Patricia Nakamura

Write "Wavelength x Frequency = 300" on your scratch paper immediately. For example, 2 meters times 146 MHz = 292, which is close enough to 300. This formula will help you eliminate wrong answers quickly.

Common issue with higher power microwave PAs - the RF power density is so high that any weak points show up quickly. Using undersized coax for the power rating is unfortunately common. Also check your SWR under full power - even 1.3:1 can cause significant heating at 400W+. Many ops add forced-air cooling and SWR protection circuits for Q65 operations.

so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra class exam. i mostly do HF, some digital modes, a bit of CW here and there. my elmer keeps telling me to just go for it but honestly the stuff i've heard about the theory sections kind of intimidates me. like the filter design questions and the oscillator stuff and whatever else they throw at you. i did fine on the general but that felt more like memorizing band plans and regulations than actually understanding anything. is the extra class exam actually testing whether you understand the theory or is it still mostly just memorization from the question pool? and is the full privileges thing even worth the hassle for the average person or is it mostly just bragging rights at this point

so we have a county ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before i show up and embarrass myself in front of the EC. last time i ran everything off a 100ah lifepo4 and it was fine for a few hours but we ended up going like 8 hours and i was babysitting the voltage the whole second half of the day which is not great when youre supposed to be handling traffic. the exercise this time is going to involve running a net control station so probably more continuous TX duty cycle than i usually deal with. im running an IC-7300 and a separate 2m/70cm mobile rig, plus a laptop. rough math says maybe 30-35ah if i keep the HF rig at like 50 watts most of the time, but that assumes a lot and i know it. a few guys in the group are pushing for a small honda generator as backup but my concern is the noise — RF and otherwise. ive heard the eu2200i is pretty clean but i also dont want to be that guy running a generator 10 feet from the antenna. anyone dealt with this in a real field deployment? also on the antenna side im probably going to throw up a linked dipole for HF and maybe a jpole for the 2m stuff but im open to suggestions if theres something that sets up faster without sacrificing too much.

so ive been on the hobby about 8 months now and finally decided to stop using the little mag loop i bought and just build something proper. ended up going with a simple half wave dipole for 40m, cut the elements to roughly 33.5 feet each using some 14 gauge stranded wire i had leftover from an old extension cord project. fed it with 50 ohm coax through a SO-239 center connector i picked up at the hamfest last spring. got it up in kind of an inverted-v configuration because i only have one decent support (a tree in the backyard, maybe 30 feet up at the apex) and the ends slope down to about 8 feet off the ground on each side. antenna analyzer is showing me around 1.4:1 SWR right at 7.150 which is honestly better than i expected but im wondering if i should try to get it flatter or if thats already good enough to not worry about. also the resonant point seems a little low, like around 7.080 or so, not sure if i should just trim or if the inverted-v configuration affects it vs a flat dipole. also curious if people bother with strain relief or any kind of weatherproofing on the coax connector. right now its just soldered and taped with electrical tape but ive seen people do all kinds of stuff with coax seal and self-amalgamating tape and i dont really know whats overkill vs necessary in a wet climate (PNW here).

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.

yeah 40m matters a ton, time of day will make or break you. daytime on 40 the closer gateways are often unusable because skip is too long and the nearby ones are in your skip zone basically. that 200 mile one working better makes total sense actually — you might have a better signal path to it depending on your local noise floor vs theirs. for the dial frequency thing in Winlink Express — when youre on VARA HF or Winmor, the frequency you enter in Winlink Express is the center frequency, so you set your radio to that exact frequency in USB mode and let the software handle the audio tones. dont offset anything manually. a lot of people screw this up when coming from WSPR or FT8 habits where you do think about offsets more. the dropping handshake thing could be a few things. audio levels are the first thing i'd check — the Signalink has that drive knob and a lot of people have it too hot which causes ALC to kick in on the 590 and that kills your signal quality mid-connect. run the Signalink drive pretty conservatively, maybe 40-50% and see if your connects improve. also check that youre not running any other audio software that might be grabbing the soundcard or spiking CPU. Winlink is more sensitive to that than people expect.

