Rachel Williams

so we finally got around to doing a proper simulated emergency exercise with our local ARES group and i have some mixed feelings about how it went. for context we had about 14 operators spread across 4 sites — EOC, two shelters, and a mobile unit in a van — and the scenario was basically a major storm had knocked out infrastructure and we were supposed to be the only reliable comms link between sites. the good stuff first: net control did a really solid job staying calm and keeping traffic moving, and we actually had pretty decent coverage with our 2m/70cm setup once we figured out where to point the yagi from the van. but here's where things got rough — we had two operators who had never done formal message handling and the whole ICS-213 thing was just completely foreign to them, like they knew how to key up and talk but when it came to actually passing formatted traffic they kind of froze up. nobody's fault, we just hadnt drilled that part enough beforehand. also discovered our backup power situation at one of the shelters was way worse than anyone thought. the battery we had there hadnt been tested in like 2 years and it gave out after maybe 45 minutes. during a real event that would've been a serious problem. honestly that part was kind of embarrassing but better to find out now i guess. curious if other groups have done similar exercises and what lessons came out of them, specifically around getting newer operators comfortable with message traffic before an actual event happens

just passed mine like two months ago so this is all fresh for me. i used hamstudy and also watched some youtube videos when i didnt understand why an answer was what it was, there's a guy who does breakdowns of the tech question pool and it helps when you actually want to understand the concept and not just memorize. the electrical stuff tripped me up a little at first but it clicks eventually. i think i studied maybe two weeks? passed with room to spare. the test is 35 questions and you need 26 right so its not brutal. good luck, its worth it once you have the callsign

Honestly the bandpass filters are the most important piece and a lot of people underestimate how much bleedover between the two radios will mess with your head even if it doesn't blow anything up. If your 40m signal is getting into the 7300's front end while you're trying to copy on 15 you're fighting that the whole time and it's exhausting. I run a 2-radio setup during CQWW and the rate difference is real but it took me a long time to get there. One thing I do that maybe sounds dumb but actually helped — I practiced outside of contests just doing SO2R with no pressure, like tuning around on a random evening just to get my hands used to the workflow without caring about score.

Consider switching to wfview if you're using Icom - it handles audio streaming more efficiently than some generic remote solutions. The latency difference was night and day for me on similar distances.

the W1AW practice files are good but have you tried the Just Learn Morse Code software or the MorseRunner program? morserunner simulates contest pileups which sounds terrifying but its actually a really good way to train your brain to pick out callsigns fast. i went from about 14 to 20wpm over maybe 4 months using that alongside regular lcwo sessions. one other thing — your sending matters more than people say. if your fist is sloppy your brain gets confused even at lower speeds. spending some time on a straight key or a bug just making sure your characters are clean can weirdly help your copying too. not totally sure why but it worked for me

so i've been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. i looked it up and apparently you need a license to transmit which makes sense i guess. but there's like three different license levels and i dont really know which one to go for first or what the test is even like. is it multiple choice? do you need to know morse code still? i saw something about the technician license being the entry level one but then someone on reddit said you should just skip to general. i have no idea what any of the frequency stuff means yet so im probably starting from zero here. any advice on where to actually study would be helpful, like is there a book i should buy or is online stuff fine

yeah the different-answer problem is real, i went through the same thing when i was building mine. i think what happened for me is i just started treating it like a camping checklist — go out and actually USE it a few times before you need it for real, and every time youll go oh i wish i had brought X. done a couple SOTA activations with mine just to shake it out and i found like four things i needed to fix or add. one thing i dont see you mention is headphones. operating in a noisy environment like an EOC or outside with generators running, being able to plug in headphones is way more useful than i expected. doesnt have to be anything fancy, those old aviation-style ones work great.

welcome to the hobby. yeah that feeling of hearing your own call come back at you never really goes away, even after years of operating. get yourself on HF as soon as you can though, 2m is great but talking across the country or to another continent on a wire antenna you built yourself is something else entirely.

so this has been driving me absolutely nuts for about three weeks now. my 7300 will start a transmission fine, i can see it hit full power on the meter, but somewhere between 5 and 30 seconds in it just drops to basically zero output. like 2-3 watts maybe. the display stays on, the rig thinks its still transmitting, ALC looks normal-ish, but RF output just falls off a cliff. what's weird is it only seems to happen when the rig has been on for at least an hour or so. if i key up cold it's totally fine. i've already reseated the finals heatsink connection and checked the fan is spinning, which it is. PA temps on the diagnostics screen dont seem outrageous either, usually sitting around 45-50C when it happens. i did check the SWR and the antenna is fine, like 1.2:1 on 40m which is where i mostly noticed this. swapped coax just in case. same deal. honestly starting to wonder if it's a thermal issue somewhere other than the finals, or maybe a cap somewhere on the driver board going intermittent when it warms up. anyone dealt with anything similar on these rigs?

i did my first EME qso last spring, honestly was not expecting it to work as well as it did. i had a 4x15el array i built over the winter and the 9700 and caught W5UN on one of his sked nights. the array makes a huge differnce over single yagi, like not even close in terms of how many stations you can hear. one thing nobody really warned me about is the azimuth and elevation rotator situation. i had an old prop pitch motor for az but my el rotator was kind of janky and tracking the moon accurately matters more than i thought it would. also polarity is a whole thing you kind of have to think about depending on where the moon is in your sky relative to the other station.

