Rachel Williams

SOTA is a totally different animal than WW if you ever want to try something more relaxed in between contests, just throwing that out there. but yeah WW is a great time, even a modest station can rack up some solid contacts especially if the bands cooperate. 15 meters has been doing some surprising things lately so keep an eye on that one

4x9el and 150w is actually workable for random EME on JT65, i wont lie to you it wont be easy but its been done with less. the big thing people underestimate is the preamp, you really do want something in the 0.3-0.5dB NF range mounted right at the antenna, not down in the shack. every tenth of a dB matters a lot more on EME than it does on any other mode because youre dealing with path losses around 250dB total, the signal is genuinely right at the noise floor most of the time. MGF1302 or ATF-54143 based preamps are popular and you can build one for not a lot if youre handy with a soldering iron, or just buy a DB6NT or SSB electronics unit if you want plug and play. the timing stuff is simple, there are windows when the moon is above the horizon for both you and the DX station at the same time, you can figure that out in any EME propagation software like WSJT-X has it built in honestly. ON4KST chat is where everyone coordinates, you definitely want to be watching that when you get on. patience is the main thing, some contacts take 20-30 minutes of sequencing back and forth.

ok so i just got my technician license like two weeks ago and im still trying to figure out what i can and cant do. i was reading through part 97 the other night and honestly it kind of made my head spin. there's all these tables about frequency privileges and i'm not sure if i'm reading it right. basically what i want to know is, i have a baofeng uv-5r and i know i can do 2m and 70cm stuff with it but someone at my local club mentioned something about how technicians can also do some HF? i looked it up and found something about 10 meters but now im seeing stuff about phone vs CW privileges and i dont fully understand the distinction. like am i allowed to just talk on 28.300 or whatever or is there more to it than that also is there a simpler way to look this up than reading the actual FCC document because that thing is dense

I'm in a pretty similar situation actually, been on Log4OM for general logging for maybe two years and just started dabbling in contests. What I ended up doing is keeping Log4OM as my main station log for everything day to day and treating N1MM as basically a contest-only tool. After the contest I export from N1MM and import the ADIF into Log4OM and it dedupes reasonably well. The one thing to watch out for is that N1MM stores contest logs separately by event which is actually kind of nice because it doesn't clutter your main log, but you do have to remember to do the import or those contacts just sit there. I forgot once and had like 200 contacts from a CW sprint that never made it into my station log for like three months until I noticed the QSL requests coming in for calls I couldnt find.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now (General class) and i keep hearing people talk about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly im a little lost on which one even makes sense to go after first. like i understand the basic concept — work enough entities or states or zones and you get a certificate — but i dont really understand how the credit submission process works or whether you need paper QSLs for all of them or if LoTW is enough for most of it. i've been logging everything on LoTW since day one because someone told me to, which i guess was good advice, so hopefully some of those contacts count toward something. i'm running a modest station, ic-7300 into a trapped vertical in the backyard, nothing fancy. i've worked maybe 60 or 70 countries so far i think but i havent actually confirmed very many on LoTW yet because a lot of the rare ones dont upload there apparently. anyway if someone could just explain like which award is most approachable for a newer ham or which one to focus on first that would be really helpful. or if theres a reason to chase all three at once i guess i could try that too. just dont want to waste a bunch of money submitting credits for the wrong thing first

yeah gpredict with fresh TLEs from celestrak has been more accurate for me than heavens-above, i think heavens above caches their elements longer or something. anyway welcome to satellite, its addictive once you actually make a contact. AO-73 can be pretty crowded on weekends so sometimes its hard to find your own downlink signal with everyone piling on

the general exam isnt nearly as bad as it looks when you first open the pool, honestly. when i upgraded a few years back i used hamstudy.org and just drilled flashcards for maybe three weeks, like 20-30 minutes a night. the site tracks which questions you keep missing and focuses you on those. by the time i sat for the exam i was consistently hitting 85-90% on the practice tests and the real thing felt pretty straightforward. the propagation stuff does look scary at first but once you actually get on HF and start hearing the bands open and close it all starts clicking in a way that reading never quite gets across. like yeah you can memorize that 10 meters is good during high solar flux but once you hear it yourself its just different. the math questions you can mostly brute force from the pool since the answers are right there, doesnt hurt to understand why but you dont have to going in. as for whether its worth it, i mean that depends on what you want out of the hobby but for me getting on 40 meters for the first time and having a guy in germany actually come back to my call was kind of a moment. its a different scale than local stuff for sure

