Ham Mountain

yeah the process is actually not too bad once you understand the structure. so the FCC does have preference groups and they go in order — the highest priority is if you're the previous trustee of a club that held the call, or a close relative of a deceased licensee who held it. after that it goes down through other categories and at the very bottom is just regular applicants like most of us. if multiple people in the same preference group apply for the same call during the same window, then yeah that subset goes to a random selection, but its not like the whole thing is a free for all lottery. as for waiting, there's no minimum hold time on your current license before you can apply for a vanity as far as i know, you just need a valid active license. and yes you can absolutely get a callsign from a different district than where you live, the number in a call doesnt have to match your location anymore, that rule hasnt been a thing for a long time. just be aware that if you pick something from like a 4 or 7 district and you're in the midwest people might ask about it on the air occasionally, not a big deal but just something to expect.

this is my first year even considering going, been licensed about 8 months and people keep telling me i have to go at least once. is it weird to go alone or do most people go with their club? i dont really have a local club yet im kind of between two of them and havent fully committed to either one

Just remember that some remote services like RemoteHamRadio explicitly state "If you do not hold a U.S. issued FCC license, you can obtain one" - they're assuming you have the proper license for the station location. The regulatory burden is on you as the control operator to ensure compliance with both jurisdictions. When in doubt, stick to CW and phone contacts without third party content.

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into the local Tuesday night net and i think i may have done something wrong. when the net control called for check-ins i just said my callsign but then someone else came back at the same time and i think we doubled and it was kind of a mess. net control sorted it out but i felt bad about it. also i wasnt sure when to say "over" vs just stopping talking. i noticed some people said it and some didnt. is there like a standard thing you're supposed to do? im still getting used to all this and dont want to be that guy who annoys everyone. been licensed about 3 months now and this was my second time on a net.

Yes! I've been amazed at the 10m openings this month. Yesterday I worked VK on just 5 watts with my end-fed wire. The cycle peak is definitely showing - haven't seen conditions this good since 2014.

yeah the ATU thing is real, the 7300s internal tuner has a pretty narrow matching range compared to some of the older rigs. i think its something like 16.7 to 150 ohms or somewhere around there which sounds fine on paper but end feds can be all over the place depending on frequency and how the counterpoise is behaving. lot of people just run an external tuner for anything sketchy and let the internal one handle the easy stuff. LDG makes a decent one that plays nice with Icom's AH-4 control line if you want to keep it automated. the touchscreen thing just takes a few weeks honestly, i still fat-finger the noise reduction when i mean to hit the filter button but its whatever. you get muscle memory eventually

I've built both and honestly, a simple tuner optimized for your specific antenna situation works better than a universal design. For random wires, consider a switchable L-network that can handle both high and low impedances. Much simpler to tune in the field!

Stock Yaesu rotor computer interface runs about $600 without cables, and Green Herron is similar price. Decided to try the K3NG Arduino solution instead. Using Arduino UNO R3 ($30) with Seeed Relay Shield ($20), plus proto board and MOSFET - total cost around $68. With Ham Radio Deluxe 5.0, the rotor turns smoothly and stops within +/- 1.0 degrees of target - exactly what I wanted for my setup. Had to adjust data rate to 9600bps for HRD compatibility since it doesn't support the default 115200bps, but now I can double-click anywhere on the planet and have automatic rotor pointing. Anyone else made the switch from commercial controllers? The K3NG firmware emulates Yaesu GS-232A/B and Easycom protocols and can easily interface with commercial rotator control units or serve as complete replacement.

okay so the thing that finally made it click for me after years of trying is just -- stop trying to memorize the dots and dashes. like seriously forget the visual pattern stuff. what you want to do is associate each letter with a sound, not a pattern on paper. the way i did it was with the koch method, which starts you with just two characters at full speed, like real speed not slow, and you dont move on until you can copy them reliably. there's a free program called lcwo.net that does exactly this and its honestly the best thing ive found. it feels painfully slow at first because youre just sitting there copying K and M over and over but it actually works. the idea is your brain learns the rhythm of each letter as a sound not a code you have to decode, and thats how experienced ops do it in their head. for how long to practice, short sessions every single day beats long sessions once a week by a lot. even 15 minutes is fine. and dont worry about the key yet, just work on receiving first, thats the hard part anyway

