Steven Brown

so ive been hunting parks for about two months now and finally decided to just go out and do my own activation. heading to a state forest nearby, i think its K-4872 but ill double check on the pota.app before i leave. planning to run my KX2 with a random wire up in a tree and hopefully get at least 10 contacts to make it count. im a little nervous about the logging part honestly. ive been using HAMRS on my phone for hunting but activating feels different, like i have to be more on top of things. also not sure if i should self-spot or wait for someone to spot me. any tips from people whove done this before would be really appreciated. or even just general stuff i dont want to forget

so we have a county ARES exercise coming up and i've been tasked with setting up the primary comms station at a park shelter that has no shore power. been doing this for a few years but our previous guy always handled the generator and i never really paid close attention to what he was running. now its on me and im kind of piecing it together from memory and what i can google. current plan is to run my IC-7300 plus a small laptop for winlink and maybe a second VHF radio for local coordination. thinking about bringing my Honda EU2200i which should be more than enough wattage wise but i've heard weird things about the 7300 and inverter generators, something about the stepped sine wave or whatever causing RFI into the receiver. anyone actually run this combo and had issues? or is that mostly just forum myth at this point. for the antenna i was going to throw up my buddipole on a painters pole but honestly thinking a linked dipole might be better since we'll probably be on 40 and 80 for most of the HF work. the shelter has some decent trees nearby. anybody have a preferred portable dipole setup for this kind of thing, nothing too exotic just reliable and fast to deploy. last exercise we lost like 45 minutes just fighting with antenna stuff and it was embarrassing.

yeah the jitter thing is classic with those pots, especially on older rotators. the cap helps but honestly what worked way better for me was adding a small deadband in software — like if the current position is within 2 degrees of the target just dont fire the relay at all. your pointing accuracy on a yagi at HF isnt gonna care about 2 degrees anyway and it stops that hunting behavior completely also try increasing your sample averaging a lot more, i was doing like 200 samples and throwing out the top and bottom 10% before averaging the rest. adds a tiny bit of latency to the position reading but for a rotator thats completely irrelevant. the other thing is make sure your analog ground is solid — ive had cases where relay switching was inducing noise into the ADC ground reference and filtering wasnt gonna fix that no matter what you did the hamlib rotctld integration on the pi side is actually pretty straightforward once you get the arduino presenting itself as a serial device with the right command format. i used the easycomm II protocol as a template, hamlib supports it natively and you dont have to write a custom backend. theres a guy on github with an arduino sketch that does exactly this, search for arduino rotator easycomm and youll find it pretty quick

the boundary thing is something i stressed about on my first one too. i think as long as you made a good faith effort to be inside you're fine, the program isnt really running spot checks lol. but yeah being actually inside is obviously the right call. one thing nobody told me before my first activation - make sure you note the exact WWFF reference number in your log for each contact, not just the park name. i had to manually edit a bunch of entries because my software wasnt capturing it right and the upload got rejected. small thing but kind of annoying to fix after the fact

yeah what he said about the tone on receive, i had the same confusion when i started. i actually had my radio set to require a tone to open squelch on receive and then wondered why i wasnt hearing the repeater at all lol. ended up being that the repeater near me doesnt transmit any tone on the output so my radio just sat there silent. took me forever to figure that out. one thing i'll add about etiquette — around here theres also kind of an unwritten thing where if the repeater is used for a net on certain nights you kinda want to be aware of that schedule. not a big deal but some of the older guys get a little grumpy if youre casually ragchewing right when the weekly net is supposed to start. the club usually posts that schedule somewhere, worth checking out.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i finally worked up the nerve to check into a net last week. been listening for ages but always chickened out. ended up jumping into the Wednesday evening traffic net on 40m that some guys from my club mentioned and honestly it wasnt nearly as scary as i built it up to be in my head. anyway my question is about the check-in process because it seemed like everyone knew exactly when to jump in and i kept missing my window and ended up waiting way too long before the NCS called me. is there like a rhythm to it or a specific way you're supposed to time your transmission? i dont want to step on anyone but i also dont want to sit there in silence for 20 minutes waiting for a gap that never seems obvious to me. also curious if there are any good special event stations or one-time nets coming up that are good for newer ops — i heard something about a veterans day thing but couldnt find details

the ALC thing is your first clue — if youre seeing ALC limiting while at 50% mic gain, thats actually backwards from how you want to approach it. ideally you want to set the mic gain so the ALC just barely kicks in on your loudest voice peaks, not sitting there constantly. backing off the compression a bit might help too, especially if its the speech processor thats squashing your highs. on the 7300 specifically, go into the menu and check your TX bandwidth setting under the SSB filter options. a lot of people leave it at the default which i think is like 2400hz but you can widen it to 2800 or even 3000 if the band conditions allow and that alone will open up the top end of your voice considerably. also double check which profile the PR-40 wants — its a dynamic mic and the 7300 expects a certain impedance match. theres a Heil adapter that some people swear by but i've never used one myself so cant say for sure if it makes a difference.

