The DXer

yeah what he said about the PTT, thats almost always the problem when i see people having this issue. also worth checking — some gateways that show up in the channel selector are actually offline or the sysop hasnt been running it lately. the map on winlink.org shows last heard times i think, might be worth looking at that before you spend hours debugging on a dead gateway. try a couple different ones if you can hit them on simplex.
one thing that helped me when i was learning this stuff was just joining a local ARES net that uses winlink, because then you have people who can actually tell you if they received your test message or not. kinda hard to know if its working otherwise unless you're emailing yourself through a different path

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.

so ive been chasing LEO sats for a few weeks now with FM birds and that went fine, but decided to try AO-73 last night since i saw a decent pass coming up, like 58 degrees max elevation which should be plenty. got my two VX-8DR handhelds set up, one for uplink on 435 and one for downlink on 145, using a pair of arrow yagis i built from that online calculator.
here's the thing — i could hear signals on the downlink, faint but definitely there, some SSB voices and what sounded like CW. but whenever i transmitted i couldnt hear myself come back through the transponder. read that you're supposed to tune the downlink while you transmit to find yourself and then keep adjusting for doppler but i just got nothing. i was putting out maybe 3-4 watts on the uplink which i thought was enough?
is there something about linear transponders im missing compared to FM? like do i need to be more precise on the uplink frequency or is 3-4 watts actually not enough for a handheld setup into a yagi? the pass is coming around again tomorrow morning and i want to actually make a contact this time

first thing id check is your symbol table and symbol code — if those are misconfigured sometimes packets go out malformed and igates just drop them silently. also pull up a SDR or a second receiver and actually decode the packet yourself, something like direwolf in receive-only mode or even just a phone app like APRSDroid pointed at your audio. if the packet decodes correctly on your end then the problem is probably path or igate coverage, but if it doesnt decode then yeah its likely your audio drive level into the TNC or something in the config.
the D710 internal TNC is usually pretty solid but ive heard of people having issues when the internal volume setting gets nudged. theres a separate audio level setting for the TNC path thats not the same as the speaker volume, worth double checking that in the menu.

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?

so ive been a tech for about a year and a half now and honestly the HF thing is starting to bug me, i hear guys on 40m and 20m and just want to get in there. my buddy said the general exam isnt that much harder than the technician one but i dunno, looking at the question pool it seems like theres a lot more about like propagation and electrical theory that i dont remember from tech.
i mostly been using the hamstudy.org site to practice and im getting like 75-80% on the practice tests but im not sure if thats good enough. the actual pass score is 74% right? so i guess im borderline. anyone been through this recently and have tips on what areas to actually focus on? the electrical stuff is what keeps tripping me up, like the LC circuit questions and some of the impedance stuff.
also once i actually pass, whats the process for getting on HF right away, does the FCC update your license automatically or do i have to wait for a new physical card or something

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.

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.

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

so this has been driving me crazy for the better part of two weeks now. my IC-7300 will key up fine, ALC meter moves, the PA temp reading looks normal, everything looks like its transmitting but the wattmeter on my dummy load is flatline. doesnt matter what band, doesnt matter what mode. i swapped the coax thinking maybe i had a bad connector somewhere and that wasnt it.
i pulled the top cover off and poked around a bit with the scope. drive signal looks like its making it to the driver stage okay as far as i can tell but im not super confident reading that board — icom doesnt exactly hand out the schematics for free. i did notice one of the small electrolytics near the PA section looks a little domed on top but im not sure if thats actually the culprit or just normal aging. radio is maybe 6 years old and lived most of its life in a pretty humid shack.
has anyone dug into one of these for a similar symptom? wondering if this is a known failure point or if im chasing something weirder. happy to desolder and test components i just want to have some idea what im actually looking for before i start pulling things.

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

yeah the difference is pretty real honestly, especially on HF. with the RTL-SDR and an upconverter you're fighting the noise floor the whole time and any strong broadcast station nearby just trashes everything around it. the RSP1A has actual preselection and the ADC is a huge step up — 12 bit vs the 8 bit in the RTL dongle. on paper that sounds like just a number but when you actually try to copy a weak signal while some 500kW AM station is sitting two MHz away you'll feel the difference.
i ran both side by side for a while with the same antenna and the RSP1A just pulled things out of the noise that were totally invisible on the dongle. WSPR decoding specifically got noticeably better for me. SDRuno is their own software and its a bit clunky to learn but it works, and it does run in SDR# too with the plugin so you dont have to change your whole workflow.
for pure receive with no TX plans the RSP1A is probably the sweet spot. HackRF is cool but the receive performance is actually not as good as the RSP1A in most comparisons ive seen, its better known as a learning tool and for TX experiments.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF stuff, some VHF contesting here and there, but EME has always been this thing in the back of my mind that seemed way out of reach. lately ive been going down the rabbit hole of reading about it and watching some videos and i think i actually want to give it a serious shot on 2m.
my main confusion right now is the antenna requirements. i keep seeing people say you can do it with a single yagi and JT65 these days which sounds almost too good to be true, but then other posts im reading from like 2010 say you need a big array. is the single yagi thing actually viable or are you just going to hear nothing and work nothing. i have room for maybe a 10-12 element yagi on an az-el mount which i could probably build or source, and my current radio is an IC-9700 which ive seen mentioned a lot for this.
also the low noise preamp situation confuses me a bit, i understand the concept but im not sure where to put it exactly, like is it at the feedpoint or in the shack, and does it need to be relay switched for transmit or what. sorry if this is a basic question im just trying to figure out if this is realistic before i sink a lot of time into it.

CQ WW is honestly fine to jump into, dont let the size of it intimidate you. the exchange is super simple — signal report and CQ zone, thats it. download N1MM+ and watch a youtube tutorial for like 20 minutes and youll have the basics down. the first few hours will feel chaotic but you get the rhythm pretty quick.
SOTA is kind of its own thing but people definitely do SOTA activations during contest weekends, especially CQ WW. some activators will chase contacts during a SOTA activation but the two scoring systems are pretty much separate. its fun if you like portable ops but id figure out one thing at a time honestly. get through your first contest first, even if you only make 50 contacts it teaches you a ton about how the bands actually behave under pile-up conditions.

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.

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?

went through this same thing a few months ago. the AE7Q site the other guy mentioned is really the way to go for searching, i spent like an hour on there just browsing calls before i found one i actually liked. one thing i didnt realize at first is that when a call becomes available it doesnt just go to whoever applies first, theres like a 18 day application window and if more than one person applies for the same call during that window they do a tiebreaker based on certain criteria like if you previously held the call or if a family member did. so sometimes you see a call thats been available for a while and think oh great nobody wants it, but other times you apply and find out three other people wanted the same one and you lose the tiebreaker. happened to me the first time i tried lol. second choice worked out though