Emily Zhang

this is really helpful actually, im fairly new to chasing DX seriously and pileups still kind of intimidate me. i never know when to transmit or if im even in the right part of the band. does the DX station usually announce the split range or do you just have to figure it out by listening around? i feel like half the time i cant even find where theyre listening

been looking at the remotehams setup for accessing my station when im traveling for work. the monthly fee seems reasonable but wondering if anyone here has actually used it long term. how's the latency for things like ft8 and js8? i travel alot for my day job and hate missing good propagation when im stuck in hotel rooms. right now i just run a raspberry pi with wsjtx but obviously cant access my beam and amplifier remotely. thinking the sdr approach might be better but dont want to pay monthly if its not really usable for weak signal work.

yeah the doppler thing clicks eventually but it takes a few passes to get the feel for it. the key thing people dont tell you upfront is that on a linear transponder bird like AO-73 you actually adjust the downlink to find yourself, not the uplink. so you park your uplink frequency somewhere reasonable and then tune the downlink until you hear your own signal, then you lock onto that and just keep tweaking as the pass goes on. the doppler shift is roughly 3.4 kHz total swing on 2m over a full pass so its not instant death, you have a little time.
gpredict can do CAT control if your FT-847 is hooked up via serial or USB adapter and then it handles the correction automatically, which is honestly the way to go once you get the cables sorted. but even without that, just knowing to chase the downlink and leave the uplink mostly alone makes a huge difference. the 47 degree pass should have been plenty workable so sounds like you were close.

so ive been at this for about three weeks now and i finally got a cheap set of paddles off ebay and a MFJ keyer to go with my old 706. the problem is no matter what i do the dits and dahs just kind of run together and it sounds terrible on playback when i record myself on audacity. ive messed with the weight setting a bunch and tried different speeds from like 12 wpm all the way down to 8 wpm but it still just sounds off to me.
i watched a bunch of videos on paddle technique and i think my squeezing might be the issue? like im not sure if im supposed to use squeeze keying from the start or just stick to single paddle mode until i get the feel for it. also the paddles i got have a really stiff spring tension and i cant figure out if i should loosen it way up or leave it kind of firm. any of you guys remember going through this phase and what actually helped you get past it

yep you got it right, that 100.0 is the CTCSS tone you need. on a baofeng its buried in the menu, i think its menu item 13 or somewhere around there depending on which model you have — its labeled T-CTCS or something like that. set that to 100.0 and youll open the repeater right up. the receive tone (R-CTCS) you can usually leave off unless the repeater is in a noisy area and you want to squelch out other stuff, but most people dont bother with that part.
as for breaking in, the polite way is to just wait for a pause between transmissions and say your callsign. dont say break break unless its an emergency, that freaks people out. just your call is totally fine. most folks on a repeater are pretty welcoming to new hams, dont stress about it too much.

so i was just messing around last weekend and 10 meters was absolutely packed with FT8, like i havent seen it this busy in probably 15 years. worked a bunch of south american stations and even a couple contacts into europe which i wasnt expecting at all given it was like 2pm local time here in the midwest. solar flux was sitting up around 190-something which is pretty wild compared to where we were a couple years ago. feels like we're really hitting the stride of solar cycle 25 now and honestly it's gotten me back into HF in a big way after spending most of last year just doing local VHF stuff.
also saw some chatter that Icom might be announcing something at the tokyo hamfair this year, anybody hear anything concrete about that? im not usually one to chase rumors but there's been enough smoke that im starting to wonder. my IC-7300 is fine but you know how it is, always curious what's coming next.

yeah what he said. also some nets have a specific website or facebook group where they post the net format, might be worth checking if your local club has one. i checked into my first net super nervous and all net control said was "copy, welcome" and moved on. totally anticlimactic in the best way lol. also theres special event stations and on-air events sometimes that are even more forgiving because theres so much activity going on nobody cares if you stumble a bit. those are actually great practice if you ever see one advertised.

the linked dipole vs EFHW thing really depends on what bands you care about. i used an EFHW for years and finally switched to a home brew linked dipole for sota and honestly the deployement time isnt that much worse once you practice it a few times. the efficiency difference is real though, especially on 40m where the EFHW is already kind of compromised depending on your counterpoise situation.
one thing i'll throw out there - have you looked at the elecraft AX1 or the various hamstick dipole type setups? for true strap-on-your-back portability those are hard to beat even if theyre not as efficient. depends what youre optimizing for i guess. if its emcomm and you need reliable contacts over efficiency, antenna height and location matters way more than a few db of antenna gain anyway

yeah the doppler thing clicks eventually but it takes a few passes to get the feel for it. the key thing people dont tell you upfront is that on a linear transponder bird like AO-73 you actually adjust the downlink to find yourself, not the uplink. so you park your uplink frequency somewhere reasonable and then tune the downlink until you hear your own signal, then you lock onto that and just keep tweaking as the pass goes on. the doppler shift is roughly 3.4 kHz total swing on 2m over a full pass so its not instant death, you have a little time.
gpredict can do CAT control if your FT-847 is hooked up via serial or USB adapter and then it handles the correction automatically, which is honestly the way to go once you get the cables sorted. but even without that, just knowing to chase the downlink and leave the uplink mostly alone makes a huge difference. the 47 degree pass should have been plenty workable so sounds like you were close.

Yeah i learned this the hard way when some guy kept copying my call wrong because i have both F and S in it and they sound similar with static. Now i always use foxtrot and sierra for those letters at least. Some of the old timers on 40m use different phonetics though like nancy instead of november which throws me off