise. also genuinely dont know what the minimum viable setup looks like. i have a IC-9700 which i think is reasonably capable on 2m, and i could probably get a 9 or 11 element yagi up without too much trouble. preamp, obviously, but is a good masthead LNA actually enough or are you fighting your coax losses so hard that it doesnt matter. and the moon tracking piece, do people actually use az-el rotators for this or is there some cheaper approach that works well enough for occasional contacts. sorry for the scatter shot questions, just trying to figure out if this is a rabbit hole worth jumping into

so after years of telling myself id get around to it, im actually building a proper go-kit. been a ham for about 6 years and never really had anything more organized than just grabbing my HT and hoping for the best. with some of the weather we've had lately it really hit me that I need to be more prepared. right now ive got a Yaesu FT-891 that im planning to use as the main rig, a 40Ah LiFePO4 battery, a basic dipole that I can string up pretty quick, and im putting it all in a Pelican case. also throwing in a notebook and some pencils because yeah apparently that matters when everyones phone is dead. what I keep going back and forth on is the antenna situation. do most of you run something like an EFHW for portability or do you just stick with a simple dipole? also wondering about power — is 40Ah enough for a full day of operating if im not transmitting constantly? feels like it should be but I honestly havent done the math. also any stuff you wish you had included that you didnt think of at first? ive seen people mention things like coax adapters and spare fuses and that kind of thing, trying not to forget the small stuff that bites you later

good writeup. that feeling you described about wondering if the training is just going through motions — yeah pretty much everyone goes through that at some point. the groups that stay sharp are the ones where the EC actually runs realistic exercises, not just a check-in net with a script. simplex ops especially, people either skip that in training or treat it like an afterthought and then get to an actual event and realize the repeater isnt going to save them. sounds like your group has their act together. the flooding situations are often harder than they look on paper too because the shelter coordinators arent always expecting to actually USE you, they kind of see radio as a backup backup, so good on you for making it work regardless.

not a dumb question at all, everyone starts somewhere. honestly hamstudy.org is probably the best place to begin, its free and it pulls from the actual question pool that the exam uses so youre studying the real questions. a lot of people pass just doing that for a few weeks, maybe 30-45 minutes a day until youre consistently scoring in the 80s or higher on the practice tests the arrl technician manual is good if you want to actually understand the why behind stuff, but if you just want to pass the test you dont strictly need it. no formula sheet at the test by the way but the math questions on technician are pretty basic, like ohms law simple, and there arent that many of them. the question pool is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass so theres actually a decent amount of room for error for finding a test session look up your local arrl affiliated club or check the arrl website for exam sessions near you, lots of clubs do them regularly and some even do remote online testing now through groups like hamstudy or laurel vec. the fee is usually pretty small, under 20 bucks typically. just dont overthink it, the tech exam really isnt that brutal

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, tech class, and ive been thinking about learning CW for a while but every time i try to figure out where to start i just get overwhelmed by all the different opinions online. some people say start with the Koch method, some say just buy a book and memorize the dots and dashes, some say use an app. i honestly dont even know what the Koch method really is, i just keep seeing it mentioned. i dont have a key yet either so i guess thats another thing i need to figure out. is it even worth trying to learn the characters before i have something to practice sending on? i tried using one of those online sites where you just listen and copy but i can only get like 2-3 characters before i lose track of where i am. is that normal when youre just starting out or am i doing something wrong