David Brown

yeah i do basically exactly what you're describing, N1MM for contests, Log4OM for everything else. the ADIF sync thing is annoying but what i settled on is just doing a manual import after each contest into Log4OM, takes like two minutes and honestly i dont trust any kind of live sync anyway, too many ways for dupes to sneak in for the WSJT-X situation i just have it log to Log4OM via the UDP broadcast and keep N1MM completely out of the loop during FT8 sessions unless im actually in a contest that has a digital component. the trick is making sure you only have one program listening on 2237 at a time, windows doesnt always throw a useful error when there's a conflict it just silently drops packets which drove me crazy for like two weeks before i figured it out. netstat -ano in a cmd window is your friend there, shows you exactly what's sitting on what port

so ive been putting together a go-kit for the county ARES group and we have a drill this weekend and im trying to figure out the power situation once and for all. right now i have a 100ah lifepo4 and a honda eu2200i but hauling both seems like overkill for a 6-8 hour activation especially if were not running anything high power. the antenna side is sorted i think - got a buddipole and a 40m EFHW on a 31ft jackite pole depending on what band conditions are doing. the EFHW has been way more reliable for me honestly, the buddipole is fussier than i expected especially trying to get it resonant quick during an exercise when everyones watching you fumble with it. but back to power - if im running an IC-7300 mostly on 20-30w for voice and some JS8call, is the 100ah battery enough for the day without the genny? i dont want to show up and have the TO mark me down for a dead radio at hour 5. also curious what other people are running for field comms setups in general, always looking to see what works for real not just what looks good on paper

yeah what he said about check ins is right. i remember being super nervous my first few times on a net, kept second guessing myself on when to jump in. honestly just listen for a full net cycle or two before you check in the first time and you'll get the rhythm of it pretty quick. every net is a little different too so dont stress if you do it slightly wrong, net control will usually just give you a gentle redirect and move on, nobody's gonna make you feel bad about it. the special event stations are fun btw, i chased one last fall for some lighthouse event and ended up with a really nice certificate mailed to me about 6 weeks later. totally worth it if youre into collecting that kind of thing

congrats on getting the 4 contacts and qualifying, that's what matters for the first one. i remember my first activation i was so nervous i forgot to write down two of my callsigns properly and had to submit the log with gaps which was embarassing. on the 20m question -- yeah at 2pm local that probably would have been worth trying, especially if you're in the southeast. 40m can be kind of dead in the afternoon on shorter paths, it really depends on where your chasers are. if you're trying to work the regular SOTA chasers most of them are on 14.285 or near there hunting around. that said 40m late afternoon into evening is fantastic for regional contacts so timing matters a lot. alerting on SOTAwatch the night before makes such a huge difference, you'll have people literally waiting for you when you hit the summit. i usually try to post an alert with a realistic activation time and then if im early or late i update it from the trail. the app works pretty well for that. once you get a few under your belt and the regulars start recognizing your callsign you'll be surprised how fast the pileup builds.

ive had the same rocky ground problem with my spiderpole setup. what helped me was just adding a few radials thrown on the ground, even 3 or 4 of them made a noticeable difference on 40 and 80. doesnt have to be perfect, just get some wire out there. and for what its worth 31ft center is fine for a linked dipole, i wouldnt mess with that unless your haul lengths are way too short for the bands you want to work.

yeah what he said. i was SO nervous my first check in i forgot my own callsign halfway through, had to start over. net control just laughed and said welcome. these guys do it every week they've seen everything, dont stress it

yeah the single yagi EME thing is totally doable on JT65B, people have been doing it for years, the mode really opened the door for smaller stations. that said theres a pretty noticeable jump going from 1 to 2 yagis, youre looking at roughly 3dB more gain plus you can start playing with the phasing harness to get some polarization flexibility which matters more than people think for EME because of Faraday rotation the preamp question is a big one. if your SSB Electronics unit is original vintage and hasnt been recapped or touched, the noise figure might have drifted a bit, those things were fine for their era but a modern unit like the Kuhne or even a well built homebrew LNA with a good GaAs FET can get you down to 0.3-0.4dB NF which makes a real difference when youre fishing signals out of the noise floor. the key is getting the preamp as close to the feedpoint as physically possible, every foot of coax between the antenna and the LNA is eating into your system noise figure also make sure youre checking the online EME chat on ON4KST, thats where most of the activity coordination happens now, nobody just calls blind anymore on 144.120 unless its a big contest period

the RPM whine is almost certainly alternator noise and yeah it's super common. first thing i'd try before buying anything is just moving the power leads away from other wiring if you can, sometimes that alone kills most of it. if not, a noise filter inline on the power feed helps a lot, the ones from West Mountain Radio or even the cheap ones off amazon work fine for this. some people also put a ferrite choke on the coax near the radio end and that can help if it's coming in through the antenna side. for the antenna, if you want something that'll stick around on the highway i'd look at a lip mount or a through-hole NMO mount. mag mounts are fine for getting started but they really do slide, especially on a smooth roof. i've been running an NMO mount through the rain gutter channel on my old silverado for years and it hasn't budged. Diamond makes some good dual band whips that aren't too long and handle highway speeds fine. the NR770HB is what i've got and it works great.