If the other operator is having trouble picking my callsign out of the noise, it sometimes helps to switch phonetic alphabets. Sometimes one or the other sound just happens to get through better or is more recognizable by the other radio operator (especially if English is not their primary language). I use "Kilo Zero Norway Radio" instead of "November" sometimes - one less syllable.

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

Learning CW isn't as daunting as it seems - you could be on the air making QSOs in just a few months with dedication. I'd strongly recommend taking an online class with an instructor, especially CW Academy - it's free and incredibly effective with structured lessons via Zoom twice a week for 8 weeks.

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, like probably a year or so of just watching youtube videos and reading random stuff online but i never actually did anything about it. my neighbor has a big antenna setup in his backyard and we got to talking and now im actually thinking about going for it and getting my technician license or whatever the first one is called. my question is basically just... where do i even start? there seems to be like a lot of different study guides and apps and websites and i dont really know which ones are actually worth using versus just noise. also is the test hard? i have no electronics background at all, like zero, i work in landscaping so this is pretty much a completely different world for me. any tips would be appreciated, kind of feeling overwhelmed honestly

so ive been running APRS for a few months now and overall its working fine, my position beacons are hitting the network no problem, i can see myself on aprs.fi and the path looks good. but whenever i try to send a message to another station — either via the TNC or through APRS-IS — it just kind of disappears. the other person never gets it and i never get an ack back. im using a TM-D710G with the internal TNC, path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. ive checked that messaging is enabled in the menu but honestly there are like 400 menu items on that radio and i might have something wrong. the messages show as sent on the radio display but thats it. doesnt matter if im trying to reach someone RF-only or someone who should be reachable through the APRS-IS gateway nearby. anyone run into this? im pretty confident the TX is working since beacons get out, so i dunno if its a configuration thing or something with how messages route differently than position packets. maybe the igate near me is rx only and not passing messages back to RF? that would explain some of it but not the ones going to IS-connected stations

so ive been messing around with this idea for a few weeks now and finally decided to just start building it. basically i have an old cd-45 rotator that i picked up at a hamfest for almost nothing, the controller works but its pretty dumb, no feedback, no way to connect it to anything digital. what i want to do is pull the pot signal from inside the rotator and feed it into an arduino analog pin so i can at least get a heading readout on a little oled display, and then eventually tie that into my logging software somehow. ive got the voltage divider sorted out i think, the pot in there runs something like 0-5v across the rotation range which is pretty convenient for the arduino. my main question is whether anyone has done this and had issues with noise on the analog read — like is it worth throwing a small cap across the pot leads or just do software averaging on the readings. also thinking about a raspberry pi zero w instead so i can serve up a little web interface but that feels like maybe more complexity than i need right now. anyway if youve done anything similar with rotator automation or just general shack automation stuff im curious what route you went

yeah i was at Hamvention for two days and honestly the Icom booth was packed the whole time, hard to get close enough to actually see anything properly. from what i could gather talking to people it sounds like they were showing off something in the IC-705 family maybe, like an updated version or a companion unit of some kind, but i didnt get a straight answer from anyone official. the Icom reps were being pretty cagey about it which usually means something is coming but not quite ready to announce fully. the flea market was incredible this year by the way, picked up an old Kenwood TS-520 for almost nothing and it actually works, just needs a good alignment. Hamvention really is something else if you've never been, its overwhelming but in a good way.

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.

ok so i just upgraded to general a few weeks ago and im still trying to figure out where i can actually transmit. like i know i have more privileges now but the band plan stuff is confusing me. specifically on 40 meters. i see people talking about not operating too close to the band edge and i dont really understand why that matters as long as youre within your allocation? also whats the difference between the actual FCC allocation and the ARRL band plan because sometimes they dont seem to match up. sorry if this is a dumb question i just dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere i shouldnt be

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.

congrats on the first one, 4 QSOs counts and thats the important thing. for the antenna question a lot of people run a sotabeams or similar linked dipole off a fishing pole mast, the cheap fiberglass ones from dx-wire or even the crappie poles from walmart work surprisingly well. you can get a 6 or 7 meter pole for like 15 bucks and it makes a world of difference on bare summits. i've done probably 60 activations now and the fishing pole is almost always what i grab. as for scouting, peakbagger.com has good photos for a lot of summits and people post trip reports there. also the SOTA reflector and sometimes just searching the summit reference on youtube turns up someone elses activation video. not perfect but usually gives you a sense of what you're walking into. after a while you kind of get a feel for it from the topo too, if the contour lines show it as a true bald top youll know to plan accordingly

