Michelle Lewis

i cant really comment on the DIY comparison cause ive only used RemoteHams but the SDR remote freezing thing has been happening to me too lately, maybe the last month or so. thought it was my crappy cable modem at first but sounds like maybe not. good to know im not alone at least

yeah im planning on it, my buddy from the repeater club said theyre setting up a table this year to hand out info about their ARES group. i'll probably get there early, the good stuff always goes fast at those swap meets. last year somebody snagged a whole box of connectors right in front of me lol. if you see a guy in a red jacket wandering around looking confused thats probably me

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, K-4857 if anyone knows it. been wanting to do this for months but kept putting it off because i was nervous about the whole setup and not knowing if id get enough contacts. ended up using my KX2 with a 20m link dipole strung between two trees and honestly the pile up on 20m was way more than i expected, got my 10 contacts in probably 15 minutes which was kind of wild. couple things i wasnt sure about — do people typically stay on one band for the whole activation or jump around? i ended up moving to 40m after 20m slowed down and got another 8 contacts there which was nice but i wasnt sure if that was the right call. also someone on the air mentioned something about activating multiple parks in one day and logging them separately, is that a thing? there were two other park units nearby and i didnt realize you could string them together like that. anyway really enjoyed it, the whole vibe on the air was super friendly and people were patient with me fumbling around with my log book. definitely doing more of these.

So I just passed my technician exam last week and now im trying to figure out what handheld to buy. I went down a rabbit hole on YouTube and now im more confused than before. Everyone seems to have a strong opinion and half of them contradict each other. I keep seeing the Baofeng UV-5R come up as the cheap beginner option and then immediately someone else says dont touch it and get a Yaesu or Kenwood instead. The price difference is pretty significant though, like I could get three Baofengs for one Yaesu FT-65 or whatever. Is the quality difference actually worth it for someone just starting out who doesnt even know if they'll stick with the hobby? Main thing I want to do is hit the local repeaters, maybe APRS eventually, and just generally learn the ropes. I live in a suburb so I'm not going off grid or anything extreme. Appreciate any thoughts from people who've actually used these things day to day.

rate optimization before SO2R, full stop imo. when i started taking scores seriously i realized i was wasting like 10-15 minutes per hour just from sloppy exchanges, not having the dupe checking dialed in, slow callsign copies etc. fixing that stuff is free and it compounds over a 48 hour effort in a big way. the SO2R rabbit hole is real and its deep. youre looking at station separation headaches, bandpass filters, sometimes separate antennas for each radio pointed different directions, the whole thing. K3 is actually a pretty good starting point for it if you get a second one since the band switching is fast but you still need to think through the RF isolation or youll blow up your front ends. i went through two contest seasons of intermittent RX problems before i figured out my issue was basically the second transmitter desensing the first radio's preamp on adjacent bands. not fun to diagnose mid contest

yeah that sounds like an audio path issue to me, even if the levels look okay on screen. -10 to -12 is actually on the low side for VARA FM, most people run closer to -3 or so without clipping. The other thing to check is whether youre getting any TX audio compression happening on the radio side — the TM-V71A has that built in mic gain thing and if its doing any processing on the modulated audio it'll trash the waveform mid-packet. Go into the menu and make sure the built-in compressor/processor is off on whatever port youre using for the TNC input. Also worth trying a different gateway just to rule out the node itself. Some of the RMS gateways out there are running older software or have RF issues on the TX side that don't show up as a bad signal on your end but cause weird session failures. The Winlink maps site shows last-heard times for gateways so you can see how active they are.

im pretty new to all this too so take this with a grain of salt but i found that just bookmarking the QRZ bandscope page helped me get a feel for propagation before i even open the cluster. like if the bands look dead there its probably not worth chasing spots anyway. the cluster stuff clicked more once i understood a little about how propagation works, before that it just seemed random to me why some spots were workable and others werent even close.

