Kevin Brown

so ive been a general for about two years now and people keep telling me to just go ahead and get my extra but honestly every time i look at the question pool i kind of freeze up. like the stuff about network filters and the transmission line theory and all the phase angle stuff... i passed my general without too much trouble but this feels like a whole different animal. my main thing is i mostly do HF voice and a little bit of digital, i dont really do anything where i need the extra band privileges right now. so part of me wonders if its even worth the headache. but then again there are a few spots on 75 and 40 that i cant use yet and it does get annoying when a net moves down into the extra portion and i have to just drop off. has anyone gone through this recently? is the theory stuff as bad as it looks or does it kind of click once you start studying? i downloaded the hamstudy app and some of it makes sense but some of it really does not and im not sure how deep i actually need to understand it vs just memorizing answers

so ive been chasing the FM birds for a while now and decided to step it up and try working one of the linear transponder sats, specifically FO-29 since it was supposedly in a decent pass this week. got my Arrow antenna, FT-817 for downlink on 2m and an old FT-857 i borrowed from a buddy for the uplink on 70cm. ran it all into a duplexer which in retrospect was probably not ideal but whatever. i can hear SSB signals on the downlink, like clearly there are people talking, but my own signal is just not coming back to me no matter what i try. ive been reading about the full duplex thing and how you need to hear yourself on the downlink to do the doppler correction properly but i genuinely cannot tell if im even hitting the transponder at all. the uplink is supposed to be 435.900 to 435.800 inverted right? so SSB on 70cm goes in and comes out on the 2m downlink inverted? im confusing myself. also how much power are people actually running into these things. i started at like 5 watts on the uplink because i didnt want to be that guy who blows out the transponder AGC but maybe thats too low with a handheld yagi and the satellite only being maybe 15 degrees elevation at best during that pass.

so ive been checking into the regional 40m net on thursday nights for about three months now and honestly its become one of my favorite parts of the hobby. started doing it just to practice my exchange and get comfortable with net control procedures but now i actually look forward to it every week. the guys on there are really welcoming especially to newer hams which i wasnt expecting honestly. anyway my actual question is about special event stations. i saw someone in the net mention a special event callsign last week and i missed most of what they said because the QSB was pretty bad that night. are special event stations usually announced through nets like that or is there a better way to find out whats coming up? i know about the ARRL website but i feel like i always find out about events after they already happened. also do special event stations usually show up in the nets or are they more of a standalone thing where you just have to hunt for them on the band? sorry if this is kind of a rambling question, just curious how other people keep track of this stuff

yeah i went through this same thing like 8 months ago. my sequential call came through in maybe 3 days after my CSCE was submitted, though i've heard it can sometimes take a week or so depending on how backed up things are. i just kept refreshing ULS obsessively lol. i did apply for a vanity call after and got one that used to belong to a silent key which felt a little weird honestly but also kind of meaningful. the ae7 calls were already all gone for the format i wanted so i ended up with something slightly different than i planned but im happy with it. just dont get too attached to one specific call going in because someone else might grab it

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and figured id just ask here because googling it gives me nothing but product pages. we have a 70cm link antenna up on a hilltop site, currently running a comet GP-9 or whatever the 70cm version is called, its been up there maybe 4 years and works fine but the path to the far repeater is kind of marginal. maybe 2-3 db of headroom on a good day. someone suggested swapping to a yagi pointed at the far site and just eating the loss of omnidirectional coverage since the link only needs to talk to one place anyway. which makes sense on paper. but then someone else said the wind loading up there is already sketchy and a yagi pointed at something 40 miles out would need to be rock solid or the whole thing falls apart every time it gets gusty. the mast is a 10 foot piece of 1.5 inch steel pipe, guyed at the top, its not going anywhere but i dont know how a horizontal yagi would handle sustained 40-50 mph winds which we do get up there in winter. anybody run a long boom yagi on a hilltop site in rough weather and lived to tell about it

so ive been licensed about 4 months now (general) and i finally worked up the nerve to check into a local 2m net last tuesday. i thought i had a decent handle on how it works from reading about it but when the net control called for check-ins i kind of froze and then talked over someone else which was embarrassing. the net control was really nice about it and just moved on but i felt terrible. my main confusion is around timing. like how long do you wait after net control finishes speaking before you give your callsign? and is there a difference between just checking in versus having traffic or a comment? i know you're supposed to wait for a pause but every time i thought there was a pause someone else jumped in. also is it rude to check in and then not really have anything to say, i mostly just wanted to hear how it all works any help appreciated, dont want to be that guy who steps on everyone

yeah what he said. i was in the same spot when i started and the decode thing tripped me up too. i just ended up setting both encode and decode to the same tone and never had an issue. one thing i'd add — some repeaters around here have different tones depending on which mode they're in when linked vs not, but that's probably more than you need to worry about right now. just listen for a while before transmitting, seriously that one habit saves so much awkwardness. you'll learn the rhythm of how people use the local machine pretty fast just by monitoring.

