Thomas Wilson

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a local state forest, KFF-something i dont remember the exact number off the top of my head. been wanting to try this for ages after watching a few videos and reading about it here and there. set up my end fed wire between two trees, ran about 20 watts on 40m and made contact pretty quickly which honestly surprised me because i wasnt sure if anyone would be hunting for references on a random saturday morning. ended up with 12 contacts which i know isnt the 44 you need for a valid activation but i ran out of time and also my 857 started acting weird with the SWR, probably a connector issue on my feedline. anyway i logged everything on paper and need to figure out how to upload to the WWFF database, is it just an ADIF upload or is there a specific format they want? also do partial activations even get recorded or does it only count once you hit 44? genuinely curious because i want to go back and finish it properly

so ive been doing Sweepstakes CW for the past few years as SO1R and honestly been pretty happy with it, typically finishing somewhere mid-pack in my section. but i keep reading about SO2R and watching the 3830 scores from guys who are clearly running two radios and the rate difference is just insane. like they'll have these huge multiplier hauls early and then just sustain a run rate that I can't match even on a good band opening. my current setup is an IC-7300 which is great but obviously only one radio. i do have an old TS-590SG sitting here that i pulled from the shack rearrangement last spring and never put back into regular use. so the hardware question is somewhat answered but everything else feels like a giant unknown. bandpass filters, SO2R controllers, antenna switching, figuring out how to not key up on myself... i dont even know where to start honestly. is there a reasonable entry point into this or is it one of those things where you either go all-in with the full microHAM setup and dedicated antennas or you're just spinning your wheels? genuinely curious if anyone has done a more budget/scrappy version of SO2R that actually worked during a phone or CW contest.

the internet linking question depends alot on what you mean by linking. if youre talking about tying the remote into like an echolink or IRLP node at the same site thats a whole separate can of worms and i wouldnt mix those two things on the same connection without some QoS rules or youll have audio stepping on itself at the worst moments cellular is usually fine for basic remote ops but i've had issues where the latency spikes during peak hours and on CW it becomes basically unworkable for anything faster than maybe 15 wpm. SSB you probably wont notice it as much. just something to keep in mind if youre planning on doing any digital or CW work remotely over a cell connection

congrats on your first real activation, flooding events are actually a good one to start with because theyre usually not super chaotic like a tornado response can be. the ICS-213 software thing is pretty common now, a lot of folks use things like ICS-DMS or some groups have their own templates in excel or whatever. paper is still totally valid and honestly sometimes preferred by served agencies who dont want to deal with files. i wouldnt stress about it at all. on the programming question — what i do and what i tell newer folks in our group is to have a dedicated "activation" memory bank or zone in your radio if it supports that. i keep all the ARES repeaters, the RACES freqs, simplex calling, and the EOC direct freqs all in one zone so i can switch to it and know everything in there is relevant. also i make a laminated card that lives in my go bag with the freq list, offsets, tones, and any notes. sounds old school but when its noisy and stressful at 2am you dont want to be digging through menus. sounds like you did well though, fumbling an offset once during a 14 hour deployment isnt exactly a crisis.

those 8 channel relay boards work but watch out for the optocoupler input logic, some of them are active low which trips people up. i fried one relay trying to figure out why my logic was backwards lol. just check the datasheet for whatever board you get before you assume high = on.

yeah this trips up a lot of newer generals, dont feel bad. so the short version is your carrier frequency plus your sideband has to stay within the allocation, so if youre doing USB on 40m and the band ends at 7.300 MHz you cant just park on 7.300 and start talking because your signal is going to extend above that. a typical SSB signal is roughly 3 kHz wide so if youre on 7.300 your actual transmitted audio is going up to like 7.303 which puts you outside the allocation. most guys say stay at least 3 or 4 kHz below the edge just to be safe, so 7.296 or lower gives you some breathing room. the FCC part 97 rules say you have to keep your signal within the band limits so technically its a rules violation, not just a gentleman thing. as for the europeans, yeah thats a whole different thing. ITU region 2 which is us here in the americas has 40m going 7.0 to 7.3, but region 1 which covers europe africa etc used to only go up to 7.1 MHz for amateur use and the rest was other services. they got expanded eventually but their phone band starts lower than ours does i think around 7.100 so you'll hear them down there and it can seem weird if you dont know whats going on

