Linda Hayes

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few months now. i have a pretty decent station at home - ic-7300, a decent 40m dipole, and a small tribander up about 35 feet - and im trying to figure out the best way to access it remotely when im traveling for work. been looking at RemoteHams and also just kinda hacking something together with a raspberry pi and maybe ham radio deluxe over a VPN. the RemoteHams SDR remote thing is interesting to me because it apparently lets you share the station with other operators too which could offset some costs i guess. but i dont totally understand how the audio routing works over their system vs just doing a direct RDP or VNC session to a shack PC. anyone actually running one of these setups day to day, like actually using it for real QSOs not just testing it once and forgetting about it? also seen some mention of internet linking stuff like maybe tying this into an Allstar node or something but im not sure thats even the same category of thing. just trying to figure out where to start honestly.

okay so the short version is they're all kind of separate systems and yeah you can use all three or just one or two depending on what you care about LoTW is run by the ARRL and it's the one that matters most for their awards like DXCC — the confirmations are cryptographically verified so they're considered really trustworthy. the downside is not everyone uploads regularly, some folks only do it once a year or after a big contest, so dont panic if your confirmations trickle in slowly. that's totally normal eQSL is a separate thing, kind of a free-for-all, lots of casual operators use it and some awards accept it but DXCC doesn't. still worth signing up for because you'll get cards from stations that don't bother with LoTW and it's nice to have the confirmations even if they dont count for the big awards physical cards are a whole other world and honestly kind of a beautiful tradition. if you want to work the bureau through your ARRL affiliated club you can receive cards pretty cheap that way, otherwise direct QSLing works fine but can get expensive with postage, especially for DX. a lot of people just use LoTW and eQSL for day to day stuff and only do physical cards for special contacts or rare DX that they really want the paper for you're not doing anything wrong, just keep uploading and it'll build up over time

yeah im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for a couple months now. what helped me was just putting on the W1AW code practice transmissions in the background while i was doing other stuff, not even really trying to copy it just getting used to hearing it. probably doesnt speed things up scientifically or whatever but it made it feel less foreign also someone told me to learn the sounds as words or phrases instead of thinking dot dash dot = R or whatever. like R sounds like "around" if you say the syllables with the rhythm. theres a list of those somewhere online i found it once but cant remember where now

so i've been doing HF for about 8 years and figured satellite would be similar enough that i could figure it out on the fly. yeah no. spent about 45 minutes just trying to get the doppler correction working properly in gpredict before the pass even started. i had the tracking set up on my FT-817 via CAT control and the uplink/downlink offsets configured but something was just slightly off and i kept hearing myself either not at all or weirdly shifted. eventually got a QSO with someone down in florida on the second pass but i was scrambling the whole time. the linear transponder on AO-73 is pretty narrow and people kept drifting into each other, i think some of them werent correcting doppler at all on the uplink side which makes it rough for everyone. also i was using a handheld yagi for the downlink and just kind of holding it pointed at the sky which definitely was not ideal. anyway my question is basically — is there a smarter workflow for setting up the doppler correction before a pass? i felt like i was always chasing it instead of staying ahead of it. and does the rate of change really get that bad near AOS and LOS or is it mostly in the middle of the pass where things are moving fastest?

yeah the whole thing can look overwhelming at first but honestly the Technician exam isnt that bad. theres a question pool that the FCC publishes and all the actual test questions come from that pool so youre not guessing at random stuff. i used hamstudy.org when i studied and just did practice questions every day for maybe two weeks and passed no problem. the site tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those more which was really helpful for me. some of the math questions look scary but for Technician theres really not much math at all, mostly rules and some basic electronics vocab. just take a bunch of practice exams until youre consistently passing and youll be fine. the tests are usually given by local clubs too so look up a VE session near you, some clubs do them really regularly.

so i passed my general about 3 months ago and ive been mostly sticking to 40m and 20m but im honestly still pretty fuzzy on what the actual rules are. like i know part 97 is the thing but every time i try to read through it i get lost in the language. my main question i guess is about power limits — someone at my club told me i can run 1500 watts but then someone else said thats only on certain bands or certain modes? and also i wasnt sure if theres like a difference between what a general can do vs extra on HF specifically in terms of where you can operate. i looked it up but the FCC website is not exactly easy to navigate if youre new to this. i dont want to accidentally do something wrong and get a notice of apparent liability or whatever its called

yeah the inverting thing is exactly your problem, AO-73 has an inverting transponder so if you tune up on the uplink your signal comes down lower on the downlink passband, not higher. it trips everyone up the first time. so when you're chasing your own signal you gotta go the opposite direction than you'd think. gpredict should handle the doppler math fine but you still need to understand the inversion to find yourself in the passband. 5 watts through an Arrow is honestly plenty for a good overhead pass, ive worked it with less. the bigger issue is usually antenna pointing especially near the horizon when the bird is moving fast. elevation below like 15 degrees is rough, signals get spotty and the doppler rate is high so everything feels chaotic. try a higher max elevation pass first, like 60 degrees or better, way easier to get your bearings and actually hear what youre doing

