Karen Brown

same thing happened to me tuesday, i was on 10m just kind of halfheartedly calling CQ and then all of a sudden i worked like 8 DX stations in 20 minutes including a ZL which i had never worked before on any band. then it just died. my neighbor who's been a ham for 30 years said this is actually pretty normal for where we are in the solar cycle and that we should expect more of these random good openings through the next year or two as we head toward the solar maximum. i didnt really understand all the details he explained but it made me want to actually start checking propagation forecasts before i just randomly sit down at the radio

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i get it, its great for working DX and filling the logbook but it always felt kind of hollow to me. like you exchange grid squares and signal reports and thats it, no actual contact really. a buddy at the club mentioned JS8Call and i finally installed it last weekend and messed around on 40m for a few hours. the concept makes sense to me — its basically FT8 under the hood but stretched out so you can send actual text messages back and forth, still works at really low signal levels. i was actually able to hold a back and forth with a guy in tennessee while my signal was pretty rough, maybe -18 or so on his end. that wouldnt have worked on SSB obviously. my question is whether people actually use it regularly or if its one of those modes thats always kind of empty. every time i tuned around i saw maybe 4 or 5 stations but nobody was really ragchewing, mostly just beacons and heartbeat messages. is there a specific time or freq where people gather or is the activity just low in general. also curious if anyone has compared it to PSK31 for rag chewing purposes because i ran PSK31 back in the day and loved it but propagation has to cooperate way more for that to work.

oh man i had the exact same problem when i first started, felt like i was shouting into a void haha. repeaterbook dot com saved me, seriously just bookmark it now. also some repeaters around here are linked into bigger systems like IRLP or AllStar so sometimes you key up and suddenly you're talking to someone in another state which is pretty wild when it first happens and you don't expect it.

dont forget a paper log and like three pens. batteries die, tablets crash, and at 2am when things are hectic you dont want to be messing around with software. sounds old school but every serious emcomm operator i know still carries paper as backup. also a headlamp -- clip it to the case so you always know where it is.

yeah the cluster firehose is real, took me a while to figure out how to tame it. what most people dont realize is that the spot origin matters a lot — a spot from a station in ohio is way more useful to you than one from a station in japan, even if theyre both working the same DX. DXwatch lets you filter by spotter continent which helps a lot, i usually set mine to just north america when im doing a casual session for the QRZ bandmap its honestly pretty decent for a quick glance but i wouldnt rely on it if youre seriously chasing DX. the latency can be a bit behind the dedicated cluster clients. if youre on a windows machine i'd actually look at DX4WIN or even just telnet directly into a cluster node like ve7cc — sounds old school but the filtering options are way more granular than any web tool ive used. you can set it to only show spots within like a certain distance or beam heading from your QTH which is a game changer havent tried DX Toolkit so cant say anything about that one

the scheduling thing is actually really well organized compared to what you might expect. most activity on 2m EME happens around 144.120 USB, and yeah JT65B is the mode almost everyone uses for smaller stations. but the real key is the EME chat system, there's a dedicated chat at no longer just relying on random CQs, most contacts get set up in advance through ON4KST chat which is basically a real time coordination thing. you find someone with a big dish or a serious array, you agree on a time when the moon is up for both of you, and you go work each other. some of the big gun stations will call CQ on the calling frequency but honestly for a modest station like what youre describing you want to be scheduling on the preamp question, MGF1302 is a bit dated now, most people running serious setups are going with the SSB Electronic or Kuhne preamps, the SP-2000 from SSB is solid and widely used. noise figure is everything on EME so you really do want that preamp as close to the feedpoint as possible, like at the antenna not in the shack. and yes absolutely use a sequencer even at 100 watts, you do not want to key up with the preamp still in line, ive heard of people frying expensive LNAs that way

Field Day totally counts as experience, dont sell yourself short. the operating rhythm is similar even if the exchange is different. for CQ WW the exchange is just signal report and CQ zone so its actually pretty simple once you get used to it. one thing i'd say — go in with zero expectations about score and just have fun with it. i spent way too much of my first real contest stressing about my rate and ended up not enjoying it. now i just treat it like DXing with a deadline and it's way more relaxed. good luck this fall

honestly for 4-5 contests a year i might not bother with full SO2R unless you just enjoy the tinkering side of it. the real gains come if you're doing a 48 hour effort and optimizing every hour of it. for a casual SS or something where you're putting in maybe 12-15 hours the complexity might cost you more than it saves while you're still figuring it out. what actually helped my rate way more before i ever went SO2R was just getting disciplined about when to run vs when to S&P and not being precious about abandoning a dead frequency. like if you've called CQ 10 times and got nothing, move. sounds obvious but i wasted so much time just hoping the band would come back to me. also logging software integration — if your N1MM setup isn't fully dialed in with the radio that's probably costing you more time than a second radio would save

