Christopher Lopez

yeah the doppler thing bites everyone when they start. the tricky part with inverting linear transponders is that you need to correct doppler on BOTH uplink and downlink but in opposite directions - if you just let gpredict do it automatically and you have the mode set right it should handle that, but double check that you actually have the right TLE loaded and that it's current. stale TLEs will make your doppler correction lag and you'll chase the signal all pass. also one thing people miss - on an inverting linear if you tune UP on the uplink your downlink signal moves DOWN. so if you're hearing yourself drift one way, try tuning the other direction than you think you should. takes a while to get your brain used to it honestly. AO-73 has a pretty narrow passband too so even small errors are obvious. what TLE source are you pulling from and how old were they when you did the pass?

yeah the alternator whine thing gets almost everybody at least once. i remeber spending a whole saturday convinced my radio was defective before someone at the club pointed me toward the ground. classic. im running a Diamond NR770HB on a lip mount on the trunk of my honda and honestly its been rock solid for a couple years now. lip mounts get a bad rap sometimes but if you do them right they work fine, the trick is getting a solid ground strap from the mount to the body because the paint breaks the electrical connection. some people run a short piece of braid from the mount down to a bolt under the carpet and that does the job. for what its worth i also ran a dedicated 12v line all the way from the battery on my FTM-400 and used an inline fuse near the battery and near the radio end. belt and suspenders approach but i sleep better knowing its done right especially with all that current draw on transmit.

went through almost the exact same thing when i first set this up for our ARES group. one thing nobody told me that wasted like two days — if you have VOX or any kind of TX delay set weird in your radio it will just blow the handshake timing completely. VARA is pretty sensitive to that. also worth trying a telnet session first just to confirm your WL account and callsign validation is working before you blame the RF path, eliminates a variable.

so i finally got around to building a proper inverted V for 40m instead of using that random wire i had thrown up years ago. used 14awg stranded copper from the hardware store, cut each leg to around 33.5 feet based on the 468/f formula. center fed with a SO-239 chassis connector i had in the junk box, fed with about 50 feet of RG-8X down to the shack. apex is at about 35 feet off a mast i bolted to the back of the garage, legs come down to roughly 45 degree angles tied off to some stakes in the ground. resonant point per my analyser is sitting around 7.080 which is a little high for where i want it (trying to get it centered around 7.050 or so). i know i need to add length but how much are we realistically talking, like an inch per leg or more? feels like every time i try to trim these things i overshoot. also wondering if the 45 degree angle on the legs is hurting me much compared to a flatter angle. i dont have a ton of horizontal space so i'm kinda stuck with it but curious what people's experience has been.

congrats on the first activation, that's awesome. to answer your questions: yes, most chasers are actively watching SOTAwatch and the RBNhole spot aggregator, so when you self-spot they'll often come looking for you pretty quickly. some will also spot you if they hear you on the air even if you didn't self-spot first, which is nice. the summit reference matters — you need the exact one, like W6/NC-042 or whatever it is, because that's how the points get assigned and how chasers log it on their end. if you're not sure which one you were on, just look it up on the summits database at sotadata.org.uk before you submit, it's pretty easy to search by location. as for the antenna shaking around in the wind, yeah that can definitely cause some signal variation but 4 contacts on a dipole between hiking poles is solid for a first time out, dont overthink it. try to get the feedpoint a bit more stable next time if you can, sometimes a short piece of cord to a stake in the ground helps keep it from swinging around too much.

congrats on getting out there, that first one is always the one that takes forever to actually happen lol. so for your logging question - WWFF and POTA are separate programs with separate databases, you upload to each one individually. some references overlap (like if the area is both a KFF and a K- POTA reference) but you have to submit the logs to each program yourself, they dont share data automatically. on the 44 QSO thing - yeah that does matter for WWFF specifically, you need 44 to get the activation counted as a full activation in their system. under 44 and it still goes in the log and hunters get credit for the contact, but it wont show as an activation on your record. not the end of the world at all, just means that one wont count toward your activator awards. totally worth going back and finishing the job sometime, 44 really isnt that hard once you get a decent pileup going. try spotting yourself on the WWFF spotter or POTA app next time and you'll probably hit it in the first hour. and ft8 is absolutely fine, nobody frowns on it, plenty of activators run digital. some purists prefer voice but the program doesnt care how you make the contacts as long as theyre in the log.

