Thomas Wilson

rs-44 is great for learning linear because the passband is pretty forgiving and it tends to have lighter traffic than AO-73 during peak hours so you have a bit more time to fumble around without someone walking over you lol. i actually started on that one before moving to AO-73 and it helped a lot one thing that helped me was marking the expected doppler shift at AOS, mid-pass, and LOS on a sticky note for each satellite before the pass, kind of a rough cheat sheet. gpredict shows you the instantaneous doppler but when youre also trying to point an antenna and work a contact its easy to lose track. eventually you just internalize it but in the beginning having that reference was clutch

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and just starting to get into chasing DX a little more seriously. a buddy at the club mentioned i should be using the cluster spotting networks and pointed me at DXwatch and the QRZ logbook spot feed thing. been messing with it for a couple weeks and i think i mostly get it but im not totally sure im using them the most efficient way. like right now i have DXwatch open in one tab and the QRZ DX spots page in another and im just kind of watching both refresh. is there some way to filter this stuff better because honestly when 20m is open its just a wall of spots and half of them are dupes or like 10 seconds old by the time i see them. feels like im always late to the party. also somebody mentioned GridTracker pulls from the cluster too? and there are phone apps that do this? would love to know what people are actually using day to day because the options are kind of overwhelming when you start googling around

okay so honestly the technician exam is not that bad, dont psych yourself out about it. the question pool is public, thats the big thing people dont realize at first, like the actual questions that will be on your test are all available ahead of time so there are no surprises if you study the pool. HamStudy.org is probably where id send anyone starting out, its free and it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those more. some people also use the Gordon West book or the ARRL technician manual but honestly for most people just grinding through the question pool on hamstudy for a week or two is enough to pass. for finding a test session you can search on the ARRL website or on HamStudy actually, they have a session finder too. a lot of clubs also do remote testing now which is super convenient if theres nothing local coming up soon. the fee is usually like 15 bucks. your neighbor being a ham is a huge resource by the way, he can probably point you to the local club and they almost certainly run VE sessions periodically.

oh man i was so confused by this exact thing when i started. someone finally explained to me that solar flux is like a rough indicator of HF conditions in general but each band has its own personality if that makes sense. 10m needs pretty high flux to reliably open for DX, like consistently above 150 is when it gets really fun, but even at 120 or so you can get surprise openings especially around the equinoxes. a vertical will work fine honestly, 10m doesnt require a fancy antenna to have fun. i work a lot of DX on a simple ground plane. just takes patience and being there at the right time

yeah technician is definitely the right starting point, dont try to jump to general right away unless you really want to grind through two separate exams back to back which some people do but honestly its a lot. the question pool does get updated every few years so just make sure whatever you're using is current — i think the technician pool got refreshed not too long ago so double check that. HamStudy.org is what most people use now and its free, it basically just drills you on the actual questions that will be on the test. some people also like the ARRL study guides but the website is probably fine for most folks. once you get like 85% or above consistently on the practice tests youre probably ready to just go take it. the test itself is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass so theres a little wiggle room. find a local club that does VE sessions, most of them do walkins and its usually like 15 bucks.

I had almost the exact same thing happen when i first set up VARA FM, drove me crazy for like two weeks. Turned out my USB soundcard was throttling on long transfers — some of the cheap ones have buffer issues that only show up when you're pushing data for more than 30 seconds or so. Swapped to a SignaLink and the problem went away completely. Not saying thats definitely your issue but worth keeping in mind if the audio settings dont fix it.

yeah totally normal for this part of the cycle honestly. we're climbing toward solar max and the flux has been trending up but geomagnetic activity has been really unsettled too, those two things kind of fight each other. high flux is great for propagation but then a CME comes through and the K index spikes and it wipes out everything especially on the higher bands. 15m to japan from midwest is very doable right now when conditions cooperate, that path is usually best in your early morning hours like around 1200-1400 UTC depending on time of year. the inconsistency you're describing sounds completely normal to me, i've been logging similar stuff from here in ohio. just keep an eye on the geomagnetic forecasts, spaceweather.com updates pretty regularly and DXmaps is good for seeing where openings are actually happening in real time.

