Brian Mitchell

so i've been chasing FT5/W for about 3 days now and kept getting buried in the pileup, tried everything i thought i knew and just kept getting walked over. my setup is nothing special, K3 into a 4el yagi at about 40ft, so i'm not exactly running a kilowatt into a stack of monobanders here. what finally worked was stopping trying to call on top of everyone else and actually listening to where the DX was coming back. took me embarassingly long to figure out he was working a very tight 2-3 khz window split and wasn't moving around much at all. once i started picking the edges of where he was actually pulling calls from instead of just smashing my call in the middle of the pileup, i started getting through within like 4 or 5 calls. also started sending my suffix only after i heard him end a qso, not my full call every time. i know thats pretty basic advice but i wasnt doing it and it made a noticeable difference. anyone else have techniques that actually work in a big pileup? feel like theres a lot of bad advice floating around about just running more power

im in almost the same situation lol, worked a VK last month on 15 and have barely heard anything exotic since. kind of wondering if i just got lucky with timing. gonna go check that dxmaps site the other guy mentioned, never heard of it

the ALC thing your buddy mentioned is real and probably your first issue honestly. if your ALC is peaking and holding, youre basically overdriving the modulator and that smears everything. back your mic gain down until the ALC is just occasionally kissing the top of the meter on voice peaks, not sitting up there. the 7300 is kinda sensitive to this. for the EQ, yeah rolling off below 300hz helps a lot especially on 40m where theres a lot of low frequency noise floating around. it cleans up your signal and makes you easier to copy. i run a pretty aggressive high pass around 250-300hz, then a small boost somewhere around 2-2.5khz to add some presence. nothing dramatic, like 3-4db. and honestly turn the compression down or off while you dial in the EQ first, otherwise youre chasing your tail because the compressor changes how everything sounds dynamically. set the tone first then add compression back in gently.

so i've been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now and my neighbor who's been licensed for like 20 years told me to just go for it and take the technician exam. i downloaded some stuff but honestly there's so much out there i dont even know what to look at first. like there's the ARRL book, there's HamStudy, there's some app someone mentioned on reddit, and then someone else said to just memorize the question pool which sounds kind of terrifying because there's what, 400 something questions? i work full time so i cant study for hours every day. is there a realistic way to pass this without spending months on it? and does it actually matter if you understand the stuff or can you just pattern match your way through it? asking for real because im not an electronics guy at all, i barely passed high school physics

so ive been putting together a go-kit for some local emcomm stuff and also just for fun portable ops and im running into the classic generator vs battery debate again. my current thinking is a 2200w inverter generator for anything longer than a few hours and then a 100ah lifepo4 for shorter activations or when i need to stay quiet. the problem is the generator i borrowed last time was noisy as hell on 40m, like S7-S8 noise floor, made ssb basically useless. i was running a linked dipole at about 30 feet and the feedline was maybe 15 feet from the genny. is that just a grounding issue or is it the generator itself being garbage? i didnt have any ferrites on the feedline or the power leads. also wondering what people are actually running for antennas in the field when they need to be up fast. i like the linked dipole but putting it up solo is kind of annoying when youre also trying to manage everything else. been eyeing one of those 9:1 unun end fed setups but i know those are kind of a mixed bag depending on who you talk to. anyone running a dedicated field power setup thats actually worked well for them across multiple bands? im not opposed to spending money but i also dont want to overthink this before the weekend

omg i totally missed it, was at work and saw some spots on the cluster when i checked my phone but couldnt do anything about it. this is exactly why i need to get my remote setup actually working lol. been putting it off for months and every time something like this happens i kick myself. what part of the country are you in? im in the northeast and we dont always get the same openings as you midwest and southeast folks do with south america.

yeah this is one of those arguments that never really dies on forums lol. i modeled a bunch of variations in 4nec2 last winter when i was bored and the takeaway i got was that apex height matters way more than the shape, like whether its V or flat. get the center up as high as you can and dont stress the rest too much. also ladder line into a tuner is already doing you favors so id just leave it alone if it's working

yeah the inverting transponder thing trips up pretty much everyone at first. the key thing to burn into your brain is that when you tune UP on your uplink, your downlink signal moves DOWN in the passband. so if you hear yourself drifting high, you need to transmit lower, not higher. once that becomes instinct it gets way easier. for gpredict and the 9700, make sure you have the doppler tuning set to full duplex mode and that youre using the correct TLE file thats actually recent — old TLEs will throw off the prediction enough to make the whole thing feel broken. also the 9700 CAT can be a little finicky with gpredict depending on which version youre running, some people have better luck with hamlib vs the native rigctld setup. i'd check the amsat-bb archives because there was a whole thread on 9700 CAT weirdness like 8 months ago that might be exactly your issue. once you get a couple passes where it clicks, the whole thing kind of snaps into place and you stop thinking about it so much. AO-7 is tricky anyway because of the whole eclipse/sunlight mode switching thing, dont get discouraged by that one specifically

cant make that one but our club is doing a swap meet in october if anyones in the northeast ohio area. pretty small compared to a real hamfest but people bring good stuff and theres usually someone around who knows way more than me which is always helpful lol

the picnic table setups are underrated tbh. ive done plenty of activations from basically a parking lot and nobody cares as long as you're in the park boundary. also for the EFHW if you can get a 9:1 unun and just mess with the wire length a bit you'll probably find a spot that tunes way easier. what length wire were you running?

