DX Dude

so ive been noticing some really odd stuff on 10 and 12 meters the past couple weeks. like i'll tune around midday and hear basically nothing for an hour, then out of nowhere there's stations from japan and australia just pouring in like its 1999 or something. lasted maybe 40 minutes yesterday then gone again. i know solar flux has been climbing but i didnt expect it to be this patchy and unpredictable. been watching the SFI on DXWatch and it was sitting around 170-180 last week which honestly seems pretty high compared to what we had for most of last couple years. K index was low too so i figured conditions would be more stable than this but apparently not? or maybe im misunderstanding how all that works together. anyway just wondering if anyone else is seeing these random short openings or if im just getting lucky with my timing

so ive been part of our local ARES group for about 8 months now, been going to the monthly nets and the occasional training exercise but this weekend is apparently a real activation — county OEM asked us to provide comms support for a pretty big search and rescue operation out in the hills east of town. nothing life or death hopefully but its real and not a drill and i guess thats whats getting in my head a little. my EC has been great about walking people through what to expect but i guess i just wanted to hear from anyone whos done their first real activation and what it actually felt like in the moment. like do you just... default to your training or does everything kind of fly out of your head when theres actual pressure? i've been studying ICS stuff, i know my phonetic alphabet cold, i have my go bag ready. i think im ready. i just dont know if i feel ready if that makes sense. also kind of a practical question — when you're logging traffic during an activation do most groups use paper logs or is there software people use in the field? our group hasnt been super clear on that and i dont want to show up using the wrong thing.

honestly i tried js8call twice and gave up both times but i think i was doing something wrong with the audio levels because my decodes were terrible. kept seeing partials and nothing completing. might have been a soundcard thing or maybe the agc on the 7300 messing with the levels, i never figured it out. for what its worth psk31 on 14.070 still has activity if you sit there long enough, especially weekends. its not 2005 anymore but its not dead either. rtty contests are where i actually get my digital fix these days, cqww rtty especially, that one gets wild.

yeah CTCSS is exactly what that is, good that you figured it out. the baofeng menu is confusing at first but once you do it a few times it clicks. what you want is the T-CTCS option (not R-CTCS) — the T is for transmit tone which is what the repeater needs to hear from you before it opens the squelch. R-CTCS is for your radio to filter what you receive and most of the time you can just leave that off unless there's a lot of interference on the output. best way to test it honestly is just to kerchunk the repeater — key up for a second without saying anything and if you hear the repeater tail (that little blip or kerchunk sound when it drops) then you're getting in. just dont make a habit of kerchunking constantly, some repeater owners get a bit grumpy about it. if you get in, just say your callsign and mention you're testing, people are usually pretty welcoming to new folks doing that.

congrats on passing the exam first of all. okay so the good news is there's no waiting period anymore, you can apply for a vanity call basically as soon as your license shows up in the ULS system. the FCC changed things up a while back and removed that old 60-day waiting period that used to trip everyone up. as for fees yeah the FCC started charging $35 for license applications including vanity requests, that went into effect in 2022 i think. so it's not free anymore which stinks but its not terrible either. you apply through the ULS just like you did for your original license, look for the vanity application option. on the call district thing — your callsign doesnt actually have to match the district you live in, thats a misconception a lot of newer hams have. your sequential call came from wherever you registered your address but with a vanity you can pick calls from any district as long as theyre available for your license class. technician class does limit you though, you can only pick from the technician/novice pool which means 2x3 format calls mostly. if you upgrade to general or extra you open up way more options including shorter calls. worth thinking about if you really want something snappy.

that wildlife refuge sounds amazing, I keep meaning to check what WWFF references are near me but havent gotten around to it yet. I do POTA pretty regularly and from what I understand theres a fair amount of overlap with references? like some parks count for both programs at the same time which is nice 67 contacts in 2 hours on an end fed at 25w is solid work, nice job

i just did my third activation last month so im basically a newbie too lol but the spotting thing tripped me up at first also. the POTA app on your phone is honestly the easiest way to handle it, you just plug in your park reference and frequency and it posts the spot for you. way easier than trying to type on the website while also operating. one thing i'd add is try 20m if 40 ever feels slow, i had a session where 40 was just dead and switched up and got a bunch more contacts including some from pretty far out. depends on time of day obviously but its worth having both options ready if your antenna covers it.

