The DXer

honestly the antenna situation is what stops most people before they even get to the operating skill part. you really do need separate antennas and some kind of bandpass filtering or you will toast something, or at minimum get such horrible IMD that your audio is useless. the ICE or 4O3A bandpass filters are what most people run, they're not cheap but they work. using the 7300 and 570 together is doable but you'll want to keep them on different bands — like one on 20 the other on 40 — rather than trying to run same-band SO2R which is a whole other level of complexity. as for the operating side, the way it actually works in practice is more like... you set a CQ macro running on radio 1, and while you're waiting for calls you're tuning around on radio 2 looking for mults. when you find one you work it between your own CQs. if the mult shows up right during a pileup on your run frequency then yeah sometimes you let a call or two go, it's a judgment call based on how rare the mult is. the rate hit is real but if it's a new one you need you take it. after maybe a full contest season of doing it your brain starts to partition things more naturally but the first few contests you'll feel completely scattered. worth it if you're serious though, the score difference is significant.

so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im stuck somewhere around 10-12wpm and it feels like hitting a wall. when i started i was doing the koch method with just two characters and that worked great, got up to 5wpm pretty quick and felt good about it. but somewhere around 10 it just... stopped feeling like progress? im using lcwo.net most days, maybe 15-20 minutes in the morning before work. i know people say consistency matters more than long sessions and i think ive been pretty good about that. but the plateau is real and i dont know if im doing something wrong or if this is just how it goes for everyone. my main issue is i still sometimes hear a letter and have to think about it for half a second before i copy it, and by then ive missed the next one. with easy common letters like E and T im fine but something like X or Q and my brain just locks up. anyone been through this and got out the other side? how long did it realistically take you to get comfortable at 20wpm, not just technically able to do it but actually comfortable receiving in a QSO?

yeah the lag on QRZ spots is real, its pulling from the same underlying cluster network but it definitely doesnt refresh as aggressively as going straight to a cluster telnet connection or using DXwatch directly. for casual use DXwatch is fine honestly. for filtering by your location the thing you want to look into is setting your gridsquare in whatever tool youre using so it can calculate beam headings and gray line stuff relative to you. DXwatch has some filter options but honestly i ended up just running a telnet connection into a cluster through Ham Radio Deluxe back when i used that, it lets you set up filters server-side so spots that are way off your beam or on bands that are dead just dont show up at all. takes a little setup but once its going its pretty slick. dont worry too much about DXKeeper yet, thats a whole rabbit hole. get comfortable with the basics first and then if you get serious about DXCC chasing it'll start making more sense why people use it.

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into the tuesday night 2m net on the local repeater last week. ive been licensed for about 4 months and mostly just listened but figured it was time to actually get on and say something. anyway i completely blanked on what to do when the net control called for check-ins. i keyed up at the wrong time, stepped on someone else (sorry whoever that was), and then when i finally got through i gave my callsign in the wrong order i think? like i said my name first and then my call instead of call then name. net control was super nice about it but i still felt like an idiot afterward. is there like a standard format most nets use for check-ins or does it vary? and how do you know when its your turn if multiple people check in at the same time? i genuinely could not tell who net control was acknowledging half the time. just want to do better next time.

so ive been messing around on 15m the past couple weeks and its been all over the place. like tuesday afternoon i was hearing Japan S9 with no problem, worked a couple JAs no sweat, then yesterday same time of day and same antenna and it was dead as a doornail. checked the solar flux index and it was sitting around 145 which i thought was pretty decent but i guess the K index had spiked up to like 4 or 5 at some point. anyway im still pretty new to understanding how all this stuff ties together. i get the basic idea that higher solar flux is generally better for the higher bands and higher K index messes things up, but is there like a rule of thumb people use for when its worth even bothering to try 15 or 10? or do you just kind of check the DX cluster and see whos getting spotted and go from there? ive been using dxmaps.com which seems pretty good but not sure if theres something better

honestly FT8 took a huge chunk of the casual operators away from SSB, thats just reality at this point. i still get on voice but its mostly contests and nets now, the random ragchew thing is pretty rare. kind of sad but what can you do

so i've been a technician for about 8 months now and joined our county ARES group back in the spring mostly because the club president said it was a good way to get more operating time and meet people. went to the monthly nets, did the ICS-100 and 200 online courses like they asked, figured that was basically it for a while. then last month we had actual flooding in the county and our EC called an activation. i honestly wasnt sure what to expect at all - like i knew the theory of what ARES does but actually showing up at the EOC with my HT and a notepad felt kind of overwhelming at first. there were maybe 6 or 7 of us and the more experienced guys seemed to just... know what to do already. ended up spending about 4 hours passing traffic between the EOC and a shelter that had lost its phone connectivity. nothing glamorous but it felt real in a way that just doing nets never does. anyway i guess my question is - for people who do this regularly, how long did it take before activations felt comfortable rather than chaotic? and is there anything specific i should be practicing or studying that actually helps when things are live

that JA opening sounds awesome, ive been trying to work japan for months and keep missing it. what time of day was that roughly and what were you running power wise? im only on 100w and a wire antenna so wondering if i even have a shot or if i need to upgrade stuff first. also whats a good solar flux number to look for before bothering to try 15m

