Steven Taylor

yeah the elevation thing bites us every single time and yet somehow we're always surprised by it lol. we did a similar exercise about two months ago and one of our guys who checks into the net from home every week with a HT couldn't even key up the repeater from the shelter location we'd picked. same radio, same antenna, just not at his house anymore. ended up being a good lesson about not assuming your go-kit will perform the same as your shack setup. the forms thing is real too. we actually started laminating a quick reference card for the net control position just to have something to glance at under pressure. nothing fancy, just the basics of how to handle a piece of traffic and the phonetic alphabet because you'd be shocked how many people go blank on G and P specifically for some reason. might be worth suggesting to your group if you dont already have something like that. honestly the exercises that go a little wrong are way more valuable than the ones where everything works perfectly. if it all goes smooth you dont really find out where your weak spots are.

yeah what he said, marathons are chill. i was nervous my first one too and it turned out to be just a lot of standing around eating granola bars lol. one thing i'll add is make sure your radio is programmed with the correct repeater AND the simplex fallback frequency before you show up, had a guy at our last event show up and his HT only had the default channels loaded which was kind of awkward. also bring a notepad and pen, sounds obvious but i forget mine every time almost

so we ran a simulated disaster exercise last saturday, basically a scenario where a category 3 hurricane had knocked out all infrastructure in the county and we were supposed to be the backup comms for the EOC and a couple of the shelter sites. been doing these for a few years now and honestly this one was kind of humbling. the good stuff first — our net control handled traffic really smoothly, we got ICS 213 messages relayed back and forth without too many repeats, and the new guys we brought in actually did pretty solid work. one of them had only been licensed for like 6 months and he was copying traffic like he'd been doing it forever, that was genuinely cool to see. the bad stuff — and this is where i want to hear if others have run into this — we had two operators who showed up without their go-bags having been updated since the last exercise. like one guy had a battery that hadnt been cycled in over a year and it browned out maybe 40 minutes in. another situation was we had a message that needed to get to the shelter on the south end and we just... had nobody positioned there. the geographic coverage gaps only showed up when we actually tried to do something real with the net. also we realized nobody had actually tested the interface between our digital setup (winlink mostly) and the EOC's intake process. they didn't know how to receive the messages on their end even though we were sending them fine. that one's on us for not coordinating better beforehand. anyway curious what lessons other groups have pulled out of similar exercises, especially around logistics and coordination gaps rather than just the radio stuff itself

honestly i flip between ft8 and psk31 more than js8call but i did spend a few weeks on it last winter. the conversations you can have are nice, feels more like actual ham radio than ft8 does. but i got frustrated with how slow it is, even in the faster speed modes its not exactly snappy. if you're patient it's rewarding, if you want quick contacts not so much. RTTY still gets more activity on contest weekends than js8call does in my experience which kind of says something about where the hobby is at right now.

nice, which kx2 battery do you use the internal one or external? asking because im about to do my first one and been going back and forth on this exact thing

so ive been running single op for years now, mostly CW sprints and the occasional phone sweepstakes, and i keep reading about SO2R guys absolutely cleaning up on rate but every time i try to think through the logistics it seems like im adding complexity without actually understanding the payoff well enough to justify rewiring half my shack like right now i have an IC-7300 as my main rig and an older FT-950 sitting on the shelf doing nothing, so the hardware is kind of already there. my station grounding is decent, beverages are out for 80/160, and i run a 2el on 40 that i can rotate. the antenna switching and bandpass filtering side of things is what scares me honestly. i know if i dont have proper isolation between the two rigs i'm just going to be deaf on one radio while the other transmits but setting that aside for a second - for guys who actually run SO2R regularly, what does your workflow look like during a high rate period? do you basically just run on radio 1 and use radio 2 for S&P between contacts, or is there some other approach that works better? and is there a point in contest score where SO2R stops mattering much vs just having better antennas or a better rate on a single radio

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, mostly because my neighbor does it and it seems really cool. he told me i need to pass some kind of test but i honestly dont know what im doing or where to look. like do i just google it or is there a book or something? i looked up the FCC stuff and it was pretty confusing. also how hard is the test actually, im not great at memorizing things and someone mentioned something about ohms law which i havent thought about since high school. any help would be appreciated, even just pointing me in the right direction would be great

