Tower Climber

the SWR rising toward the high end of 40 is pretty normal for a straight dipole, especially if its cut for the low end or CW portion. nothing wrong with your feedpoint probably. the 468 formula is a starting point and actual resonance depends on height above ground, what its near, wire type, all that. i usually cut long and trim, gives you room to work with.
self-amalgamating tape is fine for weatherproofing as long as you stretched it properly and got good overlap. where it tends to fail is if moisture got in before you taped it or if the connector itself wasnt sealed around the shell. coax seal putty over top of the tape is cheap insurance if you're worried about it.
fan dipoles work great, done a few of them. the elements do interact a bit so you usually end up trimming each leg slightly shorter than you'd expect from the formula alone. just takes a bit of fiddling but nothing too painful. worth doing if you want 20m without dealing with the tuner.

honestly the thing that got me unstuck was just getting on the air and actually making contacts even when i was terrible at it. i know that sounds scary but there are slow speed nets specifically for people learning, like the slow speed net on 40m, and most cw ops are incredibly patient if you tell them youre still learning. copying real qso traffic with all the pressure of a live contact made my brain work harder than any practice file ever did. i went from maybe 10wpm to 15 in like two months just from doing that a few times a week. still not at 20 but im getting there

the listening thing is huge and most people just dont do it. ive watched guys on the cluster see a spot pop up and immediately start calling without even tuning to the frequency first. like they havent even heard the DX station yet. the VFO split trick where you really map out the range he's working takes patience but it pays off.
the partial call thing is debated a lot but i do think theres something to it in certain conditions, especially on 15 and 10 when the pileup is just a wall of RF. the DX op catches a fragment and if your suffix is distinctive enough it can lock on. that said ive heard DX ops on expeditions say they actually prefer full calls because partials just create confusion and they end up asking for fills anyway, so maybe it depends on the operator on the other end.
QRP in a pileup is rough, not gonna sugarcoat it. i run QRP portable sometimes and the only way it works is if you have a really good antenna, like a yagi or at minimum a dipole cut for that band and up high. 5 watts into a compromised antenna in a pileup is just not gonna happen most of the time. 100w is honestly workable if your timing is good and the antenna isnt terrible.

oh man special event stations are so fun once you get into them, i got completely obsessed for a while and was chasing every one i could find. there was one for a lighthouse event last summer and the pile-ups were crazy, took me like 45 minutes to get through on 17m. totally worth it though.
for nets i mostly do CW nets now because im trying to get my speed up, there are some slow-speed ones that are super welcoming if you're still building confidence with code. the FISTS club has some good ones. but yeah the sunday evening thing is very real, theres something nice about having a regular schedule to look forward to

so ive been messing with my audio setup for a few months now trying to get a cleaner signal on SSB and honestly theres so much contradictory advice out there i dont even know where to start. some guys say compress the hell out of it, some say barely touch the mic gain, some say EQ is everything. my rig is a kenwood and the stock mic that came with it sounds pretty mediocre on a good day.
what ive noticed is that most of the advice online assumes youre running some kind of fancy external audio chain and i just want to get decent audio without spending another few hundred bucks. ive tried bumping the mic gain up and the ALC seems to be bouncing all over the place which i know isnt great. backing it off helps but then people say im too quiet. i also tried talking closer to the mic which helped a little but its kind of awkward.
anyone actually dialed this in and can tell me what settings actually made a real difference? like real world, not the manual version of the answer

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i love it for the DX chase but honestly it gets kind of hollow after a while. you exchange signal reports and grid squares and thats... it. i started poking around JS8Call because someone at the club mentioned it lets you actually type back and forth in something resembling a real QSO and i set it up last weekend but the waterfall looks totally dead on 40m at the times im operating (usually late afternoon, maybe 5-7pm local)
is JS8Call just not very populated compared to FT8 or am i doing something wrong with the frequency? i was sitting on 7.078 which i thought was the JS8 calling freq but maybe thats wrong. also my decode rate seems lower than FT8 even accounting for the slower mode — not sure if thats a soundcard issue or just how it is. running an IC-7300 into a dipole, nothing fancy
i still fire up WSJT-X for FT8 when i want to work a new grid but would really like to find something with a bit more... substance i guess. even PSK31 back in the day felt more like a real contact than modern FT8 grinding

so ive been noticing for the past few weeks that 10m and 12m have been doing some really strange things. like some days ill be calling CQ and getting absolutely nothing, then the next afternoon out of nowhere ill work 15 or 20 stations in europe and south america back to back before the band just... dies again. its like someone flipped a switch.
checked the solar flux index and its been bouncing around a lot, somewhere in the 150s to 180s range depending on the day, but the K index has also been spiking up randomly which i think is killing things when it goes above 3 or 4. im still pretty new to understanding all this honestly. been licensed about 18 months now and i feel like i sort of get the basics of how solar activity affects HF but the day to day variation still throws me off.
is there a good resource or tool people actually use to predict when a band is going to open up? ive tried a couple different sites but i cant always tell which numbers to pay attention to. appreciate any help

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the storms last month kind of kicked me in the pants about it. we lost power for almost 4 days and while i had my HT and some batteries i was really not as prepared as i thought i was. managed to check in to the county net a couple times but my battery situation was a mess, cables everywhere, couldnt find the right adapter, the usual disaster.
so im finally building a proper go-kit. right now i'm thinking the FT-891 as the main rig since i already have one, a 40ah LiFePO4 battery with a proper BMS, anderson powerpole distribution block, and a few different antenna options — an EFHW for HF and a jpole for 2m. got a pelican-style case from amazon to put it all in.
my question is what stuff do people always forget or wish they had included. like the obvious radio stuff i think i have covered but im sure theres things i havent thought about. especially around the non-radio stuff that makes operating for extended periods actually workable. logging sheets? headlamp? what else

The ARRL Lab staff is available to help amateurs make these determinations and perform calculations to ensure compliance. ARRL also has an RF Safety page on its website and is working with the FCC to update OET Bulletin 65. Don't stress too much - most typical HF stations will be compliant with minimal effort.

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