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

14 gauge stranded is what i use for everything, works great dont overthink the wire gauge too much. only thing id say is double check your actual wire length after cutting because stranded wire can stretch a tiny bit when you pull tension on it putting it up and ive had resonance shift a couple hundred khz on me before. easy enough to trim if you need to.

I had the same frustrating thing happen during a DX expedition last month, VP9 was on and i kept seeing spots on the cluster but just could not pull them out of the noise on 17m. ended up catching them the next morning totally by accident when i was just checking the rig before work. sometimes the path just isnt there from your QTH even when other people are working them fine, takeoff angle from a vertical vs a beam makes a big difference too depending on the distance

5 contacts is a valid activation, dont sweat it. ive had summits where i barely scraped 4 and was just happy to get off the mountain before dark. the EFHW thing is real though, i switched to a linked dipole setup and it made a huge difference for getting the wire up and staying up. also a small slingshot and some fishing line is a game changer for trees that dont want to cooperate

yeah the ICS courses are pretty much standard at this point, at least in my experience. our group actually requires 100, 200, 700, and 800 before anyone gets put on the deployment roster. seems like a lot at first but they go fast and it genuinely does help you understand why things work the way they do at an EOC or event command post instead of just kind of standing there confused when the IC is talking about sections and branches also 6 hours at a rest stop in the sun sounds exactly like my first activation haha, bring more water than you think you need every single time

im pretty much in the same boat as you, been licensed about a year and just started messing with cluster spots a few months ago. one thing that helped me was the HamAlert website — you can set it up to notify you by email or push notification when a specific entity or callsign gets spotted, so you dont have to sit there watching a feed all day. it ties into the cluster network too so the spots are pretty timely. i found that way more useful than just refreshing DXwatch every few minutes honestly

The RSP1A is a genuine step up, not just spec sheet stuff. The big thing you'll notice on HF is the front end — it handles strong signals way better, the RTL just gets overwhelmed and you start seeing all kinds of artifacts that aren't real signals. I had the exact same problem on 40m, broadcast stations from Europe killing everything in a 500kHz radius basically. SDRuno is okay, I use it sometimes but honestly I end up back in SDR# or HDSDR most of the time out of habit. There's a SDRplay plugin for SDR# that works fine. The RSP1A also has a decent built-in preamp and selectable MW/FM notch filters which actually help a lot in practice. If you're doing serious HF work though, a bandpass filter or preselector is still going to help regardless of which SDR you're using — the band conditions plus local noise I have here still benefit from that. Short answer: yeah worth it if HF is your main thing.

yeah what he said about AE7Q, that site saved me so much headache when i was doing mine. i got my vanity call about two years ago and honestly the hardest part was just picking which one i wanted haha. i had like a list of 6 or 7 that i was okay with and ended up getting my second choice which was fine. one thing i'll add — some calls look available in ULS but they're actually in a cooling off period after the previous holder let them expire or passed away, and theres a two year wait on those i think. AE7Q will usually flag that. so dont get too attached to any one specific call until you verify its actually open and not in that window

I'm preparing for the upcoming CQ WW SSB and struggling with my FT-991A audio settings. Currently using the stock HM-151 mic and getting mixed signal reports - some say I sound great, others report thin/weak audio. My current settings: MIC gain at 60%, PROC at OFF, AMC at 50%. Power meter shows around 25-30W average on voice peaks. I know I should be seeing more like 35-40W average for proper modulation depth. Has anyone found optimal PROC and AMC settings for the 991A that give good punch without splatter? Also considering upgrading to a Heil HC-4 element - worth it for this rig?

oh man yeah 10m has been something else this cycle. i remember back in cycle 23 and 24 when the flux would occasionally spike into the 200s and the band would be open basically coast to coast to europe from the moment the sun came up. what youre seeing now is pretty much the real deal — when the sfi gets up above 150-160 consistently that band comes alive in a way that nothing else really matches. the short skip disappears and suddenly youre working dx with a rubber duck almost, not really but you know what i mean. as for whether we're at the peak, NOAA has been revising their solar max predictions upward for the last year or so. some people are saying we might already be past it, others think theres still another year of good conditions. honestly nobody really knows for sure, the sun does what it wants. just get on and work it while its good because 10m at the bottom of the cycle is basically a nice empty parking lot with nobody home.

so anyway i finally got it working after like three weeks of banging my head against it. built a direct conversion receiver for 40m, based loosely on the Sudden design but i kinda went off script with the LO section because i had a VXO setup already from another project and figured why not. pulls in SSB pretty well actually, CW is great, but theres this low frequency hum that i cannot shake no matter what i do. tried different bypass caps on the supply rail, tried a separate regulated supply, even tried running it off batteries to rule out the wall wart and the hum is still there just a tiny bit quieter on batteries so maybe its not totally a supply issue? the audio amp is just an LM386 which i know people have opinions about but its what i had in the junk box. wondering if the hum is getting in through the input stage somehow or if its the mixer, its a diode ring i wound myself on a binocular core. RF shielding is minimal right now, just an open pcb on the bench. i dunno, any ideas appreciated because it drives me nuts to sit and listen to 60hz on top of everything