Patricia Nakamura

im kind of in the same boat as you, been licensed almost a year and just started messing with the cluster stuff a few weeks ago. one thing that helped me was the pskreporter site, its not exactly a spot cluster but if youre doing FT8 you can see who is actually hearing who in real time which is way more useful for figuring out if a path is open than relying on spots that might be from someone with a way better antenna than you lol.

i was in the exact same spot like 8 months ago and i went with the Yaesu FT-4XR and honestly no regrets. fits in my shirt pocket which i know sounds dumb but it matters when youre just throwing it in a bag. hits the repeaters around here just fine on 5 watts. the only thing i wish it had was a wider receive range but for 2m/70cm use its been solid. also just gonna throw out there - check if your local club does loaner radios sometimes because that helped me figure out what i actually liked before spending money

yeah the SSID thing confused me too when i first set this up. short answer is your SSID in Winlink Express should just be your callsign, no SSID suffix needed unless you're running multiple stations. the gateway's SSID on the frequency is separate from your account stuff. one thing worth trying — open the Winlink Express session log while you're attempting the connect and see exactly what error message comes back. sometimes it'll say something like "channel busy" or give you a clue whether it even heard the gateway respond. also some gateways are only open certain hours depending on how the op has it configured, so worth trying at a different time of day too honestly

congrats on the upgrade, the 7300 is a solid radio. i ran mine for about two years before moving to the 7610 and honestly the jump wasnt as big as i expected for everyday use, the 7300 really is that good at its price. for SSB filters i usually run the passband around 2400hz and have the twin PBT set slightly to roll off the low end a bit, helps cut some of the rumble on crowded band conditions. the manual is actually worth reading for the RF gain vs squelch interaction stuff, took me a while to figure out i was fighting myself on that. if youre doing any contesting the CW filters are worth messing with separately but for normal SSB ragchewing i found moderate settings worked best and stopped tweaking after a while. the urge to constantly adjust stuff does fade eventually haha

so ive been a tech for about a year and a half and i keep reading about CW and people seem to love it, and i guess i got curious enough to actually want to try learning it. but i have no idea where to start. like do people still use those cassette tape methods or whatever or is there apps now. i tried googling but i got overwhelmed with like a hundred different opinions and nobody agrees on anything. i dont have a key yet or anything, just wondering if i should learn the code first before buying gear or does it not matter. also how long did it take you guys realistically, not the "i learned it in two weeks" stories, actual average person timeline

i totally missed it, was stuck at work of course. this always happens to me. i've been trying to figure out a way to get alerts on my phone when bands open up but havent found anything that works great yet. does anyone use one of those apps or is there a discord or something that people post in when they notice a good opening happening?

haha yeah i do this all the time, usually around 9 or 10pm local. tuesday nights are dead more often than not in my experience. try 7.200 area sometimes theres a loose net that forms up around there, nothing official just guys that kinda drift in. also 40m has been rough this whole week for me too, solar flux is doing something weird i think

went two years ago and it was pretty meh honestly. maybe 30 tables? but I did snag a nice Kenwood mic for cheap so who knows. the outside swap meet part is usually where the better deals are in my experience, people just trying to get rid of stuff from their garage not actual vendors so the prices are way more reasonable

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and im not totally sure im going about it the right way. basically i have an old yaesu G-450A that i want to control automatically based on where the DX is coming from instead of manually twisting the knob every time. the idea is to have the pi zero read az/el data from whatever logging software im running and just... turn the rotator to match. problem is im not sure how to interface the pi with the actual rotator controller. the G-450A has that 8-pin DIN on the back for the control cable but i assume i cant just wire that straight to the GPIO pins without some kind of buffer or voltage divider situation. been looking at some schematics online but half of them are for different rotators or assume you already know what youre doing with electronics which i sort of do but not always. has anyone built something like this with a pi zero specifically? i thought about just buying one of those hamlib-compatible USB adapters but that feels like cheating and also its like $80 which seems way too much for what it does. curious if anyone has a rough circuit they used or at least some pointers on where to start.

