Daniel Garcia

so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and also just reading posts on here and everyone just throws around QRM and QSB and QTH and honestly i dont even know half of them. i know QSL means like confirmed or acknowledged or something and QTH is your location but thats about it. is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just kind of pick them up over time. also some guys on the repeater were talking about QSY and i had to google it after. feels like learning a whole other language on top of everything else

totally normal to be confused by this, took me a while to sort it out too. the ones you'll hear constantly on phone are probably QRM which is interference from other stations, QSB which is when your signal is fading up and down, and QTH which just means your location. QSL means confirmed or acknowledged basically, you'll hear people say "QSL that" meaning they understood you. QRN is natural static like from thunderstorms, different from QRM which is other stations causing trouble. on CW people use them way more because you can just send a couple characters instead of a whole phrase, but plenty of phone operators still throw them around out of habit. the OM thing just means old man, it's just how hams refer to each other, like a friendly way to address another guy. YL is young lady if you're talking to a woman operator. 73 you already know, 88 means love and kisses which is usually only sent to YLs. honestly after a few months of operating you just kind of absorb the common ones without even trying.

i went through this exact same thing last year, ended up with a 4x11el array and the G-5500 and honestly the backlash thing is real but manageable if you set up the software offsets right. first EME contact was with a big gun in Japan and i literally sat there for like 20 minutes not believing it worked. one thing nobody told me upfront is how much the feedline matters, like way more than i expected. i went from LMR400 to hardline on the run from the preamp to the radio and picked up maybe 0.3dB which doesnt sound like much but at these signal levels it kinda is. the preamp needs to be at the mast, not at the radio, thats just non negotiable. also the ON4KST chat that the other guy mentioned is essential, thats where you set up skeds with stations who will specifically point at you and call you, which as a small station is kind of how you get your first contacts. random EME with your setup is probably not realistic but sked-based stuff absolutely is

so i heard the Tri-County fest is back this year after they cancelled it the last two years, supposed to be at the fairgrounds again on the 18th. havent been since like 2019 and i remember they had a pretty decent flea market section last time, picked up an old Kenwood HF rig for almost nothing. curious if anyones planning to go or if the turnout has been getting worse like a lot of these smaller regional fests seem to be lately

yeah DXwatch and the QRZ spot data are basically pulling from the same DX cluster network (things like DX Spider nodes etc), so youre not really missing anything by using one over the other most of the time. QRZ just embeds spot info into the callsign lookup page which is handy if you're already looking someone up. what i'd suggest honestly is just pick one and stick with it for a while until you get a feel for the flow. DXwatch has decent filtering — you can set your continent and the bands you care about and it cuts down the noise a lot. for android i've been using DX Toolbox for a while and its pretty solid, lets you filter by band and mode and shows a little propagation summary alongside spots which is nice when youre trying to figure out if 17m is even going to work right now. there are fancier setups people run with actual logging software connected live to a cluster feed but thats probably overkill for where you're at right now, nothing wrong with tabs and refreshing while youre learning what youre looking at.