Christopher Lopez

QSB got me too when i started. still sometimes forget what QRP means in the moment even though i know it perfectly well when im not on the air, brains weird like that. one that tripped me up for ages was QRZ, people use it to ask whos calling but ive also heard it used as basically just a general call which i dont think is technically right but whatever, language evolves i guess

I ran into this exact scenario last year operating my Texas station from Germany. After consulting with an ARRL volunteer counsel, the consensus was that third party traffic restrictions of BOTH countries apply - you're bound by whichever is more restrictive. So US-Germany allows third party traffic, but if you were in a country that prohibits it, you couldn't handle third party traffic even through your US station.

went last year for the first time and honestly i thought it was pretty fun even if the prices were rough. the inside vendors are where the real stuff is imo, found a barely used tuner for way less than i expected. the swap meet outside is hit or miss depending on what time you get there and honestly what day too. saturday morning early is probably your best bet if youre hunting for anything specific. also the club forums and presentations inside are underrated, sat through one on POTA activations and learned more in an hour than i had in months of reading online

Set a consistent study schedule - 30 minutes every day after dinner worked for me. Stick to it and you'll feel more comfortable with the material before you know it. I used multiple sources: ARRL book for theory, online practice tests for drilling. Mix it up to keep it interesting.

this is actually really helpful to read because our group is trying to plan our first real tabletop exercise and i wasnt sure what scenarios to use. the flood thing sounds pretty realistic for our area too. did you guys script the whole thing out in advance or did someone just kind of throw curveballs as it went along? im still pretty new to all the ARES stuff, only just got my general a few months ago, so i dont really know how these things are typically structured. do most groups write up a formal scenario document or is it more informal than that

so we've got a countywide ARES exercise coming up and i've been tasked with putting together a portable field station at the EOC backup site which is basically a parking lot with a picnic shelter and zero shore power. been doing this for a few years but this time they want us to run for a full 8 hours continuous which is longer than i usually plan for. my normal setup is a honda eu2200i paired with a 100ah lifepo4 battery as a buffer, running an ic-7300 and a buddipole for hf plus a dual band vertical for local stuff. usually works fine for 3-4 hour exercises but honestly i've never stress tested it for a full day. my concern is mostly the generator runtime and fuel — the eu2200i is rated for like 4-8 hours depending on load and i dont want to be making fuel runs mid-exercise. thinking about either bringing a second jerry can of fuel or borrowing our EC's eu3000 which would obviously have more headroom but that thing is heavy and a pain to haul. also considering whether i should just lean harder on the battery and only run the genny to recharge it periodically rather than running it constant. for the antenna side i'm probably doing the buddipole as a sloper off the shelter roof, maybe 25-30 feet at the high end. not ideal but it's what i've got. anyone run similar setups for extended ops and have thoughts on the generator strategy specifically?

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. ive been reading the band plan stuff but honestly its kind of confusing because theres the FCC allocation and then theres like the "recommended" segments and they dont always match up perfectly? like i know phone starts somewhere around 7.175 or 7.2 but ive heard people say you should stay away from the edges and i dont really understand why. is it a legal thing or just a courtesy thing. and what even happens if you operate right at the band edge, is that actually illegal or just frowned upon also heard something about 40m being different in other parts of the world which is making this even more confusing for me

73 is the one that always trips new people up because it sounds like it should mean something specific but its just a general goodbye/goodwill thing, nobody really knows the exact origin but its been used forever. some people say 88 which means love and kisses, usually said to a YL but honestly some people use it just as a friendly thing too, depends on the person. one thing i'd add is that on digital modes like FT8 people use even more shorthand and the software handles a lot of it automatically so dont worry too much about memorizing everything at once. you'll pick it up

yeah the 6m opening yesterday was real good, i worked into europe for the first time in like two years. totally caught me off guard, i was just doing some idle monitoring and all of a sudden the waterfall just filled up. ended up running about 45 minutes before it faded. one of those moments that reminds you why you keep the radio on even when conditions seem dead as for the icom thing i think youre maybe thinking of the IC-905 followup rumors? theres been chatter about that for months but nothing official that ive seen. id probably just buy what works now honestly, waiting on gear rumors is a good way to never buy anything

