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

i had the exact same debate with myself a while back. ended up just keeping both installed and it honestly doesnt cause any problems. Log4OM is my main log, everything lives there. N1MM comes out a few times a year when i do a real contest and then goes back in the drawer so to speak. the import process between them is pretty painless, adif is adif mostly, sometimes a field doesnt map perfectly but nothing major. one thing i'll say is if you ever get more serious about contesting even just casually, learning N1MM before you actually need it in the middle of a contest is smart. i tried to figure it out during a sweepstakes once and that was not a great experience

i did my first EME contact about two years ago with honestly a pretty modest setup, 4x11el DK7ZB yagis and 750w out of an old Dressler amplifier i got cheap. elevation rotor was the part i almost forgot about - dont forget you need both az and el, moon goes up and down and you'll miss the whole window if you cant track elevation. seems obvious but i didnt really think through the rotor situation until late in the build and had to scramble. Q65-60A is what most people run now i think, maybe more forgiving than JT65B in some conditions. worked a dozen or so initials the first year just on weekends when the moon was up for both me and the other station. its genuinely one of the most satisfying things ive done in this hobby, knowing your signal went a quarter million miles each way is just wild

yeah dont bother with the dot dash charts, thats honestly the worst way to learn and youll end up having to unlearn it later. the thing you want is to hear the characters as sounds not think of them as patterns on paper. the Koch method is basically where you start with just 2 characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you practice until you can copy them reliably before adding another character. it sounds counterintuitive to practice fast when youre a beginner but it forces your brain to recognize the sound instead of counting dots and dashes. for resources, LCWO.net is free and specifically built around the Koch method, its a little clunky looking but it works really well. theres also a thing called Morse Mania if you have a phone. the key is consistency, even 15 minutes every single day beats doing an hour once a week by a lot. i think it took me maybe 3 or 4 months of daily practice to get comfortable enough to make actual QSOs on the air and those first contacts are pretty rewarding even if youre slow

the blowing everyone out of the passband thing is classic too-much-power problem. with linear transponders you really do want to run the absolute minimum you can get away with, like seriously back off until you can just barely hear yourself and thats probably about right. 5 watts on a yagi might actually be too much depending on your antenna gain and the satellite's AGC behavior. AO-73 in particular is pretty sensitive. on the doppler question -- for a linear transponder the way i think about it is the downlink is your reference. you tune your downlink so you can hear yourself (or hear the passband clearly) and then correct the uplink to put yourself where you want to be in the passband. in practice what that means is you tune downlink for doppler all the time as it changes, and you tune uplink to find your signal. once you hear yourself, you mostly leave uplink alone unless you're drifting out of the passband, and keep chasing the downlink frequency as the bird moves. gpredict can actually drive your radio directly via hamlib if you want to try that, makes the doppler chase way less frantic during a short pass.

im pretty new to all this emcomm stuff, just got my general last spring and joined our local ARES group a few months ago. reading this is kind of intimidating honestly but also good to know that even experienced operators run into problems. i went through the ICS 100 and 200 online courses like they recommended but havent been to an actual exercise yet. is it pretty overwhelming the first time or is there usually someone kind of guiding you through it?

so ive had this thing for about three weeks now and figured id post something since i spent forever reading other peoples impressions before buying. coming from an old ft-857d that i was using as a base which... yeah i know, not ideal but it worked. the waterfall alone was worth it honestly. i know everyone says that and it sounds like marketing speak but when youre actually sitting there tuning around 40m at night and you can just see whats going on across the whole band its genuinely different. found a couple dx stations i would have completely scrolled past before. main thing i wasnt expecting was how much i had to mess with the settings out of the box. the default TX audio profile did not sound great on my voice, had to spend a couple evenings tweaking the parametric eq and the bass/treble to get reports that werent just 'you sound a bit muffled'. not a complaint really just wasnt expecting it to need that much work upfront. RF direct sampling is interesting, still trying to fully wrap my head around what that means practically vs what i had before. receiver sensitivity seems noticeably better on 17 and 12 meters compared to the 857 but im not sure how much of that is the radio vs my antenna situation changed slightly when i remounted stuff last month. anyway if anyones on the fence and been running something older, it feels like a real upgrade. not groundbreaking in any single area but the whole package is just... cleaner. shack looks tidier too which my wife appreciated

i went from an FT-991A to the 7300 about two years ago and honestly the waterfall spoiled me within like the first week. cant imagine going back to hunting by ear now. the JA on 17m thing is exactly the kind of moment that makes you realize how much you were missing. one thing — check your noise blanker settings if you havent already. out of the box mine was set kind of aggressively and it was doing weird things on 40m near some local powerline noise. once i dialed that back the audio cleaned up quite a bit and i dont know if thats related to what you're hearing but it might be worth checking.

Just upgraded to General last month and I'm confused about 40 meters. My radio can tune 7.000-7.300 MHz but I keep seeing different info about where I can actually transmit phone vs CW/data. Can someone break down the exact frequency segments for General class on 40m? I want to make sure I'm operating legally and not stepping on anyone's toes.

totally get the confusion, i went through the same thing when i started. so the short version is that LoTW is basically the gold standard if you care about DXCC or other ARRL awards because those only accept LoTW confirmations now, eQSL has its own award system but it's separate and not universally accepted for the big ones. the certificate setup for LoTW is a bit of a pain the first time but honestly once you get your TQSL configured and your certificate sorted it's pretty much just drag and drop your ADIF log file and you're done. worth doing sooner rather than later because your log credits go back to your first QSO once you're set up. for the bureau — yeah it goes through ARRL for US hams, you basically get a small box of incoming paper cards from other countries once or twice a year depending on how active your section is. outgoing bureau means you send your paper cards to a sorting address and they route them to the right country's bureau. it's slow, like months or even over a year sometimes, but its basically free compared to sending direct. for rare dx stations that require a paper card for some awards or just for the wall, direct mail with a self addressed envelope and a couple bucks or a few IRCs used to be the way, though honestly a lot of dx stations now accept LoTW or have a manager who does i'd say get LoTW set up first since that's where the awards credits live, keep running eQSL because a lot of casual operators use it and it doesnt hurt, and do paper cards for the ones that matter to you personally. some people love the physical card, some people dont bother at all anymore

what he said about the sidebands is the thing that got me when i first started. i was sitting right on 7.300 thinking i was fine and somebody pointed out my upper sideband was spilling over. kind of embarassing honestly. now i just never go above 7.297 or so and dont even think about it anymore