Diana Williams

congrats on first activation man. i remember mine was kind of a mess too, forgot my log sheet and had to use the back of a receipt lol. it gets better once you do a few and know what to expect. the spotting network is kind of magic once it kicks in right

i dont know man, lately ive just been parking on 40m in the evenings and just... listening. not really in the mood to ragchew or chase dx or anything, just kind of letting the bands wash over me if that makes sense. heard some guy in ukraine the other night working a pile up, conditions were actually pretty decent for once. didnt call in, just listened for like an hour. there something weirdly relaxing about it even if youre not in the log anyone else go through phases like this or am i just getting lazy lol

so i finally got tired of paying stupid money for commercial antennas and decided to just build a 40m dipole from scratch. used 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had lying around from some old electrical work, nothing fancy. cut each leg to about 33.5 feet based on the 468/f formula and threw it up in an inverted V configuration off my 35 foot mast with the ends tied off to some trees maybe 10 feet off the ground. tuned up with my antenna analyzer and got like 1.8:1 SWR at 7.150 which honestly surprised me, i was expecting to have to trim a bunch. did a few contacts and signals seemed fine, got a 59 from a station in ohio on 100 watts which i mean maybe that doesnt tell me much but still. my question is kind of dumb but — is that SWR just luck or is the formula actually that reliable for a first cut? i feel like i must have done something wrong because it was too easy. also wondering if the inverted V shape is hurting me compared to a flat top, the ends are definitely drooping quite a bit.

had almost the exact same thing happen to me with a D700 a while back, different radio but same TNC architecture basically. what fixed it for me was going into the APRS setup and making sure the data band was actually set to band A and that band A was the one tuned to 144.390. the radio can receive APRS on one band while trying to transmit on a completely different frequency and you'd never know unless you checked. sounds dumb but it got me for like three days. also worth checking — is your GPS locked? if you have the GPS unit connected and it hasnt got a fix yet the radio sometimes just wont send a position packet at all, it'll sit there looking like its doing stuff but the position data is null so it holds off. if youre parked in a garage or something that'll do it. try it outside in open sky for 5-10 mins and see if the GPS icon on the display shows a solid lock before you start troubleshooting the RF side.

okay so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and ive been making contacts but i havent really figured out the whole QSL thing yet and honestly its kind of overwhelming. like i understand the basic idea that you confirm the contact with the other person but there seem to be like three different ways to do it and i cant tell if i need to do all of them or just pick one or what. so i signed up for LoTW because everyone said to do that first and i uploaded a few logs but i dont really understand how the confirmations work — like do both people have to upload for it to count? and then theres eQSL which seems easier to use but some people say it doesnt count for awards? and then theres actual physical cards which look really cool but i have no idea how to even start with that, do i just design one and print it and mail it? do i need a QSL manager or is that only for DX stations? im not trying to chase any specific award right now i just want to do it right from the start so i dont have to go back and fix everything later. any advice on where to actually begin would be really helpful, or even just which one matters most to start with

yeah the generator RFI thing is a real problem and people underestimate it. we had a similar situation at our SET last year, somone brought a predator 2000 and we ended up just shutting it off and running battery only because the noise was so bad on the digital modes. winlink on Vara HF was basically unusable. one thing we started doing is keeping a dedicated 50ah battery just for the SDR/monitoring station so even if everything else is running off generator that one stays isolated. probably overkill but it made the NCS happy. also meant we had a clean recieve reference to compare against when chasing interference sources. for antennas at fairgrounds ive had decent luck with a linked dipole on a 33ft spiderpole, not super high but gets the job done for regional. the real pain is guying it at those sites, everything is asphalt or packed gravel and driving stakes is a nightmare so bring sandbags or water jugs as ballast.

so ive been on 20m and 17m a lot this past week and something just feels off. like i'll hear a really strong EU station around 1400 UTC and then 20 minutes later the whole band just goes dead. not even noise, just dead. checked the solar flux index this morning and it was sitting around 145 which honestly isnt bad at all, so i dont know what to make of it. K index was elevated a couple days ago, maybe that's still messing things up? i caught a brief opening to JA land yesterday afternoon on 15m which was kind of unexpected, worked a couple stations and then poof, gone. my question is really just whether propagation has been as unpredictable for everyone else or if theres something wrong with my setup that im not seeing. running a dipole at about 35 feet if that matters.

