Michelle Parker

not dumb questions at all, everyone goes through this. for most open nets you absolutely dont need to be a member of anything, just listen for the net control to call for check-ins and then just say your callsign phonetically, like "Whiskey 4 Tango Foxtrot" or whatever yours is. thats really it for the initial check-in. net control will acknowledge you and usually ask if you have traffic or just checking in, and you just say "no traffic, just a check-in" or something like that. then youre in the net and they might come back to you later if it's a roundtable style or you might just be logged and thats the end of it depending on the net format. the special event station thing is a bit different — thats really just a regular QSO with a station that has a special callsign, like W1AW or one of those 1x1 callsigns they issue for events. you call them, they give you a quick exchange, you log it, sometimes you can send in for a certificate or award. its not really a "net" in the traditional sense, more like a pileup situation depending on how popular the event is. just jump in on that tuesday net, worst case you stumble over your callsign and everyone will just chuckle and move on, they were all new once

so ive been playing around with the cluster spotting stuff online for a few weeks now and im still not totally sure im getting the most out of it. basically i use DXwatch and the QRZ logbook together and sometimes i see a spot on DXwatch but then by the time i tune to that freq the station is either gone or buried in a pileup. im assuming theres some lag built in to these web clusters vs using a direct telnet connection but i dont really know how much we're talking about here. also on QRZ i noticed there's spots showing up right in the logbook page which is kind of handy but i cant figure out if those are pulling from the same network or something different. anybody use both regularly and have a workflow that actually works? feels like im always a step behind everyone else who seems to find these DX stations way faster than me.

so ive been a general for about two years now and honestly i use maybe like 20% of the HF bands i have access to already. my buddy keeps telling me to just go ahead and upgrade to extra but i dunno, the exam looks pretty intimidating with all the filter theory and that advanced antenna stuff and the regs questions that nobody seems to actually use in real life i guess my question is more like... does it actually change anything for how you operate day to day, or is it mostly just bragging rights and getting access to that little slice of spectrum on 40m that i never really hang around on anyway. i looked at the question pool and some of that stuff is pretty deep, like the math for reactance and whatever. been out of school a long time so thats kind of daunting anyone who upgraded relatively recently have thoughts on whether studying for it actually taught you useful stuff or was it just memorizing answers to pass

so ive been doing single op for years now and finally got a second radio set up this past winter, been messing around with SO2R during some smaller contests to get the hang of it before i throw myself into a serious effort. and honestly its way harder than i expected — not the RF isolation stuff (though that took a while to sort out) but just the mental side of it. like i get the theory, you run on one radio and S&P on the other during your own transmit cycle, pick up a mult or a new Q while youre waiting. but in practice i keep dropping the run frequency because i get distracted by something interesting on radio 2 and then when i come back someone else has taken my spot. or i get so locked into the run that i forget to even listen on the second radio at all. anybody have a good way to build the muscle memory for this? im running Win-Test with the SO2R assistant but im not sure i have it configured right either. curious what your actual workflow looks like when the rate is good on run but theres a juicy mult sitting there on 15m while youre on 40.

yeah the inverted-v does drop the feedpoint impedance, the steeper the droop the lower it gets. somewhere around 120 degree included angle youre looking at roughly 50 ohms give or take depending on height and ground conditions and all that. so your 1.4:1 probably isnt the coax masking anything, you genuinely got a decent match. the 468 constant is a starting point anyway, real wire has velocity factor and the insulation on stranded can affect things a little, so trimming is always part of the deal. the pvc center insulator is totally fine by the way, ive been using the same approach for years. only thing id watch is UV degradation if its in direct sun constantly, schedule 40 holds up better than the thin stuff. sounds like a solid first build honestly.

