Karen Walker

haha yeah my first one i forgot the coax connector for the antenna so i literally had to hold the wire against the SO-239 with my thumb for like 20 minutes while i made contacts. not my finest moment. but yeah four contacts counts, a summit is a summit, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. the wind thing is real, i always bring an extra bungee or two now to keep the antenna from going completely sideways

so ive been licensed about 3 years now and mostly just done local stuff and some casual HF but i finally got bit by the DX bug pretty hard last month. worked a bunch of stuff during a big pileup weekend and started logging everything more carefully and then i looked at my log and realized i might already have like 40-something countries confirmed if i had been sending QSLs all along. kicking myself a little for not doing this sooner. anyway i have a few questions i cant quite figure out from the ARRL website. first — for DXCC do i need the QSL card in hand or can i use LoTW confirmations? i know LoTW is a thing but im not totally clear on whether its treated the same as a paper card for the award application. second question is about deleted entities — theres a few things in my log from like portable operations in weird places and im not sure if they count or not. third and this might be dumb but does WAS and DXCC use the same log or do i have to submit separately for each one. feel like im overcomplicating this but i want to make sure i do it right before i start aggressively chasing stuff.

so i passed my technician exam last saturday and the VE team said my info would get submitted to the FCC but ive been checking the ULS database every day and nothing yet. its been like 5 days. is this normal or did something go wrong with my application? also i keep hearing people talk about vanity calls and sequential calls and im not totally sure what the difference is. like will i automatically get a callsign assigned or do i have to pick one? my buddy who got his ticket a few years ago has a really short call and im wondering if i can get something like that too or if thats only for certain license classes sorry if this is a dumb question, just anxious to get on the air

dont overlook documentation. i know that sounds boring but having a laminated sheet with your call sign, your grid square, common local freqs, and even just basic ICS radio log format saved me so much fumbling around at an actual activation. also a physical copy of your ARES registration or whatever your served agency needs from you ID wise. also maybe a dumb thing to mention but -- spare mic. i blew a connector on mine at the worst possible time during a flood response a few years back and had to borrow somebody else's radio for like two hours while i sorted it out. just having a cheap backup hand mic bungeed in there would have fixed that whole situation.

okay so i just got my general last month and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly on 40m SSB and a bit of FT8. people keep asking me to confirm on LoTW and eQSL and also sending me paper QSL cards through the bureau and im honestly a bit overwhelmed trying to figure out how all this works together. like i get the basic concept, you confirm the contact happened so you can count it toward awards and stuff. but do i actually need to be on ALL of these? i signed up for LoTW already and uploaded a couple logs but havent done eQSL yet. and i have no idea how the bureau even works, do i need to go through my local club for that or what. one guy i worked sent me a card directly by mail which was really cool actually but i dont know if i need to send one back or how to even get cards made. sorry if this is a really basic question, just trying to figure out what the "normal" thing to do is i guess

been doing ARES stuff for about 12 years and the biggest thing i tell new folks is dont try to build the perfect kit all at once. you end up spending a lot of money and then realizing half the stuff doesnt work together or you packed things you'd never actually need in your actual served area. figure out what your local ARES or RACES group actually needs first. around here its almost all vhf/uhf packet and voice relay, so a go-kit thats heavy on hf capability isnt really what i need for local deployments. might be totally different where you are. your EC or the local group probably has some kind of standard or at least a recommendation. for power — and this is just my opinion — i'd rather have two smaller batteries than one huge one. if one goes bad you still have something, and its easier to manage charging. i use two 12ah lifepo4 packs and a small solar panel that fits in the lid of my bag for longer deployments. also: practice setting the whole thing up in your backyard before you actually need it. timed yourself once and realized i was taking 25 minutes to get on the air which is way too long. worked out the kinks and now i can be up in about 8.

dont overlook the RSP1A either if budget is tight, its basically the same thing with slightly different specs and usually cheaper used. i run one alongside a HackRF and honestly for everyday HF listening the SDRplay wins every time, the HackRF sits there mostly when i want to do something weird like replay captures or poke at stuff above a gig. one thing nobody mentions — get a decent preselector or at least an AM broadcast filter if you're near any high power AM stations, doesnt matter what SDR you buy if youre getting hammered by a 50kw station a few miles away

the K3 and 7300 combo is a bit of a mismatch for serious SO2R just fyi — not saying it wont work but the K3 is way ahead of the 7300 in terms of close-in dynamic range and youll notice it if theyre both running at the same time. might drive you crazy hearing your own harmonics bleed into the weaker radio. plenty of people run mismatched pairs though so dont let that stop you from experimenting. one thing nobody mentions enough is the operator side of SO2R. like the station engineering is one problem but actually managing two radios without losing your mind mid-run is a whole other skill. i ran my first SO2R attempt at field day a couple years ago and i basically just stared at two screens for 20 minutes before defaulting to one radio out of sheer confusion. it gets better with practice but there is definitely a learning curve and sweepstakes might be a tough first contest to try it given the exchange complexity.

