Stephanie Chang

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i upgraded to general last month which im really happy about. my sequential call is kind of a mouthful and im thinking about applying for a vanity call. ive been reading through the FCC stuff and honestly its a bit overwhelming. from what i can tell you submit an application through the ULS and then theres like a filing window where other people can also apply for the same call and whoever wins gets it? or does it just go in order? i cant figure out if its first come first served or if there's some kind of lottery when multiple people apply for the same sign during the window period. also does it matter what region you're in or can you pick literally any available call? i saw some W1 calls that look really clean but im in the midwest so i wasnt sure if that disqualifies me. any help would be appreciated, this stuff is way more complicated than getting the license itself was lol

honestly just use hamstudy.org and grind the practice tests, thats basically all i did. the actual exam questions come directly from the published pool so if youre getting them right on the practice site youll get them right on the real thing. i probably studied for like 2 weeks and passed no problem. the math questions are annoying but there are only a few of them and if you memorize the formulas you can usually work through it even if you dont fully understand why it works that way the HF thing is the best part though, once you get your upgrade in the system you can just fire up on 40m and start listening. thats how you really learn what the bands are doing anyway

Setting up my first SO2R station with two IC-7600s and a Force-12 C-31XR tribander. I'm getting significant interference between bands without proper filtering - learned the hard way that SO2R without band filters is asking for trouble. Currently experiencing receiver overload when transmitting 100W on 20m while listening on 10m. Looking at band isolation requirements - most sources suggest -50 to -55dB isolation is sufficient for 100W operation. Considering VA6AM BPFs or building homebrew filters. The main concern is 2nd harmonic from 20M TX hitting the 10M receiver - anyone running this exact radio combination with success? Also weighing the TopTen DXDoubler vs YCCC SO2R Box Plus for switching hardware. Which direction would you seasoned SO2R operators recommend for a suburban station?

Radio Only mode is definitely more reliable for extended outages. The Hybrid approach with "simulate internet outage" still tries to connect periodically, while Radio Only commits fully to HF forwarding. Just make sure your HF forwarding schedule doesn't conflict with other local gateways.

yeah what he said about hamstudy, thats basically all i used. took me maybe 3 weeks of like 20 mins a night and passed first try. one thing i'll add is dont overthink the electrical theory questions, a lot of people get scared of those but honestly if you just memorize the answers to the specific questions in the pool you'll be fine even if you dont fully understand ohms law yet or whatever. you can learn the why later once you actually have the license and start playing around with stuff. the test is 35 questions and you need 26 right so theres some room to miss a few

yeah the delay() thing will absolutely kill you for CW timing, especially once you start getting above like 15 WPM. millis() is the right call and it clicks once you just sit down and really look at a few examples — basically you store the last time something happened in a variable and then check if enough time has passed instead of just blocking everything. there are some pretty clean CW libraries out there for arduino already too, morse.h or a couple others, might save you reinventing the wheel if the goal is just to get the beacon running. the transistor keying approach is fine but double check you have a protection diode across whatever youre switching and that youre not pulling too much current through the arduino pin directly. some rigs are a little fussy about what they see on the key line.

timing is the one nobody talks about enough imo. like waiting for the pileup to thin even slightly before calling. i noticed a lot of ops will work a quick burst of stations and then there's like a 2-3 second lull where half the callers give up and go get coffee or whatever and thats when i jump in. works better than just constantly keying up with everyone else. also on cw i started really cleaning up my sending speed, matching what the dx is sending rather than trying to blast at 30wpm when hes running 18. small thing but i think it actually matters for readability on his end

2 minute interval is actually pretty aggressive depending on where you are, some areas the channel gets congested and packets collide constantly. the APRS spec kind of assumes smart beaconing where you slow down when stationary. if your beacon interval is fixed at 2 mins and youre not moving, youre probably stepping on other traffic and causing collisions, which would explain the random appearance on aprs.fi. also check if your IGate is actually connected. pull up the APRS-IS server logs or just watch the raw feed for your callsign. sometimes the IGate near you is gated RF-to-internet fine but the server connection drops and nobody notices for hours. direwolf has a log you can watch in real time that shows whether packets are actually making it to APRS-IS. id start there before assuming its an RF problem.