Log4OM took me a while to get used to too, the UI is definitely not obvious at first. but once it clicks its actually pretty solid for day to day logging, cloudlog sync, lotw uploads, all that. i wouldnt use it for a serious contest tho. for RTTY or FT8 contests specifically i still go back to N1MM every time just because the SO2R stuff and the function key macros are so much better tuned for contest pace. one thing worth mentioning — if your WSJT-X QSOs are ending up in the wrong place check what port Log4OM is listening on versus what WSJT-X is set to broadcast on. default is 2237 i think but if you ever changed it in one app and not the other thats probably your culprit

im sort of in the same boat as you actually, just crossed 87 entities confirmed on LoTW last month and been lurking on the cluster waiting for some of the harder ones to pop up. the mode endorsement thing tripped me up too at first but yeah Mixed is basically easy mode, everything counts. one thing nobody told me early on -- keep an eye on which entities only have LoTW-active ops occasionally. like some of the pacific islands you basically have to catch a DXpedition and then hope they upload in a reasonable time. i had one sit unconfirmed for like 8 months before it finally showed green on LoTW. kind of nerve wracking when youre close to a milestone.

yeah im going, my buddy and i are splitting a table to get rid of some gear. got a old kenwood ht that needs a new battery pack, some misc coax, and a HF tuner i dont use anymore. ill probably have a box of random connectors too so come find me if you want some PL-259s. we usually set up near the east entrance where the food truck parks

oh yeah this drives me nuts too. what i started doing is using one of those cable reels - not the big heavy ones but like a small plastic one from the hardware store. wind it up nice and neat at home then just unroll it on site. takes up a bit more space in the pack but totally worth it for my sanity

ha the phonetics in the shower thing is very real, my neighbor probably thought i was losing it when i first started. anyway first activation jitters are completely normal and honestly the marathon events are a pretty forgiving environment to start with — youre mostly doing welfare traffic and position updates, nothing life or death, so if you fumble a callsign or have to ask for a repeat nobody is gonna care. biggest thing i'd say is dont be afraid to ask net control to say again if you miss something. better to ask twice than to log it wrong. also bring more snacks than you think you need because you might be out there longer than the schedule says and a hungry ham is a distracted ham. keep a paper log even if they have you on some digital system like ARES Connect or whatever, just in case. and honestly once you key up that first time the nerves kind of melt away. you got this.

so ive been chasing VP6R for like three days now and finally got them in the log last night on 17m. wanted to share what ended up working because i tried a lot of stuff that didn't before i figured it out. first couple days i was just calling on their frequency like an idiot, took me way too long to realize they were working split and i wasn't even reading the DX cluster notes properly. once i figured out they were listening up 5 to 10 i started actually getting somewhere but i still couldn't break through for another day and a half. what finally clicked for me — and i know this sounds obvious but it wasn't obvious to me — is that you cant just transmit on the same frequency everyone else is piling onto. i started listening to where the DX station was actually coming back, noticing he was favoring a certain part of the split window, and then picking a spot maybe 1 or 2 kHz away from where the crowd was. within about 20 minutes i got a response. honestly couldn't believe it after days of nothing. also started timing my calls to right after he finishes a QSO instead of just calling continuously. and kept my call short — just my callsign twice, no more. the guys sending their calls like five times in a row just bury themselves i think. anyway curious if anyone else has tactics that work consistently, especially for when propagation isn't great and you're running like 100w into a wire antenna.

ok so ive been licensed for about three months now and I keep reading about nets but I honestly have no idea what the actual procedure is when you check in. like I know you wait for the net control to ask for check-ins and then you just say your callsign but is there more to it than that? do you have to give your name every time? your location? I was listening to the 2m local net last tuesday and some people said their name and city and some people just said their callsign and sat down so I'm confused about what the expectation is. also theres a special event station coming up next month for a civil war battlefield near me and I saw something about a net associated with it but I dont really understand what that means either. is it like a normal net or something different? sorry if these are dumb questions

so i finally decided to actually participate in CQ WW SSB this year instead of just listening to the pile-ups and wondering what was going on. been licensed about 14 months now and ive been putting it off because honestly the whole contest thing felt kind of overwhelming — like everyone else knows some secret rulebook and id just be in the way. spent the last couple evenings reading through the exchange format and i think i get it, you send your signal report and your zone number, they send theirs, log it and move on. seems straightforward enough but im sure ill mess something up the first few QSOs. running a 100w into a dipole up about 30 feet so not exactly a superstation but my neighbor did pretty well in last years event with similar setup so im hopeful. also totally unrelated but ive been thinking about doing SOTA activations before the weather gets bad — anyone stack those with contest weekends or is that just chaos? and is ARRL Field Day really as social and fun as people say or is that more of a club thing where you feel out of place if you show up solo

