James Thompson

so ive been meaning to put together a proper go-kit for probably two years now and i finally just sat down last weekend and did it. threw everything into a pelican 1510 and figured id share what i ended up with and maybe get some feedback because im honestly not sure i thought of everything. i went with my FT-891 as the main radio since it covers HF and i figured that was more useful than just a handheld for actual emergency ops. packed a SignaLink for digital modes because our county ARES group does a lot of Winlink traffic. got a small 20ah lithium battery from Bioenno, a 10m telescoping mast, and a 40/20m linked dipole that i can throw up pretty quick. charger, coax, a handful of adapters, logbook, pencils. i also threw in a cheap handheld as backup just in case. what i keep second-guessing myself on is the power situation. like is 20ah actually enough for a deployment that might go longer than a few hours? i was also trying to figure out if i should add a small solar panel to the kit or just keep it simple and pack a second battery. the whole thing already weighs more than i expected and im trying to keep it manageable enough that i could actually grab it and go without hurting myself. anyway curious what other peoples kits look like and whether im overthinking the power thing or not thinking about it enough

yeah the jump from RTL-SDR to RSPdx specifically is pretty significant on HF, not gonna lie. the noise floor difference alone made me go back and re-listen to some bands i thought were just dead on my end and suddenly there was stuff there. the direct sampling on the v3 dongle is clever but it really is a compromise, the RSP stuff has actual front end filtering which matters a lot if you're anywhere near urban RF noise. for ft8 on 2m the RTL-SDR is probably fine as long as your preamp situation is decent and you're not fighting a terrible noise floor from your computer USB. the weak signal improvement you'll notice more on HF than VHF honestly. if HF listening is your main thing then yeah i'd say its worth it, if you're mostly doing VHF stuff maybe put that money toward a better LNA or a filtered preamp first. one thing though — SDRplay's software, SDRuno, is actually pretty decent now. took them a while but it doesnt feel like abandonware anymore. still run it alongside HDSDR on occasion just out of habit.

had both at the same time for a few months actually. for receive-only the RSP1A wins pretty easily in my opinion. the 12-bit ADC makes a real difference for that dynamic range problem you're describing and it has proper hardware preselection filters which the HackRF just doesnt have. HackRF is 8-bit and it shows when you have strong signals nearby. the HackRF's big advantage is the transmit capability and the wide tuning range going up past 6GHz, but if you dont need TX then youre basically paying a premium for features you wont use. and yes the RSP1A works fine with SDR++, theres an official plugin in the source tree now, i think it got merged in late 2022 or early 2023. SDRuno is honestly not as bad as it looks in videos once you understand the workspace concept but i totally get preferring SDR++. i still use SDRuno sometimes for the spectrum analyzer features when im trying to find interference but day to day its SDR++ for me too.

Had almost the exact same symptom on my old 857D which shares a lot of the same innards. Ended up being a cold joint on the driver stage, not the PA itself — the visible ones looked okay but there was one hiding under a shield that was cracked just enough to act up under RF. What I'd do is get the service manual (if you dont already have it, eham or the usual places) and trace the drive signal with the scope while it's acting up. If you can see the drive collapsing before the PA output drops, you're looking upstream of the finals. also worth checking the 8v rail if memory serves — the 897 has a regulator that feeds the driver stage and those aren't immortal. might be worth just scoping the rails while you're keyed up and watching for any sag during the dropout. that would at least tell you if it's a power supply issue vs a component issue on the board itself.

the gateway selection thing confused me too when i first started. basically any gateway that shows a solid connection in your area should work, geographic proximity matters more on VHF/UHF but on HF you can hit gateways pretty far away. what you want to check is whether the session actually completed - Winlink Express logs everything and if the transfer finished you should see a "messages sent" confirmation in the session log window. if it just shows connected then dropped that's your problem. the message flow goes from your station to the RMS gateway node, that node then forwards to the CMS (common message server) which is basically the winlink backbone up in the cloud. so theres two hops basically. if the RMS-to-CMS link is flaky your message can get stuck. check the session log, its under the menu somewhere, look for any error codes. also make sure your clocks are synced because Winlink is picky about time skew and will reject sessions if your system clock is off by more than a minute or so.

the KX2 is such a great radio, good choice. for portable antennas honestly a lot of us just use an end fed half wave with a small 49:1 unun and they work really well, you can get the wire up in a tree and have a decent signal without needing much of a counterpoise or ground situation. i built mine for about fifteen bucks in parts and it tunes up on most bands no problem. the KX2s internal tuner can handle a decent amount of mismatch too so that helps. for JS8Call at QRP levels just be patient, the mode is pretty forgiving and 5 watts will get you surprisingly far if conditions are decent. i worked a station in Germany from my backyard in Ohio running 5w into a wire and it still kind of blows my mind. main thing is just make sure your audio levels going into whatever interface youre using are set right because if you overdrive it you lose efficiency fast and the signal gets messy. parks on the air is such a good time, what parks are you near?

