Kimberly Brooks

congrats on taking the plunge, first activation is always a little nerve-wracking but you'll do fine. on the logging question - theres no rule that says you have to log in real time, plenty of people just jot callsigns on a notepad or even their hand and enter it properly when they get home. the 4 QSO rule is really just about making the contact, not how you record it. that said writing it down as you go is way easier than trying to remember who called when you had a pileup. for HAMRS i believe theres a MY_SOTA_REF field or something close to it in the ADIF export settings, but honestly i think for sota.database.sota.org.uk the import wants SOTA_REF for the chaser side and MY_SOTA_REF for the activator. might be worth posting in the HAMRS facebook group because that comes up a lot. good luck Saturday, post how it goes

the missing packets thing is pretty normal honestly. if the station is just passing through and only hits your igate once or twice with marginal signal, aprs.fi might not pick it up depending on how the IS servers are deduplicating. also worth checking if those mobiles are running 1200 baud on 144.390 or if someones being weird and running a different config. direwolf will decode it either way but the path matters a lot for whether it propgates. for the receive-only igate question, yeah thats totally valid. a well placed rx-only igate can actually be more useful than a crappy digi in some cases. if your antenna situation is limited just run the igate, watch your RF heard stats on aprs.fi and see what youre pulling in. you can always add the digi side later when you have a better antenna up.

im in a similar boat, did a fan dipole for 40 and 20 last spring and had the same coax RF issue. ended up just making a choke out of coax like the previous guy said and it cleared right up. for the feedpoint weatherproofing I went with self-fusing tape and then a big glob of coax seal on top of that, probably overkill but I sleep better knowing its not going to corrode out on me after a rainstorm. one thing i noticed with my inverted V is that the angle of the legs matters more than i expected for the radiation pattern, shallower angle seems to favor lower angles but its hard to tell practically without a antenna analyzer doing a sweep across the band. what are you using to measure SWR, a dedicated analyzer or just the radio's built in meter?

been using JS8Call on and off for maybe two years now, its honestly my favorite mode when im not chasing DX. the HF APRS-like stuff where you can query nearby stations for heard list and all that is genuinely useful during nets or when propagation is sketchy. theres a small but pretty active community especially on 40m at night. one thing tho — make sure you grab the latest build from the JS8Call website not whatever might be in your distro packages if youre on linux, the older versions had some weird UI bugs. and set your bandwidth to normal mode first before messing with the turbo or slow settings.

so ive been doing single op for a few years now and every time i look at the top scores in sweepstakes or SS phone the guys crushing it are almost all running SO2R. i get the basic concept, you're listening on one radio while youre transmitting on the other, picking up mults or finding a run freq, but i honestly dont know if its worth the setup pain for someone who only does maybe 4-5 contests a year. right now i have an IC-7300 as my main rig and a spare FT-857D sitting in the closet doing nothing. my antenna situation is a hex beam at about 35 feet and a 40m dipole, both on separate feedlines so at least i have that going for me. the main thing im worried about is RFI between the two radios, ive heard that can get really ugly if youre not careful with filtering and band-pass filters. anyone actually made the jump from single radio to SO2R on a modest station and seen a meaningful rate improvement? or is the gain mostly coming from station infrastructure and not the second radio itself? trying to figure out if i should invest in a proper SO2R controller like the microHAM stuff or just try to cobble something together first to see if it even makes sense for my setup.

i run PSK31 still, dont judge me lol. theres a small but pretty dedicated group that keeps the old watering holes alive, usually around 14.070 give or take. you actually do get real conversations and its keyboard to keyboard like you said. the software is mature and everything just works. but honestly if the band is marginal its painful compared to FT8, signals that would be totally workable on FT8 just dissapear into the noise on PSK. so i keep both running and just switch depending on conditions and what im in the mood for.

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and last weekend i finally sat down and actually built out a proper go-kit. nothing fancy but at least its something. i ended up using one of those harbor freight pelican-style cases, threw in my FT-891, a small switching power supply, some coax jumpers, a few connectors, my logging notebook, a printed copy of local ARES frequencies and the county emergency plan, some basic hand tools, and a headlamp because apparently i always forget one when i need it most. took it out to the driveway and ran it off a 35ah AGM battery i had sitting around just to see how long i could operate before it got low. ran about 4 hours of mixed receive and some local net check-ins and it barely moved. felt pretty good about that. the whole kit fits in the back of my car without taking up too much room which was kind of the goal. couple things im not sure about though. do most of you guys keep a dedicated antenna in the kit or just grab whatever you have? right now i just tossed in a tape measure yagi i built a while back but im not sure thats the most practical thing for general use. also do you keep your kit in the car permanently or just bring it out when theres an actual activation or exercise? wondering about heat in the summer messing with the battery or the radio.