yeah that feeling is completely normal, honestly the first activation is always a little overwhelming no matter how much you've trained. the training nets and tabletops are great but theres no substitute for the real thing and the pressure that comes with it. i remember my first one years ago was a search and rescue support op and i was fumbling with my log sheets and second guessing everything i wrote down. the thing that helped me most was just doing more simplex drills and actually practicing written traffic handling not just voice, because in a real activation you can get buried in formal messages real fast. also getting comfortable with the ICS 214 activity log format so it becomes muscle memory. sounds like you did fine though, keeping up under that kind of pressure your first time is honestly half the battle. the next one will feel a lot more natural.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff confused me too when i started. so the short version is they really do serve different purposes even though they overlap. LoTW is run by the ARRL and its the gold standard for award purposes like DXCC, WAS, that kind of thing. the setup is kind of a pain because you have to get a certificate from the ARRL but once its done its pretty seamless. eQSL is easier to set up and a lot of casual operators use it, but most of the big awards dont accept it, or at least DXCC doesnt. some awards do though so its not totally useless. paper cards are still very much a thing especially in the DX community. some guys abroad only do paper, and honestly getting a nice QSL in the mail from like a rare island or something still feels pretty special even in 2024. most of the time if youre working DX youll want to send a card anyway, either direct or through a bureau. id say get LoTW set up first since thats the most useful for awards, then eQSL is easy enough that you might as well. and yeah Log4OM handles both pretty well once you get the certificates sorted out.

totally been there, dont get discouraged. the net directory can be hit or miss honestly, a lot of those listings are outdated by years. best thing i ever did was just ask at my local club meeting which nets the members actually check into regularly — turns out there was a 2m net running tuesday nights like 10 miles away that wasnt even in the directory anymore because the net manager never updated it. for special event stations that's kind of a separate world from regular nets. you can find those on the ARRL special event station page, they list them by date and they're usually one time things for like lighthouses, historical sites, anniversaries of battles, that kind of thing. the lighthouse weekend in august is a big one if you havent heard of it. you work em and sometimes get a certificate or QSL card. its pretty fun once you do your first one, not scary at all. just call their callsign and give your call and signal report and youre done basically.

Hamalert has been having some growing pains with the increased digital mode activity lately. The developer HB9DQM mentioned on their forum that they've had to filter out some FT8/FT4 spots to keep the system from being overwhelmed. might not be directly related to your pota issue but could be affecting overall performance. have you tried checking the hamalert forum to see if others are reporting similar problems?

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and ive been making contacts and logging everything in WSJT-X and then importing to HAMRS and honestly the whole QSL confirmation thing is kind of overwhelming me a little. like i understand the basic concept, you confirm the contact with the other station, but theres so many ways to do it now and i dont really understand which ones matter and for what. i signed up for LoTW because someone at my club said thats the one you need for DXCC and i uploaded my log but barely anything is showing as confirmed. and then i keep hearing people mention eQSL and i made an account there too but it seems like a totally different thing? and some people still send physical cards through the bureau and i got a few in the mail which was actually really cool but im not sure if i need to send any back or how that even works. so i guess my actual question is like, do i need all three? and is there a way to make this less complicated because right now it feels like a second hobby just managing confirmations

ok so i just passed my technician exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to get as my first radio. ive been reading forums and watching youtube videos for like two weeks and somehow i feel more confused now than when i started. everyone seems to have a different opinion and half the threads im finding are from like 2015 so i dont know whats still relevant. my main thing is i want to get on local repeaters and maybe eventually do some simplex stuff, nothing crazy. i saw a lot of people recommending the baofeng uv-5r just because its cheap but then other people say avoid it and spend the extra money on a yaesu or kenwood. i have maybe 150 bucks to spend, could stretch to 200 if it makes a real difference. is the jump in price actually worth it or is this one of those things where the cheap option is honestly fine for a beginner

ok so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i finally got brave enough to check into a local 2m net last tuesday. the net control called for check-ins and i just said my callsign and my name like i heard others do and i thought that went fine. but then afterward one of the guys came back to me on simplex and said i should have waited for a pause before transmitting and that i was "doubling" with someone else. i honestly didnt even hear anyone else transmitting at the same time so i dont know if that was my radio or what. anyway now im second guessing everything. like when do you actually transmit during a net? do you just jump in when it sounds clear or is there some kind of order to it? and what about directed nets vs round table ones, is the procedure different? i checked a couple youtube videos but they kind of contradicted each other which didnt help. just want to make sure im not being that annoying new guy who steps on everyone

