Christopher Lee

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and always kind of avoided CW because it seemed intimidating but i finally got myself a cheap set of paddles off ebay and hooked them up to a MFJ keyer and honestly its a lot harder than i expected lol. not the receiving part, i've been using the Koch method with LCWO and that's going okay, maybe 8-10 wpm on a good day. its the SENDING that's killing me. like i'll be copying a callsign just fine in my head but the moment i try to squeeze out something on the paddles my fingers go all weird and i start sending garbage. does this ever get better or am i just wired wrong? i've heard people say you need to do it every day and i'm trying but some days i sit down and it feels like i've forgotten everything. also wondering if a different paddle would help or if i just need to practice more with what i got

yeah what he said about the band edges is real, i learned that the hard way on 10m during a contest. had my dial right at the edge and someone pointed out my upper sideband was spilling over. felt like an idiot. now i just mentally add a few kHz buffer and dont think about it anymore

Could be your mounting clamp affecting the pattern. If you're clamping around the boom near the driven element, try adding a non-conductive standoff or clamp further back toward the reflector. I had similar issues with my homebrew collinear.

yeah what he said about practicing in the backyard, i did that and realized my coax was like 6 inches too short to reach from where i'd actually set the radio up and it was embarrassing to figure that out at a drill lol. also i keep a small inverter in mine so i can run off a car if the battery dies, saved me once already.

nice, ive been wanting to try SOTA but havent pulled the trigger yet. did you pre-spot yourself on the SOTA watch site before going up or just wing it? i always wonder if thats worth bothering with ahead of time

field day is probably worth mentioning too since its coming up next june — if your club does a group activation that might actually be an easier first experience than sitting alone at home doing CQ WW. theres usually people around to answer questions and you can take breaks without feeling like you're wasting rate lol i did my first solo contest attempt last sweepstakes and honestly just surviving the whole 24 hours felt like an accomplishment even though my score was nothing impressive. the section exchange tripped me up a few times at first but you get it pretty quick

so ive been chasing VP6 (Pitcairn) for like three years now, every time a DXpedition shows up i get nowhere. tried the usual stuff, calling on their frequency by accident, not listening carefully enough to where they were actually pulling calls from, just general bad habits i guess. last week VP6WR was active and i finally cracked it on 17m CW after about two hours of trying off and on. what changed was i stopped just throwing my call out randomly and actually sat and listened for a solid 10-15 minutes first. figured out they were working split, listening about 3-4 up from where they were transmitting, and they had a pretty clear pattern of moving their listening frequency up maybe 500hz every 3-4 QSOs. once i mapped that out i just parked about where i thought they'd land next and sent my call maybe 2-3 times per transmission cycle instead of hammering it constantly. picked up on my first attempt after i did that. im running an IC-7610 into a 3 element SteppIR at about 45 feet so its not a barefoot HT situation, but i wasnt running crazy power either, just 100w. the antenna does most of the work honestly. anyway curious if others have specific techniques that work for them, especially on CW vs SSB since i feel like they operate pretty differently in a pile

I tried the two-logger approach for a while and it works but you have to be disciplined about it or your main log turns into a mess. I once forgot to strip out a bunch of dupe QSOs before importing from a state QSO party and spent like an hour cleaning it up in Log4OM afterward. not the end of the world but annoying. honestly for WSJT-X my reccomendation is just let it do its own thing and treat the WSJT-X log as the source of truth for those QSOs, then merge periodically. trying to get real time UDP logging working cleanly across multiple programs is more trouble than its worth unless you're doing something where you really need it live like a multi-op situation or whatever

this is something i've been struggling with tbh. just got my general like 8 months ago and HF has been a whole different world. i tried to work that 3Y0J expedition and just got absolutely nowhere, felt like i was yelling into a tornado. didnt really understand the split thing at first, was calling on the DX frequency by accident a couple times which i felt terrible about after i figured out what i was doing lol. does antenna height make that big a difference for pileups or is it more about technique? im on a dipole at like 25 feet and wondering if thats just too much of a handicap for real rare DX or if i should just keep working on my operating before i worry about the antenna situation.