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually operate on 40 meters. i know there are band edges and i know you're not supposed to go below like 7.125 or something but honestly the band plan stuff is really confusing to me. like is the band plan the actual law or is it just a suggestion? and i keep hearing people say 'stay away from the band edge' but how close is too close? my radio shows 7.000 to 7.300 as the whole band but i know i cant use all of that as a general. somebody at the club meeting mentioned something about the region 2 band plan but i didnt totally follow what he was saying. just trying to not step on anyones toes or worse get in trouble with the FCC

welcome to wwff, its a great program and honestly i like it more than SOTA sometimes because you dont have to haul yourself up a mountain haha. yes 44 QSOs is still the threshold for a full activation, that hasnt changed in a while. some folks aim for 44 SSB and then throw in some digital if theyre having a slow day but it all counts. for logging you can upload to the WWFF logbook directly via ADIF, pretty straightforward. the site has instructions but basically just export from your logging software and upload. i use HAMRS in the field on my tablet and it works well. as for spotting -- the POTA spotting system is different from WWFF technically but in practice a lot of wwff activators use wwff.cc/spots or just post on the wwff facebook group before they go out. some people self spot on dx cluster too which works fine. you might also check if there is an activators group for your country since the program has national coordinators who can be really helpful with local stuff. have fun out there, the nature references add a really nice reason to just go sit in the woods for a few hours with a radio

so i've been wanting to get into LEO satellite work for a while and last weekend i finally sat down and actually tried it instead of just reading about it. been licensed for about 6 years but always kind of ignored the sat stuff because it seemed like a lot of moving parts to get right all at once. anyway i set up gpredict on my laptop and had it tracking AO-73 (funcube-1) and the pass was pretty decent, like 65 degrees max elevation so i figured that was a good first shot. running an arrow antenna handheld with my FT-817 and a little HT for the uplink. i know some people do full duplex setups but i was just doing it handheld and monitoring my downlink on a separate SDR dongle through a laptop. the problem i kept running into was the doppler. i knew i had to manually tune but man it moves faster than i expected especially near AOS and LOS. i was chasing my own signal all over the place and i dont think i ever actually had a clean QSO, heard a couple stations but couldnt tell if i was in the passband or not. gpredict showed my corrected frequency but translating that to what i actually tune on the 817 mid-pass while holding the arrow was... a lot. is there a trick to managing doppler on a handheld setup like this? and also — how do you tell if you're actually getting into the bird when you cant hear yourself? the linear transponder is inverting right so LSB up USB down or is it the other way around, i always get confused on that.

Try rocking back and forth between tip length adjustments and your matching method to find that perfect 1:1. This isn't as hard as it sounds but is crucial to master if you're building yagis from scratch - nothing beats rolling your own. What's your driven element total length right now?

ok so i just got my technician like two months ago and ive been making contacts pretty regularly now, mostly on 2m but starting to get into HF a little. someone in my local club mentioned i should be uploading my logs to LoTW and also maybe eQSL but honestly im not totally sure what the difference even is or why you'd need both. like is one better than the other for awards? and do people still actually send physical QSL cards through the mail or is that basically a dead thing now i did make an account on eQSL already and uploaded a couple contacts but i havent heard back on any of them yet so i dont know if i did it right. LoTW seems a lot more complicated with the certificates and all that, kind of intimidating honestly. any advice would be great

the "always ready" thing is something a lot of people struggle with honestly. i went through like three versions of my kit before i stopped second guessing it. what helped me was just deciding it was done and leaving it alone except for a quarterly check where i top off the battery and make sure nothing walked off. for the non-radio stuff — printed frequency lists are huge, especially your local ARES/RACES nets and any served agency freqs you might need. a waterproof notepad is better than a regular logbook if you're outside in crappy weather. headlamp, a few granola bars, basic first aid stuff. sounds like boy scout nonsense but you'll want it at hour 6 of a deployment. for the laptop power question, a lot of guys run a small 12v to usb-c converter off the same battery. works fine for a chromebook or older thinkpad. some people add a second smaller battery just for the laptop so you're not draining your radio battery. depends how long you expect to be out. my kit has been through two actual deployments and one was almost 18 hours so the power planning really matters more than people think when they're first setting up

so ive been a tech for about a year and a half now mostly just doing vhf/uhf stuff, some APRS, worked a few satellites which was cool. but ive been listening to the HF bands on a little SDR dongle and honestly it sounds pretty amazing, especially 40m at night. just lots of conversations going on from all over. anyway im thinking about upgrading to General and i started looking at the question pool and some of it is kind of intimidating. the electrical theory stuff especially. like i remember some of it from when i took the Tech exam but General seems way harder on that front. resistors in parallel, impedance, all that. is it as bad as it seems or does it kind of click once you study for a bit? also what actually changes once you pass, like which HF bands can i use as a General? i know Extra gets you more privileges but i wasnt sure exactly what General opens up versus Tech. any tips on study resources would be helpful too, i was looking at hamstudy.org which seems decent

From our EmComm group's experience, set "Extra Time to forward through RMS" to at least 15 minutes during exercises. Documentation warns not to set this to zero minutes. Also consider that there is inherent delay in message delivery due to relaying when operating radio-only.

