Daniel Rodriguez

yeah this is pretty much exactly what we found when our group did something similar a couple years back. the tabletops give you this false sense of security because everyone sounds confident when theres no actual radio traffic to manage. the moment real operators are on the air with real (simulated) pressure its a completely different animal. the thing about the message handoff is huge and i dont think enough groups practice it. we actually started doing what we call last mile drills where someone physically walks up to an operator and hands them a written message and they have to get it formatted and transmitted while someone else is trying to talk to them at the same time. its uncomfortable but thats kind of the point. the discomfort in training is way better than the discomfort during an actual event. also worth looking at your ICS integration if you havent already. a lot of the confusion around priority traffic comes from operators not fully understanding where they fit in the incident command structure, like who do you report to when the agency rep and net control are telling you different things. that was a mess for us until we sorted out the chain more clearly.

so ive been a general for about two years now and people keep telling me to just go ahead and get my extra. i mostly do HF, some digital modes, bit of SSB on 40 and 20m. the general exam wasnt too bad once i studied for a few weeks but ive heard the extra has a lot more theory, like actual math and electronics stuff that i havent thought about since maybe high school. my main question is just how deep does it really go? i dont have an engineering background or anything, just a hobbyist who figured out how to use the radio mostly by doing it. is the extra exam something a regular person can realistically pass or do you really need to understand all the theory behind it. also wondering if the extra privileges are even worth it for someone who mostly operates on bands that generals can already use anyway. not sure if this is even the right subforum for this

yeah what he said about the generator. we tried going all-battery at a simplex exercise last summer with a similar setup and we were babysitting the voltage by hour six. not a good look when you're supposed to be demonstrating reliable field comms to the county emergency manager. one thing i'll throw in — if you do bring the Honda, get a good 30ft extension cord so you can tuck the genny away from the operating position. nothing like trying to copy a weak station over a generator buzzing three feet from your head. also if anyone on your team has a small solar panel kicking around even a couple hundred watts thrown on the battery bank during the day can make a noticeable difference as a supplement, not a replacement obviously.

oh man i remember my first activation, i was so worried about everything going wrong and then the pile got pretty big and i forgot to be nervous haha. one thing i wish someone told me - have your grid square and summit reference written on a piece of paper in front of you because when youre juggling the radio and logging and trying to hear callsigns through qsb your brain just goes blank sometimes. super basic thing but it helped me a lot on my second one when i finally did it.

okay so the single yagi thing is real but you have to be honest with yourself about expectations. with a single long yagi on 2m, something like a 9 or 10 wavelength design, and a really good preamp right at the feedpoint, you can hear the moon in Q65 mode and you will work stations running big arrays. but those big stations have to want to work you, they have to know youre a small pistol and be willing to crank out the power on their end. the path loss is around 252 dB total on 2m which sounds impossible until you realize digital modes and modern DSP have basically changed the game entirely compared to what guys were doing in the 70s with SSB and huge dishes the real minimum for consistent EME activity on 2m is probably two long yagis stacked, a low noise preamp with maybe 0.3 to 0.5 dB noise figure right at the antenna, and knowing how to use WSJT-X properly. the scheduling question is easy, check the ON4KST chat, thats where basically everyone coordinates EME skeds in real time. dx.qsl.net has a moonbounce database too that a lot of people use

honestly just use hamstudy.org and drill the questions every day for like 20 minutes. the site shows you which ones youre getting wrong and focuses on those which helps a lot. the tech pool isnt that huge and if you do it consistently for two weeks you should be fine. the current pool runs through like mid 2026 i think so you should be good unless something changed recently, worth double checking on the ARRL site just to be sure the "understand vs memorize" debate is kind of overblown for tech in my opinion. some of the questions you will genuinely understand because theyre logical, like antenna stuff or basic safety rules, but some of the electrical formula questions are easier to just pattern match unless you actually want to learn the math. for passing the exam either approach works, for actually using the radio the understanding comes naturally once you start operating anyway

honest answer? for casual SSB on 40 and 20 with a trap vertical, probably not. the 7300 is genuinely a very good radio and most of where the 890 shines is in crowded contest conditions or if you're doing serious weak signal work where you need every dB of dynamic range you can get. if your antenna is the limiting factor — and a trap vertical is a trap vertical — you're not going to hear a dramatic difference in your day to day operating that said i did go from a 7300 to an 890S about 18 months ago and i do notice a difference on 40m late evenings when the band gets busy. the close-in dynamic range really does matter when there's a loud station 2kHz away and you're trying to pull something out. but i'm also running a 4-el yagi on a 50ft tower so take that for what it's worth. if i was stuck with a vertical i honestly dont know if i'd have bothered with the upgrade

yeah what he said about the filtering. i tried SO2R without bandpass filters once, never again. my second radio was basically useless any time i was transmitting on the other one even with the antennas on different bands. ended up just running single radio that whole contest lol. one thing nobody mentions enough is the logging software side of things. N1MM+ handles SO2R pretty well but you gotta get the radio switching set up right or youll be sending on the wrong rig at the worst possible moment. had that happen during a run in CQWW and lost probably 5 minutes sorting it out while people were calling me. anyway its doable on a budget station but go in with realistic expectations i think.