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v4 dongle for about 8 months now, mostly just scanning trunked systems with SDRTrunk and doing some NOAA weather satellite stuff with WXtoImg. honestly the v4 has been way better than the old generic dongles i used to mess with, no complaints really. but i keep seeing people talk up the SDRplay units and im wondering if the jump to like $130-ish for the RSP1B is actually worth it or if im just going to end up with the same experience and a lighter wallet. the main things i care about are dynamic range and not having to deal with broadcast FM birdies wiping out everything around 88-108. the v4 handles it better than older dongles but when im trying to pull in weak stuff near there it still gets ugly. also occasionally poke around HF with a long wire which the v4 does okay at but nothing to write home about. anyone actually run both side by side? curious if the SDRplay software (SDRuno i think?) is any good or if everyone just uses it with SDR# or GQRX anyway. dont want to drop the money and find out the improvement is like 3db and i convinced myself it was amazing because of buyers bias.

so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and im trying to figure out the best way to handle power for a sustained 12-hour deployment. the plan is to run a couple HF stations plus a VHF/UHF linked repeater node and maybe a winlink gateway if we can swing it. my usual go-to has been a pair of 100ah LiFePO4 batteries with a 200w panel but honestly in late october around here the sun angle is garbage and cloud cover is pretty typical so im not confident ill get enough solar harvest to keep up with the draw. were probably looking at 30-40 amps average between everything running. the EC wants to bring a small generator as backup but last time we did this someone ran a cheap harbor freight inverter gen and the RFI on 40m was absolutely brutal. like S7 hash across the whole band. so im thinking if we go generator route it needs to be either a honda eu2200 or the yamaha ef2000is, both of which ive heard are reasonably clean but I havent actually measured either on an HF receiver myself. also still debating antennas. i was going to throw up an EFHW for 40/20 but our deployment site is a county fairground with not a lot of tall anchor points. maybe 25 feet max on a mast. anybody done a sloper or an NVIS configuration for field use and actually found it reliable for regional comms under 300 miles or so?

the FT-817 is honestly a great choice for a go-kit because it covers everything and sips power, five watts is plenty for most local emcomm work especially if you're just relaying traffic through a repeater. the guys running 100w rigs burn through batteries so fast it becomes its own problem. few things I'd add from experience doing ARES deployments over the years — a laminated copy of your local repeater frequencies and the ARES net schedule, because you will not want to be fumbling through menus under stress. extra VHF/UHF handheld at minimum a baofeng or something, because sometimes the main rig goes down or you need someone to monitor a second freq. headlamp with extra batteries. granola bars or whatever. sounds dumb but I've sat in an EOC for 14 hours with nothing. the solar panel situation you should sort out before you need it. even a cheap 25-50w panel and a little charge controller makes you self-sufficient for as long as the sun is out. and honestly the notebook is not old school, it's smart, logs on paper survive when your tablet dies.

welcome to the addiction haha. yeah 10m has been fantastic lately, solar flux has been sitting up around 180-200 which is really solid. basically the higher the flux index the more the ionosphere gets charged up and the better HF propagation gets, especially on the higher bands like 10 and 12 meters. you want to keep an eye on the SFI (that's solar flux index) and also the K index, which you want LOW. K index 0 or 1 is ideal, if it jumps up to 4 or 5 there's usually a geomagnetic storm messing things up and the bands go to garbage even if the flux is high. sites like DXmaps and the DX cluster will show you in real time what's being heard where. also prop.kc2g.com has a nice realtime map. honestly just bookmark those and check them before you sit down to operate and you'll get a feel for it pretty quick. the cycle 25 peak is coming up so enjoy it while it lasts, this is probably going to be the best propagation we see for another decade or so.

