Lisa Garcia

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF DX but EME has always been kind of in the back of my mind as this crazy thing that seemed impossible for a regular guy with a normal suburban lot. lately ive been reading more into it and with JT65 and stuff it sounds like the barrier to entry is lower than it used to be, at least on 2m. my question is what does a realistic starter setup look like. i keep seeing people mention 4 yagis as kind of the minimum to actually work anybody, but then i also see posts about single yagi contacts happening on 2m EME with good operators. is that actually repeatable or is it more of a best case scenario thing. also what are we talking for power, i have an IC-9700 which i think does like 10w on 2m, obviously thats not going to cut it but what do most people run. the path loss numbers i see thrown around are insane, like 250+ dB, hard to wrap my head around that actually working at all. also curious if there are certain windows or times that are better, i know the moon has to be above the horizon for both stations obviously but beyond that is there more to it. any pointers appreciated, not trying to build a dish farm just want to understand if this is actually doable for someone with maybe a 100 foot run of coax and a mid-size yagi setup.

ran both at different times here, lot is about 75 feet deep so similar to yours. the inverted V at about 40 feet at the apex actually did surprisingly well for DX once i got it up there, the angle isnt as bad as people make it sound when you get the center high enough. the vertical i had before that was a trap vertical with maybe 16 radials and honestly the inverted V beat it more often than not into europe from the midwest. now maybe with 60 or 80 radials the vertical would flip that around, i dont know, but who has time for that. if your choice is an inverted V with a decent apex height vs a vertical with a handful of radials id just do the inverted V, easier to build, easier to tune, you can do it with wire and a couple trees. the vertical with a good buried radial system is probably the "right" answer theoretically but getting there takes a lot of work and real estate that you might not have even underground.

yeah the digital modes changed everything honestly. back when you had to do cw EME you basically needed a serious antenna farm just to work the big guns, but now with JT65B and Q65 even a single long yagi can get you on the board. ive seen guys work initial contacts with a single 13el M2 yagi at like 5m above ground which would have been laughable in the cw era. preamp placement is not just important, its probably the single most important thing after antenna gain. you want that LNA as close to the feedpoint as possible, relay switching and all. every meter of coax between the antenna and your LNA is adding noise figure and it adds up fast. most people running serious 2m EME are using a relay-switched LNA literally at the mast head. MGF1302 or SSB Electronics type preamps are popular, noise figure around 0.3-0.5 dB is what you're shooting for. your receive chain is way more limiting than transmit power in a lot of cases, especially with digital modes where the big stations can hear you before you can hear them. for antenna i wouldnt bother with a single yagi for too long, you'll work a handful of big guns and then stall out. two yagis with proper phasing and you open up a lot more. elevation rotor matters too once you start caring about window timing relative to moon elevation. your quiet rf environment is a real asset, some suburban guys are fighting S3 noise floors which is rough on EME receive.

ok so ive been messing with Winlink for about three weeks now and i think i finally understand maybe 60% of it. got Winlink Express installed, have a Signalink USB connected to my IC-7300, and i can see the waterfall moving when i key up so thats something at least. what im not really clear on is the gateway side of things. like when i connect to an RMS gateway am i just using someone elses station that happens to be running all the time? or is there actual infrastructure behind it that Winlink as an organization maintains. i tried to read the docs but they kind of assume you already know what youre looking at. also the channel selection thing — i opened the RMS list and sorted by distance and theres like 8 gateways within 100 miles of me but half of them i cant seem to make a connection to. is that normal or is something wrong with my setup. running VARA HF on 40m mostly, tried a couple on 20m too. the sessions just timeout without completing the handshake most of the time. not sure if its an antenna issue on my end, propagation, or if those gateways are just not actually online even though they show in the list. any help appreciated, this has been bugging me for a while

10m phone is actually pretty fun when the band is open, ive worked some decent dx on it with a tech ticket back before i upgraded. just dont expect it to be open all the time, depends a lot on where we are in the solar cycle and right now its actually not bad. the general exam is worth doing though seriously, i waited two years and kind of regret it

