HF Hunter

yeah JS8Call is a different beast, the workflow is more like actual keyboard to keyboard chat so you kinda have to get out of the FT8 mindset where everything is automated. one thing that trips people up is that JS8Call has multiple speed modes, normal slow fast and turbo i think, and if you're not on the same speed as the other station you'll see their signal but the decode wont work right. worth checking what mode the other guy is running before you reply. as for PSK31, honestly yeah it's pretty quiet these days. 40m seems better than 20m for finding activity, at least in my experience, but even then you're not going to find the wall to wall signals we had like 10-15 years ago. FT8 ate everything's lunch basically. i still fire up RTTY during contests and that's still pretty active but outside of contests it's sparse too.

just getting into this myself so take this for what its worth but one thing someone told me at a club meeting that stuck with me — make sure whatever you put in the kit you actually know how to use without looking anything up. like i had this fancy logging software i thought id bring and then realized i barely knew how to set it up on a good day let alone under pressure. ended up just practicing with paper logs first which felt old fashioned but at least i know ill be able to do it also the cable thing is real, i boughta bunch of those velcro cable ties and they helped a lot more than i expected

This is why I stick with the RSPdx - much better Linux support overall. But for your immediate problem, try installing the libsoapysdr0.8-module-sdrplay3 package instead of the regular one. That version has GNU Radio 3.10 compatibility.

that SWR curve sounds totally normal for a 40m dipole honestly, most rigs will tune that no problem and the FT-891 internal tuner should handle 2.2:1 easy. the inverted V shape actually shifts resonance down a bit compared to a flat dipole so if you wanted to center it in the band you might trim a few inches off each leg but its really not worth losing sleep over at those numbers. on the balun question — yeah you want one. not because the radio will blow up without it but because without a choke at the feedpoint you can get RF coming back down the outside of the coax shield and that can cause all kinds of weird stuff — RFI in the shack, pattern distortion, the SWR changing when you touch the coax. a simple 1:1 choke balun made from winding 8-10 turns of your feedline coax on a FT-240-43 toroid takes maybe 20 minutes and makes a real difference. some guys use a coax choke (air wound coil of coax) and thats fine too for HF. for a basic 40m inverted V either works fine.

The real skill is in recognizing when to prioritize rate over multipliers in real-time. During major contests, I use spotting data to identify multiplier opportunities between CQs, but when the rate drops below my target threshold, I'll dedicate both radios to finding a new run frequency. It's all about maximizing QSO*multiplier, not just one or the other.

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about confirming contacts and i kind of get the gist of it but im still confused about how all the different systems work together. like do i need all three or just pick one or what from what i understand LoTW is run by the ARRL and its the one that counts for DXCC and stuff like that. and eQSL is a separate thing that some people use but maybe not everyone accepts it for awards? and then paper QSL cards are the old school way and you either mail them directly or go through a bureau. is that right so far my elmer told me to just sign up for LoTW and call it a day but then i worked a station last week who asked for a direct card and i wasnt even sure what address to give them or how that works. do i need to register somewhere to receive paper cards or can i just put my address in QRZ and hope for the best sorry if this is a really basic question, i tried searching but got kind of overwhelmed with all the different threads

The Whiterook MK series keys are the most under-rated portable keys! I've had mine for 25 years, just toss it in the backpack with no cover, and it's been great for SOTA and overseas travel. Very reasonable at $30-$53.

The main requirement is regular practice - half hour daily. The objective is getting away from thinking 'dit-dah = A' to instantly recognizing dit-dah as a sound relating to A. Try 13 WPM characters at 5 WPM spacing to train your ear for the cadences.

yeah DXwatch can feel like drinking from a firehose when you first open it, totally normal. what most guys i know do is filter by band and mode right from the start so youre not seeing every VE3 spotting another VE3 on 40m phone or whatever. if you set it to just show 20 and 17 meters it gets way more manageable. for alerts, there's a site called DX Alert and also the DXLab Suite has a thing called SpotCollector which is honestly really solid if you dont mind the old school interface. it can pop up a notification when something matching your needs-list shows up. i think Club Log also does something similar if you have your log linked up. QRZ spotting is fine but in my experience DXwatch pulls from more nodes so the coverage is better, especially for pacific and asia stuff in the early morning hours.

