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oh man the LoTW certificate thing trips up basically everybody the first time, youre not alone there. once its set up though it really does just run in the background and its the one that counts for DXCC which is probably the biggest reason most serious DXers care about it. eQSL is more relaxed and a lot of casual operators use it, some awards accept it too but yeah the two systems are completely separate which is annoying physical cards i still love them personally. i have a whole binder and theres something about getting a card from a station in like Uzbekistan or wherever that just feels different than a checkbox in a database. but practically speaking if youre chasing awards LoTW is where you want to be. id say get LoTW working first, then sign up for eQSL because its free and easy, and if someone sends you a physical card just enjoy it and maybe send one back if you feel like it. you dont have to have a fancy custom card either, the ARRL bureau can handle incoming ones and a lot of new hams just use a simple printed card to start

so i was just messing around on 10 meters saturday afternoon, not really expecting much, and all of a sudden i start hearing Europeans coming in like they were down the street. worked a handful of stations in Spain and Italy before it faded out maybe 45 minutes later. honestly hadnt heard it open like that in a while, at least not on a weekend when i actually had time to sit down at the radio. also been meaning to mention — saw that Icom apparently announced something new in the mid-range HF lineup, think it was at one of the Japanese ham fairs. havent found a ton of details yet but supposedly its aimed at the same market as the 7300 which i guess makes sense given how popular that radio has been. anyone seen any actual specs floating around or just the usual vague press release stuff? oh and the ARRL DX contest is coming up if anyone cares. i always forget about it until like the week before and then scramble to set stuff up. maybe this year ill actually be ready ahead of time, but probably not if im being honest.

so ive been trying to get back into CW after maybe a 15 year break and i picked up a used Bencher paddle and hooked it to my radio's built-in keyer. problem is everything i send sounds kind of... mushy? like the dits and dahs arent clean, they kind of run together. im practicing at around 12 wpm which honestly feels painfully slow but even at that speed its not sounding right. i messed with the weight setting a little bit but i dont really know what im doing there. the tension on the paddle feels ok i think, maybe a little loose. is this a keyer issue or is it my technique? ive been using iambic mode A but honestly i barely understand the difference between A and B. any help appreciated, been at this for two weeks and getting frustrated

honestly i went through this exact same thing last year. i tried Log4OM for a while and the WSJT-X UDP integration works fine, like QSOs just show up in real time no issues. but when i tried to use it for SS i found the contest mode clunky enough that i just gave up and fired up N1MM anyway. so now i run both — Log4OM as my main shack log and N1MM only when im actually contesting, then import the ADIF from N1MM into Log4OM afterward. not the most elegant setup but it works and ive stopped fighting it. the UDP thing is actually pretty slick once you get it configured right, WSJT-X just broadcasts on port 2237 by default and most loggers can listen on that. Log4OM picks it up no problem. N1MM also does it but you have to tell it to accept UDP from WSJT-X specifically in the config, theres a checkbox somewhere in the network settings.

not a basic question at all, honestly this confuses a lot of new hams because nobody really explains it all in one place. so the short version is — LoTW (Logbook of the World, run by the ARRL) is basically the gold standard if you're going after DXCC or other ARRL awards. confirmations on there carry the most weight for awards purposes. eQSL is another electronic system, some people use it a lot especially for the Worked All States digital award through eQSL itself, but it's not accepted for DXCC so just keep that in mind. physical cards are kind of their own thing and honestly a lot of people still love them, myself included. there's something really nice about getting a card in the mail from a station you worked halfway around the world. the bureau system is how most international cards get routed — your national society (ARRL in the US) runs an outgoing bureau where you send a batch of cards and they route them to the right country bureaus, and there's an incoming bureau where cards addressed to you pile up until you request them. it's slow, like sometimes years, but basically free or very cheap compared to direct mail. for your Japan contact — don't stress about not having cards yet. most DX operators are totally understanding. you can upload the contact to LoTW pretty quickly once you get your certificate set up, and that's probably the most useful thing you can do right now. get some cards printed eventually, they're a fun part of the hobby but not urgent.

