Repeater King

i have the 7300 and love it but fair warning the real rabbit hole starts when you hook it up to a computer and start running FT8 or JS8Call through the USB connection. the built in soundcard interface makes it almost too easy and then suddenly its 2am and youre working japan on 40m and wondering where the evening went. just saying.

yeah ive done almost exactly this, took me a few weekends but it works really well now. i used an arduino mega just because i had one sitting in a drawer but an uno would probably be fine. the hunting problem is real and annoying — what worked for me was adding a small deadband, like i just ignore any error less than 2 or 3 degrees and that stops it from constantly twitching. you dont need a full PID for something this slow moving honestly, a simple proportional control with that deadband is usually good enough unless your bearings need to be super precise for like EME or something. on the RPi question, i actually ended up running both — arduino does the low level motor stuff and pot reading, then it talks over USB serial to a pi zero that runs rotctld. that way the timing sensitive stuff stays on the microcontroller and the pi handles all the network stuff and integrates with gpredict. works great for satellite tracking. the pi zero is cheap enough that it wasnt really a hard decision

yeah SOTA is definitely not contesting in the traditional sense, i do a lot of activations and some days i'm just chatting with maybe 5 or 6 chasers for 20 minutes and then hiking back down. the points thing keeps it interesting though and there's actually a decent pile-up culture when a rare summit gets activated so it's not totally without excitement lol for actual contesting though id say just jump in. worst that happens is someone asks you to repeat yourself a couple times, people were all beginners once. the fall contest season is coming up so you'll have plenty of chances

so ive been running N1MM for contests for probably 4 or 5 years now and honestly its fine, does what it needs to do, but ive been messing around with Log4OM for general shack logging and i actually really like it for day to day stuff — the QSL management and the way it handles LoTW sync is way cleaner than anything ive tried before my problem is WSJT-X integration. right now i have WSJT-X talking to Log4OM no problem for FT8 and FT4 and that all works, but when i fire up N1MM for a contest weekend the whole UDP port situation turns into a mess. i think i had it set up at some point where both were kinda-sorta getting the log data but i honestly dont remember what i did and now its just not working right so the question is — does anyone actually run both N1MM and Log4OM simultaneously and have WSJT-X piping into both or do you just pick one and deal with it during contest weekends. also wondering if anyone has fully switched to Log4OM for contesting or if thats kind of a dead end, i know it has contest modes but i've heard mixed things

omg yes i noticed this too and i had no idea what was going on at first. i'm pretty new and i kept hearing all these stations speaking spanish and portuguese and i thought my radio was broken or something lol. ended up making my first ever DX contact into argentina which i know isnt that exotic but for me it was huge. 10m is now my favorite band honestly

so i finally got around to building a simple 40m dipole out of some 14 gauge stranded wire i had laying around the garage. used the 468/f formula, cut each leg to about 33.4 feet, fed it with some RG-8X i had left over from a previous project. center insulator is just a piece of PVC i drilled two holes through, nothing fancy. hung it as an inverted V off a 25 foot mast in the backyard, legs going out at maybe 120 degrees or so. hooked up my NanoVNA and the resonance is coming in around 7.4 MHz instead of down closer to 7.150 or wherever i was aiming. so either i cut it short or the velocity factor on this coax is messing with something or my NanoVNA is off. antenna is maybe 8 feet off the ground at the ends if that matters. been scratching my head on this for a couple days now. anyone dealt with this before? do i just add a bit of wire to each leg and retrim or is there something else going on here

dont sleep on just getting a good upconverter for the RTL-SDR before spending more money — i ran an Ham It Up for like 6 months and it actually helped a lot on HF. but yeah if you already tried direct sampling and youre not happy then the RSP1A is probably the right move, the HackRF for receive-only use is kind of silly unless you specifically need to go above 6 GHz or whatever it tops out at.

omg yes 10m I was just telling my husband about this, I called CQ on a whim on like 28.450 and got a pileup?? I'm a tech with HF privileges on 10 only and I was so not prepared for that. ended up in my log like 22 contacts in an hour which is more than I've done in my entire time being licensed honestly. really makes me want to study for general so I can get on the other bands when conditions are like this.

so ive been doing POTA for a while now and someone at the club meeting mentioned WWFF and i looked it up and honestly im a bit confused about how it all works. like i understand you go to a nature area and make contacts but is it the same as POTA or is there a separate log you have to submit somewhere else? and do the parks overlap, like if im at a state park that has a POTA reference does it also have a WWFF reference or are they totally different? also i saw something about needing 44 contacts to qualify an activation which seems like a lot compared to POTA. is that right? i dont want to drive an hour into the woods and come home with nothing to show for it. any tips from people who have actually done this would be really helpful, im still pretty new to portable operating in general

so ive been studying for about 3 weeks now and my exam is scheduled for next saturday. mostly been using hamstudy.org and going through the question pool over and over but i still feel like im not totally confident on some of the electrical stuff, like the math formulas and ohms law type questions. i understand the concepts mostly but when they put it in a question format it throws me off sometimes. also not really sure what to expect at the actual exam session, like do i need to bring anything specific? i looked it up and saw something about 2 forms of ID but one post said something different so now im not sure. and is it multiple choice the whole way through or are there other kinds of questions mixed in anyway if anyone has tips that would be great, especially for the electrical stuff since thats where i keep getting tripped up on the practice tests

congrats on the first one, 7 contacts on your first activation is actually pretty solid. i remember my first, barely made 4 and one of those was my buddy who i texted from the summit lol. the fumbling around thing gets better fast — i think after like 3 or 4 activations you kind of develop a muscle memory for how you set up and it just clicks into place quicker. one thing that helped me a lot was pre-rigging as much as possible before i even leave the car. like i'll have the antenna already attached to the feedline and the feedline already connected to the radio if i can manage it. obviously depends on how you're carrying everything but even small things like having your throw line already on the bag instead of stuffed at the bottom saves you fumbling around at the top when your hands might be cold. also dont underestimate sotawatch alerts — if you post an alert the day before with a rough time, chasers will literally be waiting for you. made a huge difference for me, went from struggling to get 4 contacts to having a mini pileup on the first call sometimes. the community is super active about chasing, especially if you're on a summit that doesn't get activated much.