Jessica Turner

QRZ is one they dont always mention but youll hear it a ton, it means whos calling me or sometimes just who is calling. CQ is not a Q code technically but its what someone broadcasts when theyre just calling for any station to reply, like a general shoutout. i spent like three weeks listening before i figured that one out lol

haha the food thing gets everyone. i packed way too much water and like zero actual food for a 10 hour shift one time and was basically running on vending machine coffee by hour six. not ideal when you need to concentrate on traffic handling. one thing that helped me a lot was just doing more ICS training online, the FEMA stuff is free and some of it is actually pretty practical for understanding why the EOC people are acting the way they are. once you kind of get the incident command structure it makes more sense why your EC seems frantic, theyre usually juggling a lot more than just our net.

honestly the moment it clicked for me was when i was trying to work a station in a pileup and kept getting walked on, finally just slowed down and said each letter with a full phonetic word and the dx came back to me first try. thats kind of when i stopped thinking of it as a formality and started thinking of it as just... the tool that actually works lol the mixed alphabet thing is kind of funny, i still slip up and say "Sugar" instead of "Sierra" sometimes because thats what my elmer taught me back in the day. old habits. most people just roll with it as long as theyre distinct words that cant be confused with anything else

So I've been kind of out of the loop for a few months, work has been insane, but I sat down this weekend and started catching up on everything and wow theres a lot going on. First off has anyone been working 10 meters recently? I jumped on Saturday afternoon kind of just messing around and within like 20 minutes I had worked 14 countries. I know solar cycle 25 has been building for a while but I genuinely forgot what a good 10m opening feels like, been licensed since 2019 so this is kind of my first real taste of it. Also saw something about Icom teasing a new HF rig, think it was on one of the Facebook groups, but I cant find the original post now. Anyone know what thats actually about? I dont want to get too hyped if its just a firmware update or something repackaged. My IC-7300 is doing fine but I'm always curious what's coming down the pipe. And one more thing, apparently there's a big contest coming up in a few weeks? Someone mentioned it at our club meeting but I zoned out a little, anyone know which one they were probably talking about?

so ive been messing around with an old TV rotor I adapted for my 2m yagi and the manual control box is kind of a pain, especially when im trying to do satellite passes and need to track az/el in real time. been thinking about throwing an arduino in there with a couple of feedback pots and maybe talking to gpredict over serial but honestly im not sure where to start with the software side of it. ive done some basic arduino stuff before, blinked some LEDs, read some sensor values, nothing crazy. the hardware side doesnt scare me too much but writing something that actually interprets the easycomm protocol and moves the motor accordingly feels like a lot. anyone done something like this or have a sketch thats at least close to what im describing? dont want to reinvent the wheel if someone already figured this out. also considering just going raspberry pi instead and running rotctld but then i have to deal with linux on a pi which is fine i guess just more moving parts. not sure which way to go honestly.

There's often at least a 10-point difference in overall test scores between getting the hardest questions right versus wrong - on some questions, the difference between answering correctly (87% mean score) and incorrectly (73% mean score) is literally the difference between passing and failing. The receive filter bandwidth questions always seem to stump people.

totally get the confusion, i went through the same thing when i was starting out. short answer is most serious award chasers do use all three but you dont have to right away. LoTW is the gold standard for ARRL awards like DXCC and WAS — those pretty much require LoTW confirmations so thats the one id prioritize if you care about chasing awards down the road. eQSL is faster and more casual, some people love it and some barely touch it. it does count for a few things but not the big ARRL stuff. i keep an eQSL account just because its easy to upload to and some DX stations are really active on there. paper cards through the bureau are kind of their own thing — slow as molasses, sometimes takes a year or more to get cards back internationally, but theres something genuinely satisfying about a physical card from a rare country sitting in your shack. i still send them for anything unusual or when someone specifically requests a card. for the bureau, yes if you're in the US you go through ARRL for incoming and outgoing international cards. your regional club might handle some domestic stuff but check the ARRL website for the outgoing bureau process, you basically bundle up cards and send them in with some payment per card. its cheap but slow.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, just upgraded to General last month and im starting to hear a lot about the big contests coming up. guys at my local club keep mentioning CQ WW and Field Day and honestly i dont even fully understand the difference between them or what the point is. like is CQ WW just about working as many DX stations as possible? and Field Day is more of a club thing right? i tried reading the rules on the ARRL site and got a bit overwhelmed. also someone mentioned SOTA activations and now im wondering if thats kind of like a contest too or more of a personal achievement thing. i have a basic HF setup, Icom IC-7300 and a wire antenna in the backyard, nothing fancy. just want to figure out which of these events might actually be fun to try as a newer operator and whether i need to do anything special to participate or if i can just jump in.

yeah the RTL streaming over remotehams is kinda finicky in my experience. 5 Mbps uplink is probably your bottleneck — the RTL at 2.048 Ms/s is pushing more data than people think, especially uncompressed. Try dropping to 1.024 Ms/s and see if the drops stop. You lose some spectrum width but the stream becomes way more manageable on a marginal connection. Also make sure youre not running any other traffic on that uplink at the same time, even a background windows update will murder it. The other thing i ran into was a UDP buffer overflow on the server side that wasnt obviously logged anywhere. Ended up just being that the dongle was producing data faster than the network could handle bursts and the buffer was just silently dropping packets and eventually the client gave up. Lowering sample rate fixed it for me.