Diana Patel

oh man this was me like two years ago. okay so first thing — dont try to build the perfect kit all at once or you'll never finish it. I made that mistake and had a half assembled kit sitting on my workbench for like 8 months. for most local ARES/RACES stuff yeah 2m is going to cover probably 90% of what you need. I run an FT-857D in my kit because it does HF too but honestly in 3 activations I've only actually needed HF once, and that was a pretty unusual situation where the repeater was down. if you're just starting out get a decent 25w or so mobile rig and a good battery — I use a 20ah lifepo4 and it lasts me all day easy — and figure out a simple portable antenna like a roll-up jpole or a mag mount on a small steel plate and you're honestly most of the way there. the stuff people forget is always the non-radio stuff. headlamp, notepad and pen, printed frequency lists because you cannot count on being able to pull those up on your phone, maybe a small surge strip if you end up at a EOC with power. and food and water for at least a day. nothing worse than being the guy who has to leave an activation because you didn't eat.

yeah what he said but i'll also add that some guys kind of make up their own phonetics instead of NATO and it drives me absolutely crazy lol. had a guy last week saying stuff like "N for Nancy, K for kitchen" and i just... why. stick to the standard ones because if you ever do any nets or emcomm activations people expect the NATO alphabet and anything else just causes confusion. not saying you're doing that but worth mentioning for anyone reading this

so ive been doing single op contesting for a few years now mostly on ssb sweepstakes and the odd cw sprint and my rates have kind of plateaued around 80-90/hr on a good run which i know isnt amazing but its where im at with my current setup. been reading a lot about SO2R lately and trying to figure out if its actually worth getting into or if i should just focus on better antennas and operating skill first. my current setup is a k3 and an old ft-950 thats mostly been sitting in the corner so technically i have two radios i could use. the problem is i have no idea how to get them talking to each other properly without getting RF in everything or keying the wrong rig at the wrong time. ive heard people say you need good bandpass filters and that the antenna situation gets complicated fast. my antennas are just a tribander at 45ft and a 40m dipole so its not like i have a ton of flexibility there. basically wondering if people who went SO2R saw a meaningful rate increase or if im better off spending that time learning to squeeze more out of single radio operation. the interlock stuff seems like a rabbit hole i might not want to go down before a big contest.

so ive been licensed for about 8 years now and done a lot of HF stuff, some 2m weak signal, but EME has always been this thing in the back of my head that seemed completely out of reach. talked to a guy at the club last month who actually does it regularly and now i cant stop thinking about it my main question is just... what does a realistic entry level EME setup actually look like in 2024. i know the old school guys were running massive yagi arrays and high power amps but ive been reading that WSJT-X and JT65 kind of changed the game for smaller stations. is a single long yagi on 2m actually viable or am i kidding myself. i have maybe a 100 foot run of coax to deal with which i know is going to hurt also curious what kind of contact rate people are seeing. like is this something where you sit at the window and work a handful of stations or is it more like you spend a weekend and maybe get 2 contacts if you're lucky. not complaining either way just trying to set expectations before i go dropping money on an EME capable setup

this is really cool to read about, im pretty new to all this (got my technician about 8 months ago) and just joined a local ARES group but we havent done anything like a full exercise yet. kind of nervous about it tbh because i dont really know ICS forms at all and barely know how to check in to a net properly without second guessing myself. is there like a good way to prepare on your own before doing a group exercise so you dont feel completely lost?

I'll probably swing by Sunday morning if the weather holds. The flea market part is hit or miss but the forums they do in the afternoon are usually worth sticking around for. Last time one of the guys did a whole presentation on POTA activations and it was actually pretty good. bring cash obviously, half the sellers dont do venmo or whatever

i went through the same exact debate last year and ended up with the FT-65 too. no regrets. the belt clip that comes with it is kinda flimsy tho i replaced mine pretty quick

yeah 40m evenings is kind of my thing too. though i find it depends a lot on the season, winter seems to bring more talkers out. summer everyone's busy or the band's a mess with storms. that ohio guy sounds like good people, those long ragchews about nothing in particular are honestly underrated

ran a RemoteHams node for about two years before i switched over to a private setup. the client software is fine, nothing fancy, does what it says. the latency thing is real but honestly for SSB its workable as long as your upstream at the station end is solid — i was running on a 20mbit upload connection and it was fine. the bigger annoyance for me was the server infrastructure sometimes going wonky and the whole thing depending on their relay servers if you dont have a proper static IP or port forwarding sorted out. for just you accessing your own home station i would honestly skip RemoteHams entirely and look at either SDR-Control if you want the SDR angle or just set up RemoteRig if you want a more hardware-based transparent link. the RRC-1258 boxes are old school but they basically make the remote location feel like the radio is right in front of you, keyer and all. yes its more money upfront but you stop fighting software. the AllStar idea your buddy mentioned is really a different thing — thats VoIP linking for repeaters, great for what it does but its not really the right tool for HF remote unless youre doing something creative with it.

