John Patterson

congrats on getting out there, honestly the first one is always kind of a mess and thats fine. for the QSO question -- the general guidance ive seen is that as long as YOU logged them with their callsign and gave your call at some point during the exchange, it should count. if you're really unsure about that one contact just log the 3 you're confident about, 4 is the minimum but if you only have 3 solid ones just... maybe try again. the summit will still be there and now you know the trail. for antenna deployment solo, i switched to using a small fishing pole style mast, i use a 6m telescoping fiberglass one that collapses down pretty small. i can have an EFHW up in like 5 minutes now. way better than fighting tree branches especially when weather is coming in. also pre-marking your antenna with colored tape at the feedpoint so you're not fumbling in the wind trying to figure out which end is which sounds dumb but it's saved me so much time

so ive been doing more portable VHF work lately, mostly 2m but dabbling in 70cm, and ive been going back and forth on whether to bring a yagi or just stick with a decent collinear for hilltop activations. right now im using a diamond x50 on a painters pole which works fine for general ragchew but when im trying to hit repeaters 60-70 miles out or work some weak signal stuff the gain just isnt really there. i built a cheap jpole out of 450 ohm ladder line a while back and that was actually pretty decent but im wondering if a 5 or 6 element yagi would be worth the hassle of aiming it. the thing is i dont always know exactly where the other station is especially if its a random contact so a collinear feels safer. but then again on a hilltop with low noise floor the extra gain from a yagi would probably be huge. anyone switching between the two depending on what theyre doing or do you just commit to one and work with the limitations? also curious if anyone has experience with the m2 or cushcraft yagis vs homebrew for portable use, weight and windload are factors for me

so ive been a ham for about three years now and just got involved with my local ARES group and they keep talking about go-kits and being ready to deploy and honestly i feel a little behind because everyone else seems to have these really elaborate setups and i just have my HT and a mag mount on my car i started looking online and theres so much stuff out there, pelican cases and battery systems and all kinds of antennas and i dont really know what the baseline expectation is. like is there a standard for what you're supposed to have or is it just whatever works for your situation my main question is basically what do you actually NEED versus what is nice to have. i dont want to spend a ton of money on gear that just sits in a box but i also dont want to show up to an activation and be the guy with no power backup or whatever. any advice from people who have actually deployed would be really helpful

VARA FM and packet definitely don't play well together on the same channel. I run mine on separate frequencies - 145.010 for packet and 145.030 for VARA FM. Much cleaner operation and users can actually complete sessions without getting stepped on.

yeah i had the same confusion when i upgraded. the band plan stuff took me a while to figure out honestly. one thing i'll add is that 7.200 to 7.300 is also where a lot of the DX comes in from outside the US, stations in other regions have different allocations and sometimes that creates a mess around certain freqencies. like around 7.200 you'll sometimes hear europeans who are operating in their own legal allocation but it overlaps with where US generals can be. not really something you can do anything about just kind of interesting to know anyway dont stress too much about it, just listen before you transmit and if the band plan says that chunk is supposed to be ssb then stick to ssb. you'll figure out the unwritten rules pretty quick just from operating

so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now and finally decided to just go for the technician exam. problem is i dont really know how to study for it. i downloaded some app but theres like 400+ questions in the pool and i have no idea if i should just memorize all of them or actually try to understand the material or what. a friend told me just hammer the question pool and youll be fine but that seems like cheating somehow? also some of the electrical theory stuff is going way over my head, like i have no idea what reactance is or why it matters. does everyone struggle with this at first or am i missing something obvious

Yes, mag mounts definitely work better on UHF - the shorter wavelength makes the capacitive coupling more effective. On 2M I always see higher SWR with magnets versus through-hole mounts. A 5/8 wave at 150 MHz needs a 42-inch ground plane diameter, but at 800 MHz only 8 inches is adequate.

As long as the actual RF transmission follows amateur regulations and you identify properly, the control method shouldn't matter. We use computers for digital modes - this is just extending that concept.

so ive been running a mag mount Diamond on the roof of my F-150 for about two years now and honestly its been fine but i keep reading that a proper NMO mount is way better and i should just bite the bullet and drill. the antenna is a whip for 2m/70cm dual band, nothing fancy, mainly for hitting local repeaters and some simplex when im out in the hills. thing is im a little nervous about drilling into the roof, i know its not a hard job but this truck is only 3 years old and the idea of putting a hole in it makes me hesitant. ive seen the lip mounts that go under the door frame or trunk lip and wondered if those are a decent middle ground or if theyre just kind of a compromise that nobody actually likes. if anyone has done the NMO install on a modern pickup id be curious how it went and whether you really notice a difference on receive. the mag mount does occasionally shift when i go through a car wash which is mildly annoying but not a dealbreaker

Field Day with your club is absolutely the right call for your first experience, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. the whole point of Field Day is kind of organized chaos and most clubs have people specifically watching out for newer operators who want to get on the mic. you can log for someone else for a while just to watch how it flows before you ever transmit a thing. CQ WW is incredible but jumping into that solo as a new general with 8 months under your belt... you'll have fun but it might also just be frustrating trying to get anyone to hear you depending on your setup. SOTA is a totally different animal by the way. its not really a contest in the traditional sense, more like a personal challenge slash award program. activators go to summits and make a minimum of 4 contacts to "activate" the peak, and chasers on the ground try to work as many activators as they can. the pace is way more relaxed and people on the chasers side are genuinely happy to work you because they want the points too. its a great entry point honestly. SOTAwatch and the reflector are good places to start reading up on it.