so ive been wanting to build something from scratch for a while now and finally just dove in and built a simple direct conversion receiver for 40m. followed a design i found in an old QST article, wound my own toroids and everything. the thing does receive something — i can hear carriers and what sounds like SSB voices buried in noise but they're really hard to make out. gain seems way lower than i expected. my local oscillator is running, i can verify that with my frequency counter, sitting right around 7.1 MHz. the detector is a diode ring i built on a little piece of perfboard. not sure if my problem is in the AF stage or the mixer or what. i didnt put a preamp in front of it because the article said it wasnt strictly necessary but maybe thats the issue. antenna is just a random wire off the back of my house, probably 30 feet or so. any thoughts on where to start poking around?

so ive been messing around with this for about three weeks now and i think im close but not quite there. basically i pulled an old prop pitch motor out of a junk pile and wanted to automate it with an arduino uno i had sitting in a drawer. the idea is pretty simple — read the pot on the rotator, compare it to a target bearing, drive an H-bridge to move the motor until theyre close enough, stop. sounds easy right. the problem im running into is the feedback from the pot is noisy as hell. i got a 10-turn pot wired up and even with a 10uf cap across the wiper and ground the analogRead is still jumping around like 15-20 counts. that translates to maybe 5-6 degrees of error and for satellite work that's actually kinda significant. ive tried averaging 10 samples but then the response feels sluggish. wondering if anyone has done something similar or if theres a better way to handle the ADC noise on these boards. also using a L298N driver module which gets pretty warm even at modest speeds so maybe i need to look at something else there too. running this with a raspberry pi as the front end eventually — plan is to have the pi run hamlib or maybe just a simple python script that talks to the arduino over serial and sends target azimuths. havent gotten that far yet but the hardware side is killing me first.

we ran into this exact same generator noise problem at a RACES drill last spring, the little inverter gennys are better than a cheap chinese unit but theyre not silent by any means. one thing we tried that worked pretty well was just routing the feed line away from the generator and power runs — like actively keeping them separated, not just coiled up near each other. seems obvious but in a hurried setup its easy to just throw everything together. also — not sure what your feedline situation is on the EFHW but if youre using RG-8X or something light, throw a few turns through a snap-on ferrite at the rig end. makes a dumb amount of difference for common mode stuff coming in off the coax shield. i think i used a mix-43 clamp-on, whatever i had in the box. good luck with the exercise, those fairground setups are always kind of a mess logistically lol

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i notice some guys on the local repeater use phonetics every single time they say their callsign and others never use them at all. like one guy says his call completely normally and everyone seems to understand fine but then another guy spells out every single letter with NATO phonetics even when conditions are totally clear. is there some rule about this or is it just personal preference? i dont want to sound dumb on air by doing it wrong either way

Field Day not counting as chaotic is kind of impossible haha so dont feel bad about only making a few contacts, that happens to everyone their first time. the real contests coming up this fall are great for learning though. Sweepstakes is actually really fun and the exchange is simple enough that you can get into a rhythm pretty quick once you do it a few times. one thing i'd suggest is download N1MM Logger+ before the contest and just get familiar with how it works. you dont need to be fast, just accurate. and honestly even if you only make 50 contacts in a whole weekend thats still a good experience and you'll be way more comfortable next year. welcome to the rabbit hole by the way, contesting is kind of addictive once it clicks.

i had almost the exact same setup as you, gap vertical with not enough radials, and switched to an inverted vee last fall. honestly dont miss the vertical at all. the noise floor on receive dropped noticeably and even though im probably not as loud on 40m DX as a well-setup vertical with a big radial field would be, im way louder than i was with mine. real world is what counts and a mediocre vertical vs a decent dipole, dipole wins for most people with compromised lots i think.

honestly same boat as you not that long ago. what finally clicked for me was just accepting that youre gonna miss a lot of spots at first and thats fine. the cluster is kind of like a river, you cant drink all of it, you just grab what you can. one small tip though — DXwatch lets you set up some basic filters if you poke around in the settings, i had no idea for the first few months. you can filter by your continent or by band and it makes the noise a lot more manageable. with a 7300 and a dipole youre actually in pretty decent shape for a lot of the more common DX, dont undersell your setup too much