Daniel Garcia

been thinking about doing the same thing, mostly cause i do some MARS work and it'd be handy. my only hesitation is i really dont want to void anything or mess up the receive performance. does the mod affect RX at all or is it purely on the TX side? i know its just a diode but im always a little paranoid about unintended consequences when i start messing with stuff i didnt design

so ive been doing single op contests for a few years now and im starting to hit a ceiling on my rates. i can get into the low 100s per hour during a good run but it feels like i plateau pretty fast once the initial pileup dies down. a buddy of mine keeps telling me SO2R is the answer but honestly every time i look into it i get kind of overwhelmed by the station complexity. right now im running a k3 into a 2el yagi on 20 and a dipole on 40, pretty modest setup. the idea of adding a second radio and dealing with RFI between the two rigs just sounds like a whole weekend of troubleshooting waiting to happen. is there a sane way to ease into SO2R without completely rebuilding everything? or is it really more about operating technique than the hardware at this point. also just curious — for guys who do it well, how much of your rate improvement came from SO2R vs just getting better at running a frequency and not wasting time between QSOs. because i sometimes wonder if my real problem is i let too much dead air happen between contacts and im blaming my setup instead of my technique

so i've been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now, my neighbor is really into it and he finally convinced me to just go ahead and get the license. i signed up for an exam session thats about 6 weeks away and now im kind of panicking because i dont really know how to study for this thing. i downloaded the question pool PDF from the ARRL website but its like 400+ questions and honestly it feels overwhelming. do people actually memorize all of them or is there a smarter way to do it? i've seen some apps mentioned on reddit but idk which ones are actually worth using vs just wasting time. also some of the electrical stuff like ohms law and the decibel questions are tripping me up, im not super technical. is that stuff going to be a big chunk of the actual exam or can i kind of get by without fully understanding it

nets can be a little confusing at first honestly. most of them the net control will specifically ask for check-ins and thats your window to give your call, usually just once clearly. if the net is busy they might do it by region or by first letter of your suffix. once youre checked in yeah you can generally just say youre clear and drop off unless its a traffic net where they actually pass messages, in which case they might have traffic for you or ask if youre handling any. for the special event station thing — some do certificates and some dont, really depends on the sponsoring club. usually theres a QSL card at minimum and a lot of them have a website listed on the QRZ page for that callsign where itll explain what you get. worth looking up the call on QRZ before you make the contact so you know what to expect. they operate just like any other station, nothing weird about the contact itself.

yeah same here, though i caught a pretty decent opening last thursday around 0200 utc and worked a few stations down in south america which was nice. think the solar flux has been kinda mediocre this week. 20m has been treating me better honestly, might be worth giving that a shot if you havent already

so ive been licensed about eight months now and this whole QSL confirmation thing is starting to feel like a part time job. like i log a contact, then i have to figure out if i want to send a physical card, upload to LoTW, submit to eQSL, or some combination of all three. my elmer keeps telling me just to use LoTW for everything but half the DX stations i work dont seem to confirm there, at least not quickly, and then i hear some awards require physical cards anyway? i guess my question is does anyone actually maintain all three or do you just pick one and accept that youll miss out on some confirmations. also whats the deal with the LoTW certificate setup — i did it when i first got licensed and it was kind of a pain, now i cant remember if i need to do anything to renew it or if it just keeps working. been uploading my adif logs every few weeks and the confirmations do trickle in so i think its working fine but not 100% sure. also do people still actually mail physical cards? feels old fashioned but i kind of love the idea of having a wall of cards someday

So ive been trying to figure out where to permanently mount my FTM-400DR in my 2019 Tacoma and honestly its a bigger headache than I expected. The head unit separation cable is nice but the display unit is pretty chunky and everywhere I try to put it either blocks my HVAC controls or sits too low to see without looking away from the road too long. Right now I have it kind of propped up near the cupholder area which is obviously not a real solution. Been looking at RAM mounts but not sure what I actually need to order, there are like a thousand options on their site. Anyone done this specific truck or something similar? Also running a Diamond NR770HBNMO on the roof and coax routing through the cab has been fine so at least thats sorted. Oh and if anyone has thoughts on running the control head up near the rearview mirror area id be curious — saw someone do that on a jeep forum but not sure if itd work here. Mostly doing local repeater stuff and some APRS so I dont need to be fiddling with it constantly but still want it visible.