40 meters is a great choice for evening nets, especially after local sunset when the band really opens up. theres a ton of traffic on 7.200 and nearby frequencies most nights but the one i always point new folks to is the 13 Colonies net during their special event — though that's only once a year obviously. for regular stuff, look up the ARRL net directory, you can filter by band and time of day and its actually pretty useful. most nets i've been on are super welcoming to new checkins, the net control will usually walk you through it if you just say youre new. the basic check-in is usually just your callsign phonetically when net control asks for checkins, thats really all there is to it for most casual nets. some traffic nets are more structured but youll figure that out pretty quick just by listening for a session or two before you key up.

yeah what he said. i went through this whole thing about a year ago and ended up just picking a 2x3 call that nobody else wanted and got it no problem. honestly once i stopped obsessing over getting a super short call i just found one that had a nice rhythm to it phonetically and applied and it came through fine. the ae/w/k/n prefix thing matters too for what formats you can get so worth reading the FCC part 97 stuff on vanity eligibility before you get your heart set on something specific

so ive been on the fence about satellite operation for like two years now and last weekend i finally just did it. borrowed a buddies arrow antenna and used my ft-991a for both uplink and downlink which yeah i know isnt ideal but it was what i had. managed to hear myself on AO-73 on the third pass i tried which was pretty exciting honestly. the doppler shift thing is weirder in practice than i expected — i kind of understood it conceptually but actually tuning through it while trying to hold the antenna and not lose the satellite was a lot to juggle at once. my question is about the linear transponder specifically. i was running like 5 watts on the uplink and i could hear myself fine but the signal was pretty weak. is that normal or am i doing something wrong with the power level? i read somewhere that you shouldnt run too much power on linear transponders because of the AGC but i wasnt sure how that actually applies in practice. also is there a good way to know if im actually in the passband or if im just hearing intermod or something else

so ive been messing around with remote station control for a while now and finally got a decent setup going at my QTH with a remote desktop situation over VPN, works fine for the most part but latency is a killer when im trying to work split on DX pileups. someone in my club mentioned RemoteHams and specifically using their SDR remote client alongside some kind of internet linking for the audio path and i honestly wasnt sure what they were talking about. i did some digging and it seems like RemoteHams has its own protocol thing going on, not just a raw VNC session like i was doing before. has anyone actually run this with an SDR on the remote end? im thinking SDRplay or maybe an Airspy feeding into the server software. the idea being you get the full panoramic waterfall over the link which would be way more useful than trying to work blind like i have been. the part im fuzzy on is the audio routing. like if the linked audio is going through their server infrastructure does that add a fixed delay on top of whatever my internet connection already has, or is it more peer to peer? i dont want to set all this up and find out the round trip latency makes CW basically unusable. anyone running this day to day who can comment on what its actually like in practice?

so i just passed my tech exam last week (finally) and now im trying to figure out what handheld to get. ive been reading reviews for like 3 days straight and honestly i think i know less now than when i started. everyone seems to have strong opinions the baofeng UV-5R keeps coming up and its cheap which is appealing but then theres always someone saying dont get that get a yaesu or a kenwood. the price difference is pretty significant though. like im looking at a $30 radio vs a $150+ one and i dont really know yet if this hobby is gonna stick for me so spending a lot feels risky mainly i want to hit the local repeaters and maybe do some simplex with my brother who also just got his ticket. do i really need to spend the money on a name brand or is the baofeng fine to start? not trying to start a fight lol just genuinely confused

yeah the koch method is what most people swear by these days and honestly i think they're right. the idea is you learn at full speed from the beginning, like 15-20 wpm character speed, even if the spacing between letters is slow so you have more time to think. that way you never have to un-learn the slow dah-dit-dah counting thing that trips so many people up later. LCWO dot net is the site i used, its free and you can just work through the lessons, takes a while but it sticks the alphabet-in-order apps are fine i guess but you end up with this weird situation where you can only copy letters you've learned so far which feels kind of artificial. with koch you're actually copying real letter combinations from the start even if its just two or three characters at first give yourself like 15-20 minutes a day consistently rather than doing two hour sessions on weekends, that seems to matter a lot more than total hours in my experience

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from home, been putting it off for months because i kept second guessing my setup and honestly just being a little nervous about the whole thing. took my ft-891 and a random wire antenna i threw up in a tree, got there around 9am figuring id have plenty of time before any crowds showed up. well the first problem was the tree i picked was right next to a picnic shelter and people started showing up for some kind of birthday party situation around 10 and i felt super awkward just sitting there with all my gear. moved to another spot but lost like 40 minutes in the process and my antenna was not ideal at all, probably like 20 feet off the ground at best and running along the ground for part of it. ended up making 14 contacts on 40m which i know is enough to count but i was hoping for more. one guy spotted me on pota.app which helped a lot, suddenly had a small pileup for maybe 10 minutes which was really fun actually. 20m was basically dead for me, dont know if that was conditions or my antenna situation. anyway just wanted to share because ive been reading everyones activation posts and they always seem so smooth, mine was a chaotic mess but i still got the activation and already planning the next one. any tips on picking better spots in the park would be great

yeah the age of the spot is everything, most of the time anything older than 5 or 10 minutes on a busy band is already toast especially if its something rare. DXwatch shows the timestamp but you kind of have to develop a feel for it — if its a common entity like italy or germany the spot might still be valid for a while, but if its like 3B8 or something the pileup moves fast and youre chasing ghosts. for filtering i mostly just set it to my preferred bands and sometimes filter by continent if im targeting something specific. the comment field on spots can be helpful too, people sometimes write if the station is weak or if the freq is off a bit. as for apps, i use DX Toolkit on android and its pretty solid, you can set alerts for specific callsigns or entities which is huge if youre chasing a particular DXCC. there's also HamAlert which a lot of serious dx chasers swear by — you set up triggers and it pushes a notification to your phone when a spot comes in that matches. that one changed how i operate honestly, instead of staring at the screen i just wait for the buzz.