Steven Wright

oh man i remember that phase, took me months to get past it too. the thing that helped me was dont worry about getting every letter - just try to catch familiar patterns. like when you hear a cq call, you already know what its gonna be so you can kind of fill in the blanks for farnsworth - keep the character speed high like 20wpm but slow down the word spacing. that way you learn to recognize each letter as a sound pattern instead of counting dits and dahs. most people recommend 20/8 or something like that

yeah the battery thing gets people every time. we did a drill back in the spring and i swear half the group had never actually run their station off battery under any kind of load for more than a few minutes. one guy thought his 35ah battery was fully charged because his voltmeter said 12.6v sitting there with nothing connected - put a 25w load on it and it started sagging within the hour. we ended up making battery load testing a required checklist item before any activation now. the net discipline thing is real too. we use a buddy system now where newer operators are paired with experienced ones specifically so someone can tap them on the shoulder when they're about to key up at the wrong time. feels a little babysitting-ish but it actually helps a lot. the stress simulation is hard to replicate but even just having someone timing you and calling out "shelter 3 needs a status update NOW" does something to people's brains. for scenarios we've done winter storm shelter coordination and a comms-out hospital coordination drill which was interesting because the hospital staff had no idea what to do with us at first. that one taught us as much about interfacing with served agencies as it did about radio ops.

the generator/battery buffer idea is actually pretty solid and not overkill at all. running the radios directly off a cheapo genny is asking for noise problems, especially on receive. the eu2200i is a good choice, inverter generators are way cleaner than the open frame stuff and i've had good luck running an ic-7300 off one with no issues but putting the lifepo4 in between is still smart because then the genny can run at lower load and recharge the bank while the radios draw from the batteries. just watch your charge controller setup and make sure everythign is fused properly at the battery terminals. for the antenna question, 33ft mast with a fan dipole is workable but youre going to have some compromises. on 80m especially a dipole that low is going to be more of a cloud warmer than anything, fine for short skip but if your exercise has stations more than like 150 miles out you might struggle a bit. 40m should be okay at that height for regional comms. if you can get the center up 33ft and the ends dropped down in an inverted V config that usually helps. also worth having an NVIS setup in mind if short range 80m is part of the plan, low dipoles actually work in your favor for that.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i get the appeal, the weak signal stuff is genuinely impressive, pulled contacts at -20dB that i never would have made on SSB. but lately ive been reading about JS8Call and people keep saying its better for actual communication vs just exchange-style contacts. i tried it for a few weeks and honestly the activity seemed way lower on the bands i checked (mostly 40m and 20m), like id see maybe 4-5 stations vs the wall of FT8 signals. what im trying to figure out is whether its worth keeping JS8Call running alongside WSJT-X or if im just splitting attention for no real gain. i do some ARES stuff locally so the idea of a more robust weak signal chat mode is interesting but i cant tell if the activity is just low in my area or if the mode itself has kind of stalled out development wise. also does anyone run PSK31 still, i was reading old posts from like 2005 that made it sound like the best thing ever and i tried it once and the waterfall was basically empty

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and figured id just ask here. i have a pretty small lot, maybe 60 feet of usable space side to side, and im trying to figure out if a center-fed dipole cut for 40 is even worth attempting or if id be better off just throwing up a vertical with a decent radial field. the dipole would have to be in an inverted-V config because theres no way im getting it flat, apex probably around 35 feet off the ground if im lucky. i have a decent tree in the back corner i could use as one support. the ends would probably be drooping down to maybe 8-10 feet which i know isnt ideal. the vertical option is tempting because i could fit a quarter wave pretty much anywhere and run radials under the grass, but ive heard you really need like 30+ radials to not take a massive efficiency hit, and honestly running that much wire under my yard sounds like a weekend i dont want to have. mostly interested in general rag chewing and maybe some casual contesting, not chasing dx hardcore or anything. what would you guys actually do in this situation