Jennifer Davis

oh man wildlife refuges are great for this, usually pretty quiet RF wise and you get decent antenna placement. one thing i'd add is double check the exact KFF reference number before you go because ive seen people log the wrong one and then have to fix it later which is a pain. the wwff.cc site has a searchable database, just put in the refuge name and it should come right up. good luck with it

so ive been messing with APRS for about two months now and i cant figure out why my position beacons arent showing up consistently on aprs.fi. im running a Kenwood TM-D710G with the internal TNC and ive got it set to beacon every 2 minutes with a path of WIDE2-2. sometimes ill show up on the map for like an hour then just vanish. other times i can see my packets being gated but the position just doesnt update on the website. the radio is in my truck and im mostly driving around suburban areas, not super rural. i figured WIDE2-2 was the right call for that but maybe im doing something wrong. also not sure if the beacon rate is too aggressive or not aggressive enough. ive read like 6 different pages on this and they all say something slightly different about optimal path settings so im kind of lost at this point

the wall you're hitting around 5-7wpm is super common and almost everyone goes through it. the thing that finally got me moving was switching from character speed and overall speed being the same, to using Farnsworth timing — basically sending each character at maybe 15-18wpm but putting longer gaps between them. sounds counterintuitive but it trains your ear to hear letters as sounds instead of counting dots and dashes, which is what slows people down at that stage. on LCWO you can set this in the settings, theres a spot for character speed separate from effective speed. i'd try setting character speed to 15 and effective to 8 or so and just work from there, creeping the effective speed up every week or two once you're comfortable. also your elmer is right about listening even when you cant copy it all — your brain is still processing patterns even when you think its not. i remember thinking the same thing but it genuinely does sink in over time. short daily sessions beat long occasional ones every single time for this kind of thing, even just 15 minutes a day is better than two hours on a Saturday.

honestly the technician test is way more approachable than people think. the question pool is public, like literally every question that could be on your test is available ahead of time, so if you study the pool you're basically just memorizing answers at a certain point. i used hamstudy.org and just did practice questions every day for about two weeks, maybe 20-30 minutes a day, and passed with an 85 or something. there is some basic electronics and a little bit of ohm's law stuff but nothing crazy, and even if you dont fully understand the math you can usually learn what the right answer is. the ARRL technician study guide book is good too if you like having something physical to read through but honestly the free online tools are just as good. find a local club and ask about upcoming exam sessions, a lot of VE teams do them pretty regularly and the atmosphere is usually pretty relaxed, not like some scary proctored thing

yeah im going, me and a buddy from the club are leaving saturday morning pretty early to beat the crowds. the flea market area usually fills up fast and if you get there late all the good stuff is gone. last year i found a barely used IC-7300 for way under market price because the guy just wanted to move it before the drive home lol. bring cash, not everyone does card readers. also no idea about the Fairborn club table thing sorry

so ive been running single op for about 4 years now doing mostly CW contests, CQWW, SS, a couple sprints here and there. consistently finishing in the top 20-30% of my category which im reasonably happy with but i keep looking at the top scores and wondering how much of the gap is just SO2R vs actual operating skill. a buddy of mine runs a pretty serious SO2R setup, two radios, the whole band decoder thing with the antenna switching, he swears by it but every time i visit his shack it looks like mission control and honestly i dont know if i have the headspace to manage two radios during a run while also keeping my rate up. like when you're in a good EU run on 20 and you're clicking along at 150/hr or whatever, is switching over to S&P on 40 actually netting you enough QSOs to justify the mental overhead i guess my real question is whether there's a middle ground — like using the second radio just for band changes or spotting without actually trying to do full interleaved operating. anyone done it that way before going full SO2R

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and honestly its great for working dx and chasing grid squares but i cant shake the feeling that its more like a robot handshake than actual radio operating. like you confirm a contact and thats it, you never actually talked to anyone. started messing with JS8Call a few weeks ago after someone on another forum mentioned it and its way more interesting to me personally but the activity levels are just... not there compared to FT8. i can sit on 40m JS8 for an hour and maybe see 3 or 4 stations. on FT8 the waterfall is wall to wall signals at almost any hour. my question i guess is whether anyone has found good times or frequencies where JS8Call actually has decent activity, or is it just kind of a niche thing that never took off the way FT8 did. also curious if anyone uses it for anything practical like emcomm or passing traffic because it seems like it was kind of designed with that in mind. for what its worth im running an ic-7300 into a wire dipole up about 35 feet, WSJT-X for FT8 and the JS8Call software directly for that mode, audio interface through the built in usb on the radio so no issues there.

congrats on the first one, that feeling when the fourth contact comes in never really goes away honestly. to answer your questions, yeah the summit reference needs to be the actual summit listed in the database, you cant substitute a nearby hill even if its close, the activation zone is within 25 vertical meters of the true summit so your GPS bouncing a little is fine as long as you were genuinely at the top. the sota mapping project site is really useful for checking exactly where the activation zone is before you go out. points wise, activators get points based on the summit height category, anything from 1 point up to 10 for the really big ones. chasers get 1 point per unique summit per band per mode, so you can work the same summit multiple times if you do it on different bands or switch to CW. the winter bonus is real, you get double activator points for summits done between november 1 and march 31 i believe, exact dates might vary by association though so check your regional rules. no minimum time at all, soon as you have 4 valid QSOs you can pack up, though most people stick around a while because its a nice place to sit.

