David Thompson

so ive been doing contests for about 4 years now, mostly single op single radio and ive been placing pretty decently in my region but i keep hitting this wall where my rate just dies mid-contest, usually somewhere around hour 6-8 when the band i'm running starts to thin out and im sitting there twiddling my thumbs waiting for conditions to improve instead of actually working anybody been reading a lot about SO2R and watching some of the contest recordings from guys like K3LR and the big multi-op stations and its obvious they're doing something completely different than what i'm doing in terms of keeping the rate up. my question is whether SO2R is actually worth the investment and complexity for someone at my level or if im just going to be adding a ton of overhead and making my score worse while i figure it out current setup is an IC-7300 and a tribander at 45ft plus a 40m dipole. i know the second radio situation gets complicated fast with filtering and bandpass stuff, and i honestly dont know where to even start with that side of it. is there a sane way to do this without spending another few thousand dollars on a second complete station and a full set of bandpass filters

yeah this sounds familiar, i went through almost the exact same thing when i first set up vara HF. a couple things to check -- first, are you running the free version of vara or did you pay for the full license? the free version is heavily throttled and some gateways will basically refuse to complete a session with it because the speeds are too slow and the handshake times out. worth the $69 or whatever it is to just get the full version if you havent already. second thing, and this got me for a while, is the split audio routing. winlink express needs to have the right soundcard selected AND vara has its own audio settings too, they can conflict if youre not careful. make sure vara is pointing to the signalink and not your system default audio. also check that PTT is configured correctly in vara -- if youre keying via CAT or VOX versus the signalink PTT line it makes a difference in timing. theres a vara tuning guide floating around on the winlink.org site that walks through the whole audio level calibration thing, that helped me a lot actually.

yeah they're all separate programs with separate fees and applications but the good news is the same QSO can count for all of them at once, you dont have to make separate contacts or anything like that. a contact with a station in Germany counts as a country for DXCC, Europe zone 14 for WAZ, and if you ever work all the states thats WAS. one log entry doing three jobs. my honest advice, just get LoTW set up now before anything else. the process is annoying the first time but once youre running it just uploads in the background and the credits accumulate automatically. ive had contacts from years ago suddenly confirm when the other guy finally uploaded his log and boom there goes a new one. paper QSLs work too but LoTW is where most serious DX stations are these days. as for which award to chase first, most people kinda fall into DXCC naturally because chasing DX is just fun. WAS is actually pretty achievable in a year or two especially if you get on 40m during good conditions. dont stress the messy logbook too much, just start from where you are and log everything going forward.

the ft-60 is bombproof thats all i'll say. had mine since like 2009 and dropped it more times than i care to admit. but its also like 3x your budget so maybe not the right answer right now. yaesu makes solid stuff though if you ever want to step up. welcome to the hobby btw

yeah what he said about feedline loss, i learned that the painful way. had like 30 feet of LMR-400 running to my 4 yagi array and was wondering why my receive felt so dead compared to what i was expecting, moved the preamp to the mast and it was like a whole different radio. obvious in hindsight but yeah. ON4KST chat is pretty much mandatory if you want to work EME regularly, people post their calls and grids and set up skeds right there. theres also specific 2m EME activity weekends throughout the year, the ARRL EME contest in the fall is when everyones on and the best time to make your first contacts honestly, lots of big stations willing to slow down and work smaller pistol stations during the contest.

the drift thing is totally normal especially with the cheaper crystal-based rigs, the crystal just needs to stabilize thermally. some people put the whole rig in a little insulated pouch for a few minutes before operating which sounds weird but actually helps. others will just key the rig lightly for a bit before trying to actually make contacts. not much else you can do without getting into TCXO territory which is kind of overkill for a pixie honestly. for paddles i use a set of homebrew ones i made from some brass screws and a piece of acrylic i had laying around, works perfectly fine. there are also some really tiny commercial paddles made for portable ops — GHD and a few others make them small enough to fit in a shirt pocket basically. but honestly a straight key taped to wood is a time-honored tradition, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. welcome to the rabbit hole by the way, it only gets worse from here

oh man i remember feeling exactly this way when i first got my ticket. the net directory can be a mess honestly, lot of dead listings. what worked for me was just asking around at the club or on local repeaters if anyone knew of active nets. ended up finding a ragchew net on 40m that runs every wednesday evening and its been great, very relaxed, net control is super patient with new checkins. for special event stations -- yeah absolutely just call them, thats literally the whole point. theyre usually set up to work as many stations as possible and they love getting contacts from newer hams. sometimes you get a certificate or a QSL card out of it which is kinda fun. keep an eye on the ARRL website under special events, they list upcoming ones pretty regularly. some of them are super busy so you might have to wait a bit to get through but dont be shy about calling.