so ive been doing contests for a few years now, mostly single op on 20 and 40, and i keep reading about SO2R and how the top guys are running two radios simultaneously to keep their rates up during the slow periods. i get the concept — while youre waiting for a pileup to thin out on one band you can be running a freq or SandPing on the other. sounds great in theory. but honestly every time i try to wrap my head around the actual setup it gets complicated fast. like youre dealing with antenna switching, bandpass filters so the two radios dont blow each others front ends out, the audio mixing so you can monitor both without going crazy, keying interlocks so you dont transmit on both at the same time... its a lot. my current station is just an IC-7300 into a tribander at 35 feet, pretty modest. my rates during SS and CQWW are decent i think, usually pulling 80-100/hr during the good runs and then it falls off a cliff during the slow hours. is SO2R realistically going to help someone at my level or am i better off just working on my CQing technique and search and pounce efficiency first? feel like theres probably lower hanging fruit before i go full tilt on a second radio setup.

JS8Call is definitely slower to decode than FT8 because the symbol rate is lower and the messages are freeform so there's more overhead, but you can still pull it out of the noise pretty well — I'd say maybe 3-4dB worse than FT8 at the threshold, roughly. Not a huge deal in practice. As for activity, yeah it's thinner than FT8 but it's not dead. 40m around 7.078 seems to have the most going on in North America, at least in my experience. Evenings local time you'll usually find a few people actually chatting rather than just beaconing. The heartbeat thing can be annoying if that's all you see but once you get a real back and forth going it does feel more like an actual contact. I've had some decent 20 minute exchanges on there. Patience is kind of required though, not the instant gratification of FT8. If you really want a conversational digital mode and weak signal isn't the main priority, PSK31 on a busy evening still works and feels way more natural to me personally. But JS8Call is worth sticking with for a few more sessions before writing it off.

so the club posted on their website that the annual hamfest at the county fairgrounds is coming up on the 15th, been going every year for like 6 years now and its always a decent time even if the fleamarket tables have been getting smaller lately. last year i picked up a pretty clean TS-440 for almost nothing from some old timer who was clearing out his shack. wondering if anyone else from around here is planning to show up, maybe we could grab breakfast at that diner across the road before it opens like a few of us did last time

yeah the plateau around 12-14 is super common and honestly almost everyone hits it. what helped me break through was switching to copying actual QSOs instead of random code groups. your brain starts to anticipate words and phrases and that makes a huge difference at higher speeds. the LCWO website has some good plain text practice and you can find recordings of real contacts too. also the thing about losing the whole sentence when you miss a letter -- you gotta train yourself to just let it go and keep moving. i know that sounds easier said than done but if you stop to mentally dig for that missed character you will lose the next 4 words trying. write a dash or a dot or nothing and keep copying. over time you'll get enough context from the surrounding words that the missing one doesnt even matter. took me probably 3 months of actively forcing myself to do this before it became natural.

ok so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and everyone seems to be using these shorthand codes constantly and i can only figure out some of them from context. like i get that QSL means something like acknowledged or confirmed but then theres QRM and QRN and QSB and honestly i have no idea what half of them mean. is there like a standard list somewhere or did people just kind of make these up over time also heard someone say 73 at the end of a contact and i assumed that was just like a goodbye type thing, is that right? and whats 88 mean i heard that too but only a couple times sorry if this is a dumb question just trying to understand whats going on before i actually get on the air myself

yeah the succession thing catches basically every group off guard the first time they actually test it. we had the same moment of silence during a simulated exercise a few years back and it was genuinely humbling. now we actually rotate who runs net control during our regular Tuesday nets just so more people have reps doing it under normal conditions, the idea being if its not scary during a normal night it wont be paralyzing during an actual event. the traffic handling piece is huge and i dont think we emphasize it enough in training. theres a real difference between knowing the format and being able to move traffic smoothly when youre juggling a log, a radio, and somebody asking you questions at the same time. we started doing monthly traffic practice sessions separate from the ARES stuff and it helped a lot. some of the folks who struggled most actually turned into really solid operators once they had more reps. for EOC interface specifically — if you havent already its worth getting a couple people through the ICS courses if they havent done them. not because youll follow ICS to the letter necessarily but because it helps everyone speak the same language as the served agency folks. that was a real friction point for us early on.

