Brian Wilson

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general class) and i finally started getting into chasing DX a little bit. someone at my club mentioned dxwatch and i've been poking around on it but honestly im not totally sure how to use it alongside qrz lookups efficiently. like right now my workflow is i see a spot come in on dxwatch, i copy the callsign, then i open a new tab and paste it into qrz to see what entity it is and check if i need it for my log. feels like there has to be a better way. also are there other cluster networks i should be looking at? someone mentioned dx summit but i dont know if thats different data or the same spots just displayed differently. and is there an app that kind of combines all of this in one place? ive tried a couple android apps but they either crash or the UI is really confusing. just looking for what other people actually use day to day.

Antenna performance becomes absolutely critical in QRP operations where every decibel of antenna gain or system efficiency loss directly impacts communication effectiveness Don't skimp on the antenna system - it's where you'll see the biggest gains for your investment.

haha the call sign blank is real, happened to me too. i think everybody does that at least once. the first few times on the air feel weird but it gets normal fast, just takes repitition. welcome to the hobby, 73

yeah i was in the same boat like a year ago, kind of paralyzed by all the different awards and how they interact. what helped me was just picking one — i went for WAS first because it felt more achievable and i already had most states confirmed, just needed a few like Delaware and Rhode Island which took forever on FT8 for some reason lol. once i had that done DXCC felt less overwhelming somehow WAZ i'm still working on, zone 2 is killing me

yeah same thing happened to me when i first started checking in, i double-keyed someone and wanted to crawl under my desk haha. honestly the regulars on most local nets are pretty forgiving especially if they know youre new. i usually just wait until i hear that roger beep and then count like one mississippi before i key up, works pretty well for me on our local machine anyway

ok so i just got my technician about 6 weeks ago and i finally worked up the nerve to check into the tuesday night 2m net. net control asked if anyone had any comments or questions and i figured why not, so i asked about proper way to handle a break in traffic when someone needs to use the frequency for an emergency. and i could tell from the pause before net control responded that maybe that wasnt the right time to ask something like that lol he was totally nice about it and gave me a quick answer but then moved on pretty fast. afterward i was second guessing myself, like is there a rule about not asking questions mid-net? i didnt want to derail anything but i also thought thats what the open comment period was for. someone told me afterwards i should have just emailed the net manager or waited til after the net on the repeater. not sure what the right call was honestly and now im a little gun shy about checking in again anyone else had that awkward learning curve moment with nets? just want to make sure i dont step on toes going forward

the speech processor question is a good one and the answer is yeah it absolutely makes things worse if you just crank it. what it's doing is compressing your dynamic range so the average power goes up relative to peak, which in theory helps readability, but if you overdrive it you get this horrible splatter that bleeds into adjacent channels and everyone hates you. on the 7300 i keep mine around 4-5 out of 9, maybe 6 on a really noisy band. the trick is to not hear yourself getting louder — it should be subtle. for the TX equalizer i actually run a slight cut around 200-300hz to reduce the boominess and then a small boost maybe around 1.5-2khz for presence, and i roll off hard above 2.8k. sounds counterintuitive to cut the bass but on SSB all that low end just turns into mud, especially when the band is busy. your PR-40 is a great mic for broadcast but its a bit bottom-heavy for radio work so compensating in the EQ makes sense. also make sure your ALC is behaving — if its peaking into the ALC zone consistently youre already in trouble before the processor even does anything. watch that meter like a hawk when you first set up, talk at normal conversational level and set your mic gain so ALC is just barely touching on peaks.

so basically you want to do LoTW for anything that counts toward ARRL awards, thats just the reality of it. the DXCC desk only accepts LoTW confirmations or physical cards these days and most serious DXers upload pretty quickly after a session. getting your certificate set up is a pain the first time, all that trien signing stuff, but you only do it once. eQSL is kind of its own thing, some people love it some people dont bother. the cards look nice and theres a lot of casual ops on there but its not accepted for most of the major awards so take that for what its worth. i still have an account and check it now and then. paper bureau cards i havent done in probably ten years honestly. they pile up for months before the ARRL ships a batch and half the time the card you want never shows up anyway. some rare DX entities still mostly do paper though so you cant ignore it completely if you're chasing DXCC my advice is just get LoTW set up now, upload after every session with TQSL, and treat eQSL as a nice bonus. you dont need to pick one the other station doesnt have to be on the same system at the same time, LoTW matches automatically when both sides upload