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and mostly just done some casual ragchewing and a little bit of SOTA activating which i really love btw. but a few guys at my club keep telling me i need to try a contest and honestly the idea is kind of intimidating. like i know CQ WW is coming up and thats apparently a huge one, and theres always ARRL Field Day in june which i missed this year because i didnt really know what i was doing yet. my question is i guess — is CQ WW too overwhelming for a first timer or should i just jump in and see what happens? i have a basic HF setup, nothing fancy, ic-7300 and a wire dipole up about 30 feet. also not sure if i should try phone or cw, im not super fast on cw yet maybe 10-12 wpm on a good day. someone mentioned doing the ssb weekend first which makes sense but i dunno. just looking for any thoughts from people who have been through this

dont overcomplicate it honestly. i tried the pi plus arduino combo for a rotor controller project and ended up just doing everything on the pi with a relay HAT and it was fine. depends on what your timing requirements actually are i guess. for antenna switching youre probably not talking about microsecond precision so the pi GPIO is probably okay if you isolate it properly. that said the CI-V stuff is kind of annoying to get right and having it on a dedicated arduino that just does that one job isnt a bad call.

so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for like two years now and i finally decided to just go for it and take the technician exam. problem is i dont really know where to start with studying. i looked at the question pool on the arrl website and theres like 400 something questions and i kind of panicked a little. do people actually memorize all of them or is there some smarter way to go about it. a buddy at work said just use hamexam.org and grind through it but i dont know if thats enough or if i should also get a book. i have about 3 weeks before the next local VE session so im not totally rushing but i also dont want to waste time going in the wrong way

the thing you're probably forgetting is a way to actually charge that battery in the field without shore power. a small folding solar panel makes a huge difference if you end up deployed for more than a day or two. i went with a 100 watt panel and a cheap PWM controller and it's been fine for keeping the battery topped off during extended activations. also honestly dont overlook having a laminated copy of your local ARES/RACES frequencies and net schedules, sounds dumb but when youre tired and stressed at 2am you dont want to be digging through your phone. the 857 is a solid choice for a go-kit rig by the way, runs pretty efficient and covers a lot of ground. only thing id say is make sure whatever case you settled on has decent strain relief for the cables because loose connectors have killed more deployments than bad propagation ever did, at least in my experience.

honestly dont stress too much about the tuning being perfect at first. i worked my first sat QSO with like very rough manual doppler correction, you can usually find the other station even if youre a bit off because the passband is wide enough. what got me was forgetting to invert my thinking on the uplink — when you tune your downlink up you gotta tune your uplink down, that catches a lot of people off guard. gpredict handles this automatically if you link it to the radio via CAT but its worth understanding why

so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been on 2m and 70cm doing local stuff but honestly i keep hearing people talk about HF and i want to get in on that. a buddy at the club mentioned the General exam isnt that bad but i looked at the question pool online and some of it looks pretty intimidating, like the electrical stuff and propagation questions. im not an engineer or anything, just a regular person who got into this as a hobby. i guess what im asking is how long did people actually study before passing, and is there like a best resource or do i just grind the question pool until i memorize it. also is it worth it to just go for Extra at the same time or is that overkill. i have no idea what im getting into here

the 1.8:1 is totally workable, most tuners will handle that no problem and you'll lose maybe nothing meaningful in power. for a first build that's honestly pretty good. on the balun question — it depends. without one you can get common mode current running back down the outside of the coax shield and that can cause RF in the shack, pattern distortion, all kinds of weirdness. a 1:1 current balun at the feedpoint is almost always worth it, even just a choke made from winding several turns of the coax around a ferrite toroid. i use FT240-31 cores for HF and they work great. you dont necessarily need a 4:1 here because a flat dipole is nominally 73 ohms and at 120 degrees the impedance drops a bit so you might actually be closer to 50 than you think, which explains the decent swr. also your wire gauge is fine, 14 gauge has enough surface area for 40m power levels. the self-amalgamating tape is good stuff, just make sure you stretched it properly when you applied it or it'll peel back eventually especially in weather changes.