no hard rule that you have to use phonetics every single time, its more just a tool for clarity. on a good clean repeater where everyone can hear fine, most folks just say their call straight. where phonetics really matter is when the band is noisy, youre doing simplex and the signal is marginal, or youre in a net where the control operator is logging calls and needs to get it right first try. HF is where youll see people almost always use them because conditions vary so much. and yeah you'll definitely hear the old ICAO/civilian phonetics mixed in sometimes, Easy for Echo or Oboe for Oscar. a lot of the older guys learned those first and never fully switched over. it works fine as long as the other person understands you, but if youre doing any kind of formal traffic handling or emcomm stuff you really want to stick to NATO because thats what everyone is trained on and mixing them up in an emergency net is just asking for confusion. X is Xray by the way, that one trips everyone up at first

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my uncle has been doing it for years and it always seemed cool but i never really looked into it seriously until recently. i know you need a license but i honestly dont even know what the different levels are or how the test works or anything. like do you just show up somewhere and take a test or is there a class you have to take first? and how hard is it really, im not great at math if that matters also i looked up some stuff online and saw something about technician and general and extra, are those all separate tests or is it like one big test with levels? sorry if this is a dumb question im just trying to figure out where to even begin

we went last year too and yeah the turnout was a little disappointing compared to like 2019. but i heard the club thats organizing it this time actually did some extra promotion so maybe itll be better. our club isnt doing a table but a few of us are going just to walk around. the flea market usually picks up around 9am in my experience, if you show up right at opening you can get first crack at the good stuff before the dealers cherry pick everything

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend, been meaning to try one for ages but kept putting it off because honestly the whole process seemed complicated from the outside. its really not though once you just dive in. i picked a local nature reserve that was already registered in the WWFF database, took me a while to find one nearby that wasnt super remote since i dont have 4WD and some of these references are way off the beaten track. ended up at a state conservation park about 45 minutes from home, nice spot, had a picnic table which was a bonus. ran the KX2 into a linked dipole strung between two gum trees, maybe 6 meters up. worked mostly 40m and had a go at 20 as well. got my 44 contacts which i think is the minimum for a valid activation? and then kept going for another hour or so because the pile up was still going and the weather was nice. logged about 90 QSOs total which felt pretty good for a first go. uploading to WWFF.us was a bit confusing, i had to convert my log from ADIF and make sure the reference number was in there correctly. took me two attempts but it got accepted. anyone else find the upload process a bit fiddly or is it just me?

I was in the same boat like a year ago. upgraded to General last spring and yeah the test felt a little harder than Tech but not crazy. the parts that tripped me up were more like the propagation stuff and some of the operating procedures, not so much the math. there is some math but if you just work through the practice tests enough times the formulas kind of stick even if you dont fully understand them. one thing i'll say is get yourself at least a halfway decent HF rig before you pass the exam so youre not just sitting there with a new license and nothing to use it on, i made that mistake and waited like 2 months to actually get on the air and it felt like forever. i ended up going with a used icom 718 which was maybe not the most exciting choice but it works and i've made contacts all over with it

yeah the 10m thing is real, ive been having a blast up there. worked a guy in south africa last thursday on a mobile whip which i still cant quite believe. the solar flux has been sitting up pretty high and the K index has been cooperating so conditions have just been lining up nicely. re: Hamvention flea market — get there early. like, embarassingly early. the good stuff moves fast and i mean FAST. i've gone a few times and the years i slept in i ended up just walking past empty tables by noon. bring cash, bring a cart if you can, and dont expect prices to be as low as you hope. some vendors know exactly what they have and price accordingly lol. still worth it though, theres nothing quite like it.

oh man i went down the same rabbit hole last year, started with a rockmite and then ended up with a whole pile of QRP stuff. the lipo thing works but just be careful, i killed a cell once by running it too low because i got caught up in a pileup and forgot to check, now i just tape a little voltage alarm buzzer to the pack and it beeps at me when its getting low. like two dollars on amazon and it saved my battery more than once. also if you get into SOTA the sotawatch site lets you self spot from a text message in some regions i think, might be worth looking into depending where you activate. welcome to the rabbit hole by the way, its all downhill from here in the best possible way

yeah the fan behavior on that rig has always bugged people, theres actually a pretty well documented mod floating around where you adjust the thermistor threshold — i want to say its on one of the eham threads or maybe the 857 yahoo group archive. basically you swap out a resistor to lower the trip point so the fan comes on sooner and at lower speed instead of just kicking in full blast when its already hot. i did something similar on mine and its much better for extended mobile use. search for "857D fan mod" and you'll find a few variations, some people just wire the fan to run continuously at low voltage which is simpler but a bit noisier. on the power output thing you're probably right that it tapers off on extended TX, thats normal for that radio outside its designed range. as long as youre not trying to run full power into a mismatched antenna on those freqs it should be fine for emcomm use.

