Steven Taylor

so ive been using N1MM for probably 4 or 5 years now and honestly it just works, i know where everything is and the contest support is basically unbeatable for the stuff i do like CQWW and SS. but a buddy of mine keeps telling me to try Log4OM and i finally installed it last week to poke around and honestly the interface is way nicer for day to day logging, the QSL tracking and DXCC stats stuff is actually usable without having to dig through seventeen menus here's my actual question though — does anyone run both? like N1MM for contests and Log4OM for regular rag chew and DX chasing? i was messing around with the ADIF export trying to get them to stay in sync and it kinda works but feels janky. also i have WSJT-X in the mix for FT8 and getting all three of these to play nice with each other without duplicate entries is becoming a whole thing. UDP port conflicts, WSJT-X wants to log to one place, N1MM is listening on another port, its a mess anyway not sure if im overcomplicating this or if there's a cleaner workflow that people actually use. running windows 10 if that matters

so i passed my technician exam about three weeks ago and finally got my callsign last week. been listening around on my baofeng mostly but i keep hearing people talk about checking into nets and i guess i dont really understand how that works. like do you just tune to a frequency and wait? or is there a schedule somewhere? i found some stuff on the arrl website but it was kind of overwhelming and i wasnt sure what was current vs old information. also someone at my local club mentioned there are special event stations sometimes and that logging a contact with one gets you something? a certificate maybe? i didnt want to ask too many questions at the meeting because i already felt like i was slowing everything down with basic stuff. anyway any help appreciated, just trying to figure out where to actually start participating instead of just listening

im kind of in the same boat as you tbh, been using an app called Morse Mania on my phone just because its there when im waiting for something. not sure if its the best but its something. also theres a guy on youtube who does videos of slow CW QSOs with the text on screen and i found that weirdly helpful just to see what an actual contact sounds like even before i could copy any of it

so ive been messing with this for about three days now and im losing my mind a little. running a Kenwood TM-D710G with the built in TNC, got it set to beacon every 10 minutes on 144.390, SSID is set right as far as I can tell, the radio shows the packet going out in the log, but when I pull up aprs.fi and search my callsign nothing shows up. not even old data. my buddy two miles away can see his own packets just fine. I double checked the audio levels, PTT seems to be keying, I can actually hear the packet burst go out over the air. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. not sure what im missing here. is there some kind of validation or registration thing on aprs.fi I dont know about? or is this more likely a digipeater coverage issue in my neighborhood. I'm in a pretty suburban area but there's supposed to be a few igates within range according to the map.

I actually just got my ticket a few months ago and havent tried 6m at all yet, didnt realize it did stuff like that. I thought it was basically dead most of the time? maybe i need to dust off that old beam i found in the garage and see if it covers 6. this hobby keeps surprising me every time i think i have a handle on it

the oscillator and filter questions tripped me up too but i just kept doing practice exams until i was consistently hitting like 85% and then went and took it. didnt fully understand all of it but enough to pass. the actual exam felt easier than the practice pools for some reason, maybe just nerves going away once i sat down as for the bands yeah the extra segments on 20 and 40 are worth it if you do any CW or chasing DX, thats where a lot of the action is during pileups

i just passed mine last month so this is fresh in my mind. the filter design and transmission line questions tripped me up the most, theres a handful of questions where you really do need to understand whats happening not just guess. like the ones about standing wave ratios and how a mismatched load affects the input impedance of a feedline, that stuff requires actual understanding or youll get it wrong under pressure. but the question pool is public so you can just drill it on HamStudy until you hit 90% consistently and youll probably be fine. took me about 8 weeks going slow. and yeah the Extra segments on 80 and 40 are genuinely less chaotic, noticed that immediately after i upgraded

