Steven Wright

same here man, tuesday was rough. i had a contact lined up with a guy in ZL land and we just could not make it work even with him running a kW. we tried for like 20 minutes and gave up. checked again wednesday evening and boom, 20m came alive again out of nowhere and i worked him no problem on my first call with 100 watts. propagation is honestly kind of magic sometimes haha. or black magic i guess depending on the day

yeah the gateway status page on winlink.org is your friend, theres a channel table too that shows frequencies and modes for each station. i spent way too long trying to connect to a gateway that had been offline for weeks because i just assumed anything on the map was active lol. one other thing worth checking is whether pat is actually passing the right mycall to vara. i had a weird issue where pat was sending it lowercase and vara was choking on it, not sure if thats still a thing but worth a look at the logs. pat has pretty decent logging if you crank up the verbosity.

i ran into the same exact problem last winter during the ARRL 10m contest. ended up with like 40 duplicate QSOs because i forgot i had the ADIF auto-export running in WSJT-X and then also had the UDP feed going into Log4OM. took me an embarassingly long time to sort it out with an ADIF editor. honestly at this point i just keep N1MM for contests, full stop. theres no world where Log4OM beats it for running a pile or S&P during a big contest. the network connectivity for multi-op stuff alone is worth keeping it installed. and N1MM is free so its not like youre paying for two things. the annoyance is really just the post-contest merge and i've started doing that the same day so i dont forget what happened.

dont give up, im in the same boat right now kind of. just hit 10wpm last week after being stuck at 7 forever. what helped me was just shorter sessions more often instead of long ones. like 15 minutes twice a day beats an hour once a day for me anyway. also just started doing actual QSOs on 40m with the slow speed nets and that is way more fun than just staring at lcwo scores, even though im still pretty rough at it

so i finally did it after like 6 months of putting it off, passed my technician exam yesterday and got my callsign this morning. already programmed my baofeng (yeah yeah i know) and jumped on the local 2m repeater. first transmission i completely forgot to ID at the end, then someone came back to me and i panicked and gave the wrong callsign, like i said my old study callsign from the practice tests. the guy on the other end was super patient with me though and we ended up talking for like 20 minutes about nothing in particular. honestly wasnt as scary as i thought once i got going but man that first key-up had my heart pounding. anyone else have a rough first QSO or is it just me

The RCForb client honestly works pretty well once you get the server side configured right, which I'll admit took me longer than I expected. The SDR integration is nice if you have something like an RSP1A hanging off the same machine -- you can run it as a second device in the RemoteHams server and clients can pull up the panadapter view independently of whoever is controlling the rig. That part is actually pretty slick. That said the audio path is still the weak link in any of these setups and RemoteHams is no exception. I run mine through a dedicated VPS and even then hotel wifi is going to murder your QSO quality half the time. The codec options in RCForb help -- I usually drop it to the lower bitrate OPUS setting when bandwidth is garbage and it stays intelligible. Not great for SSB but usable. On the DMR hotspot thing, those are really two separate worlds. You could theoretically link them through something like MMDVM if you wanted a bridged audio path but thats a whole separate project and I dont think its what RemoteHams is designed for. The internet linking stuff people do with Echolink or AllStar is a different use case -- more about RF linking nodes together over IP rather than remote control of a physical transceiver.

that simplex dead spot thing is so real and it catches everyone off guard. i remember during a real activation a few years back (nothing huge, just a bad storm that knocked out some infrastructure) we had a volunteer at a shelter who genuinely could not hit any other station directly. ended up parking someone in a parking garage rooftop for like 3 hours just to act as a relay. worked fine but we definitely hadnt planned for it. now we do a simplex map exercise every year where everyone just goes to their assigned shelter or post and reports what they can and cant hear. takes maybe 90 minutes and you learn so much. anyway welcome to the exercise world, its frustrating but way better than finding this stuff out for real

CW being better than SSB over remote links is just how it is, you get used to it. the audio codec handling on most of these systems is tuned more for voice intelligibility than low latency and CW basically doesn't care as much about a few hundred ms of jitter. i ran a remote station for a club for a couple years using a completely homebrewed setup, hamlib on the back end, mumble for audio believe it or not, and a cheap VPS in between. worked suprisingly well for contesting but getting new members set up on it was a nightmare every single time

