Contest Joe

Koch method is honestly the way to go, dont let anyone talk you into learning it slow. the whole point of starting at like 20wpm character speed with farnsworth spacing is that your brain learns the sounds as whole characters instead of counting dots and dashes. if you learn it slow you end up having to relearn it later when you want to actually copy at a real speed, i watched a friend go through exactly that and it cost him months. i used the LCWO website, its free and its basically designed around Koch. you just start with K and M and add a new character every time you hit 90% on a session. it sounds painfully slow at first because youre only working with 2 letters but just trust the process. i went from nothing to being able to hold a basic exchange in about 4 months, maybe 15-20 minutes of practice a day. the key thing nobody tells you is that you cant cram it. 15 minutes daily beats 2 hours on a saturday by a mile, your brain needs sleep to consolidate it or whatever. also once you get enough characters under your belt, start listening to actual qso recordings even if you cant copy all of it yet. just having it in your ears helps a lot more than i expected.

that sounds like a solid start honestly, way more thought out than my first kit which was basically a HT and a phone charger in a grocery bag lol. a few things i'd suggest from experience running ARES deployments — yes keep an HT in there, even a cheap baofeng is fine, because when you're coordinating locally and your main rig is tied up on a net or something it's really handy to just have something you can hand off or use for simplex without messing with your setup. on the power question i usually run 50w as kind of a default unless conditions are bad or the served agency needs better coverage. 100w will eat your 40ah faster than you think especially if youre transmitting a lot. do a rough duty cycle calculation for your expected usage and youll get a sense of how long it'll hold up. i usually throw a small solar panel in the car too just in case things go long. paper copy of license, yeah i keep one. also a copy of my ARES membership card and a basic ICS form or two. during a real event the last thing you want is to be digging through your phone to prove who you are to some incident commander who's never met you. oh and a sharpie. always a sharpie.

oh man i remember my first activation, i also forgot to self spot and just sat there wondering why nobody was calling me lol. took me like 45 minutes to figure out the app. the spotting thing makes a huge difference, like night and day. once i spotted myself i went from nothing to a pileup in maybe 3 minutes. 40m was definitely my bread and butter for a long time too, 20m can be hit or miss depending on conditions and time of day. if you go out around mid morning local time 20m usually opens up pretty well. also if your park happens to be a two-fer or more, like multiple park references overlap, make sure you log it under all of them, some parks are actually inside other parks and hunters really love those

