Robert Mitchell

oh man i totally missed this this morning, was stuck in a meeting until noon and by the time i got to the shack things had quieted down a bit. still heard some South American stations but nothing like what you're describing. im relatively new to HF so i always get excited when 10m opens up because my dipole actually works pretty decent up there compared to 40 where i feel like im fighting the whole neighborhood. i didnt know the 905 was shipping more widely, might have to look into that at some point even though its probably way out of my budget right now lol. for now im just happy my old 7300 is keeping me busy.

dont overthink it at first. i made that mistake. just get something working and then refine it, you'll figure out what you actually need once you do a few activations or exercises. one thing nobody told me when i was starting out — label everything. like every cable, every adapter, every little bag inside the kit. when youre tired and stressed at 2am trying to find the right PL-259 you will thank yourself for doing that. sounds dumb but seriously.

yeah the SDR mode in RemoteHams has always had that lag issue in my experience, its pulling IQ data and rendering it on the client side which adds processing overhead that the normal audio path doesnt have. i actually gave up on it for anything time-sensitive and just use the waterfall for a visual reference when im hunting for signals but do all my actual operating in standard mode. the 7300 direct audio through the server is pretty clean if you get the codec settings right, i use OPUS at 32kbps and it holds together pretty well even when my upstream gets congested. the other thing worth checking is whether youre running the RemoteHams server on the Pi alongside anything else, i had mine also doing some echolink linking stuff and the CPU contention was making everything worse than it needed to be. split it onto a dedicated Pi and things got noticeably better

oh man this post is making me want to finish the kit thats been sitting on my workbench for like 6 months lol. i got intimidated by the toroids and just kind of stopped. maybe this weekend

so anyway i went through the exact same thing when i first started and what helped me was just emailing the net manager and asking. felt a little embarrassing but he sent me back this super long friendly reply with basically how their specific net runs and it turned out every net does things slightly different anyway so generic advice only gets you so far. worth a shot if you know who runs yours

the inverting transponder thing bit me hard when i first started. i kept tuning the wrong direction chasing my signal around. what helped me was just drawing it out on paper honestly — uplink is 435 range downlink is 145 range and the passband is like 40khz wide, and as you go up in uplink freq you go down in downlink. once that clicked it made more sense in practice. one other thing — are you sure gpredict was actually sending doppler corrections to the 817 via CAT? i had a USB cable issue for a while where it looked like it was connected but wasnt actually changing the rig frequency. worth double checking that the freq on the radio matches what gpredict says during the pass

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the last storm knocked out power for four days I figured it was time to stop procrastinating. picked up a pelican case at a swap meet and started throwing stuff in but now im second guessing everything. right now I have my FT-817 in there, a couple of spare fuses, some coax with PL-259s on both ends, a notebook and pens (old school I know), and a little 7ah SLA battery. I've got a roll of wire I was gonna use as a simple dipole if I need it. been running it off a 40w solar panel I borrowed from my buddy but I dont own one myself yet. the thing is I dont really know what actual deployment looks like. I've read about ARES stuff but never really participated, so I'm kind of guessing at what you'd actually need out in the field. is there a standard loadout people use or is it totally just depends on your situation? also wondering if the 817 is enough or if people usually bring something with a bit more power. I can run it at 5w obviously but figured id ask.

okay so ive been trying to get into DX chasing a bit more seriously lately and everyone keeps telling me to use the cluster networks but honestly its kind of overwhelming. i set up an account on QRZ a while back mainly just to look up callsigns but i didnt realize it had all this spotting stuff built in too. so now im jumping between QRZ's logbook spot feed and DXwatch and sometimes i pull up DX Summit too and half the time i cant tell if im looking at the same spots or different ones or what. like is there a reason to use multiple cluster sites at once or is that just redundant? and i noticed some spots on dxwatch show a comment like "good signal" or a frequency that when i tune there theres nothing there — is that just because spots age out and by the time you see it the DX is already gone? i feel like i keep arriving late to every party lol. also has anyone tried the hamspots app on android, someone at my club mentioned it but i havent looked into it yet.

