Amanda Taylor

yeah same thing confused me when i started lol. i think the way i eventually thought about it was like — NATO phonetics are kind of the default everyone falls back on when things get rough. like if the band is noisy or the signal is weak, "alpha bravo charlie" cuts through way better than made up stuff because both people already know what word is coming next. your brain kind of fills in the gaps. honestly just learn them solid and use them as your default and you'll be fine. the old timers doing "sugar" and whatever have usually been doing it so long they just never switched and nobody makes a big deal of it

4 QSOs is 4 QSOs, summit is activated, points are points. welcome to the addiction. seriously though the fact that you improvised and still made it work is kind of the whole point of portable ops, things go wrong up there and you figure it out. i've activated maybe 80 summits at this point and something goes sideways on like half of them. wind, rain, gear issues, once a cow literally walked through my antenna. just part of it. what reference was the summit if you dont mind me asking, always curious to see what people are activating in different parts of the country

the warmth on the ubitx is pretty normal honestly, the final transistors run in class AB so there's always gonna be some heat even when you're not transmitting much. if it gets uncomfortably hot to the touch during long periods of transmitting you might wanna check your duty cycle but for casual portable use its probably fine. some people add a small heatsink to the finals which doesnt cost anything if you have junk box parts. on the tuner question i go back and forth on this. i used to always cut a wire for the target band and that works great if you know exactly what you're doing that day. but now i carry a small z-match tuner i built from a kit, weighs maybe 150 grams and lets me jump to 20m if 40 goes dead which has saved a few activations. the LNR end fedz wires are popular in the SOTA crowd for good reason too, resonant on multiple bands without a tuner so thats another option worth looking at.

so ive been running this 80m dipole i built last spring using some 14awg stranded house wire i had laying around. worked fine all summer but now that its getting colder the swr is creeping up and sometimes i get weird resonance spots that werent there before thinking maybe i should have used something heavier like 12awg or even 10awg? the spans are pretty long, about 65 feet per leg hanging between some trees. or could it be the trees themselves changing with the seasons affecting things anyone else notice seasonal changes with wire antennas or am i overthinking this

yeah what he said about the isolation is no joke. i tried to half-ass a SO2R setup a couple years ago with just a switch and thought id be fine because i was on different bands. got away with it for maybe an hour before something started acting weird on the second radio. never tracked down exactly what happened but it was not a fun afternoon. for what its worth if youre losing your run frequency to other stations that fast on 20m during SS, might also just be a power thing combined with where youre pointing. 100w into a yagi at 45ft is decent but if youre not doing periodic CQs to hold the freq while youre listening on the second radio you'll lose it. some guys set their logging software to send a CQ like every 30-40 seconds automatically while theyre working a station on radio 2. N1MM can do this i think, havent messed with it myself much.

Make your exchange as concise as possible - evaluate every syllable, especially when your pileup is several stations deep. Automate your CQ message and use that opportunity to take a drink while the radio transmits. Efficiency during peak rate periods is everything.

okay so first thing, no you dont need to know morse code anymore, they dropped that requirement years ago so dont let that scare you off. the technician exam is definitely where you want to start, its 35 questions multiple choice and you need to get 26 right to pass. the question pool is public which is honestly the best part because you can literally study the exact questions that will be on the test. most people use hamstudy.org or the hamradioprep site, i used hamstudy when i got my tech and it just drills you with practice questions until you start recognizing them. took me maybe two or three weeks of casual studying in the evenings and i passed no problem. some people do back to back tech and general but id say just get your tech first, get on the air, and then study for general when you feel ready. no rush honestly

yeah the generator noise thing is real but people overstate it sometimes. biggest issue i've seen isnt RF noise from the generator itself, its ground loops when someone ties the generator ground into the station ground improperly. kept an eye on a deployment last summer where a guy had 30 over S9 noise that turned out to be exactly that, unplugged the generator bonding wire and it dropped like 20db. anyway your math on the power consumption sounds about right, maybe a little optimistic depending on how much recieve time you actually get vs transmit. 100ah lifepo4 should be fine for a half day easily if youre not running the laptop off it too. laptop draw is sneaky, worth putting a meter on it.