so ive been at this for about 8 months now and honestly the first few months felt great, went from barely recognizing the letters to copying pretty solid at 5wpm and then 8wpm. but somewhere around 10-12wpm things just kind of... stalled. like i can still copy if the letters come slow enough but the moment it speeds up even a little bit my brain just locks up and i start trying to count dits and dahs again which i know is totally the wrong approach. ive been using the Koch method on and off but i got impatient and jumped ahead too fast i think. someone at my local club told me i need to just listen to a lot of high speed code even if i cant copy it, kind of like immersion? not sure if thats actually true or just one of those things people say. also using LCWO and doing about 20 minutes a day, sometimes more on weekends. is that enough? should i be doing more sessions but shorter? really not sure what the right approach is here and its a little discouraging when i see guys on the air rattling off 25wpm like its nothing. any advice from people who have actually been through this plateau would be really appreciated. de KB3MXQ

so we finally got around to doing a full scale simulated disaster exercise through our county ARES group and honestly it was kind of eye opening in ways i didn't totally expect. the scenario was a major flooding event that took out all the cell infrastructure in the eastern part of the county and we had to coordinate between the EOC, a couple of red cross shelters, and a field hospital site about 12 miles out. i've been licensed for about 6 years now and done plenty of nets but this was different. everything that seemed easy in a regular net suddenly got complicated when you add in people who are stressed, messages that need to be relayed through two or three operators, and the fact that half the team hadn't worked together before. we had one guy at the EOC who kept going off frequency and nobody caught it for like 20 minutes. and the ICS forms thing... i thought i knew how to fill out an ICS-213 but under pressure i was second guessing myself the whole time. the biggest thing i took away was that we really need more practice with message handling specifically. like actual radiogram traffic, not just check-ins. anyone else done exercises like this and have thoughts on what helped your group get better at the message passing stuff? we're trying to figure out what to focus on for the next one.

honestly the antenna isolation thing is what kills most people's first SO2R attempts. i tried running my tribander and a 40m dipole together and thought the physical separation would be enough -- it wasnt, not even close. you really do need those band pass filters if youre going same-band SO2R and even for different bands the second harmonic thing can bite you depending on the combo. 4O3A or the ICE filters are the usual recommendations but yeah not cheap. one thing i'd add is that even without going full SO2R, just having the second radio sitting there on a different band in receive-only while you run can help a lot with timing your band changes. you can hear when 15 opens up before you abandon your 20m run frequency. thats kind of SO2R lite i guess and the setup complexity is way lower since youre not transmitting on it.

yeah the ack thing is the killer. APRS messages need a round trip — your station sends the message, the destination has to send back an ack packet, and if that ack never makes it back to you your radio just keeps retrying and eventually gives up. so it could actually be getting through but the ack is whats failing. id try messaging a known-active igate station or someplace like a weather node that auto-acks and see if that completes. at least then you can narrow down if its outbound or the whole two-way handshake thats broken

10m is weird like that, it can go from completely dead to absolutely insane in like 20 minutes. the thing most people dont realize starting out is you gotta be watching the right indicators AND be in the right place at the right time, which sounds obvious but its harder than it sounds. your best bet is to keep an eye on the DX cluster for 10m spots — when you start seeing a bunch of spots popping up for 28 MHz you know somethings happening. also check the solar wind data not just the SFI, a high flux number doesnt automatically mean 10m is open, the K-index matters a lot too, if its elevated you can have great flux but crappy conditions because of geomagnetic disturbance. from ohio youre actually in a pretty decent spot for transatlantic openings, usually mid morning to early afternoon your local time is worth watching, like 9am to 1pm or so for Europe. South America can open up later in the day. just park on 28.400 or so and call CQ or listen, and honestly check DXmaps.com, it shows realtime 10m spots on a map and its really satisfying to watch when a big opening is happening.

so ive been running SSB on 40m mostly, some 20m, for about two years now and i keep getting reports that my audio is muddy or bassy or just kinda hard to copy. Im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 which from what i understand should be a pretty solid combo. I've got the mic gain set around 50% and the RF power at about 80 watts into a dipole at 35 feet. the thing is i hear other guys on the band who sound absolutely crisp and punchy and i have no idea what theyre doing differently. ive messed with the bass and treble in the radio's menu a bit but honestly i dont really know what im doing in there. someone told me to cut the bass and boost the mids but that felt wrong to me. is there a good starting point for the audio settings on the 7300 specifically or just SSB in general? also wondering if mic positioning matters as much as people say because i see some guys with the mic practically touching their lips and others who hold it a foot away

yeah what he said about the band edge is real, i learned that one the hard way early on. was operating SSB and had my dial sitting right at the bottom of my phone allocation and someone pointed out my lower sideband was stomping on the digital guys below. you have to think about where your actual transmitted signal is, not just where the dial says, and with LSB on 40m your signal goes down from the carrier frequency so you want to be at least a few kHz above whatever the lower limit of your segment is. also just worth mentioning the 40m band plan varies by region too, like ITU region 1 (europe etc) has slightly different allocations so if you start working DX you might notice guys operating in places that seem weird to you. totally normal just different rules in different parts of the world.