so our ARES group has a county-wide exercise coming up and i've been tasked with putting together the portable station for the EOC support role. we're going to be outside for probably 12-14 hours and i'm trying to figure out the best way to handle power because last time we had a real mess with the generator situation. what im thinking is running a 100w HF station (ic-7300) plus a separate 2m/70cm mobile rig for local traffic, maybe a laptop for logging and winlink. estimated draw is probably around 25-30A peak when transmitting on HF. i have a 100ah lifepo4 battery that i built last year and honestly it's been solid but i dont know if it'll last the full stretch especially if we're doing a lot of digital stuff which seems to run the radio pretty hard. the other option is to bring our club's honda eu2200i and just run everything off that but the noise thing is a real concern. last exercise somebody put the generator like 15 feet from the antenna feedpoint and we had so much hash on 40m it was basically unusable. plus depending on where they set us up there might be fuel storage restrictions. for antennas i was thinking a linked dipole for HF since it's quick to deploy and i have enough coax, probably hung between two of the telescoping fiberglass masts. anyone running something similar for emcomm? curious what people are doing for noise isolation if they do use a genny.

the math on the general exam is honestly not that bad, i was dreading it too but most of it you can just memorize the formulas and plug in numbers. like ohms law stuff and a few resonance calculations. hamstudy is genuinely all you need if you go through it enough times, i think i spent maybe 3 weeks on it doing like 20-30 minutes a day on my lunch break and passed no problem. on the privileges thing yeah you dont get the full band, on 20m for example generals get most of it but the extra class guys have a chunk of the lower part of the phone portion. honestly as a new HF op you probably wont even notice for a while, theres plenty of room. 40m and 15m are great bands to start on and you get good chunks of both. just go take the exam, worst case you fail and you can retake it same day at a lot of sessions anyway

yeah WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine for most situations and its definitely the baseline most people recommend. the reason you'd scale back is if you're like right next to a fill-in digi that's already hearing everyone — in that case WIDE1-1 alone might be plenty to get you into the main network. with 4-5 digis in range you're probably okay where you are but you could experiment, just watch your heard stats on aprs.fi and see how many hops your packets are actually taking. on the messaging thing — yes people do use it but you're right that it can feel laggy. it works best when both stations are actively digipeated and have something like APRSdroid or a D7/D710 style rig that shows incoming messages. ive had decent luck messaging into a net when everyone was set up and paying attention but if someones just running a tracker with no display they'll never see it. its more useful than most people give it credit for honestly, just takes coordination.

ran the DIY route with wireguard vpn + flrig + fldigi for about a year before i switched to a commercial solution and honestly i dont regret moving on from it. the custom setup was cool and i learned a lot but maintaining it was a part time job. every time something updated something else broke the RemoteHams SDR piece is genuinely useful if you already have an SDR at the remote site, being able to see whats happening on the band before you even start transmitting is nice. my one gripe is the windows-only client situation, i spend a lot of time on linux laptops and having to spin up a VM to use RCForb is annoying

honestly the theory is not as bad as people make it out to be if you actually sit down with it. the stuff on reactance and impedance and the smith chart questions looks scary at first but there's really only so many ways they can ask it, and once you work through the question pool a few times it starts to click. i used hamstudy dot org almost exclusively and just hammered it for like three weeks before my session. the transistor and op-amp stuff tripped me up more than i expected, not gonna lie. but even then its not like you need to actually design a circuit, you just need to recognize whats happening in a given configuration. the extra band privileges are real by the way, especially on 40 and 75/80 meters — that extra slice at the bottom where only extras can operate gets way less qrm and you'll notice it during a pileup or a contest weekend for sure

first thing id do before poking around inside any more is rule out the mic itself more thoroughly. multimeter continuity on the element isnt really a full test — plug in a different mic or even just a headset and see if the problem follows the radio or stays with the original mic. sometimes the connector on the hand mic takes a hit when the thing falls and youll get intermittent contact that reads fine cold but acts up under load. if its definitely the radio and not the mic, the most likely casualty from a drop like that on that board layout is going to be around the mic amp stage. on the 7300 the audio processing goes through the FPGA but the analog front end before that is where id be looking. check for any obviously cold or cracked solder joints around the mic input jack on the main board, that area takes mechanical stress pretty directly. reflow anything that looks even slightly suspect. ive seen guys fix similar issues just by reflowing a few joints that looked totally normal to the naked eye but had microscopic fractures.

oh man i did the same exact thing when i first started, two tabs open going back and forth. honestly just get GridTracker if you do any FT8, it shows spots on a map and integrates with WSJT-X and it kind of blew my mind the first time i fired it up. might not be exactly what you need for SSB dx chasing but its worth knowing about. for general cluster stuff a lot of people swear by just using the DX Summit website which has decent filtering options built in, you can filter by band or region which cuts down on noise a bit.