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think im close but not quite there. basically i have an old Yaesu G-450A rotator and ive been trying to get a pi zero w to talk to the controller over serial so i can automate it from my logging software. the idea is to just have it track satellites automatically without me having to babysit the thing. ive got a USB to serial adapter hooked up and i can see the port in linux just fine, and i wrote a little python script that sends the positioning commands — at least i think theyre the right commands, been going off an old PDF of the manual i found. sometimes it moves, sometimes it just... doesnt. no error, just nothing. im wondering if its a timing issue or if my baud rate is off or something. also not 100% sure the GS-232 command set is fully supported on this controller, the manual is kind of vague about it. anyone gone down this rabbit hole before? im not opposed to just buying one of those commercial rotator interfaces but id rather figure this out myself if i can

yeah the listen first thing is honestly the biggest one and most people skip it because theyre so excited they just start calling immediately. ive worked a lot of rare ones over the years and the guys who break through fast are almost always the ones who spent 5-10 minutes just listening before they ever key up. you start to get a feel for the operators rhythm, some of them have very predictable patterns about where theyre tuning, some go high then low then high again, some systematically sweep one direction. the single call thing works too, especially on CW. one clean crisp call at the right moment beats three rapid fire calls every time in my experience. on phone its a bit different, sometimes you need two sends just for readability especially if condx are marginal, but still keep it short. the guys sending their call four times in a row are basically wallpaper at that point, operators tune right past them. one more thing — if the DXpedition is working split and they announce theyre listening 5 to 10, dont camp on one frequency. move around a little. not constantly hopping but if youve called from the same spot 8 times and nothings happening, shift up or down a kHz and try again. sometimes its just about being in the right place when they sweep through.

14awg stranded is totally fine for a wire dipole, honestly i've run 18awg for years without any issues on power levels up to about 100w. the wire gauge really only matters much if you're running high power or want something more mechanically durable for long term outdoor use. on the balun question — it depends. for an inverted V fed with coax you're technically running an unbalanced line to a balanced antenna, so some rf can end up on the outside of the braid and come back into the shack which can cause all kinds of weird rfi issues, rf in the audio, swr that changes when you touch the radio, that kind of thing. if everything seems fine and your swr is stable i wouldn't stress about it too much right now but eventually its worth throwing a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint just to clean things up. you can wind your own with a ferrite toroid pretty cheap, type 31 or type 43 material works well for hf. sounds like a solid first build though, 1.2:1 on the first try is better than a lot of people do

this is really helpful to read, im pretty new (got my general last spring) and i keep hearing people talk about the solar flux and band conditions but honestly i wasnt totally sure what numbers to even look for or what they mean in practice. like i knew higher flux was supposed to be better but i didn't know it interacted with the K-index that way. do you have a go-to site for checking all this before a session? i've been using the NOAA space weather page but it feels like a lot of info and i'm not sure what to focus on

Log4OM does have UDP integration with WSJT-X, it works pretty well actually. you go into the settings and point WSJT-X at the Log4OM UDP port instead of the default one, or you can run them in parallel if you also want N1MM to see the spots. i ran it that way for a while where WSJT-X was broadcasting to both and Log4OM would grab the QSO data the moment WSJT-X logged it. not perfect but it worked without too much fussing around. that said i dont think Log4OM is really a contest logger, like it has some contest features but nothing close to what N1MM does. the rate display alone in N1MM is worth keeping it around for. i ended up just keeping both installed, N1MM for any serious contest operating and Log4OM as my daily driver for everything else. they both export ADIF fine so merging logs afterward isnt terrible, just a little tedious.

i went through this exact same thing a few months ago lol. ended up getting the baofeng uv-5r just to have something while i figured out what i actually wanted. its fine, works, got me on repeaters no problem. but yeah the menu system is kind of terrible and the chirp thing is basically required. now i have a yaesu ft-70dr which does fusion digital and analog both and i like it a lot more, feels way more solid in the hand. but thats like 150 bucks so depends on your budget. i dont regret starting with the cheap one though cause i wasnt even sure if id stick with the hobby at first

i built the same kit last year, the backwards connector thing happened to me too lol. mine was the audio jack i think. congrats on the first contact though, 40m with QRP can be surprisingly great when conditions cooperate. i mostly take mine out portable now, just a little backpack setup with a linked dipole and a small lipo battery and it's honestly my favorite way to operate. way more fun than sitting in the shack for some reason

the clean signal point is something a lot of people dont think about. saw a thread on here a while back where someone realized their ALC was way off and they were basically splattering across like 3-4 kHz. in a pileup that kind of thing either gets you ignored or actively cursed at by the net control if theres one. worth checking with any kind of SDR you can borrow just to see what you actually look like on the air. im still pretty new to chasing DX seriously but one thing that helped me was just reading the DXpedition's spots and comments on the cluster to understand their operating style before i ever tried to call. sometimes other stations post stuff like 'listening up 3' or 'working by number' and if you just dive in without knowing that you're basically wasting everyone's time including yours.