Ham Fan 24

the "underwater" sound is probably your antennas honestly. crossed yagis need the phasing to be right for circular polarization and if thats off even a little you'll get really inconsistent signals, especially as the sat moves through different parts of the sky. i chased my tail for weeks thinking it was my doppler correction before i figured out i had one of my phasing cables cut to the wrong length. worth double checking. what design did you use for the yagis?

ok so ive been on HF for about 8 months now with a vertical i bought and honestly im getting tired of the noise floor on it, neighbors have solar inverters and whatever else going on and the vertical just picks up all of it. a buddy at the club keeps telling me to just build a dipole and get it in the trees and itll be way quieter so i finally decided to try it. i have about 140 feet of 14 gauge stranded copper wire i pulled off a spool at the hardware store, and a 1:1 balun i bought online a while back that i never used. my plan was to cut it for 40m since thats where i spend most of my time. i know the formula, 468 divided by freq in mhz, so around 33.3 feet per leg at 7.1 or so mhz. my question is more about the center insulator and the end insulators — do i actually need to buy those or can i just use something i make from a chunk of PVC or even just some rope tied in a certain way. also how much does it actually matter if the antenna isnt perfectly horizontal, like one end might be maybe 10 feet lower than the other because of where my trees are. does that kill the antenna or is it fine. also should i solder the wire to the balun or just clamp it, i wasnt sure.

so i finally did my first park activation yesterday at the state forest about 20 minutes from my house, been putting it off for like 6 months because i kept thinking i needed more gear or a better antenna setup or whatever. finally just threw the KX2 and a 40m EFHW in the bag and drove out there. setup was fine, got the wire up in a tree maybe 25 feet or so, but i could barely get 10 contacts in the first hour which i know is enough to count but i wanted to do better. called CQ for a while on 40 and got a few responses but the band felt pretty dead for a tuesday afternoon. switched to 20 and picked up a few more including one guy in florida which was cool. anyway ended up with 14 contacts total which activates it but i felt like i was doing something wrong with my CQ timing or something. do people usually spot themselves on the POTA website before they start calling? i think i forgot to do that and maybe thats why it was slow

okay so i just passed my general exam last week and im already thinking about getting a vanity callsign. right now i have a sequential call that was assigned to me and its fine i guess but its kind of long and i had a specific call in mind that belonged to a silent key in my area. i went to the FCC ULS page and honestly the interface is kind of confusing me. like i can see the callsign i want is listed as available but i dont fully understand the whole application window thing. i read somewhere that there are different application periods depending on whether youre a club or an individual and whether the previous holder was a family member or not? and then after all that there's a random selection if multiple people apply for the same call? also does it cost anything now? i thought i saw something about the FCC starting to charge fees but i wasnt sure if that applied to vanity applications too. any help would be appreciated, this stuff is way more complicated than i expected it to be

honestly yeah you'll notice it, especially on SSB weak signal. the X50 is a solid antenna but its omni so youre spreading that power everywhere. when i switched from a collinear to even a modest 4 element yagi for 2m portable ops the difference was pretty clear — signals that were just barely readable came up maybe an S unit or so, sometimes more depending on the path. the manual pointing thing is annoying but you get used to it, i just use a cheap compass and a rough bearing from my phone maps app. takes like 30 seconds once you know roughly where the other station is. for satellites specifically the yagi is almost mandatory unless you're working SO-50 from a really clean hilltop with nothing around you. the X50 will work for some passes but you'll miss a lot of the low elevation stuff

nice one on the 3B8, thats a solid catch. the thing that helped me the most was honestly just working more pileups even when i didnt need the entity. like practicing on stations that arent rare so you get a feel for it without the pressure. the other thing — and this took me embarassingly long to figure out — is sending just your suffix when the pileup is really thick. if theres 200 guys all sending their full callsign its just noise to the DX op, but if you send just the last two or three letters of your call it can pop out of the mush in a way that makes them come back with a partial. then you send your full call and ur in.

so ive been a ham for about 8 months now (got my tech last spring, general in september) and i keep reading about how CW is worth learning but every time i try to sit down and figure out where to start i just get confused about the whole process. like do you learn the alphabet first and just memorize the dots and dashes on paper, or do you go straight to listening? someone at my club said the koch method is the way to go but i looked it up and honestly i still wasnt sure how to actually begin with it practically. i downloaded lcwo.net and just kind of stared at it for a while before closing the tab also not sure what speed i should be trying to learn at, ive seen people say 5wpm and others say start at like 20wpm which seems insane to me. is there like a rough order of operations here or does it really depend on the person. sorry if this is a dumb question, just feels like theres a lot of conflicting info out there

so ive been putting off building one of these for years, always told myself id get around to it. finally pulled the trigger on a bitx40 kit a few months back and just got it on the air last weekend. took me way longer than i expected to get the board assembled, mostly because im slow and kept second-guessing my solder joints, but it works. first contact was with a guy in ohio, im in western pennsylvania, so not exactly a monster dx contact but honestly i was just happy to make any contact at all running 7 watts. the audio wasnt perfect and i think i have a slight hum issue thats probably a grounding problem but overall i was pretty impressed with what you can do with such a little signal. anyone else been messing around with QRP kits lately? curious what other people have built. ive been eyeing the ubitx for the multiband capability but not sure if i want to jump into something more complicated before i get more comfortable with the bitx40