congrats on the first one, that feeling of getting your 10 and knowing you qualified the park is pretty great isnt it. 35 minutes on a first activation with a wire in a tree is honestly solid, dont undersell it. on the spotting question -- yeah most activators self spot, its kind of expected now that the app is so easy to use. the pile up thing is totally normal, especially if you spotted on a busy band during decent conditions. some people do rely on RBN or POTA spots from hunters who hear you calling CQ, but that can take a while and you might sit there calling for 20 minutes before anyone finds you, self spotting is just way more efficient especially when youre trying to get your 10 and get out. putting your frequency in the spot is a good habit if youre on a non-standard frequency or if youre doing something like running FT8 or CW, for SSB on 40 most hunters will just look at the spot and tune around a little anyway. i usually include it just to save people the trouble. one thing i will say -- if you move frequency for whatever reason, re-spot yourself, nothing more frustrating as a hunter than going to a spot and finding nobody there.

hackrf is overrated for pure receive work imo, the noise floor on that thing is genuinely not great compared to dedicated rx-only hardware at the same price. i have one and i use it mostly for replay attacks and messing around with transmit stuff not for actual listening. if you just want to receive dont buy a hackrf. SDRplay is the right call for what youre describing. the AM broadcast problem is real and annoying, i had the same thing living near a 50kw station.

i does the same thing all the time lol, just spin around and end up down a rabbit hole. last week i stumbled onto some net i had never heard of before and just lurked for like 45 minutes. 40m at night is underrated imo especially when the conditions are halfway decent

yeah you can absolutley mix paper QSLs and LoTW confirmations, they all count toward the same DXCC total. you just submit the paper cards through the card checker process at an ARRL convention or mail them in depending on what division youre in. the LoTW credits get applied automatically when you submit for the award. DXCC and WAS are tracked completely separately, different awards different databases on their end, so no worries there. 87 confirmed at 3 years is honestly pretty solid especially if youre not running a big station. what bands are you working mostly? if youre only on 40 you're leaving a lot on the table, 17 and 15 can be great for EU and Asia when the bands cooperate and a lot of guys sleep on 12m which can be wide open sometimes.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and im still a little confused about when youre supposed to use the nato phonetics vs just saying your callsign normally. like i get that Alpha Bravo Charlie etc exists but on most of the nets i check into people just say their callsign pretty fast and dont always spell it out phonetically. is there a rule about this or is it more of a judgment call situation? my callsign has a couple letters that sound similar so sometimes i wonder if the net control even caught it right. also is it weird to use non-nato words? i heard someone say "New York" for N the other day instead of November and wasnt sure if that was wrong or just old school or what

I use PoLo for logging and love how it uses the device's GPS to automatically select the closest park reference. For spotting though, I just use the official POTA spotting website at pota.app - this is the official spotting website for POTA. Simple and reliable.

i literally just did this like two months ago so maybe i can help. i used hamstudy and also watched some YouTube videos from a channel called HamRadioCrashCourse which helped a lot with the concepts that didnt make sense just reading the questions cold. took me about three weeks of studying maybe 20-30 minutes a night and i passed with a 32 out of 35 which i was pretty happy with. the waiting for the callsign thing drove me crazy ngl, mine took four days to show up and i kept refreshing the FCC lookup page like every few hours. but yeah once its there youre good to go

yeah i had the exact same issue when i first started, spent like two days thinking my radio was broken before someone told me about the tone. one thing i'll add is that some repeaters around here have gone to requiring a 1750 Hz burst tone to open up instead of CTCSS, which is more of a european thing but a few machines locally still use it. probably not your situation but worth knowing exists. also on the etiquette side of things — once you do get it working, just remember to pause a second or two after you key up before you start talking. the repeater needs a moment to actually open and if you start right away the first word or two of what you say gets cut off. learned that one the hard way in front of like ten people on a net

yeah im planning on going, my buddy Dave (K8something i forget his suffix) has a table reserved and hes selling off a ton of his old VHF gear so ill be helping him unload stuff in the morning. usually get there around 6:30 before the crowds hit the good junk. hit me up if you want to meet at the main entrance around 8 or so

just wanted to say im kind of in the same boat, newer to CW but the iambic mode confused the heck out of me when i started. my elmer actually had me practice on a straight key for the first few months before ever touching a paddle and i think that helped me understand the rhythm better. might not work for everyone but its something to consider if the paddle keeps frustrating you.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been grinding away at this for about 6 months. one thing that helped me a lot was listening to actual QSOs on the air even when i can only catch maybe half of it. theres something about real morse with real operators that trains your ear differently than practice software. 40 meters in the morning has a lot of slower ragchew type stuff if you hunt around. oh and head copy is huge. i was writing everything down and i think that was actually slowing me down because my brain was focused on the pen not the sound. forced myself to just listen and it was painful at first but after a couple weeks something shifted a little. still not at 20 but im closer than i was

