Lisa Patel

yeah the buddipole on 40 is kind of a known thing, its workable but you really need to spend time with the tuning and the counterpoise situation matters a lot more than people think when youre on the ground like that. ive basically stopped bringing mine for anything below like 20 meters unless i have a lot of time to mess with it for a parking lot setup with no stakes i've been using a painter's pole - the extending fiberglass ones from the hardware store - zip tied to a traffic cone with some weight in it. ghetto but it works and costs like 12 bucks. throw an endfed or even just a random wire over it and use the car as a counterpoise sorta. not ideal but for emcomm purposes it gets the job done and setup is under 5 minutes which matters when things are already chaotic

so ive been licensed about 4 months now (general class) and i mostly just listen on the local 2m repeater and sometimes HF. i joined a couple of nets but honestly im still not totally sure what the right thing to do is in different situations. like theres this weekly SSB net on 40m i check into sometimes and last week the net control asked if there was any emergency traffic and i wasnt sure if i should say anything or just stay quiet since i obviously didnt have emergency traffic but i panicked and keyed up anyway and just said my call which i think was the wrong move? also separate question kind of - when is it appropriate to just call CQ on your own vs waiting for a net or finding someone already in QSO and asking to join? i dont want to step on anyone or be that guy who breaks into a conversation at a bad time. i know the basics from my technician study but actually doing it feels really different

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now and figured id just ask here. i've got a pretty small backyard, maybe 60 feet end to end if im generous, and im trying to figure out whether to put up a proper dipole (inverted V probably) or just go with a vertical. the vertical is obviously easier to fit but everyone i talk to has a different opinion on whether the low angle radiation actually makes up for what you lose in gain or whatever. my main interest is 40m DX, not really local contacts, so i know low angle radiation matters a lot. ive got decent ground conditions i think, not particularly rocky, pretty normal suburban soil. the thing is if i go vertical i need to put down radials and i honestly dont know how many i realistically need to get decent performance out of it. ive seen everything from 4 to 120 radials mentioned and that range is just kind of paralyzing. current setup is literally nothing, just been running a random wire into my tuner which works but i know im leaving a lot on the table. anyone been in this situation and actually done a comparison somehow?

yeah 40m at night is something else. i do the same thing sometimes, just tune around and see whats happening. caught a guy last week running a net i didnt even know existed, been listening to it every tuesday since. beats doomscrolling for sure

i had almost the exact same issue with my first 40m dipole, drove me nuts for a weekend. turned out one of my legs was like 4 inches longer than the other because i measured wrong off a spool that had kinks in it. once i actually straightened the wire out properly and remeasured i was way off on total length. might be worth double checking your physical measurements with the wire stretched straight before messing with the formula. also 14 gauge stranded from the hardware store is totally fine btw, thats basically what most people use

congrats on the first activation, 12 contacts is totally solid especially for a first time out. yeah the pile drying up is completely normal, once the hunters who saw your spot work you theres not a huge pool waiting around unless youre at a rare or popular park. what a lot of activators do is wait maybe 15-20 minutes and then re-spot yourself, a fresh spot bumps you back to the top of the list and you'll usually get another small wave of callers. some guys spot on multiple bands too which helps, and yeah you do have to manually re-spot each time you change bands, the app doesnt do that automatically. some people use the self-spot feature built into the KX2 if they have the right cables set up but honestly just doing it from your phone works fine one other thing that helped me early on was trying to get on the air a little earlier in the morning on weekends, seemed like more hunters are active then. good luck with the next ones, once you get a few under your belt it becomes kind of addictive

that story about the guy in the truck is exactly why i love doing these activations. ive had more conversations about ham radio at parks than anywhere else, something about the outdoors setting makes people curious instead of just walking past. had a whole family stop once and the kids thought the antenna was wild. anyway welcome to the pota rabbit hole, fair warning it gets addictive pretty fast and youll start eyeing every green blob on the map wondering if its an activated park or not

the band scope span thing — go into the SET menu, Display, and there should be a Scope Range Hold option or something close to that, i forget the exact label. mine was off by default and it drove me nuts for like the first month. once you set it per band it sticks. or at least mostly sticks, i swear mine occasionally forgets when i power cycle but that might be operator error. anyway yeah the 7300 is a genuinely good radio for the price, been running mine for almost 3 years now and still happy with it. the front end isnt quite up there with the higher end SDR-based rigs when you have a really noisy band or you're trying to work weak signal next to a 59+20 station, but for general HF use its hard to argue with. what antenna are you running it into?

check the DC power connector at the radio itself, not just the cable. ive seen the barrel connectors on icom gear get a tiny amount of corrosion or just work slightly loose over time and under load they drop enough voltage to trigger protection. 100 watts is pulling like 20 amps and a bad connection that looks fine at low current will show up real fast. put a meter on the terminals at the radio while someone keys it up and watch what the voltage actually does during a dropout. if it dips more than like half a volt under load you found your problem.