yeah made that exact jump about 18 months ago and the difference on HF is not subtle at all. the dynamic range improvement is immediately obvious, like within the first hour of using it i could actually copy signals that were just getting buried before. 40m and 80m especially felt totally different. the RSP1B front end handles nearby strong signals way better than the rtl dongle with direct sampling, which always felt like a bit of a kludge anyway even though it works surprisingly well for what it is. SDRuno takes some getting used to, the UI is honestly a bit of a mess at first and i spent more time than i want to admit just figuring out where everything was. but once you get the hang of it the feature set is solid and the IF gain staging actually makes sense once you understand whats happening. also worth knowing SDRplay devices work fine in SDR# and HDSDR too so you're not locked into SDRuno if you hate it. HackRF for pure receive only is kind of overkill and the 8-bit dynamic range is actually worse than the RSP1B in a lot of situations, so if you're not doing transmit or wideband stuff like signals intelligence type work the RSP1B is the smarter buy for what you're describing.

had almost identical symptoms on mine a couple years back, turned out to be a cold solder joint on one of the driver board connectors. the internal ribbon connectors on those rigs can work loose over time especially if the radio's been moved around a lot. i reseated everything i could get to without major disassembly and it came back to life. probably took 20 minutes total. obviously not saying thats definitely your problem but worth trying before digging into the PA section.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 40 minutes from my house. been putting it off for months because i kept telling myself i needed better gear or more practice or whatever, just excuses honestly. anyway i threw the KX2 in a backpack with my EFHW and a little collapsible fishing pole for the mast and just went for it. made 12 contacts in about an hour which i know is not a huge pile but the park was qualified so im pretty happy with it. mostly 40m SSB, tried 20m for a bit but was having a hard time hearing responses to my CQ. i think my antenna placement was kind of off because i was near a lot of trees and it was a weird sloped setup. couple of things im not sure about though - when i log it on the POTA website do i need to upload an ADIF or can i just enter contacts manually? i used a paper log in the field and havent set up any logging software yet. also is there a way to let hunters know youre activating in advance, like do people actually use the spots page or is that more for when youre already out there? also someone on the air told me i should try to do a selfspot but i was fumbling with the radio and didnt really have a way to do it easily. is there an app for that or do people use a second phone or something

so i finally got activated for a real event last weekend, our county ARES group got called in to support a marathon and then partway through the day a pretty serious weather situation developed nearby so it turned into more than just a fun community service thing real fast i've been doing training nets for about eight months and passed the ICS courses (100, 200, 700, 800) back in the spring like the EC told us we needed before we could deploy, and i gotta say nothing really prepares you for when the NCS is juggling like four different things at once and you're trying to remember proper net procedure while also watching the sky turn green the thing that surprised me most was how much of it is just waiting and listening and then suddenly you have to relay a message and you better have been paying attention. i fumbled one message relay because i wrote down the wrong street name and had to ask for a repeat which felt embarrassing but the net control was totally calm about it, just had me say it back again anyone else remember their first real activation? did you feel like you were gonna mess everything up the whole time or was that just me

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and the tracking side works fine, my beacon shows up on aprs.fi no problem, but when i try to send messages through the network they just seem to vanish. i can see my own beacon getting picked up by a couple of digipeaters about 8 miles out and then hitting the IGate at W4xxx but the messages never seem to reach anyone. tried sending to a buddy across town who was showing green on the map and nothing got through either way. running a Kenwood TM-D710G into a mag mount on the car, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. the TNC is internal so i dont think thats the issue. ive checked the audio levels about a dozen times and everything looks okay. is there something specific about message routing that im missing compared to just beacon packets, or is this more of a coverage problem than i think it is

I tried SO2R for about two contests and gave it up, went back to focused single radio and actually did better. maybe im just not wired for it. the guys who really make it work seem to have been doing it for years and have their shack dialed in perfectly for it, like dedicated SO2R keyers and proper station automation. trying to bolt it onto an existing setup always felt kludgy to me. one thing that did help my rate more than anything else was just being more aggressive about when to switch from running to S&P and back. a lot of people stay on a dead run frequency way too long out of habit.

I missed it unfortunately, was stuck at work. This is literally the story of my ham life lol. Every time someone reports a good 10m opening I'm either at the office or mowing the lawn or something. I did catch a brief one about two weeks ago where I heard a beacon from Argentina pretty clearly on my dipole which was cool but by the time I got set up to actually call anyone it had faded out. I need to just set up some kind of alert system I guess.

honestly same boat as you when i started lol. one thing that helped me was just watching how people handle it when conditions get rough — like if theres QRM or the signal is weak everyone suddenly goes back to full phonetics real fast. thats when you realize why they exist in the first place. also random tip — some people use non-NATO phonetics like "sugar" for S or whatever and it kind of drives me crazy because now i have to think about it for a second instead of just knowing. stick to the standard ones and people will appreciate you for it even if they dont say so