Lisa Garcia

so ive been messing around with this idea for a while now and finally started actually building it out. the basic idea is i want the arduino to read the band data output from my IC-7300 and then drive a relay board to switch between my HF antennas automatically without me having to reach over and flip the coax switch manually every time i change bands. the 7300 puts out band voltage on the ACC connector, different voltage levels for different bands, so thats what im feeding into the analog pins. got a basic sketch going that reads the voltage and maps it to bands okay but im running into trouble with the relay switching — sometimes it bounces between two states when the voltage is in between bands during a QSY and that causes a brief open circuit on the antenna port which im not thrilled about. thinking i need to add some hysteresis or a debounce delay in the code but not sure what a safe delay would be before the relay actually commits to a new position. also not sure if a brief open during transmit would actually hurt anything or if the rig just sees a high SWR for a split second and the ALC handles it. anyone dealt with this kind of thing before?

Field Day was my first real operating event and i had a blast even though i barely knew what i was doing. the club i went with basically just handed me the mic and talked me through it which was nerve wracking but great. way more low key than what you're describing with CQ WW. one thing i'd say about doing SOTA activations if you ever want something in between -- its not a contest exactly but there's a whole activator/chaser community and it kind of scratches the same itch in a different way. slower paced but you're working people all over the place from a mountain top which is its own kind of cool. anyway good luck with CQ WW this year

so ive been sitting on this decision for like two months now and i keep going back and forth. currently running an old FT-450D that i picked up used a few years ago and it's been solid but i want to upgrade and get something with a proper panadapter and better DSP filtering cause i do a fair bit of RTTY and some SSB contesting on weekends. the IC-7300 is obviously the crowd favorite and i get why, the real-time spectrum scope is genuinely useful and not just a gimmick. but the 991A does VHF/UHF all in one box which would clean up the shack considerably since i have a separate 2m rig sitting on the desk just eating space. price difference in my area is about $200-250 depending on where you look. i know this gets asked constantly but most of the threads i found are from like 2018 and wondering if anything has changed with firmware updates or if peoples opinions have shifted. mostly HF with occasional satellite stuff if that changes anything.

man that kansas contact on 7w from a park with a wire is a great feeling, i remember my first time being genuinely surprised propagation actually works the way the books say it does lol. ive been doing POTA pretty regularly for about three years now and honestly the antenna is where i obsess the most too. i went through a bunch of different wire setups and eventually landed on a 40/20m linked dipole that i can deploy in like 10 minutes. total weight with the feedline is maybe 200 grams, which sounds ridiculous but you appreciate it on mile four of a hike. for the rig itself i run an elecraft kx2 now which is cheating a bit because it's so polished, but before that i was using a homebrew pixie and a sw-3b kit and honestly the sw-3b was a better experience than i expected for cw. if you're itching to keep building stuff have you looked at the 4state qrp group kits? some of them are really well documented and they have a pretty active community that'll help if you get stuck.

dont overthink the interrupt thing for this use case honestly. if the band data is just a voltage level that changes and stays put, polling it in your loop with a delay is totally fine. interrupts shine when youre catching fast pulses or need sub-millisecond response and antenna switching just isnt that. id just throw a delay in there and call it done.

the choppy audio above 15m is almost definitely not the codec — ive seen that same thing and it turned out to be the raspi just getting overwhelmed when band noise gets unpredictable and the AGC starts doing weird things through the audio chain. what sample rate are you running the audio at? if youre at 48k try dropping to 32k and see if it smooths out. sounds counterintuitive but the lower rate actually reduced CPU load enough on my pi 3 that the whole thing stopped stuttering. on the SDR side yeah RemoteHams has had panadapter support for a while but its finicky. you basically need to run SDR# or HDSDR locally at the remote end and pipe the IQ data out through a virtual audio cable situation, then the client software picks it up. ive got this working with an Airspy mini and it actually works really well for spotting signals before tuning the main rig over. the RTL-SDR should technically work but the phase noise on those cheap dongles gets annoying when youre trying to do serious operating, youll see birdies all over the place. the linking idea between two remote stations sounds cool in theory but the double latency would probably drive you nuts. even at 150ms one way youre already noticing it, stack two hops and youre pushing 300-400ms which is rough for anything except maybe slow digital modes.

yeah i was in the same boat when i started, ended up just doing eQSL first because it felt simpler and then did LoTW later once i figured out the certificate thing. both are worth having honestly, different stations use different ones. some guys on FT8 will upload to both automatically which is nice. one thing nobody told me — make sure your callsign and grid info is right before you start uploading a bunch of logs because fixing it later is kind of a pain