so after about 8 months of going to the monthly ARES nets and doing the online ICS training (which honestly took way longer than i expected to finish) i finally got my first real activation last weekend. county had a pretty bad storm roll through friday night and the EC called us up to provide backup comms for the county EOC and one of the shelter locations about 12 miles out. i was assigned to the shelter and honestly i was way more nervous than i thought id be. its one thing to check in on the weekly net and do tabletop exercises but when someone actually hands you a message form and says get this to the EOC i kind of froze for a second. the traffic was pretty light thankfully — mostly resource requests and some health/welfare stuff — but it felt real in a way that none of the training exercises did. the thing that surprised me most was how much of the job is just... waiting. and staying ready. and making sure your radio is on the right freq and your battery is topped off and you're not in the way of the shelter staff. i kind of expected it to be more hectic i guess. anyway just wanted to share since ive seen a few posts from people wondering what an actual activation is like vs. the training side of things. happy to answer questions if anyone has em

so ive been a Tech for about 2 years now and mostly just been doing 2m/70cm stuff, some APRS, helped out with a few local nets. i keep hearing people talk about HF and how much better it is once you get your General but honestly the whole process of studying for another exam feels kind of overwhelming and im not even totally sure what i'd be getting out of it that i dont already have. like i know i'd get HF privileges but which bands exactly? i've looked at the band chart thing and it's kind of confusing with the different license segments. and is the General exam a lot harder than Tech or about the same? someone at the club told me the electrical theory gets way more involved but another guy said it wasnt that bad if you just use the question pool. i dunno who to believe at this point also do i need to do anything with the FCC after i pass or does the VE team handle all that

omg yes 10m has been crazy i made my first ever dx contact last week on that band, got a guy in Argentina and i was literally just using a vertical in my backyard. i've only had my general for like 4 months so this whole thing is kind of blowing my mind. my elmer told me 10 was basically a wasteland for years so i feel pretty lucky to have gotten licensed now i guess

I'm setting up a dual-mode RMS gateway using VARA FM and packet on a single radio per the NS7C document. Got both modes working individually but having collision issues when they run together. VARA FM pretty much hogs the channel 100% until the session completes, while packet users don't monitor first and just press connect. Using UZ7HO Soundmodem with AGWPE driver as recommended. The KISS driver has timing issues with default RMS Packet settings causing collisions, while AGWPE doesn't have these problems. Should I implement separate frequencies or is there a better workaround?

so im putting together a portable setup for a ARES activation exercise this weekend and ive been going back and forth on the power situation. we're deploying to a community center parking lot, probably 6-8 hours of operation, and i want to run an IC-7300 plus a laptop for logging and maybe a second VHF radio. i have a Honda EU2200i that ive used before and it runs great, quiet enough that you can actually hold a conversation next to it. but my buddy is saying i should just run off batteries and a solar panel to keep things simple. the thing is i dont think a 100w panel is going to keep up with the draw if we're transmitting a lot on HF, especially if we push 100w output. i ran the numbers and figure somewhere around 20-22 amps on transmit peaks which is a lot to ask from solar alone unless we have a big battery bank. antenna wise im planning on an EFHW for 40/20 with a 9:1 unun and about 65 feet of wire. throw it up in a tree with a fishing line launcher. done this a bunch of times and it works fine. but i keep second-guessing whether i should just bring the Buddipole because its faster to set up even if the EFHW probably outperforms it on lower bands. anyone run this kind of mixed power setup before? trying to figure out if the genny is overkill or if im going to regret not having it

I helped install a BTech UV25X2 recently - open as a barn door, either they're still working though old stock or they don't care. Depends on where your radio comes from and when it was manufactured. Sometimes you get lucky with older firmware.

so im finally doing my first real field deployment this weekend, not just playing around in the backyard, actually setting up a proper portable station for a ARES exercise and i've been going back and forth on power for like two weeks now. my buddy says just bring a honda eu2200 and call it a day but i dont know, the noise floor on those inverter gens is supposedly pretty clean but ive heard mixed things depending on what rig you're running. my setup is an IC-7300 and a fan dipole i built myself, feedline is about 50ft of LMR-400 which is probably overkill for a portable setup but i had it lying around. the dipole is cut for 40 and 20 which is where most of the exercise traffic will be. im planning to use a jackery 1000 as primary power and have the generator as backup if the battery gets low, does that make sense or am i overcomplicating this. also considering a buddipole but the fan dipole has served me pretty well in the backyard so maybe not worth the hassle of learning new antenna day-of. any thoughts on the power chain specifically would be helpful, i know you all have done way more of these than i have

so ive been messing around with an arduino mega for the past few weeks trying to get it to handle antenna switching and also trigger my logging software when i key up. the antenna switching part works fine, got a bunch of relays on a board i etched myself and the arduino just reads the band data from my 7300 via CI-V and switches accordingly. that part was honestly easier than i expected. the logging integration is where im losing my mind a little. im running N1MM and i know it puts out UDP packets but parsing those on the mega is kind of a pain because the string handling on these things is just not great. im wondering if anyone has bridged this with a Pi instead — like put the Pi in the middle to do the heavy lifting on parsing and just send simple commands down to the arduino for the relay control. seems like overkill but maybe thats just how it has to be done also my relay board is getting warm which is probably fine but wanted to mention it in case someone tells me thats actually not fine