the thing that catches most people off guard is documentation. like you probably have the radio manual somewhere but do you have a laminated card with your local repeater freqs, the ARES net schedules, your own callsign and contact info, and whatever ICS forms your served agency uses? sounds dumb but when things are actually hectic you dont want to be scrolling through your phone trying to remember what PL tone the county EOC repeater uses, especially if your phone is dead too. also I'd think hard about a dedicated VHF/UHF radio separate from the 857. not because the 857 is bad on 2m, it absolutely isnt, but if youre doing logistics on the local repeater for 6 hours straight you dont want to tie up your HF capability. a used IC-2300H or even a decent dual band mobile is like $80-100 and gives you flexibility. I run an FTM-400 alongside my HF rig and its been worth it every single time ive been deployed. one more thing and then ill shut up -- get a Anderson Powerpole distribution block and standardize everything to powerpoles if you havent already. borrowing gear from another operator or the club kit is way less painful when everything just plugs in.

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. got a 2019 F-150 and i want to put up a decent UHF antenna, mostly for linking into the local repeaters and occasional APRS stuff. right now im running a little mag mount Diamond which honestly works fine but it slides around a bit and i hate looking at the coax going through the door seal. a buddy told me to just drill for an NMO and be done with it but my wife is not thrilled about drilling into the roof of a truck we still owe money on. so i been looking at the lip mounts, the Larsen ones specifically, and people seem to have mixed opinions. some guys say the ground plane isnt as good, others say it doesnt matter for UHF frequencies at the distances im working. for what its worth im planning to run either a Tram 1185 or maybe step up to a Hustler G7 if the difference is actually worth the price. anyone running a lip mount long term and had issues with it loosening up or corroding? im in the midwest so road salt is a real thing here

yeah I did almost exactly this a couple years back with a pi 3b and my 7600, same general concept with the ci-v. the relay latch issue is pretty common with those sainsmart boards actually. what fixed it for me was adding a simple RC circuit on the coil side and also making sure i had a proper pull-down on the gpio pins so on boot they dont go high momentarily and fire the relays in a random state — that one bit me pretty hard the first time lol. for the fail-safe thing i ended up just wiring the normally-closed contacts to the dipole feed, so if the relay loses power or the pi dies the antenna defaults back to the dipole without any intervention. the pi watchdog built into the kernel works fine as long as you configure /etc/systemd/system.conf properly, theres a few guides out there for that. also worth considering adding a small UPS or at least a good capacitor on the 5v rail cause power glitches will absolutely cause relay chatter which is not great when youre transmitting.

so ive been chasing parks for about 6 months now and finally decided to just go do an activation myself. heading out to K-4556 tomorrow morning, its a state forest about 40 minutes from my house. got my KX2 and a random wire antenna i've been using for portable stuff, plan to just throw it up in a tree or use my trekking pole if i cant find a good branch. i logged my activation on the POTA website already and set a spot for around 10am local. my question is mostly about the log — do i really need 10 QSOs to count it or is that just the recommended minimum? i keep seeing different things. also should i be spotted before i go out or is it fine to self spot once im there on my phone? i dont have great cell service at this park so thats kinda worrying me a bit. any other stuff i wish someone had told me before my first one would be great, im probably overthinking this whole thing

yeah 80m is great for local and regional nets at night, pretty reliable even with a modest antenna. I got into the habit of checking into the nightly rag chew type nets just to practice my mic technique honestly. some nights net control is super casual and other nights they run it pretty tight, kind of depends who's running it that week. one thing i'd say is just listen to the whole net once before checking in so you get a feel for the flow — i jumped in too early my first time and totally stepped on another station which was embarrassing but everyone was chill about it lol

so ive been playing around with cluster spotting for the past few weeks trying to actually work some DX for the first time and i feel like im kind of fumbling around in the dark. i have the QRZ logbook open in one tab, DXwatch in another, and im also messing around with that web-based DX cluster on DXsummit i think its called. but i honestly dont know if these are all showing me the same spots or different ones, and sometimes i see a station spotted on DXwatch and by the time i tune there its gone or the band conditions changed or something. is there like a better workflow people use for this? or a single app that kind of pulls it all together? i heard some people use dedicated cluster clients but i dont really know where to start with that. running windows 10 if that matters. i also downloaded something called HRD a while back but never really got into it.

so ive been chasing FT5XO for about three days now and kept getting absolutely nowhere. running a K3 into a 3el yagi at about 45ft, decent setup i thought, but just could not punch through. tried calling on top of everyone else like you do and just got buried every single time. what finally worked — and i feel kinda dumb for not doing this sooner — was actually listening to where the DX was pulling people from. like really listening for 5-10 minutes before even touching the mic. i noticed the op was consistently coming back to stations that were calling slightly above where the bulk of the pileup was sitting. maybe 200-300hz up. so i just parked there and waited for a lull and got him on like the third call. also started tail-ending more aggressively, not over the top of the previous QSO but just right as the contact was wrapping up. the split was 5 up to 10 and most guys were just spinning the dial to like 7 up and calling forever. i think there's a real advantage to watching where the DX is actually fishing rather than where everyone assumes he is. curious if anyone else has noticed patterns like this or if it was just luck this time honestly