Christopher Lee

What's the Q of those loading coils? With 15 turns on 2-inch forms you might be getting pretty narrow bandwidth. I'd measure the actual inductance and maybe try fewer turns with tighter spacing to maintain the same L value but improve Q.

had almost the exact same thing happen on mine maybe a year ago, turned out to be a cracked solder joint on one of the connectors going to the PA board. not visible to the naked eye, had to use a magnifying glass under good light to find it. the joint looked fine but under load it was making intermittent contact and the rig was just folding back the power to protect itself even though it wasnt showing a fault. re-flowed it and went straight back to 100w. might not be your issue but worth looking before you start suspecting the transistors themselves.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing different things about confirming contacts and i'm honestly a bit lost. when i first got on HF my elmer told me to sign up for LoTW which i did and i upload my logs there pretty regularly. but then someone i worked on 40m last week said they only use eQSL and dont bother with LoTW at all, and then another guy sent me an actual paper card through the bureau which was really cool but i have no idea how to send one back properly. so like what's the actual difference between all these systems? i understand LoTW is run by the ARRL and is more official or whatever but does that mean eQSL confirmations dont count for anything? and the paper cards through the bureau — do i need to join something or pay for that? i set up an account on QRZ but i'm not sure if that connects to anything. sorry if this is a really basic question, i just want to make sure im not missing contacts that could count toward awards or whatever down the line. been chasing a few DX stations and would hate to lose those confirmations

Throughout North America the recommended path for mobiles or portable stations is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1, but I'm seeing conflicting information about newer WIDEn-N algorithms. Advanced digipeaters support WIDEn-N and TRACEn-N algorithms which dynamically adjust packet relaying and reduce redundant transmissions to optimize network efficiency. For someone running a mobile tracker in the Pacific Northwest with mixed urban/rural coverage, which path strategy provides better reliability? I understand the theoretical difference but want real-world experience from operators who've compared both methods.

congrats on the ticket, welcome to the hobby. So the baofeng thing is kind of a never ending debate around here and honestly for just getting on a local repeater it will work fine. the spurious emissions concern is real in the sense that they do sometimes transmit garbage on frequencies they shouldnt, but at the power levels we're talking about for a handheld you're unlikely to cause any real problems unless you're right next to something sensitive. its more of a principle thing for some folks. that said if you can stretch your budget even a little bit, like to the $60-80 range, the Yaesu FT-65 or the BaoFeng UV-82 are both noticeably better built. the FT-65 in particular feels way more solid in the hand and the receiver is a lot better at pulling weak signals. audio is clearer too. i gave a UV-5R to a new ham friend and they were frustrated because they kept missing parts of conversations on the repeater, switched to a Yaesu and suddenly everything was crisp. but honestly dont let perfect be the enemy of good - if the budget is the budget, grab the baofeng, get on the air, and upgrade later when you know what you actually want out of the radio.

the things that always bite people are the stupid small stuff — anderson powerpole connectors and a handful of different adapters, a good multimeter, coax adapters (BNC to PL-259, SMA to BNC, etc) because you will always need the one you dont have. also a notebook and pencils, like actual physical paper, because logging on a device when your battery situation is uncertain is just asking for trouble. the pelican vs backpack question really does depend on what kind of deployment you're thinking. if you're setting up at an EOC or a fixed location for a while, the case is great because you can organize everything and it protects the gear. if you might need to hump it any distance at all, you want a backpack or at least a rolling case. i actually ended up with two kits eventually — a lighter grab-and-go bag with a smaller radio (ft-818 in my case) and then a bigger more capable setup in a case for when i have a vehicle and a real deployment. took me a couple actual ARES activations to figure that out the hard way. also dont forget a headlamp. sounds dumb but you'd be amazed how often you're trying to set up an antenna at 2am.

Don't forget you need your FRN number! New applicants must register in FCC CORES before the session and get their FRN assigned. I almost got turned away because I hadn't done this step. The whole process took about 1.5 hours including waiting for others to finish.

congrats on the ticket first of all. ok so the spurious emissions thing with baofengs is real but honestly for just hitting local repeaters its not gonna cause you any real world problems, the issue matters more if you were transmitting near aircraft freqs or something which youre not gonna be doing anytime soon that said if you can stretch to like 60-80 bucks the Yaesu FT-65 or the older FT-60 are both solid choices and the build quality is just noticeably better, the buttons feel right, the menus make more sense, battery lasts forever on the FT-60 especially. ive had mine for probably 8 years and dropped it more times than i want to admit. still works fine the kenwood TH-D75 and stuff like that is amazing but thats like 500 bucks and way more radio than you need right now, save that rabbit hole for later when you know what features you actually want

yeah single yagi EME is absolutely a thing now, JT65B basically changed everything for small stations. back in the cw only days you needed massive arrays just to hear anything but now guys are making contacts with a single long yagi and 100 watts, granted it helps to be working against a well equipped station on the other end but its genuinely possible. your 17el is not huge but its workable. you'd want to know the gain figure on it, most decent 17el designs are somewhere around 15-16 dBd which is enough to at least hear signals on a good night. the 9700 is fine, the preamp placement is critical like you said. biggest thing a lot of people overlook starting out is the feedline loss, even a couple dB between your preamp and the radio adds up when you're talking about signals that are barely above the noise floor. also elevation capability on your mount if you dont have it already, moon isnt always conveniently placed at low elevation angles especially for EME windows with Europe if you're in the states.