the channel selector thing — yeah most people just sort by distance or SNR and pick the top few, theres not really a magic formula. what i do is sort by distance first since a closer gateway usually means a cleaner path even if the SNR reading looks middling. the SNR numbers in the selector are based on beacon decodes so they're a snapshot not a live reading anyway for your HF drops with Vara HF that ALC barely moving thing is actually good, you dont want ALC working at all on digital modes, it means your audio drive is in the right range. but id double check your ICC-7300 DATA MOD setting is set to USB-D and not just USB, and make sure the twin peak audio thing in Vara is calibrated. also check if the gateway youre hitting has good propagation at the time — some of the public RMS HF gateways get hammered during certain hours and will drop sessions if the channel gets busy. try connecting at off peak times and see if your completion rate goes up also worth trying a couple different RMS HF gateways, some are definitely more stable than others depending on where they are and what antenna setup they're running

im in basically the same spot as you so take this for what its worth but i started mixing in actual QSO recordings from places like the CW operators site and it helped more than any of the random character drills. hearing real people send real exchanges with real timing somehow clicked different in my brain than the computer generated stuff. plus it made it feel like something i might actually do someday instead of just a weird typing exercise haha

yeah the net directory thing is real, i bookmarked it ages ago. also worth checking if your local club has any affiliated nets cause sometimes those dont show up anywhere official but theyre on the air every week. my club does a Tuesday night tech net thats specifically for newer hams and honestly its pretty low pressure if you want to practice before jumping into bigger stuff special event stations are a lot of fun to chase, some of them have really nice QSL cards too which got me started collecting them. just dont expect them all to be super organized, some of the smaller ones are clearly just a couple guys with a table at a county fair or whatever and the pileups can be pretty chaotic lol

so ive been practicing CW for about 3 months now, finally passed my extra and wanted to really get into morse code properly. i picked up a used Bencher BY-1 paddle and a Winkeyer USB and honestly its been a blast but something feels weird about my sending. like the spacing between elements feels slightly off to me, not sure if its the iambic mode or my squeeze timing or what. i mess around with the dit/dah ratio in the software and it helps a little but when i record myself and play it back it still sounds a bit... clumpy? if that makes sense. my elmer says my fist is actually pretty decent for 3 months but i can tell something isnt quite right. is this just a muscle memory thing that goes away with time or is there something i should actually be adjusting. running it around 15 wpm right now trying to build up from there. any advice from folks who went through this phase would be great

oh man i noticed this too and im pretty new to all of it so i cant really explain the why but yeah the bands have been strange. one afternoon last week i heard what sounded like a pileup on 10m and i had no idea what was going on because ive literally never heard that band do anything since i got licensed last year. turned out someone was working south america i think? anyway i downloaded the HamSphere app or maybe it was HF propagation app, cant remember the exact name but it shows a little globe with colored paths on it and it helps me understand whats supposed to be open. not sure how accurate it is but its fun to look at before i sit down at the radio

welcome to the rabbit hole, dx chasing is genuinely one of those things that takes over before you realize it. i cant add much to what the other guy said about the technical side but i will say dont get too hung up on finding the perfect app or tool right away. i spent way too long messing with software when i first started and not enough time actually calling stations. one thing that helped me was just picking one spot source and sticking with it long enough to understand how it works before adding more. DXwatch is fine, just leave it open in a tab and check it when you sit down to operate. the spots go stale pretty fast so anything older than maybe 5-10 minutes you should retune and listen before you call anyway

ok so i passed my general a few months ago and ive been trying to figure out the 40m band but honestly the band plan stuff is confusing me more than the license exam ever did. like i know there are certain segments for phone and cw but i keep seeing people say stuff like 'stay away from the band edges' and i dont really understand why that matters or how close is too close. i was calling CQ around 7.290 the other night and someone came on and told me i was 'too close to the edge' but 7.300 is where the band ends right so i thought i was fine? also what even is the difference between the band plan and the actual FCC allocations because it seems like two different things that people keep mixing together

so ive been doing these hilltop activations for a while now, mostly 2m and 70cm, and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother lugging a yagi up or just stick with the comet gp-9 clone i have on a painters pole. the collinear is way easier obviously but i feel like im leaving signal on the table when theres someone i really want to work on the far end of a tropo opening or whatever. did a test a few weeks back where i had both antennas up at the same time and switched between them on the 857 — the yagi was definitely better into certain directions but the collinear was surprisingly competitive when the other station was roughly in the right direction anyway. not exactly scientific i know. the yagi i have is a cheap 7 element arrow knockoff thing, works fine but its kind of a pain to point accurately when the mast is just a camera tripod. maybe im just not using it right. anyone else do this kind of portable stuff and settled on one or the other?