Check your ALC settings too - I know it sounds weird since you're talking about receive but I've seen rigs do strange things when the ALC feedback circuit gets wonky. Also try doing a full reset, sometimes these rigs get their brains scrambled and a factory reset fixes weird band-specific issues. Worth a shot before you start pulling boards apart.

so i finally sat down for a serious chunk of CQ WW SSB last weekend and wow. i've been licensed about 14 months and done a little bit of Field Day stuff with the club but never really operated solo in a big contest like this. i wasn't even planning to submit a log i just wanted to see what the bands were doing. ended up working like 47 countries in about 4 hours on 20m and a bit of 15m which i know isnt impressive to most of you but for me that was kind of a revelation. kept hearing zones i'd never even thought about, worked a couple of guys in africa and one station in the middle east that came back to me on the first call which felt pretty good. the rate during the peak hours was insane though, some of the big contest stations were just running and running and i had no idea how they were keeping up. also realized pretty quick my logging software setup was a mess and i was doing a lot of manual stuff i shouldnt have been. anyway my question is - for someone who wants to actually do CQ WW or ARRL DX seriously next year, where do you even start with getting competitive? is it mostly antenna or is operating skill a bigger factor at lower power levels? and does anyone do SOTA activations around contest weekends to try and get both at the same time or is that too much to juggle

i was in the exact same spot about 8 months ago lol. ended up getting the UV-5R because i wasnt sure i'd even stick with the hobby and didnt want to drop real money on it. honestly no regrets for where i started, got me on the air same day basically. now that im more into it im saving up for a Kenwood TH-D74 which is a completely different world obviously but as a starter radio the baofeng did its job. one thing nobody told me — get a better antenna for it right away. the rubber duck that comes with it is pretty mediocre and a nagoya NA-771 or similar is like $12 and makes a noticeable difference on weaker repeaters.

that ZL contact on 10m is awesome, new zealand from the midwest is not a short hop at all. i've only worked ZL a couple times and both were during really good openings. what time of day was that if you dont mind me asking? im trying to get a feel for when to actually be at the radio for the good stuff on 10. i'm pretty new to all the propagation prediction stuff myself so i dont have much advice but i downloaded an app called HamSphere or actually i think the one i use for predictions is called VOACAP, someone on here recommended it a while back. havent totally figured it out yet but it looks like it can tell you the best times and bands for a given path which would have been useful for me last weekend when i completely missed what sounded like a big 15m opening to africa.

Had the RSP1A for about two years and coming from the rtl-SDR dongle the difference on HF is pretty significant, especially below 10 MHz where the dongle just kind of falls apart. The direct sampling mod on the v3 dongle is ok but its not the same. The RSP1A has proper HF coverage and the preselection filters make a real difference when youre near strong AM broadcast stations. SDRuno works fine but honestly i mostly use it with SDR++ now which has come a long way and handles the RSP devices well. On linux you can use SoapySDR with the RSP drivers and then most software just works through that layer. gqrx will see it no problem that way. The HackRF transmit thing sounds appealing but the receive performance is actually worse than the RSP1A in my experience — the noise figure isnt great and the 8-bit ADC hurts it. If you mostly want to listen id go RSP1A without much hesitation. If you eventually want to get into stuff like replay attacks or portapack experiments then maybe HackRF but thats a whole different direction.

i was in the same exact spot like eight months ago, had no clue about any of it. i just used hamStudy dot org for about three weeks maybe 20 minutes a day and passed tech on the first try. the electronics questions were the ones i struggled with most, like the ohms law stuff, but there are only a few of them and the rest is more like rules and regulations which you can just memorize. dont overthink it, its really not that bad

Perfect timing for the upcoming contests! With the K-index at 1 showing very quiet geomagnetic field conditions and solar flux at 158 providing strong ionization, we should have excellent multiplier opportunities. Time to dust off the beam and get competitive!

Seeing more posts about band edge confusion lately, especially with the recent FCC changes to data bandwidth limits. Here's a systematic approach to ensure you're always operating within your privileges: Know your license class limits - not just the band, but the specific segmentsAccount for signal bandwidth - your signal extends beyond the carrier frequencyCheck mode restrictions - some frequencies are CW/data onlyVerify power limits - especially important on 60 meters and above 50 MHzWhat other steps would you add to this checklist?