Sarah Mitchell

so i passed my general last spring and joined the local ARES group maybe two months after that. been going to the monthly nets and training sessions pretty regularly and i thought i had a decent handle on things but now they're asking me to actually serve as a net control operator during a real activation (county is doing a full scale disaster drill with the EOC next weekend) and im kinda freaking out a little if im being honest the training nets are one thing because everyone knows its practice and if you fumble a message or lose your place on the ICS-213 nobody really cares. but the idea of doing it for real with actual served agency people listening and county emergency management watching... i dont know. i feel like i know the phonetic alphabet and message handling well enough but what if i freeze up or something goes sideways with the radio setup anyone else been through this first activation jitters thing? does it actually get easier or is it always a little stressful? i just want to do a decent job and not embarass myself or the group

so ive been wanting to do a proper homebrew build for ages and finally sat down last weekend and put together a crystal set basically following the ARRL handbook design but with some mods i found on a old QRP forum thread from like 2009. wound my own coil on a pvc pipe former, about 60 turns of 26awg enamel wire, and used a 1N34A germanium diode i had rattling around in a parts drawer. it picks up a few AM broadcast stations which is cool but the selectivity is pretty terrible — two of the stronger stations are bleeding into each other pretty bad. i added a small variable cap i pulled from an old transistor radio to tune it and that helped a bit but not much. using a long wire out the window, maybe 15 meters or so, and a ground to the water pipe. not sure if the coil needs more turns or if the problem is just the antenna being unbalanced or what. anyone actually built one of these that can point me in a direction? i know its a simple circuit but clearly im missing something

so i was just messing around on 10 meters yesterday afternoon, not really expecting much since conditions have been kind of hit or miss lately, and all of a sudden the band just lit up. i was hearing stations from south america, europe, a couple of JA stations which i wasnt expecting at all. worked a CT3 and a PY5 back to back which honestly made my whole week. solar flux index had been creeping up the last few days and i guess it finally pushed things over the edge. anyway thats not even why i posted. i saw over on the Icom USA page that they teased something new coming — looks like it might be related to the IC-7300 line but nobody really knows yet. theres a bunch of speculation on the usual forums but nothing confirmed. anybody heard anything more concrete about what theyre actually announcing? the hamvention announcement window is coming up so maybe thats where theyll drop it. just curious if anyone has more info than i do because i feel like im always the last to know about this stuff.

honestly the short answer is just use phonetics whenever there's any doubt the other station can copy you clearly. on a quiet local repeater with full quieting yeah people just rattle off letters and its fine. but on HF especially when signals are marginal or theres QRM, full NATO phonetics every time for callsigns at minimum. the mixing thing youre describing isnt the end of the world but it can actually cause more confusion than just picking one and sticking with it. if you say kilo four and then suddenly switch to just X Y it kind of throws people off. the phonetics exist because letters like B, C, D, E, G, P, T, V all sound way too similar under noise. once you get a feel for propagation and signal reports youll know pretty instinctively when to go full phonetic and when its overkill

took my General last spring after being a tech for like 3 years, wish i had done it sooner tbh. the theory questions tripped me up at first but i just kept doing practice exams on hamstudy until i was consistently hitting like 85% and then i felt okay about it. took maybe 3 weeks of studying maybe 20 mins a day. one thing nobody really told me before i upgraded was that even after you pass you kinda have to figure out how HF actually works, like propagation and when to use which band and all that. its a whole other learning curve but a fun one. 17m has been my favorite lately, less crowded than 20m

so ive been on 40m almost every evening this week and honestly it feels quieter than usual, not like quiet as in less noise but quiet as in less activity? hard to explain. used to be i could tune around and find a ragchew pretty easy but lately its like everyone disappeared. maybe its propagation doing something weird or maybe im just hitting the wrong times. been calling CQ a few times and getting nothing back which is always a little deflating. anyway not really a question just wondering if others are noticing the same thing or if its just my corner of the world being weird right now.

im in basically the same boat, built a 40m rig last year from a design in SPRAT and it took me forever to figure out why my output was lower than expected, turned out i had one of my toroids wound wrong, like the number of turns was off by two and it was killing the efficiency. might be worth double checking all your coil counts especially if you substituted anything from the original design. also 500mw making a 200 mile contact is honestly pretty cool, i remember my first qrp qso felt way bigger than any of the 100w contacts i'd made before haha

honestly the extra portions of the bands are genuinely less crowded, that part is real. on 40m especially during the evenings the general portion gets wall to wall signals and if you can drop down a bit it does make a difference. that said if you're mostly ragchewing you might not care that much. the exam itself is not as bad as it looks. the math questions are harder if you actually try to understand the theory but a lot of people just memorize the pool and pass. i'm not saying that's the right way to do it but it works and the pool isn't going to change for a while. took me maybe six weeks of studying on and off using hamstudy.org and i passed first try. the actual operating privileges felt worth it to me after about a year of having the ticket but your mileage may vary depending on what you're into