WAZ took me forever to finish because a few zones are just brutal to get — zone 2 up in the canadian arctic and some of the pacific zones depending on your location. i was chasing DXCC at the same time and had no idea i was also closing in on WAZ until i checked one day and was only missing like 4 zones. so yeah the overlap is real, one contact can count for multiple awards. also just a heads up on the LoTW confirmation numbers — 12 out of 40 worked isnt bad at all for a newer general, some entities are just slow to upload. keep paper cards as backup too, QSL bureau cards still work for DXCC credit if the station isnt on LoTW.

Running VARA FM gateway here for 18 months - the speed difference is dramatic, especially for ICS forms and longer messages. In VHF testing, VARA FM significantly outperformed AX.25/FX.25 packet modes. Just ensure your duty cycle stays reasonable for continuous operation.

so ive been using Log4OM for general logging for about two years now and honestly i really like it for day to day stuff, the award tracking and the way it syncs with QRZ is pretty solid. but every time a contest rolls around im kind of stuck because Log4OM just doesnt feel right for contesting, the interface gets clunky and i miss dupes sometimes which is embarrassing. a buddy at the club keeps telling me to just run N1MM for contests and then import the ADIF into Log4OM afterward. seems like a reasonable workflow but ive heard people have issues with duplicate QSOs when you do that, especially if youre also running WSJT-X at the same time for FT8 contacts. like if i work someone on FT8 during a contest that supports it and WSJT-X logs it, then N1MM also has it, then i import everything into Log4OM... that just seems like a mess waiting to happen. does anyone actually run all three of these and have a clean workflow or am i overcomplicating this. right now i mostly do CW contests and some FT8 on weekends, not a serious contester but i like jumping into the state QSO parties and stuff like that.

so ive been checking into our local ARES net on 146.940 every tuesday night for about three months now and honestly its one of the things that got me way more into this hobby than i expected. started doing it just to get my feet wet and now i look forward to it every week. the net control guys are super patient and it doesnt matter if your signal is a little rough or whatever. anyway i was wondering if other people here are active on any nets regularly, like weekly or monthly check-ins, special event stuff, anything like that. also curious if anyone knows of any good national or regional nets that welcome newer hams. i have HF now too (finally got my General back in march) so maybe something on 40m or 80m would be cool to try. heard the traffic nets can be kind of intimidating but maybe im overthinking it

so i finally got my technician last month and ive been listening to the local 2m repeater for a few weeks now. theres a net every tuesday night and i keep chickening out on actually checking in. i know its probably not a big deal but i just dont want to sound like an idiot and mess up the whole thing for everyone else. like do i just say my callsign and wait? do i give my name and location? is there some script i should follow or does it vary by net? i heard some nets are really formal and some are just people chatting but i have no idea which kind this one is. ive been listening and it seems pretty casual but the net control guy sounds like he knows exactly what he wants and it makes me nervous. anyway any tips would be great

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general) and i feel like im still just sitting on my radio not really doing much with it. i hear people talking about checking in to nets and i tried to find some schedules online but honestly the info seems really scattered or outdated. like i found one page that listed a 2m net on 146.940 but when i tuned in at the listed time there was nothing there, just a quiet repeater. also saw something about a special event station being active for some kind of anniversary thing and missed the whole window before i even figured out what was going on. is there a good way to track these things or is it mostly just word of mouth and knowing the right people? feels like theres a whole social layer to this hobby i havent cracked yet