honest answer — it takes most people a few months of consistent daily practice to get to around 5 wpm where you can actually make a slow QSO, and then getting to 10-15 where things start feeling comfortable is more like 6 months to a year depending on how much you put in. some guys get there faster but i think the two week claims are either exaggerating or they had prior exposure. for actually learning the characters the Koch method is probably the most recommended approach right now and LCWO.net is free and uses that method, you learn two characters at full speed and add more as you get them. the idea is your brain learns it as sound patterns not dit-dah counting which matters a lot later. theres also the Morse Trainer app which is decent for mobile practice. honestly dont overthink the key situation yet, just get the characters in your head first, you can tap on your leg or a desk to practice sending and it still helps. the main thing everyone says and its true is daily practice even just 10-15 minutes beats doing a long session once a week by a lot.

so ive been listening on HF for a few weeks now and people throw around all these abbreviated things constantly and i cant keep up. like QSL, QRM, QSY, QTH... i know QSL is like confirming a contact i think? but the others im totally lost on. and its not just Q codes either, people say 73 and i figured out thats like goodbye but then theres 88 which i only just heard for the first time yesterday and had no idea what that was. is there like a standard list somewhere or do you just kind of pick these up over time. also do people actually use all of them or just a handful regularly. seems like there must be hundreds of Q codes if you look them up but i never hear most of them on the air

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. my HOA situation is basically impossible so the only real option i have for HF is running a remote station somewhere else. a buddy offered to let me put up a dipole at his property about 40 miles away and ive been trying to figure out the best way to actually control it over the internet. ive looked at RemoteHams and it seems solid but i honestly cant tell if its worth paying for the client software when i could theoretically just cobble something together with an SDR setup, maybe an RTL-SDR or an Airspy on the receive side and then figure out TX separately. the problem is the TX side is where things get complicated obviously — you cant just slap an SDR on it and call it a day. has anyone actually used RemoteHams for a long term setup like this? im curious how the latency feels during an actual QSO, like is it workable for SSB or are we talking basically digital modes only. also wondering about the linking side — does it play nice with stuff like Echolink or is that a whole separate rabbit hole

yeah what he said about the offset is important, i forgot about that when i started too and was confused for like a week lol. also just to add — if the repeater has a timeout timer and youre keying up and just sitting there without talking it might be cutting you off before you even finish. some repeaters have pretty short timers like 3 minutes. just something to be aware of, probably not your issue but worth knowing

so i finally participated in a full SET exercise with my local ARES group and wow there was a lot more going on than i expected. for context i got my general about 8 months ago and joined the group mostly because i wanted to do something useful with the hobby beyond just ragchewing, which is fine but i wanted more structure i guess. the scenario was a prolonged power outage affecting the county EOC and surrounding served agencies — hospitals, red cross shelter, that kind of thing. we had to stand up a net from scratch and pass simulated health-and-welfare traffic while also handling some ICS-213 message forms that had to get relayed to a neighboring county. the biggest thing i took away honestly was how much slower everything goes when you're doing it for real (even simulated real) versus just talking on the repeater normally. we had a guy at the hospital site who kept breaking in out of turn, not his fault he's new, but it really showed how net discipline kind of falls apart under pressure. also our net control lost track of who had checked in maybe 20 minutes in and we had no backup log going. small thing but it snowballed. curious if anyone else has done these and what caught you off guard the first time. feels like no matter how much you read about it you still learn something you didn't expect when it's actually happening.

yeah the tradeoff you're describing is basically the whole game with remote ops. RemoteHams is fine if you want something that just works and you dont want to deal with NAT traversal and port forwarding and all that, but the moment you want to do something slightly outside what their client supports you're kinda stuck. i ran RCForb for about 8 months on a IC-7300 at a club site and it was solid for casual operating but the audio compression artifacts got to me on weak signal stuff, not terrible but noticeable. the DIY VPN route is where most serious remote guys end up eventually. i use wireguard now instead of OpenVPN and the overhead is much lower, makes a real difference on the audio path. for the SDR side i actually run both — the RSP for monitoring and the main rig for TX, and i bridge them with a little audio routing on the remote machine so i can use SDR Console as a panadapter while the rig handles the actual contacts. takes some messing around to get the audio levels right but once its dialed its really nice. the echolink thing is interesting but i never went down that road, feels like a different use case to me. echolink is more about linking repeaters and having a presence on a node, not really the same as remote HF control. unless you mean something else by the linking idea?

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i keep reading about how people who know cw say its like this whole other level of ham radio, like they talk about it the way some guys talk about getting their first hf contact. anyway i decided i want to learn it even though theres no license requirement anymore obviously, just feels like something i should know. problem is i have no idea where to start. like do i learn the alphabet first just visually and then learn to hear it, or do you just dive into audio from day one? i downloaded like three different apps and theyre all doing different things and i dont know which approach is actually going to work. one of them has me copying random letters and another one wants me to start with just E and T and build from there. also how long does this realistically take, im not trying to be a speed demon just want to be able to have a slow qso someday