Lisa Patel

the QCX mini is what got me back into the hobby after being inactive for years so good choice haha. i take mine out on bike rides sometimes, just strap the whole kit to the pannier and find a picnic table somewhere. 40m has been treating me well but i've had some really nice contacts on 20 too when conditions cooperate. the efficiency of that chip amp in those rigs is kind of wild when you think about it, getting like 80 percent or so out of the final stage means your battery lasts way longer than you'd expect

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and im starting to get into chasing awards and i keep seeing people talk about uploading to LoTW and eQSL and also sending physical cards and im honestly not sure what the difference even matters for. like do i need to be on all three systems or is one good enough? i set up my LoTW account a few months ago and i think i uploaded my logs but im not 100% sure the tqsl signing thing worked right because i never got any confirmations back. eQSL i havent even touched yet. and physical cards i got a batch made up but havent sent any out yet because i wasnt sure if i should wait for someone to send me one first or just send them out automatically. any advice from people who actually do this regularly would be great, im trying to work toward my WAS eventually so i want to make sure im doing this right from the start

paper QSLs are absolutely still valid for DXCC credit, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. you submit them through an ARRL card checker at a hamfest or you can send them in directly, there's a process on the ARRL site that explains it. LoTW just makes it way faster and cheaper because you dont have to physically mail anything. but yeah keep those paper cards, some rare entities are only confirmable that way because the operator never bothered with LoTW. as for WAS and DXCC at the same time — honestly most serious DX chasers end up doing both kind of automatically. if youre working dx you're probably hitting states along the way too. WAZ is the one that sneaks up on you, chasing all 40 zones gets surprisingly tricky for a few of them. zone 2 was the one that sat missing in my log forever. anyway welcome to the rabbit hole, fair warning it does not get cheaper from here

Good questions and smart to ask before you drill anything. On the antenna — honestly just do the NMO now. Mag mounts are fine temporarily but they move around, the cable gets pinched in door frames, and you'll end up doing the proper mount eventually anyway. Might as well skip the in between step. A lip mount or a through-hole NMO on the cab roof will be way more stable and you'll get better ground plane contact too. On the power question, running direct to the battery with an inline fuse is the right call. Fuse panels in modern trucks often share circuits with stuff that can cause interference, and the wire gauges on those circuits aren't always rated for the current draw a 50 watt radio can pull, especially on transmit. Just run 12 or 10 gauge wire with a fuse close to the battery and you'll be good. It sounds like more work but honestly it isnt that bad and you'll be glad you did it. Newer trucks can definitely have noise issues but a lot of people install without any problems at all. If you do get ignition whine or alternator noise there are a few things to try — engine ground strap, ferrite chokes on the power leads, etc. But dont pre-solve a problem you might not have. Get it installed first and see how it goes.

honestly when i first got on air i was so nervous about the phonetics that i'd blank on them mid-callsign and just say the letter by itself which is way worse lol. i printed out a little card and taped it next to my radio for like the first month. most people are pretty patient if youre clearly still learning but yeah the NATO ones are what everyone expects to hear so thats what you want to go with. some of the old timers use things like "Radio" for R instead of Romeo and nobody really bats an eye but for a newer person i'd just stick with the standard

yeah that tracks, last tuesday i heard some 10m signals that sounded like they were next door and they turned out to be Australia. i'm relatively new to HF and this solar cycle stuff is still kind of confusing to me but it's cool to see it actually working in real life instead of just reading about it. congrats on the Japan contact that's awesome

yeah i went through this exact same thing like 8 months ago lol. ended up getting a cheap baofeng UV-5R just to have something while i figured things out and honestly it worked fine for basic stuff but the reciver is pretty noisy and i kept getting weird intermod hits near the city. eventually picked up a wouxun and its noticeably better. that said if money is tight the baofeng will still let you get on the air and thats what matters when youre starting out

the import after approach is what most people end up doing i think. i tried to get clever and run both simultaneously for a while and it just created duplicate entries and headaches. not worth it. N1MM for contests, Log4OM or whatever else for everything else, sync them up after with an ADIF import and call it a day. WSJT-X UDP drops are annoying but restarting WSJT-X usually fixes it faster than digging into why it dropped in the first place, at least during an actual contest when you dont have time to troubleshoot

