Anthony Davis

don't feel bad at all, everyone fumbles their first few net check-ins. what probably happened is you keyed up either a hair too early while net control was still transmitting, or a bit too late after they'd already moved on. the sweet spot is right when they stop and ask for check-ins — you just give your callsign once, clearly, and wait. some nets want phonetics some dont, depends on the net. one thing that helped me when i was new was just listening to the same net a few times without trying to check in, just to get a feel for the rhythm. every net has its own pace and the NCS usually has a particular way they do things. also if you miss the window dont stress, a lot of nets do a second or even third call for late check-ins. just try again next week, they were all new once too.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, newer to the whole emcomm thing and still figuring out my kit. one thing i did that helped was i made a laminated checklist that lives in the top of the case so when im stressed or tired i dont have to try to remember everything. saw that tip somewhere on here i think. the antenna thing is tough. i dont have a great answer but someone at my club showed up to a field exercise with one of those tactical mast setups, like the push-up fiberglass kind, and it made the whole deployment way smoother. kinda pricey though. i just use a squid pole which works okay most of the time.

oh man i remember being exactly where you are a couple years ago, it does get easier. okay so QRM and QRN are definitely not the same thing -- QRM is interference from other stations, like someone transmitting on or near your frequency, whereas QRN is natural static and noise, like lightning crashes or atmospheric stuff. easy way i remember it is QRM = man-made, QRN = nature. the ones you'll actually hear constantly are QSB (signal fading), QSY (change frequency), QRZ (who is calling me), QTH (location), QRP (low power, though a lot of guys use that loosely), and QSL which just means confirmed or acknowledged. 73 is best regards and 88 is hugs and kisses, traditionally sent to or from women but honestly people use it however now. de means "from" so when you hear W1ABC de K5XYZ that's K5XYZ calling W1ABC. just lurk on some nets for a while and it really does click eventually

35 miles on 25w that's pretty solid honestly. what repeater you hitting? i'm in a similar area and always looking for good links to try. also what antenna did you go with, i'm still running a mag mount on my car and keep telling myself i'll do a proper install but... yeah.

okay so ive been licensed for about three months now and i finally got my baofeng programmed to hit the local 2m repeater but im not totally sure i understand how the CTCSS stuff works. like i know i need to set the encode tone to whatever the repeater wants (its 100.0 hz for the one near me) but do i also need to set the decode tone? my radio has both encode and decode settings and i wasnt sure if i should set both or just the encode side. also someone on the air last week mentioned something about a linking system and how the repeater ties into some network i think it was called IRLP or maybe echolink? and they were asking people to stand by before making calls. is that a thing i should know about? like is there some kind of etiquette around when repeaters are linked up vs when theyre not? i dont want to step on anybody or come across as that new guy who doesnt know what hes doing. well i mean i am that guy but still

yeah this tripped me up for a while too when i was starting out. so DXwatch and the QRZ clusters are pulling from the DX cluster network but they dont all have the same feed exactly — different aggregators pick up spots from different nodes and the timing can vary by a minute or two. its not really a big deal for most operating but if youre trying to catch something rare that disappears in 30 seconds it can matter. honestly what most guys i know do is just pick one they like the interface on and stick with it. i use DX Summit personally, its been around forever and feels fast to me. the QRZ one is fine but i find it a little cluttered. the apps can be handy when youre away from the shack but for serious DXing sitting at a computer with a proper cluster feed or even a telnet connection to a local node is going to be more reliable than any web app. once you get WSJT-X or similar going it can pull spots right into the software which is pretty nice.

yeah dont worry about it. ive got a 7el up here on a pushup mast, probably 60 feet of lmr-400 and its doing fine for 2m ssb work. only time i started caring more about line loss was when i got into 70cm EME stuff and even then its the connectors that'll kill you way before the cable does. your setup sounds solid honestly, hitting a 40 mile repeater full quieting from a 5 element is about what you'd expect if everyting is working right.

congrats on the first one, 23 QSOs is a solid activation especially on a first go. and yeah 10 is the minimum to count it, so you were well clear of that. on the spotting question — you can self-spot, someone else can spot you, or you can use the POTA app which makes it pretty easy. ideally you spot before you start calling so hunters can find you, but honestly people will still find you even if you spot a few minutes in once you have a frequency nailed down. i usually get set up, do a quick listen to make sure the frequency is clear, then spot and start calling. the spot shows up almost immediately and thats usually when the pileup starts if youre gonna get one. the park-to-park thing — yeah that was a P2P contact and it absolutely counts for both of you. you each log it as a normal QSO but you note the other persons park reference in your log. when you upload to the POTA website it recognizes P2P contacts and they show up separately on your stats page. some people really chase P2P contacts specifically, theres a whole separate leaderboard for it i think. nothing different about how you operate for it, just make sure you got his park reference logged correctly and youre good.