headphones. seriously everybody forgets headphones. when youre operating in a noisy environment like a shelter or an EOC with a bunch of people talking around you the speaker on the radio is basically useless, you'll miss half of what comes through. i learned that the hard way during a flood activation a few years back, borrowed a pair from another op and felt like an idiot for not having my own. also maybe a laminated card with your ICS forms or at least a quick reference for ICS-213, depends on what kind of ARES or CERT involvement you have. and snacks. people laugh but when you're sitting a 6 hour shift at a served agency and nobody thought about food it's not funny anymore. your kit sounds pretty solid though, the lifepo4 was a smart call. rough rule of thumb, at 25w on a typical operating cycle you're probably looking at 8-10 hours easy out of a 40ah pack, more if youre doing a lot of receive time.

im kind of in the same boat as you tbh, been dabbling with morse for maybe three months now. what helped me more than anything was just doing like 10-15 minutes every single day instead of trying to grind for an hour on weekends. consistency thing i guess. also theres a podcast called the CW podcast or something like that where they just send code at different speeds and you can listen while doing other stuff, i put it on during my commute sometimes still not confident enough to call cq but getting there i think

so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im stuck somewhere around 10-11wpm and it feels like the wall is real. started with the basics back in the spring, got through the alphabet pretty quick with some app called Morse Mania, and then jumped onto cwops stuff and some of the LCWO lessons. got comfortable enough at 5wpm that i passed my general (not that you need it anymore but still wanted it for my own satisfaction), now im trying to push up toward 20 because that seems to be where you can actually have a real QSO without it feeling like torture. my main question is how long did it realistically take people to get to 20wpm where you felt comfortable just jumping into a pile or ragchewing on 40m. i keep reading people say stuff like "copy what you hear dont write it down" and im trying but my brain just freezes when i miss a character and then i miss the next 3 while i panic about the first one. does that get better on its own or is there something specific that helped break through it also what speed do you set your practice tone at, ive been doing 15wpm character speed with 10wpm effective (farnsworth) and wondering if i should just rip off the bandaid and go full 15 effective

that SWR curve sounds completely normal for a 40m inverted V honestly. the lower apex angle and the legs drooping a bit actually broadens the bandwidth compared to a flat dipole, which is why you're seeing such a wide 2:1 window. nothing wrong with that at all, you didn't mess anything up. 58-62 ohms at the feedpoint for an inverted V checks out too, flat dipole in free space is theoretically 73 ohms but real-world inverted V with that apex height will pull it down toward 50, so coax is a pretty good match without even needing a balun in some cases. the choke balun you wound is fine for keeping common mode off the coax shield, definitely keep it, but the reason your SWR looks so good isnt because something is wrong its just because thats how dipoles behave. the end fed wire with a 9:1 unun is always going to be fussier because youre working against a bad impedance transformation and any little thing changes things. a resonant dipole fed with coax is just a more forgiving system. go operate it, youll probably like it.

so i passed my technician exam about three weeks ago and just got my callsign last week, KD9 something something i wont bore you with it lol. been lurking on 2m for like 10 days just too nervous to key up and say anything. last night i finally just did it, called CQ on a local repeater and this guy came back to me and we had like a 5 minute ragchew about nothing really, signal reports, weather, that kind of thing. my voice was literally shaking the whole time. he was super patient and walked me through the whole exchange which was great. anyway just wanted to say hi to the community and yeah i know its not a big deal to most of you but it felt huge to me. planning to study for general pretty soon so i can get on HF because thats really where i want to be eventually. anyone else remember their first contact being terrifying

I've been licensed for about 8 months now and keep hearing about this CQ WW DX Contest coming up. As a General with an IC-7300 and a dipole, should I even bother jumping in? It's apparently the largest Amateur Radio competition in the world with over 35,000 participants - sounds pretty intimidating for someone still learning the HF bands! What's the typical experience like for a new contester? Any advice on bands to focus on or times to operate?

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals. so the legal edge for phone on 40 is 7.175 but your carrier frequency has to be inside the band, and with USB your actual signal extends upward so thats fine, but the issue is if youre running USB near 7.175 your lower sideband components can spill below the edge. most people just stay above 7.178 or so to be safe, gives you a little cushion. the FCC rules are about occupied bandwidth not just carrier so technically your whole signal has to be within the allocation. the other thing is just the convention stuff — like cw ops really do get annoyed if you're running phone down in the cw segment even though as a general you technically have some of that. 7.125 to 7.175 is your phone subband as a general and most experienced guys just stay in there and dont push the edges. honestly just listen around first before transmitting anywhere you're not sure about

Take your time and don't rush it. I spent 3 months studying 1-2 hours per night and felt well prepared. You need 26 out of 35 questions correct (74%). The key topics are operating procedures, propagation, antennas, and RF safety. Practice tests are your friend!