David Brown

Don't forget about Museum Ship Weekend where stations submit logs to the coordinator and upload to LoTW in late June. Great for working different states and the ships usually have good operators. Keep an eye on the various contest calendars too - lots of special event overlap.

yeah what he said about third party traffic is the big one people mess up on. i actually got into an awkward situation a while back where a friend wanted to say hi to someone i was working DX with and i had to explain i couldnt just hand over the mic because the country we were talking to wasnt on the third party list. the guy thought i was being weird about it lol but its a real rule. honestly for day to day stuff on vhf/uhf you probably dont need to stress too much about part 97 as a tech, just dont do anything obviously stupid and youll be fine. the rules exist more to prevent actual interference and misuse than to catch normal hams making honest mistakes

the relay question is a good one and it confused me too when i was setting this up last year. basically the RMS nodes you see in the channel picker are all internet-connected gateways, so when you connect to any of them your message hits the winlink common message server pretty much instantly, no meaningful delay. the relay path in the old packet days was different but with vara HF youre usually connecting direct to an RMS gateway not bouncing through a bunch of digipeaters or anything like that. the peer to peer stuff is a completely separate mode and thats really for when there genuinely is no internet, like you and another station can exchange messages directly without any gateway involved at all, but neither of you get to the outside world that way. its good for local emcomm exercises and stuff but dont confuse it with normal gateway operation. for testing yeah go ahead and use telnet sessions, thats exactly what theyre there for. lets you make sure your message templates are right and your address book works before you go trying to make RF connections. just remember to switch back to RF when youre actually testing your radio path or it doesnt prove anything about your station capability. hybrid network is fine at defaults honestly, express handles most of that logic for you.

ok so i just got my general ticket last month and ive been trying to figure out 40 meters but honestly the band plan stuff is making my head spin. like i know there are frequency allocations from the FCC and then there's also the ARRL band plan and they dont seem to be the same thing? my license says i can operate in certain ranges but then everyone online says dont operate near the band edges and i dont really understand why. is it just a courtesy thing or is there an actual rule? also i keep seeing people say 7.200 and above is phone only but then i heard someone on 7.195 doing SSB and wasnt sure if that was ok or if they were doing something wrong. i know this is probably a dumb question but i genuinely cannot figure out where to look to get a straight answer on this

ok so ive been licensed about 4 months now (tech) and just got my first HT, a Baofeng UV-5R, and im trying to get into the local 2m repeater. the repeater listing on repeaterbook shows a 100.0 Hz tone and i programmed that in but im not totally sure if that goes on transmit only or both transmit and receive or what. like i can hear traffic on the repeater just fine but when i try to call out nobody seems to hear me, or at least nobody responds. also i just wanna make sure im not being rude or stepping on anyone — i know there's some kind of etiquette stuff i should know about. like do you just key up and say your callsign? do you wait for a gap in conversation? ive been lurking on the frequency for a few days and it seems like there's a small group that chats most evenings but i dont want to interrupt them if thats not how it works. any help appreciated, still figuring all this out

haha yeah my first one i got to the trailhead and realized i left my coax at home. had to literally jury rig something with a piece of wire i had in the car. still made my contacts though so i count it as a win. you learn real fast what you actually need vs what you think you need when you gotta carry it all uphill

so i was at work when apparently 10 meters just went absolutely wild last tuesday, saw a bunch of spots on the DX cluster when i got home and i was pretty gutted. looked like there were stations from south america and even some EU coming through pretty strong according to the spots. typical right, the one time i actually have a decent antenna pointed that direction and im stuck in a meeting about quarterly reports or whatever. anyway has anyone been keeping an eye on the solar flux lately? it's been bouncing around in the 150s which is decent but nothing crazy. i know we're climbing toward solar max and supposedly 2025 is going to be really something but i feel like ive been hearing that for two years now. also curious if anyone has tried the new Icom IC-905 in any real world situations yet, keep seeing posts about it but nothing from people i actually trust

the latency spikes you're describing sound like your ISP is doing some kind of traffic shaping or the QoS on your router at the remote end isn't set up right. i had almost the exact same thing with a remote station running through Comcast and it turned out the modem was doing some bufferbloat nonsense. running fq_codel on the router fixed it almost completely. worth checking with something like the DSLReports speed test that shows bufferbloat rating before you go too far down the SDR rabbit hole. on the panadapter question -- the cleaner approach IMO is to not try to stream SDR# over the network at all. use something like rtl_tcp running on the remote machine and then connect to it from your end with SDR# or SDRConsole using the RTL-TCP source. the bandwidth needed is actually pretty reasonable for a narrow chunk of spectrum if you keep your sample rate down. i do something similar with a KiwiSDR at a friend's club station and it works better than youd expect.