congrats on the 100 confirmed, thats the fun part right there. so for Mixed DXCC, yeah all your modes pool together, thats the whole point of Mixed -- doesnt matter if its SSB, CW, FT8, whatever, it all counts toward that one endorsement. if you later want the phone endorsement specifically you'd need 100 confirmed on phone only, and same deal for CW. they're separate endorsements but Mixed just grabs everything. LoTW confirmations are treated exactly the same as paper QSLs for credit purposes, ARRL made that pretty clear years ago. actually most people submit purely via LoTW now, way easier than mailing a stack of cards in. you still pay the fee either way though. as for doing WAS and WAZ at the same time, honestly i'd say go for it. a lot of the contacts you're already making will cover multiple awards at once, youre gonna work state-side stations anyway so WAS kind of fills in naturally. WAZ is more of a grind, zone 1 (northwest territories/nunavut area) and zone 2 are definitely the rough ones like you said, and zone 40 down in antarctica shows up maybe twice a year if youre lucky.

I'm looking to get into conversational digital modes and torn between JS8Call and PSK31. I understand JS8Call has replaced PSK31 as the primary keyboard mode, though 20M PSK31 still has activity. JS8Call takes FT8's robustness but adds messaging and free-form text capability, while PSK31 offers narrow 31 Hz bandwidth and real-time typing. For someone new to digital conversations, which would you recommend? I've read JS8Call can be complex to set up but has better weak-signal performance.

so we finally did a full SET with our county ARES group saturday and honestly it went way better than i expected but also highlighted some stuff we really need to work on. the scenario was a prolonged power outage combined with a flood event that took out the repeater infrastructure, so we were operating mostly simplex and trying to pass formal NTS traffic to the EOC. the part that caught us off guard was how quickly people forgot net discipline when things got hectic. everyone wanted to talk at once, we had two people calling in with health and welfare traffic at the same time someone was trying to pass a formal message, it just got messy fast. our net control did a decent job but you could tell she wasnt used to managing that volume simultaneously. one thing that worked really well was having a designated liaison station at the EOC who was only handling traffic from the field teams — that single point of contact made a huge difference once we settled into it. we also learned that not enough of our members have practiced sending ICS-213 formatted messages over voice, like they know how to fill out the form but translating it to a proper voice transmission is its own skill. anyway wondering if anyone elses group has done similar exercises and what lessons came up for you. particularly curious if anyone has dealt with the transition from normal repeater ops to going full simplex during a drill.

congrats on passing the exam, the waiting is the worst part honestly. to answer your question — yeah the sequential process is basically just the FCC working through a pool of available callsigns in order based on your license class and district. so as a new tech you'd get whatever is next available in your call district, which is that number in the middle of most callsigns. you dont really have any say in it during the initial assignment. after that if you want something specific you can file a vanity application. the 1x2 2x1 stuff refers to the format — like a 1x2 is one letter prefix, one number, two letter suffix (W6AB for example) and a 2x1 is two letters, number, one letter which are the shorter ones that used to be reserved for extras. you have to have the right license class to qualify for certain formats so a technician cant just grab a 1x2 in most cases. on the fees thing, there is a $35 application fee now for vanity calls last i checked, the FCC brought that in a couple years ago. your initial sequential assignment should be free though as part of the license grant. double check the FCC ULS site for current fee info just to be safe since that stuff can change

the ridge is probably your real problem more than the antenna choice honestly. a higher collinear might help a bit if you can get it above the terrain obstruction but if the ridge is actually in the first fresnel zone youre just going to keep fighting it. a yagi with even modest gain pointed that direction would likely make a bigger difference than going from a x50 to something taller. i know you dont want to give up the omni but you could always put both up and use a switch, lot of guys do that. keep the collinear for general use and flip to the yagi when you want those specific repeaters. a 5 element for 2m is not that big a deal to mount and aim.

yeah what he said about the tone, just TX. i made the same mistake when i started and had the tone set on receive too which was actually causing me to miss some transmissions because my radio was filtering everything out lol. on the etiquette side of things -- the general rule i follow is if i call and nobody comes back, i just wait a few minutes and try again or honestly just monitor for a while first. if the repeater sounds dead quiet for like 20-30 minutes before you call theres probably not many people listening so dont take it personally. weekday evenings and weekend mornings tend to be busier on most club machines at least around here. also some repeaters have a timeout timer so if you talk for too long without unkeying the repeater cuts you off, worth knowing if you ever have a longer conversation going

so ive been doing contests semi-seriously for maybe 3 years now, usually single op on one radio, and i keep reading about SO2R and how guys are running 2 radios simultaneously to keep their rate up while searching for mults on the second radio. sounds great in theory but every time i try to wrap my head around the actual setup it feels like a part time job just to get the station ready before the contest even starts. my current setup is an IC-7300 and i just picked up a used TS-590SG, so technically i have two radios now. but the interlocking, the antenna switching, the audio routing... like i dont even know where to start. does anyone actually do SO2R with modest station equipment or is this really just for the guys with dedicated shacks and stacks of yagis? also wondering if the rate improvement is even noticeable if youre not already pulling 150+ QSOs/hr on a single radio. would love to hear from people who made the jump and whether it was actually worth it or just a rabbit hole