Except under circumstances where you know who you are talking to, it's a good practice to use phonetics on a repeater, especially during a net. Also remember to pause between transmissions - Be sure to leave some space in the conversation to let the repeater stop transmitting. This helps prevent the repeater from "timing out" due to too long of a transmission.

Had the same Windows 11 driver nightmare! Finally gave up and dedicated an old laptop just for radio programming with Windows 10. Sometimes the old ways work best. For cables, genuine FTDI chipsets are worth the extra cost - no driver headaches.

honestly the general exam isnt that bad, i was stressed about it too but passed first try with like a week of studying on hamstudy. the pool has a lot of questions but there's definitely patterns once you go through it a few times. the electrical theory stuff you dont really need to fully understand to pass, though it does help later when youre actually troubleshooting stuff on the bench as for HF bands once you get the ticket, most people i know who are new to HF kind of gravitate toward 40m and 20m first. 40m is great at night for regional stuff and 20m opens up pretty well during the day and you can work some decent DX even with modest antennas. if youre into just casual ragchewing 40m SSB is usually pretty active. honestly just go take the exam, you can keep studying the theory after you get the upgrade, nothing stops you from learning more once youre on the air

not a basic question at all, this stuff genuinely trips people up. So the short version is that vanity calls have a format system tied to your license class. As a General you can apply for certain formats but not others — the 1x2 and 2x1 calls (like W6AB or WA6B style) are reserved for Extras only. As a General you can apply for a 1x3 like KD9XYZ or a 2x3, basically what you probably already have but you can choose which specific one within those formats. The sequential process is separate from vanity — that's just what happens automatically when you pass your exam, the FCC system assigns you the next available call in sequence for your district. Vanity is when you actively go to the FCC ULS and apply for a specific call you want. There's a 30 day application window after you file and if nobody else applies for the same call in that window you get it, but if multiple people apply for the same call it goes to whoever has held a license longer I think, or there's some tiebreaker system. AE7Q's website is honestly the best resource for tracking call availability and understanding the rules, way better than trying to parse the FCC docs directly.

For contest timing, bypass software PTT and use hardware VOX or direct relay control. I trigger PTT via GPIO immediately when audio starts rather than relying on CAT commands. Much faster response.

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. currently running a 40m dipole up about 25 feet in an inverted-v config, fed with coax, and honestly it works fine but im starting to wonder if a vertical would do better especially for dx. the dipole has that figure-8 pattern which is great in two directions but theres some pretty big nulls off the ends and it happens that europe is almost exactly in one of those nulls from my QTH which is annoying. a buddy told me a quarter wave vertical with a decent radial field would outperform my dipole for low angle radiation but i dont know if thats really true at 25 feet or if he's just been drinking the vertical kool-aid. i have space for either, backyard is maybe 80 by 60 feet so a proper radial field is doable. would probably do 16-24 radials on the ground, not buried, just laid out on the grass. anyone actually compared these two setups side by side? not looking for theory, just what you actually observed on the air.

Try disabling Windows "USB Selective Suspend" function and set power management to "never sleep". I had the exact same issue and this completely solved it for extended FT8 sessions.

so i've been getting more into checking into nets lately, started with the local 2m club net on monday nights and then kind of fell down a rabbit hole. im now checking into like 4 or 5 different nets through the week and i made this whole spreadsheet with times, frequencies, net control callsigns, all that stuff. my wife thinks im losing it. anyway the reason i'm posting is i recently heard about a special event station that was running for some kind of anniversary — i forget what exactly, might have been a lighthouse or a historical site thing — and i completely missed it because i had no idea it was happening. is there a good place people go to find out about upcoming special event stations and one-time nets? i check the ARRL website sometimes but i feel like i miss stuff. do you all just find out through word of mouth or is there a better system

you're not overthinking it, first activations feel a lot bigger than they usually end up being, especially for a watch situation. most of the time you're just sitting at a desk, checking in on nets periodically, logging traffic if any comes through, and mostly waiting. the ICS stuff your EC mentioned is probably just the 214 activity log and maybe an ICS-309 comms log — honestly just ask your EC when you get there and they'll walk you through it. nobody expects a new member to have all that memorized. bring something to take notes with, a printed copy of your local ARES frequencies if you have one, and maybe a snack because EOC duty can be slow. your HT should be fine for most tasks but if you have a mobile rig in your car that's worth knowing about too. mostly just show up, stay attentive, ask questions when things are quiet, and you'll be fine. the first one is always the weirdest just because you don't know the flow yet.