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while and figured id just ask. my house is kind of in a shallow valley, not terrible but there's a ridge to the northeast that blocks a couple repeaters i actually want to use. right now im running a diamond x50 on a j-pole mount about 15 feet up on the side of the house and i can hit the closer repeaters fine but the ones on the ridge are marginal at best, scratchy audio and sometimes just drop out mid-conversation. someone suggested i just put up a small yagi pointed at the ridge but i dont really want to give up the omni coverage if i can help it, i like being able to hit repeaters in multiple directions without thinking about it. is there any kind of compromise here or am i just going to have to pick one and live with it. i was also wondering if getting the collinear higher would even help in this situation or if the ridge is just physically blocking the path regardless of height

yeah this sounds really familiar honestly. we had almost the exact same issue come up during a simulated earthquake scenario we ran two winters ago — the ICS forms thing especially. what ended up helping us was doing a dedicated traffic handling night at our regular club meeting, just passing practice messages back and forth on a local repeater for like an hour. nothing fancy but people got more comfortable with the format without the pressure of a full drill on top of it. the frequency mix-up thing is a real problem and i dont think theres a perfect solution. we now hand out a laminated card with the primary, secondary and tertiary freqs plus the simplex fallback and we ask people to put it in their go bag. some still show up with outdated ones but its better than it was. also the assumption problem — man that one is hard to fix. we started doing a short verbal briefing right before exercises start just to make sure everyone at least heard the same thing at the same time even if the written plan wasnt read. helps a little.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and honestly its great for racking up contacts and getting grid squares but lately its been feeling kind of hollow you know, like youre just exchanging signal reports with a robot. heard about JS8Call from a guy at the club meeting last month and started poking around with it this week. the basic idea makes sense to me — its built on the same weak signal foundation as FT8 so you get a lot of that noise floor magic but the messages are freeform text so you can actually talk to someone. the tradeoff is obviously the speed and i guess bandwidth in a way. JS8Call messages take longer and you lose some of that extreme sensitivity that makes FT8 so stupid good at pulling signals out of nowhere. im running a G90 into a random wire up about 25 feet with a 9:1 unun, so not a great antenna situation, and i was curious if people have had luck with JS8Call when the signals are marginal. like does the extra symbol time actually help enough on a compromise antenna setup or am i going to be frustrated watching half my messages fail to decode. also is there still an active userbase on JS8Call or did everyone just go back to FT8 after the novelty wore off. seems like every digital mode eventually loses people to FT8. not trying to abandon FT8 entirely just wondering if JS8Call fills a different niche or if its kind of redundant

i took mine like 6 weeks after getting my tech and passed first try, the practice tests on hamStudy really do prepare you pretty well. the part about operating priveledges and band plans tripped me up a little because theres a lot of overlap to keep track of but just make sure you know which portions of HF bands general gets vs extra and youll be okay for those questions. once you get it you'll want a radio immediately lol, 40m at night is something else

oh man i remember this exact feeling, i was stuck around 12-13 for probably six months and it was super frustrating. what finally helped me was two things — first, i stopped trying to write everything down. once you start copying on paper your brain is doing two things at once and it really slows you down at higher speeds. try just listening and letting it go if you miss something, your brain will start to fill in gaps way better than you think. second thing, and this one sounds counterintuitive, is to spend time listening to stuff thats WAY faster than you can copy. like put on 25 or 30wpm and just let it wash over you for 20 minutes. you wont copy any of it but your ear starts to get used to the rhythm and the way letters clump together. i think its called shadowing or something like that. after a few weeks of mixing that in with my normal practice i broke through pretty quick. also just get on the air, even if its scary, because real qsos do something for you that software practice cant

this is actually really helpful to read because im pretty new and still trying to understand how all the solar stuff connects to what i actually hear on the radio. like i know higher flux number good, high k-index bad, but i dont really have a feel for it yet in practice. what app or website do you guys use to check those numbers in real time? ive been using spaceweather.com but not sure if thats the best one for ham stuff specifically

Got my Technician license two weeks ago and bought a Baofeng UV-5R to get started. Been listening to the local repeater for hours but I'm terrified to key up. Every time I hear someone call CQ, I freeze up and can't bring myself to respond. Worried I'll mess up the phonetics or forget my call sign or something embarrassing. Does everyone go through this mic fright? Any tips for a brand new ham who's scared to make that first contact?