FTDX10 guy here, switched from an older icom about 18 months ago. the rx really is noticeably better when 40m gets crowded friday nights, thats not placebo, you can hear it. that said the 7300 ui is genuinely more polished and if youre doing a lot of FT8 the direct usb audio on the icom is just less hassle to set up. i think it comes down to whether you prioritize the operating experience or the out-of-the-box ease of use if that makes sense. also the FTDX10 runs a bit warm, mine gets pretty toasty after a long session, never had an issue but its something i noticed.

yeah what he said. also just wanted to add — dont stress too much about accidentally transmitting somewhere wrong when youre first starting out, as long as youre not doing it on purpose and you're making a genuine effort to learn the rules the FCC isnt going to come after a new licensee for an honest mistake. that said obviously still try to get it right lol. one thing that helped me was just listening a lot before ever transmitting, you kind of learn where activity is and that gives you a feel for the band plans even before you memorize all the specific frequencies. the band plan thing is also worth knowing — thats not the same as FCC rules, those are more like gentlemens agreements about where certain modes tend to hang out, but its good to be aware of both

oh also one thing i noticed when i first started using my UV-5R — make sure youve got the right offset programmed. 2m repeaters usually need a -600 kHz offset but its worth double checking because the baofeng doesnt always auto-set that depending on how you entered the frequency. if your offset is wrong youre transmitting on the wrong frequency entirely and no amount of tone fiddling will help. i made that exact mistake for like two weeks before someone pointed it out to me at a club meeting, pretty embarasing honestly.

congrats on the 7300, genuinely one of the best bang for buck rigs out there right now and you'll probably still be using it 10 years from now. on the panadapter question — honestly i mostly use it to spot activity and get a quick feel for band conditions, then i still tune by hand to actually find what i want. clicking on signals in the waterfall works fine but i find you can miss stuff between clicks if you're not paying attention to the audio. once you get used to the span and reference level settings it becomes second nature. the 40m noise thing in a suburb is almost definitely your environment and not the radio. the 7300 has a pretty solid noise floor on its own. try turning everything off in the house and see if it drops — switching power supplies, LED lighting, all that stuff murders 40m especially. a better antenna will also help a lot more than most people expect, even something like a simple dipole outside would be a big improvement over a random wire indoors.

worth checking if you have any voltage sag on the 13.8v line under TX. i know it sounds obvious but ive seen rigs do weird stuff when the supply dips even a little bit under load. what are you running for a power supply? some of the cheaper switching supplies have caps that go bad after a few years and they cant hold up under the current draw of the finals. throw a meter on the supply terminals right at the radio while you're transmitting and see if it stays solid. might not be the radio at all.

so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and honestly been pretty lazy about emergency prep. got my technician then general and kind of just enjoyed the hobby without thinking too much about the serious side of it. but we had a pretty bad storm come through last month and the power was out for almost 4 days in my neighborhood and i kept thinking man i should really have something ready to go. anyway ive started throwing together a go-kit. right now i have my FT-60 HT with a couple spare batteries, a roll of speaker wire ive been meaning to turn into a proper j-pole, some coax, a small notebook and pens, and my ARRL handbook. i grabbed one of those plastic tote bins from home depot to keep it all in. what am i missing that i'd really kick myself for not having? im thinking about getting a mobile rig too, like a used 2520 or something, and running it off a deep cycle battery with a cigar lighter cable. also not sure if i should be investing more in HF capability or if that's overkill for what most people actually use these kits for in a real event. im in a suburban area, pretty close to the county EOC, so vhf/uhf is probably where most of the action would be locally. just want to make sure im not reinventing the wheel here when smarter people have already figured this stuff out

honestly i was in the exact same boat like 8 months ago lol. i used the gordon west technician book which some people swear by but honestly hamstudy.org ended up being way more useful for me just because i could do it on my phone while waiting around. the tech test is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass so its not as brutal as it sounds. i failed my first attempt by two questions which was annoying but passed the second time no problem. just keep hammering the practice tests until youre consistently in the 80s and youll be good

