Diploe Dan

so ive been messing around with an arduino mega for the past few weeks trying to get it to control my 4-port coax switch automatically based on what band the radio is on. the idea is to pull the band data off the CI-V bus from my IC-7300 and then have the arduino decode that and fire the right relay. in theory its pretty simple but im running into some weirdness with the serial parsing and im not sure if its a timing issue or if im just reading the CI-V packets wrong. the relay board im using is one of those cheap 8-channel ones from amazon, 5v coils, and it seems to work fine when i just hardcode which relay to trigger. the issue is specifically with the CI-V reading part. ive got it pulling data over a MAX3232 level shifter but every so often it seems to drop bytes and then the band decode goes completely wrong and it tries to switch to the wrong antenna. anyone done something similar? or honestly any CI-V over arduino project would be helpful to look at. ive been at this for like 3 weekends and its starting to get frustrating. also wondering if a raspberry pi would have been a better choice for this kind of thing but i feel like the arduino should be able to handle it, its not that complicated

so ive been at this for about four months now and im kind of stuck. started learning CW back in the spring mostly because i wanted to get on 40m during the evening and it just seemed like the thing to do. got up to about 5wpm pretty quick using the koch method with the G4FON trainer but now im just... stalled. im at maybe 8-9wpm on a good day and it feels like the gap between where i am and actually being able to ragchew at 20 is just enormous. i know the usual advice is just keep at it, practice every day, dont count dits and dahs, etc. and im doing all that. been listening to W1AW code practice bulletins in the morning which helps a little. just wondering if anyone who went through this can tell me roughly how long it took them to go from beginner to actually comfortable on air. like was there a moment where it clicked or did it just slowly get easier. i feel like im missing something

the nervous feeling is completely normal and honestly a good sign that you're taking it seriously. ive seen people show up to activations totally overconfident and those are usually the ones who freeze or go off procedure. the folks who are a little anxious tend to listen better and follow net discipline which is honestly most of what the job is anyway. one thing nobody told me before my first activation was to eat something before you go and bring water and snacks because you might be out there longer than you think and it's really hard to copy traffic when your blood sugar is tanking. super unglamorous advice but seriously. good luck this weekend, sounds like your EC has set you up well.

i went through this same thing about a year ago. the fee thing caught me off guard too, i think i paid like 35 bucks when i applied. the AE7Q website that the other guy mentioned is seriously the best resource, it'll tell you the exact date a callsign enters the sequential pool or becomes available for vanity apps which is super helpful so you know when to actually submit. one thing i'll add — dont get too attached to one specific call because if somebody else applies in the same window its basically a coin flip. i applied for two different calls at the same time just to hedge my bets and ended up getting my second choice which i actually like just as much now. the whole thing took maybe two or three weeks from application to the new call showing up in ULS for me

the mult vs rate tradeoff is something i argued about with my club guys for years and honestly i dont think there's one answer, it depends so much on where you are in the contest. early on id say chase the mult almost always, especially if its one of those that wont show up again — a rare DXCC on 10m at the start of CQWW when the band is open, you go get it even if you break a decent run. late in the contest when youve already worked most of the mults and youre just grinding rate, i get a lot more reluctant to stop a good run for a single point mult. the thing that actually helped me most wasnt a rule of thumb, it was logging software mult alerts with band-specific tracking. when i can see that a mult only shows up once on 40 every 2 hours in my history, that changes my calculus. N1MM+ has tools for this if you dig into it. and yeah for state QSO parties i mostly single radio it, the SO2R overhead genuinely doesnt pencil out unless the exchange is fast and the rate gets high enough to justify managing two pileups.

I went to one of these a few years back before I even had my ticket, kind of what got me interested honestly. Haven't been back since I got licensed but maybe this is the year. Do they usually have stuff for newer guys or is it mostly old timers selling boat anchors lol

i use MacDoppler on mac, works fine but its not free. if youre on windows or linux gpredict is probably the better call anyway. one thing that helped me a ton was just recording a few passes with audacity first before actually trying to make contacts, that way you can hear how fast the doppler shifts and kind of internalize it before youre also trying to key up and talk to someone

congrats on the first one, it kind of hooks you doesnt it. to answer your questions: yes QSOs with other activators count the same as hunters for your 10 contact minimum, no difference there. and yeah the park HAS to be in the POTA reference database, you cant just activate any green space. the list is on the POTA website under the references section and they do add new parks periodically so its worth checking. county parks can definitely be in there but some smaller ones arent. if the park youre thinking of isnt listed there used to be a way to request additions but i think the process changed, you'd have to look at the current guidelines on the site. also for the phone spotting situation -- a lot of activators use a small tablet or just a dedicated old smartphone that stays on the spots page. some guys set up the spot before they even start calling CQ so they dont have to fumble with it mid-operation. once you get a few under your belt it all gets easier, the first one is always a bit chaotic

