Nicole Davis

im pretty new too so take this for what its worth but i started using pskreporter alongside those and it helped me understand propagation a lot better, like you can actually see who is hearing who in real time which kind of tells you whether a path is even open before you go chasing a spot. not sure if thats helpful for your exact question but it changed how i think about all of it

so ive been doing the local 2m club net on monday nights for a while now and its fine but honestly gets a little repetitive, same 6 people checking in every week. started poking around for other nets to join just to hear more activity and practice my HF operating a bit more. found a couple 40m nets that run tuesday evenings around 7-8pm local but i dont always catch them because the skip is weird or im just late getting to the shack. wondering if anyone here has nets they really like and check in to regularly, doesnt matter what band really. also curious about those special event stations, i saw something about a lighthouse weekend coming up and have no idea how that works or if you just call them like any other station. still relatively new so any pointers appreciated, been licensed about 8 months now

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and the weak signal stuff is genuinely impressive, like i worked a station in japan last week with maybe 5 watts and a dipole that definitely isnt optimized for 17m, but at the end of the day you're basically just exchanging signal reports and grid squares and thats... it. doesnt really feel like ham radio to me sometimes, more like a slow ping utility. anyway i started messing around with JS8Call last month and its a completely different vibe. you can actually say something to another station, have a back and forth, send store-and-forward messages through relay nodes, whatever. the tradeoff is obviously the mode is way less sensitive than FT8 — JS8 at normal speed is supposedly around -16 or -17 dB S/N compared to FT8 which is what, -24 dB? so you're giving up a good chunk of that weak signal margin. my question is whether people actually use JS8Call regularly enough on the bands that you can find activity without just sitting there waiting. i check 14.078 sometimes and its pretty quiet compared to the FT8 watering holes. is there a better time of day or a net or something im missing? also running WSJT-X and JS8Call at the same time on the same radio, is that asking for trouble or do people do it routinely with a virtual audio cable setup?

honest answer - it's not that bad if you already sat through the tech pool. the general pool is bigger and yeah some of the electrical theory questions are a step up, like you'll see stuff about impedance matching and some antenna theory that you might not have seen before. but its not crazy. i used hamStudy the same way you did for tech, just drilled the questions every day for maybe three weeks and passed with a few wrong answers to spare. the band privilege stuff is worth actually understanding though rather than just memorizing, because once you're on HF you'll want to know where you can actually transmit without accidentally wandering into extra-only territory. on 20m for example general gets phone starting at 14.225 and extra gets down to 14.150, so if you're just spinning the dial and land somewhere in that chunk you technically cant transmit there as a general. the ARRL band plan chart is worth printing out and staring at for a bit. once it clicks it stays with you. what part of the electrical theory is tripping you up? some of it you can kind of brute force memorize the answers without actually understanding the math and still pass, which isnt ideal but it gets you on the air which is where the real learning happens anyway

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and working new countries but lately i feel like im just clicking buttons and not actually doing any ham radio if that makes sense. its like a video game almost. anyway someone at our club mentioned JS8Call as a way to have real qsos on weak signal and i installed it last weekend but im a bit confused about how the timing works compared to WSJT-X. like with FT8 everything is locked to the 15 second cycles and you cant really deviate but JS8Call seems more freeform? i tried calling CQ for like 20 minutes on 14.078 and got nothing, not sure if i was doing something wrong or if the band was just dead or if nobody monitors that freq. also wondering if the SNR sensitivity on JS8Call is anywhere close to FT8. i know FT8 can decode stuff way down in the noise like -20dB or whatever and thats half the reason it works so well on marginal conditions. does JS8Call get close to that or is it more like PSK31 territory in terms of what it needs to work. been running 100w into a trapped vertical if that matters

yeah i went through this last year and the ae7q site the previous guy mentioned is genuinely a lifesaver. i spent like an hour on the FCC site getting nowhere then found ae7q and had my application in within 20 minutes. you can filter by available calls in your district and see exactly whats open. one thing i'll add — when i got my vanity call i had to wait like 18 days after the window closed before it actually showed up in the system. felt like forever but it did come through. just dont expect it to be instant even after you get the grant notice.

honestly the thing that took me the longest to figure out was documentation. i had all the gear but if someone else had to use my kit or i was stressed out trying to remember frequencies and offsets in the dark, it was a mess. now i keep a laminated card in the lid of my case with my common freqs, the local ARES net info, and a basic setup checklist. sounds dumb simple but it has saved me more than once at actual deployments. for antennas, i ended up going with a linked EFHW that i wound myself. cheap to make, no tuner needed for the bands i cut it for, and it packs down to almost nothing. buddipole is fine but its a lot of parts to keep track of when youre tired. whatever you pick just practice setting it up in the dark at least once, seriously. also dont forget a headlamp, some way to charge your phone, and snacks. the radio stuff people think about but then you show up to a 12 hour RACES activation and youre starving by hour three lol.

i just passed mine last month and the thoery wasnt as bad as i expected. some of the questions about digital modes and the emission types stuff is actually pretty interesting once you get into it. the filter stuff did trip me up a few times in practice but by the time i sat for the real exam it was mostly fine. go for it

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep telling myself im going to get serious about morse code but every time i sit down to practice it just feels like im going nowhere. i can copy maybe 5wpm on a good day if the letters are ones i know well but anything faster and my brain just locks up completely i've been using the Koch method on lcwo.net and also messing around with the Morse Toad app on my phone. the problem isnt really the individual characters at this point, i know most of them, its more like when they come at me in sequence at even like 8wpm i just cant keep up and then i miss one letter and then i panic and miss three more and suddenly im totally lost does this get better? like is there a point where something just clicks? i really want to be able to ragchew on 40m some day but right now that feels pretty far off. any advice from people who actually made it through this would be awesome

so the short version is — LoTW is run by the ARRL and it's the one that counts for DXCC and a lot of the bigger awards, so that's the one you really want to get sorted first. eQSL is a separate thing, some people use it, some dont, but it's generally not accepted for DXCC. paper cards are still used and some awards specifically require them or at least give you the option, but a lot of people have moved mostly digital. for LoTW you need to make sure your log dates and callsign match exactly what you uploaded and that the other station also uploaded their log — both sides have to be in there for a confirmation to show up. 40m ssb is pretty active on LoTW so if youre not seeing confirmations after a few months it might be worth double checking that your certificate is set up right and tied to the right callsign and dates. the ARRL has a walkthrough on their site. it took me probably two evenings of fiddling to get it all sorted when i first started. as for the bureau — yeah your club receives incoming cards for members and you drop off outgoing cards with them. it's slow, like months sometimes, but basically free. totally worth it if you ever start chasing DX because a lot of DX stations still send paper.

welcome back. conditions have been pretty intresting lately with the solar stuff going on so good time to get back into it

dont forget about clublog too, its not technically a qsl service but lots of dx expeditions use it and you can see if your contact made it into their log. as for the certificate thing with lotw - yeah its confusing at first but theres good tutorials on youtube that walk you through it step by step. took me like an hour to figure out but now i just forget about it and everything uploads automatically from my logger