so i just got home from work and figured id spin the dial on 40 for a bit, nothing serious just listening around. its been a while since ive actually sat down and done this without some agenda like a contest or trying to work a specific station. just nice to hear the band alive you know. caught a couple guys ragchewing down around 7.250 or so, sounded like they've been talking every night for years. thats kind of the thing i miss about this hobby sometimes, just the casualness of it. anyway if anyones on tonight throw out a call or something, im around

so i was just sitting down with coffee saturday morning kind of half paying attention to the radio and suddenly 10 meters just absolutely came alive around 9am local. i mean i havent heard it that good since probably 2012 or so, had stations from south america, europe, even caught a couple JAs which i wasnt expecting at all. ran like 40 contacts in maybe an hour and a half before it started fading again. my modest wire antenna was doing way better than it has any right to do honestly. also been seeing a lot of chatter on the mail lists about the new Icom IC-7760 or whatever its going to be called, supposedly a head-separable design that takes some cues from the 7300 but bumps up the power and has a cleaner front end. havent seen official specs yet but a few people who were at the Tokyo hamfair were posting about it. anyone have actual details or is this still all rumor at this point? the 7300 has been such a runaway hit i can see why theyd want to do something in that direction for the higher end market. also reminder if anyone is in the northeast, the Rochester hamfest is coming up end of the month i think, always a good time to poke through the flea market tables even if you dont need anything.

so ive been trying to get Winlink Express working for about three weeks now and im at the point where i just want to throw the laptop out the window. running it on HF with a IC-7300 and a Signalink, vara HF is installed and i can see signals on the waterfall no problem. the issue is when i try to connect to an RMS gateway it either times out or i get a partial handshake and then nothing. tried a few different gateways that show green on the Winlink maps and same result every time. my dial frequency is set correctly as far as i can tell, using the channel list built into Winlink Express and i pick whatever shows good propagation to my area. i'm in the midwest so theres usually a few options. power is around 50w into a dipole that tunes fine on 40m. not sure if its a VARA config issue or something with my audio levels or what. anyone been through this and figured out what was wrong? feels like im missing something obvious but i cant see it

the RSP1A is a real step up, no question. the dynamic range alone makes a huge difference on HF compared to the rtl dongle. direct sampling on those dongles is fine for casual listening but you're right that it's janky — the noise floor is pretty rough and you miss a lot of weak signals. the RSP1A has actual coverage from like 1kHz all the way up and the front end is just cleaner. the FM broadcast overload thing you mentioned is exactly where you'll notice it most. i live about 2 miles from a bunch of FM towers and my rtl-sdr was basically unusable without an external FM trap. the RSP1A handles it much better, still not perfect if you're super close to a transmitter but noticeably better. SDRuno is a bit of a learning curve if youre coming from SDR# but once you get used to it its fine. worth it if you're actually going to use it seriously for HF work.

so ive been running a Diamond X510 collinear up on a hilltop site for about two years now for local 2m/70cm work and it does the job fine for everyday repeater stuff but lately ive been wanting to work some simplex farther out, like 80-100 miles on a good tropo day, and im starting to wonder if swapping to a yagi or even a dual-band yagi like the Directive Systems or Arrow stuff would actually make a meaningful difference or if im chasing ghosts here. the X510 is up about 30 feet on a pushup mast with LMR400 running maybe 60 feet to the shack, so the feedline loss isnt terrible. im running about 50w on 2m from an IC-9700. the location already has a pretty clean shot in most directions except there's a ridge to the north that kills anything past about 40 miles that way, everything else is pretty open. main question i guess is whether the gain from a yagi actually translates to real world improvement on tropo or if the collinear is already doing most of the work and im better off just leaving it alone. i know the obvious answer is 'yagi wins on gain' but im wondering if anyone has actually done this comparison from a similar setup and noticed a real difference in practice, not just on paper.

nice, i've been thinking about doing one too but i keep second guessing my antenna situation. good to know the buddistick worked ok under trees, that's kind of my worry since most of the parks near me are pretty wooded. did you have any trouble with noise or was it pretty quiet out there rf wise

