Kimberly Brooks

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i mostly just listen on the local repeater and occasionally check in on the wednesday night net. everyone seems to know exactly what theyre saying but half the time i have no idea what they mean. like QSL, QTH, QRM, QSB -- i kind of figured out QSL means like confirming something? and QTH might be location? but then someone said QRN last week and i had no clue. also people say 73 at the end of everything and i know thats like goodbye or something but where did that even come from. is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just kind of pick these up over time. i feel like everyone else just knows this stuff already and i dont wanna ask at the club and look dumb

so i've got nothing going on tonight and just been parked on 7.200 for like the past hour listening to some guys ragchew about absolutely nothing — truck problems, weather, somebody's neighbor who keeps parking in the wrong spot. honestly its kind of relaxing? idk there's something about just listening to people shoot the breeze on SSB that i never get tired of. been licensed since 2019 and i still just like to sit and listen sometimes more than actually transmitting. anybody else do this or am i weird

yeah 40 has been weird for me too, though i think some of it is the solar stuff going on right now. i checked propnet the other night and the path i usually work into the midwest was just not there. tried again an hour later and it opened right up. so maybe just timing. also yeah ft8 ate a lot of the casual operators i think, which is kind of a bummer but whatever gets people on the air i guess

yeah 10m has been pretty fantastic when the conditions line up, the current solar cycle is really delivering and we're apparently getting close to or maybe past the cycle 25 peak depending on who you ask. flux in the 170-200 range is when 10 starts getting really fun, below like 120 or so it's kind of a crapshoot unless there's some sporadic-E mixed in which is a whole other thing
the A and K index stuff is more about geomagnetic disturbances, so a high K index (like 4 or above) can really mess up propagation even if the flux looks great. i usually check dxmaps.com and pskreporter to see where signals are actually going before i bother calling CQ because sometimes the flux looks good on paper but a coronal mass ejection or something has churned up the ionosphere and nothing's getting through. 14 countries in a couple hours on a dipole with 100w is a solid afternoon, that's the magic of 10m when it's open

yeah the duty cycle thing is the real gotcha with battery only setups. people always calculate worst case transmit draw but in practice on a nets and traffic exercise youre probably sitting at receive current most of the time which on the 7300 is what, like 2 amps? so the actual average might be way lower than you think depending on how the exercise is structured.
one thing worth doing before you go is just run your actual gear for a couple hours at home and log how fast the battery drops. way better than doing math that turns out to be wrong at the worst time. also if you havent looked at it, the 7300 has a power limit setting buried in the menu somewhere, dropping to 50 watts makes a noticeable difference in draw and for most emcomm work youre not trying to work dx anyway so who cares

Check out the YCCC SO2R Box Plus for switching - handles the audio routing and PTT logic cleanly. Configure N1MM for split audio (left/right channels) rather than the latch mode, and definitely enable the Auto-Resume CQ feature with the %X command in your CQ message.