Kevin Jackson

yeah the doppler thing trips everyone up the first time or two. the key thing to understand is that for something like AO-91 which is FM not linear, you really only need to correct the uplink frequency because the repeater on the satellite handles the downlink shift automatically. so if you hear yourself coming back through the bird you're on frequency. if you dont hear yourself, tune the uplink up a bit at AOS and work it down toward the published frequency as it passes overhead, then below as it goes away from you. rough numbers for 70cm uplink you're looking at maybe plus or minus 10kHz across a full pass. for linear transponders like FO-29 or AO-73 it gets more complicated because you have to compensate both sides simultaneously. thats where CAT control through gpredict actually earns its keep. but start with the FM birds first, get comfortable with the mechanics of tracking and tuning, then tackle linear later. also the arrow doesnt need to be cross pol for most LEO work, circular helps but plenty of people work satellites with a standard linear yagi just fine.

so ive been playing around with cluster spotting for the past few weeks trying to chase some DX and honestly i feel like im doing it wrong or at least not getting the most out of it. been using DXwatch mainly because someone on another thread mentioned it and it seemed easy enough to get started with but im not totally sure how to filter it properly for my situation. like right now i get flooded with spots for bands i cant even use or modes i dont really operate on. someone told me to cross reference with QRZ's logbook and the DX alerts but that seems like a lot of tabs open at once lol. is there some smarter way to set this up? im running a 100w station into a dipole so some of those dx spots are basically useless for me anyway, might as well filter down to stuff i actually have a shot at. also does anyone use any phone apps for this instead of juggling browser tabs, i downloaded one called DX Toolkit i think but havent really figured it out yet

went through this exact thing earlier this year, got my Extra in february and applied for a 1x2 call i'd had my eye on for a while. ae7q is the site you want, seriously just bookmark it now. you can look up any callsign and it'll tell you the status and if it's in a holding period and roughly when it comes available. one thing i'll add — you can actually submit applications for multiple different callsigns at the same time, just not overlapping windows i think. so if your first choice doesn't work out you're not stuck waiting forever to try again. i got my second choice in the end and honestly im totally happy with it, its shorter than my sequential call and easier to give out phonetically which is really all i cared about.

140 miles on 40m with VARA HF is solid, what speed are you typically syncing at? just curious because i've been having wildly inconsistent results with my setup and trying to figure out if its a propagation thing or my audio chain. one thing about gateway selection i noticed — the ones closer to you arent always the best choice if theyre running an older or slower system. some of the gateways are maintained really well and some are clearly just somebody's old laptop that hasnt been rebooted in a year. you cant really tell from the list though, its kind of trial and error until you find a couple that work reliably and then you just stick with those.

ok so ive been licensed for about 4 months now, got my technician ticket and ive been mostly doing 2m and 70cm stuff but i want to get on HF. i thought techs couldnt do HF at all but then someone at the club meeting last week said something about being able to use some parts of 10m? and maybe 40m for CW? im honestly not sure if he knew what he was talking about or if the rules changed recently or what. i looked at part 97 for like 20 minutes and gave up, the way its written is just really hard to follow. can someone just explain in plain english what a tech is actually allowed to do on HF without me having to decode legal language

so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been listening to the local 2m repeater a lot just to get a feel for things. there's a net on tuesday nights and i really want to check in but honestly im not sure of the right way to do it. like i know you wait for the net control to ask for check-ins but do you just say your callsign? do you say your name too? what if someone else starts talking at the same time as you — do you just stop and wait or keep going? also i heard someone get kind of corrected on air last week for jumping in during a net and it made me nervous about doing something wrong. i dont want to be that guy. any advice from people who actually run or participate in these things would be really appreciated