yeah the Q codes go back way before ham radio, they were originally developed for maritime and commercial telegraph operators so they could communicate across language barriers quickly. there are like 40 or 50 of the common ones you'll hear on the air but you really only need to know maybe a dozen to get by on HF. QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural static and noise, QSB is when your signal is fading in and out, QTH is your location, QSL is confirmation of a contact. QRP means low power which is a whole rabbit hole if you get into that stuff. and yeah 73 is just tradition at this point, people have been saying it since the 1800s basically. the OM/YL/XYL thing is old fashioned too, OM is old man which sounds rude but its just how hams refer to each other, YL is young lady for any licensed woman, and XYL is supposedly ex-young lady meaning wife. i know it sounds kind of dated but thats just how it is. honestly the best way to learn is just to listen a lot, you'll pick it up fast once you start making contacts

so i finally got around to putting up a proper 2m yagi on the roof, its a 5 element M2 and i ran about 35 feet of LMR-400 from the shack up through the attic and out a weatherproof fitting. got it pointed roughly northeast toward the repeater cluster about 40 miles out and its working but im second guessing myself on the feedline choice. my buddy keeps telling me i shouldve used hardline but honestly the run isnt that long and LMR-400 at 144mhz should be fine right? i measured like 0.8db loss over the run which seems acceptable. the antenna itself is doing great, im hitting that repeater full quieting which i never could with the old 5/8 wave whip on the car. just curious what others are running for longer rooftop runs and whether i should be losing sleep over half a db or whatever.

congrats on your first one, the pile up feeling is pretty addictive isnt it. to answer your questions -- yep the activation zone is the whole area within 25 vertical meters of the true summit, you dont have to be standing on the actual highest rock or whatever. most summits have a pretty generous zone, some of the bigger mountains you can literally be hundreds of meters away horizontally and still be valid for spotting without cell service, a lot of people use the SOTA Goat app and just pre-write the spot then send it when they get a bar of signal on the way down, or some folks have a friend at home watching for them and you call them on 146.52 or something before you start. there are also people using Garmin inReach to self-spot through satellite but thats a bit of a setup cost. honestly just posting on SOTAwatch when you get back down is totally fine too, chasers are forgiving and yeah 2m FM counts just fine, same points, though youll generally get fewer contacts unless there's a repeater or someone specifically watching for SOTA activity on simplex. HF just has more reach obviously

get a headset or at least an earpiece. working in a noisy shelter or EOC without one is miserable and youll miss stuff. also bring food and water for yourself, i know it sounds dumb but i showed up to a drill once completely unprepared to be there for 6 hours and just kind of suffered lol the j-pole from speaker wire thing works great btw, i have one and its my backup antenna, just make sure you tune it before you need it

the cutting board tip is legit, i think i read about that on eham years ago and have been using that method ever since. mine has been up in the midwest weather for going on 4 years now and still looks basically new. i do coat everything in self-amalgamating tape at the feedpoint connection which probably helps keep water out too. one thing i'll throw in — if you ever decide to build a vertical next, the math is a little different and the ground radials are kind of a pain to deal with but the results can be worth it on the lower bands. i have a homebrew 160m vertical that beats my dipole by a decent margin on the low angle stuff, which makes sense given the geometry. anyway good luck with the tree negotiation lol

so ive been sitting on a pile of parts for like two years now and i finally decided to just do it and build a simple direct conversion receiver for 40m. been going back and forth between the NE602 based designs and just rolling my own with a diode ring mixer but honestly im leaning toward the NE602 just to keep things manageable since this is my first real homebrew RX project. my plan is something loosely based on the Sudden receiver design but ive made a few changes to the audio chain because the original felt like it was going to be a bit deaf in the AF department. added a second stage of audio gain after the LM386 section. not sure if thats going to cause oscillation issues or what, i havent breadboarded it yet. the VFO is the part im most nervous about. i want something stable enough to actually copy CW without the thing drifting all over the place every time i breathe on it. thinking about a Hartley or maybe a Colpitts — any strong opinions on which holds up better thermally in these kinds of low power homebrew situations? ive read a bunch of posts going back and forth on it and nobody seems to fully agree. anyway if anyones built something similar and has gotchas to warn me about id really appreciate it before i start committing parts to the board

yeah the fixed wireless thing is your main culprit i'd bet. i ran a similar setup for about a year using a wisp connection at the remote end and the jitter was just unpredictable, didnt matter what i did on the software side. you can tune buffers all day but if the underlying link is dropping packets in bursts there's not much RCForb can do about it. what worked for me was actually setting up a separate low-bandwidth heartbeat monitor so i could see when the packet loss was actually happening vs just feeling like it was. turns out mine was only bad during certain times of day when the tower was congested. once i knew the pattern i just avoided operating during those windows which isnt ideal but it worked. on the SDR stream question — yes absolutely running that concurrently hurts you. the RTL data stream is not small especially if you've got a decent sample rate set. i'd either schedule them so you're not pulling both at once or look at running the SDR through a lower sample rate just for the panadapter function. 1.2 MSPS is probably overkill if you just want to see the band around your operating freq.