yeah what he said about the balun, i skipped it on my first dipole and had RF coming back into my shack on certain frequencies, wasnt a huge deal but it was annoying. added a ugly balun (just coax wound into a coil) and it mostly went away. one thing nobody mentioned — when you cut for 40m dont forget to account for the velocity factor of the wire itself, the standard formula gives you a free space length but wire antennas are usually a few percent shorter in practice. i usually start about 5% longer than the formula says and trim down while watching the SWR on a analyzer. way easier to trim than to splice more wire on lol. also if your wire is insulated there's an additional shortening effect from the dielectric, not huge but it adds up

so i was going through my usual morning routine of checking the hamradio360 podcast and a couple of the usual forums and it sounds like Icom finally pulled back the curtain on the IC-7760 at Hamvention this year, or at least officially confirmed what everybody kind of already knew was coming from the FCC filing leaks a few months back. the remote head design looks really interesting honestly, separating the main unit from the control head so you can mount stuff cleaner in a vehicle or shack without having the big box taking up desk space. not sure how i feel about the price point yet, nobody seems to have solid numbers but the speculation is pretty wild also heard 10 meters has been absolutely ripping lately, guys on the DX clusters are working all kinds of stuff into Europe and South America without even trying that hard. solar cycle 25 is really delivering this year compared to what we were told to expect honestly. if you havent fired up 10 or 12 meters in a while its worth checking in, i had a random tuesday afternoon sesh last week and worked 14 countries in like 90 minutes which for me is pretty unusual anything else coming out of Hamvention that people heard about? i couldnt make it this year and im mostly going off secondhand reports and YouTube videos

so ive been lurking here for a while and finally decided to just build something instead of buying another antenna. went with a simple half wave dipole for 40m, used 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had lying around from an old project, and got some SO-239 connectors and a chunk of PVC for the center insulator. nothing fancy. cut each leg to about 33.5 feet using the 468/f formula, soldered everything up, and ran some RG-8X down to the shack. got it up in an inverted-V config with the apex at maybe 25 feet, ends tied off to some trees. SWR at resonance is sitting around 1.4:1 which i thought was decent but im second guessing myself now. been reading conflicting stuff about whether i need a balun or not and i just dont know what to believe anymore. also the wire i used, is 14 gauge going to hold up or should i have gone heavier? the span is maybe 65 feet total and theres some tension on it but not crazy. just want to make sure this thing doesnt come down in a storm.

the thing you'll forget is always something stupid like a power cable or the right adapter. i'd say the number one thing people overlook is having a written copy of their freq plan and any nets they're supposed to check into — because in an actual emergency you might not have your phone and your memory gets real fuzzy when things are stressful. print it out and laminate it or at least stick it in a ziplock. also headphones. people forget headphones and then they're trying to copy traffic in a noisy shelter or EOC and it's a mess. a simple set of earbuds works fine but have something. the 7300 is honestly not that crazy for a go-kit if you have the battery capacity for it, just watch your power draw on SSB. might want to think about adding a small VHF/UHF rig too for local coordination since HF isn't always what the agency needs from you right away. a cheap Yaesu FT-65 or even an old 2m mobile thrown in there doesn't hurt. the tote is fine to start. don't let the perfect be the enemy of good — a lot of guys spend more time obsessing over the pelican case than they ever spend actually training.

yeah what he said about TXD is probably it, i had the exact same problem when i first set mine up. also one thing that got me — i had the APRS menu set to INTERNAL GPS but hadnt actually acquired a lock yet so it was sending null coordinates, like 0.00N 0.00E or something obviously wrong and aprs.fi just wasnt plotting it. you can check by looking at what the raw packet actually says, there's a raw packet decoder on aprs.fi if you click around enough. if your lat/long is coming through as zeros thats your culprit right there. also unrelated but if you ever wanna do messaging through APRS the D710 is actually really solid for that, the keyboard on it is annoying but it works

the 40% drop rate on HF vara honestly sounds like propagation to me more than settings, especially if VHF is running clean. what frequencies you trying? some of the 40m gateways i use are rock solid in the evenings but in the afternoon forget it. also have you looked at the Winlink maps site to see which RMS stations are actually active and when, its pretty useful for figuring out whos actually online vs just listed

tbh i just gave up trying to be clever about it and run N1MM for everything including day to day. yeah the interface is clunky when youre not in a contest but once you get used to it its fine. Log4OM is prettier for sure and the LoTW integration feels smoother but i kept having issues with WSJT-X dropping the UDP connection randomly and i never figured out why. might have been a firewall thing on my machine

Honest answer — with a single 5WL yagi you're gonna struggle but its not completely hopeless if you work stations with big arrays on the other end. The math is rough. EME path loss on 2m is something like 252dB and you need to overcome that with EIRP on both ends. Single yagi guys do make contacts but they really depend on the other station running serious hardware, like a 4x25el array or a dish. Your 160w is low — most single yagi ops are pushing 500w to 1500w at the feedpoint, legal limit in a lot of cases. The Mirage wont cut it. For az/el the speed thing matters more than you'd think. Moon moves faster than you expect and if you're trying to peak up before a sequence you need something reasonably responsive. G-5500 combo is the classic starting point, lots of people run that for EME. The interface to get it talking to your logging software is the other piece. WSJT-X handles JT65B and Q65 which is what most people run now honestly, Q65 is noticeably better in marginal conditions. If you can get a used 4x yagi array going with proper phasing and push 500w legal limit you'd have a real shot at contacts, not just big stations either.