so ive been licensed for about three weeks now (Tech class) and im trying to figure out what handheld to start with. everyone keeps telling me different things and its making my head spin honestly. some guys at the club meeting said get a Baofeng to start, others were almost offended by that suggestion lol. one older guy told me to just save up and get a Yaesu right off the bat and not bother with the cheap stuff. i mostly just want to hit the local repeaters and maybe do some APRS stuff eventually? i dont have a big budget, probably $80-150 range. also i have no idea what half the specs mean like i see stuff about dual band, wideband receive, tone squelch settings, all that. is there a decent guide somewhere or can someone just point me in the right direction. dont want to make a dumb first purchase

congrats. the baofeng thing is always a worry but most of the time they sound fine on a decent repeater. what part of the country are you in? some areas have really active nets for new hams which can be a good way to get comfortable talking without it feeling like you're just bothering people randomly

yeah the finals are the obvious guess but i'd check something simpler first — the ALC line. if there's a fault condition the radio can actually suppress its own output down to nothing as a protection thing. worth seeing if there's anything weird in the menu diagnostics before you crack it open. also fwiw i've seen the antenna tuner relay on these cause weird TX issues after a surge even when it looks like the tuner is bypassed. just a thought, might save you some time before digging into the PA section.

so ive been sitting on the fence about this for probably two years now, kept telling myself id study and then never doing it. my neighbor is a ham and he finally just said look just sign up for the test and that'll force you to actually study, which honestly is probably true about me lol anyway i signed up for a technician exam that's like 5 weeks out and now im kind of panicking a little. i downloaded the question pool and it is way longer than i expected. im decent with electronics basics but the regulations stuff is kind of a blur and i dont really know where to start. is the hamstudy.org thing actually good or is there something better? and how long did it actually take you guys to feel ready? i dont want to fail in front of people which sounds dumb but thats my real worry

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the storms last month i figured i really need to stop procrastinating. started pulling stuff together for a basic go-kit and i think i have the radio side covered — got my FT-857D, a few different antennas, coax, power cables, all that. running it off a 40ah LiFePO4 battery with a small solar panel for recharging. what im not sure about is all the other stuff. like the non-radio stuff. i know i need logging sheets and pens, a copy of my license obviously, frequencies list for the local nets and repeaters. but then i started thinking about what happens if im deployed somewhere for like 12-18 hours and i realized i dont really have a plan for any of the comfort or logistics stuff. food, water, rain gear, that kind of thing. also not sure how to organize it all physically. right now its kind of spread across two bins and a backpack and its a mess. anyone who actually does emcomm deployments have advice on how they have it set up? or what they wish theyd thought of before their first real activation?

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and everyone keeps telling me to just jump in and try a contest, so i figured CQ WW phone is coming up and why not. but honestly i dont even really know what im supposed to do beyond the basics. like i know you exchange signal reports and zones but i keep reading stuff about rate and multipliers and running vs search and pounce and my head is spinning a little. my setup is nothing special, ts-590 into a dipole up about 30 feet, so im not expecting to win anything obviously. just want to get a few contacts and not embarrass myself on the air. any tips for a first timer would be really appreciated. also is there a good way to log during the contest or do people just use paper and sort it out later

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general) and i finally got a cheap baofeng to play around with while i save up for something better. theres a 2 meter repeater about 12 miles from me that i found on repeaterbook and it lists a tone of 100.0 Hz. i programmed it in but when i key up nobody can hear me, or at least nobody responds. i can hear other people on it just fine though. my question is — is the 100.0 tone the one i transmit, or is that what the repeater sends back to me? i honestly cant tell from the listing which direction that tone goes. ive tried both settings in chirp (encode only vs encode and decode) and still nothing. or maybe nobody is just around and im overthinking this. also is there like a standard thing you say when you first get on a repeater? i dont want to sound like an idiot