so we finally got around to doing a full-scale simulated disaster exercise Saturday and honestly it was kind of humbling. we've been talking about doing one for like two years and actually running through it showed us how many assumptions we'd been making about how things would go. the scenario was a major bridge collapse cutting off the east side of the county, EOC needs radio links to three shelter locations and the hospital. on paper it looked totally manageable. in practice we had net control trying to juggle too many stations at once, a couple guys showed up with radios that hadnt been programmed with the current frequencies (one of them was still on the frequencies from our plan that we revised last spring), and we spent probably 20 minutes just sorting out who was supposed to be where before any actual traffic got passed. the thing that surprised me most was how fast everyone's procedure kind of fell apart once there was any time pressure. people were doubling up on transmissions, not waiting for the net to clear, couple instances of folks using their callsigns wrong in traffic nets. all stuff we know how to do, just... didn't under simulated stress i guess. what's worked for your groups when you do these? we're trying to figure out if we should be doing smaller more frequent drills instead of the big annual thing. or maybe tabletop exercises first before we get on the air. curious what others have found.

oh man dont worry about it, literally every single one of us has done exactly this at some point. i remember my first net check-in i gave my call sign wrong twice and then forgot to give my location. the net control was super patient and it was fine. the basic flow on most directed nets is you wait for net control to specifically ask for check-ins, then you give just your callsign phonetically, wait for him to copy you and acknowledge, then he'll come back to you if he wants a traffic pass or just log you in and move on. you dont need to say a whole lot at the check-in stage. and yeah QNI is just net control signaling that check-ins are open, some nets use it some dont, depends on the net manager honestly. the doubling thing happens to everyone too, especially on a busy repeater where you cant always tell someone else keyed up at the same time. just good habit to pause a half second before transmitting and listen for the courtesy tone if the repeater has one. after a few more check-ins it'll feel totally natural, just keep showing up

Hey, welcome to the hobby. The CTCSS thing trips up a lot of new folks so dont sweat it. In CHIRP there are actually two tone fields to pay attention to — one for what you transmit TO the repeater (the tone squelch column, sometimes labeled Tone or CTCSS) and one for what the repeater sends back to you. You only need to worry about setting the transmit tone to 100.0 Hz for most situations, the receive side you can usually leave blank or set to none unless you specifically want your radio to stay quiet until it hears a tone back. Also double check your offset is right — most 2m repeaters use a 600 kHz offset and it matters which direction. If the repeater is on 146.940 for example your transmit freq should be 146.340. If you have that backwards youre transmitting nowhere useful. Once you get that sorted and you key up you should hear the courtesy beep after you release PTT if the repeater picked you up. As for breaking in — if theres an ongoing QSO just wait for a pause between transmissions and say your callsign. Just the callsign, nothing else, and let them invite you in. Most people are pretty welcoming.

I'm still pretty new to all this (got my general about 8 months ago) so take this with a grain of salt but I've been reading a lot about go-kits and one thing that comes up over and over is documentation -- like having a laminated quick reference card for your radio's memory channels and the local ARES/RACES frequencies so you're not digging through a manual under stress. I made one for myself even though I haven't deployed anywhere yet, just seemed smart. Also heard people mention having some cash in small bills tucked in the kit in case you need to grab something at a store and card readers are down. Probably overthinking it but hey.

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, got my tech ticket last spring and im still kind of figuring out what i can and cant do. my buddy told me i could operate on some HF frequencies as a tech but i honestly dont fully understand which ones and under what conditions. like i know part 97 covers all this stuff but whenever i try to read through it my eyes kind of glaze over, its not exactly written for normal people ya know. so my actual question is, if im a technician can i just hop on 10 meters and start talking to people or is there some kind of power limit or mode restriction i have to worry about. and also i heard something about needing to id every 10 minutes, is that still the rule or did they change it. i dont want to accidentally do something wrong and get a notice from the fcc or whatever they send you

yeah 10m has been absolutely wild, worked a ZL station yesterday afternoon on just 50 watts which blew my mind a little. i've been a ham since the early 90s and i keep forgetting how good this band can get near solar max. a lot of newer hams have only ever seen it dead so this must be a real eye opener for them. on the Yaesu thing — i saw something floating around on one of the Facebook groups about a possible announcement but i wouldnt hold your breath waiting. These rumor cycles happen every few months and sometimes nothing comes of it for a year or more. if the used radio is a good price and in good shape id probably just get it honestly. a bird in hand and all that.

More radials are always better for efficiency, especially on 80m and 40m. For field use you can lay radials on the ground and they don't have to be exact length, but for permanent installation, elevated radials at 8-12 feet work even better. Consider that for future upgrades.

yeah QRM is interference from other stations, like man-made noise, whereas QRN is natural static like from lightning or whatever. easy way i remember it is QRM = Man-made. QSY you got right, that's moving to another frequency. there's a pretty decent list on the ARRL site but honestly the ones you'll use day to day are maybe 15-20 of them. QSL, QTH, QRM, QRN, QRZ (who's calling me), QSB (fading signal), QRP (low power), and a few others. 73 is just the standard sign-off, means best regards basically, been used since telegraph days. 88 is specifically love and kisses and is traditionally sent to women, though you see it used all kinds of ways now. you'll pick it up fast once you start actually transmitting, promise

Why not both? I run a 35Ah LiFePO4 as primary with 75Ah AGM backup in the vehicle. LiFePO4 handles 90% of operations, AGM provides extended runtime for emergency situations. The charge acceptance rate of LiFePO4 makes solar charging far more effective - you can actually recharge during operation with adequate solar input.

