Ham Mountain

yeah i ran a RemoteHams setup for about two years at my old QTH before i moved. the audio latency is actually pretty manageable once you dial in your buffer settings, and the SDR remote piece is kinda nice because you get a waterfall even if your rig doesnt natively do that over the network. the tricky part for me was always the CAT control - sometimes the virtual com port stuff would get flaky after a reboot and id have to remote desktop in just to reset the software anyway which kind of defeats the purpose. the sharing part is real though, i had a few guys using my station when i wasnt on it and they were pretty respectful. you set up access levels so nobody can just key up without you approving them. i think the bigger headache is your upload bandwidth - if youre on a typical cable connection the upstream is going to limit how clean the audio sounds to whoever is connecting in. i was pushing 3-5 mbps upload most of the time and it was fine for SSB, FT8 obviously doesnt care at all. Allstar is really a different thing, thats more for linking repeaters and doing EchoLink type stuff, not really for controlling an HF station remotely. people conflate them but the use case is pretty different.

nice work getting out there. i was terrified my first activation too and kept second guessing everything. re: the spotting thing, i've had luck just spotting myself before i even leave the parking lot while i still have signal, then if the frequency holds ill stay on it and people find me. obviously you have to actually stay on that freq which isnt always possible if someones already there when you get set up but it works more often than not. some parks are just dead zones and you kind of have to accept youll get fewer hunters calling in, which is fine, you can still get your 10 from cold calling on a busy frequency or just CQing until someone bites.

general is definitely a step up from tech but its not crazy hard if you already passed tech. the pool has more questions and some of the electrical theory stuff is a bit more involved, like youll see questions about impedance and reactance and propagation that tech barely touches. but honestly if hamstudy worked for you before just do the same thing. i think i studied maybe 3-4 weeks for general and felt comfortable going in. i wouldnt try to do both general and extra at the same time unless you have a ton of free time. the extra pool is big and the questions get pretty deep into theory. better to just knock out general, get on HF and actually use those privileges for a while, then come back for extra when you feel like it. thats what most people do. once you get on 40m and start making contacts youll be way more motivated anyway trust me

one thing that tripped me up when i was new is that some of the Q codes change meaning depending on wether its a question or a statement. like QRV as a question is are you ready and as a statement means i am ready. most of the time in casual voice operation people dont really use them as questions but its good to know. also dont stress too hard about memorizing them all at once, you just kinda pick them up after hearing them enough times on the air

im in basically the same boat as you, started last year and the whole award credit thing was really confusing at first. one thing that helped me was just signing into LoTW and looking at the award tracking section, it kind of shows you where you stand for DXCC and WAS at least. still wrapping my head around WAZ zones honestly, i keep confusing zones with continents lol

so we have a county ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and im trying to figure out the best way to power everything without losing my mind. last time we ran a honda eu2200i and it was fine but kind of overkill for what we were actually running — an IC-7300, a couple laptops for winlink, and some misc 12v stuff for lighting. the whole thing probably drew maybe 300-400 watts sustained and that little honda was barely breaking a sweat. this time around im thinking about just going deep cycle AGM and a decent solar panel since we're expecting good wx and the site has decent southern exposure. i've got a 100ah bioenno lifepo4 that i use for portable ops and honestly that thing has never let me down but im not sure it's enough for a full 8 hour shift especially if the laptop guys are drawing off it too. antenna wise we're planning on a linked dipole up maybe 25-30 feet on a spiderbeam mast, probably 40/20/15 links. site is kind of in a valley so im a little worried about 40m being degraded but thats a different problem i guess. main question is really whether to bring the honda as backup or just trust the battery and solar. anyone run a serious comm station off a 100ah lifepo4 for a full day without a genny backup?

dont sleep on just adding an upconverter to the RTL-SDR if budget is tight. the ham-it-up or even the cheaper clones do make the HF situation a lot less painful. thats not me saying dont get the RSP1A, just saying theres a cheaper middle step if you want to try it. i ran that combo for like a year before i moved to an Airspy HF+ Discovery which is kinda a different beast anyway and overkill for most stuff

yeah this confused me for a long time too honestly. so the short version is LoTW is run by the ARRL and its what most serious award chasers use, especially for DXCC — most of those confirmations basically have to be in LoTW now or youre mailing physical cards to the ARRL which is a whole thing. eQSL is a completely separate system run by a private company, its been around forever, and some people swear by it but its not accepted for DXCC so if thats your goal youll want to focus on LoTW first. the paper cards thing is real though, dont dismiss it. lots of DX stations still love getting a nice physical card in the mail and honestly theres something satisfying about having a stack of them. you can send and receive through the ARRL bureau which is cheap but slow, or direct which costs a couple bucks per card but you get it fast. i still do paper cards for anything rare or special and use LoTW for the everyday confirmations. your LoTW confirmations being low is totally normal at first, it just takes time as more people upload logs. some folks only upload once a year or after contests. patience is kind of part of the hobby at that stage haha