yeah the part 97 wording is genuinely written in that government legal style that makes simple things sound way more complicated than they are. i remember being totally lost when i first got my ticket. one thing that helped me was just downloading the actual part 97 document and using ctrl+F to search for stuff rather than reading it cover to cover. also the technician privileges chart on the ARRL site is way more readable than the actual FCC text tbh. dont stress too much about third party stuff until you actually have a reason to deal with it

so ive been a General for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the Amateur Extra. like i use HF pretty regularly, mostly 40m and 20m, and honestly i dont really feel like im missing out on that much spectrum wise. but something keeps bugging me about just leaving it on the table you know? my main worry is the theory on the Extra exam. i remember the General being kind of rough in spots but i got through it. people keep telling me the Extra has stuff like filter design and impedance matching and oscillator theory that gets pretty deep. i took electronics in school like 15 years ago so i remember the basics but im honestly not sure how much of that is still in my head. is it realistic to study for this thing on my own without an electronics background? or do you kind of need to already understand the deeper theory to make sense of it? i dont want to just memorize answers without understanding anything but i also dont know if i have time to basically retake a college course

same tbh. havent touched my 857 in like 3 weeks. bands have been rough on 40 lately tho so maybe thats it

oh man i remember being exactly where you are like two years ago, baofeng and all. one thing that tripped me up for a while was that i had the offset direction wrong — the uv-5r sometimes defaults to plus offset and you have to manually flip it to minus. so double check that because if youre transmitting on the wrong side nobody on the repeater is gonna hear you no matter what you do with the tone. and honestly once you get it working dont stress too much about etiquette, just listen for a while and you'll get a feel for how people do things on that particular repeater. they all have their own little culture kind of. some are really chatty and informal, some are more structured. just give your callsign when you want to jump in and youll be fine.

I'm in the same boat pretty much, been licensed about a year. What I ended up doing is just uploading to LoTW and eQSL after every operating session and I dont really worry too much about paper cards unless someone sends me one first and then I try to send one back. Got a really nice one from a station in Japan last month which was cool. The LoTW upload from WSJT-X is actually pretty straightforward once you watch a youtube video on the TQSL setup, that helped me way more than reading the documentation.

the monitor hum is almost certainly a ground loop yeah, classic symptom. if you can borrow a hum eliminator or just try running the rig from a different outlet temporarily you'll probably hear it vanish. happened to me when i added a second screen to the shack desk, took me embarrassingly long to figure out what changed. on the broader audio thing — the PR-40 is a great mic but its a large diaphragm condenser-ish dynamic and it picks up room acoustics way more than something like a desk mic with a tighter pattern. in a concrete basement you might actually be getting some weird reflections that smear the clarity. try draping a moving blanket behind your operating position when you're testing, sounds dumb but it works. also worth running through the IC-7300's built in scope in monitor mode while you transmit and watch the ALC — if that thing is slamming hard on voice peaks your compression might be working against you even at low settings.

the ALC thing you're describing is real imo, not in your head. i noticed something similar on my 7300 around 29-30 MHz range after the mod. what i think is happening is the radio's protection circuitry gets a little more conservative when its operating in ranges it wasnt expecting to, kind of like it knows it shouldnt be there. total speculation on my part but it tracks with what i've seen. doesnt cause any actual problem in practice, at least not for me.

honest answer? for casual SSB on 40 and 20 you probably wont notice a huge difference in what you can do. the extra allocations are real but most of the action isnt exclusively in the extra-only segments anyway. that said i took mine about a year after getting my general and im glad i did, not because i suddenly had access to magic frequencies but because studying for it actually taught me stuff i use. the filter theory stuff makes you understand why your rig sounds the way it does, the antenna theory clicks better, propagation stuff starts making more sense. its not just a piece of paper but it is kinda front-loaded in that you get more out of the studying than the actual license sometimes the pool questions look scarier than they are. get hamStudy or the ARRL book and just grind through it over a few weeks. the math is mostly not that bad once you see the patterns

im gonna try to make it, my buddy has a table set up out there and hes selling off some of his old HF gear. not sure what all he's bringing but he mentioned a couple handhelds and maybe a older rig he cant remember the model of lol. ill probably just walk around and see whats there honestly

so last tuesday i finally worked up the nerve to check into our local 2m weekly net for the first time. ive been licensed for about four months now and just been listening forever but i figured id actually do it. and wow i was way more nervous than i expected to be, my voice was shaking a little when i gave my callsign. the net control guy was really patient but i did mess up a couple things. i forgot to say my name and location after my call (apparently thats just what you do around here?) and i also keyed up right when someone else was finishing and caused a double. felt bad about that. nobody was rude about it at all but i could tell i fumbled it. anyway i stuck around and listened to the whole net after that and it made way more sense the second time through. just wondering if there are any kind of unwritten rules i should know about before i try again next week. like how long do you wait after the last transmission before you key up, is there a standard pause people use or is it just feel