I had almost the exact same experience on my first activation. Spent weeks overthinking the antenna situation and then just used a linked dipole I threw together the night before and it worked great. The chasers are really helpful too, like they actually want you to succeed so they'll dig your signal out even when its rough. Definitely gets addictive, I think ive done 14 activations since March.

yeah the NATO and ITU phonetic alphabet are basically the same thing for our purposes, dont stress about that. X is X-ray, you were right the first time. as for when to use them — theres no hard FCC rule that says you must use phonetics every time but its considered good practice especially when youre giving your callsign at the end of a transmission or when conditions are rough. on a clear local repeater with good audio a lot of guys just rattle off their call letters without phonetics and thats fine. but on HF or when theres any QRM or noise you really should be using them because otherwise people mishear letters constantly. like B and D and E all sound similar if the audio isnt clean. when i was newer i made a habit of always using them just to burn them into my memory, and now it comes naturally. definitely worth drilling the alphabet until you dont have to think about it. there are a handful of letters people commonly mess up — November vs November is fine but ive heard people say Nectar or Neptune which just isnt right and causes confusion.

so we finally got around to doing a proper tabletop sim with the local ARES group, been trying to schedule this thing for like four months and kept getting pushed back. anyway the scenario was a prolonged power outage hitting three counties, maybe five to seven days, with cell and landline infrastructure knocked out. we had about eleven people show up which was honestly better turnout than i expected. what really surprised me — and kind of embarrassed me if im being honest — was how fast things fell apart in the first simulated hour just from people not knowing who was supposed to be doing what. we had two people both trying to be net control at the same time and nobody had a clear picture of which repeaters were actually on backup power and which ones werent. we thought we had all that documented but the documentation was out of date by like two years. the other big thing that came up was HF fallback. most of the newer members have their tickets but dont really operate HF regularly, so when we got to the part of the exercise where we pretended the repeaters were down, there was this kind of awkward silence. good learning moment though. we're talking about doing a follow up exercise that's strictly HF simplex just to shake out the rust. curious if anyone else has run exercises like this and what scenarios caught your group off guard. always good to learn from other peoples mistakes before they become your real ones.

oh man park to park contacts are seriously addicting, i started hunting about 8 months ago and now i check the spots app like way too often during lunch at work lol. one thing i'd add is that some activators are really good about annoucing themselves as available for P2P if you just ask, like if the pileup dies down a bit and you say "any park to park" a lot of activators will come back to you first. not all of them do but most are pretty cool about it. also seconding HAMRS, its what i started with and its pretty foolproof for POTA uploads.

Direct QSL method seems to be the most effective (63% success rate) compared to LoTW at 18% in my experience over 2 years. For rare DX I always go direct with green stamps and SASE. If you don't include return postage to a manager, you'll likely get your card back via bureau which takes months minimum.

so our ARES group finally got around to doing a proper tabletop/radio exercise last saturday, been trying to organize this thing for like 6 months and we finally pulled it off. the scenario was a major bridge collapse cutting off one side of the county, no cell service, primary EOC needed welfare traffic and resource requests relayed from two staging areas about 12 miles apart. honestly thought it would go smoother than it did. first thing that fell apart was everyone trying to talk at the same time on the simplex frequency — we had maybe 8 operators and nobody wanted to wait their turn, net control kept getting stepped on. the guy running net control was one of our more experienced guys too, so it wasnt a skill issue, just... chaos, which i guess is kind of the point of doing these exercises right. the other thing that surprised me was how fast the ICS message forms slowed everything down. in a real keyboard-and-chair environment they make sense but out in the field with people handing you scribbled notes, translating that into proper ICS 213 format while also trying to relay on the radio took way longer than i expected. we ended up with a backlog of like 4-5 messages at one point. anyway curious if anyone else has run similar exercises and what caught you off guard. feels like there's always something that humbles you when you do one of these for real.