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, been talking about it forever and just kept putting it off. picked a local summit that was only a 4 pointer just to keep it low pressure, figured id bring the ft-818 and a simple end fed wire and see what happened the hike up wasnt bad at all maybe 45 minutes but i was carrying way more than i needed to, the radio, spare batteries, a whole bunch of coax i didnt even use, snacks for like 3 days... anyway got to the top and spent probably 20 minutes just trying to figure out where to throw the wire. ended up hanging it off a branch at a pretty bad angle and i think thats why my SWR was all over the place on 40m managed to get 4 contacts which is the minimum to qualify the summit so it counts officially, but two of those were the same guy chasing twice on different bands which i didnt realize was allowed until he told me. missed a couple calls because i wasnt used to pile-up style operating and fumbled through logging on paper in the wind next time im going to actually practice setting up the antenna at home first which sounds obvious but here we are. anyone have tips for getting a fast deployment sorted out? also whats a realistic antenna to bring that doesnt weigh anything but still performs decently on 40 and 20?

pretty classic symptom of one of the final transistors letting go, the RD70HVF1s in that rig have a reputation for going soft before they fail completely rather than just dying outright. the fact that receive is fine and it shows full power on the meter internally but nothing's actually getting out really points that direction. the internal power reading on those is measured before the finals so you can have the driver stage working perfectly and the finals half dead and the radio has no idea. before you pull it apart though, check the ALC voltage with a scope or even just a DC voltmeter on the ALC line while you key it up, if something upstream is going haywire with ALC it can throttle the output way down. had that happen on a buddys 897 once and it looked exactly like a final failure but ended up being a leaky cap on the ALC circuit. saved him like 80 bucks in parts. that said in my experience with the 857 specifically, its usually the transistors. Yaesu used to sell them direct but check RF Parts, they usually have them in stock.

yeah what he said about S&P is good advice. i did my first one two years ago and tried running way too early and just got frustrated sitting there calling CQ into the void. also get N1MM set up beforehand if you havent already, dont try to paper log it trust me. the zone map thing tripped me up too at first, just google CQ zones map and bookmark it, youll refer to it like 50 times the first contest oh also unrelated but if you ever get a chance to do a SOTA activation before or after the contest season its a completely different vibe but i think it actually made me better at quick exchanges because you kinda have to be efficient when guys are waiting in a pileup on a summit. anyway good luck this weekend

yeah what he said. also some nets have a specific format they want and it varies a lot from net to net so if you can find whoever runs it and just ask them directly before the next session, most net controls love when newer folks do that. shows you care about doing it right. i run a weekly simplex net and honestly the thing that matters most is just being patient and listening before you jump in. the rest you pick up pretty fast after a few weeks.

That 50ms delay sounds like audio buffering in ALSA. Try reducing buffer sizes in your audio config — I got it down to 10ms with proper tuning. Also consider real-time kernel for better timing precision.

so ive been trying to keep up with everything going on and its a lot right now. first off, anyone else been following the chatter about Icom teasing something at the next hamfest? saw a post on one of the facebook groups about it but couldnt find any solid info, just speculation mostly. someone mentioned a possible successor to the 7300 but i have no idea if thats real or just wishful thinking at this point. also completely separate thing — 10 meters has been absolutely insane this past week or so. i work mostly HF and i hadnt touched 10m in like two years because it was just dead every time i checked. fired it up Tuesday evening on a whim and the band was wide open, worked stations in Brazil, a couple in Europe, even got a reply from someone in Japan which i honestly did not expect. solar flux has been climbing and i think we might actually be hitting something close to a real cycle peak or at least close to it. anyway if anyone has actual info about new gear coming out or upcoming events id love to hear it. feels like a good time to be back in the hobby after a slow couple years.

Made the switch to Q65 six months ago and it's a significant improvement. In direct A/B tests with DL stations, Q65-60 consistently decodes signals that JT65 misses. The libration fading handling is noticeably better - contacts that would have taken multiple sequences with JT65 now complete in one or two.

On HF bands below 30 MHz, voice contacts are generally safe on the upper two-thirds of the band, while CW and data modes use the lower third. Great systematic approach! I'd add: Step 5 - Note any contest activity or special events that might affect normal band plan usage.

I've been running 75' of Cat6e between my control head and RF deck for six months now with zero issues. Connection via a home network allows flexible remote control and the control panel can be placed anywhere in the house as long as there is a LAN connection. Just make sure you use quality cable and keep it away from any high-power RF sources.

I highly recommend taking an online class with CW Academy - they have beginner courses that will get you operational in 8 weeks. Having structured lessons with an instructor makes a huge difference versus going it alone.