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.

yeah the thing your friend told you about character speed vs word speed is the Koch method basically, or part of it anyway. the idea is you learn each character at a speed that sounds like real CW — like 15 or 18wpm — but then there are long gaps between characters so you have time to think. its called Farnsworth spacing. if you learn characters slow from the start your brain memorizes the pattern of counting dits and dahs instead of just hearing the whole letter as one sound, and then when you try to speed up later you hit this wall and have to basically relearn everything. ask me how i know lol. i'd honestly just pick one app and stick with it for at least a month before deciding its not working. LCWO dot net is free and does the Koch method, a lot of people have had good results with that. the thing nobody tells you is the first few weeks feel completely pointless and then one day something clicks. just copy by hand at first, pencil and paper, dont worry about sending yet.

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?

so ive been trying to get into DX chasing more seriously lately and everyone keeps telling me to watch the cluster spots but honestly i'm a bit confused about the different options out there. i started with the spotting network on QRZ because i already had an account there and its pretty easy to use but then someone at my local club mentioned DXwatch and said it was better, dunno why they thought that though they didnt really explain. i've also seen people mention apps on their phone, like i think there's one called DX Toolkit or something and another one i cant remember the name of. does anyone actually use these on a regular basis and if so which one do you find yourself going back to most. im running a pretty basic setup right now, just a 100w rig into a wire dipole so im not working crazy DX or anything but its fun to see whats around and plan ahead a bit before i get on the air also is there a way to filter by band in any of these, that would help a lot because i mainly operate on 17 and 20m

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

so ive been trying to work the linear transponders on AO-73 for about three weeks now and im just not getting it. i can hear signals on the downlink sometimes, pretty faint but theyre there, but whenever i try to transmit i either cant hear myself come back through or the signal just disappears. running a 7el yagi on 145 and a 5el on 435, both homebrew, connected to an IC-9700. the tracking software is gpredict and i think its correct, im using the latest TLEs from celestrak. passes overhead here are maybe 8-10 minutes when its a good high elevation pass. the problem is i dont really know if im actually hitting the bird or not because the transponder is linear and im used to FM birds where you just hear the squelch break. someone told me i need to do the doppler correction manually on the 9700 but i thought the 9700 handled that through gpredict? maybe im misunderstanding how the whole thing works. any help would be appreciated, been lurking this forum for a while and figured id finally ask

yeah the hunting thing is almost certainly your PID tuning, specifically your derivative term is probably too low or you're not using one at all. that wiper motor has a lot of inertia and the control loop needs to anticipate the overshoot before it happens, not react after. try backing off your proportional gain first and see if the oscillation amplitude changes, if it does you at least know the loop is responding which is a good sign i did almost the exact same project a couple years back, also used a pi3 and gpredict, though i used an arduino mega as a dedicated co-processor for all the low level stuff — motor drive, encoder reading, limit switches. the pi just sends target az/el over serial and the arduino handles the closed loop control. works really clean that way and you dont have to worry about linux scheduler jitter messing up your timing sensitive stuff. the MCP3208 is fine btw, i used the same chip, just make sure your SPI clock isnt too high and that your pot wiper isnt floating when the rotator is at either mechanical stop

paper cards are definitely still a thing, i got one last week from a station in Reunion Island and honestly it just felt cool to hold it. went straight into my binder. i get that its old fashioned but there's something about it that LoTW just cant replicate that said for actually tracking confirmations i do everything digitally now, lotw for the serious award chasing and eqsl kind of just runs in the background. i check it maybe once a month

To set up a Winlink Gateway, first you need authorization from the Winlink Network Administrator, then download RMS Packet from Winlink's Sysop Programs page. But for your audio issue - try enabling the Digirig's internal sound card levels in Windows and use those controls instead of relying on radio settings alone.

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

As a Tech, you can operate CW on 40m/15m/10m in narrow segments, plus RTTY/data on 10m, and voice on 10m from 28.3-28.5 MHz. These HF privileges give you worldwide communication depending on band conditions and current propagation - 10m can be amazing when it's open!