Jessica Turner

first thing i'd check is whether any nearby digipeaters are actually hearing you. aprs.fi not showing anything usually means the packet isnt getting into the network at all, not a display issue. if you can, try running APRSIS32 or even just a cheap RTL-SDR to monitor 144.390 and see if your own packets are appearing on the waterfall and getting decoded. that'll tell you real quick if the radio is actually putting out a valid packet or just keying up with garbage. also double check your MYCALL is set correctly in the TNC settings — the D710 has separate call settings for voice and packet and its easy to have one right and the other blank or set to the factory default. ive seen that trip people up more than once.

oh man i just did my third activation like two weeks ago so im right there with you on the learning curve. the spotting thing confused me too at first. i downloaded the SOTA goat app and it makes self-spotting way easier when youre up there with cold fingers trying to type. definitely worth it

went through almost exactly this a couple years back. the RSP1A is genuinely a big step up from the dongle for HF work — the noise figure is way better and having proper 12-bit ADC instead of 8-bit makes a noticeable difference when youre trying to dig weak signals out of the noise. SDRuno works fine with it, though i actually prefer running it in SDR# with the SDRplay ExtIO plugin, feels more familiar. the HackRF is a different animal. its a great device but the receive performance is honestly not as good as the RSP1A — wider bandwidth and TX capability but worse noise floor. so if youre primarily a listener which it sounds like you are, the RSP1A is probably the better choice for what you described. the HackRF makes more sense if you want to do things like replay attacks or transmit test signals or get into the whole GNU Radio experimentation side of things. for just monitoring HF and satellites the SDRplay wins on pure receive quality at that price point. one thing worth mentioning — for satellite work you might want to look at the RSP1A with a good LNA anyway because even the better SDRs benefit from one for weak sat signals. the SDRplay suites well into SDR++ now too which is a much better piece of software than SDRuno imo.

welcome to the hobby, dont stress too much about it. first thing id check is whether your radio is actually transmitting the tone or just set to receive it — some radios have separate settings for encode vs decode and its easy to have one without the other. also worth double checking the offset direction, make sure its minus not plus or whatever the repeater needs, that catches a lot of new hams off guard. as for etiquette, the usual thing is to just say your callsign and say youre listening or monitoring, something like "[callsign] listening" and see if anyone comes back. if theres already a QSO going on wait for a pause between overs and just toss your callsign in, theyll usually invite you in. most repeater regulars are pretty welcoming to new folks, especially if you mention youre newly licensed. give it another shot and let us know how it goes.

I've never been to a hamfest before actually, is it mostly just people selling old gear or is there like demos and stuff too? asking because my club mentioned Dayton and I didn't really know what to expect

so i finally did my first ever SOTA activation last weekend, W6 summit up in the sierras, took me like 3 hours to hike up and by the time i got there my hands were pretty much frozen and i couldnt figure out why my KX2 wasnt putting out any power at all. stood there like an idiot for 20 minutes fiddling with it before i realized i had the RF power knob turned almost all the way down from when i was testing inside the car before the hike. got 4 contacts and then the battery died because i forgot to fully charge it the night before. still counts as an activation though right? i was in the activation zone the whole time

yeah same boat as you like 8 months ago lol. the workflow i landed on was just using dxwatch as my main spot source and then flipping over to qrz to look up whoever im hearing to get the country info and sometimes their bio if theyre a serious dx operator. clublog is also worth bookmarking because you can check if a callsign is actually active and see their recent activity. one thing that helped me was filtering the cluster by band so im not scrolling through 80 spots on bands i cant even use right now. dxwatch lets you do that pretty easily. oh and watch out for the self-spotting stuff on ft8 freqs, thats basically automated and those spots are usually pretty reliable compared to ssb spots which can be way off frequency sometimes

so ive been a tech for about 2 years now mostly working 2m repeaters and such but really want to get on HF so decided to finally take the plunge. got the arrl book and been going through it but man there's way more math and electronics stuff than the tech test had. anyone have any tips for the harder concepts like impedance matching and all that antenna stuff? also wondering about the band plan questions - do i need to memorize all the frequency ranges or just the general segments we can use? exam is march 15th at our local hamfest, kinda nervous since i struggled with some of the technical parts in the tech test too. any advice would be great

yeah the listening thing is huge and its something that took me embarrassingly long to figure out. i used to just hammer away thinking more transmit time = more chances. completely wrong. the DX op has a rhythm and if you can figure out where in the passband he's pulling calls from and when he's ready for a new one, that's 80% of it right there. on CW specifically i've had good luck sending just my suffix when the pileup is really thick. if he's copying partials anyway you might as well make it easy on him. once he comes back with a partial that sounds like mine i send the full call once, properly formatted. that back and forth is way faster than two dozen guys sending their full 6x2 call signs over each other. the power thing you mentioned is real too. more power past a certain point just makes you part of the noise floor for everyone else. i run an ACOM 1010 and i've noticed cleaner runs when i'm not pushing it. intermod from overdriven amps in a pileup is a real problem and i think a lot of guys dont realize their signal sounds like garbage on the other end.