yeah i was confused about the same thing when i started, went through like three different explanations before it clicked for me. one thing that helped me was just listening to how the experienced guys on my local net handled it for a few weeks before i ever keyed up. you pick up the rhythm pretty fast. the phonetics thing -- i personally say mine phonetically almost every time just out of habit but thats probably overkill on a clear local repeater honestly. on HF where conditions are bad its basically essential though, especially if you have any letters that sound similar like B and D or M and N.

yeah the listening thing is so underrated. i spent probably six months wondering why i couldnt break anything good and then an older guy at my club basically said the same thing you did — just shut up and listen first. the op always has a pattern even if it seems random. some of them are really predictable about working by region or by where they hear the strongest signals geographically and if you can figure that out youre halfway there. the partial call thing is a bit of a gray area for me. technically youre supposed to ID with your full call but in a huge pile i get why it works. what i've found that helps is timing more than anything. theres always this brief lull right after the DX comes back to someone and before the pileup erupts again, maybe half a second, and if you can hit that exact moment youre transmitting into relative quiet instead of the wall of noise everyone else is generating. takes practice to feel it but once you do it becomes kind of instinctual. congrats on the VP6 by the way, thats a tough one. still need it myself on 40m.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, went up to a summit near me that had a pretty easy trail, only about 2 miles in. brought my FT-818 and a end fed wire thrown over a branch and honestly was pretty nervous i wouldnt get the 4 contacts needed to qualify it. ended up getting like 9 QSOs in maybe 25 minutes which felt great, a couple of them were chasers who already knew my callsign from the sotawatch spot i put up before i left the car which blew my mind a little. anyway my questions are kind of basic — when i look up a summit reference like W6/NC-042 or whatever, the number at the end, is that just an arbitrary ID or does it mean something about the difficulty or points value? and also i noticed some summits show as 1 point and some are like 10 points, is that purely based on elevation gain from a base reference or is there more to it? also one thing that went wrong — i forgot to actually log the UTC time during the contacts and just wrote down local time in my notebook, had to convert everything later which was a pain. lesson learned i guess. anyone else do dumb stuff like that on their first one?

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 40 minutes from my house, been wanting to do this for months and kept putting it off because i wasnt sure i had everything figured out. ended up just throwing the gear in the car and going for it. ran my KX2 with a random wire up in a tree, maybe 25 feet or so, and worked 10 contacts on 40m in about an hour and a half which i know is the minimum to count but honestly i was pretty happy just getting it done. signal reports were decent, few people said i was a bit down but nothing terrible. anyway my questions are — when people talk about "hunting" a POTA station, are they just tuning around looking for activators or is there a better way to find them? i spotted myself a couple times on the POTA app but i wasnt sure if that actually gets people calling me or if i need to get spotted by someone else. also does the park reference number matter when you log it or does the app sort that out automatically when you upload the adif? sorry if these are dumb questions, still figuring out the whole ecosystem around this

so ive been using Log4OM for a couple years now as my main shack logger and honestly its been fine for day to day stuff, keeps track of my QSOs, syncs to QRZ, does the ADIF export thing without drama. but every time contest season rolls around im kind of fumbling around trying to figure out if i should just run N1MM instead and then import everything back into Log4OM afterward. the thing is i also run WSJT-X pretty regularly for FT8 and the UDP integration with Log4OM has been mostly solid but i had a weird thing happen last month where it stopped auto-logging for like two days and i couldnt figure out why, turned out to be some firewall thing but still. does N1MM handle the WSJT-X UDP feed any differently? i always assumed they were basically the same on that front but maybe not. anyway main question i guess is whether anyone actually runs two loggers simultaneously or if that's just asking for trouble. like Log4OM for the daily stuff and N1MM just for contests and then merging the logs after. seems like it could get messy with dupes and stuff but maybe im overthinking it

oh man this is kind of timely because i literally just passed my general last month and somebody at my club meeting mentioned 10 meters being open and i had no idea what that even meant at first. i thought something was wrong with the band or like a repeater went down lol. had to look up what a band opening actually is and now i kind of cant stop reading about solar cycles and propagation which is a whole rabbit hole. havent made my first HF contact yet because i dont have an HF radio yet but im saving up. congrats on the new radio whenever you go pick it up

oh man yeah 13wpm is THE wall, you're definitely not alone. i was stuck there for like 4 months before something finally changed for me. the thing that actually helped was switching away from random letter groups and just doing real QSO text instead. like actual on-air conversation stuff. your brain starts recognizing common words and phrases as sounds instead of individual letters and thats when it starts to feel less like decoding and more like listening. also the skipping days thing will really kill your momentum with CW. even 10 minutes every single day beats an hour three times a week. its one of those things that needs to be really consistent or your brain just resets. i used the Morse Trainer app on my phone and would do a few minutes at lunch or whatever just to keep it fresh. the speed you copy at now will feel slow eventually but you kinda have to trust the process even when its annoying and yes the thing about forcing higher speeds is real but dont go too high too fast. maybe try 15-16wpm instead of jumping to 18. you want it to hurt a little but not be completely incomprehensible