Robert Thompson

yeah i made a similar mistake on my first ARES net, tried to have a whole conversation about antenna stuff right in the middle of it lol. the net control was less patient than yours sounds like he was. live and learn i guess. one thing that helped me was that somebody in my club gave me kind of a cheat sheet they'd made — basically just the phrases you use at each point: how to check in, what to say if you have traffic, how to call for a relay if your signal is weak. pretty simple stuff but having it written out in plain language was way more useful than reading the official documentation. maybe ask around your club if anyone has something like that, clubs usually have their own version of it tailored to how their specific nets run anyway.

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech class) and i've been borrowing my buddy's Baofeng UV-5R to mess around on the local repeaters but he wants it back and i figure its time to just get my own radio. i was just gonna grab another UV-5R since i know how it works already and theyre like 25 bucks but a few people at my club meeting last week were kind of snooty about it and said i should get something better. the thing is i dont really know what better means in this context. like what am i actually getting if i spend $150 on a Yaesu FT-60 vs just buying two UV-5Rs for the same price. is the audio quality actually noticeably different or is this one of those things where experienced hams just dont like cheap Chinese radios on principle. genuinely asking not trying to start a fight about it lol mostly i just want something that works on 2m and 70cm, decent audio so people can understand me on the repeater, and something that wont die on me. dont really need APRS or anything fancy right now. any thoughts appreciated

yeah these trip up a lot of new hams, dont feel bad. the Q codes go back to like early maritime radio days, they were originally designed so operators who spoke different languages could still communicate quickly. QTH is your location, QSL means acknowledge or confirm (thats also why the cards are called QSL cards), QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is static or natural noise, QSB is signal fading, QRZ is basically "who is calling me", and QSY means change frequency. theres a ton more but those are the ones you hear constantly. the 73 thing just means best regards, nobody really knows exactly where it came from but its been around forever. OM means old man which sounds rude but its actually just how you refer to any male ham, and YL is young lady which is used for any female operator regardless of age. honestly just spend some time on the air and you pick it up real fast, within a few months it starts to feel totally natural

that feeling of the first pileup on a summit is something else isnt it. i remember my first one i was so flustered i forgot to ask for signal reports for like the first 6 contacts, just kept saying thank you 73 and moving on. took me a few activations to actually calm down and run things properly. on the logging thing — youll be fine, the summit reference for SU-051 isnt going to change and if you remember roughly when you made the contacts you can cross reference against the chasers logs on sotadata, a lot of them upload pretty quickly and you can usually piece together who you worked. i do paper logs in the field and then transfer when i get home, ive gotten pretty good at writing the ref at the top of each page so i dont have to think about it. KX2 and an EFHW is basically the classic SOTA kit at this point, hard to go wrong with that combo. what summit are you thinking for number two?

had something vaguely similar on an older ic-746, turned out to be a cold solder joint on one of the filter board connectors. the vibration from moving the radio around had worked it loose over time i guess. wouldnt have found it without reflowing a few suspicious joints near the band switching area. just something to keep in mind when you do get in there, worth a look at the connectors before assuming the relay itself is toast.

so ive been using QRZ's logbook and cluster spotting for a while now and honestly it works fine for what i do, mostly chasing DX on 20m and 40m when i get time after work. but a buddy at the club keeps telling me i should be using DXwatch instead and honestly i cant figure out what the big difference is supposed to be. like they both pull from the same cluster network right? i logged into DXwatch the other night and it looked pretty similar to me, same kind of spots rolling in, same basic format. is there something i'm not seeing or some setting i'm missing that makes one better than the other for actually hunting DX? i did notice DXwatch seems to update a little faster maybe but i dont know if thats just my imagination. also does anyone use any of the phone apps for this, someone mentioned HamSphere or maybe it was something else, i forget. just wondering what other people actually use day to day when theyre actively chasing spots.

yeah the chart is confusing at first but once it clicks it makes more sense. for 40 meters as a general you're good for phone from 7.175 up to 7.300, and then data and CW you get 7.025 to 7.125 i believe. the extra class guys have a little more room down at the bottom of the band. power limits are the same across license classes for most situations, 1500 watts PEP output is the max for everyone assuming your station is authorized, it's not like extras get more power or anything like that. the one thing that trips people up is that some bands have specific lower limits like 200 watts on certain parts of 60 meters, but that's a band-specific rule not a license class thing. your elmer's advice to stay above 7.200 for phone is pretty solid honestly, avoids any confusion near the extra-only portion. just download the arrl band plan and keep it nearby for a while until it becomes second nature

so ive been running my 7300 for about two years now and always kinda bugged me that the reference oscillator wasnt as stable as id like, especially when im doing weak signal stuff on 17m and sometimes 10m when the band opens up weird. you know how it is, slight drift when the rig hasnt fully thermaled out and youre trying to hold a freq. anyway i finally pulled the trigger on the TCXO-3 upgrade from Icom. not exactly cheap for what it is but the install was pretty straightforward if youre comfortable taking the lid off. just that one board swap essentially. i did it on a Saturday afternoon, had it back together in maybe an hour and a half including me being overly careful about the RF shield clips. honestly? the difference is noticeable. cold startup is way more stable now, frequency doesnt wander nearly as much in the first 10-15 mins of warmup. if youre doing any kind of digital work or you care about dial accuracy below like 10hz resolution it actually matters. probably overkill for just casual phone ragchewing but for what i use the radio for i think it was worth the like 50-60 bucks. anyone else done this one or done other mods to their 7300? curious what else people have found worth doing vs not