so i've been messing with winlink for a few weeks now and i finally got a connection to go through last night which was exciting but im still pretty fuzzy on how the whole gateway side of things works. like i understand the basic concept, you send an email over RF and it eventually makes it to the internet through a gateway station, but the RMS part is where i start losing the thread. right now im using Winlink Express and connecting through a local RMS node on 2m packet. that part works fine. but i want to start thinking about HF because thats kind of the whole point for me — being able to use this when normal infrastructure is down. i tried connecting to a couple of the HF gateways listed in the propagation map but i keep getting timeouts. not sure if thats a propagation issue or if im doing something wrong with the VARA settings. my antenna situation on HF is not great (end fed that probably has some issues) so that could be it too. also does anyone actually run their own RMS gateway? like whats involved in that? i saw something about needing to register with winlink.org and i assume you need to keep the station running pretty much constantly for it to be useful. just curious whether thats something a regular person does or if its more of a club thing.

WAZ is another one worth looking at too if you havent already — 40 CQ zones confirmed. i actually found WAZ harder than WAS in some ways because a few of the zones are just really underrepresented on the bands, like zone 2 up in northern Canada gets active sometimes but you gotta catch it. anyway yeah dont stress too much about strategy early on, just work DX whenever you can and the awards kind of fill in naturally over time. the chasing is half the fun honestly.

7.250 is fine, i work that area all the time. just be aware that 40m gets pretty crowded especially in the evenings and you might find a lot of nets already parked on certain freqs. dont stress too much about the band plan stuff when youre starting out, just listen before you transmit and youll figure out where things are pretty quick. the main thing new generals mess up isnt the allocations, its forgetting that their ssb carrier freq plus the audio bandwidth is what takes up space, not just the dial number

oh wow I had no idea 10m was open like that, im pretty new and just got my general a couple months ago so ive mostly been hanging around 40 and 20 just trying to figure things out. gonna have to tune up there this weekend and see whats happening. do i need to do anything special or just start scanning around 28.3 or so for SSB?

i tried SO2R for about one contest and gave up lol. maybe im just not wired for it but the cognitive load of managing two radios while trying to copy calls at speed was too much for me. went back to single radio and honestly my accuracy went way up. the guys who are good at it seem to have a very specific mental workflow where the second radio is almost background noise until its not, hard to explain but its like they've trained themselves to partition their attention differently. i think some people can learn it and some just cant or dont want to and thats fine. not every contest op needs to be chasing the efficiency ceiling

im kind of in the same boat as you, been thinking about this for a while. one thing i picked up at a club presentation is that the WSJT-X implementation of JT65B is really what opened EME up to smaller stations, like before digital modes even 4 yagis wasnt always enough to reliably complete contacts. now people are doing it with two yagis and legal limit more often than youd expect. still probably wont be easy but its not the impossible thing it used to be the preamp thing i cant speak to from experience yet but the guy presenting said the mast mount vs shack mount thing is huge, something about even 3 feet of LMR-400 before the preamp adding noticeable noise. dunno if thats exactly right but it stuck with me

yeah dont stress about it too much. i messed up way worse my first time — accidentally keyed up right when net control was talking and had no idea what happened. someone came back and said "you've got a doubling situation" and i was completely lost. took me a minute to figure out i had stepped on the frequency. nobody was mean about it though, the guys on our local net are pretty patient with newer hams. just keep showing up and you'll get it.

Increasing the counterpoise beyond about 3 feet won't make any noticeable improvement. What you've discovered is the minimum needed to make the antenna function. Some of the "no counterpoise" claims online are misleading - they're often relying on stray capacitance or the coax shield acting as the return path.