so ive been using Log4OM for about a year now for general logging and i really like it, the interface makes sense to me and the QSL tracking stuff is pretty solid. but every time a contest rolls around everyone seems to act like N1MM is the only option and i kind of just... go along with it and fire up N1MM even though i dont really know it that well. my question is whether people actually maintain two separate logging setups or if theres a smarter way to handle this. like right now i have WSJT-X feeding into Log4OM via UDP for FT8 and that works fine day to day, but when i do something like the ARRL DX contest i switch over to N1MM and then i have to manually import the ADIF afterward and sometimes the duplicate checking gets weird. is that just the way it is or am i missing something obvious. feels like theres probably a cleaner workflow that i havent figured out yet

so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just did local stuff and some contests but a buddy of mine at the club keeps talking about DXCC and i got curious and started looking into it and now im kind of down a rabbit hole haha from what i understand you need 100 confirmed entities for the basic award and then theres endorsements for different bands and modes and then theres WAS for states and WAZ for zones and they all kind of stack on top of each other? i submitted a couple QSLs through LoTW last week and got a few credits confirmed already which was exciting honestly my main question is really about the best way to approach this — like should i just work everything i can hear and let the credits pile up naturally or is there some strategy to it? i have a pretty modest setup, IC-7300 and a dipole up about 30 feet, live in a suburb so not ideal but ive already worked like 40 or 50 entities i think just messing around over the past couple years. wondering if those old QSOs can still count if the other station uploaded to LoTW

yeah 100% learning curve, took me probably 3 or 4 serious contest weekends before i stopped feeling like i was patting my head and rubbing my stomach at the same time. the key for me was treating radio 2 as a totally passive thing at first — like it's just there to find my next frequency, i dont transmit on it unless radio 1 is between QSOs. you build up from there the filtering situation is real though, you really cant cheap out on that. i went through two different sets of bandpass filters before i found a combination that actually isolated things enough to not lose my mind. also your antenna situation matters a ton, if your 40m and 20m antennas are only 30 feet apart you're gonna have a rough time no matter what filters you throw at it. once i got the antennas farther apart and dialed in the interlock timing in N1MM it started feeling more natural. now i cant imagine contesting without it for anything serious

yeah i caught the tail end of that opening, got on around 3pm and still managed to log a few ZL stations which honestly blew my mind. 10m to New Zealand from the midwest on a vertical with no amp, i'll take that any day. the cycle really does seem to be peaking nicely, WSPRnet has been showing some wild propagation paths lately if you watch it. on the Icom thing, ive seen the same rumors floating around. there was something on one of the Facebook groups too but it was vague. wouldnt surprise me if they announce something at a hamfest later this year. Dayton always brings out new gear reveals even if the product doesnt ship for months after. i'll believe it when i see the actual spec sheet but yeah im curious.

congrats on the ticket first of all. okay so the baofeng thing -- look, lots of people use them and they work fine for hitting repeaters and local stuff. the type acceptance thing matters if you transmit on frequencies you shouldnt or in certain situations but for normal amateur use most people dont worry about it too much. that said the programming software can be a real pain and the manual is honestly terrible if youre serious about the hobby i usually point new folks toward the Yaesu FT-65 or the FT-4XR, both are solid dual band radios around $60-80 range and theyre much easier to program by hand without needing a computer cable every time you want to change something. audio is better too. the build on the yaesu stuff just feels more solid in your hand, hard to explain but you notice it your simplex 8 mile shot is going to depend way more on terrain and antenna height than which radio you pick though so just keep that in mind. you might want a mag mount for a car at some point if that link matters to you

Price difference is substantial though. At around $650-750 street price, the TH-D75A sits firmly in premium territory. For D-STAR users or serious APRS operators, the value proposition is clear. If budget matters, FT-5DR gets you 80% there for much less.

yeah the priority system is still technically there but its kind of a shadow of what it used to be. immediate family members of a silent key can still have priority for that specific callsign during a window, but for most regular vanity applications its basically first come first served once that window closes. the FCC processes them in batches i believe, so its not like a literal first-second-third race down to the millisecond but close enough that timing matters if you want something popular. you can apply right away, no waiting period after getting your sequential. just go through the FCC ULS directly, honestly dont pay one of those services, its not complicated and youre just handing someone money to click buttons you can click yourself. the form is a bit clunky but you get through it. one thing though — make sure whatever callsign you want is actually available and that youre eligible for the format based on your license class, a general cant hold a 1x2 for example. theres a few callsign lookup tools people use, qrz has one and so does ae7q which is probably the best one for checking availability and expiration dates on callsigns you might want to snag.

yeah agreed on the SSID thing, that trips up a lot of people. but also -- is your buddy running an igate that has two-way capability? a lot of igates are receive only and wont inject messages back onto RF. if hes on aprs.fi messaging you and the igate near him is one-way only that message never hits the air. you'd need him to be on RF directly or have a two-way igate nearby. just something to consider before you go digging through the radio config for hours.