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, summit was only a 2 point peak but figured id start easy. hiked up with my ft-818 and a linked dipole i built from some youtube tutorial and honestly the whole thing was kind of a mess. took me forever to get the antenna up in the trees, the feedline kept tangling and by the time i actually got on the air i maybe had 20 minutes before i needed to head back down before dark. still made my 4 contacts which i guess counts but i was expecting it to be more relaxing than it was. also my phone battery was almost dead by the time i got up there so i couldnt even properly spot myself on sotawatch which didnt help. anyone else have a rough first activation and then get the hang of it later? feels like theres a lot to figure out all at once

yeah same thing tripped me up when i first got general. what helped me was just downloading the arrl band plan chart and printing it out and keeping it near the radio for a while. the fcc part 97 stuff is what you legally have to follow, the band plan stuff within that is basically what the community agreed on to keep things organized also worth knowing that some of those lines shift for ITU regions, like 40m is actually different in europe vs here so if you're working DX the other station might be operating somewhere that looks weird to you but is totally fine on their end

yeah this has been bugging me too, i see the modeling software show like 1.5 to 2 dB difference and on paper that sounds like something but in a real qso that's nothing. half the time the other station has a noisy rx anyway so it doesnt matter if you're a little stronger theoretically. one thing tho — the inverted V does have the legs closer to horizontal at the top where most of the radiation happens, so the compromise isnt as bad as people make it sound. EZNEC if you havent already, throw your actual geometry in there and see what it spits out for your specific heights and leg angles. might surprise you either way.

nice work, 23 contacts for a first time out is pretty solid. i did my first one earlier this year and only got 12 which still counted but felt like i was barely scraping by the whole time. whats the KX2 like for portable ops? ive been eyeing one for a while but havent pulled the trigger yet, mostly been using a full size rig with a battery in a backpack which is obviously kind of ridiculous

so ive been trying to get back into CW after maybe 10 years off and i picked up a used Bencher BY-1 a few months ago. nice paddle, feels good, but im running it into my IC-7300 and the iambic keyer just seems to be fighting me. like ill try to send a clean E or I and it comes out as EE or III or whatever. i know my timing is rusty but i dont think its entirely my fault lol. the keyer speed is set around 18 wpm which maybe is too fast for me right now but i was running that speed fine years ago. i messed with the weight setting a little and that helped a bit but not really enough. i also tried switching from mode A to mode B in the radio menu and honestly i cant tell the difference. is that normal? i thought mode B was supposed to feel different. anyway just wondering if anyone else went through this coming back to CW after a long break and whether its just a matter of grinding through it or if there are actual settings tweaks that helped. also open to hearing if anyone thinks the BY-1 is a problem paddle for this kind of thing or if its fine and its just me

im kind of in the same boat lol so cant offer much advice but just wanted to say youre not alone. i hit 12wpm back in like june and felt like i was going backwards for a while. somebody on here told me to try just listening without copying at all sometimes, just absorbing it. not sure if it works yet but it feels less stressful at least haha

one thing i'd add is be really careful near the band edges. like dont try to set your dial to exactly 7.300 because your signal will have sidebands that extend above that and technically part of your transmission could be out of band. most people stay at least a few kHz inside the edge just to be safe, so like 7.295 or so as a practical upper limit when running SSB. caught me off guard when i first got my general too, i thought the dial frequency was all that mattered but its actually where your signal occupies in the spectrum that counts. someone explained it to me as the carrier isnt the whole story with sideband, which i guess makes sense once you think about it

so ive been running a remote station for about a year now, started with RemoteHams because it seemed like the easiest path to just get on the air from my apartment while keeping the rig at my parents place out in the country where the noise floor is actually usable. setup wasnt too bad honestly, the RCForb client connects fine most of the time and the latency is manageable on SSB if you're not trying to do anything fast paced. their SDR remote stuff is where it gets interesting though because you can actually run a wideband rx session without having to babysit the whole rig, just spin up the SDR view and dig around the band which is pretty cool for dx watching. but then i started messing with my own setup — running a pi4 with a SDRplay RSPdx on one end and just tunneling everything through a VPN back to my apartment. the control latency is way lower when im on the same VPN and i have way more flexibility with the audio codec and buffer settings. the thing is its a lot more to maintain and when something goes wrong at the remote end i have to either bug my dad to go look at something or drive out there which is a 2 hour round trip. anyone else bouncing between the hosted remote platforms and DIY? curious if theres something in between im not seeing. also wondering if anyone has experimented with the internet linking side of things for like coordinating skeds through echolink or something tied into the remote — felt like there might be something there but i havent thought it all the way through yet.

