Michelle Lewis

yeah the learning curve is real, I won't sugarcoat it. I spent two full contest seasons fumbling around with SO2R before it actually started helping my score instead of hurting it. the thing nobody tells you upfront is that the software config is almost the whole battle — N1MM absolutely handles dual radio, you just have to have it set up with the right COM port assignments and the radio focus switching mapped to a footswitch or at minimum a hotkey you can hit without thinking. if you're clicking around in a window to switch focus you've already lost. the other thing is station isolation. if your two rigs are bleeding into each other you're going to be fighting RF instead of making contacts. a lot of guys run bandpass filters between the two and that makes a huge difference. without that you're just hearing yourself on the second radio and it's miserable. once I got the microHAM controller and sorted the interlock so the radios wouldn't both TX at the same time it started to feel more manageable. but honestly for most ops, especially if you're not seriously chasing a top 10 finish, just running one radio really well will outperform sloppy SO2R every time.

JS8Call is genuinely usable for conversation but you have to adjust your expectations — it's not IRC, more like texting someone who replies every 30 seconds or so depending on which speed setting they're using. Normal mode is 15 seconds per transmission, slow is 30, there's a turbo mode that's faster but noisier. Most people i've talked to are running normal speed. Sensitivity-wise you're giving up a little compared to FT8 but honestly not as much as you'd think. I've had contacts through some pretty rough conditions with maybe 10w into a PAR end-fedz. The bigger thing is there's just way fewer people on it so if you're in a rural area you might be calling CQ into the void for a while, especially on anything other than 40m or 20m. There's a relay feature that lets messages hop through other stations which is cool in theory but ive never actually needed it. Point is if you want actual communication with weak signal capability it's probably your best option right now, FT4 is even more stripped down than FT8 so that's not gonna scratch that itch either.

nice work getting it done, that summit is a solid first choice. 11 contacts is fine, dont stress about the number as long as you hit the 4 minimum. the spotting thing is always annoying, i usually pre-fill the spot before i even leave the trailhead and just update the frequency when im actually set up. saves a lot of fumbling. one thing that helped me a lot was switching to a linked dipole instead of the EFHW, easier to throw up and you can change bands without messing with the tuner. not that the EFHW is bad just a preference thing. anyway sounds like youre hooked now, which is how it always goes lol

yeah im kind of in the same boat as you lol, been sitting at like 8wpm for months. one thing that helped me a little was just listening to actual QSOs on 40m even when i cant copy most of it. you start picking out callsigns and common words like 73 and CQ and ur and stuff. its not really structured practice but it keeps it feeling like a real thing and not just an exercise if that makes sense

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been trying to figure out the whole QSL confirmation thing and honestly its a bit overwhelming. like i get the basic idea, you worked someone, you confirm it, great. but there seem to be like three different systems and nobody i talk to at the club can agree on which one matters. my buddy told me to just upload to LoTW and forget about it, but then i see people on here talking about eQSL and how some awards accept it and some dont. and then theres still guys mailing out actual paper cards which i think is really cool but also seems like a lot of work and expense with the SASE stuff. im mostly doing HF, some SSB some FT8, working toward DXCC eventually. what do most of you actually use day to day and is there a reason to bother with more than one system? dont want to set up accounts on six different things if i only really need one or two.

mag mounts are kind of notorious for this honestly. i switched to a lip mount on my jeep and the difference was pretty noticeable. also — and this might sound obvious — but is the coax shield actually making good contact with the mag mount base? sometimes the connector or the cable itself is the culprit. i've seen brand new coax from those tram antennas have weird issues right out of the box.

honestly your instinct is right — fix the rate problem first before going SO2R. SO2R adds a ton of complexity and if your fundamentals arent solid it just becomes a distraction. the guys making it look easy have usually been doing it for years and have their station dialed in, like hardwired band switching, proper filtering between the radios, maybe a 2x4CD or an ICE bandpass filter setup. without that kind of isolation you're gonna get IMD garbage all over the place especially if the antennas are only 30 feet apart. for the rate dropoff thing, are you keeping a second window open tracking where the multipliers are? a lot of people just run blind and then scramble for mults in the last hour. if you use N1MM or whatever, keep the bandmap populated and have a plan — like stay on 40 when propagation shifts, don't abandon a frequency too early just because it feels slow. and CQing with higher power intervals vs S&P has a huge effect on your overall efficiency. some contesters swear by the 80/20 rule, 80% running 20% S&P, but it depends on your rate at any given moment.