oh man W4T/SU-062 is a nice little starter summit, i think i chased someone off there maybe a year ago. the FT-818 is such a solid choice for this stuff, ive seen people use all kinds of rigs but that one just works and the battery situation is easy to manage. one thing i'll add about SOTAwatch alerts — even if you're bad at predicting exactly when you'll summit, just posting something vague like a 2 hour window helps a lot. chasers are patient and theyll check back. i've had activators post alerts and then show up 3 hours late and still get spotted and chased so dont stress about being precise. the community is pretty forgiving about timing as long as you actually show up eventually haha

so ive been thinking about going for my general and eventually extra and i keep seeing people talk about cw and how much they enjoy it even though its not required anymore. figured id give it a shot but honestly i dont even know where to start. like do people just memorize the dots and dashes on paper or is there some better way to actually learn it. ive tried looking it up and theres a million different apps and websites and i cant tell which ones are actually worth using vs just garbage. also how long does it realistically take before you can actually use it on the air, not like contest speed just enough to have a slow qso

haha yeah the first one is always a little rough. i remember mine i forgot to bring a way to hang the antenna and ended up just propping it on my trekking poles at like a 45 degree angle, still worked but barely. 40m during the day can be hit or miss depending on the time, sounds like you figured it out though. the activation zone thing gets easier once you do a few, i usually just pull up the summit page on sotl.as before i leave the parking lot and screenshot it

congrats on pushing through that wall, that 10-13 range is where a lot of people just quit so you should feel good about sticking with it. the farnsworth spacing thing you mentioned (character speed high, effective speed lower) is really the key and it took me forever to trust that it actually works. i kept wanting to slow everything down and it just made my brain start counting again. one thing i'll throw out there — once you're solid at 15, try copying without writing anything down for short bursts. like just listen to a minute of cw and then write what you remember after. sounds counterintuitive but it forces your brain to actually process the sounds as words instead of just transcribing. took me from 17 to about 22 faster than anything else i tried. also just getting on the air and actually making contacts helped more than any practice software honestly, even when i was a mess at it. people are usually pretty patient if you let em know you're still learning.

so ive been a ham for about 8 months now (got my general last spring) and i only just this week really started digging into the whole cluster spotting thing. i knew about it but kept putting it off because honestly it looked complicated from the outside. anyway i downloaded the DX Toolkit app on my phone and also have QRZ open on my laptop pretty much all the time now, and the combination of those two plus watching the spots come in on DXwatch has been kind of a game changer for actually finding stations to work. before i was just spinning the dial hoping to land on something interesting. my question for the more experienced folks — is there a preferred cluster node most people connect to, or does it not really matter? i've been using the web interface on DXwatch but i see people mention connecting directly through their logging software and im not sure if thats better or just different. also is there a way to filter by band without missing stuff? i run mostly 20m and 40m so theres a lot of 10m and 6m spots cluttering up my view right now

so ive been practicing CW for about 3 months now and im finally starting to feel okay sending with my paddle but something feels off with how my keyer is producing the dits and dahs. like sometimes the spacing between elements feels mushy, not crisp. im running a Winkeyer USB into my radio and i've messed with the weight setting a little but honestly i dont fully understand what it does. at what point do you know if its the keyer settings vs just your own technique being inconsistent? because sometimes i wonder if im gripping the paddle too tight or squeezing at weird times and that's causing it. been doing about 20 minutes of practice a day with the Koch method on my phone app and im around 10-12 wpm comfortably. anyone been through this and figured out what was actually wrong

so we finally did our first full-scale exercise in probably two years, simulated a major flood event cutting off the county EOC from the hospital and two Red Cross shelters. i've been with our ARES group for about six years now and honestly thought we had our stuff together but man, some gaps showed up real fast. biggest thing that hit us was net control getting overwhelmed within the first twenty minutes. we had maybe fourteen stations trying to check in at once and the guy running NCS — good operator, really is — just got buried. nobody had agreed on a check-in format beforehand so everyone was doing their own thing, some giving full phonetic callsigns, some just rattling off a short call, one guy started reading his position report before NCS even acknowledged him. the other thing that kinda surprised me was how fast people defaulted to using their phones and texting each other off-net when things got confusing. kind of defeats the whole point you know. we lost two stations from the exercise for like 20 minutes because they were just texting the EC instead of staying on frequency. anyway im curious if other groups have run into similar stuff and what you've done about it. feels like the check-in procedure thing is fixable but i wonder if theres a better way to structure the net when you have a lot of stations all coming on at once. also wondering if anyone has done tabletop exercises before going full field deployment — might be worth doing that first next time to get everyone on the same page before we go live

congrats on the first one, 32 is a solid number especially for 40m with a wire. honestly the pileup thing catches a lot of people off guard the first time, the hunters are out there refreshing that map constantly. for the logging question — yeah hamrs should be tagging every QSO with the park reference automatically, when you export the adif and upload it the site reads the sig and sig_info fields. just open the adif file in a text editor real quick before you upload and spot check a few entries, you should see something like SIG: POTA and SIG_INFO: K-XXXX in there. if it looks right you're good. had a guy in our club upload a whole activation without the park ref attached once and had to resubmit everything manually, not a huge deal but worth the quick check.

