Sarah Mitchell

hey welcome to the hobby, youre doing fine honestly. for most local 2m voice nets you pretty much just say your callsign phonetically and wait — some nets also want your name and maybe signal report or location but the net control will usually ask if they want more. every net is a little different so just listen to how other people check in before your turn and copy what they do, that works 99% of the time. the lighthouse thing is almost certainly the annual lighthouse weekend event, they run it every August. special event stations are basically just regular contacts except somebody somewhere went out and set up a station at a lighthouse (or whatever the event is) and they're handing out contacts to people. you log it like any other qso. the award side of it usually means you collect confirmations from a certain number of those stations, there's a website where you submit your log. just make the contact and get a qsl or lotw confirmation and you're set. honestly it's a lot of fun and there are usually a ton of stations active so the bands get pretty lively that weekend.

yeah the privileges table for technicians is honestly one of the more confusing things to parse when you first look at it. the short version is that techs do get some HF access — on 10 meters you can do phone (voice) from 28.300 to 28.500 MHz and you also get some CW privileges a bit lower down on that band. and then there's a tiny sliver on 40m and 15m but only for CW, no phone there. so your club contact was right about that. the ARRL website has a privileges chart thats way easier to read than the actual part 97 text, just search for technician privileges and you'll find it pretty quick. as for power limits, the general limit is 1500 watts PEP but as a tech on those HF segments i believe you're limited to 200 watts on 10m phone, and honestly at your stage that probably doesn't even matter since most radios you'd be starting with run way less than that anyway. the FCC doesn't have enforcement agents sitting around monitoring every frequency all day but the ham community does self-police to some extent, and getting caught operating outside your privileges is a real thing that can happen especially if someone files a complaint

so i finally decided to take the plunge and try working some of the linear transponder birds after watching a few youtube videos about it. picked up a cheap handheld yagi setup and been using gpredict on my laptop to track passes. my question is about the doppler correction because honestly i dont fully get how people manage to tune both uplink and downlink at the same time while also pointing the antenna and not fall over like on AO-73 for example, the passband is only what, 30khz or so? and the doppler shift is way more than that over a full pass so if i'm not constantly retuning i'm going to be outside the transponder completely right? i've been using a FT-818 and just manually adjusting but it feels like i'm chasing my tail the whole time. is there some trick to this or do people just get used to it with practice? also does anyone run separate radios for uplink and downlink or is that overkill for a beginner trying to get their first contact

so i finally did my first real activation last weekend at a state park about an hour from my house, K-4882 if anyone knows the area. ive been hunting parks for about 6 months and kept telling myself id get out there and activate one and i just never did it. anyway i finally went out saturday morning with my KX2 and a random wire i threw up in a nearby tree and... yeah it was a mess at first. took me almost 45 minutes to get a decent SWR on 40m because the ground was really dry and i think my counterpoise situation wasnt great. ended up making 11 contacts before the battery started acting weird, which isnt even close to the 10 minimum but i was stressing about it the whole time. then i spotted myself on pota.app and the pile started coming in a little and i hit 10 and then squeaked out a couple more before i packed up. the thing is even though nothing went perfectly it was honestly one of the more fun operating experiences ive had. something about being out in the woods with a little radio just works for me. already planning the next one. anyone got tips for improving the antenna situation when the ground is dry like that? or just general first activation advice that you wish someone told you?

so i finally finished my first QRP rig build, went with the Pixie kit because everyone said it was a good starting point and honestly yeah it was pretty fun. took me a weekend and most of it worked first try which i was shocked about. im getting out a little but not sure if im doing everything right on the efficiency side of things. the thing is im running it off a 9v battery right now and i know thats not ideal, the output is probably somewhere around 200-300mw if im being honest. ive been reading about matching the antenna properly for QRP and i get the concept but in practice im not sure how much difference it makes at these power levels. like does a bad swr matter MORE at low power or less? i always assumed less but someone in another thread said the opposite and now im second guessing myself. also if anyone has done portable ops with something this small id love to hear how you set up. im thinking about taking it to the park next weekend with a wire antenna and just seeing what happens. any tips for field deployment without a lot of gear would be great

don't feel bad about that, honestly we've all done something similar when we were new. you're on the right track just by noticing and wanting to learn. most directed nets — which is what a regular check-in net usually is — are pretty structured and the net control is basically running the show. when they ask for checkins you just give your callsign, and when they ask for traffic or announcements that's really for stuff relevant to the whole group like club meeting reminders or emergency info. your HT programming question is totally valid it just belongs after the net or in a ragchew on the repeater some other time. the fact that net control handled it graciously and offered to help after close is honestly how it should work. a lot of elmers genuinely enjoy helping new hams, they just need the net to stay on track first. if you want to look up the basics, ARRL has a pretty readable rundown on net procedures but honestly just keep checking in and you'll absorb most of it just from listening to how other people do it.