I've been licensed for about eight months now, and up until last weekend I was using one of those multi-band verticals with a tuner. It worked okay for getting started, but 40 meters was always frustrating. I could hear the big guns coming through, but getting anyone to hear me back was hit or miss. The antenna was mounted on my deck railing about 12 feet up, which I know isn't ideal, but it was what I could manage in my HOA neighborhood. Planning the Inverted V After reading through the antenna handbook and watching way too many YouTube videos, I settled on an inverted V as my first wire antenna project. The theory seemed straightforward enough - basically a dipole bent down at an angle to fit in a smaller space. My backyard isn't huge, maybe 120 feet deep, so the inverted V seemed like a good compromise between performance and space requirements. For the center frequency, I aimed for 7.200 MHz since that's where I spend most of my time on 40 meters. Using the standard formula, that put my half-wave length at about 66 feet total, or 33 feet per leg. I decided to cut it a bit long and trim as needed - always easier to cut wire than to add it back. The biggest challenge was the support structure. I don't have any really tall trees in the right spots, so I ended up buying a 33-foot telescoping fiberglass mast from one of the ham vendors online. Not cheap, but I figured it was an investment in better performance. I set it up in the corner of my backyard where it's partially hidden by some bushes. Construction Details For the wire itself, I used 14 AWG stranded THHN wire from the hardware store. Some folks swear by antenna wire, but from what I read, regular house wire works fine and costs a lot less. I stripped about an inch off each end and soldered them to a center insulator I made from a piece of phenolic board I had lying around from an old electronics project. The feedpoint was the part I was most nervous about. I used a 1:1 current balun - just a simple ugly balun made with about six turns of RG-8X coiled up and secured with zip ties. I know there are fancier commercial baluns out there, but I wanted to keep the cost down and see how this simple approach worked. Getting the antenna up was definitely a two-person job. My neighbor helped me raise the mast while I guided the coax and guy wires. I secured the mast with three guy wires at the 20-foot level, using some landscaping stakes I drove into the ground. The antenna legs slope down at about a 45-degree angle to insulators tied off to fence posts on either side of the yard. Initial Testing and Tuning Once everything was up, I fired up my antenna analyzer to see what I had. The initial SWR curve showed resonance at about 6.9 MHz - a bit low, as expected. I trimmed about 18 inches off each leg and checked again. Still a little low. After three more trimming sessions, I got it centered right around 7.2 MHz with an SWR of 1.3:1 at resonance. The bandwidth was pretty good - SWR stayed under 2:1 from about 7.0 to 7.3 MHz, which covers most of where I operate. I can tune the rest of the band with my internal tuner without any problems. What really surprised me was how much quieter the receive was compared to my vertical. That antenna picked up every bit of noise from the house electronics, LED lights, and who knows what else. The inverted V is so much cleaner on receive. I can actually hear weak signals that were completely buried in the noise before. On-Air Results The proof was in the pudding when I got on the air that first evening. I called CQ and immediately had three stations come back to me - all giving me 59 reports. With the vertical, I was lucky to get 57 reports and often had to repeat my call multiple times. The difference was dramatic. Over the past few weeks, I've worked all across the US and into Canada on 40 meters with just 100 watts. Last weekend I even managed a contact with a station in Italy during a contest - something that never would have happened with my old setup. The antenna seems to have a nice low angle of radiation that's great for DX. One thing I noticed is that the pattern seems to favor the northeast-southwest direction, which makes sense given the orientation of the wire. I can work the east and west coasts really well, but stations to the north and south sometimes seem a bit weaker. That's the trade-off with a directional antenna, but overall I'm thrilled with the performance improvement. Lessons Learned If I were doing this project over again, I'd probably invest in a better antenna analyzer from the start. I was borrowing one from a club member, which meant I had to do all my trimming and testing in one afternoon. Having my own would let me fine-tune things over time. I also wish I'd planned the guy wire anchors better. I ended up with the stakes closer to the house than I'd like, and one of them is right in the middle of where my wife wants to plant flowers this spring. I may need to relocate that one before I get in trouble. The biggest lesson though is that antennas really do make all the difference. I spent months struggling with mediocre contacts, thinking it was just the way 40 meters was. Turns out I just needed to get some wire up in the air properly. This project has me motivated to try an 80-meter dipole next - if I can figure out where to put 130 feet of wire! For anyone thinking about their first wire antenna, I'd definitely recommend starting with an inverted V. The performance improvement over a compromise vertical was huge, and the project wasn't as intimidating as I thought it would be. Just take your time with the planning and don't be afraid to ask for help when you need it.