the rate meter thing is real and honestly it took me a long time to stop chasing it. what helped me was setting a threshold in my head — if i havent had a qso in like 90 seconds on the run frequency i start seriously evaluating whether to move. doesnt matter if the rate meter is still showing 60 from the last burst of callers, that number is backwards looking and its basically lying to you about right now. for the SO2R mental load thing, the way i think about it is radio 1 is always the run radio and radio 2 is never allowed to just sit idle. even if im in a good run on 20, radio 2 should be slowly scanning 15 or 10 looking for a new opening. you dont have to actually work anything, just keep ears on it. when you hear the noise floor drop and signals start popping up you already know before the cluster tells you. that lead time is worth a lot of rate. wintest SO2R interlocking can be a bit finicky depending on your interface but you probably already know that. the main thing i had to accept is that perfect SO2R takes like two or three major contests before it stops feeling like youre patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time.

yeah i'd just swap to LMR-400 anyway if you're going back up on the roof. the price difference for 40 feet isnt that much and you'll never think about coax loss again on either band. also double check that the antenna feedpoint connection is clean, those diamond whips sometimes have a little corrosion creep in if theyve been up more than a year or two especially if you're near salt air or anything like that. 70cm is pretty unforgiving compared to 2m with any lossy stuff in the chain.

so ive been meaning to do this for probably two years now and just never got around to it. last month we had a pretty bad storm come through and the power was out for almost four days and i just kept thinking man i really need to get my act together here. im a general class, been licensed about three years, mostly do local repeater stuff and a little HF when the mood strikes. anyway i finally started building out a proper go-kit. right now ive got my FT-891 with a separation cable so the head can mount up front, a 40ah lifepo4 battery from bioenno, and a little anderson powerpole distribution block. i grabbed one of those harbor freight pelican knockoff cases to put it all in. also threw in a roll of RG-8X and a end fed half wave for 40 and 20. but here than the radio stuff i feel like im probably forgetting something obvious. like the non-radio parts. logbooks, pens, that kind of stuff. does anyone have a list or just general advice from actually deploying this stuff? i want this to be something i can actually grab and go if the county ARES group calls, not just a box that sits in my closet looking organized.

its definitely real but your clubmate isnt totally wrong either. the FCC enforcement bureau is pretty thinly staffed and they tend to go after the egregious stuff first — like people running illegal power, pirates, intentional interference, that kind of thing. an accidental out-of-band transmission because you forgot where your privileges end is not gonna get you a knock on the door. that said i wouldnt use that as an excuse to get sloppy. the NALs (notice of apparent liability) that do get issued are usually for repeated willful violations or stuff thats causing actual problems for other operators or services. if you're genuinely trying to stay legal and you slip up occasionally you're probably fine. but i've seen people get formal warnings for things like not IDing properly or running more than the legal limit, so it does happen. just know your band edges and you'll be alright.

the pattern listening thing you mentioned is real, some ops are creatures of habit. i chased VP6D back when that was active and after about 20 minutes i noticed the op was consistently working up the band in maybe 2-3 kHz chunks before jumping back down. once i figured that out i just waited for him to get close to where i was parked and got through pretty quick. felt like cheating almost lol. one thing i'd add for low power guys specifically — 40m at the right time of day can be surprisingly good for breaking pileups compared to 20m. 20m pileups are just absolute chaos, everyone and their brother is on there. sometimes the same station is much more workable on 40 in the evenings with a smaller crowd even if the path isnt quite as strong.

oh man yeah the 13wpm wall is absolutely real, i hit the exact same thing and it lasted way longer than i wanted to admit. what worked for me was honestly just forcing myself to stop writing anything down for a while. like i mean it, put the pencil away completely. you can't copy what you cant get anyway so you end up training yourself to just let stuff go and keep listening rather than freezing on one word and missing the next three. also the farnsworth thing — i'd say keep your character speed where it is or even bump it to 25, but slowly creep the effective speed up maybe half a wpm every few days rather than jumping it. the goal is to get your brain associating the sound with the word or meaning, not the individual dits and dahs. once that clicks it really does click. took me probably three months of daily practice to get comfortable at 20 and i still have bad days. just dont give up, it comes.

so ive been at this CW thing for about 4 months now and im kind of stuck around 10-12 wpm and honestly starting to wonder if im doing something wrong or if its just supposed to take this long. when i first started with the Koch method it felt like good progress but now its like hitting a wall every time i try to push past 12. my current routine is just running the G4FON trainer for about 20-30 minutes a day, copying random characters to a text file. i dont do much on air yet because honestly im embarrassed to call CQ when im this slow, feels like id be wasting everybodys time. anyway just curious how long it took other people to get from beginner speeds up to like 20wpm where you can actually have a real qso without the other station having to wait forever for you