mode B drives a lot of people crazy when they're coming from straight key, honestly you might just want to switch to mode A and forget about it. the difference only really matters if you're doing true iambic squeeze sending and most people aren't even doing that properly. mode A is a little more forgiving because it doesn't add that extra element at the end of a squeeze. on the tension thing — yeah lighter isn't always better. i actually run mine a bit heavier than most people would recommend because i tend to tense up when i'm concentrating and i'd overshoot dashes. just fiddle with it at whatever speed you're comfortable at and find what doesn't cause mistakes. give yourself a week with mode A and see if the extra dits go away.

so ive been doing FM sats for about a year now, mostly SO-50 and the PSAT2 stuff, and i finally decided to give AO-73 a real shot last weekend. got a decent pass, around 35 degrees max elevation from here in ohio, and i could hear the transponder beacon no problem. pulled up gpredict and had it running doppler correction through hamlib to my 817. heres where i got confused though — i was tuning around the passband and i could hear a few stations but when i tried to transmit i could never find myself in the downlink. i know you have to work the doppler on both uplink and downlink independently which is different from FM birds, and im pretty sure i was doing that, but honestly i might have been doing it wrong. is there a good way to verify youre actually hitting the transponder without someone else telling you? also does the 817 have enough drive for this or should i be running a small amp on the uplink side i was using a pair of Arrow yagis by the way, handheld, which worked fine for FM so i figured itd be ok

so this has been driving me nuts for about two weeks now. picked up an 857D off a silent key estate sale, price was too good to pass up even knowing it might need work. guy's family said it was working fine but who knows how long it sat in that garage. anyway when i got it home and fired it up the S meter just sits at zero, no noise floor, nothing. squelch all the way off and still dead silence. but here's the weird part — i can key it up and my other radio hears it just fine on the other side of the room, so RF is getting out apparently. tried it on multiple bands, same thing across the board. also tried different antennas and a dummy load just to rule that out. i pulled the covers and dont see any obvious damage, no burnt components or anything that looks fried. voltages on the main board look reasonable to me but i only have a basic DMM so im not catching anything subtle. anyone dealt with this specific failure mode on the 857? wondering if its the RX frontend or something in the IF chain. service manual is not super helpful for actually diagnosing this kind of thing, at least the way i read it.

No need to apologize, everyone goes through this exact same confusion at first. Short answer is you dont have to be on all of them, but each one has its purpose so its worth understanding what youre getting into. LoTW is the big one for ARRL awards like DXCC and WAS, pretty much any serious DX chaser or contester will expect you to be on there. eQSL is kind of its own thing, some people swear by it and some ignore it completely — it counts for a few different awards but its not universally accepted the way LoTW is. For FT8 in particular a lot of people upload to both automatically through WSJT-X and the logging software so its not much extra work once you set it up. The bureau is basically a slow cheap way to exchange paper cards internationally. Your national organization (ARRL if youre in the US) handles it and your local club can sometimes help too. It can take months or even over a year for cards to move through the system so dont expect anything fast. If someone mails you a card directly yeah its nice to send one back, just basic courtesy. You can get cards made pretty cheaply from a few places online, vista print or some of the ham-specific printers. Doesnt have to be fancy when youre just starting out.

so ive been running Log4OM for about a year and a half now for general logging and i really like it for day to day stuff, tracking my QSOs, looking up callsigns, all that. but every time a contest rolls around everyone in the club is talking about N1MM and i feel like im the only one not using it. the thing is i dont really want to maintain two separate logs. i know you can export and import between them but that always feels like a disaster waiting to happen, duplicate QSOs, missing fields, whatever. and then theres the whole WSJT-X situation where i have that piped into Log4OM via UDP and it actually works pretty well most of the time. not sure how that would interact if i had N1MM running at the same time or if i even could. has anyone actually got a clean workflow going between all three of these? or do most contesters just accept that contest logs live separately and they manually merge stuff later? genuinely curious how people handle this because it seems like the kind of thing nobody talks about until you're in the middle of a contest weekend and suddenly nothing is talking to nothing.

so this has been driving me nuts for about a week now. my position beacon is going out, i can see it hitting the local igate (W5XYZ-10 shows me in its heard list) but aprs.fi just shows me sitting at my home QTH from like 3 days ago even when im mobile. tried clearing browser cache and all that. running a TM-D710G into a Byonics TinyTrak4 — wait no actually the 710 has its own built in TNC so i bypassed the TinyTrak a while back. SSID is set to -9 for mobile. symbol is car. path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. smartbeaconing is on and set to corner pegging at like 5mph minimum. the weird thing is if i pull up findU it shows the recent packets just fine with correct coordinates. so the data is getting to the APRS-IS network... aprs.fi is just not updating for some reason? or am i missing something obvious here. been on HF a lot lately and feel like maybe i forgot how this is supposed to work lol