the 9700 is actually a solid starting point, good receiver and the built in functions help. your instinct about the LNA is right, that matters more than almost anything else honestly. something like a MGF1302 based preamp right at the mast, every foot of coax before the LNA is coax you're losing signal in and you really cant afford that on EME. SSB Electronic or a homebrew unit both work, just get it as close to the antenna as you physically can. single yagi on 2m EME is doable but you need to be realistic about it. youre not going to be calling CQ and getting a pile up. what actually happens is you work the big stations who have enough antenna gain and power to close the link on their end even if your signal is weak. with WSJT-X running JT65B mode (thats the one, forget JT65 generic, for EME its JT65B specifically) a single yagi around 7-9 elements can get you on the scoreboard. i'd say minimum 9 elements with a clean takeoff and a good preamp. the path loss is around 250 dB each way so the math is pretty brutal but the digital modes changed everything for small stations. 10-15 years ago you needed a serious array. now you can work it with a yagi and some patience. check the ping jockey website and the moonbounce mailing list, thats where people schedule skeds and youll see who's active. first contact takes a while usually but it happens.

so ive been trying to get serious about CW for about 3 months now and im finally at the point where im not embarrassed to get on the air but my paddle is driving me nuts. its a cheap chinese dual-lever paddle i picked up on ebay and the keyer is built into my IC-7300. the problem is i keep getting these extra dits squeezed in at the end of characters especially when im sending something like a K or an N, like the contact will end and theres just this little stray dit tacked on. i dont know if its my technique or the paddle tension or what. ive messed with the keyer speed (running about 18 wpm right now) and tried adjusting the weight ratio a little but nothing seems to fix it. someone at the club told me it might be a squeeze keyer issue and to try iambic mode B instead of mode A but honestly i dont totally understand the difference and i fumbled around in the menus for a while without figuring out what was actually changing. anyone dealt with this? is this just a learning curve thing or is the cheap paddle probably the culprit here

so ive been on SSB for maybe 8 months now and i keep getting reports that my audio sounds "processed" or sometimes people say its kinda bassy and unclear. im running a ts-590sg into a heil pr-40 which i thought was supposed to be a good combo but clearly something isnt right. the mic gain is set around 50% and i have the speech processor off because someone told me it causes more problems than it solves for newer operators. ive tried adjusting the equalizer in the radio a little but honestly i dont really know what im doing with that. is there a standard starting point people use for mic eq on that radio or do i need to be doing something on the computer side too. also how do i even know what my transmitted audio actually sounds like without asking someone every time — i feel like thats getting annoying for the guys on my local net

totally normal question and honestly the answer is kinda situational. on a clear local repeater where everyone already knows you, saying your full call phonetically every single time gets old fast and people will actually start tuning you out a little. but on HF, especially if conditions are rough or you're working someone far away, phonetics are genuinely useful because callsigns can get mangled in QSB or QRM. the NATO alphabet is the standard and most ops know it cold, so stick with that rather than making up your own. ive heard people say things like N for Nancy or whatever and it just creates confusion. on SSB DX contacts i always use phonetics at least on the first exchange, after that if the signal is solid i might just say the call straight. for contests though, speed matters so a lot of people drop the full phonetics unless asked to repeat

yeah I did almost exactly this with a T2X about two years ago. used a nano originally but switched to a mega just for the extra pins when I added an LCD display and a manual control mode with a joystick. the pot noise thing is real, averaging helps but I ended up using a 10uf cap across the wiper and ground which cleaned it up a lot before it even got to the ADC. made a huge difference honestly. for satellite work the latency over serial was fine for me, I was using Hamlib and it worked with Gpredict no problem. the heading accuracy ended up being within about 3-4 degrees which is more than good enough for anything I was doing. if you're doing EME with a narrow beam that might not cut it but for LEO satellites it was totally workable. just make sure whatever relay board you use has some kind of braking logic so you're not slamming the rotator to a stop, mine would occasionally overshoot before I added a slow-down zone near the target heading.

