Paul Anderson

the physical card thing is honestly just fun imo, i keep a binder of the ones i've gotten from rare dx stations and it's kind of cool to flip through. practically speaking though most serious award chasers just do LoTW and forget the rest unless someone specifically requests a bureau card or something. i wouldnt stress too much about eQSL unless you start getting into specific contests or awards that require it, most of the ones i care about dont bother with it

the lifepo4 plan makes sense to me, the EU2200i is great but yeah for 4-5 hours with reasonable duty cycle its probably unnecessary weight. i ran my 7300 through a full 8 hour simulated emergency exercise off a 100ah battleborn last fall and still had like 60% left, and we were actually pretty active on 40m most of the day. key thing is watch your resting voltage if you havent used the pack in a while before the exercise, lifepo4 sits weird sometimes and a partial charge can fool you. one thing id add — bring a small solar panel even if you dont think you need it. even a 100w rigid panel on a tiltable stand just sitting there topping things off is nice peace of mind and the weight isnt terrible. i use a renogy 100w with a victron 75/15 mppt and it just runs in the background, barely have to think about it. buddipole for 40 and 20 is fine, just give yourself time to tune it. that thing can be finicky if youre rushed and the coil settings for 40 are not always obvious from the chart. id do a backyard test run before the exercise if you havent already, seriously.

congrats on passing the tech exam, welcome to the hobby. ok so the baofeng vs yaesu thing is kind of a whole thing in the ham world. the short version is that baofengs work, they really do, i started on a UV-5R and made plenty of contacts on local repeaters with it. the audio isnt great and the software is a pain but at 25 bucks you cant really go wrong for learning the basics. that said if you can stretch to the FT-65 or even the Yaesu FT-70DR (which does C4FM digital too), youll appreciate the build quality and the menus actually make sense without having to google everything. for APRS you might want to think about getting something like the VX-8DR down the road which has built in GPS and APRS, but that's way overkill for starting out. get on a repeater first, talk to people, figure out what you actually want to do. the gear rabbit hole can wait lol

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor is a ham and he keeps telling me i should just get my ticket already. i finally decided to actually do it but now im looking at all these study guides and websites and honestly its a little overwhelming. like theres hamstudy.org and the arrl book and some other stuff people mention and i dont know which one to actually use or if i need all of them or what. also the question pool thing — someone told me the actual exam questions come from a published pool? so technically you could just memorize all the answers without really understanding anything? not that i want to do that but i guess im wondering how much of the theory stuff i actually need to know vs just pattern matching the answers. the electrical stuff especially looks pretty dense and im not an engineer or anything anyway any advice on how to actually approach this would be great, i have maybe a month before theres a testing session near me

I did something similar in my 2019 F-250, not exactly the same cab layout but close enough. What ended up working really well was a Lido mount that goes between the seat and the console — no drilling and it holds the radio solidly even on rough roads. the radio sits at a decent angle and doesnt block anything important. you do lose a little elbow room but honestly after a few days you dont notice. If you go the remote head route that works too but you're adding cable routing complexity and depending on how you do it the control cable can be a real pain to run neatly. I'd try a good no-drill mount first before committing to separating the head. Also make sure whatever you do the radio isnt blocking the airbag deployment zones — people forget about that and it can get sketchy.

so ive been going through the hamstudy.org question pool for about two weeks now and im kind of overwhelmed honestly. like there are questions about electrical theory and then questions about operating procedures and band plans and i dont really know which ones i should be spending the most time on versus which ones i can just kind of skim and hope i remember. someone at my local club told me to just memorize everything but that feels like a lot and some of the electrical stuff like the ohms law calculations are tripping me up. do i actually need to understand the math or is it okay to just memorize what the answer is. also is the gordon west book still worth getting or is hamstudy enough on its own these days