I went through the same thing about a year ago. The Extra pool isnt as bad as it looks once you get momentum going. I used the Gordon West book alongside HamStudy and that helped me at least have some context for why the answers are what they are even if I wasnt deriving anything from scratch. One thing I'll say is dont stress too hard about fully understanding every concept before you test. Get your ticket first, then go back and dig into the stuff that interests you. Ive learned way more about the theory stuff since passing than I ever did studying for it, just from building things and reading when something specific comes up. The privileges are worth it too, having access to those CW and phone sub-bands on 75 and 40 makes a real difference especially when its crowded.

yeah you do have to do them in order, tech first then general then extra. but tech is definitely the easiest one and honestly the electrical theory questions arent that bad once you get a feel for the patterns. theres a handful of ohms law type questions and if you just remember E=IR and the power formula you can work most of them out instead of memorizing. i used hamstudy.org when i was studying and just ran through practice tests over and over until i was consistently hitting like 85% or better, took me maybe two weeks of casual studying in the evenings. the real test pool is 426 questions and they pull 35 for the actual exam so yeah theres some memorization involved but the site does a good job of weighting the ones you keep getting wrong. look up if theres a local club near you too because a lot of them run license exam sessions pretty regularly and some even have a study class before it.

during contests i basically never use full phonetics on every letter when im running stations fast, no time for that. but during a contact if the other op asks me to repeat my call i go full phonetic immediately. its kind of situational honestly. the one time it really matters is emcomm or anything where a message has to be copied exactly right, then you phonetic everything and you dont rush it.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, sitting around 80 confirmed on LoTW and trying to figure out when to pull the trigger on applying. from what i read on the ARRL site you need 100 confirmed entities and you can apply as soon as you hit that, theres no reason to wait beyond that point other than just wanting a bigger number i guess. the fee is pretty reasonable too so its not like youre risking much. the dipole at 30 feet is totally fine for a lot of DX especially on 20 and 17 meters, dont let anyone tell you that you need a beam to get started. i worked like 40 entities on a wire antenna before i got anything better. good luck, keep at it

congrats on the first build, that feeling you described is exactly why people get into homebrewing in the first place. it never really goes away either, i still get a little kick out of every contact on something i built myself. for SOTA i'd honestly say 20m is probably more useful overall especially if you want to activate summits and work people further away. 40m is great but like you noticed it gets rough during the day and on a summit activation you might only have an hour or two up there. a lot of activators run both bands if they can, just swap the antenna or use a rig that covers multiple bands. the QCX mini only does one band right but you could always build a second one for 20m down the road, theyre not that expensive. or look into something like a MTR or an Elecraft KX2 if you want multiband in one box, though obviously thats a different price point than a kit build. your end-fed into a tree sounds like a solid portable setup btw. what are you using for a feedpoint matchbox?

Interesting timing - I'm planning the same modification. Current setup has 16 buried radials of varying lengths, but poor soil conductivity seems to be limiting performance. What height did you choose for the elevated radials, and did you notice any change in the radiation pattern or preferred DX directions?

so ive been trying to work some DX on 17 and 20 meters for the past couple weeks and the conditions have just been all over the place. some days i can hear europe no problem around 0900 local, other days the band sounds completely dead and i cant even pull in strong stateside signals. checked pskreporter and its showing spots but i just cant hear anything. looked at the solar flux index this morning and it was sitting around 145 which i thought was pretty decent, but the K index was like 4 last night so maybe thats part of it? i dunno i feel like im still trying to figure out how all of this fits together. does higher K index always kill the higher bands or is it more complicated than that? any good resources to bookmark for checking conditions before i sit down for a session would be appreciated

Welcome to the addiction, seriously once you do your first one youll want to do them every weekend. So WWFF and POTA are actually separate programs with separate databases, but a lot of parks overlap meaning the same physical location has both a KFF reference number and a K- POTA reference. You can operate at one and log for both programs simultaneously which is great, just make sure you upload to both sites separately - wwff.us for the WWFF side and pota.app for POTA. For the log upload, WWFF uses ADIF just like everything else, and you submit through the WWFF website. The 44 QSO requirement is correct for a full activation, though i think you can still submit a partial activation for fewer contacts and it still counts toward the hunters chasing your reference. Spotting yourself on the WWFF or POTA spotting networks makes a huge difference, you go from calling CQ into the void to having a pileup in about 30 seconds. Use SOTAwatch or the POTA spots app. Your 705 and a random wire is totally fine, i do most of my activations with similar setup. Get there early, give yourself time to set up before you start operating, and dont stress if the first 15 minutes feel slow. 40m is usually the workhorse band for parks during the day.

been trying to get my winlink setup dialed in better and im having issues with longer messages just timing out at the RMS gateway. short stuff like 73 how are you doing messages go through fine but anything over maybe 500 characters or so just sits there and eventually times out running pat on linux with a ic7300 through rigctl and usually connect to the local VHF gateway about 15 miles away. signal reports are always good both ways so i dont think its an RF issue. wondering if theres some setting im missing or if the gateway itself has message size limits that arent obvious anyone else run into this or know what might be going on