honestly the rate thing is real but people oversell how seamless it is when you're starting out. the first contest i tried SO2R i probably made it worse because i was spending mental energy on the second radio instead of working the pile on the first one. the real gain comes from using radio 2 to find your next CQ frequency or grab a multiplier while youre in a slow period on radio 1, not trying to literally work two stations at the same time which is where people get themselves into trouble. with a K3 and 590 you actually have a decent setup for it. the interlocking and audio routing is the part that'll take you a weekend to sort out before you even think about a contest. N1MM has the SO2R stuff built in pretty well now but you need to spend some real time with the config. i'd say try it on a shorter contest first, like a state QSO party or something low stakes, before you throw yourself into SS or CQ WW with it. the contacts per hour improvement is real once its muscle memory but it doesn't happen in your first attempt

yeah im kind of in the same boat haha, been licensed two years and i still have a stack of incoming cards on my desk that i keep meaning to reply to. my buddy told me if its a bureau card you have maybe 6 months before it looks rude but honestly most people are pretty understanding i think. the LoTW thing though — make sure your callsign certificate is actually current because mine expired and i didn't notice for like three months and none of my uploads were going through, that was annoying to sort out

yeah the audio level thing bites everybody at least once. in Vara HF theres that little drive level indicator and you really want it sitting around 30-40% on transmit, not pegged. if the Signalink TX knob is cranked up youll overdrive the vara modem and it just wont decode properly on the other end. also double check that the IC-7300 isnt doing any compression or processing on the TX side — turn all that off, data mode should be clean passthrough basically. for the dial frequency, Vara HF on 40m most people use around 7.101 or check the RMS list in Winlink Express itself, it shows the exact dial freqs for each gateway. the list can be a bit stale sometimes so if a gateway shows green but wont connect try the next one down the list. and yeah peer to peer is totally different, thats for connecting directly to another station without going through any gateway infrastructure, useful for field day or emcomm when internet is down but not what you want for normal message handling to the internet side.

ok so i just passed my general last month and got my sequential call which is fine but honestly its pretty ugly and long and i was looking into getting a vanity call instead. ive been reading the FCC ULS stuff and some old posts on here and im getting kind of contradictory info about how the whole thing actually works now. from what i understand there used to be some kind of preference system where like extra class licensees got priority over generals during the application window, and certain groups like close relatives of silent keys could claim a call before it went general public. is that still a thing or did they change it? i keep seeing references to the old system and im not sure what still applies. also is it literally just whoever submits first once a call becomes available, or is there still some kind of window period where multiple apps get batched together and then sorted by preference? i really dont want to go through the whole process and miss out because i didnt understand how the timing works. any help appreciated, been lurking here for a while and you all seem to know your stuff

completely normal, dont worry about it. that 7-10wpm wall is real and pretty much everyone hits it. the writing thing -- honestly just keep doing it for now. the whole 'copy in your head' advice is good advice but its more for when youre trying to break through the 15-20 range. at 10 theres nothing wrong with writing, youre still building the character recognition reflex and your brain hasnt fully automated it yet. what helped me more than anything was listening to actual QSOs on the air even when i couldnt copy most of it. like i'd tune around 40m in the evenings and just let it wash over me. your brain starts picking out callsigns and common words like CQ and 73 and DE without even trying. took me almost a year to get comfortable at 15wpm but i wasnt super consistent about practicing either. if youre doing 20-30 min every single day youll probably get there faster than i did.

so i've been wanting to do this for probably two years now and i finally just committed and built one of those Pennywhistle kits, the 40m version. took me about three evenings spread across a couple weeks because i kept second-guessing my solder joints and redoing stuff that was probably fine to begin with. anyway got it done, threw it in a bag with my little notebook and a 9ah lipo i had from a drone project, and drove out to the county park about 20 minutes from my house. strung up a wire antenna between two trees — just a simple end fed with a 9:1 unun i built last winter — and honestly i was not expecting much. figured id make one or two contacts and call it a win. worked 11 stations in about 90 minutes running around 4 watts. one guy in new mexico who was pretty loud, couple stations in the southeast, even heard but couldnt pull a european station out of the noise. the whole setup weighs almost nothing and i genuinely had more fun than i have on my home station in months. something about the constraints of it, the low power and simple wire, makes every contact feel like it actually means something. if anyone is on the fence about getting into QRP or building a kit i really cant recommend it enough. my soldering is mediocre at best and the kit still works fine.

