Michelle Parker

that simplex situation is so real, we had almost the exact same thing happen at a flood support operation a couple years back. everyone trains on the repeater and then the moment you need to go direct nobody remembers their simplex calling frequencies or what power level makes sense for the terrain. after that our EC made simplex practice a regular part of our monthly nets and it helped a lot. sounds like you did fine though, keeping a log and staying on top of shelter numbers is honestly most of what the EOC actually needs from a shelter station. dont be too hard on yourself about the fumbling, everyone does it the first time especially when the adrenaline is up a little. the fact that you stayed on net and kept passing traffic is what matters. good on ya for getting involved, a lot of people get their ticket and never bother with any of this stuff.

jpole for vhf is solid, i use a roll-up jpole made from 300 ohm twinlead that fits in my bag. works better than any mag mount ive used in open field conditions because you can get it up on a painters pole or camera tripod and get it 10-12 feet off the ground easy. mag mounts need a ground plane and if youre not on a vehicle roof they kinda suffer. just something to consider. also depending on how far you need to hit the repeater, 2m at even 25 watts should be fine for a county exercise so you might not even need to push the VHF rig hard at all, saves battery too if youre trying to avoid the genny situation.

the eu2200i is genuinely whisper quiet compared to most generators so i wouldnt sweat that too much, especially if you're more than like 20-30 feet from it. run a good quality extension cord and you're fine. the bigger issue is RF noise from it - worth checking your noise floor with it running before you actually need it in the field. some of those hondas are clean, some arent, depends a bit on load and grounding. for your power math youre in the right ballpark but the 7300 isnt pulling 20A continuously unless youre transmitting the whole time. receive is more like 2A, and most nets or ICS operations youre maybe 20-30% duty cycle on TX so your actual average draw is way lower than you think. a 100ah lifepo4 will last you much longer than 3-4 hours in realistic ops. id bring both the battery AND the generator and just run on battery with the genny as backup/recharge. best of both worlds and you're not married to one approach. NVIS flat top is the right call for regional stuff, dont overcomplicate it. 40m is perfect, maybe bring wire for 80m too if you think propagation might dip later at night. dipole up at like 15-25 feet is basically textbook NVIS geometry anyway.

congrats on the general. so yeah the band plan vs allocation thing trips up a lot of new folks. the actual FCC allocation is the legal part — thats whats in part 97 and you absolutely have to stay within that. for 40m as a general you can do phone from 7.175 to 7.300 MHz. the band plan is more like a gentlemens agreement, things like where nets typically hang out or where DX stations operate, nobody is gonna fine you for being in the wrong spot on the band plan but people might get annoyed. the band edge thing is real practical advice. if youre running USB and your carrier is right at 7.300, your actual transmitted signal is going to be a few kHz above that depending on what youre saying, which puts you outside the allocation. so most people just leave a little buffer, like 7.298 or so, to be safe. your radio isnt always perfectly calibrated either so there's that too.

ok so the basic DXCC is just 100 confirmed entities total, doesnt matter what band or mode, you just need 100 unique ones confirmed. LoTW is definitely the easiest way to get confirmations these days since a lot of DX stations upload pretty regularly, but paper cards absolutely still count you just have to send them to the ARRL card checker. i did my first 100 mostly through LoTW and it took maybe 8 months of actually trying. for WAS yeah thats all 50 states confirmed, also works with LoTW. WAZ is 40 zones and thats run by CQ magazine not ARRL so its a separate submission process. honestly i'd just work whatever you can log and let the awards sort themselves out later, you'll find your totals creeping up across all three at the same time without really planning it. the zones that are tough like zone 2 in northern canada or some of the pacific zones yeah you just gotta wait for the right expedition or contest weekend when someone activates from there.

been on 2m a lot more lately myself. local repeater has been pretty active which is nice to see after it being kinda dead for a while

so i was just sitting there messing around on 28.400 and all of a sudden stations start popping up everywhere, i was working EU for like two hours straight which honestly hasnt happened for me on 10m in years. caught a couple of UA stations and even a ZL near the end before the band went quiet again. solar flux has been pretty wild lately and i feel like we're really hitting our stride with the cycle now. anyway while i had the radio out i was also playing around with my buddys FT-710 that he just picked up. first impressions from someone who's used IC-7300 for a while — the receiver feels really solid honestly, roofing filters seem to do a good job in a crowded band. the touchscreen is not quite as snappy as the icom but its fine. he paid around $1100 for it which seems like decent value for what you get. curious if anyone else has been running one of these for a few months and has longer term thoughts

the S2S contacts are my favorite part honestly, theres something about knowing both operators are sitting on a cold windy hill somewhere that makes it feel more real than a regular contact. ive started specifically looking for S2S opps on sotawatch whenever im activating which KX2 setup were you running, just curious if you had the internal tuner doing the work or external? ive been going back and forth on whether to stick with my 817 or finally make the jump