yeah i did almost exactly this with a pi zero W and an ic-7300 about two years ago. the CI-V stuff is doable but i ended up using a python library called pyserial and just polling the rig every 500ms or so for the operating frequency then mapping frequency ranges to relay states. its not elegant but it works and hasnt missed a beat. one thing — make sure you debounce or add a short delay before switching the relay because sometimes when you're tuning across bands the rig spits out a bunch of frequency updates fast and you dont want the relays chattering. for RF i put ferrite beads on every line going into the arduino and wrapped the USB cable a few times through a big clamp-on ferrite. also grounded the arduino case to station ground. had one reset issue early on that went away after i added a 100uf cap on the 5v rail close to the board — probably just noise on the supply more than actual RF but it helped.

honestly the technician exam isnt that bad at all, i was worried about the math too but theres really only a handful of questions that involve any actual calculation and even then the formulas are pretty simple. the pool of questions is publicly available so you kind of know exactly what to expect going in which is nice. i used hamstudy.org to study and just drilled practice tests every night for like two weeks before i took it. there's also the ARRL technician manual if you want something more thorough but i honestly just did the online practice questions and felt ready. Gordon West study guides are popular too, my elmer swore by them. just find whatever format works for you and grind the practice tests, the real thing felt almost identical to the practice ones. good luck with it

honestly the exam itself is very passable if you just grind the question pool, most people do it that way and there's no shame in that. but here's the thing — some of that theory actually does stick, especially the antenna stuff and the filter design questions, because once you start understanding why certain things work you start noticing it on the air. like i finally understood why my old tuner was acting weird on 80m after i actually worked through the impedance stuff. wouldnt have connected those dots before. the privileges on the lower end of the bands are real though, thats not nothing. 40 meters especially there's a chunk below 7.175 thats general/extra only and on a crowded weekend that matters. i'd say just do it, the worst that happens is you learn some things and have to retake it once.

Your receiving filter should be set to 400-600 Hz bandwidth, centered on a pitch comfortable to your ear. I find around 600-700 Hz tone works best for my ears. Also try turning the sidetone/monitor audio down to a low level so you focus entirely on the received signal.

yeah i went through the same thing when i upgraded. one thing that helped me was just downloading the ARRL band plan pdf and keeping it open when i was getting started. its not the law but pretty much everyone follows it so if you stick to it you wont accidentally land in the middle of the DX window or whatever and have people annoyed at you. 40m can be kind of a zoo especially at night so just listen for a while before you transmit and youll get a feel for where stuff happens

ok so i just got my technician license like 3 weeks ago and im still trying to wrap my head around what exactly im allowed to do. i understand the basic band privileges but what i dont get is the rules around like... content? someone at my club mentioned something about business communications being prohibited and i wasnt sure if that meant i literally cant mention my job or if its more specific than that. also heard something about not being able to play music which makes sense i guess but then what about like nets that do trivia or whatever, is that considered entertainment and does that run into any rules i tried reading Part 97 directly but its kind of dense and i kept getting lost around the definitions section. just want to make sure im not doing something dumb on the air without realizing it

so i've been wanting to do this for a while and last weekend i finally got out there with my homebrew 40m DSB transceiver that ive been slowly putting together over the past few months. ran it off a 3ah lipo and a random wire up in a tree and honestly i was not expecting much but i worked 6 stations in about 2 hours which for 5 watts felt pretty incredible to me. the rig itself is based on that W7ZOI design i found in the ARRL handbook, nothing fancy, just a VXO for the oscillator which means i'm kinda stuck around 7.030 give or take a bit but thats fine for CW. the whole thing fits in an old altoids tin basically, well the main board does, the PA stage and LPF are in a separate little enclosure i made from some scraps of aluminum i had laying around. biggest thing i noticed is how much more you pay attention to propagation when every single db matters. like i was actually watching the greyline and thinking about where my signal might be going in a way i never really did with 100 watts. also realized pretty quick that my antenna situation matters WAY more than i ever appreciated before. had to retune like 3 times because the wind kept moving the wire around. anyway just wanted to share because im pretty stoked about it and also curious if anyone else builds their own stuff and what bands you find most useful for portable QRP. thinking about doing a 20m version next but not sure if the extra complexity is worth it vs just sticking to 40m for parks stuff.

check if your radio somehow switched from GPS mode to manual coordinate mode, that catches people off guard sometimes. on the D710G there's a setting buried in the GPS menu where it can fall back to a manually entered position if the GPS signal drops, and if someone (or a firmware quirk) toggled that without you noticing, it would transmit the old hardcoded coords. worth pulling up the GPS status screen while its running and confirming it shows an actual satellite fix and not just showing dashes. also just a thought — aprs.fi does cache stuff but it shouldnt be showing wrong data if fresh packets are coming in correctly. you can click on your callsign and look at the raw packet log to see exactly what lat/lon string is being transmitted. that'll tell you real quick if the problem is in the radio or somewhere downstream.