If you read my post from last month about my first month of learning CW, you know I was pretty frustrated. I was drilling away with the Koch method using the trainer software every single morning before work, usually 15 or 20 minutes, sometimes longer on weekends. I was stuck around 10 words per minute and the characters just weren't sticking the way I wanted them to. I'd hear a V and think "dit dit dit dah" and by the time I'd consciously worked through that in my head, I'd already missed the next two characters. It was exhausting. My Elmer, a guy I met at our local club's license exam session back when I was studying for my General, kept telling me to stop trying to decode the dits and dahs and just let my brain hear the whole character as a sound. He said it the same way every time we talked about it: "Stop counting. Just listen." I heard him. I understood the concept. I just couldn't make my brain do it. Then about three weeks ago on a Tuesday morning, I was copying random code groups with the trainer set to 15 wpm character speed and about 10 wpm effective speed — the Farnsworth method spacing — and something was different. I wasn't thinking about the dashes and dots in the letter K. I just... heard K. Same with R. Same with the number 5. I didn't realize what was happening until I looked down at my paper and noticed I'd been copying pretty cleanly for maybe two minutes straight without really trying. I actually stopped the trainer and just sat there for a second. Then I started it back up because I was afraid to lose whatever had just happened. It didn't all suddenly become easy after that. Let me be real clear about that. There are still characters that trip me up consistently. Q is one. Y is another. Anything with a bunch of dahs tends to blur together when I'm tired. But something fundamental had shifted. The copying felt less like translating a foreign language and more like just listening. Even a little bit. I went down to the shack that evening and tuned around 40 meters in the low end where the CW activity is and just listened for a while. I've been doing that regularly actually — just tuning around without trying to copy anything specific, just getting comfortable with the sound of actual on-air CW rather than the clean perfect tones of a software trainer. Real radio CW is messy. There's QRM, there's guys whose timing isn't perfect, there's fading. The trainer didn't really prepare me for that part. I tried copying a few QSOs and I could get maybe 60 or 70 percent of it on a good signal. Not enough to actually respond to anything, but enough that I felt like I wasn't completely lost. That's genuinely progress from a month ago when I could barely pull out callsigns. The thing I wish someone had told me earlier — and maybe they did and I just needed to experience it myself — is that the frustration plateau is real and it lasts longer than you want it to. I hit a stretch of about two and a half weeks in week six and seven where I felt like I was actively getting worse. My accuracy was dropping, I was second-guessing characters I had previously nailed, and I was starting to wonder if I was one of those people who just doesn't have the brain for this. My Elmer basically told me that's normal and to just keep going, which is the kind of advice that's both completely right and also kind of annoying to hear when you're in the middle of it. I've also started supplementing the trainer with the LCWO website, which has some different exercise formats that help break things up. The callsign copying practice there has been particularly useful because callsigns are obviously what I'll be dealing with the most on the air. You get a feel for the rhythm of a typical ham callsign pretty quickly. There's also a feature where you can slow down specific characters that are giving you trouble and drill those individually, which helped me a lot with F and L, which I kept mixing up for an embarrassing amount of time. One thing I've started doing on weekends when I have more time is copying ARRL code practice transmissions on . They broadcast CW practice at various speeds on a regular schedule and they publish the text afterward so you can check your copy. There's something about copying real transmitted signals with actual propagation effects that the software trainer doesn't give you. Plus it just feels more like ham radio, which helps with motivation when you're grinding through drills. I set myself a goal of making my first actual CW QSO by the end of this month. That's about two and a half weeks away. I'm nervous about it but I've been practicing a simple exchange — RST, name, QTH — and I think I can get through it if I find someone patient. There are operators out there who specifically look for beginners on certain frequencies and will slow way down. I've been told that QRS (please send slower) is one of the most important things to know how to send, which honestly cracked me up because of course that's critical information. My Elmer suggested I try making contact during a slower part of the day when experienced operators are more likely to be hunting for any contact and won't mind taking it slow. He also reminded me that I don't have to copy everything perfectly to have a valid QSO. People have been making CW contacts with partial copy for as long as CW has existed. The culture around it is actually pretty forgiving from what I understand. I'll post an update after I finally pull the trigger on that first CW contact. If it goes anything like my first ever HF contact on voice did, it'll be simultaneously terrifying and one of the most satisfying things I've done in this hobby. And probably a lot shorter than I expect because I'll blank on something obvious and just sign off early out of panic. That's kind of where I am at the two month mark. Still very much a beginner, still making mistakes, but starting to believe that this is actually going to work. If you're in month one and feeling like you're never going to get it — I hear you. I was you. Keep going.

yeah what he said about the documentation stuff is real. I went through ARRL's EC-001 course online last year and that kind of drilled into me how much of emcomm is paperwork and organization not just having a working radio lol. one thing I'll add from my own kit — a small DC power meter/wattmeter inline is super handy, lets you keep an eye on battery voltage without hunting through menus. I use one of those little inline ones from Powerwerx, nothing fancy. also a small USB power bank for charging phones and stuff, separate from your radio battery. people at a shelter are going to be asking to charge things constantly and you don't want that draining your radio battery. I'm kind of in the same boat as you building mine out, so curious what others have to say too. haven't fully figured out my antenna situation for HF yet.

check your audio sample rate too, had the same problem and it turned out winlink express and windows were fighting over whether it was 44100 or 48000. soundcard stuff is always the dumbest possible reason for something not working

so ive been studying for like three weeks now and im pretty sure im ready but also kind of not sure if that makes sense. i've been using the hamstudy website which has been great for drilling questions but i keep second guessing myself on the electrical theory stuff, like the ohms law questions are fine but some of the other formulas trip me up. i guess my main question is how hard is the actual test compared to just doing practice exams online, and is there anything that catches people off guard that i should know about going in? also do they give you scratch paper or anything for the math questions

the ceiling fan is probably killing you more than you realize, especially if its anywhere near the mic. low frequency rumble gets picked up real easy and on SSB it just turns into mush on the other end. first thing id do is turn it off when youre operating and see if you get more consistent reports. on the 7300 specifically, the default TX bandwidth is pretty wide and the bass response on the stock mic element is kinda boomy. go into the menu and bump the low cut up to like 100hz or even 150hz, most of the voice intelligibility is in the mids anyway and cutting the lows cleans things up a lot without making you sound thin. i also roll off the highs a bit above 2700 or so just to keep the audio from getting harsh. takes maybe 10 minutes to mess around with and the difference is noticeable. also mic distance matters more than people think, closer means more bass proximity effect, farther means more room sound. try staying consistent around 2-3 inches and talk across the mic slightly rather than straight into it, reduces plosives too.

honestly the 7300 is such a good radio that the jump to anything else is kinda hard to justify unless youre doing serious contesting or you just want new stuff (which is a valid reason, no shame). ive seen guys with 7300s work DX all day long that guys with much fancier setups couldnt because the antenna situation was better. that said the 890S roofing filter thing is real, i borrowed one for a weekend and the difference on a busy 40m saturday evening was not subtle at all, it was like someone turned the blender off.