tail-ending is totally fine and honestly its one of the more effective techniques when done right. the key thing is you're not stepping on the actual exchange, you're just filling dead air before the next caller. DX operators are used to it and most of them actually prefer a clean tail-end call over the wall of noise they get from the main pack. the pattern recognition thing you mentioned is huge and most people never bother. ive worked rare stuff with 100w and a wire just because i paid attention to where the op was actually fishing. some of them have very predictable habits — theyll work by prefix for a while, or theyll sweep geographically. if you can figure that out youre already ahead of 90% of the pile. one other thing that made a big difference for me was narrowing my tx bandwidth on SSB. running the mic eq a little flatter and cutting some of the bass so your signal sounds a bit more punchy and distinct in a pile. probably placebo to some extent but ive had operators comment on audio quality mid-pileup so something is going on there.

your list is actually pretty solid for a first kit, dont stress too much. the thing i wish id had early on was a laminated card with all my local repeater frequencies, CTCSS tones, and the ARES/RACES net schedules written out — because when things get hectic you really dont want to be hunting through menus or trying to remember if the county EOC repeater is 146.940 or whatever. just laminate it and zip tie it to the case handle or tape it inside the lid. also a headlamp and some AA batteries sound obvious but i left mine at home the first time i deployed and worked in a dim gymnasium for six hours squinting at my radio, never again. and bring more food and water than you think you need because nobody is gonna be feeding you at a shelter or EOC, learned that the hard way too. for the VHF/UHF thing, a mag mount and a short run of coax you can snake out a window or door is usually enough. if the repeater is down you can still do simplex on 146.520. some people throw a slim jim made of ladder line in the kit which rolls up really small and actually works great hung from a tree or stuck out a window with some tape.

the battery thing is real, that was my biggest headache too. i ended up switching to a 20ah lithium iron phosphate battery a couple years back and the weight difference is honestly kind of shocking. still have plenty of capacity for a weekend and i can actually carry it with one hand. little pricey but worth it if you can swing it. for organization what finally worked for me was thinking of it in layers. radio and power stuff in one pelican-style case, antennas and coax all coiled up with velcro straps in a separate duffel, then a small backpack for the personal stuff — headlamp, notepad, reference cards, snacks, that kind of thing. that way if im just doing a quick local ARES activation i can grab the small stuff and leave the bigger antenna bag if its not needed. the thing most people forget honestly is a power strip or distribution block. you get on site and suddenly everyone needs to charge something or you need to run two radios and you're fumbling around. i have a small anderson powerpole distribution block and a 12v to usb brick just zip tied inside the case now, always there. check that battery though seriously, a battery tender that hasnt been looked at in 8 months on a deep cycle could be in rough shape depending on how it was stored

i was in the same spot like 8 months ago, zero background in electronics. i used the Gordon West book and also watched some youtube videos when i got confused on the electricity stuff. the math questions scared me at first but honestly there are only a few formulas you need and once you memorize those it clicks. took me maybe 3 weeks of studying on and off and i passed first try. just do a ton of practice tests thats really the main thing

i just did mine like two months ago. honestly just used hamStudy and did practice tests every day for like two weeks. the math questions look scarier than they are, theres only a few formulas you really need. i was scoring around 60% at first too and ended up passing fine. good luck

My FTDX101D waterfall shows the whole pileup spread beautifully, but I still rely on audio more than visual. One nice thing about the scope, once 7P8RU has contacted a station, most times you can see this station visually answering the DX station. By watching this interaction you get an idea of how the DX station is working the pileup. Combined approach works best - waterfall for big picture, audio for timing details.

im in the same boat kind of, took my General last spring after being a tech for like three years. the reactance stuff tripped me up too but i just memorized the formulas and moved on, didnt fully understand it at the time and tbh still dont completely but i passed. the exam itself felt easier than studying the pool made it seem if that makes sense. one thing nobody told me before i upgraded was that you still need an antenna that actually works on HF lol. i passed my exam and then realized my setup was not ready at all so that was its own whole thing to figure out

i had almost the exact same thing happen on my second ever POTA activation, wasnt even on a summit just a windy field and my end fed was basically a windsock. ended up just holding the feedpoint with one hand and keying with the other which was stupid but it worked. you'll figure out your system after a few more times out, the first few are always kind of a mess honestly

so ive been licensed about three years now and been doing a lot of HF but mostly just ragchewing and some contests here and there. recently i started actually logging with the intent of going for DXCC and i guess i just assumed i understood how the credits worked but now that im sitting here with like 87 confirmed entities i'm realizing i dont fully get the process. like, do i need paper QSLs for all of them or can i just submit everything through LoTW and call it a day? i have maybe 40 or so confirmed on LoTW already but a lot of my older contacts especially some of the DX stations just never uploaded. and what about WAS — is that totally separate from DXCC or do some contacts count toward both at the same time if theyre stateside contacts? also someone at the club mentioned WAZ and i had to pretend i knew what they were talking about lol. is that one actually worth chasing or is it kind of a stepping stone thing people do before DXCC? genuinely not sure where to focus my energy. been working 20m mostly, some 17m when the band cooperates.