yeah im going, been going pretty much every year for the past decade except during covid obiously. the tailgate swap meet part is worth it alone, picked up a barely used IC-7300 two years ago for way under what they go for online. you just gotta get there early before all the good stuff walks out the door. what part of the midwest are you coming from?

the powerpole wiring is honestly the thing that held up my go-kit the longest too, I kept putting it off and then one day just sat down and did it all in an afternoon and wondered why I waited so long. get yourself a decent powerpole crimper if you dont have one already, the cheap ones are frustrating. on the HT question — I do keep one in my kit and its saved me more than once just for local repeater traffic when I needed both hands free or wanted someone else to monitor a frequency while I was operating HF. doesnt have to be anything fancy. my spare is literally a BF-F8HP I got years ago that I dont use for anything else anymore. rubbermaid tub is totally fine by the way. the pelican cases look great but unless you're getting rained on regularly or checking bags on an airplane I think people overthink the case thing. the real stuff that matters is whether your kit actually works when you pull it out six months later — so plug everything in occasionally, run it for an hour or two, make sure the battery is still holding charge. that's the part most people skip.

yeah the sequential process is basically what it sounds like — after your license shows up in the FCC database, they just assign the next available callsign in your call district based on where your mailing address is. so being in say Indiana you'd get a 9th district call. its pretty automatic, you dont really have any say in it which is why a lot of people end up with these longer KD9 or KG5 type calls. for vanity you can actually apply pretty much right away once you have a valid license in the system, no waiting period that i know of. you go through the ULS on the FCC website and file a form 605. the tricky part is you have to request a specific callsign that's actually available, and the format has to match your license class. as a tech you can get a 2x3 format (two letter prefix, three letter suffix) or a 1x3, but the shorter ones like 1x2 or 2x1 are reserved for general and extra class. so yeah you'd need to upgrade first if you want one of those short snappy calls. lots of people upgrade pretty quickly just to open up more vanity options honestly

JS8Call is genuinely good but yeah the activity thing is real. 40m and 20m during the day are your best bet, i find more people on 40 in the evenings especially. the SNR performance isnt quite FT8 level — FT8 can decode down to like -24dB or so and JS8Call in slow mode gets you maybe -18 to -20ish depending on conditions and how clean your audio chain is. so youre giving something up but its not a huge cliff either, most of the time if you can hear anything at all you can make a contact. the thing that hooked me was the store and forward messaging and the ability to query heartbeat stations. theres a small but pretty dedicated group of guys who leave JS8Call running and you can leave messages for people even if theyre not at the keyboard. its a different vibe than FT8 for sure. worth running both honestly, they dont really conflict if you just split the screen and keep them on different parts of the band.

So ive been running an RTL-SDR v4 dongle for about 8 months now mostly on VHF/UHF stuff, NOAA weather sats, some ACARS, the usual rabbit hole you fall into when you first get one of these things. But lately ive been wanting to get into HF a bit more and i know the rtl needs an upconverter to do that properly while the SDRplay has native HF coverage built in. My question is whether the RSP1B is actually a significant jump or if the rtl-sdr v4 with its direct sampling mode is good enough that im just wasting money. I see a lot of people online saying the SDRplay is way better but i also see a lot of people perfectly happy running SDR# or SDRuno with just the cheap dongle and an upconverter. I run SDR++ mostly because i found SDRuno kind of clunky to be honest. Not trying to do anything serious, mostly just want to listen around 40m and maybe some shortwave broadcast stuff. Budget isnt huge.