so ive had my technician for about two years now and mostly been doing local stuff, some 2m simplex, a little APRS. but ive been hearing about HF and people talking about working stations in europe and stuff and im starting to feel like im missing out on a whole other world of the hobby anyway i downloaded the question pool and its honestly kind of overwhelming. theres stuff in there about propagation and feed line losses and like... G factors for antennas? i barely understood some of the tech license questions when i took that. is this actually something i can get ready for in like a few weeks or am i looking at a longer study period. and is HF actually worth all the trouble because i dont even have an HF rig yet so itd be an investment also does anyone know if the question pool changed recently because i saw something about that and dont want to study the wrong version

yeah what he said, hamstudy is basically all you need. i passed mine like three months ago and was super nervous about the math too but its really not bad, most of it is just memorizing formulas and they kinda tell you what to plug in. the hardest part for me was the band plan stuff honestly, remembering which frequencies you can transmit on as a tech. just keep doing practice tests until you're consistently hitting 80% or above and you should be fine on test day

congrats on the first QSO, that feeling doesnt really go away even after years of doing this. my first contact was a disaster, i forgot to give my callsign at the end and the guy had to ask me twice lol. Columbus is a solid area for repeater activity too so youll probably hear a lot of traffic through there. HF is absolutely worth getting into when youre ready, general class isnt that much harder than tech and it opens everything up. dont rush it though, just enjoy where you are for a bit

welcome to the rabbit hole, fair warning you may end up spending more on paddles than you ever planned to haha. but to answer your question, yeah a mushy or poorly adjusted paddle will absolutely cause phantom dits and make your sending sound rough. the first thing id check is the contact gap — if its too small even a little vibration will close the circuit. most paddles have a small adjustment screw for that. even a cheap paddle can be made workable if you dial it in carefully. as for iambic A vs B, honestly a lot of experienced ops just use mode A or even straight key mode with a paddle and never look back. mode B has that extra element completion thing at the end of a squeeze which some people love and others find totally confusing when starting out. id switch to mode A for now and not overthink it until your fist gets more consistent. the main thing is just sending every single day even if its just callsigns and numbers into a dummy load, muscle memory is everything with CW.

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been doing local stuff on 2m and 70cm, talked to a few people on the repeaters and done some APRS stuff but honestly im getting a little bored and everyone keeps telling me to get my general so i can get on HF. my question is how hard is the general exam compared to tech, i remember the tech exam wasnt too bad but i didnt really study the electrical theory stuff much and just kind of brute forced the question pool. is the general more of the same or is there actually stuff i need to understand for real this time. also whats the deal with HF privileges for general vs extra, like is it worth just going straight for extra or should i just get general first and see how it goes. i dont even have an HF rig yet so maybe this is all getting ahead of myself but figured id ask

yeah the no-balun thing is almost certainly part of your problem. without a choke or 1:1 balun at the feedpoint the shield is radiating and the pattern gets all weird, and it also messes with your SWR reading because current is coming back down the outside of the coax. easy fix is just winding a few turns of the coax into a coil right at the feedpoint — like 6-8 turns about 6 inches diameter — that acts as a decent air core choke and costs you nothing. it wont be perfect but it'll be way better than what you got now. also 18 feet is low but it shouldnt push you that far off resonance by itself. id try the choke first then retrim the legs. cut a little at a time, like an inch per side, check SWR, repeat. going up even a couple more feet would help a lot too if thats an option.

so ive had my technician for about two years now and mostly just been doing local repeater stuff and some APRS but i keep hearing people talk about HF and working DX and all that and im starting to get curious. i looked at the general class question pool and honestly it looks pretty intimidating, all that stuff about propagation and impedance and i dont really have an electronics background so some of it just looks like gibberish to me right now. is the exam actually as hard as it looks or does it get easier once you start studying? im using the hamstudy.org site and doing the practice questions but im not sure if thats enough or if i should get a book too. also once i actually pass and get my HF privileges what do i even need to get started, like do i need a big antenna setup or can i get on the air with something simple at first. i rent so i probably cant put up a big beam or anything

yeah what the other guy said about the FEMA courses is spot on, do those sooner rather than later. i procrastinated on them for like two years and then felt kinda dumb when everyone kept referencing ICS concepts during activations and i was just nodding along pretending i understood. one thing i'd add — find out if your group does any actual go-kit building sessions or field exercises. some ARES groups are really active with drills and simulated emergencies and others mostly just talk about it at meetings. the hands on stuff is where you actually learn whether your equipment works and whether you can set up under pressure. my first real deployment was during flooding a couple years back and i was really glad id done a few drills beforehand because even simple stuff like logging traffic properly under stress is harder than it sounds