oh man the flea market is the whole reason i go honestly. get there like before the gates open if you can, guys are already setting up and some vendors will sell before official start time. bring cash and dont be afraid to haggle, saw a guy talk down a HF rig by like 40 bucks just by standing there looking skeptical lol. parking is a whole thing, we usually stay at a motel about 20 min out and just drive in early each morning. totally worth it

i was in the same spot like two years ago and honestly just picking one goal at a time helped me not go crazy. i did WAS first because it felt more achievable and gave me a reason to get on the air consistently. once i had that confirmed through LoTW i had a lot more confidence going after DXCC. some guys do everything simultaneously and thats fine but for me having one concrete thing to work toward kept it fun instead of stressful

same boat here, ive only been licensed about 8 months and 10m has kind of become my favorite band just because when it opens up you can work DX with like nothing for power. i'm running 100w into a dipole and worked japan last month on 10m SSB which i still can't quite believe. the audio just sounded so clean too, way better than the 40m pile im used to fighting through one thing somebody told me was to check the k-index too not just the solar flux, like even if flux is high if there's been a geomagnetic storm the bands can get weird especially on the higher HF. had a day last month where flux looked great on paper but 10m was totally dead and i think that was why. still learning all this stuff honestly

oh man just do it, seriously. your first CQ WW is going to be a blast even if you only make 50 contacts the whole weekend. the thing people dont tell you is that you dont have to operate the whole 48 hours, just jump in for a few hours when the bands sound good and see what happens. with 100w and a dipole youre gonna work more than you think, especially if 15m opens up nicely which it has been doing a lot lately with the solar cycle where it is. for SSB vs CW - if youre slow on code id definitely start with SSB, the CW weekend is great but yeah it can be rough if you're still building speed. the SSB one is usually last weekend of october. you'll hear stations from all over the world just pounding away calling CQ CONTEST and you just jump in and give your callsign and exchange. takes maybe 3 or 4 contacts to get the rhythm and then it kind of clicks. dont stress about your score, nobody cares about first timers score except maybe yourself haha

congrats on the first one. dont stress too much about the antenna being perfect, ive worked people running a random wire just thrown over a branch and got good signal reports. the KX2 is a great rig for this stuff. did you log it on the SOTA database yet? make sure you do it while you still remember the exact time, i always forget and have to guess later

Yeah I've noticed it too, especially during peak hours on weekends. I usually wait until monday morning to upload my logs now, seems to work better then. For bulk uploads you can use ADIF files if you have logging software that exports them - much easier than manual entry.

so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and i just need someone who's actually used both to weigh in. i currently have an older FTM-100DR in the truck and its fine but the screen is pretty small and honestly i want something with a bit more to it — aprs, better scanning, maybe dual receive on separate antennas if i can swing it with a duplexer or whatever. the D710G keeps coming up in conversations at the club and i know it has built in tnc which is a big deal for aprs without hauling extra gear around. but the FTM-400 touchscreen looks really nice and my buddy has one and loves it. main thing im worried about is the audio on the 400 because i do a lot of highway driving and my current radio is tough to hear over road noise unless i really crank it. anyone daily drive either of these? mostly use for local repeaters, the odd simplex chat, and id like to get more into aprs tracking when i travel. dont need a desktop unit, just want something that lives in the dash and works reliably. appreciate any thoughts

so we have a county ARES exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before i show up with a half-baked setup like i did last year. last year i ran everything off a 100ah lifepo4 and it was fine for the first few hours but we ended up running the net way longer than planned and i was sweating it by hour 6. had the ic-7300 and a laptop pulling maybe 20-25 amps combined at full tx which is obviously not great for battery math. this year i want to bring either a small honda eu2200i or add another battery bank. the genny option is nice because i dont have to worry but honestly the noise is annoying and depending on where we set up i dont want to be the guy running a loud genny next to the served agency folks. the extra battery route means more weight in the truck but its quieter and cleaner power. antenna wise i was planning on the buddipole again but last time it took me like 30 minutes to get it tuned on 40 which is kind of embarrassing during an actual activation. wondering if anyone has used the chameleon emcomm III or something like that as a faster deploy option. i mostly need 40 and maybe some 80 if we do any local traffic nets. anyone done similar setups for multi-hour exercises? curious what people are actually running in the field vs what sounds good on paper

yeah that first one is always kind of a revelation isnt it, you spend so much time worrying about gear and antenna and then it just... works. i was the same way with my first POTA activation, convinced myself id need way more stuff than i actually did. now i go out with basically just the radio and a piece of wire and call it a day. whats the kx2 running for power, 10w? those little rigs punch way above their weight on cw