oh also just to add — some references overlap with POTA parks so you can actually do a dual activation and submit to both programs at the same time with the same log. i did that last summer at a national wildlife refuge and it was great, knocked out both in one trip. just make sure you have the right reference numbers for each program logged correctly or the submission gets confusing

yeah i was confused about the same thing when i started. what helped me was just thinking of it as — would someone tuning in randomly be able to figure out who's talking within the last 10 minutes? if yes youre probably fine. ive heard old timers on HF go like 20 minutes into a contact before they ID again and nobody says anything but technically they should be IDing more. i dont stress about it too much on the repeater because net control usually handles most of it anyway

im pretty new to this, just got my general like four months ago, and i actually tried getting on 10m after reading this post and holy cow i was not expecting to hear so much. i only have a dipole in the attic so i figured id hear nothing but i actually pulled in a couple stations from what sounded like spain? didnt manage to complete a contact yet because i got nervous and fumbled my callsign haha but still exciting. what part of the band should i be listening on for DX, i was just kind of randomly tuning around 28.4 or so

this is something i've been trying to get better at. im still pretty new to chasing dx seriously and the pileup thing is intimidating. like i genuinely dont know how people figure out the split when the dx doesnt announce it clearly. do you just scan around and listen for where other people are bunched up calling? i feel like im missing something obvious

so the FCC part is actually pretty straightforward once you see it laid out. for 40m phone, generals get 7.225 to 7.300 MHz. that's it for voice. so 7.200 is actually not in your phone privileges as a general — that's the lower edge of the extra class phone segment. easy mistake to make because a lot of older charts floating around online still show the pre-2007 allocations which were different. as for band edges, the concern is basically that if you're running USB on 7.300 your signal's upper sideband components extend above that. so you could technically be putting energy outside the allocation even if your carrier is right at the edge. most people just give it a few kHz of breathing room. 7.295 or so and you're fine. same thing applies at the bottom of your segment, 7.225 — don't park your carrier right there. your radio won't stop you, which is kind of the whole point of actually knowing this stuff before you key up

honestly the ft-65 recommendation your club friend gave you is solid advice and i'd probably stop second guessing it. yaesu build quality is noticeably better than the baofengs and the receiver is way more selective which matters more than people think when you're near a city with lots of rf floating around. ive seen new hams get frustrated with cheap radios because they get desensed by pager towers and stuff and think something is wrong with the repeater. the aprs thing — dont worry about it for now. most people who buy aprs capable HTs use that feature maybe twice and forget about it. get on the air first and figure out what you actually want to do and then upgrade with some experience behind you. the ft-65 will do everything you described just fine and you wont feel like you wasted money on it when you eventually move up.

I ran into basically the same wall when I first got SO2R working. Honestly for SSB specifically I ended up just accepting that the run rebuilds and adjusting my expectations — if I can average 130/hr across a whole 48 hour contest I'm happy even if individual hours swing around a lot. chasing peak rate is kind of a trap imo because you start making bad decisions about when to move. one thing that helped me was keeping a sticky note next to the monitor with my target multiplier count by hour, so instead of randomly S&Ping on radio 2 whenever the run slowed down I had an actual goal. like if I was behind on mults I'd be more aggressive with radio 2 even at the cost of run rate, if i was ahead id just let radio 2 sit on a beacon or something and focus on running. kind of obvious in hindsight but it helped me stop second-guessing every band change

55 miles on 2m is doable but yeah its marginal without some real gain in that direction. i have a M2 2M5WL at about 35 feet and i can hit a repeater 70 miles away pretty reliably but thats a 5 wavelength yagi, its a beast. for your situation honestly a small 3 or 4 element yagi on a separate mast angled at that far repeater might be the cleanest solution. you keep the x50 for everyday stuff and just flip to the yagi when you want that far one. the coax switch thing works, just make sure whatever switch you buy is rated for UHF frequencies too if you ever want to use it on 70cm or you can get some surprises with insertion loss

yeah same thing happened to me when i first started paying attention to it. 15m was the band that kind of clicked it all into place. one thing i'll add is the VOACAP propagation predictor tool is worth messing around with — you put in your location, where you want to work, the time, and it gives you probabilities for each band. its not perfect but it helped me understand why certain bands open to certain parts of the world at specific times of day. like 20m to europe from the US northeast is almost always best in the morning hours, stuff like that. once you start connecting the theory to what you actually hear it gets pretty addictive