The 10 minute rule is actually per transmission series not per individual exchange, so if you and another ham are going back and forth in a conversation you just need to make sure neither of you goes more than 10 minutes without identifying — and then you both ID when you're done. In practice for a short ragchew thats usually just ID at the start, maybe once in the middle if it runs long, and then at the end. Nobody's sitting there with a stopwatch but the spirit of it is pretty easy to follow once you get a feel for it. For nets it really does vary. Most formal nets the net control will acknowledge you by callsign when you check in and then you ID again if you get a traffic pass or have a comment. Informal nets are more relaxed. Honestly just listen to how the regulars do it on whatever nets you frequent and mirror that — you'll pick it up fast. The fact that you're even asking means you're already ahead of a lot of new hams.

i went through this maybe 6 months ago, got the call i wanted on the first try which was honestly surprising. the ae7q site the other person mentioned is really the key, i spent like an hour on there just browsing what was available in my district before i even decided what to apply for. some calls you think would be taken have been sitting open for ages. one thing i'll add — dont get too attached to one specific call before you check how many other people might want it. i picked something a little less obvious and had no competition. if you go for something super short like a 1x2 everyone and their dog is probably watching that one

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, got a few hundred in the log at this point. people keep mentioning LoTW and eQSL and i honestly dont fully understand the difference or which one i should be bothering with. i went to the ARRL site to sign up for LoTW and the whole certificate thing kind of confused me and i gave up halfway through. also do people still actually send paper QSL cards? ive gotten a few in the mail from DX contacts and theyre really cool but i dont know if im supposed to send one back or how that even works. do you just mail it directly to the other person or is there a bureau thing? im in the US if that matters. just want to make sure im not being rude to people by not confirming contacts i guess

so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now and generally its been working fine for tracking, my position beacons show up on aprs.fi no problem, but the last few weeks any messages i send to other stations just seem to disappear into the void. the other station isnt seeing them and they dont appear in the message log on aprs.fi either. im running a TM-D710G into a digi i built from a T2-135 board with a raspberry pi running direwolf, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. ive tried sending to a couple different callsigns to rule out the one station being the problem. beacons still work fine which is what makes this weird to me, its specifically the message packets that seem to be getting dropped. anyone seen this before? wondering if its a direwolf config thing or maybe something upstream with the APRS-IS injection. honestly not even sure where to start debugging this one.

yeah this is actually by design and it tripped me up too when i first set up my iGate. Direwolf (and most iGate software honestly) wont forward packets from stations it hears directly on RF if those packets are already making it to APRS-IS through other paths — it's an anti-duplicate thing baked into how the network is supposed to work. so your beacon is probably getting picked up by surrounding digis and hitting the IS that way, which is exactly what you're seeing on aprs.fi. if you want to verify your OWN iGate is the one doing the work you'd have to be somewhere where you're not reachable by any other digi, which kind of defeats the purpose. the better question is whether your iGate is actually digipeating for other stations in your area and from what you said it sounds like it is, so honestly you're probably fine. check the IGFILTER line in your Direwolf config too, sometimes that catches things unexpectedly.

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor is licensed and he keeps telling me to just get my ticket already. i finally decided to go for it but honestly i dont even know where to start. i looked up the question pool online and theres like 400+ questions and i kind of panicked a little. do i need to actually understand all of it or is it more like just memorizing the answers? and are there certain sections that trip people up more than others because some of the electrical stuff looks pretty intimidating. i took basic physics in high school like 15 years ago so im not totally clueless but its definitely been a while. any tips on study guides or apps or whatever would be helpful, i just dont want to show up to the exam and completely blank out

so i finally did my first parks on the air activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house. been wanting to do this for months and kept putting it off. anyway i brought my KX2 and a simple end fed wire that i threw up in a tree maybe 20 feet and operated for about 2 hours. here's the thing though — i only got 11 contacts. i know you need 10 to make an activation count but two of those were kind of sketchy, like i wasnt sure if the logging software actually saved them right because my tablet was acting weird in the cold. so i manually wrote them down in a notebook too just in case. uploaded the ADIF when i got home and it showed 11 confirmed contacts in the log so i guess it worked out. my question is, does the activation still count if some of the signal reports were pretty rough? i had one guy come back to me like four times before he got my callsign and park reference right. and is there anything i should do differently for next time setup-wise, especially for getting spotted on the POTA network faster? i didnt really figure out the self-spotting thing until like 40 minutes in which probably cost me some contacts early on.

