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.

yeah the America/Adam/etc thing is the old "able baker" phonetics from before NATO standardized everything in the 50s. you still hear some old timers using them, mostly guys who learned on AM back in the day. not wrong exactly but it can cause confusion if the other station isnt familiar with it. as for when to use them -- honestly its just conditions and context. on a clear local repeater with a strong signal theres no real need to phonetic out your whole callsign every time, people can hear you fine. but on HF especially when the band is marginal or youre working DX, phonetics are genuinely useful because certain letters just sound identical through static and QRM. B and D, M and N, S and F... they all smear together. so most operators just develop a feel for it. if you have to repeat yourself, thats usually a sign you shouldve gone with phonetics from the start

Welcome to the hobby, you picked a good time to ask this actually because this exact question comes up a lot and the answers have kind of shifted over the years as more options appeared. The Part 97 thing you mentioned — the short version is the Baofeng will work fine for ham use, the compliance question is more about whether it meets FCC rules for transmitting on non-ham frequencies, which you shouldnt be doing anyway. So dont let that scare you off if the price point makes sense for your situation. That said, if youve got even a little more room to spend, the FT-60R really is a different class of radio. The receiver is noticeably better, the audio is louder and clearer, and mine has been dropped more times than i care to admit and still works perfectly. For APRS you'd actually want to look at something like the Yaesu FT2DR or one of the newer dual-band HTs with built-in APRS support, but thats definitely a later upgrade kind of thing, not where you need to start. Honestly my suggestion would be grab the FT-60R and spend the rest of your budget on a decent nagoya antenna. The stock rubber duck antennas on most of these radios are kind of mediocre and a good aftermarket whip makes a real difference on receive especially.

so ive been running N1MM for years mostly because thats what everyone at the club uses and it just works for contests, but ive been hearing a lot about Log4OM lately and wondering if its worth switching over or at least using it for day to day stuff outside of contesting main thing is i do a fair bit of casual HF work, some DX chasing, and then a handful of contests a year, nothing serious like a full CQWW effort but i do the state QSO parties and sometimes the ARRL DX CW. right now i basically run N1MM for contests and then manually export the adif into a separate spreadsheet which is kind of embarrassing to admit but it works. the problem is the spreadsheet has gotten unwieldy and im missing stuff like award tracking and being able to see at a glance what bands i still need for a DXCC entity someone at the last hamfest mentioned Log4OM has pretty good integration with clublog and lotw which would be huge for me. does it play nice with WSJT-X too? i run FT8 a fair bit in the evenings and right now WSJT-X just logs to its own file and i import that periodically which is kind of clunky. wondering if Log4OM can just sit there and grab the spots in real time or if theres some setup involved not trying to ditch N1MM for contests obviously, that would be crazy, just want something better for the day to day logging side of things

yeah the first minute is basically always wasted, dont feel bad about it. even with a full az/el setup and gpredict driving the rig via hamlib it still takes me 20-30 seconds to get oriented when the sat comes up. the difference is at least im not also fighting doppler manually by then. the inverting transponder thing on FO-29 just takes repetition honestly. you tune up on the uplink, signal goes down on the downlink, brain eventually accepts it. what helped me was just spending a few passes not even trying to work anyone, just listening and watching how my signal moved. also USB on the downlink pretty much always even though youre sending LSB up, thats the rule of thumb for inverting transponders and once it clicks it clicks. AO-73 has been frustrating lately, youre right to be skeptical. stick with FO-29 for now or look at the SO-50 passes for FM just to get reps in on tracking without also fighting the linear transponder learning curve at the same time.

honestly for that budget the uv-5r is hard to argue with as a starting point and i know some guys roll their eyes at it but look, it gets you on the air, it works, and if you drop it on a trail it's not a heartbreaker. just get chirp set up on your computer to program it because doing it by hand is genuinely painful. dual band is fine to have from day one, you'll want 70cm eventually even if most local repeaters are 2m. that said if you can stretch to like 100-120 the yaesu ft-65r is a noticeable step up in build quality and audio and the menu system is way less cryptic. i gave mine to my nephew when i upgraded and he's still using it two years later with zero issues. the vx-6r is great but thats a different budget conversation entirely, submersible and all that, probably overkill for just getting started but not a bad radio at all if you find one used

ok so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i know i have some HF privileges but i honestly cant figure out from the part 97 stuff exactly where i'm allowed to operate. like i know theres something about 10 meters and maybe 40 meters for phone? but then someone at my club said techs can do some CW on other bands too and i got completely lost trying to read the actual FCC rules because the table is kind of confusing when you read it the first time. also i was wondering if theres some kind of rule about how often you have to identify yourself? i thought it was every 10 minutes but my elmer said something different and now im second guessing everything. i dont want to accidentally break a rule i didnt know about. is there like a plain english version of part 97 somewhere that actually makes sense to a beginner

so ive been thinking about learning CW for a while now and i finally decided to actually try it. bought my tech license last year and now im working toward general but honestly the thing that keeps pulling me back is wanting to do CW properly someday. the problem is i have no idea where to start and theres like a million different opinions online about how to do it. some people say do the koch method, some say just listen to a bunch of QSOs until it clicks, some say use apps. i downloaded one app and it just felt like i was memorizing dots and dashes which i read is the wrong way to do it? i dont know. is there like a generally accepted best starting point or is it really just whatever works for you. also how long did it actually take you to feel even a little confident with it

yeah i did almost the exact same thing for my first antenna, 40m dipole with whatever wire i had. one thing nobody told me that i wish they had — the trees move. like obviously they move in wind but i mean they also grow and shift and the tension on your rope changes with seasons. first hard wind i had my whole center piece came down because i didn't leave any slack in the feedline drop. just something to think about when you're rigging it up, give yourself a little droop in the coax so it doesn't pull the connector. RG-8X over 50 feet on 40m is totally fine loss wise, dont worry about that.

Echolink and IRLP are totally different animals, those are for linking repeaters and nodes together, not really what you want for a personal remote HF setup. Not knocking the idea but yeah that wouldnt solve your problem at all. Ive been running a remote setup for about two years now, different software but same general idea, and honestly some amount of latency is just the reality of doing SSB over the internet. the guys who get it really tight are usually running dedicated fiber on both ends or they live close enough to their remote site that round trip time is under 30ms. if your home upload is like 10-15 Mbps cable you might be able to squeeze it down but probably not eliminate it. some people just switch to CW for remote work because timing matters less than it does on phone.

the switching question is something i still get wrong honestly. my rough rule is if i've had more than about 90 seconds with nothing coming back to my CQ i'll at least start actively hunting on radio 2 for a better frequency. if i find something that's clearly hotter i'll move the run over but i try to leave a spot on the old freq first — sometimes just CQing once or twice before fully committing to the new one, like a soft handoff. doesn't always work but it feels less like jumping off a cliff. the other thing with SO2R that took me forever to get right was audio. i was running both radios into both ears and it was just noise. switching to left ear = radio 1, right ear = radio 2 with the non-run radio turned way down in the mix made a huge difference. you want to be aware of radio 2 but not actually listening to it if that makes sense.