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i know there's the license class thing but every chart i look at seems slightly different and i dont want to step on anyone or worse transmit somewhere im not supposed to be. like the ARRL band plan shows one thing and then i see people talking about band edges being a bad idea and i dont totally understand why. also whats the deal with the lower end of 40 vs the upper end, someone at my club mentioned phone vs cw segments but i got confused when they started talking about it. is there like one definitive place to look this up or do i just have to memorize it

8 contacts on a bad band day with a droopy dipole isnt bad at all tbh. i do a lot of SOTA and the rule i follow is bring a backup antenna, i always toss a random wire and a 9:1 unun in the bag just in case the primary setup doesnt work out. the rain thing is annoying but 40 meters in the afternoon is pretty rough anyway depending on where you are

honestly the memorization approach works fine for passing the test, thats basically what most people do. but if you actually want to enjoy HF you'll want to understand at least the propagation basics because otherwise youre just spinning the dial wondering why nobody hears you for the bands yeah General gets you a solid chunk of 40m, 20m, 15m, 10m and a few others, some with restrictions on the lower end of the sub-bands. 40m is great to start because its pretty forgiving during evening hours and you can usually hear domestic stations pretty easily. 20m is the workhorse band for DX but it can be humbling when the band closes and you have no idea why i used the Gordon West book alongside hamstudy when i upgraded and it helped me actually connect the dots on some of the theory stuff. not saying you need it but for like 15 bucks it might make things click a little better. good luck at the session, the General test isnt that bad once you spend a couple weeks with the material

yeah the gateway vs just being a user thing tripped me up too when i first started. running your own RMS is really more of a club or served agency deal, you need a pretty solid setup and someone has to keep it running and updated. for most people just using the public gateways is totally fine. the winlink.org maps show gateway activity and there's also a "channel selection" button in Winlink Express that queries which gateways are actually hearing you based on recent propagation data, that thing is super helpful and way better than just picking one off a list manually. as for gateways dropping offline mid-session yeah that happens, some of them are running on volunteer hardware and if the op has to QRT or there's a power flicker its just gone. the software should timeout and let you try another one. 40m in the evening can be tricky too depending on where you are and where the gateway is, sometimes you gotta drop to a lower freq or try a closer node on 80m

yeah the timing thing is the biggest frustration when you're starting out with clusters, totally normal. a few things that helped me — first, filter DXwatch down to just your bands, there's no point seeing spots for 10m if youre not on there. also look for spots that are coming in repeatedly from multiple sources, that usually means the station is still active and the pile hasnt completely died off yet. for phone apps, HamSphere has some stuff but honestly i mostly just use the mobile browser version of DXwatch, it works fine. there's also DX Alert which can push notifications to your phone when something shows up on bands you care about, that ones pretty handy when you dont want to stare at the screen all day. the key is just setting your filters tight so you're not chasing ghosts. oh and cluster spots can be wrong or stale, always trust your ears over a 20 minute old spot.

so ive been licensed since 98 and lately ive just been noticing things feel different, not bad necessarily just... different. like back then you'd get on 75m in the evening and there'd be 40 guys just ragchewing about whatever, fishing, cars, work stuff. now i get on and its mostly digital modes running unattended and the occasional dx pile. dont get me wrong FT8 has been a godsend for my antenna situation but sometimes i just miss the actual conversation you know? not trying to sound like an old man yelling at clouds here just curious if others feel the same or if im just tuning to the wrong frequencies or whatever

yeah the alltrails time estimates are basically a joke when you have a pack with radio gear lol. i always double whatever they say if im carrying anything beyond a day pack. sounds like you did great though, a lot of first activations dont even get the 4 contacts people panic and pack up too early. welcome to the addiction, your summit total is gonna climb fast now that you've done one

I passed last month and found T8 (Modulation/Signals) and T9 (Antennas) easier to understand once I grasped the basics from T5. The propagation stuff in T3 was mostly memorization for me.