7 contacts on your first go is solid, dont be too hard on yourself. i think my first one i barely squeaked 4 and one of them was my buddy who drove to a parking lot just to make sure i qualified lol. the alerting thing does make a big difference though, i noticed way more pileups once i started doing proper alerts on sotawatch.org the night before. welcome to the addiction btw, your gear list is going to slowly get lighter every trip i promise

yeah propagation is one of those things where you think you've got it figured out and then the bands just do whatever they want anyway. the SFI number is useful but its really more of a general indicator of how ionized the F layer is, doesnt tell you about the actual path geometry between you and wherever you're trying to work. a 165 SFI is great but if the MUF for that specific path hasnt quite made it to 28 MHz yet you'll sit there and hear nothing. the thing i always tell people is to check something like VOACAP or even just DXmaps to see if anyone nearby is actually completing contacts on the band before you assume it's open to the region you want the K-index thing with 20 vs 17 being affected differently isnt that weird actually. higher bands tend to suffer first when there's geomagnetic activity but sometimes the disturbance hits certain latitudes harder and if your path to somewhere on 20m is more equatorial it might skate under it. grey line is definitely not just a morning thing either, there's an evening component too and some paths are actually better in the evening grey line depending on where the other end is

oh man this is motivating me to finally try one. ive been hunting for a few months now and its so fun from the home station side but i keep telling myself my portable setup isnt ready. what radio were you running if you dont mind me asking? im trying to decide between a few options for a first field rig

so i finally decided to stop being lazy and build a proper 40m dipole instead of using that crappy end-fed thing i threw up last year. cut two legs to roughly 33.5 feet each using 14 gauge stranded copper from the hardware store, nothing fancy. managed to get it up in an inverted-v configuration about 30 feet at the apex tied to my chimney. my question is about the center insulator situation. i used one of those cheap plastic egg insulators i had laying around and just drilled a hole through it to run the coax through and soldered the feedpoint connections directly to the shield and center conductor. it works, swr is around 1.4:1 at 7.150 which im pretty happy with, but im wondering if i should have used a choke balun there instead. ive read a bunch of conflicting stuff online about whether you really need one for a dipole or if its overkill. also the center thing is not the prettiest, water might get in there eventually. what are you guys using for weatherproofing the feedpoint? self-amalgamating tape? just wondering what works long term before this thing falls apart on me.

the path thing is worth double checking but honestly messaging on APRS has always been kinda flaky in my experience. one thing to check is whether the igates in your area are actually igating messages both directions — a lot of igates are RF-to-internet only and wont pass messages back down to RF. thats usually the culprit when you can see your packets going out but the other end never gets them. also the aprs.fi message interface has been weird lately, not sure if that affects WB4APR's message server or not. try messaging a local station who you know is definitely on RF and watching their radio and see if that works, that'll help narrow down if its a local rf problem or an igate problem.

so i finally did my first parks on the air activation last weekend at a state park about 45 mins from my house. been wanting to do this for probably a year now and just kept putting it off. anyway i set up my KX2 with a 20m end fed wire thrown up in a nearby tree and honestly got my 10 contacts in about 25 minutes which i was not expecting at all. people were just coming to me which was kind of amazing, i knew hunters were out there but didnt realize how active the whole thing was. so my questions are pretty basic i think. when i log on the POTA website do i need to upload the adif same day or is there a window? i used a paper log in the field and then transferred to HAMRS when i got home. also i noticed a few people gave me their callsign and then said a park reference like K-something, does that mean they were activating at the same time and we get credit for a park to park contact? i read about P2P but wasnt totally sure how it works in practice. also one thing i wasnt prepared for was how fast some of the exchanges go. i run qrp so i had a few people who clearly couldnt hear me well and i had to repeat a lot. any tips for managing that when youre running low power? do most people just crank up or is there a way to manage the pileup better so you dont lose people