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.

dude same thing happened to me like two months ago. i was so nervous i forgot to give my callsign at the end of my first transmission and had to key back up and correct myself lol. the elmer who talked to me for a while ended up inviting me to their club meeting which was cool. definitely go if your local club does anything like that

hamstudy.org is legit, thats basically what everyone uses now. the question pool is public so any site that has it is pulling from the same source, but hamstudy has a really good adaptive quiz thing that figures out which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those. i passed my tech after about two weeks of doing maybe 20-30 minutes a day on there. the test itself is 35 questions and you need to get 26 right, so its not like you have to be perfect. to actually take the test you need to find a VE session near you, which stands for volunteer examiner. the ARRL website has a search tool for that, or you can look up your local ham radio club because most clubs run sessions pretty regularly. some of them moved online during covid and a bunch still offer remote testing which is convenient if theres nothing near you. you do have to pay a fee now, think its around 15 bucks to the FCC plus whatever the VE team charges, usually 15 or so. just check before you go. honestly dont overthink the electronics stuff, a lot of it is just memorizing answers and understanding enough to make sense of it. the regulations questions are probably more important to actually understand since those matter when youre on the air.

so we've got a county-wide ARES exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and i've been tasked with putting together the primary comms node at the EOC backup site which is basically a parking lot behind the old fire station. no shore power, no nothing. just whatever we bring. my current thinking is to run my IC-7300 for HF and a separate VHF/UHF station (probably just my 2m/70cm mobile rig pulled off the truck) and i need to keep both running for potentially 12-14 hours. i've done portable ops before but never this long without being able to plug in somewhere. the debate i'm having with myself is whether to drag out the honda eu2200i or just go heavy on LiFePO4 batteries. the generator is obviously more capability but it's also noise, fuel, and the exhaust situation is a little awkward in a parking lot depending on wind direction. last time i ran it at a public site somebody complained about the fumes even though i had it positioned reasonably well. for the antenna side i'm thinking a trapped vertical for HF since we'll probably need 40 and maybe 80 for regional nets, and then a j-pole or small yagi up on a mast for the VHF work. site is pretty flat with some trees to the south which is slightly annoying for takeoff angle but probably not a dealbreaker for emcomm purposes. anybody done long duration portable setups like this and have strong opinions either way on the power question? also curious if anyone has used the bioenno or power films batteries for something this demanding, i see them recommended a lot but havent actually seen one run a 100w HF rig for 8+ hours in practice

1.4:1 on a first build is honestly pretty good. i think mine was like 2.8 the first time and i had no idea why lol. ended up being the coax i used was ancient and had water in it but thats a whole other story.

so i've been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. i looked it up and apparently you have to take a test? i dont really know where to start. like do i need to already know morse code or is that not a thing anymore. and what's the difference between the license levels, do i need to get them all or can i just get one and actually use a radio. i've been looking at some websites but honestly a lot of them assume you already know stuff and i get kind of lost. is there like a straightforward way to study for this without buying a ton of books. also how hard is the test actually, i work full time so i dont have a huge amount of time to dedicate to this but i do want to actually do it

yeah DC receivers and hum are basically old friends at this point lol. one thing people dont always think about is the VFO bleedthrough into the audio path, depending on how close your oscillator is physically to the audio amp you can get some weird coupling that shows up as noise or instability. shielding the VFO section with a small tin can or even some copper tape can help a lot. nice work getting it on the air though, the Sudden design is a good starting point. I built something similar years ago and it got me hooked on homebrewing. eventually went down the rabbit hole of building a full transceiver from scratch which took about three years but thats another story

so i picked up a used Yaesu FTM-400 a few months back and it sat on my desk forever while i figured out where to put it in my F-150. finally bit the bullet last weekend and did the install and overall im pretty happy with how it came out but i have a couple things bugging me. first the antenna. i went with a Tram 1185 on a NMO mount drilled through the roof, ran the coax down the A pillar and under the carpet. signal seems good but i honestly have no baseline to compare to since this is my first mobile setup. is that antenna decent for general use or should i be looking at something else eventually? i mostly work the local repeaters but want to eventually do some simplex too. second thing is the fan noise. when the radio is transmitting it kicks on the cooling fan pretty quick and its kinda loud. is that normal for the 400? the head unit is mounted on the dash and the main body is under the seat which i thought would help with the noise but you can still hear it pretty clearly. doesnt seem to be causing any issues just wondering if thats how they all are. oh and i ran the power directly to the battery with a fused run, 12 gauge wire about 6 feet total. hope that was the right call

i was in the same boat about six months ago lol. what finally clicked for me was realizing LoTW and eQSL are totally separate systems with no connection to each other, so yeah you kind of do have to maintain both if you want the coverage. i use Log4OM and it can upload to both at the same time which helps a lot. the confirmed count thing — once matches happen on LoTW they show up in your account and when you eventually go to apply for something like WAS or DXCC it pulls from that. so the confirmations are just sitting there waiting for you to use them basically. i was surprised how many i had built up without realizing it.

so ive been trying to figure out if its worth the drive this year, last time i went was like 3 years ago and honestly it was a blast but gas prices are kind of killing me lately. thinking about carpooling with someone from the club but half those guys are flaky about committing. anyway if anyones planning to go hit me up, also curious if the swap meet section is still as big as it used to be or if more people are just selling on qrz and ebay now instead

FT8 decodes signals 10-20 dB below the noise level and I've confirmed this works even with QRP rigs or budget equipment costing just $200. The entire FT8 channel fits in about 50 Hz of bandwidth, allowing many signals to coexist without interference. Perfect for newcomers who want to work DX without big antennas or high power.