18 hours is doable on solar plus battery if you're not running the amp hard the whole time. the math isnt that scary — IC-7300 at 100w output is pulling maybe 22 amps worst case but you're not transmitting constantly at net control, probably more like 20-30% duty cycle if its a typical voice net. throw in the TNC and whatever else and call it 8-10 average draw. 100ah lithium at say 80% usable is 80ah, so youre looking at roughly 8 hours from the battery alone before you even account for solar input. 200w panel in decent sun should push 10-12 amps into the battery depending on your charge controller and angle. if you can get 6-7 hours of usable sun youre basically breaking even or better. the problem is 'depending on cloud cover' as you said — thats the variable that kills you. i'd bring the honda anyway and just treat it as a backup you hopefully dont need. the peace of mind alone is worth the back strain honestly. last ARRL SET we did i brought mine and never started it, but i was really glad it was in the truck around hour 14 when the sky went gray.

so ive been a General for about two years now and a few guys at my local club keep bugging me to upgrade to Extra. i dont really have a burning need for it honestly, i mostly do HF phone on 40 and 20, but the extra privileges on like the lower parts of those bands would be kind of nice i guess. my main hesitation is everyone acts like the theory section is this massive wall to get over. like ive heard people say the math is brutal and theres stuff about filter design and transmission line theory that even EEs struggle with. is that actually true or is it one of those things that sounds scarier than it is. i remember the General exam being pretty straightforward once i actually sat down and studied the pool. does Extra work the same way if you just grind the question pool or do you actually need to understand the underlying concepts to pass it

yeah the net control overload thing is super common and i dont think people realize how bad it gets until they're actually in it. we had almost the exact same situation during a Skywarn activation a few years back, wasnt even a full EOC exercise just a severe weather event and the NCS was just getting buried. what helped us was designating a separate liaison for each served agency so they were the only ones talking to net control on behalf of that agency. NCS only had to deal with like 3 or 4 people total instead of a dozen. took some coordination to set up but it made a huge difference in how clean the traffic flow was. also having a dedicated logger who wasnt doing anything else, just writing stuff down, that alone probably saved us from some real confusion. the traffic handling gap is real too. we started doing a monthly simplex net specifically for practicing formal message passing and it helped a lot with the newer folks getting comfortable with it before they need to do it under pressure.

wait 6 meters does FT8? i thought that was mostly like a HF thing lol. im pretty new and just got my general last month so still figuring out what goes where. do i need a special setup to try that or will my regular rig work if it covers 6m? i have a Yaesu FT-991A which i think does 6m but ive never actually tried it on there

tail ending is a rabbit hole lol. i've heard guys absolutely insist its cheating and other guys say its just good timing. i think the people who hate it are mostly the ones who arent good at it honestly the pattern recognition thing you mentioned is real though. i noticed on the last big pileup i worked that the op was consistently coming back to stations maybe 1-2 kHz above where he said he was listening. took me like 20 minutes to notice but once i parked there i got through in maybe 3 calls. felt like cheating but its just paying attention

so ive had my 891 for about two years now and overall really happy with it but a few guys on my local net keep telling me my audio sounds a bit boxy or something. i messed with the parametric EQ settings in the menu which helped a tiny bit but i keep seeing references to this hardware mod where you swap out a capacitor on the TX audio chain to open it up a bit. i think it's C211 or somewhere around there but i cant find a consistent answer on which component it actually is. has anyone actually done this on the 891 specifically? not the 857 or 897, those seem to have different threads everywhere. i can solder fine and i have the service manual so that part isn't the concern, just not sure if the payoff is worth cracking the case open. also wondering if it affects the SSB transmit bandwidth in a way that would put me outside of regs or if it just affects the tonal quality. anybody have before/after audio recordings even?

so we finally did a full scale simulated emergency exercise with our local ARES group, first one ive actually participated in as a net control and not just as a field unit. figured id share some thoughts since we had a few newer hams show up and i think there's some real lessons in how it went. the scenario was a flood event cutting off the northern part of the county, three shelters needing coordination with the EOC. on paper it sounds straightforward but man when you actually try to run it with 12 operators scattered around at different locations, half of them on HT's with battery packs and one guy who forgot his power cable entirely, things get complicated fast. biggest thing i noticed — and i probably should have anticipated this — was that people defaulted to casual conversation habits on the air during the exercise. like folks would just start chatting about what they were seeing instead of keeping traffic formatted properly. had to gently redirect a couple times. nobody's fault really, it's just muscle memory from normal rag chewing and it takes practice to flip that switch. the other thing that caught us off guard was how quickly our simplex fallback frequency got stepped on by a repeater bleed from the next county over. we had that written into the plan but when it actually happened in real time there was this moment of confusion before someone remembered we had a secondary listed. would have been nice to drill that specific scenario more deliberately. anyone else done exercises like this recently? curious what other groups are doing for realistic disaster scenarios and how you debrief afterward. our after action review was kind of rushed and i feel like we left some good lessons on the table.