terrain wins every time in my experience. ive compared antennas all i want but if theres a ridge between me and the repeater its not happening regardless. that said on a clear shot path the collinear does pull in those marginal signals noticeably better, its not just placebo. your friend probably just drives routes with better RF geography honestly

did this to my last two vehicles, no regrets at all. the difference between a proper NMO with a good ground plane and a mag mount is actually pretty noticeable once youve done it. mag mounts are great for temporary setups or if youre borrowing someone elses car but for a daily driver thats also your main mobile rig its just not ideal. i did center of roof on my Tacoma and it worked great. ran the cable through the headliner trim, popped it out at the A pillar and down behind the dash. looked totally factory when i was done. the lip mount is easier to get to the cable but you lose some ground plane symmetry and at VHF/UHF that can actually matter a bit depending on the antenna. not huge but its real. the Comet SBB-5 is solid, ive used one for years. the Tram stuff is fine too, just make sure whichever you get is actually rated for the NMO base because some of those antennas are threaded differently than you expect. use a step bit when you drill and seal around the mount properly, never had a water issue in years of doing this.

this was me like a year ago lol, i stepped on the net control station on my first checkin attempt which was pretty embarrassing. one thing that helped me was actually reaching out to the net manager beforehand, most nets have that info on their website or qrz or whatever, and just saying hey im new can you walk me through how your net works. every single person i did that with was super welcoming and it made the actual checkin way less stressful. also some nets have a separate simplex or echolink frequency where they do a kind of informal pre-net hangout and thats a great lowkey way to get to know the regulars before the actual net starts

so ive been running my 7300 for about two years now and the stability on weak signal stuff was always bugging me a little, not terrible but you could see it wandering a bit on FT8 especially when the shack gets warm in the summer. finally pulled the trigger on the TCXO-2 upgrade last weekend and honestly the difference is more noticeable than i expected. dial stability is just rock solid now, like even after the rig warms up fully i'm not chasing drift anymore. whole install took maybe 45 minutes, the hardest part was just not stripping the tiny screws getting the top cover off. if you've done any light soldering and aren't scared of cracking open a rig it's totally doable. icom's instructions are actually pretty clear on this one. just be careful with the ribbon cable near the front panel, mine was a little stiffer than i expected and i got a bit nervous bending it back. anyway wondering if anyone else has done this and if you noticed any other improvements, someone told me it helps with the phase noise on receive too but i havent done any real A/B testing on that. also has anyone done the port expansion mod on these? ive been reading about unlocking the CI-V stuff more but cant find a clear write-up that isn't three years old.

so ive been trying to figure out if its worth the drive this year, last time i went was like 3 years ago and honestly had a blast just walking the flea market tables, picked up a old Kenwood HT for almost nothing and it still works great. my buddy says the swap meet part has gotten smaller but i dunno if thats true or just him being grumpy lol anyone been recently or planning to go this year? also does the local club usually have a table there because i was thinking about finally joining one and figured that might be a good way to meet people without it being too awkward

so ive been trying to get Winlink going for a few weeks now and honestly its more complicated than i expected. i got Winlink Express installed and i can connect via Telnet just fine which is great but thats basically just using the internet right, so whats the point for emergency comms if the internet is down what i really want to do is connect via RF to an actual RMS gateway. theres one listed in my area on the winlink.org map, looks like its about 22 miles away on 145.010. im running a Yaesu FT-991A into a decent vertical outside so i should have the power to hit it. my question is about the setup on my end - i have a Signalink USB and ive been reading that i need to configure it for packet or VARA FM, and i dont really understand the difference or which one i should be using also once i get a connection working, how does the message handling actually work? like does it sync automatically or do i have to manually trigger sends and receives every time? i guess im also wondering if theres a way to monitor what messages are queued without opening the full client. been lurking here for a while and figured id finally just ask

so ive been messing around with an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly listening to airband and doing some NOAA weather sat stuff with WXtoImg which has been a blast honestly. but lately ive been wanting to get into HF more seriously — like actually monitoring 40m and 80m, maybe some utility stuff on lower freqs. the rtl-sdr does ok in direct sampling mode but its pretty noisy and the dynamic range is just not great. i keep reading that the RSP1B is a big step up but its also like 4x the price of a dongle. is it actually that much better for HF or is it more like a marginal thing and id be better off saving for a HackRF or something. i mostly use SDR# right now but ive been playing with SDRangel too which seems more capable but also way more confusing to set up on windows. anyone actually gone from RTL to RSP and noticed a real difference on HF specifically? not talking about general receive quality, i mean actual usability for lower bands without it being just a wall of noise