Michael Torres

so ive been running a diamond x50 on the roof for about two years now and it works fine for the local 2m/70cm repeaters, hits everything within maybe 30-40 miles no problem. but theres this one repeater about 55 miles out that i can only barely hit when conditions are good and i got to thinking maybe a yagi would solve it. the thing is that repeater isnt even one i use that often, its just bugging me that i cant reliably hit it. my shack is on the second floor so running new coax down to a dedicated yagi mount on the chimney is gonna be a whole afternoon project minimum. and then i lose the omnidirectional coverage i have now unless i set up both antennas which means a duplexer or a second feedline and it just starts to snowball. anyone gone down this road and regret it or was it worth it for you? also wondering if a longer collinear would even get me there or if im just not going to beat the physics on a 55 mile path without going directional

ok so i just passed my technician exam last week (finally) and now im trying to figure out what handheld radio to actually buy. ive been reading threads on here for like two hours and now im more confused than when i started honestly. everybody seems to have a strong opinion about baofeng vs yaesu vs kenwood and i get that there are differences but for someone who literally just wants to get on the local repeater and maybe do some simplex with a buddy who also just got licensed, does it really matter that much which one i get starting out? i dont want to spend a ton but i also dont want to buy something that falls apart in six months. the baofeng uv-5r keeps coming up as like the budget choice but then someone always jumps in saying the audio is garbage or the spurious emissions thing and i dont totally understand what that means yet. is that actually a real problem for just talking on repeaters locally? anyway just looking for a nudge in a direction. dual band vhf/uhf is what i want i think since thats what most repeaters around here seem to be on.

I've been involved with ARES for going on 12 years now and the one thing I always tell new members is exactly what you just described - the drills and training nets feel a little abstract until you're sitting in a shelter with real people who need something and you're the link. That's when it clicks. The procedures that seem overly formal during training suddenly make a lot of sense when there's actual noise and stress around you. Also don't beat yourself up too much about the ID. Everyone does it at least once. The important thing is your EC noticed and told you, that's what good mentorship looks like. Keep showing up to the nets and exercises and before long you'll be the one helping orient the newer folks. It goes fast.

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually operate on 40 meters. i looked at the arrl band plan chart but honestly it kind of confuses me more than it helps. like theres the fcc allocation which is the legal part and then theres the band plan which is kind of a gentleman's agreement thing? or am i totally wrong about that also i keep hearing people say dont operate too close to the band edge because of frequency drift or something but my radio shows my frequency pretty precisely so does that still apply. i have an ic-7300 if that matters mostly i want to do some ssb and maybe some digital modes eventually and i just dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere i shouldnt be

Consider using separate INI files for contest operation vs daily WSJT-X use. N1MM+ creates "WSJT-X – ForEW1" instance that's completely separate from your everyday copy. This isolates your contest configuration and prevents conflicts with your regular digital mode setup.

so i've been messing around with LEO sat ops for maybe 3 weeks now, started with SO-50 just doing FM passes to get my feet wet and that went fine, but i wanted to try a linear transponder bird and AO-73 has been pretty cooperative lately with decent passes over my QTH in the mornings. my setup is nothing fancy — a yaesu ft-817 and a pair of handheld yagis i built from that arrow copy design, one for 2m uplink and one for 70cm downlink. the issue im running into is the doppler correction. i know the transponder is inverting so if i tune up on uplink my signal comes down lower on the downlink, got that part sorted in my head finally after reading about it for an hour. what i cant figure out is whether im supposed to be chasing my own signal by moving both vfos or just the downlink vfo as the pass progresses. i was using gpredict to get the doppler shifted frequencies printed out beforehand and kind of pre-programmed some memory channels but that feels really clunky and i definitely missed a chunk of the pass fiddling with the radio. also heard a few stations working each other but couldnt tell if my signal was even getting in — no one came back to me. is the 817 putting out enough power for a reasonable pass? i was running maybe 2-2.5w on uplink, not full 5w because i didn't want to be that guy hog the transponder.

im kind of in the same boat as you, been at it for maybe 6 weeks now. im using an app called Morse Mania and also the LCWO website and honestly the combo has been working okay for me. i do the app when im just sitting around and the website when i want to actually practice copying. still making tons of mistakes but i can do like 10-12 characters reliably now which felt impossible a month ago so i guess its working lol one thing i did not expect is how much it helps to just listen to actual CW on the air even when you cant copy any of it yet. just having it on in the background while i do other stuff, idk if thats doing anything scientifically but it made the sounds feel less alien faster than just practicing alone

so i've been puttering around with the idea of building a small QRP rig for probably two years now and i finally just did it. built a little 40m CW transceiver from a kit, one of the Pixie derivatives but i modded it a bit with a better filter cap and swapped the crystal for one i had sitting in my junk box that puts me at a slightly less crowded spot on the band. took the whole thing out to the park last saturday with a 9v battery and a wire antenna i just threw up in a tree. honestly wasnt expecting much. five watts (well more like 3 honestly with that battery) and i figured id just hear a bunch of stuff and nobody would hear me. made 4 contacts in about an hour and a half, one of them was down in florida which i was pretty happy about considering im in ohio. the battery barely got warm which surprised me, i think people underestimate how long a small lipo or even a 9v will last when your TX duty cycle is low. anyway the whole setup fits in a small canvas bag and the radio itself is about the size of a deck of cards. kind of addictive honestly. thinking about trying SOTA next summer with this thing or maybe building something for 20m too. anyone else been down this rabbit hole

