Mark Taylor

ok so I just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get onto the local 2m repeater but nobody ever seems to hear me. I can hear other people just fine, their conversations come through loud and clear, but when I key up nobody responds and I dont even hear my own audio come back through the machine. I looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it says the input is 146.955 and output is 146.355 and there's a CTCSS tone listed as 100.0 Hz. I programmed that into my Baofeng and set it to... I think tone encode? but im not sure if I also need to decode set or just encode. my radio has like four different options for the tone squelch stuff and I honestly have no idea what the difference is between them all. Also slightly related — is there like a standard way you're supposed to announce yourself when joining a conversation? I dont want to just barge in and be rude about it. one of the guys at my club mentioned something about waiting for a pause but I wasnt sure what that meant exactly in practice.

okay so i've been doing EME on 2m for about four years now and the single yagi + 100w thing is not a myth but you have to be realistic about it. with Q65 specifically the sensitivity is genuinely remarkable compared to JT65, like we're talking enough of a difference that stations that were borderline workable before are now solid copy. that said you're still going to need a decent yagi, something in the 12 to 14 element range minimum, and a really good low noise preamp at the feedpoint is honestly more important than squeezing another 50 watts out. coax loss kills you on EME because the path loss is something like 252 dB on 2m, every tenth of a dB at the feedline matters more than you think. for timing and scheduling, the ON4KST chat is basically where all the action happens in real time, people post their moon windows and call for skeds right there. there's also the big contest weekends organized by ARRL and DUBUS where activity goes way up and even modest stations can make contacts because everyone is specifically looking for smaller guns. honestly the first contact feeling is pretty surreal, knowing your signal left earth, hit the moon 1.3 seconds later, and came back. worth the hassle.

so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up in about 6 weeks and i've been trying to figure out the best way to set up a self-contained station that can run for like 8-10 hours without needing to rely on shore power. this is always the thing that bites us during actual activations too so i want to actually nail it this time instead of scrambling right now im leaning toward running a pair of 100ah lifepo4 batteries in parallel feeding a 30 amp linear supply for the IC-7300, plus a separate smaller pack just for the laptop and logging. the other option ive been kicking around is just bringing a small inverter generator like a honda eu2200 and calling it done, but theres the noise issue and fuel logistics and honestly nobody wants to babysit a generator all day for antennas we have a buddipole and also a end-fed halfwave on a 31ft fiberglass pole, the efhw has been way more reliable in my experience especially when youre not sure whats under you. thinking about using that on 40m as the primary workhorse and maybe the buddipole configured for 2m if we need local tactical stuff anybody run a similar setup and have thoughts on whether the battery approach actually holds up for that kind of runtime? im especially curious if anyone has had issues with voltage sag on lifepo4 under transmit loads, the 7300 can pull around 20-22 amps on high power and i dont want to be doing the math wrong here

nice work getting it on the air, 8 bucks is pretty good. i built something similar last year except i used a toriodal wound VFO instead of the onboard osc and that helped the hand capacitance thing a lot, but it was obviously way more work to get stable. whats your frequency coverage like, can you tune the whole band or just a chunk of it

totally get where you're coming from, i was the same way when i first started paying attention to this stuff. the short version that actually stuck with me was basically — SFI above 150 and you start seeing 10m come alive, above 200 and it can be absolutely wild. below 100 and the higher bands are usually pretty dead, 40m and 80m become your friends the other number worth keeping an eye on is the K-index, which is geomagnetic activity. you want that LOW, like 0 or 1 ideally. even with great solar flux if a geomagnetic storm kicks up the K index goes to 4 or 5 and propagation just falls apart, ive had it happen right in the middle of what should have been a great opening. DXMaps.com is pretty good for seeing live spots and you can kind of watch the bands wake up in real time, helps it click faster than reading about it

so ive been a ham for about three years now and honestly embarrassed to admit i still dont have a proper go-kit put together. every time there's a weather event or something i end up scrambling around the shack grabbing stuff and its a mess. finally decided to actually do this right. i have a yaesu ft-857d that i was thinking of using as the main rig since it does hf/vhf/uhf all in one, but i also have a couple of baofengs and an ic-2300h just sitting around. was thinking of building the kit around the 857 but man that thing eats power. wondering if anyone else went through this same decision process. also not sure what to do about power. i have a 35ah AGM battery i picked up at a battery store a while back but never really tested it under load for any length of time. do most people just run straight off a deep cycle or does everyone have some kind of solar panel situation going on too. anyway would love to hear what people actually have in their kits vs what they thought they needed when they started building it out

yeah CW changes everything for SOTA, i can get 10 contacts in like 15 minutes once im set up. but hey dont stress it, SSB activation counts just the same. which summit you do again?

okay so i went through this exact thing a couple years ago, also started in my 40s so dont worry about that part at all, the brain can still do it just takes a bit longer maybe. the biggest thing i can tell you is dont learn by memorizing what the letters look like on paper, like dont study the dit dah patterns visually. you want to learn each letter as a sound from the start. the Koch method is what worked for me, theres a free program called LCWO dot net that does it properly, you start with just two characters at a target speed like 20 wpm and you dont add a new one until you can copy the ones you have at like 90 percent accuracy. it sounds slow but honestly within a few weeks you start to have actual letters in your head instead of counting dits and dahs. the farnsworth timing thing where the characters are fast but theres extra space between them is also really helpful early on. i probably spent 15-20 minutes a day just doing the LCWO lessons and that was enough. dont try to listen to real QSOs yet, too much going on and youll just get frustrated

