Diana Patel

i run the 991A and honestly dont regret it but i'll be straight with you — if i was starting over and didnt care about the vhf/uhf i'd probably just get the 7300. the all in one thing sounds great on paper but in practice i still ended up with a dedicated 2m FM rig anyway because the 991A's vhf tx power is fine but the rx feels a bit mediocre for weak signal work. so kind of defeats the purpose depending on what you want out of it

so i've been licensed about two years now and mostly just operate from home on my kenwood with a decent antenna setup, nothing fancy but it works. anyway a buddy of mine has been bugging me forever to try QRP and i finally caved and built one of those MTR kits last month, took me way longer than it should have because i kept second guessing my solder joints but i got it done. took it out to a state park saturday, just a random summit not actually doing sota or anything, threw an end-fed up in a tree and spent about 3 hours on 20m. made 7 contacts which honestly felt like more of an accomplishment than making 50 contacts from home somehow. one guy in germany heard me running like 4 watts which still kind of blows my mind. but here's the thing im confused about — i was having a hard time breaking pile-ups even small ones, and i noticed a lot of stations i could hear clearly just werent hearing me at all. is this just the reality of QRP or am i doing something wrong with how im calling? i tried tail-ending, waiting for a pause, sending my call a couple times... sometimes it worked sometimes nothing. wondering if there's a trick to it or if its just a numbers game at low power

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.

So I've been running a Yaesu FTM-300DR in my truck for about three months now and honestly the install has gone through like four different versions before I was happy with it. First I had it just sitting on the seat which was obviously dumb, then I tried one of those cheap console mounts from amazon which rattled like crazy every time I hit a bump on the highway. What finally worked for me was going under the seat with the main body and running the control head up to a RAM mount on the dash. Took a whole afternoon to route the cables neatly but its so much cleaner now and I dont have stuff sliding around. The separation cable that comes with the 300DR is long enough to go under the seat and back up without any issues. Audio was also a problem for a while — picked up a ton of ignition noise until I put a ferrite on the power leads close to the battery. Should have done that from the start but live and learn I guess. Anyone else do a separated head unit install in a truck, curious how others have handled the power routing. I went direct to battery with a 20A fuse close to the terminal and it seems solid.

So I've been a ham for about 3 years now and I keep saying I'm gonna put together a proper go-kit and never actually do it. Well after the ice storm last month knocked out power for 4 days around here I figured I really need to stop procrastinating on this. We had a couple nets running on the local repeater for welfare traffic and I felt kind of embarrassed honestly that my whole setup was just my HT with a half dead battery and no way to charge anything. So I started pulling stuff together and I've got a Yaesu FT-891 I was thinking of using as the main radio since I already own it and it does HF and I can throw a wire antenna pretty quick. Got a 20ah LiFePO4 battery I picked up a while back. Thinking a small folding solar panel too. I've got a decent RigExpert for digital modes if needed. Packed it all in a Pelican knockoff case from Amazon. My question is what are the things people always forget until they actually need them? I feel like I have the big obvious stuff but I know there's gonna be something dumb I overlooked. Cables? Adapters? I put in some coax but not sure how much spare. Also what do you guys do for logging when you dont have a laptop running? Just paper?

yeah same thing happened to me a few months back. i think i said my callsign backwards or something. the net control was super nice about it though and just moved on. i think most people running nets have seen everything at this point and a nervous new ham stumbling through a check-in is like the least of their concerns. just keep showing up, it gets easier really fast

i had similar issues with a 40m dipole last year. turned out one of my end insulators was cracking and letting moisture in during the cold snaps. might want to check your connections and insulators before blaming the wire gauge

Sporadic-E season typically kicks off in late spring and continues through summer, with early season starting in late May and June. I'm seeing some brief 6m activity that looks like early Es - anyone else noticing unusual propagation on the magic band? Sporadic E is common from spring through summer, and even with very low power, global contacts are possible. Working Es with only a few watts and simple antennas is possible - most VHF DXers get their start with Es openings on 6 meters.