i went through the vanity process about two years ago and it really wasnt as bad as i expected honestly. the FCC's ULS system is a bit clunky but once you find the application section its pretty straightforward. just make sure the call you want actually shows as available before you go through the whole thing, theres a few sites that let you look up callsign status so you're not flying blind. one thing i'll add -- if multiple people apply for the same call in that window they do a kind of lottery among the eligible applicants so its not first come first served exactly. caught me off guard when i learned that. good luck with it though, getting a call that means something is pretty cool

so i finally did my first activation last weekend up on W4T/SU-001 and honestly it went way smoother than i expected. took my FT-818 and a linked dipole up there and made my 4 contacts no problem, even had a couple guys call me from pretty far out which was cool. the whole thing only took maybe 45 minutes once i got set up which surprised me. my question is about logging the activation on sotadata — i entered everything i thought was right but im not sure if i did the activation zone thing correctly. the summit page shows a specific grid and i just used that but one of the guys who chased me said something about being in the activation zone versus the actual summit and i got a little confused. also does it matter what mode you log it as if you switch between SSB and CW during the same activation? i did a few contacts on each and wasnt sure if i needed to split the log or anything. also for the chasers out there — do you guys actually prefer when activators post an alert ahead of time or is it fine to just self spot on the reflector and hope someone sees it? i used SOTAwatch and spotted myself but only after i was already set up, wasnt sure if that was the right move or not.

yeah the UDP thing for WSJT-X is actually not that bad once you find the right setting, its under reporting in the WSJT-X menu. just make sure Log4OM or whatever you're using is running first before you start a session or sometimes it misses the first few QSOs in my experience. i had a weird thing happen where dupes werent getting flagged correctly but i think that was a config issue on my end not the software itself

yeah the listening thing is huge and i think its the part that took me the longest to really internalize. when i was newer i thought more power was the answer to everything and i spent way too much money chasing that before i figured out that operating skill is probably 60% of the battle in a serious pileup. one thing i'd add for the LP/wire crowd -- and im in that camp, running 100w into an EFHW most of the time -- is that timing and brevity are everything. like if everyone else is sending their full callsign every time, try just sending the last two letters a couple times and see what happens. expedition operators who are working fast often respond to partial calls anyway and then you give the full thing when they come back with a partial. saves time in the pileup and honestly gets attention because your signal isnt buried under 30 other stations all sending at the same time. also 17m and 12m are criminally underused during a DXpedition when 20m is a zoo. ive had 5-minute pileups on 17m when 20m was completely impenetrable. dont sleep on the WARC bands during expeditions

oh man dont feel too bad about that, it happens to literally everyone especially on 40m where the skip can be really weird. the guy who snapped at you probably should have been a bit more understanding honestly — if you cant hear someone you cant hear them, thats just radio. the standard thing you did was correct, ask if the frequency is in use, wait a few seconds, then proceed. some people will also say their callsign when they ask so anyone monitoring knows who's asking. beyond that you just cant do much if propagation isnt cooperating. what i usually do now if i get no response but the band sounds a bit busy is move up or down 5 kHz just to give myself a little more breathing room, not a perfect solution but it helps. and yeah definitely get on that local net, nets are actually great for learning this stuff because there's a net control who basically guides everything so it takes a lot of the pressure off. much more forgiving than random HF operating for a new person.

path loss on EME at 144 mhz is something like 252 dB which sounds insane and it kind of is. the thing that gets people is they calculate link budgets on paper and then get frustrated when reality doesnt match, usually because they didnt account for antenna noise temp or their coax loss is eating them alive i went through three different preamp setups before i got something i was happy with. ended up with a MGF1302 based unit mounted right at the boom and dropped my system noise temp considerably. your 150w and 4el is probably borderline for terrestrial meteor scatter contacts let alone EME but dont let that stop you from getting on and listening, thats how you learn what the signals actually sound like and youll know when its worth upgrading

So after about three weeks of fiddling around i finally got my FT-7900R mounted in the car and mostly happy with how it sits. Running it off a proper fused line direct to the battery which made a huge difference over the cigarette lighter thing i was doing before, way less noise on receive. Anyway my main question is about the antenna. Right now i have a mag mount NMO dual band whip stuck on the roof toward the back and it works fine but ive been reading about doing a proper hole mount through the roof or maybe the trunk lip and im not sure if its worth the effort. Like is the performance difference actually noticeable day to day or is it more of a theoretical thing? I mostly use it for hitting the local repeaters and occasionally some simplex when im out hiking with buddies who have HTs. Also not sure if it matters but its a 2016 honda civic so not the biggest roof in the world. Anyone done a proper mount on a smaller car?

the 7300 and 891 pairing is going to be rough for SO2R just because of the IF architecture on the 7300 — it's not terrible but you'd want to be really careful about harmonic relationships between your two operating frequencies. had a buddy try something similar and spent half a contest chasing a birdie that turned out to be his own second radio. one thing that helped me a lot before i got serious about SO2R was just working on running vs searching discipline like the other guy said, and also logging speed honestly. if youre fumbling with the keyboard during an exchange that's eating into your rate more than you think. what logging software are you on? some of them have really good SO2R support built in now which lowers the bar a bit but you still need the hardware side sorted out.