so ive been using Log4OM for a couple years now and mostly happy with it for day to day logging, the WSJT-X integration works pretty well once you get the UDP port sorted out, but every time contest season rolls around i feel like im missing something not running N1MM. my buddy keeps telling me to just switch to N1MM full time but honestly the interface feels like it was designed in 2003 and never touched again, which maybe it was, i dunno. the thing is i do a mix of stuff — some FT8 on a tuesday night, occasional SSB contesting, and log4om handles the everyday stuff great but when i jumped into the sweepstakes last fall i was fumbling around with the contest module and definitely left points on the table. does anyone actually run both? like log4om for the normal hamming and then switch to N1MM just for contests? that seems annoying to manage but maybe thats just how people do it. also does N1MM even do the WSJT-X UDP feed cleanly or is that still a mess?

so we have a county-wide ARES exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before i commit to hauling everything out. last time we ran the exercise we had a little honda eu2200i running the whole station and it worked fine but it was honestly overkill and the fuel thing got annoying after about 6 hours. trying to decide if its worth switching to a battery-based setup this time around. the load is pretty modest — IC-7300 running at maybe 50-60 watts output most of the time, a small laptop, and a signalink for digital modes. maybe a couple LED lights. i ran some rough numbers and figured maybe 20-25 amp hours per hour at that draw, which would put me right around 100ah for a 4-5 hour operational period. i have two 100ah lifepo4 batteries from a previous project so that would cover it if my math is right but id love a sanity check from someone who's actually done this kind of thing. for antennas i was planning on a Wolf River Coils silver bullet with a tripod mount and a 17ft whip. decent performer on 40 and 20 which is where most of our nets will be. dont really need anything crazy but im open to suggestions if something works better for portable NVIS on 40.

yeah 180 is solid, we've had some days pushing into the 190s and even cracking 200 a couple times this cycle which is pretty exciting. solar cycle 25 has been outperforming what a lot of people predicted honestly. when the SFI gets up there like that 10m can open in ways that just dont happen at solar minimum — like genuinely working the other side of the planet with 100 watts and a wire antenna, its kind of magic when it happens. for knowing when to check, i basically just have pskreporter open in a browser tab and glance at it every so often. you can see 10m spots lighting up in real time and it gives you a pretty good sense of where propagation is going. DXmaps is another good one. 15m has been really consistent lately too, most afternoons theres something happening there. 12m kind of sits between them and can be great but its a little less predictable in my experience. honestly just start leaving a radio parked on 15m while you do other stuff and see what you hear, you might be surprised

the sota spotter thing is real, i was doing a POTA run a few months back and had zero cell signal so nobody knew i was even on the air. ended up self spotting via SMS which i didnt even know worked until some guy in the pile told me about it after. still a fun time though honestly operating portable just hits different than sitting in the shack

yeah what he said about self spotting is huge, i didnt know about that for my first couple activations and i was just sitting there calling into the void wondering if anyone could even hear me. the pota.app site has a spot button and once you use it youll wonder how you ever activated without it also dont stress too much about the antenna situation, ive seen people validate with a mag loop in a parking lot so whatever works. your random wire setup sounds totally fine, maybe just practice deploying it at home a couple times before the next one so the setup goes faster on the day

yeah the two-log problem is real and honestly i just gave up trying to keep them in sync. what i do now is N1MM is the contest log, full stop. after the contest i export the ADIF and import it into Log4OM and just let it handle dupes on import — there's a setting somewhere in the import dialog to skip exact dupes by callsign+band+mode+date, and that catches most of the mess. its not perfect but its maybe a 5 minute cleanup instead of an hour. for WSJT-X the UDP dropout thing has been a known annoyance for years. i think sometimes it's a windows firewall thing silently blocking the packet after a while, or the port just goes weird. i added a firewall rule explicitly for WSJT-X UDP and it got a lot more stable. also make sure youre on a recent version of WSJT-X because there were some fixes in the 2.6.x builds related to logging.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about CQ WW and Field Day and SOTA and honestly it all kind of blurs together for me. like i understand theyre contests but i dont really get what makes each one different or why people get so into them. i tried jumping into a little bit of Field Day last summer with my elmer but we were just kind of operating from a park and i didnt really understand the exchange or why we were logging certain things. he explained it but i was too nervous to actually get on the mic myself. CQ WW is coming up and a few guys at the club are doing a multi-op from someones shack and they invited me to come watch and maybe operate a little. should i just go and try to figure it out as i go or is there stuff i should know beforehand? and is SOTA a completely separate thing or does that tie into contests somehow? i feel like i keep mixing those up. sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to get my bearings before i embarrass myself