so ive been a ham for about two years now and i keep hearing about go-kits and emergency preparedness stuff especially at the club meetings but nobody really sits down and explains what they actually have in theirs. like i get the general idea — radio, power, antenna — but beyond that i dont know where to start. my situation is i have an FT-857D which i love but its kind of big, and i also have a little Yaesu FT-65 HT. i was thinking maybe build around the HT for portability but then i lose a lot of capability obviously. also i live in tornado country so the go-kit isnt just for served agencies stuff, i genuinely might need it someday for real. that kind of changes my thinking a little. what do you guys actually have packed and ready to go? and how do you handle power — are you running LiFePO4 or just sticking with a big SLA? i priced out a 20ah LiFePO4 and it wasnt cheap but maybe worth it. anyway any thoughts appreciated, even just telling me what you wish youd done differently when you built yours

had almost the exact same thing happen when i first set up my remote. turned out the issue wasnt the upload bandwidth itself but the router at the remote site was doing some kind of traffic shaping or QoS thing that was deprioritizing the UDP audio packets once the TX keying traffic started hitting at the same time. basically the router saw two simultaneous streams and just decided the audio was less important. i threw the remote station machine into the DMZ temporarily just to test and the dropouts went away completely. not a permanent fix obviously but it told me where to look. also worth checking if your ISP at the remote end does any burst throttling. 35mbps sounds like enough headroom but some cable providers will let you sustain that for a bit and then quietly step it down when you hold the connection open for more than a minute or two. RemoteHams audio stream isnt huge but if the pipe is getting squeezed even a little it shows up pretty fast.

yeah the guy keying up over people is just rude honestly, happens on our repeater sometimes too. if its a regular thing you could mention it to whoever runs the repeater, they usually appreciate a heads up. most people dont even realize they're doing it.

so i finally pulled the trigger on one of those QCX mini kits from QRP Labs and spent most of last weekend putting it together. im pretty new to kit building, i think the last thing i soldered was like a school science project, so i was pretty nervous about the whole thing. it actually went together surprisingly well. the instructions are really detailed and i took my time with the SMD parts which i was honestly dreading. fired it up on 40m and got it aligned and it was just... working. i made my first contact with it about an hour later running 4 watts to a random wire up in a tree in my backyard. honestly the thing that got me was how far 4 watts actually goes when you know what youre doing. worked a station in georgia (im in ohio) and he gave me a 579 like it was nothing. been chasing DX with my big rig for a while and always assumed you needed at least 100w to be heard but i dunno, maybe ive been doing it wrong this whole time. anyway just wanted to share since i see people ask about kit building a lot. happy to answer questions if anyone is thinking about starting with something like this.

cant make dayton this year, too far for me to justify the drive honestly. we got a club swapfest in june though about 40 miles north of pittsburgh if anyone here is in that area. pretty small compared to hamvention obviously but its a good time, usually 60 or 70 tables and the club does a foxhunt in the afternoon which is always fun

the SDR panadapter thing over RCForb is doable but its not super clean in my experience. what most people end up doing is running SDR# or SDRuno locally at the remote site and then using something like SpyServer to stream the IQ data separately from the RCForb audio path. so you end up with two connections going — one for rig control and audio through RCForb, one for the IQ stream through SpyServer on a different port. bandwidth adds up fast though, even a decimated IQ stream at like 1.2 MSPS is gonna eat a couple meg depending on compression. on 4-5 up youre probably okay if nothing else is hammering the connection. the echolink idea for club monitoring is honestly kind of a frankensteins monster situation. i mean it could work, you could feed audio out of the RCForb client into an echolink node running on a local machine, but youre stacking latency on latency and the echolink codec isnt gonna sound great after already being compressed once for the remote link. if the club just wants to listen maybe just set up a web audio stream with something like icecast, simpler and doesnt require eveyrone to have echolink configured. just my two cents