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually operate on 40 meters. ive been reading the band plan on the arrl website but honestly its a little confusing because it shows different things for phone vs cw and then there's the actual FCC allocations which seem different from the "recommended" stuff and i dont know which one i actually have to follow legally vs which is just courtesy. like can i just park on 7.250 and call CQ or is that too close to the edge of the phone segment or what. also someone at my club said something about 7.300 being the upper band edge and you shouldnt go above that but i thought the allocation goes a bit higher? maybe im misremembering. anyway just trying to not step on toes or worse transmit somewhere im not supposed to as a new general

i passed mine about four months ago and was in pretty much the same boat. what got me through it was just doing practice exams over and over on that hamstudy site, like i barely even read the study material i just did tests until i was consistently getting 90% or above and then went and took the real thing. the antenna and propagation questions were the ones i kept missing at first but they kind of clicked after a while. one thing i'd say is dont overthink the electricity section, theres really only a handful of formulas that actually show up and once you see them a few times theyre not bad. good luck, it really is not that hard

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly im starting to get lost trying to figure out what each one actually is and whether you need all of them or if they overlap somehow. like are these all run by the ARRL? do you apply for them separately? i talked to a guy at our club last week who said he was chasing his 5BDXCC and i just nodded like i knew what that meant lol i've been logging contacts since day one so hopefully i have some credits building up, i just never really knew what i was tracking toward. running a modest station here, IC-7300 into a G5RV in a small backyard, so nothing fancy. mostly 40m and 20m. any pointers on where to even start with this stuff would be really appreciated

that shoulder on the rising edge is almost certainly the IRF510 doing its thing before the gate fully turns on — those MOSFETs are not super linear at the transition point and without proper bias they can do weird stuff. what are you running for gate bias voltage? a lot of people just ground the gate through a resistor and call it day but that leads to exactly what youre describing. also worth checking your lowpass filter toroids with an LC meter if you have access to one. winding on T50-2 is fine but if the cores got warm during winding or you miscounted a turn or two the cutoff frequency shifts and you get harmonics bleeding through. i built a 40m rig a couple years back and spent two weekends chasing a third harmonic that turned out to be one turn short on the last inductor in the filter.

congrats on getting it done, that first one is always a little chaotic. yes it absolutely counts, 10 unique QSOs in the log and you're good, signal reports have nothing to do with whether an activation is valid. the other station confirming your call and park reference is all that matters and it sounds like they did. for spotting — yeah that's the big thing new activators miss. download the POTA app on your phone before you go out, you can self-spot directly from there in like 10 seconds once you're set up and on frequency. a lot of hunters are just watching the spots page waiting for new activations to pop up so the sooner you get on there the faster the pileup starts. also if you can post on the POTA subreddit or a local club Facebook group the day before saying youre going out, some people will specifically look for you. once you get that going 10 contacts usually happens in the first 15-20 minutes honestly.

honestly the arrow + 818 combo is pretty much the classic beginner satellite setup so youre in good company. i ran that exact thing for about a year before i bothered with any kind of computer control. the trick i used was to just chase the downlink by ear and not worry too much about where exactly my uplink was landing in the passband -- as long as you can hear yourself you know youre close enough and then its just fine tuning one thing that helped me a lot was just doing a bunch of passes where i only listened and practiced keeping a signal centered before i tried to actually make a QSO. gets your hands doing the right thing automatically

so we had our quarterly drill saturday and man did we screw up bad. the scenario was a tornado hit the county fairgrounds during a festival and we had to set up emergency comms for the red cross shelter. sounds simple right? well first off half the guys showed up without their go kits charged. then when we tried to set up the 2m repeater link it kept dropping out because apparently nobody checked the backup power at the site in months. took us almost 45 minutes just to get a stable connection to the EOC. but the real disaster was traffic handling - we had like 8 health and welfare messages come in at once and people were stepping all over each other trying to log them. total chaos. our net control guy was getting flustered and started making mistakes on the message forms. i know its just practice but if this was real people would be screwed. anyone else have drills that went sideways like this? what did you learn from it

Planning a 20m vertical dipole for portable ops and debating materials. Aluminum tubing offers telescoping convenience but I'm concerned about bandwidth and mechanical complexity. Aluminum tube provides broader bandwidth compared to simple wire but costs significantly more. Wire is cheap and proven but requires guy lines and careful support. Looking at a fiberglass pole setup similar to what I've seen in POTA activations. What's been your experience with both approaches? Weight for backpackingSetup time in field conditionsPerformance differences

haha yeah the spotting thing catches everyone the first time. what i do now is pre-spot before i even leave the parking lot if i have signal there, just set a time like 30-45 minutes out and note your planned frequency. most chasers will wait around for you especially if its a new or rare summit. also look into the SOTA Spotter app, you can set up alerts and it makes the whole thing smoother. for the antenna situation with trees not cooperating, ive started carrying a longer throw line and a small weight, total game changer on summits where the branches are being difficult. four contacts is four contacts though, activation counts and thats what matters for your first one.