so ive had this 857 for about 4 years now, bought it used from a guy at the club and it's been solid until a few weeks ago. started noticing my signal reports on 40m were noticeably worse than usual, finally got around to checking it with my dummy load and a power meter and yeah, its only putting out around 18-22W when it should be doing 100W. every other band seems fine, checked 20m and 10m and both are doing 95-100W no problem. the radio itself doesnt throw any fault or protection mode, ALC looks normal on the meter, SWR into the dummy load is fine. i did the usual stuff first — reseated all the connectors i could get to, checked the power supply voltage under load (sitting at 13.5V solid), cleaned the band switch contacts with deoxit. nothing changed. my first thought was the low pass filter board for 40m but i dont really know how to verify that without swapping in a known good one. anybody been down this road with an 857 before? wondering if its worth sending to an authorized service center or if this is something a reasonably careful guy with a scope and soldering iron can trace down at home.

yeah what he said about old QSOs is right, i spent like two weeks going back through paper logs from my first couple years and getting everything entered and it turned out i already had way more entities worked than i thought. the hard part is getting the other side to confirm, especially for some of the more rare ones where the operator might not be active anymore or doesnt use LoTW one thing nobody told me when i started — paper QSL cards still count if you submit them to the ARRL card checker, so dont ignore that route for entities where LoTW matching just isnt happening. took me forever to figure that out

yeah the inverting part got me too when i started on linear sats. i was using gpredict for doppler correction and it helped a lot but honestly even with software you still end up tweaking manually cause nothing is perfect. what are you using for tracking, like do you have a computer in the loop at all or doing it by hand? cause doing full doppler correction by hand on two radios simultaneously while also physically pointing two yagis is... a lot to manage solo. i ended up building a small az-el rotor setup just to deal with that part

oh man i remember my first one, i was way more nervous than the actual EOC staff lol. honestly the biggest thing i'd tell you is just relax and remember that you are there to serve them, not impress them. most emergency management folks have worked with ham operators before and they really just want someone reliable who shows up on time and doesnt cause problems. bring your own water and snacks because you might be there a while and the EOC coffee situation is always a mystery. the ICS forms thing is huge, make sure you actually know how to fill out a ICS-213 under a little pressure because it sounds dumb but when someone is standing over you waiting for a message to go out your brain can go blank. we do a lot of drills in our group specifically for that. also write everything down even if it seems minor, your EC will appreciate it when they do the after action review. you're gonna do fine, first activations are always a little overwhelming but that's kind of the point of exercises right

Great choice! I built my QCX-20 last year and it's still my go-to portable rig. The built-in test equipment is really handy for field calibration. Did you get a case for yours?

the LM386 is kind of notorious for being a little finicky in RF heavy environments, which a receiver chassis definitely is. the usual thing people miss is bypassing the supply pin really aggressively -- like 100uf electrolytic in parallel with a .1uf ceramic right at the chip, and then another cap back closer to your power source. if youre picking up 60hz hum on a battery that actually sounds more like a ground loop or maybe your audio wiring is running too close to the mixer section and acting like an antenna. also what value did you put on pins 1 and 8 for gain? if you cranked it all the way up to 46db or whatever it is with the 10uf cap the chip gets real unhappy with RF getting in. try dropping the gain and see if the distortion on strong signals clears up, sometimes it is literally just the amp being overdriven by a hot signal off the mixer. DC receivers can push a lot of audio voltage on a strong signal.

so i finally got around to building a center-fed dipole for 40 meters after putting it off for like three months. used 14 gauge stranded wire i had in the garage, nothing fancy. calculated the length using the old 468/f formula which put me at about 66.3 feet total, cut it just a tiny bit long so i could trim down from there. got it up in an inverted-v config, apex maybe 30 feet up tied to a tree in the backyard, legs going down at roughly 45 degrees each. fed it with about 50 feet of RG-8X i had lying around. when i threw the antenna analyzer on it the resonant point came out around 6.9 MHz with swr of about 1.4:1 which is fine but id really rather have it closer to 7.2 or 7.25 where i do most of my operating. trimmed about 4 inches off each side and now its resonant around 7.05 but swr climbed to almost 2.1:1 at the dip. feels like im chasing my tail here. is the issue the inverted-v angle or am i just doing something dumb with the trimming process

I did my first activation about a year ago and was nervous too, it ended up being way more fun than I expected. One thing I wish someone had told me — bring more food than you think you need, I got so caught up trying to work stations that I forgot to eat lunch and the hike back was rough lol. Also pre-spotting is smart but also just post again when you're actually set up and ready, sometimes the pre-spot gets buried by the time you're actually on the air and a fresh spot gets the pile going faster.