Patricia Nakamura

RG-8X at 144 is going to cost you somewhere around 3-3.5 dB per 100 feet from memory, so your 60 foot run is probably eating close to 2 dB. that doesnt sound like much but on weak signal work it absolutely matters, youre basically cutting your effective power almost in half before it even gets to the antenna. LMR-400 is closer to 1.5 dB per 100 at that freq so yeah you'd recover a meaningful chunk. its not dramatic but for EME every tenth of a dB people obsess over so. honestly if youre redoing the mount anyway just do the coax at the same time, the annoyance of doing it twice later isnt worth the savings. i ran LMR-400 equiv (the times microwave stuff, cant remember the exact designation) on my 2m yagi run and it was totally worth it. the connectors are a bit of a pain to work with compared to thinner coax but you get used to it. cant speak to the M2 specifically, mine is a homebrew 9 ele but the M2s have a good rep on the weak signal nets i follow. boom length matters less than pattern and feed quality imo.

yeah the stock mic thing is real, i went through the same thing. eventually just got a Heil PR-40 on a boom arm and suddenly people were commenting on how good i sounded without me doing anything else. not saying you need to spend that kind of money but the stock mics on most rigs are kind of mediocre and designed to be acceptable rather than good. one thing nobody told me early on — your mouth distance to the mic matters a lot on SSB. closer gives you more bass from proximity effect which sounds warm on FM or in a studio but on a 2.4khz wide SSB signal it just turns into mush. id start about 6-8 inches away and talk across the mic rather than directly into it if youre getting plosives or that congested sound.

so im thinking about getting my technician license and ive been looking at study materials and honestly its a bit overwhelming. theres like the ARRL handbook, hamstudy.org, the actual question pool PDF from the FCC or whoever puts that out... i dont know which one is actually worth spending time on vs which ones are just filler. i work a full time job so i dont have hours and hours to pour into this. someone told me you can just memorize the question pool and pass but that feels kinda cheap? like i want to actually understand what im doing when i get on the air eventually. but also i just want to pass the exam first and then learn the rest as i go. is that how most people do it or am i thinking about this wrong also the question pool thing — i read somewhere it rotates or gets updated, is the stuff on hamstudy current or do i need to double check that somewhere

so ive been going back and forth on whether to make the drive out to dayton this year. its like 6 hours from me and last time i went was maybe 2012 or something. i remember the flea market being absolutely massive and i picked up a used 706 for way less than i expected. wondering if its still worth it or if people just buy everything on qrz classifieds now anyway. also our local club is doing a swap meet next month if anyones in the midwest area, ill post the details when i get them from the club secretary

ok so ive been trying to get Winlink working for a few weeks now and i think im mostly there but im confused about a couple things. running Winlink Express on a windows 10 laptop connected to my IC-7300 via USB, using Vara HF for the modem side. i can see sessions happening and sometimes i actually connect to an RMS gateway no problem, got a few test messages through to my gmail which was pretty satisfying. but here's where it gets murky for me. i set up a session template pointing at a specific RMS gateway callsign i found on the winlink.org map, and it works when that station is up, but sometimes it just times out and i dont really understand how to make it automatically try other gateways in my range. is there a propagation scanning thing built into Vara or do i need to set up multiple channel entries in Express? i've read the help docs but honestly they kind of assume you already know what youre doing. also totally separate question but related — my club wants me to help set up an RMS relay for local VHF emcomm use. we have a TNC-Pi sitting around and a spare vhf radio. is RMS Relay the right software for that or is there something else people are actually using these days. feels like the documentation online is from like 2018 and im not sure whats current.

so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now mostly just tracking, got my VX-8GR set up with the built in TNC and its been working fine for position beaconing. i can see myself on aprs.fi no problem, moving around the map when im mobile, all good there. the issue is messaging. i tried sending a message to another local ham yesterday, he could see my beacon fine but my messages just never showed up on his end. and ive gotten zero messages from anyone even when people said they were sending to me. tried adjusting my SSID thinking maybe thats the issue but that didnt seem to matter. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for around here right? our local igate is maybe 8 miles away and i hit it consistently based on the packets showing on the site. is there something specific about how message routing works vs just beacon packets? feels like they should work the same way but clearly something is different. running RF only, no APRS-IS connection on my end.

yeah it definitely feels impossible at first, i wont lie to you. the big thing that made a difference for me was switching away from trying to count dots and dashes and just learning the sound of each letter as like a rhythm or a word. theres a method called Koch where you start with just two characters at a time at a faster speed, like 15-20 wpm, and only add new ones once you can copy the first ones accurately. sounds counterintuitive but it works way better than learning slowly because your brain ends up hearing each letter as its own sound instead of a series of elements you have to decode. LCWO dot net is free and pretty much what most people use for Koch method practice. there's also the Morse Code Ninja guy on youtube who has a ton of drills at different speeds which are great once you have the characters down and want to start building speed. the apps are okay but most of them teach it wrong honestly, too slow, too much visual association with dots and dashes. people absolutely still use CW on air, the low bands especially, 40 and 80 meters at night you'll hear plenty of it. and QRP guys love it because you can make contacts with like 5 watts that you just cant do with SSB.

so ive been doing single op contests for a few years now, mostly phone, occasionally CW when my brain cooperates. consistently getting maybe 600-800 QSOs in a typical SS or 10m contest weekend and i keep wondering if adding a second radio would actually move the needle or if im just leaving rate on the table because of other stuff im doing wrong the thing is my rate optimization feels pretty solid on the run frequency side, im holding a freq, working stations as they come, calling CQ every 5-7 seconds when things slow down. but during those dead spots like when the pile thins out and youre just CQing into nothing for 30 seconds at a time, that feels like where SO2R would let me S&P on the second radio without giving up the run freq question is, does the complexity of managing two radios actually hurt more than it helps at my level? ive read about guys who say you cant really do SO2R justice unless youre already pulling 1000+ hour rates consistently on single radio, but i also feel like maybe practicing with it in lower stakes contests first makes sense. anyone actually made the transition and can speak to whether the learning curve wrecked their score before it helped it