so ive been running a remote station for about eight months now, got it set up at my brother in laws place out in the country where the noise floor is actually usable unlike my HOA nightmare here. been using RemoteHams RCForb for control and it mostly works but the SDR side of things is giving me grief. the issue is roughly every 20 to 30 minutes the audio just cuts and the waterfall freezes, the control connection stays up fine i can still see band data and key the rig but the SDR stream dies. i have to close and reopen the client to get it back. its not the internet on my end, ive checked and my upload is steady, and my brother in law has fiber out there so its not his side either at least i dont think so. i messed around with the buffer settings in RCForb and bumped the jitter buffer up a bit which helped a little but didnt fix it. i also tried switching from the default codec to a lower bitrate one thinking maybe the stream was getting throttled somewhere in the middle but same result. the rig itself is an IC-7300 and the SDR feed is coming off a separate RTL-SDR dongle running as a panadapter basically. RemoteHams is linking them together through their server infrastructure or at least thats how i understand it working. anybody run into something similar, wondering if its a server side thing or if i need to look harder at my router config out there.

im kind of in the same boat as you were before this, been going to the monthly ARES meetings and doing the weekly net but havent been activated yet. didnt realize you could run packet from the shelter like that, i thought most of the shelter work was just voice. is that something your EC specifically set up or is it more standard than i think? maybe i should ask about getting my winlink stuff dialed in before i get called up

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and honestly not sure if im overcomplicating things or if this is actually the way to go. basically i have a pi zero w sitting on my desk doing nothing and i figured i could use it to run flrig, feed into cloudlog, and maybe do some basic rig control over wifi to my ic-7300 since it has that usb serial interface built in already. the actual connection part wasnt too bad once i got the right usb otg adapter sorted, and flrig sees the rig fine most of the time. my problem is the pi zero just doesnt have enough horsepower to also run wsjt-x without turning into a space heater and dropping frames or whatever the digital mode equivalent of that is. so now im thinking maybe i split it — use the zero just for logging relay and rig control stuff, and keep wsjt-x on my main shack PC like before. has anyone done something like this where you have a dedicated little linux box just handling the background automation stuff but not trying to do the heavy lifting for dsp? feels like it should work but im curious if theres a cleaner way to wire it all up. also kinda want to eventually add an arduino to read SWR from my antenna tuner and log that automatically but thats a whole other rabbit hole i havent fallen down yet.

Yeah the ARRL net directory is honestly hit or miss, youre not imagining it. A lot of those listings havent been updated in years. What i usually do is check the Amateur Radio Newsline site and also the W5YI net directory — that one tends to be a bit more current. Also honestly just asking in a local club, someone always knows whats active on what frequency and what days. For special event stations specifically, the ARRL has a page for that too but the QRZ forums are actually pretty good — people post upcoming events there and someone usually knows the operating schedule. DX-World dot net is another one i check. The thing with special events is they dont always stick to the published hours so i usually try to work them on multiple days if i can. Dont stress too much about it, after a while you just kind of build up a mental list of nets you like and it gets easier.

oh man i just went through this exact thing like three months ago. i used the AE7Q website to search for available calls before i even applied, way easier than trying to do it through the FCC site directly. you can filter by district and call format and see whats actually open. just a heads up though, some calls look available but might be in a holding period if the previous holder recently became a silent key, so double check before you get too attached to a specific one

so i finally got around to building a proper 40m dipole instead of using that random wire ive had strung up forever. cut each leg to roughly 33.5 feet based on the 468/f formula, used some 14 gauge stranded wire i had leftover from a house project, and fed it with RG-8X through a basic 1:1 choke balun i wound myself on a FT-240-43 core. hung it as an inverted V with the apex at about 35 feet off an old pine tree and the ends tied off to fence posts. got it tuned pretty well across most of the band with the MFJ-259 showing around 1.4:1 at 7.150 which im happy with. but the feedpoint situation is bugging me a little — i just used a PL-259 chassis connector in a project box with some silicone around the edges. it rained pretty hard sunday and i noticed some weird readings afterward, wondering if moisture got in or if thats just normal variation with weather changes. also curious if anyone has opinions on weatherproofing the feedpoint better, i've seen people use self-amalgamating tape but also coax seal and im not sure which is worth the effort

so ive been a ham for about 12 years mostly doing HF stuff, some 2m weak signal occasionally, and i keep reading about EME and it seems like the kind of thing i want to try before i get too old to climb towers lol. problem is every time i start researching the antenna requirements i kind of go cross-eyed. like i get that youre bouncing signal off the moon and the path loss is something like 250-260 dB depending on frequency which is just an insane number to even think about, but then i start reading about array sizes and preamp noise figures and it starts feeling like youre either all-in with a 4x4 yagi array and a kW or youre not doing it at all. im working with a decent sized yard and i could realistically put up a 2-element or maybe 4-element yagi for 2m. got a pretty solid IC-9700 already and i know the IC-9700 has a sequencer built in which is nice. my main question i guess is — is single yagi EME actually doable these days or is that just a myth that gets passed around? i know JT65 and now Q65 have changed things quite a bit for weak signal work but im not sure if a single 9-element yagi or something like that is actually getting through or if people are just saying it to be encouraging. anyone actually done contacts with a modest setup on 144?