Nicole Jackson

i've never been but my elmer keeps telling me i should go at least once just for the experience. maybe this is the year, how do you even find out about the carpool thing is that through your club's email list or what

the D130 is a pretty decent antenna tbh, probably not the problem. mag mounts on steel roofs actually work pretty well from what ive seen, the ground plane is fine. id check your coax connection and make sure the mount contact points are clean before blaming the antenna or the mount style.
that said i did a hood mount on mine which sounds weird but its actually not bad for a pickup, runs the cable way shorter and you dont have to deal with routing through the headliner. center of roof is still probably ideal on UHF but for most 2m repeater stuff the difference is pretty marginal unless youre really pushing the edge of coverage

okay so i passed my technician exam about three weeks ago and ive been lurking here reading threads but i still cant make up my mind on an HT. my plan is mostly local repeater stuff, maybe some simplex with a buddy who lives about 8 miles away, and eventually i want to get into APRS but thats not urgent right now.
ive been looking at the Baofeng UV-5R because honestly the price is hard to argue with, but then everyone says get a Yaesu FT-65 or a Wouxun and i dont know if the extra money is actually worth it for a new person who might decide this hobby isnt for them. then i went down a rabbit hole about the Yaesu FT-70D for the fusion capability but i dont even know if there are any fusion repeaters near me.
i guess my real question is — does the build quality difference actually matter that much day to day, or is this one of those things where the experienced guys are just being snobby about the cheap stuff. not trying to be rude i just want an honest take from people who have actually used both.

the arrl net directory is hit or miss honestly, youre right that some of the listings are stale. what i usually tell newer folks is to just ask around on whatever repeater you already have access to — someone local almost always knows whats active in your area and thats going to be way more useful than a national database.
that said for HF i really like the 40 meter rag chew net, runs in the evenings and the guys on there are super welcoming especially to newer generals. also worth checking out the 75 meter phone nets if you want something a little more lively, though that band can get... colorful sometimes. for traffic handling the NTS nets are well organized and they run on a pretty reliable schedule if you want something more structured. stick with it, checking into a net the first time feels awkward but after a couple times you wont even think about it.

oh nice, which reserve is it if you dont mind sharing? i try to chase as many of the nature references as i can on weekends, would love to look for you on the cluster. im still fairly new to all this but WWFF got me into portable operating way more than i expected, something about the whole nature angle just makes it feel more worthwhile i guess. good luck with the buddistick, hope the trees cooperate for a decent counterpoise situation lol

yeah the cluster thing confused me too when i first got into DX. the short version is there are multiple cluster networks and they do share spots with each other most of the time but not always perfectly — so you'll sometimes see the same spot twice with slightly different timestamps or one network will have a spot the other doesnt for a few minutes. DXwatch, DX Summit, and the cluster feed on QRZ are all pulling from overlapping but not identical sources depending on how they're configured.
for filtering, DXwatch lets you set your continent and mode preferences which helps a lot. i usually filter to just the bands that are open based on what the solar data looks like and ignore spots older than like 10-15 minutes because conditions change fast. the "dupe" spots are annoying but you get used to spotting which ones are legit pretty quick — if three or four different callsigns spotted the same station within a few minutes its probably real.
one thing worth trying is DX4WIN or even just using an app called DX Toolkit if youre on android, some of them will tie into your logging software and alert you when something you need gets spotted. took my DX chasing to a whole different level once i set that up honestly

yeah alternator whine is super common and going direct to battery doesnt always fix it by itself. the noise usually gets into the radio through the power leads not through the antenna side. first thing i'd try is a ferrite choke on the power cable right at the radio, just snap a couple of the big clamp-on ferrites on there and see if that changes anything. also check your ground — sometimes people run the negative lead back to the chassis instead of all the way to the battery negative and that can introduce noise into the path.
the lip mount grounding is worth checking too honestly. i had a similar setup years ago and the lip mount was just barely making contact, cleaned it up with some sandpaper where it touched the metal and it made a big difference. doesnt hurt to run a short jumper from the mount to a good chassis ground point just to be sure.

So I just passed my technician exam last week (finally) and now I'm trying to figure out what handheld to actually buy. I've been reading threads on here for like two months and honestly it's made things worse not better because everyone has a different opinion and half the posts are from 2016 so I dont know whats still relevant.
My main use case is just local stuff, maybe hitting a few repeaters in my area, and my buddy mentioned something about APRS which sounds cool but I have no idea if I actually need that or if im getting ahead of myself. Budget is somewhere around $60-150 depending on how convincing you guys are.
I keep seeing the Baofeng UV-5R come up everywhere and it seems like people either love it or think its basically a toy. Then theres the Yaesu FT-60 and the FT-65 and honestly I cant tell the difference between those two. Is the Kenwood TH-D74 something a brand new person should even be looking at or is that overkill for just starting out?
Any thoughts appreciated, just trying to not make a dumb first purchase here.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, tech class, and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is for weak signal stuff and dx and whatever else. i got curious and started messing around with it a little but honestly i have no idea how people actually learn this. like do you just memorize all the dots and dashes on a chart or is there a better way? i tried printing out one of those charts and just staring at it but that doesnt seem to be working at all. my brain just isnt retaining it. someone at my club said something about the koch method but i dont really know what that means. is there like an app or a website that actually works well for this? im not trying to get a license or anything (obviously) just want to be able to at least copy some simple qsos eventually

yeah what he said about the dynamic range is accurate in my experience. i went RTL-SDR -> RSP1A and never really felt the need to go HackRF since i wasnt doing any transmitting experiments. SDR++ works great with the RSP1A too, the sdrplay driver integration is solid these days, had some issues a couple years ago but thats been sorted out for a while now. WSPR decoding with WSJT-X piped through a virtual audio cable works fine once you get the levels right, thats probably an afternoon of fiddling the first time but nothing terrible

oh man the ICS forms thing is so real. i've been doing emcomm stuff for probably 15 years and i still see experienced operators freeze up when they have to do written traffic under any kind of pressure. the thing that helped me most early on was just printing out a stack of blank 213s and practicing at home, like actually writing out fake messages start to finish until the format was completely automatic. sounds tedious but it works.
the repeater tone thing is classic too and honestly thats a planning failure more than a you failure. whoever set up the drill should have had a pre-drill checklist that included confirming everyone had the correct CTCSS programmed. we had almost the exact same issue during a SET a few years back, operator couldnt get into the machine for nearly ten minutes because he had the wrong tone from an old frequency list. after that our EC started requiring everyone to do a radio check on the designated freqs like 30 minutes before any activation. simple fix.
keep going to the drills though, seriously. the people who show up twice and think they've got it figured out are usually the ones who disappear when a real event happens. the ones who keep coming back and treating each drill like it actually matters are worth their weight in gold when things go sideways for real.