I was in the exact same spot about a year ago and ended up going with the baofeng UV-5R just because it was cheap enough that I didnt feel bad if I messed something up learning. Programmed it with CHIRP software which made the whole thing way less painful than doing it by hand through the menus. I will say though after a few months I did upgrade to something better because the receive on the baofeng felt kinda muddy compared to radios my elmer let me try. So if you can stretch to the ft-60 range from the start you might save yourself buying twice like I did. Either way you're gonna have fun, local repeaters are a great way to just get comfortable making contacts

so the short answer is yes, LoTW confirmations absolutely count for DXCC — actually the ARRL basically built LoTW around DXCC so its really well integrated. you log your contacts, upload your ADIF to LoTW, and when the other station also uploads their log and there's a match, that becomes a confirmed credit. you dont need paper cards at all if both stations are on LoTW. as for which award to chase first, honestly i'd say just let it happen naturally. work whatever stations you hear and over time you'll accumulate credits toward all three. DXCC needs 100 confirmed entities which takes a while but is very doable, WAS is 50 states which sounds easy but Alaska and Hawaii will make you wait, and WAZ is the 40 CQ zones which some people find trickier because zone boundaries dont follow country lines. the real trap is spending money on QSL bureau fees before you figure out if LoTW is going to cover most of your needs. get active on LoTW first, see where you stand after a few months of real operating.

mag mounts work fine for most people, dont let anyone talk you into drilling your truck if youre not comfortable with it. that said if youre hitting marginal spots on your commute the coax on a lot of mag mounts is pretty lossy especially the ones that come bundled with the antenna. id check what youre running first before assuming its the mount causing issues.

i was in the same boat like a year ago and honestly just downloaded morse mania on my phone and messed around with it during lunch breaks. its not perfect but it got me knowing the alphabet at least. the key thing i wish someone told me earlier is dont try to learn everything at once, i kept trying to memorize all 26 letters in a week and it just didnt stick. also hamcram.com or was it hamtest.online, one of those has some cw practice audio files i think, or maybe thats a different site i cant remember exactly

our club is doing a table there this year selling off some donated gear, should be some decent stuff if anyone needs older HF equipment or random accessories. stop by if you see the W8 something banner lol i always forget our exact callsign suffix

nice work getting it done. i did my second one a few months ago and im still figuring out the sotawatch stuff, kept forgetting to put my frequency in the spot and people were hunting around for me. 40m yeah its crowded but i had good luck dropping down toward the bottom of the phone portion and just calling CQ SOTA a bunch of times. some people will find you even without a spot if you're persistent enough i think

Yeah don't stress about memorizing all of them, there's like 100+ official Q codes but realistically on the air you're gonna hear maybe 15-20 regularly. QSL is acknowledged/confirmed, QTH is location, QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural noise like static, QSB is fading signal, QRZ is asking who's calling, QRP means low power operation and people use that one a lot. QRO is high power, QSY means change frequency, QRX is standby. 73 just means best regards, it's not a Q code but it's been around forever, and 88 is hugs and kisses which you mostly hear between close friends on air or sometimes YL operators. Honestly just listen for a while and they'll start clicking. I kept a little cheat sheet printed out next to my radio for the first few months and that worked fine.

yeah that plateau around 8-10wpm is super common, almost everyone hits it. what worked for me was forcing myself to listen at a higher speed than i could copy -- like set the character speed way up, 20wpm or even 25, but stretch out the spacing between characters so you have time to process. Farnsworth timing they call it. the idea is your brain starts to hear letters as sounds instead of counting dits and dahs, which is the thing that kills most people at that stage. also and this is the big one -- stop writing everything down. i know it feels wrong but trying to write every letter is what causes that snowball effect you're describing. practice head copy, even if you only catch half the letters at first. let the ones you miss go and focus on the next one. it gets better faster than you'd think once you commit to it. i went from stuck at 10 to comfortable 18-20wpm over about four months doing mostly that plus some time on 40m just listening to QSOs even when i couldnt copy them fully.

been tech for about 3 years now, mostly just chat on the local repeaters and do some simplex stuff when hiking. everyone keeps telling me to upgrade to general but im not sure if its worth the hassle since i really dont know much about HF yet. like what would i actually do with it? seems like a lot more complicated than vhf/uhf also how hard is the test compared to tech? i barely passed that one lol

As a Tech on 10m, I typically stay between 28.300-28.500 for phone and keep my CW around 28.070-28.150. The IC-7300 has excellent frequency stability, but I still give myself at least 5 kHz buffer from the band edges. Different signals occupy the band differently - narrow modes such as CW and many data signals can live efficiently in smaller slices, while phone and image work need more bandwidth.