mic placement is definitely worth checking before you go deep into menus honestly. i spent like three weeks tweaking DSP settings on my old 756 pro before i realized i just had the mic too close and was getting all that proximity bass boost. moved it back a few inches and suddenly reports got way better without changing anything in the radio. also what kind of audio are you monitoring on your end? cause sometimes what sounds fine in your headphones is not what's going out over the air, especially with the 7300's monitor function there can be some processing in the monitor chain that doesnt reflect the actual transmitted signal. if you have a second receiver or a friend nearby who can actually listen thats gonna tell you more than any meter.

done a few of these 12-18 hour things with our group and honestly the generator is the safe call like you said, especially in late october in the northeast. you're not getting enough sun to keep up with two radios running all day, and even if the HF rig is sitting in receive most of the time the VHF repeater traffic can keep that second radio busy. the lifepo4 packs are great as a buffer and backup but i wouldnt count on them as primary for that duration. the eu2200i is quiet enough that if you position it downwind and run a decent length of extension cord (keep it to 12 gauge if you're going more than 50 feet) you should be fine at the shelter. exhaust just make sure you're not pointed at the tent or wherever people are congregating. we run ours about 30 feet out with an eco-throttle on and it barely registers over normal conversation. for the antennas, NVIS low dipole is the right call for regional, just watch your height — you want it under about 0.2 wavelengths for the bands you're working, so on 60m or 40m that works out pretty low which is easy to do with shelter poles. jpole for VHF is fine. if you have a short mast you can get it up 10-12 feet which is plenty for local tactical assuming the repeater isnt too far.

honestly its not that scary, i upgraded last spring after putting it off forever and kicked myself for waiting so long. the question pool is bigger but a lot of it builds on what you already know from tech. propagation stuff like understanding skywave and how the bands behave at different times of day, that trips some people up at first but once it clicks it makes sense. the electrical stuff gets a little more math-heavy, like calculating impedance and figuring out power levels, nothing crazy but you actually have to think about it a little unlike some of the tech questions where you could kind of just memorize. i used hamstudy same as you and also grabbed the ARRL general handbook from the library just to read through the relevant chapters, not to memorize but just to actually understand why the answers are what they are. took me about 5 or 6 weeks studying maybe 20-30 mins a day. passed with an 87 i think. the HF privileges are absolutely worth it, first night i had my upgrade in the system i made contacts into europe on 20m with my crappy dipole hanging from a tree

yeah so the FCC allocations are what you legally have to follow, the ARRL band plan on top of that is basically just gentlemens agreement stuff to keep things organized. for 40m as a general your phone privileges run from 7.175 up to 7.300 MHz, so 7.250 is fine and well within your range. 7.300 is indeed the top of your phone segment so you dont want to transmit above that. the confusion comes because technically the US amateur allocation on 40m does go up to 7.300 for general/extra on phone, but some older references show 7.225 as a starting point which was the old pre-2007 plan before the ITU refarmed things. your club buddy is right that 7.300 is the ceiling, just make sure your signal and any sidebands stay inside that. USB on 40m means your carrier frequency should probably be no higher than about 7.298 or so to keep the actual audio within the band. its a small thing but worth knowing near the edges

yeah the simplex thing gets people every time. we did a similar exercise maybe two years ago and half the group had never seriously thought about what happens when the machine goes down. everybody's so used to hitting the repeater that going simplex feels like switching to a different hobby almost. one thing that really helped our group was doing what we call 'no repeater tuesdays' where we just make a point of doing our weekly net on simplex instead of through the club repeater. doesn't solve everything but at least people start to get a feel for their actual coverage and figure out where the dead spots are before it matters. also forced a few people to finally put up better antennas which is never a bad thing. for practicing message handling on your own, honestly just get on winlink or find someone else in the group who wants to do some informal traffic passing on an HF net. the ARRL has nets specifically for that, NTS stuff, and even if the traffic is just practice messages it gets the muscle memory going for the format and the phonetics and all of it.