the ALC thing is almost certainly your problem, or at least a big part of it. if its creeping over the recommended range youre basically letting the radio clip the audio before it even gets modulated properly and it just sounds like mush on the other end. back your mic gain down until the ALC is sitting comfortably in the middle of the zone when youre talking at a normal conversational level, not when youre shouting into it. a lot of people set gain while saying a loud test word and then wonder why it sounds bad in normal conversation. also the PR-40 is a large diaphragm condenser style dynamic and it picks up a TON of low end if youre close to it, like within 4-5 inches youre going to get serious proximity effect. try pulling back to maybe 6-8 inches and see if the muddy bass goes away on its own before you touch the EQ. the 7300 TX equalizer can clean things up but its easier to start with a decent signal and tweak from there rather than trying to EQ your way out of bad mic technique

yeah the Q codes go way back, originally from maritime and commercial telegraphy before ham radio even existed, so they predate CW in amateur radio by a long stretch. the reason they work is because you can send a lot of info with just three letters, like QRM means interference from other stations, QRN is static or natural noise, QSB is fading, QTH is your location, QSL means confirmed or acknowledged. on phone people absolutely say them out loud and it doesnt sound weird at all, especially on HF where theres a lot of crossover from CW ops. youll hear guys say my QTH is kansas city or the QRM is terrible tonight and nobody blinks. the 73 thing is separate, thats just traditional ham shorthand for best regards basically, been used forever. 88 means love and kisses and you mostly hear that between people who know each other. DE just means from in morse shorthand and yeah people say it on voice too sometimes, like DE W5whatever. honestly the best thing to do is just keep listening and theyll all start clicking pretty fast, you dont need to memorize a chart or anything

welcome to one of the most confusing parts of the hobby honestly, you're not alone in being puzzled by this. so the short version is — you dont need all three, but each one has a different purpose and different people care about different ones. LoTW (Logbook of The World) is run by the ARRL and it's what you need if you're chasing awards like DXCC or WAS. it is free to use but yeah the setup is a little annoying because you have to get a certificate mailed to you and then install it. worth doing though especially once you get more active on HF. eQSL is also free and a lot easier to set up, some people love it, but its not accepted for official ARRL awards so keep that in mind. paper cards are kind of a tradition thing. a lot of DX stations and older ops still really love getting physical cards and some awards specifically require the paper version. they're not strictly necessary when youre starting out but honestly once you get a nice design made up it's kind of fun to send them. i use all three personally but i wouldnt stress about it right away. get LoTW set up first since thats the most useful for awards long term.

so we had a county ARES exercise last weekend and my portable setup just did not cooperate the way i expected. ive been running a IC-7300 off a 100ah LiFePO4 for a while now at home but decided to bring the whole thing out to the field and man there were way more variables than i accounted for. first problem was the generator. borrowed a honda eu2200i from a club member and it ran fine but i was getting a ton of RFI on 40m, like S7-S8 noise floor just garbage. i know the inverter generators are supposed to be cleaner than the old brush types but this thing was brutal. ended up having to run on battery only which was fine for the exercise duration but not a real solution if we're talking 12+ hour activations. second thing was the antenna. i had a buddipole set up which i've used a bunch of times but the ground at the park was basically rock under about 2 inches of grass so i couldnt stake anything properly. the tripod kept wanting to tip in the wind and i was babysitting it half the time instead of actually operating. thinking about a more stable base or maybe going to a NVIS wire antenna on a couple of jackite poles instead. anyone else dealt with the generator RFI thing? is it just about bonding and ferrites or is there something more fundamental going on. feels like there should be a cleaner solution than just not using the generator at all.

so ive been running my 7300 for about two years now and the frequency stability was always just a little bit annoying to me, especially when i was trying to do FT8 for more than like 20 minutes after cold start. drift wasnt huge but enough that i noticed it on the waterfall sometimes drifting off a little before it fully warmed up. anyway i finally pulled the trigger on the TCXO-19 upgrade last month. the install itself was pretty straightforward, just the one board swap, took me maybe 45 minutes including double checking everything before i closed it back up. honestly the hardest part was just not stripping the tiny screws on the board. and yeah the stability difference is real. like genuinely noticeable right from cold power on. i was skeptical it would matter that much but the 7300 with the stock oscillator is just not as tight as i expected from a radio in that price range. now it sits rock solid from the moment i key up. FT8 is way more satisfying, no more babysitting the AFC offset at startup. curious if anyone else has done this mod and what else they found worth doing on this radio. ive heard some people do the fan mod to run cooler on digital but im not sure if thats actually necessary or just overkill for normal use.