yeah dont sweat the doubling with someone, happens to everyone especially on a busy repeater. the main thing I had to learn was just to listen for the full second or two of silence before transmitting because sometimes what sounds like a gap is actually just someone pausing mid-sentence. net control on most of the local nets ive heard are pretty used to new folks checking in, theyre not gonna bite your head off or anything.

i was in the exact same spot like a year ago and honestly just announcing yourself works. i said something like "this is [callsign] just got my license, anyone around?" and someone came back within like a minute. felt weird at first but thats kind of the point of a repeater right. good luck, it gets less awkward fast

yeah the first few passes on linear birds are pretty humbling, im not gonna lie. what helped me a ton was setting up Gpredict with CAT control to actually drive the radio's tuning automatically for the doppler. once i had that working i could just focus on listening and not chase the shift manually. the 9700 plays really nice with that setup. the trick i use for finding myself quickly is start with low power, like really low, and sweep slowly through the downlink passband before the pass while its still low elevation just to hear what the noise floor sounds like and where the transponder edges are. then when i key up i already have a rough idea of where to listen. also CW is way easier to find than SSB when you're hunting for your own signal, at least at first. the bandwidth is just narrower and it sticks out better against the transponder noise. dont give up on AO-73 though, once it clicks it really clicks and working DX through a linear sat feels completely different from the FM ones.

the bioenno 100ah will probably get you through it depending on your actual duty cycle. i ran a similar setup last summer — ic-7300 plus some accessory stuff — off a 100ah lifepo4 and made it about 7 hours before i started getting nervous about state of charge. that was maybe 40-50% transmit time on 20m so your mileage will definitely vary. one thing i'd say is dont skip bringing a way to monitor the battery voltage in real time, not just a coulomb counter. under load those readings can be misleading and lifepo4 has that flat discharge curve that tricks you into thinking you have more headroom than you do and then it drops off fast. on the antenna question, honestly the buddipole is great but for a parking lot ARES exercise where 40m is your main band i'd just stick with the dipole. you know it works, you know how to put it up, and the buddipole takes longer to tune than people admit especially if you're trying to move bands in a hurry. bring the buddipole if you think you'll need 20m or 15m coverage and want flexibility, otherwise its just more gear to trip over.

i made almost the exact same move last year, TS-570 into a 7300, and the waterfall thing genuinely changed how i operate. like i didnt know how much activity was sitting just off to the side of where i was tuned until i could actually see it. found a whole pileup on 20 last week just by noticing a cluster of signals about 8 kHz up from where i was parked. the menus do get easier after a while, its mostly just repetition. the ones i use all the time i kind of have memorized now without thinking about it. the ones i dont use often i still have to go hunting for but thats fine.

yeah i built almost the exact same thing for 40 last year, inverted V off a push-up pole. mine came in high too and i ended up trimming quite a bit more than i expected before it settled where i wanted it. the formula gives you a starting point but real world is always different depending on height, what's underneath it, nearby objects etc. one thing i did that helped was solder a short pigtail of wire to each leg at the feedpoint so i could wrap extra wire around it and add length back if i cut too much. kind of a pain but saved me once when i got a little aggressive with the cutters

honest answer — for your situation just build the dipole. 35ft apex inverted-V on 40m is going to have a higher radiation angle than a proper vertical with a good radial field, yeah, but here's the thing: for ragchews within say 500-1500 miles that higher angle actually works in your favor. and for DX you can still work stuff, it just might take a few more calls. the vertical your neighbor has, do you know how many radials he's got down? because that's where people get burned. guys put up a trap vertical, throw down four radials and wonder why it doesnt hear anything. you need at minimum 16-20 radials to start seeing real improvement over a dipole and even then it depends. a well built inverted-V with decent height is competitive with a mediocre vertical basically every time. i ran both for a while and honestly the dipole was just less hassle and worked great. verticals make more sense when you literally have no horizontal space or you're dead serious about DX angles. sounds like neither applies to you.

okay so the chart thing is actually one of the worst ways to do it, at least thats what most people will tell you and i agree from my own experience. you want to learn the sounds, not the patterns on paper. the Koch method is what worked for me, basically you start with just two characters at full speed (like 20wpm) and you just listen until you can copy them reliably, then you add another one. sounds slow and kind of tedious at first but it means you never have to translate dots and dashes in your head, you just hear the letter. LCWO dot net is free and does the Koch method, thats where i started. also the Morse Trainer app is decent if you want something on your phone for commuting or whatever. as for how long, honestly it varies so much it almost doesnt matter to say. i was making ragchew qsos at maybe 10-12 wpm after about four or five months of practicing maybe 20 minutes a day. some people get there faster. the main thing is consistency, like every day even if its just 10 minutes beats doing an hour once a week by a lot in my experience.