yeah i went through the same confusion when i started. my elmer told me just learn the nato ones and use them any time you're not 100% sure you're getting through clean. honestly on a local repeater nobody cares but the first time i tried a dx contact on 20m i was really glad i had them down because the guy came back asking me to repeat my call twice and i had to go slow with full phonetics each letter. making up your own is kind of frowned on in most circles from what ive seen, people just expect the standard ones

i did my first EME contact about two years ago on 2m with a 4x10el cross yagi array and an old henry 2k amp pushing maybe 800w at the connector. took me forever to get everything phased right and i made probably every mistake possible with the power divider but eventually it came together. the moment you see your own echo come back in wsjt its kind of surreal honestly. one thing nobody really warned me about is how important the azimuth and elevation rotor situation is — you need something that can actually track the moon smoothly and a lot of the cheap tv rotors just arent going to cut it for elevation especially. i use a Create RC5B-3 for az and a homemade elevation setup and even that gets sketchy sometimes. also moonrise and moonset are your best windows when the moon is low and you get the ground gain effect, worth reading up on that if you havent already because it can add a few dB at the right moments which matters a lot at this level

so i spent most of saturday running coax and getting my FT-7900 bolted under the dash and honestly the install looks pretty clean if i do say so myself. ran the power leads direct to the battery with an inline fuse which i know some people skip but i wasnt gonna do that. antenna is a NMO mount i drilled through the roof which was terrifying by the way, first time i ever drilled into a vehicle roof. anyway everything powers up fine and i can hit the local repeater no problem on 2m but when i checked SWR on the 70cm side its sitting around 2.5 which seems high. the antenna is a Diamond MR77 which i thought was supposed to be a decent dual bander. coax is about 12 feet of LMR-240 with PL-259 connectors that i soldered myself. im wondering if maybe i messed up one of the connectors or if the antenna needs some kind of tuning which i didnt think it did. havent had a chance to pull the antenna off and check the connection at the mount yet. anyone dealt with this before

i was in the same spot maybe two years ago. i messed around with a few different methods and wasted probably a month before someone told me about morse.ninja, that site kind of changed things for me. also honestly just listening to actual CW on the air even when you cant copy any of it helps your ear get used to it. i tuned around 40m a lot late at night and at first it was just noise but eventually i started picking out letters here and there. takes longer than people say it will but its not as hard as it sounds when youre starting out

the single yagi 100w thing isnt made up, its just really hard and you need to be on the other end of a very large station to pull it off. most of the serious EME guys running big arrays will sometimes specifically call CQ to work small pistols as a challenge, so it does happen. but dont build your expectations around that being your everyday experience. realistically for 2m EME you want to be thinking at least a pair of long yagis, something like 2x17 element or similar stacked, and as much power as you can legally run into a decent preamp. the preamp is honestly as important as the power, your receive side matters enormously because the path loss is roughly 252dB on 2m and youre fighting that on both ends. a good low noise figure preamp at the feedpoint, like 0.3-0.5dB NF, makes a real difference. i use a DEM unit but there are several good options. on software yeah JT65A is still the go-to for EME specifically even though a lot of 2m operators have moved to FT8 for terrestrial stuff. the EME community has mostly stuck with JT65A, theres an EME2 protocol too but JT65A is what youll see the most activity on. grab WSJT-X and look at the EME section on the WSJT website, theres a lot of good documentation there and the logging side will make more sense once you see how the sequencing works.

so ive been using N1MM for a while now mostly because thats what everyone told me to use when i first got into contesting and it does work great for that, no complaints there really. but for everyday logging between contests its kind of a pain, like it doesnt feel designed for just sitting down and working a few DX stations on a sunday afternoon and writing notes and stuff. someone at the club mentioned Log4OM and i downloaded it and poked around but honestly the interface threw me off a bit, theres a lot going on. i do run WSJT-X for FT8 and that seems to play nice with pretty much everything via UDP so thats not really the concern. i guess what im wondering is whether anyone actually runs both — like N1MM for when a contest is on and Log4OM or something else as the daily driver — and how annoying is it to keep them in sync or not have duplicate QSOs showing up everywhere. or is there some other setup that just handles both cases without switching apps all the time.