oh i just did my second one last month, KX2 is a great choice for this kind of thing. i used a linked dipole and it worked fine. the pile up when you first spot yourself is kind of overwhelming if you havent done it before so just slow down and dont panic lol. good luck tomorrow

also just to add, 40m during the day is kind of rough for domestic contacts anyway, best time to try it is evening into night when the skip starts to come in. i was in the same boat as you when i got my general and spent weeks trying to make contacts at 2pm and getting nowhere. evening is when all the action is, youll hear a ton of stations

so ive been trying to figure out the best way to run coax from the trunk lip mount on my F-150 up to the radio in the cab and i keep second guessing myself. right now ive got maybe 15 feet of LMR-240 going from the antenna, under the weather stripping on the rear door, across the headliner and down the A pillar. it works but honestly the SWR looks a little weird on 70cm and i dunno if its the coax routing or if i kinked something somewhere in the door jamb area. the radio itself is mounted under the dash on a RAM mount which i like a lot, power runs direct to the battery with a fuse inline about 6 inches from the battery, so thats fine i think. the 2m side seems totally normal, like 1.1:1 across the band which is great. but on 440 im seeing it climb up toward 1.8 or so at the high end of the band. the antenna is a Tram 1185 dual band so it should be resonant on both. anyone dealt with this before or know if maybe the coax pinching in the door jamb could do this? i really dont want to pull it all apart again if i can avoid it

so the actual FCC allocation for general class phone on 40m starts at 7.175 MHz, your buddy has it wrong or maybe hes thinking of a different band. the upper edge is 7.300 and thats a hard stop, you do not want your signal going above that. thing is with SSB you need to think about where your suppressed carrier frequency is versus where your actual transmitted audio ends up. if youre on USB and you set the dial to 7.300 your voice is going to be spilling above the band edge, so most people stay at least 7.299 or even a bit lower to be safe. the rig doesnt know or care about band edges, thats on you. and yeah there is a difference between the FCC rules which are law and the ARRL band plan which is more like a gentleman's agreement. the phone lower limit for general on 40 is definitely 7.175 per part 97, anything below that on 40m phone is extra class territory