so ive been chasing bouvet for literally years, had the cluster alerts set up and everything, and last week during the 3Y0J operation i actually managed to get through on 17m after about 45 minutes of trying. wanted to share what finally worked because ive tried a lot of different approaches over the years and most of them dont. first thing i did was stop trying to call on top of everyone else. i know that sounds obvious but honestly i spent the first 20 minutes just throwing my call in with the rest of the pile and getting nowhere. what actually started to work was listening really carefully to where the DX station was actually coming back to — not where they said they were listening but where the contacts were actually happening. those two things are often not the same, especially as the op gets into a rhythm. i run about 400w into a 4el yagi at 45ft and i was still getting buried. ended up dropping to like 200w because i was getting intermod on myself from the amp and it was making my signal muddy. cleaner signal at lower power seemed to help. also started timing my calls to fill the gap right after the DX station sent their last character, not when i heard other people starting to call. the split listening thing took me a while to really internalize. you have to kinda mentally tune out the chaos on the tx frequency and only focus on what the dx is doing. anyway just sharing in case it helps anyone. curious if others have techniques that work consistently because i feel like every pileup is different

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, took the kx2 and a end fed up to a local summit about 3 miles in, nothing crazy just a 4 pointer. was really nervous about the whole thing because ive never operated portable like that before and wasnt sure if id even get contacts but ended up with 14 qsos in about 45 minutes which i think is pretty decent? the battery lasted way longer than i expected too. only issue was the wind kept messing with my antenna wire and i had to retie it like twice. already looking at doing another one next month, maybe a higher summit if the weather cooperates

what Gary said is right about the tone. one thing i'd add is double check your offset too since that can also cause a one-way situation where you hear the repeater output but your signal goes nowhere useful. most 2m repeaters use a 600 kHz offset but just make sure yours is set negative or positive correctly depending on the frequency — there are charts online and most programming software handles it automatically if you import from RepeaterBook. oh and dont stress too much about the etiquette stuff, honestly just listen for a while before jumping in and youll pick it up fast. the only thing that really bugs people is dead kerchunking the repeater over and over without IDing, so just make sure you always give your callsign when you key up and you'll be fine. welcome to the hobby by the way

so ive been wanting to build my own 40m dipole for a while now and finally got around to it last weekend. used some 14 gauge stranded wire i had sitting around and cut each leg to roughly 33.5 feet, threw a SO-239 chassis connector on a chunk of PVC for the center insulator and called it a day. got it up in an inverted-V config with the apex at about 28 feet using my pushup mast. heres the thing though — SWR is sitting around 2.3:1 at 7.150 which isnt terrible but not where i want it. i was expecting closer to 1.5 or so. the ends are maybe 6 feet off the ground which i know isnt ideal. wondering if the high SWR is just the end height situation or if my soldering at the feedpoint is suspect. i did have some trouble getting the solder to flow right on that SO-239, the center pin specifically, it kind of looked dull when it cooled. also not sure if stranded vs solid makes a meaningful difference at HF. figured i'd ask before i start trimming.

yeah i saw that thing about the new Icom too, someone posted a blurry photo on one of the facebook groups and people were going nuts over it. hard to tell much from the pic honestly but it did look like a slightly bigger chassis than the 705. my guess is they bumped the power output, maybe 10 watts instead of 5? that would make a lot of people happy for portable ops. the 705 is great but you do feel that 5 watt ceiling sometimes especially on 40 when conditions arent cooperating. and yes 10m has been fantastic. worked 22 countries on 10 last weekend just messing around, wasnt even doing a contest. solar cycle 25 has really delivered so far and were probably not at the peak yet so theres more to come. if anyone hasnt dusted off their 10m antenna now is the time, seriously.

one thing nobody told me when i started messing with this is how much the azimuth and elevation accuracy of your rotator setup matters. i had a cheap az/el rig that was off by several degrees and i couldnt figure out why my signals were so much weaker than expected, especially near moonrise and moonset when the path length is longest. turns out i was just not pointing where i thought i was. ended up getting a G-5500 and actually calibrating it properly and things got noticeably better. not saying you need fancy gear but dont overlook the mechanical side, a great LNA on a poorly aimed antenna is still going to disappoint you