oh man i went through exactly this when i started. the thing nobody tells beginners is that cheap paddles have really inconsistent contact spacing and the gap between the paddle arm and the contact point is often way too small right out of the box. you want to open it up more than you think — most people set their gaps too tight and that causes exactly what youre describing, the dot contact stays closed a fraction too long. also check your keyer's dit weight or ratio setting if the MFJ has one. some of those older units drift a bit and a heavier dit weight will definitely mush things together at higher speeds. honestly though if the paddle itself is really cheap it might just be fighting you. i used a no-name paddle for about 6 months before i gave up and got a Begali, which is probably overkill but i dont regret it at all. somewhere in the middle like a Bencher BY-1 would be a good step up without spending a ton.

yeah 40 has been hit or miss for me too honestly. some nights its wall to wall signals and then other nights i can barely raise anybody. i think the solar flux has been bouncing around a lot lately which doesnt help. try later in the evening like after 9 or 10 local, thats usually when it opens up better for me at least on the east coast

honestly i was in the same boat like six months ago. what helped me was just keeping a little notepad next to the radio and writing down anything i didnt recognize and looking it up after. you also start to figure them out from context pretty quick. like if someone says QRM on the frequency you can usually tell from the conversation that somethings causing interferance. the one that confused me for a while was QRX, which means stand by or wait a moment, people dont use that one as much but it shows up. oh and 55 means good luck, see that sometimes in contesting. most of the older abbreviations that arent technically Q codes are just CW shorthand that carried over to voice, stuff like OM which is old man basically just means male operator, YL is young lady for any female operator regardless of age, XYL is wife. its a whole little language honestly

honestly just jump in, the G5RV and 100 watts will work fine especially if you pick the right times. i ran my first CQ WW with a dipole at 20 feet and still managed a few hundred QSOs over the weekend. the exchange for phone is dead simple once you do it a few times, you send your signal report which is basically always 59 and then your CQ zone which for most of the US is zone 4 or 5 depending where you are, just look it up ahead of time so you're not fumbling for it mid-contact Field Day is a great intro too but its a different animal, more about operating under portable conditions and its a club thing mostly. CQ WW is just pure DX chasing which i think is more addictive honestly. try both and see what hooks you. the october phone weekend gets wild on 15 and 20, just find a station calling CQ and throw your call in, worst they say is nothing or QRZ and you try again

so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now with a TM-D710G and a pretty decent antenna setup, 5/8 wave on the roof. my beacon is definitely getting digipeated and showing up on aprs.fi no problem, i can watch myself move around the map when im mobile which is cool. but the messaging part just doesnt seem to work reliably at all. tried sending a message to another local ham yesterday who was also showing up on the map, so i know he was active, and it just sat there as unacknowledged. he said he never got it. we were both hitting the same digipeater so im not sure whats going on. i checked my path and im using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for this area right? is APRS messaging just kind of unreliable in general or am i missing something in my config? i went through the menu on the radio like three times and cant find anything obviously wrong

JS8Call is a different animal for sure. the thing people miss is it's not really designed to be a contact-logging machine like FT8, it's more like a slow chatty text mode with some store-and-forward capability. the relay stuff is actually pretty cool once you get it — i've had messages get passed through 3 or 4 stations to reach someone who was only semi-reachable from my QTH the 40m calling frequency you're on is right, though honestly activity seems to have drifted around a bit depending on time of day and what part of the world you're trying to reach. i find it more active on 20m during my morning greyline window. the lack of response might just be propagation or timing, not you doing anything wrong. give it another week or two of regular monitoring and you'll start to get a feel for when the band is populated with JS8 traffic PSK31 is honestly underrated these days. yes it needs more signal than FT8 to decode but there's something satisfying about a real back and forth with someone, even if it's just signal reports and weather. i still fire up fldigi on slow evenings