yeah what he said. i was confused about this too when i started. one thing i'll add is that in contests basically everyone just blasts through their callsign fast without phonetics unless asked to repeat, but in like EMCOMM or public service situations they're pretty strict about using the standard NATO ones because you might be talking to someone who isnt a ham and they need to write stuff down accurately. i did a served agency exercise last year and the net control actually corrected someone on the air for using non-standard phonetics which i thought was kinda harsh but i get why in that context. for everyday casual stuff on 40m dont stress it too much

I'll push back a little on the idea that SO2R is the obvious next step for a mid-pack finisher. I went down that road a few years ago and spent two contest seasons fighting RFI and intermod instead of actually improving my operating. Ended up pulling the second radio out and just focused on running cleaner single-radio, worked on my CW speed, got my exchange down to like 2 seconds, learned to find clear frequencies faster. Went from mid-pack to top 10 in section without any of the SO2R complexity. Not saying SO2R doesn't work, it clearly does for the top ops, but there's a lot of rate you can find in single-radio discipline first. things like how fast you move after a dupe, how aggressively you hold a run frequency, when you decide to give up and S&P vs keep calling CQ. That stuff compounds over 24 or 48 hours way more than people realize.

so i just passed my technician exam last month and im trying to figure out which handheld to get as my first radio. i went down a rabbit hole on youtube and now im more confused than when i started. everyone seems to have strong opinions and half the videos are just guys pushing whatever they get paid to promote i mostly want to hit the local repeaters and maybe use it for hiking since i do a lot of trails in the cascades. my budget is probably around 80-100 bucks but i could stretch to 150 if it actually makes a difference. ive seen a ton of people mention the baofeng uv-5r because its cheap but then just as many people saying dont bother and get something better from the start is there a middle ground here or am i overthinking this. also does dual band actually matter that much for a new person just getting started on local repeaters

so i was just browsing around and caught wind that there was a pretty decent 10 meter opening last week, guys on the west coast were reportedly working Europe pretty easily which is wild considering where we've been in the solar cycle. i managed to catch a few EU stations myself on Friday afternoon, nothing crazy but definitely better than the last few months. felt like the band had some actual life to it again. also saw something on one of the other forums about Icom possibly releasing something new — think it was related to the IC-705 line but im not totally sure, the post was kind of vague. anyone actually know whats coming or have more details? i dont want to get too excited and then find out its just a firmware update lol. been happy with my 7300 but i always like to see what's out there. also did anyone catch the ARRL announcement about the changes to the Extra class question pool? worth paying attention to if you're studying or helping someone study right now.

yeah i get what your saying. i only got my general like 2 years ago so i dont have the same history but even in that short time the nets ive tried to join have thinned out. found a local 2m net that meets tuesday nights and thats honestly the most actual human conversation ive had on the air in months. tried 40m a few times and it just felt like shouting into a room where everyone has headphones on

yeah i caught the tail end of that opening, was probably around 4pm local time when i noticed it. worked a couple stations in Brazil and one in Argentina before it started to fade. solar flux has been climbing a bit this week so i wasnt totally surprised but it was still better than expected. 10m openings like that remind me why i keep a dedicated antenna for that band even when its been dead for weeks at a time. on the Yaesu thing, ive heard the same rumors floating around. somebody in our local club mentioned something about a possible successor to the FTDX10 but honestly who knows, could be nothing. Hamvention is what, a few weeks out? i'd just wait until then. thats usually when things actually get confirmed rather than just being forum speculation. Icom had that big reveal a couple years back that nobody saw coming so anything is possible i guess.