12 contacts counts for sure, activation is valid. dont stress it. i use HAMRS on an old ipod touch i keep charged just for activations so i dont kill my main phone. works pretty well offline too

i went through this exact same thing like 8 months ago and ended up just getting the baofeng to start. no regrets tbh, still using it. the only thing that kind of annoyed me was the battery life isnt amazing and the belt clip broke pretty fast but those are minor things. for hitting repeaters and chatting it works totally fine one thing nobody told me that i wish someone had — program it with CHIRP before you do anything else, doing it manually through the keypad is genuinely miserable

yeah same boat here, just passed mine like 6 weeks ago after being a tech for almost 3 years lol. the regs section is whatever honestly, mostly common sense stuff if you already know the basic tech rules. what got me was the propagation questions, like i had no real mental model for how skywave works and those questions felt random at first. once i watched a couple youtube videos on it something clicked and it was fine after that. dont stress about failing, worst case you just take it again. testing fees are pretty cheap

I use both systems - they each have different user bases. LOTW QSLs actually count towards ARRL sanctioned awards, such as DXCC and WAS, while eQSL.cc has its own awards system. Start with LoTW for credibility, add eQSL later for volume.

your buddy isnt wrong but hes not telling you the whole story either. verticals pick up a lot of local noise because theyre omnidirectional and close to the ground, and 4 radials is basically nothing — you really want 16 minimum and even then youre leaving performance on the table. with a proper radial field the noise thing gets a little better but not dramatically. for what you're describing — ragchew, nets, not hardcore dx — an inverted V is honestly going to make you happier. 80 feet is plenty, a 40m half wave is about 66 feet so you have room to spare even with the slopes. center up as high as you can get it and the ends dont need to be super high, even 6-8 feet off the ground works. the receive difference is noticeable, like actually noticeable, not just in your head. my noise floor dropped almost 2 S units when i swapped to a dipole configuration at my old QTH. that said if you ever get the radial situation sorted on the vertical it might be worth trying again just to compare.

JS8Call is definitely less populated than FT8, that's just the reality of it. the people who use it tend to be on at more specific times or in nets rather than just randomly calling CQ. try checking the JS8Call nets — there are a few on 40m in the evenings that are pretty active depending on where you are. 14.078 is right but honestly 40m is where i see more traffic for it, at least in north america. PSK31 still has some activity but its mostly older guys who've been doing it since the early 2000s and dont wanna change, nothing wrong with that but youre not gonna work a pile of new stations on it. if you want actual keyboard-to-keyboard chat type stuff JS8Call is probably your best bet, just gotta catch people when theyre actually monitoring. the async messaging feature is actually pretty slick once you figure it out, you can leave messages for specific callsigns and they'll see them next time they connect.

not a basic question at all, its actually kind of a mess when you first look at it lol. ok so the short version: LoTW is run by ARRL and is what you absolutely need if you want credit toward DXCC or WAS through ARRL. eQSL is a completely separate system, its fine and a lot of people use it, but ARRL doesnt accept eQSL confirmations for their major awards. so if DXCC is on your radar eventually, focus on getting LoTW sorted first. for paper cards through the bureau — yes you need to be signed up as an ARRL member to use the incoming bureau, which it sounds like you already are. you just go to the ARRL website and register your callsign with the bureau. when cards come in for you they hold them and send them in batches a few times a year. to send outgoing cards through the bureau you buy some cards from a printer (or design your own, lots of people do), fill them out and mail them to the outgoing bureau for your district. honestly for everyday contacts these days most people just do LoTW and call it done. but some ops — especially older guys or DX stations — really appreciate a physical card, so its worth having some made eventually. not urgent though, get the digital stuff working first.

so i've been lurking on here for like 6 months reading everything and watching youtube videos and i finally just bit the bullet and took my technician exam last saturday. passed with a 33/35 which honestly surprised me because i blanked on a couple of the electrical questions. anyway im KD9something, still waiting for it to show up in the ULS but my VE gave me a temporary reference number so i can operate now technically. my first actual QSO was kind of a disaster lol. i keyed up on the local 2m repeater and completely forgot to say my callsign at the end, the control op had to remind me. then the second time i forgot to wait for the courtesy tone and stepped on someone. so yeah its going great. but i did manage to have a real actual conversation with a guy about 40 miles away and it was pretty cool even if it was just about the weather. anyway just wanted to introduce myself, probably gonna ask a lot of dumb questions on here so sorry in advance

yeah im planning to go, my buddy from the repeater club said hes bringing a whole trunk load of stuff to sell so the swap meet might actually be decent this time. i need to find a working HT, something cheap just for backup. also i think the ARRL rep is supposed to be there doing license exams in the afternoon if anyone needs that