honestly the technician test really isnt that bad, i was stressing about it for weeks before i sat down and actually started studying and then knocked it out in like 3 weeks. i used HamStudy.org almost exclusively and just did practice questions every night before bed for maybe 20-30 minutes. the site tracks what you're getting wrong and keeps throwing those at you which helped a lot. the thing is the question pool is publicly available so you literally know every possible question that could show up on your exam. thats a huge advantage. i did read through the ARRL technician manual too just to get some actual understanding of whats going on with the electronics stuff, because some of those questions make zero sense if you dont know even the basics of like what voltage and current are. but you dont need to go deep, just enough so the questions click. day of the test i was done in maybe 10 minutes and passed with one wrong. find a local club doing a VE session and just go do it, sitting on it too long doesnt help

yeah trees are definitely not a given at the kinds of parking lots and fairgrounds they always seem to pick for these things. i carry two of those surplus military mast sections — the fiberglass push-up kind — and they nest together to get me around 20-25 feet which is enough for a vertical or the apex of a low dipole. not glamorous but it packs into a duffel and i can set it up solo. one thing i'll throw out there, and maybe this is obvious, but make sure whoever is on the genny backup duty actually knows how to start it and check the oil before the exercise. sounds dumb but that run-it-dry thing you mentioned is way more common than it should be. we had the same thing happen at a simulated emergency last spring. the generator came back fine after it cooled down thankfully but it was a stressful 45 minutes.

so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and yeah its great for working new entities and all that but honestly it feels like a slot machine most of the time, you click a callsign, exchange the 73 and thats it, no actual contact made if you know what i mean someone at our club meeting mentioned JS8Call a few months back and i finally got around to installing it last weekend. took me a bit to figure out the relay and store-and-forward stuff but once it clicked i actually had a 20 minute back and forth with a guy in Montana while running like 10 watts into my end-fed on 40m. felt more like actual ham radio to me the decode sensitivity isnt quite as deep as FT8 obviously but for what it does its pretty impressive. my question is whether anyone has found a good balance between running both on the same band at the same time, right now im just alt-tabbing between WSJT-X and JS8Call but that seems janky. also curious if anyone still runs PSK31 regularly because the JS8Call guys on the reflector kept bringing it up like its the comparison point and i havent touched PSK in probably 8 years

so ive been chasing VP6R for like two weeks and kept getting nowhere, just wall of noise every time i called. been licensed 6 years and honestly pileup operating is still kind of a black box to me. i know the basics, listen for where the DX is actually coming back, work split obviously, but i kept getting stomped. what finally clicked was i stopped calling right when the DX finished and started timing my call to land maybe half a second after the pile starts. not sure if thats what did it or if propagation just opened up but i got him on 17m around 0200z. running about 600w into a 4el yagi at 45ft which isnt crazy but its decent. curious what other people actually do differently. ive read all the advice about tail-ending and working the edges of the pileup frequency and honestly some of it seems contradictory. like some guys say call slightly high, some say low, some say varies by DX operator preference. anyone have a real feel for this or is it mostly just persistence and luck?

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. seriously though the paddle tension thing took me forever to figure out and i still tweak mine occasionally. what you want is light enough that your fingers arent working hard but not so loose that you get double letters from bouncing. just sneak up on it slowly — tighten the contact gap just a tiny bit at a time and send some letters until it feels clean. there's no magic number, its totally personal. on the speed question i'd go with farnsworth. starting at 5wpm character speed is painful because the letters dont sound like letters anymore, they sound like you're counting dots and dashes which is exactly the habit you dont want. i started with LCWO at 20wpm characters and like 8-10wpm effective speed and it was hard at first but i think it rewired my brain faster. took me maybe 3 months to get comfortable enough to actually make contacts. keyer brand at your stage really doesnt matter much. the cheap ones work fine for learning. once you know what you like you might want something nicer but dont spend money on that yet, spend it on a decent set of paddles if anything. the paddle feel makes more difference than the keyer electronics IMO.