10 meters is at a high frequency that propagates very efficiently when the sunspot count is high. Think of SFI as the "fuel" for ionospheric propagation - anything over 150 usually means the higher bands will perform well during daylight hours. HF bands 20m–10m will continue to perform well during the day with stable geomagnetic conditions.

honestly i was in the exact same spot like a year ago and what finally helped me was just listening to actual QSOs on the air even when i couldnt understand any of it. there's something about hearing real operators sending real exchanges that your brain starts to pick up patterns from even if you dont know what you're hearing yet. i used 40 meters late at night, tons of CW activity down around 7.050 or so. the app i used was called Morse Mania, pretty basic but it worked for me for the first few months. im not super fast still, maybe 12wpm on a good day copying, but i made my first CW contact last spring and it was kind of a big deal after thinking id never get there

so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now and finally decided to just go for it and take the technician exam. i downloaded a couple things but honestly im not sure if im studying the right stuff. like i found this one pdf that says its the question pool but then i read somewhere that they update it every few years and i dont know if what i have is current. also does anyone actually memorize all the questions or is there like a smarter way to go about it. some of the electrical stuff is going over my head a bit, especially the math parts with ohms law and all that. im not totally clueless with electronics but its been a while. any tips appreciated, i want to take the test in the next month or so if i can

nice work man. i did my first activation like two months ago and the spotting thing got me too, i didnt respot and then the pileup just kinda dried up and i sat there confused for ten minutes before i figured it out. also WWFF spotting is separate from POTA spotting which nobody told me and i wasted time on that

nice one, my first qso was a disaster haha i forgot to say my callsign at the end and the guy had to ask me twice. youll get the hang of the rythem of it. whats your setup right now, HT or you got a mobile rig?

so i passed my technician exam on the 14th and been lurking on the local repeater for like 5 days trying to work up the nerve to key up. finally did it yesterday evening, just said my callsign and that i was new and someone came back to me from Boise which is like 340 miles from here. we only talked for maybe 3 minutes but i was shaking the whole time lol. anyway just wanted to share that somewhere because none of my friends care about this stuff and my wife just smiled and nodded when i told her

The FCC has granted hams secondary access on USB only to five discrete 2.8-kHz-wide channels. Amateurs can not cause inference to and must accept interference from the Primary Government users. On 60 meters, hams are restricted to only one signal per channel, and automatic operation is not permitted. The channels are: 5330.5, 5346.5, 5357.0, 5371.5, and 5403.5 kHz.

i was in the same spot like a year ago lol. the thing that helped me was just listening a lot before transmitting, you kinda absorb what people actually do vs what the rulebook says. also the ARRL handbook has a section that breaks down part 97 in normal language if you have access to one

went from a 7300 to a 7610 last year and the difference on a crowded 40m night is noticeable, the dual watch and better roofing filters make a real difference when thigns get busy. but for casual ssb and ft8 the 7300 is honestly more than enough and the interface is really intuitive. the 590 is no slouch either though so yeah probably just GAS lol

ok so i passed my technician exam back in march and ive been mostly doing 2m and 70cm stuff but i want to get on HF. someone at my club told me techs can use some HF privileges but i looked at part 97 and honestly i got lost pretty fast. like there are all these tables and footnotes and i dont really know how to read it properly. from what i can tell i can do something on 10 meters? maybe 15? but i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere im not supposed to because i know the FCC takes that seriously. can someone just kind of explain in plain english what HF i actually have access to as a tech and what modes are allowed, i dont want to get a violation or whatever

Excellent data! I've been considering the same upgrade for moonbounce work. What did you use for the phasing harness construction? Also curious about the mechanical challenges at that boom length - wind loading must be significant with two long Yagis.

yeah the filter thing is probably it honestly. but also — have you tried just bypassing your local igate situation entirely and connecting aprx directly to rotate.aprs2.net and seeing if your beacon shows up that way? that would at least tell you if the problem is on your end or the igate's end. then you can narrow it down from there. i spent way too long chasing a hardware problem once when it turned out the igate two miles from me had been offline for a month and nobody noticed lol

went last year for the first time and yeah the flea market is hit or miss but i found a barely used LDG tuner for like 30 bucks so i cant complain. the forums and talks are actually pretty solid if you pick the right ones, sat in on one about WSPR propagation stuff and it was way better than i expected. definitely worth going at least once imo

so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been doing local 2m stuff and some APRS but im starting to get curious about HF and people keep telling me to just go get my General already. the thing is i looked at some of the practice questions and some of them are pretty confusing, like the electrical stuff and the propagation questions. i did fine on the Tech exam but this feels like a bigger jump than i expected. is the General exam actually hard or am i overthinking it? i downloaded the ARRL book but havent really cracked it open yet. mostly just been using ham study dot org and doing random quizzes when i get bored. some of the questions i get right but i have no idea why i got them right if that makes sense. like i just remembered the answer but dont actually understand what its asking. also once i get my General what can i actually do on HF that i couldnt before, like is it worth it? i have an old ic-7300 my uncle gave me thats just sitting there