yeah the wire gauge thing depends a lot on how you've got the ends supported. i ran 18 gauge for a while on a 40m dipole and it held up for almost two years before one of the ends finally gave out in a bad ice storm. 14 is definitely better. some guys use harder drawn copper wire instead of stranded for the extra tensile strength, worth looking into if youre in an area that gets ice loading. what feedline length are you running? sometimes a weird swr reading is the feedline length doing something funky, especially with RG-8X and no balun. not saying thats your problem but its worth ruling out.

the IC-9700 is actually a pretty solid starting point for this, the IF output thing people do with it for coherent EME stuff is interesting but thats way down the road. just run it stock for now. one thing nobody mentioned yet is the antenna pointing — do you have a way to actually track the moon? like az/el rotators and some kind of tracking software. thats kind of a whole other rabbit hole but you cant really do EME if your antenna is just sitting there fixed. i use a cheap azimuth rotor and a homemade elevation setup and it works fine, nothing fancy required. there's free software like PstRotator or even just doing it manually if you're patient enough but you need something

JS8Call really does scratch a different itch than FT8. the way i think about it — FT8 is for when you want to work someone, JS8Call is for when you want to talk to someone. sounds obvious but it took me a while to actually feel that difference operationally i use JS8Call mostly on 40m in the evenings for a loose group of guys we have, kind of a rolling informal net. the store-and-forward relay stuff is genuinely clever if you have nodes set up. weak signal performance is still really good, maybe not quite FT8 level but close enough that it doesnt matter most of the time PSK31 is not dead but its definitely slower pace than it used to be. i still pull it up maybe once a week and can usually find someone on 14.070 or close. theres something satisfying about watching the waterfall and seeing those little carrier lines RTTY for contesting is its own thing entirely, the speeds involved and the whole feel of it is just different. CQWW RTTY is worth getting on for just to experience it once honestly. your G90 will handle all of this fine, the mode really doesnt care about the radio much as long as youre getting audio in and out cleanly

yeah Telnet is just internet, has nothing to do with RF. so that working perfectly is kind of expected and doesnt tell you much about your radio path. the fact that it drops mid-handshake with VARA HF sounds like an audio level issue to me almost every time ive seen that symptom. VARA is pretty sensitive to overdriven audio — if your SignaLink drive knob is even a little hot it'll corrupt the VARA tones and the RMS on the other end will time out or just boot you. what i'd do first is pull up the VARA modem window and watch the ALC indicator while youre transmitting. it should not be pinned. a lot of guys coming from SSB voice will have the drive cranked way up and VARA hates that. try dropping your SignaLink TX knob down a good bit and see if sessions stay connected longer. also make sure VOX delay isnt cutting the tail of your transmissions off, thats another classic one with SignaLink setups.

yeah speech processor being off is probably fine for now tbh, i ran mine off for about a year when i started and it really helped me learn what clean audio sounds like before i started messing with compression. once you add processing on top of bad fundamentals you just get a consistently bad sound instead of a variable bad sound lol one thing that helped me a lot was actually recording myself — just plug a cheap usb audio interface into the radio acc port and record a few seconds of yourself talking, then play it back. its kind of embarrassing at first but you hear exactly what other people hear. changed everything for me when i realized i was way too close to the mic and getting a ton of proximity effect buildup in the lows

the general pool isnt that much harder honestly, just more of it. the electrical theory stuff trips a lot of people up but you dont need to actually understand ohms law deeply, just recognize which formula goes with which question if that makes sense. hamstudy does a good job of drilling that in if you do enough practice tests. propagation section is worth spending time on because that stuff actually matters when youre trying to figure out why 20m is dead at noon but 40m is working. and honestly knowing it helps you operate not just pass the test. as for transmitting after you pass -- as soon as the VE session is over and they submit your paperwork, you can actually operate with your new privileges even before the FCC database updates. your cert of successful completion or whatever the VEs give you is enough. your callsign stays the same by the way, same call just now with the General class attached to it in the database. you dont get a new one unless you apply for a vanity call.

yeah this hits close to home, we did something similar through our county ARES group about two years ago and the dead battery thing is SO common it's almost a running joke at this point except it really isn't funny when you think about why we're doing this. our EC basically instituted a rule after that drill where everyone has to do a comms check including battery verification before any activation, even for routine stuff, just to build the habit. the ICS forms handoff problem you mentioned is a real one. we found that having a laminated quick reference card specifically for the message log format helped a lot for operators who don't use it regularly. muscle memory stuff. also we started doing 15-minute mini drills, like just net control handoffs, not a full exercise, just practice the one thing that keeps failing. that helped more than I expected honestly. the big multi-hour sims are important but sometimes drilling the one weak link is more efficient. one thing nobody talks about enough in these exercises is the mental load on net control when traffic volume spikes. we simulated that by having a bunch of people all try to check in at once and our NC just kinda froze for a second. not a criticism of him, it just revealed something we hadn't thought about training for.