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into the local 2m net last night, been licensed for about 3 months now and have mostly just been listening. the net control called for check-ins and i keyed up and gave my callsign but then wasnt sure what to do next. like do i just wait? do i say anything else? i think i said my callsign twice and then just kind of dropped off which felt awkward. net control acknowledged me which was great but then there was this whole procedure for passing traffic that i had no clue about. nobody got mad or anything but i definitely felt like i was the only one who didnt know what was going on. is there like a standard way nets work that i should know before i try again? also i wasnt sure when it was okay to just jump in vs waiting to be called on

so ive been chasing DX pretty seriously for the last couple years and i keep seeing the same bad habits in pileups over and over, including from myself when i first started. figured id share some things that have actually worked for me and maybe get some input from guys who do this more than i do. the biggest thing i had to unlearn was calling constantly. i used to just hammer away every cycle like that was somehow going to help. all it does is stomp on the guy who the DX station is actually trying to pull out. now i listen first, figure out the split properly, watch where he's actually coming back — not just where he says he's listening — and then time my calls. one solid call at the right moment beats twenty calls scattered everywhere. on SSB i've had way better results keeping my call short. just the suffix, or sometimes just my callsign once, clearly. i hear people sending their call four times in a row and it just sounds like mush to the DX op. on CW same thing, once or maybe twice if conditions are rough, but if you're QRP or running modest power you need to pick your moment even more carefully. also the whole working split thing — if you're not listening UP before you transmit you're probably going to call on the DX frequency or the wrong part of the spread and the locals are going to hate you. i've definitely done this. embarrassing. anyone have techniques that work specifically for LP or when you're at a geographic disadvantage? im in the midwest so sometimes the guys on the coasts have a real edge on certain paths and i'm trying to figure out if there's anything to be done besides just waiting for better propagation windows.

honestly 12 up should be fine for this, ive run remotehams over way worse connections. one thing i dont see you mention is where the bottleneck actually is - have you checked the ping time and jitter between the two endpoints specifically, not just a general speedtest. i use mtr for that. also if your shack is on a residential ISP some of them throttle or deprioritize certain port ranges which can mess with the realtime audio even when raw bandwidth looks ok. the internet linking side of things is really sensitive to jitter, like way more than bandwidth.

General gets you 160, 30, 17, and 12 meters - these HF bands support worldwide contacts during favorable propagation. The big win is 20m during the day and 40m/80m at night. 10m is great when it's open, but 20m is your workhorse band for consistent DX. The power increase matters more than you'd think for weak signal work.

you can absolutely work EME with what you have, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. 500w and a 15 el yagi is genuinely enough to get on the scoreboard with JT65B, people have done it with less. the mode basically brought EME down to the level of a halfway decent 2m station. you wont be breaking any records but you'll make contacts. the elevation rotor thing is real though. technically you can do what's called horizon-to-horizon tracking but you're really limiting your windows, maybe 20-30 minutes of usable time when the moon is crossing at low elevations. for serious operation you want full az/el. G-5500 combo is the goto for a lot of guys at this level, nothing fancy but it works. pair it with something like Orbitron or MacDoppler for tracking and youre basically set on that side. biggest thing people underestimate is the preamp. a good low noise preamp at the feedpoint makes more difference than you'd expect, something with a noise figure under 0.5dB. down to 0.3 isnt hard to find these days. that matters a lot more on receive than squeezing another 50 watts out of your amp.

JS8Call clicked for me once i stopped thinking of it like FT8 and more like a slow text message app for HF. theres a relay/store-forward thing it can do where messages kind of hop through other stations which is pretty wild when it actually works. not something youre going to use for a casual ragchew but for like passing a message when conditions are terrible its a different beast than anything else out there. the learning curve is real though, the interface is a bit clunky and figuring out the addressing took me a while. your 7300 and a dipole is more than enough for any of this stuff btw, i work JS8 with way less and it does fine.

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and keep telling myself ill get a proper go-kit together and just... never do it. then we had a pretty bad storm roll through last month and our local ARES group got activated and i showed up with basically my HT and a half charged power bank and felt like a complete idiot standing next to guys with these organized pelican cases and everything. so im actually doing it this time. ive got an FT-857D which i figured would be good since it does HF/VHF/UHF all in one, and i have a decent LiFePO4 battery from a previous project thats like 30Ah. what i dont really know is how to think about the whole thing — like how long should i be planning to run for without recharging, what antennas make sense to have ready to go, do people typically pre-program everything or rely on their memory in the field. any advice from people who have actually deployed would be really helpful. im not even sure if i should get a second radio for redundancy or just focus on making the one kit really solid first.

yeah what he said about the telnet cluster is right, N1MM and Log4OM and most of the logging programs have that built in and once you set it up it's actually not that complicated, just takes like 20 minutes the first time. but honestly for just browsing and seeing whats on the bands the websites are totally fine and thats what i use when im just sitting at the desk deciding if i even want to get on the air. one thing nobody mentions — the spots are only as good as the people posting them. you'll see busted callsigns and wrong frequencies sometimes especially during pile ups when everyone's in a rush. always listen before you transmit even if a spot says someone is on a certain freq, sometimes it's stale by 10-15 minutes and they've already moved or the pile up is long gone. learned that the embarassing way a few times