congrats on actually doing it, most people stay in the 'i should put a kit together' phase forever lol. your solar question — i've had good luck with a 50 watt renogy panel with one of those cheap PWM controllers from amazon. nothing fancy but it keeps my battery topped off during a long deployment without me thinking about it. just make sure whatever panel you get the voltage matches up okay with your charge controller input range, burned out one controller early on being dumb about that. one thing i'd think about that took me a while to add is some kind of logging setup. even just a clipboard with pre-printed ICS-213 forms if you're doing any kind of served agency work. some EOC managers get real particular about documentation and showing up with actual paper forms makes you look like you know what you're doing even when everything else is chaos. you can download and print those for free off the FEMA site i think.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and im starting to get into chasing awards and i keep seeing people mention LoTW and eQSL and also still sending paper cards through the bureau and im honestly just confused about what i actually need to be doing here. like do most people use all three or is one of them basically the standard now? i set up my LoTW account a few weeks ago and uploaded some logs but i only have like 4 confirmed contacts on there so far even though ive worked way more stations than that. i guess the other guys just havent uploaded their logs yet? and then i downloaded an eQSL account too but that one seems totally separate and i dont really understand how it fits in with LoTW. and then people on the air keep asking for my QSL card and i havent even ordered any yet because i wasnt sure if paper cards were still a thing people actually want or if its just old timers being nostalgic no offense to anyone. anyway if someone could just explain how this whole system works or how you personally handle it id really appreciate it. feels like theres a whole culture around this that nobody really explains to new hams

honestly if it works dont fix it lol but i get the annoyance. i just ziptied mine to the side of the center console which looks terrible but its been there for two years and hasnt moved. arizona heat is no joke though id probably do what the other guy said and keep the main unit out of direct sun at least

congrats on the first one, 44 in a single outing on QRP is solid especially on a weekday. to answer your logging question -- it depends a bit on where you are but for most US activators you'd go through the WWFF-USA program which feeds into the global database, same general idea as how national programs plug into the worldwide system. the hunters side works pretty similarly to what you're used to with POTA, they upload their logs and the system does the matching, no special action needed from them beyond that. the new reference question is a good one. you generally cant just activate somewhere and have it count if its not already in the database, but submitting a new reference for consideration isnt that hard. you fill out a reference application with the details of the protected area -- official designation, coordinates, that kind of thing -- and the national coordinator reviews it. can take a little while but if it's a legitimate protected nature area it usually gets approved. i'd reach out to the WWFF-USA coordinator directly, they're pretty responsive in my experience.

did you try just shorting the input to your audio amp stage and seeing if the hum is still there? if it goes away with the input shorted then its coming from upstream somewhere, if it stays its in your audio amp itself. thats usually the first thing i do when chasing hum in a homebrew build, saves a lot of time compared to just poking around randomly

so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and honestly ive been doing mostly VHF/UHF stuff with my handheld and the local repeaters but i keep hearing people talk about HF and working DX and all that and it sounds pretty cool. my buddy at the club said i should just go ahead and take the General exam but i honestly have no idea what to expect or how different it is from the Tech exam. like the Tech exam wasnt too bad, i used hamstudy.org and just drilled the question pool for a few weeks and passed no problem. is General the same kind of thing or is there actually stuff i need to really understand to pass? some of the topics i saw mentioned like propagation and operating procedures on HF seem kinda involved. also is there anything specific that trips people up the most? dont want to waste a trip to the testing session if im not ready

So I just passed my technician exam last week and now im trying to figure out what handheld to buy. Everyone keeps saying different things and im kinda lost. My local club guys are split between baofeng and yaesu and one guy wouldnt stop talking about the kenwood he bought in like 1998 which, okay cool but that doesnt really help me. I mostly want something I can use on the local repeaters, maybe do some APRS eventually, and just have something to carry around. Budget is probably around $50-100 but I could stretch a little if it actually makes sense. I've seen the UV-5R everywhere and the price is obviously hard to argue with but some people seem really down on them. Also looked at the Yaesu FT-60 which seems more solid but its getting a little old right? There's also the BF-F8HP which I think is just a beefed up baofeng. Anyway just looking for what people actually use day to day and whether the cheap chinese radios are really that bad or if its more radio snobbery.

yeah what he said about the ALC is really the main thing. i spent like two months fighting audio issues and it turned out i was running my mic gain way too hot and the ALC was doing all this weird pumping that made me sound distorted. once i backed it off so the ALC was barely moving things got way cleaner even without touching eq at all. also — and this sounds dumb but — how far from the mic are you? i used to almost eat the thing and it made the low end super boomy. most dynamic mics like the pr-40 have proximity effect so a few inches back can make a big difference