the whip on the downlink is almost certainly killing you. 145 downlink from a LEO is weak enough that even a small yagi makes a huge difference — going from a whip to even a 5 element yagi is probably 8-10dB and thats the difference between hearing nothing and copying signals fine. i worked AO-73 for a while with a single yagi on each band and it was totally workable on good passes, you dont need crossed yagis to have fun on it but you do need gain on both ends. also worth checking your gpredict keps are fresh — if theyre more than a few days old on a low bird the timing can be off enough that you miss the pass window or the doppler corrections are wrong. i usually grab fresh keps from celestrak the morning of an operating session. the inverting transponder thing you described sounds like you have that figured out correctly so probably not the issue there.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i mostly do 2m FM on local repeaters and a little HF here and there. my question is kind of dumb but when are you actually supposed to use the NATO phonetics vs just saying the letter normally. like if someone asks me to confirm my callsign do i spell it out as November Whiskey three Tango Alpha Lima or can i just say N W 3 T A L or whatever. i see people do both and im not really sure if theres a rule or if its just preference. also i noticed some of the older guys on the local repeater use some totally different words for certain letters, not the standard NATO ones, and it kind of threw me off the first time. is that normal

so ive been running a simple 40m dipole in an inverted V configuration for about two years now, center fed at maybe 35 feet with a 4:1 balun, and honestly it works fine. decent reports on SSB, picked up a few DX contacts, nothing crazy but im happy enough with it. but ive been reading a lot lately about how a vertical with a good radial field can really outperform a low dipole for DX because of the lower takeoff angle and i keep going back and forth on whether to try building one. the problem is i live on about a third of an acre and running 30+ radials is going to be a project and my wife is already side-eyeing the wire sticking out of the back of the house. has anyone actually done a comparison like this with real results not just modeling software? im curious if the real world difference is noticeable or if im chasing something that wont matter much at my power level (running 100w). also wondering if a vertical with a mediocre radial system is worse than just leaving the dipole up.

this is really interesting to read, im still fairly new to all the ARES stuff and havent been in a full drill yet. we have one coming up in the fall I think. the part about message volume is kind of intimidating honestly, i've been working on my radiogram format but like you said doing one at a meeting feels pretty different from what youre describing. do you think it helps to have done some actual nets like NTS before a drill like this, or did most of your operators come in without much traffic handling background?

yeah 50ah lifepo4 is plenty for that, especially if youre not running a linear or anything crazy. the 7300 pulls maybe 2a on receive and around 20a at full power transmit but if youre doing 50w its more like 10-12a peaks. over a 6 hour exercise with realistic duty cycle you're probably looking at 20-25ah total draw maybe less. i've done full day field ops on a 40ah battleborn and still had 40% left. the solar panel is kind of a bonus at that point, with partly cloudy skies you might only get intermittent charging but honestly you dont even really need it for something that short. id bring the panel anyway since you have it but dont stress if its under a cloud half the day the generator argument is the old school thinking, totally valid for a multi-day deployment or if youre running a full power HF station plus a repeater plus laptops, but for what you're describing its just noise and exhaust fumes and someone has to babysit the fuel level. battery is the right call here imo

so ive been running FT8 pretty heavily for the last year or so, got my DXCC entities up to 287 which im happy with, but lately ive been feeling like its just... automated stamp collecting? like i click a callsign, the software does its thing, i get a confirmation in LoTW, and thats it. never actually talked to anyone. a buddy of mine at the club keeps pushing me toward JS8Call and i finally installed it last weekend and messed around with it a bit on 40m. the interface is a little rough around the edges compared to WSJT-X but i get what its trying to do — its basically using the weak signal propagation benefits of FT8-style encoding but letting you actually type messages back and forth. feels more like the old PSK31 days where you could have a real ragchew at like -15dB SNR or whatever. my question is whether people here actually use it regularly or if its mostly empty frequencies. i tuned around for maybe an hour on a saturday afternoon and only heard maybe 4 or 5 stations, all of them seemed to be running beacon mode rather than waiting for a QSO. compared to the FT8 watering holes which are always packed. is there a certain time or frequency thats more active, or is this just one of those modes thats cool in theory but the userbase never really materialized?