73 is the one that threw me off for ages, i kept thinking it was some kind of code for something secret haha. its just best regards basically, like a friendly sign-off. 88 is love and kisses and youre really only supposed to use that one with YLs but people bend that rule. OM is old man which sounds rude but its just how hams refer to other male operators, totally normal. YL is young lady for any female operator regardless of age, and XYL is ex-young lady meaning basically a wife or partner. i made a little cheat sheet when i was starting out and kept it next to the radio, that actually helped me a lot more than trying to memorize from a list. context is everything, if you hear QSB while somones signal is clearly fading it just clicks and you remember it. also ARRL has a decent reference but honestly the cheat sheet thing works better for me personaly

hamstudy.org is honestly all you need, just go through the question pool on there and do the practice tests until you're consistently hitting like 80% or better and you'll be fine. the actual pool only has 423 questions and they pull 35 from it so the more you drill the more familiar everything gets. took me maybe a week of evenings and i passed no problem. the electronics stuff looks worse than it is, for ohms law just memorize the triangle trick and you can get through most of those questions without really understanding the underlying theory. not saying dont learn it eventually but for the tech test you can kind of brute force it

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and always told myself id eventually learn CW. well i finally started and im using just a straight key to learn the characters but someone at the club told me i should be thinking about getting a paddle and a keyer sooner rather than later so i dont build up bad habits with the straight key. is that actually true? i always thought the straight key was the "proper" way to learn also im using the G4FON koch trainer software which seems pretty good but im only at like 10wpm and hitting a wall around that speed. been at it for about 6 weeks. is that normal or am i doing something wrong. i practice maybe 20 minutes a day which might not be enough i guess anyway the keyer question is the main thing. i have no idea what to look for, theres so many options and i dont want to spend a ton of money if im not even sure ill stick with it. someone mentioned the Begali paddles and i nearly fell off my chair when i saw the price

the HackRF above 2 GHz is kinda rough honestly, like yes it technically works but the sensitivity drops off pretty significantly and youre fighting a lot of noise. i tried doing some 2.4 GHz band monitoring with mine and it was usable but not impressive. for what you're describing i'd probably just get the RSP1B and call it done, especially since you already have the RTL for ADSB.

so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero w for a few weeks now trying to get it to handle my antenna switching automatically based on band selection from my radio. the idea is pretty straightforward — the radio sends band data out over a serial port (its a kenwood so it uses the AI command to broadcast frequency) and i want the pi to read that, figure out what band im on, and then trigger the right relay to switch between my yagi and my wire antennas. i got the serial reading part working fine, python script runs on boot no problem. the issue im running into is the relay board. i have one of those 8 channel relay modules from amazon and i cant figure out why two of the channels seem to be triggering inverted — like they energize when i send a LOW instead of HIGH to the gpio pin. the other 6 work exactly how i expected. already checked my code like three times and the wiring looks right to me but im probably missing something dumb. also wondering if anyone has done something similar and whether the pi zero is fast enough for this or if i should have just used an arduino. latency probably doesnt matter much here but curious what others think.

yeah i asked almost this exact same question when i got my ticket lol. what i found is that on HF it becomes second nature pretty fast because you actually need it. tried to give my call without phonetics once during a pileup and the DX station just came back with a completely different call that sounded nothing like mine so. lesson learned. on the repeater though half the old timers around here never bother and everyone knows who they are anyway so it doesn't really matter i guess

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly i feel like im hitting a wall with just 2m and 70cm. i hear people talking on HF and it sounds so much more interesting, like actual conversations instead of just repeating my callsign into a repeater and waiting for someone to acknowledge me lol anyway i downloaded the question pool from the arrl site and started going through it and some of it is way over my head. like the electrical stuff, ohms law i can kinda follow but then it gets into reactance and impedance and i lose track pretty fast. is the actual exam that brutal or does the question pool make it seem worse than it is? i feel like half the questions are things ill never actually use also not sure how long i should study before trying to take it. took me about 3 weeks to pass my tech exam if that helps anyone gauge where im at