From a practical standpoint, generators are usually used because of the power requirements for amplifiers and the ease of refueling versus recharging a battery. Logistics drive most equipment decisions on DXpeditions - fuel is easier to transport than massive battery banks.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep seeing people talk about uploading logs to LoTW and eQSL and also sending paper QSL cards and im genuinely confused about whether i need to do all of these or if one is good enough like i worked a station in japan last week and he said 73 QSL via bureau and i didnt even know what the bureau was until i looked it up, and then i find out it can take like a year or two for cards to actually arrive?? thats wild to me i signed up for LoTW and uploaded my log from WSJT-X but i have no idea if its actually working because none of my contacts show as confirmed yet. do both people have to upload for it to show up? and does eQSL do the same thing or is it totally separate just trying to figure out what the actual workflow is that most people use. i dont want to spend money on paper cards if digital is basically the same thing for awards and stuff

so i finally did it after putting off studying for like 6 months. passed the technician exam last tuesday and got my callsign a few days later. first thing i did was dig out this old baofeng uv-5r i bought ages ago and never programmed and tried to hit the local repeater. well. it took me about 45 minutes to figure out the offset and tone and by the time i got on someone was already mid-conversation and i just kind of kerchunked accidentally and felt terrible. eventually i just waited for a gap and said my callsign and that i was new and this older guy came back to me right away, gave me a signal report and everything. we talked for maybe 10 minutes and he told me about the local club's monday night net. anyway i dont really have a question i just wanted to tell someone because nobody in my family gets why im excited about this. anyone else remember their first qso being kind of a mess

drilled my 4runner back in 2017 and never looked back honestly. lip mounts are fine for a temporary thing but the ground plane really is noticeably worse, especially on 70cm where that stuff matters more. i had a hustler lip mount for about 6 months before i finally just bit the bullet and did the NMO through the roof and the difference on receive was pretty obvious, not huge but definitely there. the tacoma roof is pretty straightforward to do, i helped a buddy do his a while back. just take your time with the drill, use a step bit, and seal it properly with some self-amalgamating tape and you should be fine for years. the MR77 is a solid antenna by the way, ive run one for probably 4 years without any issues, SWR is flat across both bands right out of the box pretty much. the Tram is decent too but i think the Diamond is built a bit better, the connector end especially.

so ive been slowly building out a remote station at my parents house about 90 miles away, mostly because my HOA situation here is a disaster and im not fighting that battle anymore. been running a basic setup with a raspberry pi and some port forwarding for a while but i finally started looking at RemoteHams more seriously and also just discovered you can tie in an SDR for the panadapter side of things which honestly changes everything for me. the question i keep running into is how people are handling the latency when youre trying to work any kind of digital mode or even just SSB when the internet link isnt super clean. my parents have decent cable but its not fiber and sometimes the upstream drops or gets wobbly. ive got a Icom 7300 out there and im wondering if running the built in USB audio through RemoteHams client is any better or worse than some of the other approaches ive seen people cobble together. also someone mentioned using echolink or IRLP nodes as a fallback if the main control link goes down, like for monitoring purposes at least, but i couldnt quite follow how they had that wired up. anyone done something like that or is that kind of a frankenstein solution that isnt worth the trouble

so ive been watching the solar flux index pretty closely the past few weeks and its been all over the place. we had a few days up around 180 which honestly i havent seen in a while and 10m was just absolutely nuts, i worked a bunch of stuff in europe and even caught a few JA stations which i wasnt expecting at all. then like two days later the flux dropped back down and there was a K index spike from some geomagnetic activity and it felt like everything just died. i guess my question is how closely do you guys actually watch this stuff in real time? i use the DXmaps site and check propagation.hepburn.es but im wondering if theres better tools people are using. also curious if anyone has a feel for how long after a flux jump you usually start seeing the bands actually respond — like is it pretty immediate or does it lag a bit?