so ive had my 857 for about 4 years now and overall its a solid rig but the receive audio has always bugged me a little, its just kind of thin and harsh especially on SSB. been reading about the collins filter mod and also the electrolytic cap replacement on the audio board. some guys swear by it and others say they didnt notice much difference. my question is has anyone actually done both mods on the same radio and if so was the improvement noticeable enough to justify cracking the case open. im reasonably comfortable with a soldering iron, done some work on older tube gear so small SMD stuff doesnt terrify me but i also dont want to mess with something thats been working reliably for years if the gain isnt worth it. the collins filter in particular seems like it could make a real difference for CW but i mostly do SSB and some digital so maybe its not even the right mod for my use case. also if anyone has the specific cap values handy for the audio board replacement that would be helpful, ive seen different numbers floating around on different sites and im not sure which version of the board mine has

haha yeah your first few activations are always kind of a disaster. i forgot my coax connector the first time and just sat there eating a sandwich for an hour before driving home. the checklist thing is genuinely good advice though, i have one in a ziplock bag that lives in my go kit permanently now. also paper logging isnt as bad as you think once you get used to it, i actually prefer it when the weather is rough because phones get weird in the cold.

so i've been a tech for about 8 months now and ive mostly been doing stuff on my baofeng uv-5r that i grabbed right after passing my exam, which is fine for what it is but i keep feeling like im fighting it every time i try to do something that should be simple, like programming it without chirp is basically impossible and even with chirp it feels kinda clunky anyway i want to step up to something better. mostly i'd be using it for local repeaters, some simplex with a buddy a few towns over, and id like to eventually get into aprs if thats even something you do on a handheld. budget is probably 150-250 bucks, maybe a little more if something is really worth it. ive been looking at the yaesu ft-60 and also the wouxun kg-uv9d but honestly i dont know enough to know what actually matters and what is just spec sheet noise also does dual band even matter that much for local stuff or am i overthinking it

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly i dont fully understand the difference or which one makes sense to go after first. like i get that DXCC is working 100 countries and WAS is all 50 states but what even is WAZ? someone at the club mentioned it last week and i kind of nodded like i knew what they were talking about but i really didnt lol also how does the whole credits thing work — do i need paper QSL cards or is LoTW enough now? i've been pretty good about uploading everything to LoTW since i got on air but i only have like 23 confirmed entities so far. running 100w into a dipole in the backyard if that matters not sure where to even start with this stuff, any help appreciated

yeah this is one of those things where everybody has a strong opinion so i'll just tell you what worked for me. forget the dots and dashes on paper, seriously, that'll slow you down. the whole point is to get your brain hearing a letter as a sound, not mentally counting dit-dah-dah and then going oh thats a W. that extra step will kill you at any real speed. what i did was use the Koch method, theres a free program called LCWO dot net that walks you through it. you start with just two characters at like 20wpm and only move on when you can copy them reliably. its kind of maddening at first because you feel like youre getting nowhere but after a few weeks something clicks and the letters just start coming. i spent maybe 15-20 minutes a day on it and got to about 10wpm copy in maybe 3 months, which was enough to get on the air and muddle through a QSO. the on-air practice is honestly what pushed me past the plateau, no app really replicates that.

so i finally drove out to do my first real SOTA activation last weekend, W4C/EM-001 or something like that, and i had this whole plan worked out but of course nothing went like i expected. got to the summit fine but the wind up there was absolutely brutal, like i could barely keep my endfed strung up. kept sagging and i ended up just holding one end of it for like 20 minutes while trying to log contacts with my other hand which was pretty ridiculous looking im sure. managed to get 4 QSOs on 40m SSB before the battery on my KX2 started acting weird and i just packed it in. still counts as an activation right? i posted the spots on SOTAwatch before i went up but honestly i dont think anyone was really expecting me, probably should have self spotted from the summit too. anyway it was fun even though it was kind of a mess and im already planning the next one