so ive been checking into the local ARES net on wednesday nights for about six months now and honestly its one of my favorite parts of the hobby at this point. started doing it just to practice my voice procedure and make sure i had the basics down but now i kind of look forward to it every week. net control does a great job keeping things moving without being too rigid about it. anyway i started looking around for other nets to check into on other nights — mostly HF, somewhere in the 40 or 80 meter range since thats where i seem to get the best results with my setup. found a few listed on the ARRL net directory but honestly that thing feels a little outdated in spots, some of the listed nets havent been active in years as far as i can tell. also curious if anyone has done special event stations — theres one coming up apparently for a lighthouse event and i dont really know what to expect. do you just call them like a normal QSO or is there a specific exchange? im a tech who just got my general so still figuring out the HF side of things.

i went last fall to a different one nearby and honestly the swap meet stuff was pretty picked over by like 10am so get there early if you want the good stuff. also bring cash, half the guys selling gear dont do venmo or whatever

so ive been putting off building my own dipole for like two years now, just running a vertical i bought off amazon that honestly never impressed me. finally sat down yesterday with some 14 gauge stranded wire i had in the garage, cut it to length for 40m using the 468/f formula, and threw it up in an inverted V config between my chimney and a tree about 60 feet away. center is maybe 30 feet up give or take. swr at resonance is sitting around 1.4:1 which i know is fine, the radio is happy and i dont have the tuner kicking in. but something just feels off, like the signal reports im getting on 40 are maybe slightly better than the vertical but not the huge jump i was expecting. worked a few stations in the midwest from the northeast and they were giving me 57-58 which is decent but i was hoping for more. maybe my expectations were just too high? or maybe 30 feet isnt really enough for a 40m dipole to shine. the legs are each around 33 feet and i oriented it more or less east-west which should favor north-south paths theoretically. feedline is about 40 feet of rg8x going into the shack, no balun currently which i know some people will yell at me for. thinking about adding a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint but wanted to see how it performed first. anyone built similar setups and have thoughts on what to tweak first?

the split thing is so underrated and half the guys in any given pileup are either not running split at all or running it wrong and just adding QRM to the DX's receive frequency which drives me crazy. listen before you transmit, people. the partial call trick — honestly it depends on the DX operator. some of them love it because it helps them pull a call out of the mud, but ive heard DXpedition operators say in interviews afterward that it just confuses things when five different stations all think they heard their suffix. if the DX is clearly struggling to pull calls out and keeps asking for repeats, it might help to send just your suffix. but if things are moving smoothly i'd stay with full call. the VP6 guys last year specifically asked for full calls only at one point in their operating notes i think. what antenna are you running? that makes more difference than any technique tbh. ive got a 2-el yagi at 45 feet and it changed everything for me on 20m pileups compared to when i was on a dipole.

oh man i remember building my first kit, i built a little 40m pixie years ago and made my first CW contact and just sat there kind of stunned that it worked at all haha. your question about optimizing vs just operating -- i'd say just operate for a while first. i spent way too long tweaking stuff early on instead of just getting on the air and the operating experience taught me more about what actually needed improving than any amount of reading or fiddling. the antenna thing the other guy mentioned is spot on though, if you ever get a chance to compare your end-fed against something else back to back you'll see exactly what i mean

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think im close but not quite there. the idea is pretty simple — use a pi zero w to control my ft-891 remotely over wifi, handle PTT via a gpio pin through a little transistor circuit i cobbled together, and pipe the audio both ways using a usb soundcard i had lying around. got rigctld running on the pi and can hit it from the shack computer no problem, PTT fires fine when i test it manually. the problem is the audio latency is just... rough. like 400-600ms rough. ive tried messing with the alsa buffer settings and bumped the sample rate down to 8khz to ease the load but it still feels like im talking to someone on the moon. not sure if this is a pi zero limitation (probably is, single core after all) or if im doing something dumb in the audio routing. using mumble as the audio transport btw, seemed like the obvious choice. anyone gone down this road? wondering if i should just bite the bullet and use a full pi 4 instead, or if theres some mumble config magic im missing. also open to completely different approaches if anyone has one.

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and honestly i keep putting off building a proper go-kit and then every time there's a storm or some local emergency activation i feel totally unprepared and kind of embarrassed about it. our county ARES group had a drill last month and i showed up with basically just my HT and a half charged battery pack which... yeah not great. anyway i finally decided to actually do something about it. i picked up a surplus pelican-style case at a garage sale and i have a spare Yaesu FT-857D that could probably live in there permanently. my question is really about power — do most people go with a dedicated sealed lead acid battery or is lithium the way to go now? i know lithium is lighter but i've heard some people are nervous about it in enclosed cases or whatever. also should i be pre-programming all the local repeaters or just load whatever chirp file i normally use? wondering if anyone else has gone through this and what you wish you'd done differently