Welcome to DXing! WAC requires all six continents which is a great starting point - much more achievable than 100 countries. Start there, then move to WAS (all 50 states) and its endorsements. These will teach you the basics of award hunting and propagation patterns.

yeah i was in the same boat like 8 months ago lol. i used the hamstudy app on my phone mostly just while waiting around or whatever. took me maybe 2 weeks. the ohms law stuff tripped me up at first but theres only a few of those questions and once you see the formula a couple times it clicks. find a club near you too, a lot of them will let you sit in before you even have your license and people are usually pretty welcoming to newcomers

so ive been messing around with remote station control for a while now, started with just a basic hamlib setup over SSH tunneled through a VPS which worked okay but had latency issues whenever the connection wasnt rock solid. a buddy of mine swore by RemoteHams and the RCForb client so i finally sat down and tried it out last weekend. honestly the SDR remote side of things is what got me interested in the first place — i have an SDRplay RSPdx at the remote site and wanted to be able to pull a waterfall remotely without eating up a ton of bandwidth. RemoteHams handles it better than i expected, the compression is decent and you can tweak the FFT update rate to back off on the bandwidth if your link is marginal. compared to setting up OpenWebRX or whatever it actually just works out of the box which i wasnt expecting. the internet linking piece is where i keep going back and forth though. i already have a node on AllStar at the remote site and bridging that into the remote control workflow feels clunky. has anyone actually gotten a smooth setup where the audio routing between the SDR frontend and the linked repeater node doesnt cause weird loop issues or latency stacking? im probably overcomplicating it but i cant figure out if the problem is in the RCForb audio chain or somewhere in how AllStar is grabbing the soundcard. anyway curious if anyone has a similar setup or just said forget it and stuck with something simpler

honestly for casual contesting Log4OM is probably fine, i used it for the state qso parties for a couple years and never felt like i was missing much. N1MM is overkill if youre not doing multi-op or serious single op hp stuff imo. the cabrillo export from Log4OM works fine for submitting logs so thats not really an issue. the WSJT-X thing though, yeah that UDP integration is a bit flakey sometimes. i actually just let WSJT-X write its own log and then do a manual ADIF import into my main log after the session, its a bit old school but i never get dupes that way and i know exactly whats in my log. not elegant but it works

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for a while now mostly just scanning VHF/UHF stuff and occasionally poking around on HF with the direct sampling mode. it works but honestly the direct sampling always felt like kind of a hack to me, images all over the place and the noise floor is pretty rough compared to what people post online. anyway been thinking about stepping up to an SDRplay RSP1B or maybe the RSPdx and I'm trying to figure out if its actually worth like the $130-150 difference or if I'm just going to end up with a nicer noise floor and the same frustrations. most of what i do is shortwave broadcast, some utility monitoring, occasional WSPR decoding with WSJT-X piped through SDR#. I dont have a particularly great antenna situation, just a long wire out the window about 30 feet or so. has anyone gone from RTL to SDRplay and actually noticed a big difference on HF specifically? not asking about the HackRF because I know thats a transmit capable thing and thats a different rabbit hole i dont wanna go down right now

that ontario contact on 4 watts is nothing to sneeze at, 40 meters can be real magic in the right conditions. i've been doing QRP for maybe 8 years now and i still get a little thrill when a DX station comes back to me knowing im running like 5 watts into a wire. the MTR-3B is a great first build too, Steve Weber designs are solid and pretty forgiving for someone still getting comfortable with a soldering iron. only thing id add is maybe look into a small ATU if you havent already, even a little Z-Match you wind yourself can open up a lot more flexibility with random wire antennas. the 9:1 unun works great but sometimes you want to squeeze a bit more out of a weird length of wire depending on the band. anyway sounds like you had a fantastic outing, keep at it

yeah the antenna situation is always the wild card isnt it. ive shown up to parks that looked great on google maps and then in real life the trees are like 15 feet tall. i started carrying a cheap fiberglass mast just for those situations, its not glamorous but it gets the wire up. congrats on getting it done though, most people talk about doing POTA forever and never actually go.

so i've been interested in ham radio for a while now, mostly because my neighbor has this huge antenna setup and it looks really cool, and i asked him about it and he said i should just get my license and try it out. problem is i have no idea where to start. like do i need to take a class somewhere or can i just study on my own? and how hard is the test actually, im decent with electronics but i dont really know anything about radio specifically. also not sure if i need to buy equipment before i take the test or after. any advice would be helpful, ive been going back and forth on this for a few months and just want to finally do it