you're gonna be fine, honestly the hardest part is usually just getting the antenna up in the trees lol. one thing i'd say is post a spot for yourself as soon as you're set up and have signal, even before you make any contacts. you can do it through the SOTAwatch app or just text SOTA SMS if you dont have data up there. the chasers will find you pretty quick once youre spotted, especially on a weekend morning. 40m is worth having with you if the wire isnt too much extra weight. 20m can be hit or miss depending on propagation and sometimes you get up there and 20m is just dead or really noisy and 40m saves the day. i usually bring both and just use whichever end of my linked dipole i need. also make sure your alert time is in UTC not local time, thats a mistake people make all the time and then the chasers are looking for you an hour off.

so ive been chasing a pretty rare one for a while now, not gonna say which entity but it was a short window DXpedition and the pileup was absolutely brutal. like genuinely one of the worst ive dealt with in maybe 10 years of serious DXing. thought id write up what actually worked vs what didnt because i see a lot of bad advice floating around on this stuff. first thing that actually helped was listening way more than i was transmitting. sounds obvious but i spent a good 20 minutes just watching where the op was pulling people from before i even keyed up. he had a pattern, maybe not totally consistent but enough to get a feel for it. was working maybe 5-7 up most of the time but occasionally dipping to 3 up when the rate slowed. once i figured that out i stopped throwing my call out blind and started placing it more deliberately in that window. second thing, and this is more controversial i guess, i dropped my power a little. running full legal limit into a stack was just contributing to the mess honestly. a lot of people think more watts = more chance of getting through but in a really dense pileup with hundreds of stations it mostly just adds to the noise floor on their end. timing and placement matter way more than that last 3db. also ran split properly on the rig, had the vfo tracking set so i wasnt accidentally drifting. seen so many people get this wrong and theyre calling on the DX frequency without realizing it. the dx op was pretty clearly ignoring anything that wasnt in the right window anyway. ended up getting through on maybe my 8th or 9th attempt once i dialed all that in. not fast but way better than the hour of random calling i was doing before i stopped and thought about it.

Just got my first mobile rig - an Icom ID-5100 dual band. I'm planning to mount the radio body under the passenger seat and run the control head up to the dashboard. My main concerns are proper power wiring (should I go directly to the battery with an inline fuse?) and antenna grounding. The antenna mount will be on a painted luggage rack - do I need to scrape off the paint or run a separate ground wire? Any installation tips from experienced mobile operators would be appreciated!

so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and everyone is throwing around all these codes and abbreviations and i can barely keep up. like i get QSO is a contact and QTH is location but then someone will say something like QRM or QSB or TNX es 73 and i kinda piece it together from context but i dont really know if im right is there like an actual list somewhere that people use or do you just kind of absorb it over time? also some of the CW guys seem to use even more shorthand like GE and GM and stuff, are those separate from Q codes or is it all mixed in together. just trying not to sound like a complete idiot when i finally get on the air

oh man i remember that feeling, dont sweat it too much honestly. most nets especially local club ones are used to new folks stumbling a bit and net control has usually seen it all. the general thing with most nets ive been on is you just give your callsign when they call for check-ins, then wait for them to come back to you before you say anything else. some nets specifically ask for callsign and name together from the start but they'll usually announce that before calling for check-ins. the "please stand by" thing — yeah that was probably for you but it's not a big deal, you learn the timing by feel after a while. trying to find the gap on a net with lots of stations and varying signal levels is genuinely tricky especially on a new repeater you're not used to. and checking in with nothing further is completely fine, like totally normal. a lot of people do exactly that. some nets are just a roll call with a bit of chit chat after and nobody expects you to have a traffic message or some big announcement. just being there and saying hi is the point half the time.