yeah ive done almost exactly this with a 7300, took me a while to get the CI-V parsing reliable. your instinct about SoftwareSerial is probably right — i switched to using a Mega so i had a hardware serial port free for the CI-V side and things got a lot more stable. the timing on SoftwareSerial gets flakey if anything else is happening in your loop, even just millis() calls for debouncing relays can cause it to drop bytes. also worth checking if you have the CI-V address set right and that transceive mode is on in the 7300 menu, because without transceive it wont broadcast frequency changes automatically and youll have to poll it which is more complicated. with transceive on the radio just shouts out its frequency whenever you turn the VFO and you just listen. the amazon relay boards are usually fine for switching solenoid control voltages, current is low enough that you wont cook anything. i did put a flyback diode across my relay coil just in case but honestly the MFJ switch solenoids are pretty forgiving.

yeah the dual doppler thing on linear birds is the classic headache when youre starting out. the trick a lot of people use is to just pick a spot in the passband and then instead of correcting your uplink, you correct your downlink to follow yourself. basically you tune until you hear your own signal on the downlink and you keep that frequency locked in your head or just leave the RX tuned there and chase it. your uplink freq will drift as seen from the sat but if you compensate on receive you can at least hear yourself which is the important part for making contacts. gpredict with CAT control really is the way to go long term, even if your HT cant do it you might want to run a separate receiver that can be controlled. a lot of guys use an FT-817 or similar for sat work specifically because of the CAT. the HT uplink situation is workable for low passes but youre gonna have a bad time on anything under 25 degrees honestly, its just not enough link budget especially on the uplink side. also make sure your TLE data is fresh, gpredict can pull from celestrak and if your TLEs are more than a few days old on an LEO the pass predictions will be off enough to matter.

so i finally took the plunge and built one of those youkits clones from a kit i ordered off qrz classifieds like six months ago, been sitting on my bench forever. took it out to the state park saturday with a buddipole and a 3ah lipo i had from an old drone project. managed to get three contacts on 20m running about 4 watts, one of them was in spain which i was honestly shocked about. but i had a few weird things happen, signal reports were all over the place and at one point the rig just kind of... stopped transmitting mid qso. came back fine after i cycled the power but that was a little nerve wracking. is that a thermal thing? temps were around 85 degrees out and i had it sitting on the picnic table in direct sun like an idiot. also wondering if anyone has tips for squeezing more efficiency out of these little rigs, i feel like im leaving watts on the table somewhere. antenna matching maybe? my swr was reading about 1.8:1 on most of the band.

yeah that logging thing gets everybody. i remember my first real exercise maybe 8 years ago now and i basically had to throw out half my log because i couldnt read my own notes later. what ended up helping me was practicing ICS 214 forms at home just filling them out while watching tv or something, gets the muscle memory going so when youre stressed its not so foreign. also dont underestimate how important it is to have a designated net control who can actually pace the traffic — if NCS is calm the whole net calms down, and if NCS is rattled everybody panics. the simplex coordination piece is genuinely hard especially in hilly terrain. we had one exercise where half the stations couldnt hear each other at all on our designated simplex frequency and we had to improvise relay stations on the fly. that was actually a great learning moment though because it forced people to problem solve in real time instead of just following a script.

IRLP is similar to EchoLink but not nearly as friendly to install or operate, requiring Linux and a proprietary commercial interface. For a club your size, I'd recommend EchoLink - it's the most user-friendly and has the largest user base.

That's exactly how I started 6 months ago. Pro tip: write down your check-in on paper first so you don't stumble over words. The net control always asks for repeats if they miss anything, so don't stress about being perfect!

that's a great question and honestly it comes up more than people talk about. the short answer from my experience is you kinda read the room. if the coordinator is overwhelmed and needs an extra set of hands moving cots or whatever, helping out for a few minutes isn't going to hurt anything as long as your radio is still being monitored and you're not abandoning your comm assignment. served agencies appreciate when we're flexible, it builds the relationship. but the flip side is you're right to be careful. your primary job is communications and if you get pulled too deep into logistics or whatever and miss a message or aren't available when they actually need the radio link, that's a problem. i usually just tell people something like "i can help with that real quick but i need to stay close to the radio" and most coordinators get it immediately once you explain it that way. sounds like you handled it fine though, six hours on a real activation in your first year is solid experience most people dont get for a while