Kenneth Lopez

Some national societies make bureau QSLing easy for members - in Germany, DARC dues include unlimited free bureau use, and local clubs have QSL managers who handle everything for you at club meetings. The infrastructure varies dramatically by country, which definitely affects your success rates depending on who you're working.

congrats on the first one, thats always the hardest part just actually going and doing it. On the park reference question -- yes you can absolutely log both references if the location youre operating from is officially within both parks. A lot of places have overlapping boundaries especially state parks inside national forests. Just go to the POTA website and look up both references on the map, if your operating spot falls inside both polygons you can list both on the activation and get credit for activating two parks at once. Some people call these 2-fers or multi-park activations and hunters love them because they get credit for both parks in one QSO with you. For the ADIF thing, are you using the POTA log template or just the raw log off the radio? The KX2 logs are generally fine but you need to make sure the POTA_REF field is in there or you add it manually. The POTA website has a help page about adif requirements, worth a look before you try to upload.

i went the other direction and got a HackRF instead of the SDRplay and kinda regret it for pure HF listening tbh. the HackRF is cool for transmit capable stuff and wideband scanning but its half duplex and the noise floor isnt as clean as id like for weak signal work. great if you want to do replay attacks and RF experimentation stuff but for just sitting down and listening to 20m it feels like overkill in the wrong direction if that makes sense. the RSP1B is probably the smarter move for what you're describing.

i went through this last year and honestly the hardest part was just figuring out which calls were actually available. there are some third party sites that let you search available callsigns by district and format which saved me a ton of time vs trying to dig through ULS directly. dont remember which one i used but if you google it youll find a couple options got my vanity on the second try, first one had like three other people going for the same call and i lost out on the tie. wasnt the end of the world, picked my second choice and im happy with it now

the flux and K index thing took me forever to really get too. i kept thinking higher solar flux = good all the time and would get confused when things were still crummy. turns out when a coronal mass ejection hits even decent flux numbers dont save you, the whole ionosphere just goes wobbly. 17m has been my go-to lately when 20 gets flaky, sometimes when 20 sounds dead 17 still has something going on, worth a shot if you havent tried switching around

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. seriously though building your own QRP rig is one of those things that just completely changes how you think about radio. i started with a 40m DC receiver kit years ago, just to get comfortable, then moved on to a full transceiver build. the leap from audio to RF isn't as scary as people make it out to be as long as you're patient and dont skip steps when troubleshooting. if you want to ease in i'd honestly recommend starting with something like a 40m CW kit, there's several out there in the 30-50 dollar range. you learn a ton about how a simple superhet or direct conversion rig works, and if somethings not right you have enough of a foundation to figure out where things went wrong. the ubitx is fun but its a bigger project and the community support is kind of scattered now since the company changed direction a bit. still doable just maybe not the first thing you build. that 8 contacts on 5w sounds great by the way. once you start chasing efficiency like that its hard to go back to just cranking up the power.

haha yeah i remember mine, i keyed up on the wrong repeater and had no idea why nobody was answering me for like 20 minutes. turned out i had the offset wrong and was just transmitting into the void. when i finally got it sorted out and someone came back to me i completely blanked on my callsign and just said uh, my name is Dave. the guy on the other end was real nice about it though dont sweat the small stuff, everyone starts somewhere and the guys on the repeaters have seen it all before. Ron probably enjoyed helping you out, a lot of the older elmers really do like welcoming new people in

so ive had my tech license for about two years now and mostly just been doing 2m and some 70cm stuff, a little APRS here and there. been thinking about going for General so i can actually get on HF but honestly the exam scares me a little. like i heard there's a lot of electrical theory and i was never great at math in school. does anyone have advice on how long it actually takes to study if you're starting basically from scratch on the HF stuff? i tried looking at the question pool online and some of it looks okay but then theres stuff about feed line impedance and propagation modes that i dont really understand. is the gordon west book still the go-to thing or is there something better now. also once you pass do you get privileges right away or do you have to wait for it to show up in the FCC database first

so ive been licensed about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF DX, some 6m sporadic-e stuff, even messed around with meteor scatter a little on JT65B. but EME has always been this sort of mythical thing in the back of my mind. like the idea that you're bouncing a signal off the moon and someone 10,000 miles away hears it is just... i dont know, it still blows my mind even knowing the physics of it. anyway i operate from a suburban lot so i know im not gonna be running a 4x4 yagi array on 2m or anything like that. ive been reading about how the weak signal digital modes like JT65 and now Q65 have kind of opened up EME to smaller stations. is that actually realistic or is there still a pretty hard floor on how much antenna and power you need? ive got a 17 element 2m yagi right now and a TS-590 that i sometimes use on 2m with a transverter setup. also what software are people using these days, is WSJT-X still the go-to or has something else taken over? would love to hear from anyone whos actually done it especially if you're running a modest station

so we had a storm roll through about two weeks ago and i had everything unplugged except apparently i forgot the coax was still connected to the back of the radio. nothing took a direct hit but there was a strike maybe 300 feet away and now the 7300 receives fine, display is normal, everything looks okay from the outside but when i key up i get zero watts out. not low power, literally nothing on the meter. ive been poking around and the finals look okay visually, no obvious burn marks anywhere on the board. driver board maybe? im not super experienced with board level repair but i can solder and i have a decent DMM. wondering if anyone has been down this road with the icom stuff or knows what to check first before i just ship it off to icom and wait 3 months.

oh man yes the spacing thing is exactly what trips everyone up at first with a paddle, youre not alone at all. the keyer handles the dit and dah timing but the space between letters and especially words is totally on you and your brain just hasnt built that muscle memory yet. what helped me was slowing way down and i mean like painfully slow, like 8 or 9 wpm, and just sending random words over and over and really paying attention to that pause. not trying to go faster, just getting the pauses to feel natural. also one thing nobody told me when i started was to practice sending while copying something, like have the radio on and try to send along with what youre hearing, even if its way too fast for you to keep up. something about that helped my brain understand the rhythm better. give it a few more weeks at least, 62 is not too old for this by the way, some of the best ops ive worked are retired guys who finally had the time to really dig into CW

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i can copy at maybe 5wpm on a good day, sometimes a little faster if its someone sending really clean. i want to eventually get to 20wpm but honestly that feels like it might as well be the moon right now. ive been using the LCWO website and doing the Koch method but i keep stalling out around 8-9wpm and i dont know if im doing something wrong or if this is just normal and i need to be more patient. one thing im wondering is whether i should be spending more time on just copying or also sending, because i read somewhere that sending helps with receiving but i havent really started using a paddle yet, still just on a straight key for now. any of you who went through this process have any thoughts on what actually made the difference? did you hit a wall somewhere and how did you get through it?