so ive been a ham for about 12 years now mostly HF stuff, some 2m weak signal, and a buddy of mine at the club keeps going on about EME and how he worked like 40 countries last year just bouncing signals off the moon and i guess im finally curious enough to actually look into it seriously the problem is every time i try to read up on it i get lost pretty fast. like i understand the basic concept obviously, signal goes up hits the moon comes back down, but the link budget math gets confusing when people start throwing around path losses of 250+ dB and im trying to figure out what that actually means in terms of what i need on the ground to make it work right now i have a decent IC-9700 and a pair of M2 2m yagis stacked, running maybe 200w out, no preamp yet. is that anywhere close to enough to even hear anything or am i dreaming. ive seen people say you need a big dish or a huge yagi array and then other guys claim to work EME with like 4 yagis which sounds insane to me. also how does JT65 change the picture because i gather thats basically what everyone uses now sorry if this is a dumb question, i know its a rabbit hole

so ive been doing contests on and off for a few years now, mostly phone, some CW. usually just do single op single radio search and pounce, maybe mix in some running when the rate is there. did okay in last years sweepstakes, nothing crazy but respectable score for my station. been reading a lot about SO2R lately and honestly im not sure if its something i should even bother with or if its just for the guys with giant contest stations and dedicated setups. my current station is an IC-7610 which technically can do some of that with the dual receivers but its not the same as two completely separate radios and antennas obviously. the interference between the two radios when both are transmitting is what i keep reading is the real pain to sort out. my main question is really about the rate side of things — like at what point does running vs S&P actually make sense? i know the conventional wisdom is if you can hold a run frequency and get more than like 2-3 qsos per minute consistently then run, but i feel like in the middle of a contest when rates are fluctuating that math changes constantly. anyone have a practical feel for when to switch strategies mid contest?

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and seeing how far out you can get with low power but honestly after a while it starts to feel like im just exchanging signal reports with robots. like theres no actual communication happening, you just click a callsign and the software does everything. so i started poking around JS8Call which is supposed to give you like a messaging capability on top of the weak signal stuff and i set it up last weekend and honestly im a little confused by the interface. like i get the basic idea, its built on top of WSJT-X style decoding but you can type actual messages and relay through other stations and stuff. but when i tuned around 14.078 i was seeing a bunch of activity but i couldn't figure out if people were just calling CQ or actually in the middle of conversations. the SNR reports it was decoding were wild, like -18 dB stuff, which is cool. anyway my actual question is whether JS8Call has enough of an active user base to make it worth spending time on or is it kind of a ghost town outside of certain hours. also does anyone run both on different VFOs or rigs simultaneously, i have an IC-7300 and a spare FT-891 just sitting there.

i mean it kinda depends how far out your contacts usually are doesnt it. from a good hilltop with 50w and an X50 youre probably getting out 80-100 miles easy on 2m so unless youre regularly working guys at the edge of that range i wouldnt bother with the yagi for FM. different story if you were doing ssb or meteor scatter or something but sounds like youre not going there

Excellent reminder! I see operators pushing 100W into FT8 when 25W would make the same contacts. It's always recommended to use minimum output power to make a QSO. More power doesn't help you receive better anyway.

Working JA stations taught me that "M" sounds similar to the letter "N", "B" may sound like "D". This can be particularly troublesome if the transmission is weak or encounters a lot of interference. Extra emphasis on the first syllable helps: MIKE versus NOvember.

yeah the 6m opening last tuesday was something else, i had stations from western europe calling me back to back for like 45 minutes straight which almost never happens from here in the midwest. my IC-7610 was just pulling them in no problem. FT8 is kind of a mixed bag for me personally because i miss the old days of just working SSB on 6 but you cant argue with the results when the band opens like that. as for the Icom thing, ive heard the same rumors. my money is on some kind of updated version of the 7300 with better filtering or maybe a built in panadapter improvement, but honestly they could surprise everyone. Yaesu has been pretty quiet too which always makes me nervous they're about to drop something. the last time both companies went quiet at the same time we got the FTDX10 announcement so who knows. keep your wallets ready i guess haha