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still feel kind of awkward about when to use phonetics. like on a clear 2m repeater with good signal i feel dumb going through the whole alfa bravo charlie thing when i could just say the letters. but then on HF when things are rough i get why you need them. is there like an unwritten rule about this? i asked my elmer and he said just use them always to build the habit but then i hear a lot of guys on the local repeater just rattling off callsigns without phonetics and nobody seems confused. i dunno, maybe it depends on conditions? or is it more of a courtesy thing also slightly related — i heard someone on 40m say "november" for N and someone else say "nancy" for the same letter in the same QSO which was kind of confusing. are the NATO ones the only acceptable ones or is there some flexibility there

im pretty new too, got my ticket about 8 months ago, and what helped me a lot was just downloading one of those Q code reference cards as a PDF and printing it out. also the ARRL has a decent list somewhere on their site. the ones that confused me forever were QRM vs QRN because both are interference but from different sources. QRM = man made, QRN = natural. once someone explained it that way it clicked. oh and people also use a lot of CW shorthand even in voice sometimes which is weird, like saying 73 out loud instead of just saying goodbye. some of the older guys also say things like PSE for please and TNX for thanks and UR for your and it can feel like a whole different language at first but you do get used to it

went through the exact same thing like 8 months ago. just take the test, i studied for maybe 3 weeks with hamstudy and passed fine. the formula questions i basically just learned which formula goes with which question lol, i didnt deeply understand all of it and i still passed no problem. youll learn more by actually getting on air than from any amount of studying i promise. one thing i wasnt expecting — even after i got my General it took me a little while to actually get a QSO because HF feels different, like you have to learn when to transmit and the whole rhythm of a pileup or just a regular SSB contact is different than FM. but its addicting once it clicks

yeah the frequency mismatch thing is totally normal and its because those spots are coming from different nodes in the cluster network. DXwatch aggregates from a bunch of different sources and QRZ pulls from their own feed so sometimes youll see a 2-3 kHz difference just because two different guys spotted the same station at slightly different times or from different parts of the world where propagation made the signal appear a little shifted. not a big deal, just tune around a bit when you get there for filtering on the phone apps — on DX Toolkit if you go into settings there should be a way to set your continent and band preferences. took me a while to find it honestly. once i set it to only alert me for new entities on 20 and 17m it got way more useful. before that i was getting notified constantly and just started ignoring everything which defeats the whole point one thing i use that you didnt mention is the ON4KST chat for real time DX chatter, its kind of old school and the interface looks like its from 2003 but the info in there during a good opening is way more current than any automated cluster. guys will post things like "just worked him, he's listening up 3" and that kind of thing saves a lot of time

so ive been running a Yaesu FT-7900 in my F-150 for about a year now and the antenna situation has been kind of a mess the whole time. started with a mag mount on the roof which worked okay but i was always worried about scratching the paint or it flying off at highway speeds, which it did once, thankfully in a parking lot. right now ive got a lip mount on the tailgate but the coax routing is driving me crazy and the SWR on 70cm is not great, like 1.8 to 1 which isnt terrible but i feel like i can do better. wondering if anyone has done a proper through-hole mount on a truck or one of those bed rail setups. i do use the bed for actual work stuff so i cant have anything that gets in the way too much. also open to hearing what antenna you're running. im on a NMO mount dual band right now, think its a Tram 1185 or something similar.

yeah what he said about Field Day is right, its a weird hybrid thing. but honestly just go and operate at your club setup this year, even if you only make 20 contacts it gives you a feel for the pileup thing without the pressure of being alone at your own station. SOTA is great prep for contesting too because you already know how to work fast exchanges if youve been doing activations. i did my first CQ WW like two years ago and was totally lost for the first hour then something just clicked. stick with 40m to start since thats what you know.