Michelle Parker

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.

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 i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, summitname was W6/CT-216 which is only a 2 point summit but figured id start easy. packed the KX2 and a random wire up the side of the hill and honestly the hike nearly killed me lol im not in as good shape as i thought
got to the top and the wind was absolutely brutal, like knocked my pole over twice before i got it staked down properly. managed 6 contacts on 20m SSB which i know barely qualifies but hey it counts right. tried 40m and got nothing which was weird, maybe the antenna was off or i was just too close to some noise source up there
already planning my next one, thinking about actually trying CW this time cause i hear the pileups are way more manageable. anyone else do a lot of portable ops in southern california, feels like theres a ton of options out there

yeah i had almost the exact same thing when i put a Kenwood in my Tacoma a while back. turned out my ground strap was making contact through a painted surface and wasnt actually a good connection even though it looked fine. scraped down to bare metal and the hum dropped way down. might be worth checking that if you havent already scraped the paint off where the strap contacts the body.

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?

so ive been trying to figure out where to put my FT-7900 in my 2018 honda civic and im going back and forth between doing a proper trunk mount with a remote head up front versus just cramming the whole radio under the dash somewhere. the car is pretty small and theres honestly not a lot of room under the dash without blocking stuff or having it look terrible.
ive seen some people do the trunk mount thing and run just the head up front and it looks really clean but im nervous about the cable run and whether ill lose any audio quality or have interference issues with all that extra wire. also not sure how to route the power if the radio is in the trunk — do people just run a dedicated line all the way from the battery back there or tap into something closer?
anyone done this on a smaller car and have opinions either way? im a general class if that matters, mostly do local repeaters and some simplex when im out hiking spots to check conditions.

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

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 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

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 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

185 is pretty solid, you're right to be excited about that. when the flux gets up into that range 10m can open to europe from the US east coast almost daily, usually right around the time you described. the thing people dont always realize is that the flux number is kind of a lagging indicator in a way — what actually matters in the moment is the K index staying low. if you've got decent flux but the K index spikes up from geomagnetic activity you can kiss those openings goodbye real fast.
for predicting it, i honestly just check the space weather center page in the morning and if flux is above 150 and K is 2 or under i make a point to check 10 and 12m during the afternoon. DXMaps is great but yeah the cluster spots can lag, sometimes by 10-15 minutes which on a marginal opening is basically an eternity. try WWV on 10 MHz if you want a quick gut check on conditions, they broadcast the solar data every hour.