Great write-up! We had similar findings during our spring exercise. Amateur radio operators equipped with go kits provide an agile and adaptable opportunity for connecting communities when power and traditional communications are interrupted. Did you guys test any mesh networking or were you strictly point-to-point?

been getting back into hf after like 10 years and wow things have changed. everyone keeps talking about these digital qsl systems but im confused which one is better. i see lotw and eqsl mentioned all the time but cant figure out if i need both or just one. my buddy says eqsl is easier but another guy at the club swears by lotw for dxcc credit. what do most of you actually use day to day

the biggest thing i'd tell anyone starting from scratch is don't learn the dots and dashes visually, like don't sit there memorizing that S is three dots on paper. you want to learn the sound of each letter as its own thing. look up the Koch method, thats what most people swear by now. basically you start with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you only add a new character once you can copy the existing ones reliably. sounds weird but it works way better than starting slow and trying to speed up later because your brain kind of gets locked into the rhythm of slow characters and its really hard to break out of it later. for actually doing it, LCWO dot net is free and pretty decent for Koch training. a lot of people also use the Morse Toad app or Just Learn Morse Code. i used a combination of LCWO and just listening to a lot of QRS stations on 40 meters while i was learning. took me maybe 3 or 4 months of pretty casual practice, like 15 minutes a day, before i felt comfortable enough to actually get on the air at around 8 or 10 wpm. first real qso was terrifying but the other op was really patient

hey everyone, ive been working on DXCC for about 2 years now and im sitting at 87 confirmed entities but i think i actually worked way more than that. the problem is i have a bunch of QSLs that came back but some say things like "QSL via bureau" or have different callsigns than what i logged. do these still count for DXCC or am i missing something? also saw some people talking about LoTW but not sure if thats better than paper cards for award credits. getting frustrated because i feel like im so close to 100 but dont want to submit my application and get rejected

yeah the tqsl certificate thing tripped me up too when i first did it, i think i had to redo it twice because i sent the wrong file or something. just make sure when you request the certificate you actually wait for the email from ARRL and then load it back into tqsl, i missed that step the first time lol eQSL i use mostly for the digital stuff, like when im doing FT8 a lot of people are on there. its just nice to have the card image show up. some of the guys i know dont bother with paper at all anymore but i still send them out for any DX contact i make, feels like the right thing to do

so ive been sitting on this NE602 and LM386 combo for like 6 months just sitting in a parts drawer and finally decided to just do it last weekend. followed the basic circuit from EMRFD, wound my own toroid for the input filter which was honestly the part i was most nervous about since i always screw up the turns count somehow, but this time i counted twice and it came out pretty close. got it all stuffed into a mint tin which i know is kind of cliche but whatever it works and the shielding isnt bad. tuned up around 7.1 and was pulling in SSB stations pretty clearly considering theres no AGC and just a volume pot on the output. audio is a little hissy and i think i need to look at the gain staging, the LM386 at full gain is pretty rough. but honestly im just excited it works at all because my last attempt at a receiver never got past the oscillator stage anyone played with adding a simple audio filter to one of these? ive seen some guys put an active low pass after the 386 and it cleans things up a bit. also curious if theres a better audio amp chip to swap in, the 386 has a reputation for being noisy

Word of caution - don't set up VARA FM gateway on a popular packet channel! Learned this the hard way. Also recommend separate frequencies if you have channel availability in your area.

yeah dont underestimate how much the software side has changed things. like 10 years ago EME was basically CW only if you were a small station and you needed big antennas just to get a signal through. now with WSJT-X and JT65B people are doing it with stuff that would have been laughed at before. i worked my first EME qso last winter, i have 4 x 9el M2 yagis and about 500w to them, preamp is a down east microwave unit mounted right at the power divider. it took a few months of weekends to actually log someone because the scheduling matters a lot, you kind of have to coordinate with the other station via the ON4KST chat so you know someone is actually pointing at the moon at the same time as you. the random CQ thing works sometimes but coordinating makes it way more likely especially with a modest setup. your 40 degree max elevation should work, just check when the moon peaks at your location and make sure its during a time you can operate