oh man this brought back memories, my first net check-in i was so nervous i forgot my own callsign halfway through and just went silent for like three seconds. the NCS waited patiently and then just said go ahead with your call and i stumbled through it. nobody made me feel bad at all. honestly what you described is pretty much how everyones first time goes. the doubling thing especially, its hard to know the timing until youve done it a few times and get a feel for when the frequency is actually clear. most NCS operators have seen it all and they genuinely want new people to participate, thats kind of the whole point of a net in some ways. ARRL has a decent write-up on net procedures and theres also the NTS methods and practices guide which is a bit dry but actually explains the formalities really well. but honestly the best thing is just to keep checking in. after like 4 or 5 times it clicks and you stop overthinking it.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and finally decided to take the plunge into cw after putting it off forever. been using the G4FON trainer and also just keying around on the air a bit but honestly my sending is all over the place. some days it sounds decent and other days it just sounds like garbage, like my spacing between letters is terrible and i rush through words when i start to panic a little. im using a cheap set of paddles i picked up used, pretty sure they're a MFJ something or other, paired with the keyer built into my IC-7300. the paddles feel okay i guess but i dont really have anything to compare them to. my question is mainly about the sending side -- is inconsistent spacing just a practice thing that goes away with time or is there something specific i should be working on. also does paddle tension matter a lot because mine feel kinda loose to me but again not sure what normal feels like any help appreciated, CW feels like learning to play an instrument and im not sure im musical haha

the hum on those LM386 builds drives people crazy, pretty much everyone hits this. first thing id check is your ground layout, if youre on perfboard and the audio ground is sharing a long trace with anything on the RF side you get all kinds of weird coupling. star grounding helps a lot with these. also make sure there's a decent cap from pin 7 on the 386 to ground, like 10uf, that bypass is easy to miss and the chip will oscillate or just be noisy without it. as for the sideband rejection, yeah direct conversion is what it is. you can do a simple RC phasing network on the audio output to get some improvement but honestly for casual listening most people just live with it or they add a narrow audio filter downstream which helps a little perceptually even if it doesnt actually reject the other sideband. the Weaver method gives you better rejection but youre right that its basically a whole second project. if you want clean DC RX that project the whole phasing approach was a rabbit hole i spent like two months in and it was worth it but not for a first build.

oh man yeah it absolutely rewired my thinking, been running qrp almost exclusively for about 6 years now and honestly going back to a full power rig feels almost like cheating now, which i know sounds weird. the discipline you develop watching propagation and timing your calls and picking the right band window, thats stuff you just dont think about when youre running 100 watts because you can kind of brute force your way through marginal conditions. the kit building side of it too, once you build one transceiver you start wanting to understand every stage and before long youre modifying things and eventually maybe doing scratch builds. i built a little 40m direct conversion rig from scratch a couple years ago based on some designs from EMRFD and it worked, i mean it wasnt pretty and the audio had a bit of hum i never fully sorted out but it worked. the qcx is a great starting point, Hans Summers really did a solid job with the design on those. sota is the perfect application for what youre describing, if you havent dug into the sota reflector yet theres a ton of good info on antenna setups people use for summits.

32 contacts on your first activation is solid man, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. i remember my first one i barely got 10 and called it a day. the throw line thing is real, i use one of those arborist bags with paracord now and it makes such a difference. once you get that sorted out you'll have more time to actually operate. what park was it if you dont mind me asking

so i heard the Tri-County hamfest is back this year after they cancelled it the last two years, supposed to be at the fairgrounds again. anybody else planning on going? i remember they used to have a pretty decent swap meet area out back where you could find some real deals on old gear. hoping to maybe pick up a decent HF rig or at least some coax and connectors without paying new prices for everything. also not sure if our club is doing a table this year, havent heard anything from the net control guys about it. would be nice to do a little recruiting too since we've been losing members lately.

yeah what he said about N1MM, thats pretty much the standard. i will say field day next year try to actually run some contacts yourself even if its just for like 20 minutes, makes a huge difference. i was nervous my first time calling CQ in a contest and just fumbled through it but by the end of the weekend i was way more comfortable on the mic in general. also keep an eye on the ARRL contest calendar, they list everything coming up and you can kind of plan out which ones fit your schedule. there are smaller contests that are good warmups before something big like CQ WW, the state QSO parties are usually pretty low key and fun.