oh wow i had no idea 10m was doing that, im still pretty new and mostly been hanging around 40m since thats where my club told me to start. might have to tune around up there and see whats happening. what time of day were you guys finding it most open? mornings, afternoons?

honestly i had the same confusion when i started. what helped me was just listening to how net control handles it on a directed net, they always phonetic everything because they're copying down callsigns from a bunch of people and cant afford to mishear. i kind of adopted that habit and now i just default to phonetics whenever i'm giving my callsign to someone i havent worked before or if the signal isnt perfect. the fast guys on 40 are probably just calling CQ over and over and got used to running through it quick, doesnt mean its right lol

yeah im kind of in the same boat, been at it about the same amount of time. one thing that actually helped me was recording myself with audacity and just listening back. its brutal but you can actually see in the waveform where youre mangling the timing. i found out i was squishing dits way too short on certain letters, K was the worst for me. also someone on another forum suggested practicing with a straight key for a while first to really get the rhythm in your head before going back to paddles and i thought that was dumb advice but it actually kind of worked

i just got into hf a few months ago and picked up a 7300 new because everyone kept recommending it for a first serious hf rig and i have zero regrets. the waterfall thing really does change how you operate, i feel like i actually understand whats happening on the band now instead of just randomly spinning the VFO. still figuring out all the menus though, there are a lot of settings buried in there that i havent touched yet

congrats on passing the tech exam first of all. so the sequential call is totally valid and you can start using it right away, theres no reason to wait on that front. the vanity process is separate and yeah you basically submit up to 25 callsign choices in order of preference through the FCC ULS and they go through them in sequence during the application window which i think opens a few days after you apply. if your first choice is available and nobody with higher eligibility wants it, you get it. the eligibility groups thing is real -- as a tech you can apply for Group D calls which are the longer format ones like KD9 something, and if you upgrade to general or extra you get access to shorter formats. theres no actual waiting period to apply for vanity, you can do it right now if you want, but a lot of people just stick with their sequential because honestly after a while it just becomes your callsign and you dont think about it anymore. i had a sequential for 3 years before i switched and sometimes i still almost sign the old one out of habit.

yeah you pretty much nailed the difference. FT8 is optimized for one thing and it does that one thing incredibly well but its not a conversational mode by design, Franke and Taylor built it for chasing DX and contests not ragchewing. JS8Call is KD8CEC's attempt to take that weak signal foundation and bolt actual messaging onto it and honestly for what it is i think he did a solid job. i run both depending on what i want out of a session. if band conditions are garbage and i want to see whats actually out there ill fire up FT8, if i actually want to have a conversation with someone at low power on a quiet night JS8Call is genuinely fun. the relay functionality where messages can hop through other stations is something i havent seen work reliably yet but in theory its cool. PSK31 isnt dead but its definitely quieter than it was ten years ago. 14.070 still has some activity most evenings, the decoding is satisfying in a different way because youre watching the waterfall and picking out signals with your eyes before the software gets them. theres a tactile feel to it that FT8 just doesnt have. RTTY is similar, still alive in contests especially, CQWW RTTY gets pretty busy.

so im just parked on 7.200 with a cup of coffee doing basically nothing, which honestly is like half the hobby for me at this point. heard some guys chatting about the weather down in texas and a couple of ragchews going on further up. nothing wild but the band sounded decent considering how the solar stuff has been lately. reminds me why i got into this in the first place, just listening and occasionally throwing out my call. anybody else do this or am i just weird for finding it relaxing

yeah the first couple times i tried SO2R it was genuinely awful and i think i finished worse than i would have on one radio. the thing nobody really tells you is that you have to basically rewire how your brain works during a contest. you're used to one focus point and suddenly you're trying to monitor two bands, decide which one to work, and not accidentally key the wrong one. takes a lot of practice runs before it stops feeling like rubbing your head and patting your stomach. what helped me more than anything was N1MM's SO2R support and getting the foot switch setup right so i always know which radio is active. also honestly running mock contest sessions on a weekday evening just to practice the mechanics without the pressure of actual contest points on the line. after maybe 3 or 4 weekends of that it started clicking. for rate gains, yeah it's real but it's really most noticeable during the slow periods when you'd otherwise just be sitting on a run frequency hoping someone calls. that's when you flip to the second radio and go S&P on another band. the multiplier hunting alone can justify the whole setup honestly. with a 7300 and K3S you've already got better gear than a lot of people doing SO2R so that part isnt your problem.