im actually trying to get our club to do a table this year, we havent in a while and i think its a good way to get new members. still trying to convince the club president its worth the hassle lol. if we end up going ill post here

first thing id check is whether your symbol and path are actually being decoded correctly at the first digi. sometimes what looks like a relay is actually just aprs-is injecting your packet back in from an igate somewhere and it only looks like it went through the digi. pull up the raw packets on aprs.fi and look at the path trace, youll see if WIDE1-1 actually got decremented to WIDE1* which would show it was actually digipeated vs just seen directly by an igate. also 50 watts with a mag mount honestly might not be as good as you think depending on your ground plane situation. mag mounts on a truck cab can be pretty decent but if the antenna isnt centered or the cab geometry is weird youll lose a few db you didnt expect to lose. not saying thats it but worth ruling out. whats your packet rate set to, are you beaconing smart or fixed interval

4 contacts is exactly the minimum so yeah it absolutely counts, congrats on the first one. the wind thing is real, i ruined a perfectly good afternoon on a summit in Colorado because i didnt bring enough layers and just gave up after 2 contacts. now i always check the summit weather specifically not just the town at the bottom for the antenna i switched to a random wire with a 9:1 unun and an autotuner, way less fiddling around. the linked dipole is great but when youre cold and frustrated its just more stuff to deal with

i went through the whole debate and ended up just getting a better mag mount with a bigger base plate, like one of those 6 inch diameter ones. helped the slipping problem a lot and i didnt have to touch the truck. not saying the NMO isnt better because it probably is but depending on how long you keep the vehicle it might not be worth the resale headache for some people. just a different way to look at it.

The traditional methods most hams use are often the slowest and most frustrating approaches to learning code. I'd strongly recommend switching to Koch method - start at 20 WPM character speed with slower effective speed. Those who get past 10 WPM do so because they've developed copying as a reflex rather than thought.

the timing/rhythm thing is real and i think its massively underrated. ive noticed the same thing on a lot of the big dxpeditions, the ops get into a groove and if you can sync to it youre basically halving the randomness. some of the well-run operations like the recent ones out of the central pacific, their ops are incredibly consistent and once you find the pattern its almost mechanical. the split listening window thing is also spot on. that 5 up designation is almost meaningless in a huge pileup, everyone piles into the bottom khz of the range and the smart move is to find the quieter water higher in the split. ive had good luck going maybe 7-8 up when listed 5-10, theres way less competition up there even though its clearly in range. you do risk the op not hearing you as well depending on their antenna situation but its a tradeoff worth making when the bottom is just a wall of noise. one thing i'd add is antenna polarization matters more than people admit. had a buddy running similar power to me on the same path to a carribbean entity, he had a vertical i had a yagi, his vertical was actually outperforming me into that specific path that day. sometimes you just gotta accept propagation is doing weird stuff and the 100w guy with a vertical at the right angle is beating your 1kw beam.

the RF isolation thing is real and dont underestimate it. i fried the front end on my second radio the first time i tried SO2R because i thought my bandpass filters were good enough and they werent, not with the antennas i had. ended up with two radios that were 40ft apart on the same tower and still had issues until i got the stubs sorted out for what its worth though even just using the second radio to passively monitor a second band while youre running on the first one is useful, you dont have to be full dual-transmit SO2R to get some of the benefit. just having headphones on one ear for the second band so you can hear when a mult shows up is something

this is actually really helpful to read, im about to do my first mobile install in my truck and have been kinda nervous about it. the coax routing part especially, everyone makes it sound easy but then you watch youtube videos and its never as clean as they make it look. did you have to drill for the NMO or did you use a lip mount or something?

im using a similar setup but with a different radio and honestly the latency for SSB voice is the main reason i mostly just use it for monitoring and digital modes now. for FT8 and JS8Call it really doesnt matter much since you're not doing real time back and forth anyway. if you really need low latency remote voice operation you might want to look at something like a Raspberry Pi running a dedicated link with maybe AllStarLink or even just a simple audio bridge, some guys are doing really clean remote setups that way with sub 200ms round trip. RemoteHams is great for what it is but i think its more optimized for the SDR monitoring use case than like actual contesting or rag chewing remotely