Why an EFHW? Apartment living means I don't have a lot of options. I've got a small balcony and access to a fence post about 40 feet away that I can probably throw a line over. The end-fed half wave appealed to me because you only need one support point at the far end — the other end feeds directly into the transformer at the radio end, so I could mount that near the shack and run coax inside. No need to run the actual antenna wire through a window or anything weird. At least that was the theory. The core of an EFHW transformer is basically a 49:1 impedance transformer wound on a ferrite toroid. The end-fed half wave antenna presents something in the neighborhood of 2450 ohms at its feed point, and you want to bring that down to 50 ohms to match your coax and radio. The 49:1 ratio does that — 49 times 50 is 2450. That part actually made sense to me once I sat down and thought it through. Parts and First Attempt I ordered a couple of FT-140-43 toroids off of an online supplier. The -43 material is what most of the builds I saw recommended for HF frequencies, especially the lower bands. I also grabbed some 26 AWG magnet wire from a local electronics shop — I probably could have gone heavier but that's what they had in stock. The winding I went with was 3 turns primary and 21 turns secondary, which gives you that 7:1 turns ratio (and 7 squared is 49, so there's your impedance ratio). I followed a diagram I found that showed the primary going right at one end of the core, then the secondary wound over essentially the whole toroid. I also added a 100 pF silver mica capacitor across the primary based on some recommendations I saw — supposedly it helps with matching on the higher bands. First attempt at winding it went okay but my secondary turns were really uneven and I could tell just looking at it that they weren't spaced well. I also nicked the enamel on a couple of the magnet wire turns with my fingernail while pulling the wire through. Scraped the ends off with sandpaper, soldered it up, and put it in a small weatherproof enclosure I got at the hardware store. Testing — The Humbling Part I hooked up a temporary wire I cut for 40 meters — about 66 feet for a half wave. Draped it out the balcony as best I could, thrown over a string line to the fence post. Nothing fancy, lots of sag in the middle. Connected my cheap nanoVNA to the coax port of the transformer and did a sweep. It was not great. I was seeing an SWR of around 3.5:1 at 7.2 MHz. Definitely not 1:1 and my radio's internal tuner was struggling with it. I posted on a forum and somebody immediately asked if I had a counterpoise. I did not. I had completely forgotten about the counterpoise. End-fed antennas need something to push against — the common solution is a short wire connected to the ground terminal of the transformer, usually around 0.05 wavelength long, so about 6-7 feet for 40 meters. I added an 8-foot wire to the ground lug of the enclosure, just let it hang down off the balcony. Swept it again on the nanoVNA. SWR dropped to about 1.4:1 right at 7.150 MHz. That I can work with. My radio's built-in tuner brought it right down to 1:1 and I was on the air. On the Air Results Made my first contact with the new antenna on 40 meters a couple evenings after I finished it. Worked a station about 600 miles away running 50 watts and got a solid 57 signal report. Not earth-shattering but way better than the cookie sheet whip setup. On 80 meters it's a bit rougher — I'm running it as a non-resonant wire on 80 with the tuner doing more work, and I can tell the transformer gets a little warm after longer transmissions. I'm keeping key-down time short for now. I did notice some RF in the shack — the kind where you touch the radio and get a little tingle, or the audio gets a weird buzz on transmit. I think I need to add a common mode choke on the coax, which I haven't done yet. That's my next project. Probably 8-10 turns of the coax through another toroid right at the transformer output. What I'd Do Differently Honestly, not a ton. The core build was pretty straightforward once I accepted I might have to rewind it. I'd probably use slightly heavier wire next time — the 26 AWG feels fragile when you're winding it around the toroid. I'd also drill the enclosure holes before winding the transformer, not after, because I cracked the lid a little trying to drill near the PL-259 connector hole. The counterpoise thing was a dumb oversight on my part. Read the instructions, people. Or in this case, read all of the forum posts, not just the winding diagrams. Total cost was around $25 for the toroids and wire, maybe $8 for the enclosure, and I already had coax and connectors sitting around. Way cheaper than buying a commercial EFHW transformer, and I actually understand how it works now, which feels like kind of a big deal to me honestly. If you're newer like me and thinking about trying this, I'd say go for it. The math is accessible, the winding is tedious but not hard, and there's a ton of help online. Just remember your counterpoise. Don't be me. I'll probably post an update once I get the choke sorted out and do some more testing on the higher bands. 73 and thanks for reading.

Field Day with a club is just a completely different experience, like you said you miss the social part and yeah thats kind of the whole point for a lot of people. the technical side gets spread around so nobody burns out, plus you usually end up learning a ton just from watching how the experienced ops run the pileups. i've done it both ways and solo is rewarding in its own way but if you have a decent club nearby it's worth showing up at least once to see what it's like. as for Sweepstakes, dont let the complexity scare you off. yeah the multiplier system is a bit weird with sections instead of countries but once you get your head around it after the first hour or so it clicks. the 24 hour single op limit also means its not as brutal as something like CQ WW where people are going 48 hours and turning into zombies. i'd say go for it, worst case you learn a ton and get a feel for high rate domestic contesting which is its own skill set.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and mostly just done local stuff and some SSB ragchewing but lately ive been getting into working DX and i think i want to actually go for DXCC at some point. i worked a few entities already — japan, germany, some caribean station i cant remember which island — and i guess ive just been logging without really thinking about it. my question is basically how does this whole thing work in terms of submitting credits. do i need paper QSLs for everything or is lotw the way to go now? i keep hearing people say lotw but then i also see guys talking about chasing paper cards and i dont really know which route makes more sense when youre just starting out. also is there a difference between how DXCC counts things vs WAS or WAZ, like are they all tracked separately through the ARRL or what sorry if this is a basic question, just trying to wrap my head around the whole awards ecosystem i guess

yeah the 857 has a known issue with the driver stage on certain bands. 40m specifically can be tricky because of how the band switching works on that radio. first thing id check before assuming finals is the ALC -- hook it up and watch the ALC meter while youre transmitting on 40, if its pegged or doing something weird that can actually pull power down and make it look like a finals problem when its not. also worth checking is whether the PA voltage is actually getting to the finals on that band. there's a switching transistor involved and those do fail. i had an 857 come through my bench with like 3 watts on 20m and it turned out to be a bad Q1022 or somewhere around there, one of the switching fets. pulled it, put in a replacement, back to full power. the service manual has the voltage test points labeled pretty well so if you have a DMM and the SM you can at least narrow it down before buying parts.