yeah what he said about N1MM is right, dont try to paper log CQ WW it'll drive you nuts lol. i tried my first contest on paper and spent half the time flipping through pages trying to figure out if i already worked that guy from Romania. one thing i'd add is just dont stress about your antenna too much. ive seen guys with way less than a dipole make solid showings in CQ WW just by being patient and picking good times to operate. like late saturday night on 40 when europe is coming in is honestly magical even with modest setups

congrats on the first kit build, that feeling never really goes away honestly. i've been doing QRP for probably 15 years and i still get a kick out of working DX with 5 watts or less, theres just something satisfying about the efficiency of it all. your end fed setup sounds solid for 40m too. if you do go portable definitely look into POTA or SOTA depending on your area. POTA especially is really beginner friendly and the chasers are usually pretty patient with weaker signals. i run a small lithium pack with mine and can get several hours of operating time no problem at QRP levels since the current draw is so low. just dont forget a good pair of headphones, copy gets a lot easier when you can really focus on the signal.

yeah the ICS paperwork thing gets everyone. we did ours back in the spring and same deal, half our ICS-309s had the wrong frequencies listed because someone updated the band plan and didnt tell the forms guy. its one of those things that seems like a small admin detail until you actually need it. the part about newer operators freezing up is really real though. what we started doing is running really low stakes practice nets every couple months, like not even pretending its an emergency, just doing formal check-ins and passing traffic so people get comfortable with the rhythm of it before theres any pressure. seemed to help a lot. the first time someone hears net control say "go ahead with your traffic" in a real SET it shouldnt also be the first time they've had to respond under any kind of formality at all. sounds like your simplex planning paid off though, thats honestly the thing that trips up a lot of groups. glad the Winlink piece worked too, we had a nightmare with that a couple years ago where the gateway was down and nobody had a backup path configured.

so ive been putting together a portable field communications kit for the past few months and i think i finally have something that actually works but man the power side of things has been a headache from the start running an IC-7300 in the field which i know some people think is overkill for portable work but its what i have and it does the job fine. antenna wise im using a Chameleon MPAS 2.0 which has been solid on 40 and 20, kind of mediocre on 80 but whatever. i set it up on a 17ft telescoping mast last weekend for a RACES exercise and it held up even with some wind the problem is power. i started with a 100ah lithium (actually a Battleborn) and that works okay for a few hours at low power but when im running 100 watts for any length of time it drains faster than id like for an all day deployment. so i picked up a cheap 2000 watt inverter generator from harbor freight and honestly it runs the battery charger fine but its SO loud. like embarrassingly loud. like people at the exercise kept looking over at me has anyone found a good middle ground here? i dont want to spend honda eu2200 money right now but the predator is just too loud for any kind of real deployment near other operators or in a residential area. and before anyone says it -- i know i could just bring a second battery but id rather have a charging solution running

yeah dont memorize the patterns as dots and dashes, thats the thing everyone says and its true. youll hit a wall around 8-10 wpm and never get past it because your brain is counting instead of hearing. the whole idea is to hear each letter as a sound, like how you recognize a word in english without spelling it out in your head. koch method is probably the most structured way to go and LC (learn CW online) at lcwo.net is free and does it pretty well. you start with just two characters, get comfortable recognizing them at a fast character speed even if the words come slow, then add one character at a time. takes a while before you have the full alphabet but when it clicks it really does click differently than the dots-and-dashes approach. i think i was maybe three or four months in before i felt like i could copy something on air, badly, but still. just set aside like 15 minutes a day and be consistent, thats honestly more important than any specific method

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still feel weird about when to use phonetics and when to just say the letter. like if someone asks me to confirm a callsign i just spell it out normally sometimes and other times i do the whole nato thing and i feel like im doing it wrong half the time. nobody has said anything but i dunno. is there like an actual rule or is it just whatever feels right in the moment also i noticed some guys on 40m just mash through their callsign so fast i cant even catch it and they dont use phonetics at all, is that a regional thing or just experienced operators being lazy lol

73 is not a Q code, its just an old telegraph abbreviation that means best regards basically. its been around since like the 1800s and hams just kept using it. you also hear 88 sometimes which means love and kisses, mostly used between friends or with a YL on the air. as for the Q codes, QRM is interference from other stations, like man made noise, whereas QRN is natural static, like from lightning storms and that kind of thing. QSB is when your signal is fading up and down, you know when someone sounds like theyre going in and out. QRZ just means whos calling me, you hear that a lot when someone is calling CQ and thinks they heard someone come back but wasnt sure who it was. honestly the best way to learn them is just time on the air. after a while they become second nature and you dont even have to think about it. theres also the ARRL handbook which has a pretty complete list but youll mostly use maybe 20 or so of the common ones in everyday contacts.