yeah i just did mine like two months ago. the privileges are genuinely worth it, being able to get on 60m with more flexibility and having the whole phone portion of 75 meters is nice. the CW sub-bands open up too even if you dont actually use CW much. honestly the exam itself felt more manageable than i expected after dreading it. the propagation and antenna theory sections werent bad at all. i think i missed one question about something to do with mixer spurious products and i still have no idea what the right answer was, but everything else kind of clicked. just put the time in with hamstudy and dont skip the ones you keep getting wrong, thats the whole point.

yeah on ssb I pretty much always use full phonetics, signals can be all over the place and the last thing you want is someone logging your call wrong. on the repeater though honestly half the time i just say my call straight and if someone needs me to repeat i'll go phonetic. saves time on a busy repeater one thing that trips people up is mixing non-NATO phonetics in there, like saying "easy" instead of echo or whatever. just stick with the standard ones and everyone knows what you mean

yeah the 386 is notorious for that. i had the same thing on a little CW monitor i built a while back and spent way too long chasing it. ended up being that i had too much lead length between the chip and the bypass caps, moved them right up against the pins on the underside of the board and it mostly went away. also dont run any audio traces parallel to anything carrying RF, even a short run near your antenna input can couple enough to make it misbehave. the NE602 is already pretty microphonic on its own so any pickup gets amplified all the way through

yeah this is a pretty classic tradeoff and honestly it depends what youre doing. if youre working repeaters spread around 360 degrees then a collinear makes way more sense, you dont want to be rotating a yagi every 5 minutes. but if youre trying to make a specific path work or do any kind of weak signal ssb then a yagi will eat the collinear alive, no contest. i built a 6 element 2m yagi from one of the VK2ZOI designs a couple years back, light enough to carry up a hill no problem and the difference compared to my j-pole was honestly shocking. got into a repeater i had never hit before on low power just from antenna gain alone. but i only point it one direction when im up there so it suits me. if your use case is more social and you want to rag chew with whoever is on, get the collinear and dont overthink it. the diamond x50 or whatever its called is solid, lots of people run them portable with decent results.

I went last year for the first time and honestly wasnt sure what to expect but ended up staying like 4 hours. grabbed a decent SWR meter and some random adapters i probably didnt need. the talks they had inside were actually pretty good too, somebody did a whole thing on sota activations that got me interested in portable ops. definitely worth going if you're anywhere near the area

The math in the General pool is mostly Ohm's law stuff and some basic impedance calculations, nothing that should trip you up too bad if you just memorize the formulas. Honestly I'd say hamstudy is better than the book just because it tracks which questions you're getting wrong and focuses on those. The Gordon West book is fine but it's a lot of reading and some of it feels like overkill for just passing the test. One thing nobody told me before I upgraded -- once you actually get on HF with even a simple wire antenna it kind of changes everything. I put up a 40m dipole the week after I passed and just sat there spinning the dial for like an hour listening to SSB contacts from stations all over. Took me a while to actually key up because it felt different than 2m somehow, like more intimidating. Anyway just go take the exam, worst that happens is you fail and you can retake it same session usually depending on the club running the VE session.

so i just got my general license about 4 months ago and somehow ended up joining our county ARES group almost right away because a guy at my club basically dragged me in, which im glad he did but now theres a potential activation coming up because of some flooding in the area and the EC called a net tonight saying we might be needed at the EOC tomorrow. i've done a couple of the weekly nets and one tabletop exercise but nothing real. not sure what gear i should have ready or how formal it all is when you actually show up at the EOC. do they just tell you where to sit and what frequency or is there more to it. also my HT is just a baofeng uv5r which i know people have opinions about but its what i have right now. will that be a problem or should i just not worry about it for now

so ive been at this for a while now and i just cant seem to push past about 13wpm. started back in the spring at 5wpm and made pretty good progress up until maybe 8 or 9 weeks ago and now its like i hit a wall. i can copy at 13 pretty comfortably if the sending is clean but anything faster and i start to fall apart after like the first minute or two. my practice routine is just doing the LCWO lessons every morning for maybe 20-30 minutes and sometimes i listen to W1AW code practice on 40m at night when the band cooperates. been using the Koch method the whole time. i know 20wpm is supposedly where it starts to feel more like listening to a language instead of decoding individual letters but im not sure how to actually get there from here. has anyone else been stuck at this kind of plateau and what did you do to get through it? wondering if i need to change something about how im practicing or just grind through it.

so ive been at this for about 8 months now and i can receive pretty well up to maybe 18-20 wpm on a good day but my sending is just... not great. im using a Begali Traveler that i picked up used and honestly i think its a fine paddle i just dont think i know how to set it up properly or maybe my technique is wrong the main issue is after like 20-30 minutes of operating my right hand starts to really tense up, especially between the thumb and index finger, and my dits start sounding uneven. ive watched a bunch of videos on hold technique and i keep seeing people say to barely rest your fingers on the contacts but when i do that i fumble everything. i feel like im fighting the paddle the whole time anyone gone through this and figured it out? also my keyer is the one built into my IC-7300 and i wonder if the iambic mode settings have anything to do with it, im currently on mode B i think