congrats on the first activation, 47 contacts is solid especially if you were dealing with rain and weird prop. to answer your log question — you upload through the wwff logbook portal, same concept as SOTA if you've done that. just export your log in adif format and submit it there, they'll process it and your contacts who are registered will get the credit automatically. pretty painless once you do it the first time. and yeah the car thing is totally fine as long as you were within the reference boundary, which it sounds like you were. the rules are about operating within the designated natural area, not about being outdoors in any specific way. plenty of people operate from their vehicles especially if weather turns. on the 20m vs 40m thing — i usually start on 40 for local and regional contacts then jump to 20 when i want to grab europe or further out. mid afternoon on weekends 20m can be really productive for DX. honestly just spot yourself on both and see what bites, you can always run two spots back to back. some activators run two rigs but thats a whole other rabbit hole.

so ive had my general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra. i mostly do HF and some digital modes, occasionally get on 40m SSB when the band cooperates. the thing is i looked at some of the extra exam practice questions and honestly a lot of it went over my head — like the stuff about filter design and transmission line theory and some of the impedance matching stuff. i know you can memorize the question pool and pass without really understanding it but i feel like thats kind of cheating myself? i dunno. anyway what i really want to know is — did anyone here actually find that studying for the extra actually made them a better operator or did you just grind the pool and move on. and also is the extra segment on like 75m and 40m actually that useful or is it mostly empty up there. i feel like general already gives you so much of the bands that the extra privileges dont seem like a huge deal but maybe im missing something

so ive been chasing this for like three weekends now and im pretty frustrated honestly. got a funcube dongle plus and a cheap yagi i built from a tape measure design, using gpredict to track and the timing seems right but i just cannot hear anything on the downlink. tried AO-73 and also FO-29 since someone on the club net said FO-29 was in linear mode again. my setup is the yagi feeding into the funcube, running SDR# on the side and gpredict doing doppler correction through the CAT interface... or at least i think it is, i followed a youtube tutorial but honestly not sure the correction is actually being applied properly. elevation was like 35 degrees max on the pass i tried yesterday which should be enough right? is there some trick to the linear transponder passband i'm missing? like do i need to be listening on the exact inverted frequency or something? and how much does the doppler actually shift things in practice, i know it's like 10khz-ish at LEO but i've read conflicting stuff about how SDR# handles the correction versus if you need to tune manually

honest answer is it probably will wreck a contest or two before it helps. i ran SO2R for the first time seriously in last years CQWW and my claimed score was actually lower than the previous year single radio, just from the mental overhead of managing band changes on the second rig and forgetting to monitor the run freq. but by the time arrl dx came around i had it more dialed in and the difference in mults found during dead periods was noticeable. the dead CQ periods you mentioned are exactly the right use case. even 15-20 seconds on the second radio fishing for a new mult while your run freq sits there is worth it. the trick is dont try to run on both radios simultaneously until you have the basics down, just use radio 2 for quick S&P grabs. also bandpass filters are not optional if your antennas are anywhere near each other, learned that the hard way with rf in the audio on the first radio every time i transmitted on radio 2.

yeah the Koch method is probably what most people suggest these days and for good reason. the basic idea is you start with just two characters at a comfortable but not too slow speed — like 15 or 20 wpm sending speed — but with a lot of extra space between characters so your brain has time to process. you never actually go below like 12-15 wpm on the character speed itself, that's the key thing people miss when they say start slow. starting too slow just teaches your brain to count dits and dahs instead of hearing the sound as a whole character, and then you have to unlearn all that later which is a pain. LCWO dot net is the site a lot of people use, its free and it implements Koch pretty well. just do 10-15 minutes a day consistently, thats honestly more useful than an hour every couple weeks. it takes a while before it suddenly starts feeling natural but there is a point where it just kind of clicks and you stop consciously decoding and start just hearing words. hang in there with it

We run both on our repeater using EchoIRLP. EchoIRLP allows one interface to run two separate linking systems - IRLP and EchoLink - all out of one single box. IRLP is rock solid and secure, while EchoLink gives more user flexibility. The combination works great for us - users get the best of both worlds.

yeah same thing confused me when i started. what i do now is i just use phonetics whenever i'm not 100% sure the other op heard me right, or if its my first transmission with someone new. better to over-phonetic than have them ask you to repeat 3 times lol. the non-standard ones are kind of a pet peeve of mine honestly, heard someone use "sugar" for S last week on a net and it just sounds sloppy to me now that im used to Sierra