went through almost exactly this about 18 months ago, was sitting on a 7300 and eyeing the 7610 for a while. ended up pulling the trigger on a used 7610 and honestly the dual watch receiver situation alone was worth it for contesting. the way you can park one ear on the run frequency and still be digging around for mults with the other — its hard to go back once you've used it that way. the roofing filters on the 7610 are meaningfully better than the 7300 too, real world difference in a pile-up, not just on paper. i looked at the 990 briefly but the size of that thing was a problem for my desk and also i just wasnt sure about Kenwood's support situation going forward, nothing against them just a personal hesitation. if you can find a clean 7610 in the low-to-mid 2k range used its probably the cleaner upgrade path from where you are.

so i finally got around to trying AO-73 yesterday after months of just watching the waterfall on SDR and never actually transmitting. i've been doing terrestrial VHF/UHF for a while so i figured how different could it be right. very different apparently. the doppler correction alone was kind of a nightmare to keep up with manually. i was using gpredict for tracking which worked fine, but trying to actually tune my uplink and downlink at the same time while the frequencies are sliding around... i dont know how people do this without a rig that does it automatically. i've got an FT-818 for uplink on 435 and an SDRplay for downlink monitoring on 145 and keeping both corrected by hand during a 9 minute pass was just chaos. i did hear myself in the transponder for maybe 30 seconds which was exciting but i was barely able to have any kind of qso. the other station i heard kept drifting out of my passband and i wasnt sure if that was him not correcting or me not correcting or both. ended up logging nothing which is a bit disappointing but whatever, first pass. i'm assuming the doppler on the downlink moves faster than the uplink since it's a different band? like the 145 MHz side shifts less per second than the 435 side? i think i read that somewhere but want to make sure i understand it right before my next attempt tomorrow evening.

As a newer ham, I'm curious about the formal After Action process. Is it ideal to take a break after the exercise and return to the After Action session on the same day to gather as much information as possible? How long should we wait before conducting the debrief to get accurate feedback while memories are fresh?

i was in the exact same spot about a year ago and just went with the UV-5R to start. zero regrets for learning on it. honestly half the fun was figuring out why it wasnt working and then figuring out it was just a PL tone thing lol. once i understood the repeater stuff better i picked up a used FT-70DR for like 65 bucks and that became my main HT

omg i didnt even know the 7760 was shipping yet, i thought it kept getting pushed back. definitely let us know what you think when you get it in hand. im still running an old 7300 and love it but ive been curious about the higher end stuff. also the 10 meter thing is real, i made my first ever DX contact last week on 10 — ZL1 station in New Zealand and i was running like 50 watts into a vertical. i literally couldnt believe it when he came back to me. so yeah the bands are doing something right now for sure

so ive been sitting on this for a while but last weekend i finally cracked open the 857d and did the transmit mod to open it up past the ham bands. not that i actually needed it for anything specific, more just wanted the option and i was already in there messing with the squelch pot which had gotten scratchy as hell over the years. while i had it open i also did the ref oscillator mod with a TCXO replacement, grabbed a cheap-ish one off ebay that supposedly drops the frequency error down to under 0.5ppm. haven't done a proper calibration against a GPS disciplined source yet so i cant really say how much difference it made but the display reading seems more stable on 10m compared to before. probably placebo but who knows. also replaced the stock electrolytic caps near the final amp section since a couple looked a little puffy to me. radio is like 15 years old at this point so figured it couldnt hurt. anyone else done any of these mods or have opinions on whether the TCXO thing is actually worth the trouble? i feel like for HF its probably overkill but on 2m/70cm it might actually matter