Nancy White

honest question - does anybody actually think power matters less than technique at these distances? im not being argumentative i genuinely dont know. like at some point isnt the signal either making it or not regardless of what you do with your VFO. i run barefoot into a vertical on a city lot and i wonder sometimes if im just wasting my time in a serious pileup for like a real rare one, not your average EU station. i did work FT5ZM back when that expedition ran and i was shocked, took me about an hour of trying but i got through. 100w, ground-mounted vertical. so maybe there's something to the technique argument after all. though that was also a huge well run expedition with multiple ops and great antennas on their end so maybe they just had enough ears to eventually hear me.

oh man i remember my first net check-in, i think i gave my call sign twice by accident and then said "over" like i was on CB radio or something. nobody cared at all. the thing about nets is that net control has heard everything, they're not judging you, they're just trying to run through the list efficiently. most voice nets follow a pretty loose pattern - net control calls for check-ins, you give your call sign (phonetics help if the band is noisy), they acknowledge you and usually ask for name and QTH, you give those, maybe mention if you have traffic or if you're just checking in for the count, and that's basically it for a lot of casual nets. some nets have more structure than that like directed nets where you only transmit when called upon, but your basic weekly 2m social net is usually pretty relaxed. just listen a couple more times and you'll have the rhythm down fast. and yeah listening first is exactly the right move, you did nothing wrong there.

so i finally got to participate in an actual ARES activation last weekend - not a drill, real deal, local flooding had knocked out some normal comms infrastructure and our EC called us up. ive been a member of our local ARES group for about 8 months and done maybe 4 or 5 of the training nets plus the SET in october, but nothing had ever actually gone live before so I wasnt sure what to expect. honestly the training prepared me better than i thought it would. the ICS stuff we did, the net discipline, knowing when to transmit and when to just listen - all of that clicked into place pretty fast once things got real. what i DIDN'T expect was how much of it is just... waiting. like you're deployed, you're at your post, radio's on, and then a lot of it is just being there and being ready. which is fine, totally fine, just not what I pictured in my head. couple things that caught me off guard: my HT battery died faster than i thought it would running high power for extended periods (obvious in hindsight), and i realized i hadn't actually tested my external antenna setup in the field before that day which was kind of dumb on my part. it worked but there was a stressful few minutes getting it sorted. anyway just wanted to share, if you're on the fence about joining your local ARES group and actually putting in the time for the training nets and exercises I'd say go for it. the real activation felt very different from just ragchewing on the local repeater. curious if anyone else had surprises their first time out

yeah same here, been noticing that too. i think some of it is the bands honestly, we had some geomagnetic stuff last week that kinda messed things up. but also i think a lot of the ragchew crowd moved to 80m in the evenings now, at least thats where i keep finding people. worth a try if you havent already

so i've been putting this off for like two years but i finally just sat down last weekend and built a simple half wave dipole for 40m out of some 14 gauge stranded wire i had in the garage. cut each leg to roughly 33.5 feet using the 468/f formula, soldered it to a so-239 i had in my junk box, wrapped everything in self-amalgamating tape because thats all i had on hand. threw it up in an inverted-v config between a tree and my deck railing, apex is maybe 25 feet up which i know isnt ideal for 40 but its what i have. swr is reading around 1.4:1 at 7.150 which honestly surprised me, i was expecting worse. made a few contacts into the midwest from here in the northeast and the signal reports were decent enough. couple things im not sure about though — i didnt use a balun and ive been reading conflicting stuff about whether that matters for a basic dipole fed with coax. also the feedpoint connection is just soldered and taped, no weatherproofing box or anything, and im wondering how long that'll hold up. this is kind of a permanent install if it works so i want to do it right. any suggestions from people who have actually built a bunch of these?

honestly the general rule most people follow is you use phonetics when there's any chance the other station might mishear you, which on SSB is like... most of the time. on a dead quiet band with a strong signal yeah you can probably just say your call straight and it's fine. but when you're exchanging callsigns especially with someone far away or when QRM is an issue, phonetics just prevent you from having to repeat yourself five times. the ITU standard is the NATO alphabet and that's what you should stick to. the reason non-standard ones are a problem is exactly what you said — sugar vs sierra made you hesitate. now imagine that on a pile-up or during an emergency net where every second counts. people expect Sierra, they hear Sierra, brain processes it fast. you say Sugar and there's that little hiccup. it doesn't seem like a big deal but it adds up. not saying the phonetics police are gonna come after you or anything, plenty of old timers use their own favorites, but if you're still learning i'd just get the NATO ones locked in first.