So i finally did my first ever park activation yesterday at a state forest about 45 minutes from my house (K-4566 for anyone curious). Ive been licensed for about two years now but kept putting off doing POTA because it seemed complicated to log and i wasnt sure what gear to bring. Ended up just throwing my KX2 in a backpack with a 40 meter EFHW i made from a kit and a cheap fiberglass mast from amazon, found a picnic table near the parking lot and just started calling CQ POTA on 40. honestly the pile up i got was way bigger than i expected. within like the first 20 minutes i had 12 contacts and ended up with 34 total before the battery started getting low. didnt even make it to 20 meters which i was planning on doing. a couple hunters called me and said they'd been waiting for someone to activate that park for months which made me feel pretty good about it. the logging was the part i was most worried about but i just used a paper log in the field and then entered everything into the POTA website when i got home that night. uploaded the adif from HAMRS no problem. if anyone else is on the fence about trying this i really do think you should just go for it, the community is super welcoming and the hunters are patient when you're fumbling around.

so we finally got our act together and ran a full simulated emergency exercise for the county last Saturday. scenario was a major flood event cutting off the eastern part of the county, no cell service, main EOC needs to coordinate with three shelter sites and the hospital. we had about 14 operators show up which was honestly better turnout than i expected. the short version is that it went... okay. not great, not terrible. the stuff that fell apart was mostly the stuff we assumed would just work. like we had two guys show up with radios they hadnt touched in six months and the memories were all messed up from some firmware update. one of the shelter sites couldnt hear the EOC net control at all because turns out the repeater we planned to use had a PL tone change nobody told the newer members about. we lost probably 45 minutes just sorting that out in a simulated scenario which in a real event would have been catastrophic. the thing that actually went well was the ICS paperwork flow once we got comms stable. the guy we have doing our training has been really pushing the ICS 213 forms and it showed, the message traffic was way cleaner than our last drill two years ago. curious if other groups have found good ways to stress test their frequency plans before an actual activation. we're thinking about doing a shorter tabletop exercise before the next full drill to work out the coordination stuff on paper first.

okay so ive been listening on HF for a few weeks now and i keep hearing and seeing all these weird shorthand things and i honestly have no idea what half of them mean. like QSL i kind of get from context but then theres QRM, QRN, QSB, QRZ and a bunch others and people just throw them around like everyone knows what they are. also saw someone type 73 at the end of a message and wasnt sure if that was like a frequency or something? and whats the deal with OM and YL, is that like a callsign thing or what. i tried googling some of it but different sites say slightly different things and some of it seems like old morse code stuff that people still use for some reason. anyway just trying to get a handle on the basics before i try to actually get on air

cutting board insulators are actually totally fine, ive used them for years. what kind of coax are you running and how long is the feedline? sometimes the line length can make the SWR reading at the radio look worse or better than it actually is at the antenna. a half wave of coax at the operating frequency will show you the true impedance, any other length and youre reading through a transformer basically. not that it matters for actual operation usually but it can make troubleshooting confusing if you dont account for it.

so ive been a tech for about 2 years now and mostly just do local repeaters and some APRS stuff but i keep hearing people talk about HF and honestly it sounds pretty cool. a guy at my club last month was working some DX on 20 meters and i just stood there like an idiot not really knowing what was going on lol anyway i started looking at the General exam pool and it seems like a LOT. like way more than the tech exam felt. theres stuff in there about propagation and operating practices and some electrical theory that i honestly dont remember from the tech exam at all. im not dumb but i also havent done math since high school so some of the formula stuff is making me nervous is it actually as hard as it looks or does it kind of click once you get into it? i downloaded the ARRL study guide pdf from somewhere but havent really cracked it open yet. just wondering if anyone went through this recently and what helped them most

yeah what he said. also worth knowing that 40m is kind of a mess in terms of different regions of the world having different allocations so if you're working dx you might hear stations operating in parts of the band that would be outside your privileges or at least outside the US allocation. that can be confusing at first. i remember being totally lost about why some european stations were showing up below where i thought the band started.