so i just got my technician license a few months ago and ive been reading about HF and everyone keeps talking about CW and how its still super useful especially for DX and weak signal stuff. i never learned morse code and honestly it always seemed kind of impossible to me, like how do you just hear a bunch of beeps and know what letters they are. but im starting to think maybe i want to try learning it, i dont know. my grandfather was a navy radioman and used to do CW and i kind of want to connect with that i guess. anyway i dont really know where to start. ive seen some apps mentioned and something called the koch method but i dont totally understand how that works. is it better to just memorize the dots and dashes first or is that a bad idea? i feel like thats how i would naturally approach it but ive heard people say thats the wrong way to go. just looking for whatever advice people have, im not in any hurry but i want to actually make progress and not spin my wheels for months

yeah the chart staring thing doesnt work, dont waste more time on that. the Koch method is legit and its basically what most people recommend now -- you start with just 2 characters but you learn them at full speed like 20wpm from day one, and then you keep adding characters as you get comfortable. the whole point is your brain learns the sound as a unit instead of counting dots and dashes which is a trap a lot of new people fall into LCWO dot net is the site most folks use, its free and its set up for Koch training. just make the account and start with lesson 1. the other thing id say is do it every day even if its only 10 minutes, consistency beats long cramming sessions by a lot. took me maybe 4 or 5 months of daily practice to feel comfortable enough to actually get on the air with it and even then it was rough at first. also look up the app Morse Toad or just the regular Morse It app, good for practicing on your phone when youre waiting around somewhere

so ive been chasing DX for maybe 8 months now since i upgraded to general and i finally feel like im starting to get a handle on the cluster spotting thing but im still not totally sure im using these tools the right way basically what i do is i have DXwatch open in one tab and then QRZ.com open in another so i can look up whoever gets spotted and see what band theyre on and whether the spot is recent enough to bother tuning there. but sometimes i see the same call spotted on both and the frequencies dont match which is confusing, like is one of them pulling from older data or something? also QRZ has that little spot list on the main page when you look someone up which is handy but it doesnt always update as fast as DXwatch seems to i also downloaded DX Toolkit on my phone which is pretty solid for alerts but i havent figured out how to filter it down so im not getting pinged every 30 seconds for stuff i cant work anyway. like i dont need to know every time someone spots a W station when im sitting in the midwest trying to snag something new for my DXCC count anyway just wondering if anyone has a better workflow for this or if theres something im missing. feels like theres a lot of tools out there and i only know about like three of them

the timing thing is probably your first issue honestly. in WSJT-X for EME you need to make sure you have your period set correctly — JT65B on 2m EME uses the standard 60 second period but the sequencing matters a lot. if youre calling CQ you transmit in the first period, listening in the second. but when youre hunting for stations you flip that depending on whether they're calling in the first or second half. if you're off by even a second or two because of your PC clock your decodes just dont happen. i always check with the internet time sync before any EME session, like literally right before i start, because my shack PC drifts more than i'd like to admit. on the antenna question — two yagis stacked is workable but its gonna be tough. youre probably in the range where you can work the really big stations on the other side, like the 32m dish guys or the multi-element arrays, because they have so much gain they can hear anything. the problem is working smaller stations with similar setups to yours — that link budget just doesnt close very well. 4x9el is sort of the gentlemens agreement minimum for being able to work a reasonable variety of stations. that said i worked my first real EME QSO with 2x17el yagis and about 600w so it's not impossible, just takes patience and good conditions.

Using your call sign clearly every ten minutes and speaking in plain language rather than jargon are equally important. I've heard too many conversations where operators forget to ID properly or use unclear abbreviations that confuse everyone.

honestly for what you're describing the 7300 is more than enough radio. the 7610 is great but the main things you're paying for are dual watch, better roofing filters, and some improvements to the receiver that you probably wont notice on a random wire anyway. the SDR waterfall on the 7300 is genuinely good, way better than what you're coming from, and the interface is just nice to use day to day. i ran one for two years before upgrading and the only reason i moved on was i started doing some SO2R stuff which you clearly arent. save the money and put it toward a better antenna situation down the road, that'll do more for you than the receiver improvements in the 7610 ever would on your current setup.

yeah i had almost the exact same setup on an older silverado, went from a lip mount to a through-the-roof NMO and it was like night and day on 440. the lip mounts are convienent but you're basically compromising the whole antenna for the sake of not drilling a hole. cant really comment on the Tram specifically but ive heard mixed things about their quality control, the one i borrowed from a club buddy had a loose connector that was causing all kinds of intermittent weirdness. might want to check the SO-239 connection before you do too much testing or you'll be chasing a gremlin that isnt really an antenna pattern problem at all.