I might swing by, depends on if I can get out of work early Friday to make the drive not terrible. what's the parking situation like, last hamfest I went to was kind of a nightmare trying to find a spot and then haul stuff back

so ive been chasing SOTA for about 8 months now and finally decided to just do my first activation. picked out a W6 summit thats only a 2 mile hike, nothing crazy, rated at 4 points i think. got my KX2 and a linked dipole im borrowing from a club buddy and im planning to run 10 watts on 40 and maybe 20 if propagation cooperates. couple things im not totally sure about — do i need to be at the actual trigpoint or just within the activation zone? i looked it up and i think the zone is within 25 vertical meters of the summit but i want to make sure im not doing it wrong. also is it worth setting up on 2m FM just to grab some local chasers or is HF where most of the action is these days. and the selfspotter thing on SOTAwatch, do i use that from my phone before i start calling CQ or after i make my first contact, i keep seeing different things. sorry for all the questions, just dont want to drive 3 hours and mess something up basic

i literally just passed my tech exam last month so maybe i can help from the fresh perspective lol. i used hamstudy too and also watched some youtube videos from a guy called Ham Radio Crash Course, that helped me understand the why behind some of the answers instead of just memorizing. took me about 2.5 weeks studying maybe 20-30 mins a night. honestly the hardest part for me wasnt even the studying it was finding a test session nearby. look up the ARRL exam search or hamstudys own session finder, a lot of clubs do them on weekends. some are even remote now if thats easier for you. once you find a session just sign up and go, dont overthink it

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still feel weird about when to use phonetics. like i know NATO phonetics, Alpha Bravo Charlie etc, but sometimes on the air people just say letters normally especially on 2m repeaters around here and i dont want to sound like im overdoing it or being annoying. but then on HF everyone seems to use them all the time even mid sentence sometimes. is there like an unwritten rule about this or do you just feel it out? i was doing a contact last week and said my callsign without phonetics and the other guy asked me to repeat it three times so maybe that answers my own question lol. but still curious what more experienced people do, like do you always phonetic your full call every time or just when conditions are rough

yeah i was at Hamvention and saw the booth, the demo unit looked really nice in person. the head separation thing is genuinely useful if you operate from a vehicle or have your rig in a weird spot in the shack. that said i always wait at least 6 months after a new Icom release before buying, not because the quality is bad but just because firmware on first-run units is always a work in progress. remember how the 7300 launched with some odd audio quirks that got sorted out pretty quick? same deal probably applies here. if youre happy on HF and not in a huge rush the 7300 used is still one of the best value radios out there, hard to argue against it honestly

yeah so Q codes go way back, like pre-radio telegraph era i think, they were used to speed up morse communication and a lot of them stuck around. QSL is receipt confirmed yeah, QTH is your location, QRM is man-made interference (like someone elses signal bleeding in) and QRN is natural static, like from a thunderstorm. QSB is fading signal which you'll hear a lot on HF. the ones you'll run into constantly are QSY which means change frequency, and QRZ which is basically who's calling me. people throw that out when they hear someone calling but didnt catch the callsign. 73 is just the old telegraphers shorthand for best regards, it's been used forever. some people say 73s which is technically wrong since 73 is already plural but honestly nobody cares at this point it's just a thing people say. and yeah QRP is generally accepted as 5 watts or less on CW and 10 watts PEP on SSB, thats the pretty standard definition most contests and clubs use. some purists get real particular about it though

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, took the kx2 and a random wire up to a local summit about 3200ft, nothing crazy but still counted as a valid summit. setup took way longer than i thought it would because i kept fumbling with the antenna mast in the wind and my fingers were freezing by the time i got the feedline sorted out. made 6 contacts in about 40 minutes which i guess qualifies but i was hoping for more. the worst part was my phone died before i spotted myself on sotawatch so i ended up just calling cq blind on 20m for a while until a chaser found me. overall though it was really fun and i get why people get hooked on this, already looking at the map for the next one

that's really cool to hear. i joined ARES about six months ago and have only done the SET so far, plus one public service event for a marathon which doesnt really count as emergency comms i guess. the ICS training was the part i least expected to actually use but everyone keeps saying the same thing you did so i believe it now. what radio were you running if you dont mind me asking, and did you need anything beyond like basic vhf/uhf capability for what you were doing?