yeah the internal speaker is pretty bad, dont bother trying to live with it. i just use headphones most of the time when im doing serious operating anyway so it doesnt bother me much. the radio itself is solid, been running mine for like 3 years and only thing ive had to do is a firmware update here and there. enjoy it

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general class) and i keep hearing people talk about checking into nets but honestly i have no idea where to even begin. like i know they exist and i know the concept but finding one that actually has activity in my area is another thing entirely. i tried the ARRL net directory a few times but half the frequencies i tune to just sound dead or i cant tell if im even on the right time. also someone at my club mentioned there are special event stations that do on air contacts for like historical anniversaries and stuff — is that a separate thing from nets entirely or do some nets do special events too? i feel like im missing something obvious here. any advice on how to actually get my first real check in would be great, im getting a little tired of just scanning around hoping something happens

yeah same thing happened to me when i first started. i just kind of blurted out my callsign at what i thought was the right time and net control came right back to me and it was totally fine. the nets ive been on are pretty forgiving. one tip i got was to have your callsign written down in front of you so you dont blank on it when you key up — sounds silly but when youre nervous your brain does weird things

honestly the good news is working toward any of them kind of overlaps naturally. every state contact counts toward WAS, every zone toward WAZ, and every DXCC entity toward DXCC — so if you're just logging contacts and being intentional about who you're working you'll be building credits for all three at the same time without really trying. for someone starting out id probably say WAS is the most approachable just because working all 50 states is very doable even with modest equipment, and you'll get a feel for chasing and confirming via LoTW before the stakes feel as high. DXCC is absolutely not out of reach with a G5RV and 100 watts though — FT8 has kind of changed everything for guys without big antennas. you can work a lot of rare stuff on digital modes that you'd never crack a pileup on with 100w SSB. i was at like 180 entities before i ever ran more than 100 watts, all wire antennas in a suburban lot. just make sure you're uploading everything to Logbook of the World. that's the main thing. get in the habit now and you'll thank yourself later.

so i finally decided to try activating a summit last weekend, been reading about SOTA for like two years and just never pulled the trigger. picked what looked like an easy one on the map, W4C/EM-001 or something like that, drove out there saturday morning with my KX2 and a end fed wire and a small pack. well the trail that was supposed to be the easy route was basically washed out and i ended up bushwhacking for like 45 minutes to get into the activation zone. by the time i set up my wire in a tree and got on 40m it was already past noon and the bands were kind of dead. managed to get 4 contacts before my phone battery died and i couldnt pull up the spots anymore. needed one more for a valid activation and just couldnt get it. honestly kind of frustrating but also kind of addictive? already looking at maps for next weekend

dont stress too much about the timing thing, honestly most net controls have heard it all and they're not going to hold it against a new op. the main thing is you showed up and checked in, that counts for a lot more than you think. as for the callsign question, technically by FCC rules you're supposed to use your full callsign for identification purposes, but in practice a lot of nets are pretty relaxed and they'll accept just the suffix especially if you're already in the system and net control knows who you are. some nets are more formal than others, like traffic nets tend to be tighter about procedure than a casual rag chew net. best thing to do is just listen for a few sessions and see what style that particular net uses and follow their lead. if in doubt, full callsign is always correct. and honestly the best advice i can give is just listen a lot before you transmit. you'll pick up so much just from hearing how other people handle themselves, especially the experienced ops. nobody who's been in this hobby more than a few years is going to look down on a new ham for being a little rough around the edges, we all sounded exactly like that at some point.