so ive been running a mag mount dual bander on my truck for about two years now and honestly its fine but i keep reading that NMO is the way to go if you actually care about performance. my issue is im a little nervous about drilling into the roof of a relatively new truck, its a 2021 f150 and i dont want to make a mess of it or have water getting in later. the mag mount sits on the roof right now and i get into the local repeaters fine, occasionally have issues on the 70cm side when im further out but i dont know if thats the antenna, the radio, or just the repeater being finicky. someone at the club told me the ground plane on a mag mount is never as good as a proper NMO through the roof and that explains the UHF dropouts. makes sense to me in theory but i havent actually measured anything. has anyone gone through the drilling process on a newer truck and regretted it or is it basically a non issue if you do it right? also wondering if a lip mount on the door or trunk edge would be a reasonable middle ground or if those things introduce their own problems with the antenna being off center and all that.

jump into cq ww, seriously. i remember being terrified my first time and just kind of tuning around for an hour before finally calling somebody. worst that happens is nobody comes back to you and you try again. the attic dipole might limit you a bit on 40 and 80 but 20 meters should be hopping that weekend and youll find stations. just have your logging software ready to go, n1mm is free and works great, and look up your cq zone beforehand so you dont have to think about it mid-qso.

so i heard through the club email list that theres a hamfest up in Millbrook on saturday, the one the Tri-County ARC puts on every year. ive never gone to this one before, always end up missing it for one reason or another. anybody been to it recently, is it worth the drive? im about 90 minutes out and not sure if the swap tables are any good or if its mostly just a flea market with a couple of radios thrown in. looking to maybe find a decent HF rig or at least some coax and connectors cheap

so ive been running my IC-7300 for about two years now and always kind of lived with the stock oscillator drift issue, especially on digital modes like FT8 where you really notice it after the rig warms up. been reading about the TCXO-15 upgrade for a while and finally pulled the trigger last month. installation was pretty straightforward honestly, took maybe 45 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself before touching anything. the board layout is pretty accessible once you get the top cover off and you can see exactly where it drops in. no soldering required which is nice. the difference on JS8Call and WSPR is noticeable to me — drift on WSPR went from like +-2 or 3 Hz over a 2 minute transmission down to basically nothing. but my buddy who hasnt done the mod keeps saying his stock radio does fine and i'm overthinking it. maybe i had a particularly bad unit to start with? curious if others have done this and actually measured before and after rather than just going by feel

the Baofeng menu thing is real, i spent like an hour on mine before i figured out the T-CTCS vs R-CTCS difference lol. one thing that helped me was just downloading CHIRP and programming it from the computer, way easier to see everything laid out. you can double check that the tone is set on the transmit side that way. also dont stress too much about repeater etiquette at first — most people are pretty forgiving with new hams. just leave a little pause before you respond to someone so you dont step on them, and if youre not sure if the repeater is in use just listen for a minute before keying up. some clubs also have a specific courtesy tone that plays after someone finishes transmitting so you know its safe to go.

so ive been messing around with remote station stuff for about 6 months now and i finally got a pretty stable setup going with a raspberry pi and some VPN tunneling but its a pain to maintain honestly. a buddy at the club mentioned RemoteHams and specifically the RCForb software and i looked into it a bit but im not totally clear on how the SDR integration actually works in practice. like i get the basic concept — you run the server software at your station, clients connect over the internet, rig control goes through CAT or whatever, and audio is streamed back and forth. thats pretty standard stuff. but what i cant figure out is whether the SDR remote piece is a separate thing or if its baked into the same client. and does it work with like an RTL-SDR or are we talking more serious hardware like an Airspy or RSP1A type thing. also curious if anyone has used this for linking purposes — ive got a local repeater that occasionally does some internet linking through Echolink but im wondering if a proper SDR remote setup would be a better approach for monitoring purposes. not trying to replace the repeater linking just kind of thinking out loud about using a wideband SDR remotely to keep an eye on a few frequencies at once. anyway if anyones actually running RemoteHams day to day id love to hear how reliable it actually is over a typical home ISP connection, the latency thing is what worries me most for CW ops

so i finally decided to actually sit down and do a real contest this year instead of just listening to all the pile-ups and wondering what's going on. picked CQ WW SSB because it falls on a weekend i have off and my antenna situation is decent enough i think — got a dipole up about 30 feet for 40m and a vertical for 20/15 that i threw together last spring. my main question is just... where do you even start? like do i just pick a frequency and start calling CQ or do i tune around and answer other peoples calls? ive heard people talk about running vs SandP but honestly i dont fully understand when you'd do one vs the other. also how does the exchange work exactly, i know its signal report and zone but im not sure how to figure out my own zone number. any advice welcome, even the basic stuff. i know its probably obvious to most of you but i've been licensed about 8 months and this would be my first real contest attempt