so i've been running an HT clipped to my visor for like two years now and finally broke down and got a proper mobile rig, picked up a used Yaesu FTM-400 from a local ham who was upgrading. thing is beautiful but man the install has been a whole adventure. got the power leads run direct to the battery which i know is the right way to do it, used 10 gauge wire with an inline fuse close to the battery. the radio seems happy. but im getting a weird buzzing noise that changes with engine RPM which i'm pretty sure is alternator whine. tried a noise filter inline on the power leads but it didnt seem to help much. the antenna is a nagoya NMO mount through the roof which i'm pretty happy with, got a decent ground plane at least. also trying to figure out the best spot for the head unit vs the main body. right now the body is wedged under the passenger seat and the remote head is on a RAM mount on the dash. works okay but the cable between them is a bit of a rats nest still. anyone dealt with the alternator whine thing? is there something i'm missing or do i just need a better filter?

the interference thing is the real gotcha and most people underestimate it until their 40m radio is deafened by their own 20m signal. if your two antennas have decent physical separation youre already ahead of a lot of people, but youll almost certainly need band-pass filters. the 4O3A or Array Solutions bandpass sets are the standard go-to, they're not cheap but trying to do SO2R without them on a real station is kind of an exercise in frustration. that said, for sweepstakes specifically i'd argue the SO2R benefit is a bit more nuanced than people let on. SS is as much about working all the sections as it is raw rate, so having that second radio tuned to a mult band while you run on the other one is genuinely useful, especially late in the contest when youre hunting that one WY or ND or whatever you're missing. i made the jump with a similar setup to yours a couple years back, cobbled it together with a used SO2R box from a guy on the reflector, and yeah it helped, maybe 10-15% more QSOs but the mult pickup was the real payoff. honestly just try it without a controller first to get a feel for the workflow before you spend money on microHAM stuff. its a lot of mental load at first and some people decide its not worth it, thats a legitimate conclusion too.

went through the same thing last year, tech for like 18 months then finally sat down and did General. the question pool is public so theres really no excuse not to just memorize the answers even if you dont fully understand everything, though understanding it is obviously better. took me maybe 3 weeks of casual studying. the privileges are worth it even before you have a radio imo. some clubs have club stations you can use once youre licensed and that's actually how i got my first taste of 20m before i bought anything. might be worth looking into if theres a club near you

congrats on the first one! yeah 44 QSOs is plenty to qualify, the minimum is 44 for most programs that use the WWFF rules so you hit it right on the nose. the wildlife refuges are great choices, a lot of them arent activated very often so hunters will really go after them. i keep a list of unactivated references in my state and try to hit one every few months. 40m is usually the go-to but if you havent tried 20m for WWFF it can be really productive, especially if you spot yourself on the WWFF cluster — thats where a lot of the european hunters are watching.

which kx2 setup are you running, internal tuner or external? asking because im planning my first activation and cant decide if i should bother bringing the mx-P50M or just trust the internal tuner with an EFHW

this is making me feel better because im running like 80w into a wire dipole and i always assumed i just couldnt compete. i tried working a pileup a couple weeks ago on some pacific island thing and gave up after maybe 20 minutes because it seemed hopeless. didnt even think about actually studying where the op was pulling from, i just tuned to whatever frequency i heard the most activity on and called there which i guess is exactly the wrong thing to do lol

yeah separate supplies will probably fix most of your grief. relays are nasty on a shared rail, even with the flyback diodes. i had almost the exact same problem when i built a little sequencer for my preamp switching — the relay coil was dragging the voltage down just enough on transitions to cause all kinds of weird readings on the ADC. put the relay board on its own little buck converter fed from a 12v line and everything calmed right down. the optocoupler idea is also solid if you want to be thorough, but honestly id try the power supply thing first since its the easier fix. also might be worth adding a small RC filter on the ADC input pin — something like 1k resistor and 100nf cap to ground right at the chip. smooths out a lot of the garbage before it even gets sampled. rotator pot signals dont change that fast anyway so a little filtering doesnt hurt anything.

so ive been in ARES for about eight months now, went through the ICS-100 and ICS-200 online courses like they asked and showed up to most of the monthly nets, but this weekend theres an actual activation for a local marathon event and its my first real one. my EC said its a good starter event because its not an emergency obviously but it runs like one in terms of how they set up the comms structure. i guess what im wondering is what should i actually have ready to bring. i have my HT and a spare battery pack, i know they want us on the local 2m repeater but i dont know if i should bring my mobile rig too or if that would just be overkill. also do people usually bring their own logging sheets or does someone have those already printed out. feeling a little underprepared honestly

yeah the stale spot problem is just kind of a fact of life with the cluster unfortunately. what i do is look at the timestamp on the spot — anything older than maybe 5-6 minutes and i'm skeptical, especially on 10 and 12m where conditions can flip fast. some of the dx peditions will also post on their website or twitter if they're still active so i keep that open too when something big is going around for filtering i actually switched to using dxsummit instead of dxwatch for a while because i found the interface a bit cleaner for setting up continent filters, but honestly they both pull from the same underlying cluster network so the data is the same. just preference really the qrz logbook thing i hear you — it can bog down especially when theres a big pileup happening and everyone is trying to confirm at once. i just log locally in log4om and sync later when the traffic dies down