so ive been using WSJT-X for ft8 stuff and it logs to its own adif file which is fine but i want to get everything into one place and also do some contesting this winter, maybe the ARRL 10m contest and possibly cqww if i can get my antenna situation sorted before then right now im kind of split between just going all-in on N1MM since everyone says its the gold standard for contesting, but the interface looks like it was designed in 2003 and honestly kind of intimidates me. a buddy at the club has been pushing Log4OM and it does look a lot cleaner and apparently handles the WSJT-X udp logging without much fuss but then the question is can Log4OM actually hold its own in a real contest environment or is it going to fall apart when im trying to dupe check fast and log fast exchange. i dont need anything crazy, im a single op from a modest station, no SO2R or anything like that does anyone run both or switch between them depending on what theyre doing? feels like there should be a cleaner answer here but every thread i find is from like 2019

yeah what he said about the tone. also just wanted to add that some repeaters are linked to other repeaters through systems like IRLP or Echolink or AllStar so sometimes when you key up you might be going out to like 50 other repeaters at once which sounds intimidating but honestly its the same deal. just identify yourself and be normal about it. the linked systems usually have a little beep or a different courtesy tone to let you know theyre connected somewhere. our local linked system makes this kind of double beep after each transmission which confused me for the longest time before someone explained it

congrats on passing and yeah that feeling is pretty universal i think. my first qso was a complete mess, i forgot to give my callsign like three times and the other guy had to remind me. been licensed since 2019 and i still remember it clearly the baofeng and mag mount combo is actually a solid way to start, dont let anyone talk you out of it. people love to snob on the UV-5Rs but they work fine for getting your feet wet on local repeaters. once you start wanting to do more youll figure out what you actually need, no rush

so the CTCSS thing — what you want is to set the transmit tone (the T-CTCSS or whatever Baofeng calls it in that menu) to 100.0 Hz and leave the receive side either off or open squelch. the receive tone setting is for when YOU want to only hear transmissions that include a certain tone, which is a different thing and not required just to access a repeater. a lot of people leave receive tone off entirely and just let the radio unsquelch on carrier like normal. the simplest way to confirm you're getting into the repeater is to listen for the courtesy tone or tail — after someone transmits on a good repeater theres usually a brief beep or a short carrier drop before squelch closes. if you key up and hear that same thing happen right after your transmission, you're probably making it in. some repeaters also have an ID beep when you first access them. as for etiquette, main thing is just listen before you transmit. if a QSO is going on, wait for a pause between overs before jumping in. most repeater users are pretty welcoming to new folks especially if you just say youre new and checking in — honestly most elmers on a local machine are thrilled when someone new shows up.

so im studying for my tech license and the practice tests keep bringing up the NATO phonetic alphabet and im wondering when you actually use it on the air vs just saying the letter normally. like do people really say "Whiskey Foxtrot" every single time or is that just for formal stuff. i tried listening to some repeater traffic on my scanner and it seems like people just talk normally half the time and then suddenly bust out full phonetics for no reason i can tell. is there a rule about this or is it just feel-based. also is it weird if i use phonetics and people dont expect it or will that just make me sound like i know what im doing

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals, dont feel bad. so the FCC part 97 rules are the actual legal limits -- as a general you get phone privileges from 7.225 up to 7.300 on 40m. everything below 7.225 down to 7.175 is still general but the band plan kind of steers you away from certain spots. 7.150 isnt a hard rule thing but its kind of in the DX window area that some ops informally respect, especially in the evenings when the band opens up. the ARRL band plan is just a gentlemans agreement basically, nobody can fine you for ignoring it but youll get grief on the air if you park yourself somewhere thats traditionally used for something else. i just keep the ARRL band plan page bookmarked on my phone and check it when im not sure

so ive been licensed for about 6 months now and i keep hearing about these tone things but honestly im still confused. i know my radio has like 50 different tones to choose from but how do i know which one to use? my local repeater directory just says "pl tone" but doesnt say what that means exactly. also do i need to worry about this for simplex too or just repeaters? sorry if this is a dumb question but the manual for my baofeng is pretty useless and youtube videos all seem to assume you already know this stuff

ah yeah that situation is always a little awkward the first few times, don't stress about it. what you did was basically right — when someone breaks in with their call they're usually either wanting to join in or they have a quick question. standard thing is to acknowledge them, give your own call, and then just ask if they need the frequency or want to join. something like "this is [your call], go ahead [their call]" and see what they want. most of the time it's someone just needing a quick relay or asking if the frequency is in use. on the ID question — the 10 minutes runs from your last ID, not from each transmission. so if you IDed at the start of the contact, your clock starts there, and you need to ID again before 10 minutes is up regardless of how many times you've keyed up in between. at the END of the contact you always ID no matter what. a lot of guys just get in the habit of tossing their call in naturally every few transmissions so they never have to think about it, honestly that's probably the easiest way to handle it when you're new.

For emergency use, stick with LiFePO4 over regular Li-ion - much safer chemistry and better temperature range. I've been happy with Battle Born batteries. Built-in BMS is worth it for peace of mindWeight savings is huge for portable opsInitial cost hurts but they'll outlast 3-4 SLA batteries