That feeling is completely normal, I remember my first real activation back in 2019 and it was a marathon event where a local 5k turned into a search and rescue situation halfway through. I had drilled plenty but nothing quite prepares you for when an served agency rep is looking at you expecting answers in real time. The ICS 100 and 200 are a decent foundation but honestly ICS 700 is where a lot of the actual day-to-day EOC stuff makes more sense. Some ARES groups also require 800 which covers the national response framework a bit. Might be worth knocking those out on the FEMA IS site, theyre free and dont take too long. The bigger thing though is just doing more exercises with your group, the more you work alongside the served agency before an actual event the better it goes when it counts.

yeah this tripped me up too when i first got my general. so the short version is as a general you can do phone on 40m from 7.175 to 7.300, and below that down to 7.025 is cw/data. the tricky part people dont talk about enough is the band edge thing — you really dont want to be operating right at 7.175 on usb because your signal has sidebands that extend a few khz above your carrier, so if you're on 7.175 usb your actual signal is spreading up to maybe 7.177 or so which is fine, but if you drift down toward the edge the sidebands start bleeding into the tech/extra portion below. rule of thumb i use is just dont go below 7.178 or so on ssb and you have some breathing room. the arrl band plan page is pretty decent if you can find it, they have a chart that lays out all the class privileges side by side.

so i was sitting in the shack last night just spinning the dial on 40m and not really doing anything productive, wasnt trying to work any dx or chase a contest, just kind of listening and it hit me that i havent actually had a real conversation on here in like 3 weeks. caught a bit of a net on 7.250 or somewhere around there but didnt check in, just listened. theres something kind of nice about that honestly. anyway anyone else go through phases where youre just kind of present but not really operating? feels weird to admit but sometimes i just like the noise of the band being there

I did CQ WW for the first time two years ago and felt exactly the same way lol. ended up with like 200 contacts which felt like nothing compared to what the big stations post but I had a blast. the 7300 is a solid radio for it, way better than what I started with. just make sure you have N1MM or something set up beforehand because logging by hand gets old real fast

the thing that got me the first time I deployed was not having a way to mount anything. like you show up somewhere and theyre like great set up over there and youre standing there holding a radio and a battery with no table, no way to prop up the antenna, nothing. I started keeping a small piece of pegboard and some velcro straps in mine after that. also zip ties, like way more zip ties than you think you need. other thing — and this sounds dumb — is a printed copy of your frequencies and local repeater info. your phone dies, your laptop dies, and suddenly you cant remember if the county EOC net is on .760 or .860. I laminated a little card and it lives in the lid of my case now. also dont forget a headlamp because youre probably setting this thing up in the dark in the rain knowing how these things go.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff confused me for a long time too. so heres how i think about it — LoTW is basically the gold standard if youre chasing ARRL awards like DXCC. the ARRL runs it and they only accept LoTW or physical cards for credit, not eQSL. so if DXCC is on your radar eventually, you really do want to be uploading to LoTW. the setup is a little annoying at first with the certificate stuff but once its going it kind of runs in the background. eQSL is totally real and plenty of people use it, theres even some awards that specifically use it, but yeah its not interchangeable with LoTW for the big ARRL stuff. i use both personally just because some ops only do one or the other. for paper cards — honestly the etiquette has relaxed a lot. if someone sends you a card its nice to send one back but nobody is going to be mad if you dont, especially if youre just starting out and watching your budget. a lot of people use the bureau system through your ARRL section to keep postage costs down, or you can just do direct when you have the means. dont stress too much about it, most of us have a pile of unanswered cards sitting around at any given time lol

JS8Call is definitely more of a niche thing compared to FT8 but its not dead by any means. 14.078 and 7.078 both have reasonable activity, just not the wall to wall signals you see on the FT8 frequencies. the thing that trips people up at first is that JS8Call has these different speed modes, normal, slow, fast, turbo, and stations running different speeds can't decode each other so sometimes youll see signals but they wont decode because they're on a different mode speed than you. worth checking that first. as for running two rigs simultaneously yeah i do exactly that, FT8 on my main rig and JS8Call on a second radio. just make sure your audio interfaces dont fight each other and use separate instances of everything. the 7300's built in USB audio makes this pretty easy since it shows up as its own device. the 891 will need a SignaLink or something similar unless you're going CAT and audio through a different interface. once you get the hang of JS8Call the store and forward messaging thing is actually pretty cool for emcomm type scenarios. not saying thats why you'd use it but it gives the mode a purpose beyond just seeing how weak a signal you can decode.