so ive been running a flat top dipole for 40m for a couple years now, center fed with 450 ohm ladder line into a tuner, and it works fine but im trying to figure out if theres any real world benefit to drooping the ends down into an inverted V configuration. my supports are pretty good, got a 35ft fiberglass mast in the middle and two trees on either side but the trees arent perfectly placed so the flat top always ends up a little saggy in the middle anyway. the reason im even thinking about this is i helped a buddy put up an inverted V for 40m last weekend and his SWR was way better across the band without a tuner than mine ever has been, and he only has a 30ft support. i know the inverted V has a slightly lower feedpoint impedance so that probably explains some of it but his signal reports on 40 have been comparable to mine on most paths which surprised me honestly. was expecting the lower angle lobes to favor my flat top more. anyone actually done a real comparison or is this one of those things where its like 3db either way and nobody can hear the difference in practice

so i finally got around to building my first dipole from scratch, been putting it off forever because i kept telling myself i'd mess it up. used 14 AWG stranded wire i had leftover from some electrical work, cut each leg to about 16.4 feet for 40m based on the 468/f formula. fed it with some RG-8X i had lying around and threw together a basic center insulator out of a piece of PVC flat stock i drilled holes through. hoisted it up in an inverted-V config with the apex at around 25 feet (thats all my pushup mast will do) and the ends tied off to a couple of trees maybe 8 feet off the ground. antenna analyzer shows the resonant point sitting around 6.9 MHz instead of 7.150 like i was aiming for, so SWR at the low end of 40m is like 1.4:1 which honestly isnt terrible but the resonance is clearly off. did a few contacts yesterday, including one guy in ontario that gave me a solid 57 so the thing is obviously radiating. just wondering if i should bother trimming the legs to move resonance up or leave it since the rig's internal tuner handles it fine. also not sure if the inverted-V angle is killing my efficiency, the legs are probably only at like 100 degrees included angle or so.

Congrats on passing, welcome to the hobby. So the way sequential assignment works is basically the FCC just hands out calls in order from a pool, thats why you got a 2x3 — those are the most common ones available right now since a lot of the shorter formats are already taken or reserved. The call district number in your callsign used to matter a lot back when it actually reflected where you lived, but the FCC dropped that requirement years ago so you'll see people with a W5 prefix living in Ohio or wherever, it doesnt affect anything operationally. Vanity calls are totally worth looking into if you want something shorter or more memorable. The FCC charges a small fee for the application I think its like 35 bucks now, and you apply through their ULS portal. There's also a site called AE7Q that has a really useful vanity call search and availability tool, that's probably the easiest place to start before you go digging through the FCC's own pages which yeah, are not exactly user friendly.

the notepad file made me smile, i did the same thing my first Field Day lol. Definitely get N1MM or even just use the web-based log at the end if you dont want to deal with software during the actual operating, though real time dupe checking is really nice once you try it once. honestly SOTA and contesting scratch different itches for me. contesting is this kind of almost frantic energy especially when the bands are good and youre just running stations one after another, whereas SOTA is more about the whole experience of getting out there and making a contact from a hilltop with like 5 watts. both are great. Field Day in june is probably the most beginner friendly contest environment if you havent tried that one yet, most clubs set up a multi-op station and you can just sit down and operate for a bit without any pressure.

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, summit was only a 2 point peak but figured id start easy. threw the KX2 in a pack with a 40m EFHW and just hiked up there. took maybe 45 minutes to the top and honestly the setup was way faster than i expected, had the antenna strung up between two trees and was on the air in like 10 minutes. managed 12 contacts which i think is enough to count? i was on 40m the whole time and most contacts were pretty quick, everybody seemed to know the drill with SOTA which helped a lot. one guy actually spotted me on SOTAwatch which i didnt even know was happening, suddenly had a small pileup which was fun but also kind of stressful. anyway my question is about power, i was running 5w and it felt fine but should i bother bringing a bigger battery for 10w on future activations or is 5w basically the standard for this kind of thing

so last weekend was my first actual activation with our county ARES group, we had a pretty big weather event come through and the county EOC requested us for net control backup and liaison to the Red Cross shelter down the road. i've been through all the ICS training, done the SET exercises, thought i was pretty prepared but man actually sitting in the EOC with real served agency people asking you questions is a whole different thing. couple things i noticed that nobody really warned me about — first, the EOC staff barely knows what we do or how we operate, like the emergency manager kept asking if we could just patch into the phone system, had to explain a few times that it doesnt quite work like that. second, the ICS paperwork stuff (213s, 214s) is way more important than i thought during training, they actually wanted our logs in real time which i wasnt totally ready for. the actual radio work was honestly the easy part, 2m simplex between the shelter and EOC worked great, we even had to relay a few messages when the shelter net control had trouble with a portable. just curious if anyone else had similar experiences their first time out, or things that caught you off guard