Rachel Williams

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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