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i love it for the DX hunting and all that but honestly after a while it starts to feel like youre just watching a slot machine, you know? you get the contact, log it, move on. theres no actual conversation happening. a buddy at the club mentioned JS8Call and how its basically like a messaging layer built on top of the JS8 waveform which is derived from FT8 if i understand it right. supposedly you can have actual back and forth exchanges, send longer messages, even relay stuff through other stations. been reading about it but havent actually fired it up yet. my question is for people who actively use both — do you find JS8Call worth running alongside WSJT-X or do you kind of have to pick one. and is the activity level on JS8Call decent enough that youre actually going to find someone to talk to on a given afternoon. i mostly operate 40m and 20m if that matters. running an IC-7300 into a trapped vertical so nothing fancy. also been messing with PSK31 a little bit lately and honestly thats scratching the itch more for real conversations but the signals you need are way higher compared to FT8 obviously so weak signal wise its not even close

the shoulder thing on the peaks is almost certainly flat-topping, means the IRF510 is being driven into saturation even if you think you backed off the drive. those fets are real sensitive to gate voltage and the sweet spot is narrow. also the IRF510 has kind of a rough reputation for RF work, it can work but the capacitances are all over the place and if your bias isnt set right you get that exact symptom. try dropping your drain voltage a bit and see if the waveform cleans up before you chase the filter. and yeah keyclicks are usually a shaping issue at the keying circuit, if you're hard keying the oscillator or the driver stage directly that'll do it every time. a simple RC network on the key line smooths things out a lot.

so ive been a ham for about 12 years mostly HF stuff, some 2m weak signal when the band cooperates, but ive been reading about moonbounce for probably two years now and i think i actually want to try it. not just listen but actually make contacts. i know its not trivial and the equipment requirements are kind of intense depending on how you approach it. my current setup is a ft-991a and a 5 element yagi for 2m which i know is basically nothing for EME. i was looking at the JT65 digital modes since i know thats how most of the activity happens these days, and wsjt-x handles that. but the antenna situation is where i get lost. ive seen people running 4x9 element arrays and ive seen people claiming they worked EME with a single long yagi on JT65B which honestly seems impossible to me but apparently its a thing? also what kind of preamp situation do i need, i see a lot of people talking about mounting the LNA right at the feedpoint and i get why but is that mandatory or just really helpful. and what about the dish route vs yagi arrays, i have some space for a dish maybe 2-3 meters. tried searching the archives here but got kind of overwhelmed.

yeah the stock mic on the 7300 isnt terrible but it really depends on how close you're holding it and the room youre in. the compression thing is almost definitely contributing to the mud — if you crank it up too high it starts pumping and smearing everything together and you lose intelligibility even if the average power goes up. try dropping the TX comp down to like 4-6 dB range max and see if that clears things up first before messing with anything else. also the TX bandwidth on that radio defaults to something pretty wide i think, try narrowing it to 2.4 or 2.6k for normal SSB and that alone can help a lot on a busy band. mic gain is the other thing, most people run it way too hot and the ALC is just clipping the whole time. watch your ALC meter when you talk and try to keep it barely flickering.

yeah spotting is super helpful for getting chasers to pile on but like the other guy said it's not required. i did my first three activations without ever self-spotting because i kept forgetting and still got credited fine. what radio setup were you running? the KX2 with a linked dipole is kind of the classic combo, curious how you fed it — did you use a short counterpoise or just the two dipole legs?

oh man i went down this same rabbit hole a few months ago when i first started trying to work some DX. QRZ logbook has the spots integrated which is nice if youre already logging there but i found DXwatch way easier to just glance at quickly. theres also a site called DXheat that i actually like better than both of them for just seeing whats active right now, the band breakdown is cleaner imo. havent messed with apps much, i mostly just have DXwatch open in a browser tab on the laptop next to the rig. old school maybe but it works lol

just chiming in because i went through the exact same thing a few months ago. the filtering on dxwatch is there but its a bit hidden, took me forever to find it too. also dont sleep on the qrz logbook if you already have an account there, it has its own spot feed built into the logging page and it will flag new entities for you which saves the tab switching you were talking about. 30 feet with a dipole on 20m you should be hearing plenty of stuff, good luck with the chasing

Yeah dont mess around with that stuff. I know a guy who got a notice from the FCC for operating on 40m phone with his tech license - apparently someone reported him. He got off with just a warning but it scared him straight. The volunteer monitoring coordinator in our area says they do spot checks and will investigate any complaints they receive

I started with a cheaper 12V 7Ah SLA just to try POTA and it worked fine for my first few activations from drive-up locations. But once I wanted to hike to more remote spots, the weight became a real problem. The weight difference is immediately noticeable - you can carry twice the usable capacity at half the weight compared to old SLA batteries.

so i just passed my tech exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to get. ive been reading way too many threads and reviews and now im more confused than when i started lol. basically everyone says something different and half the threads are from like 2017 so i dont know whats still relevant. my main use case is probably just local repeaters to start, maybe some simplex stuff, and i want to eventually get into APRS but thats not a must right away. budget is somewhere around $50-150 depending on if theres actually a good reason to spend more. i looked at the baofeng UV-5R because its cheap but people either love it or really hate it and i cant tell if the hate is justified or just snobs. also seen the yaesu FT-60 mentioned a lot but thats at the top of my budget. is there like a middle ground thats actually worth it