so i finally passed my technician exam last month and been doing a lot of reading about what to buy first. everyone keeps saying get an HT to start since they're affordable and you can hit local repeaters without a big setup. makes sense. but then i go look and theres like a hundred options and i dont know where to start. ive been looking at the baofeng UV-5R since its cheap and everyone seems to have one but ive also read a lot of people say its kinda junk or at least the programming is a nightmare. then theres the yaesu FT-60 which seems more respected but costs more. and i keep seeing people mention the kenwood TH-D74A but thats way out of my budget right now. mostly i just want to hit the local 2m and 70cm repeaters, maybe do some APRS eventually if thats not too complicated. i live in a suburb so there are definitely active repeaters within range. what would you guys actually buy if you were starting over? not looking for the perfect radio just something i wont regret in 6 months

yeah the whole thing is a little confusing at first but once you go through it once it makes sense. so basically the vanity process is totally separate from sequential — when you got your ticket the FCC just assigned the next call in the queue for your district and license class, thats the sequential part and you dont really have control over that. the vanity application is where you pick a specific callsign you want and apply for it through the ULS. there are application windows and they open in a specific order — first priority goes to close relatives of a deceased ham who held that call, then surviving spouses, then other relatives, and then after all those windows close it opens up to everybody else. the whole window process takes like 18 days or so from when the call becomes available before the general public can grab it, if i remember right. as for fees — yes unfortunately the FCC does charge now. i think its $35 per application or somewhere around there, and that applies to vanity applications too. so if you apply for a call and dont get it you still pay. theres a site called ae7q.com that a lot of people use to track call availability and see when specific calls are coming up, that might help you figure out what to go after before you spend the money.

$850 is pretty fair for a clean 7300 with the box, maybe not steal-of-the-century territory but its not getting ripped off either. i've seen them go anywhere from 750 to 950 depending on condition and accessories. if it comes with the DC cable and the mic its probably worth it at that price, if those are missing i'd maybe push back a little. on the RF/USB thing, yeah its a real issue and almost always grounding related in my experience. the ferrites help but if your station ground isnt solid they're kind of just a bandaid. what i ended up doing was running a proper ground buss along the back of my operating desk, everything bonds to that, and then a short run to a ground rod outside. the mix 31 on the USB cable still stayed on but after i sorted the ground the problem basically went away on its own. also make sure you're not running the USB through a cheap hub, go direct to the computer if you can. and yes the receiver on the 7300 is a genuine step up from the 450D especially on 40 at night when the band gets congested. the roofing filter situation is way better and you can actually use the waterfall to spot signals instead of just staring at noise. you'll notice it pretty quickly.

im kinda in the same boat as you, been chasing DX for maybe a year now. one thing that helped me was just accepting that spots that are more than like 5-10 minutes old on a popular entity are basically useless unless its a really long activation. i check the timestamp religiously now before even bothering to spin the dial. also have you tried PSK Reporter? its not exactly a DX cluster but if you're doing any digital modes its incredible for seeing propagation in real time. like you can literally watch your signal propagate across the globe which is kinda addictive honestly. different tool than what youre asking about but worth bookmarking

honestly i tried JS8Call for like two weeks and gave up, not because the mode is bad but i just couldnt find anyone to talk to at the times i operate which is usually weekday evenings. might be different for you depending on your schedule. the 40m frequency thats somewhat standard is around 7.078 i think, and theres a loose group that shows up on weekends in the afternoon. one thing nobody mentions is the CPU hit if youre running an older machine — my laptop fans would kick on hard with JS8Call in a way that WSJT-X never does, not sure why, maybe the UI framework or something.

So I finally did my first parks on the air activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house. Been wanting to do this for months and kept putting it off because I wasn't sure I had the right gear or whatever. Anyway I just went for it. Set up my KX2 with a random wire antenna strung up between two trees, nothing fancy. Got on 40 meters around 2pm local and started calling CQ POTA. First like 20 minutes absolutely nothing and I was starting to think I was doing something wrong or maybe my signal was just garbage. Then all of a sudden I got a reply from a station in Ohio and after that it just kind of opened up a little. Ended up with 12 contacts over about an hour and a half which I know is enough to count as a valid activation technically but I was hoping for more. I think part of my problem was I didn't spot myself on the POTA website before I started which I learned about after the fact. Also I had the wrong park reference number in my head the whole time, had to go back and look it up later when I was logging. Pretty sure I told at least two stations the wrong number which is embarrassing. Anyway still counts I think since I can correct it in the log? Anyone else mess up the reference on their first one?