David Thompson

yeah that 12-13 wall is real and almost everybody hits it, you're not imagining things. what worked for me was cranking the character speed way up — like 25 or even 30wpm character speed — while keeping the overall word rate slower. Farnsworth spacing basically. your brain starts associating the whole sound of each character instead of counting elements. it feels wrong at first because you think you're failing but after a few weeks something clicks and you start hearing "the" as a sound not as dit-dah-dit-dit or whatever. also i'd say get on the air even if you feel not ready. even just listening to a slow net or sending with a friend on sked. that real-world pressure actually helped me more than any training software. i stayed on lcwo way too long before just getting on and doing it.

For contesting, I prefer DXSummit because of the historical data capability. Being able to see patterns from previous years helps with band planning during major contests. The interface isn't as fancy but it's fast and reliable when you need it most.

this is really good to hear actually, im still working toward getting my general and have been thinking about ARES but kind of intimidated by it. didn't realize there was so much downtime lol. sounds like the logging and message handling stuff is where most of the actual skill shows up? i've been trying to practice Winlink and ICS forms but it feels a little abstract when you're just doing it at home with nobody else on the other end

that's really cool to hear, congrats on your first real one. i've been part of our county RACES group for about eight years and the waiting thing never really goes away lol. during a bad ice storm we had a few winters back i think i sat at a repeater site for almost four hours just monitoring before they needed anything from us. but that's kind of the job right, being there in case. the jump kit thing is something our group actually does a whole session on now because everybody shows up with different stuff and half of it is wrong for the situation. we had a guy bring a massive linear amp to a deployment once, like what are you doing with that. we sort of landed on a standard list for our area which helps, though people still customize. whats in yours that you found you were missing if you dont mind me asking, always curious what gaps people find

so the Tri-County hamfest is coming up Saturday and i havent been in a few years, last time i went i picked up a really solid Kenwood HF rig for way under what they go for on QRZ classifieds so im pretty excited to go back. wondering if anyone from the club is planning on showing up, would be cool to meet up and walk the tables together. also does anyone know if they still do the antenna building thing in the afternoon or did they drop that? i remember it being pretty fun but couldnt find anything about it on the flyer.

yeah the mars mod on yaesu stuff is pretty much a rite of passage lol. did mine day one honestly. the only thing id add is double check your power output on the expanded segments because sometimes it drops off noticeably outside the ham bands, mine was only doing like 60-65w at the edges which was fine for my purposes but worth knowing.

I made my first EME QSO with just 50W and a directional antenna using JT65B digital mode. The key is finding someone with a big array willing to sked. Several operators post successful QSOs with single Yagis when the other end has high power.

ohio on the first call with 5 watts is honestly a great sign, 40m can be really good for that kind of range especially in the evenings. i had a similar experience when i first started doing POTA with my ft818 and it kind of rewires how you think about power. i cant help much on the battery chemistry stuff but i will say that once you go down the solar rabbit hole you kind of dont come back lol. i use a bioenno 10ah lifepo4 now and a little 20w panel and it basically means i can just stay out all day without thinking about it. lifepo4 holds voltage really flat compared to lipo which is nice for exactly the reason the other guy mentioned

Be careful with your excluded frequency bands configuration! Very important to exclude bands where you don't have antennas, because the automatic system tries to find gateways across all frequency bands. I learned this the hard way during our last SET when it kept trying 15M with my dummy load connected.

yeah the LMR-400 for 50 feet is not overkill its actually fine, the loss difference vs something lighter isnt huge at those lengths but the handling is kind of a pain when youre trying to set up fast. might want to think about that for your next build but for this weekend whatever. the thing that always bites people on first field deployments isnt power or antennas its the little stuff, extension cords, tent stakes for the dipole ends, rope that tangles up, all that. i once showed up to a full field day with a beautiful station and forgot the coax connectors had never been weather sealed and it rained. that was a fun afternoon.

yeah congrats on the General by the way. I went through this whole thing about a year ago and ended up with a pretty clean 1x3 that I really like. one thing nobody told me was that you can actually apply for multiple calls in the same batch I think, or at least submit a few applications close together to hedge your bets if a call you want is popular. also worth knowing that some calls that look available on the FCC lookup are actually in a held status because the previous holder recently let the license lapse — theres a 2 year wait or something before those become available again. definitely check AE7Q like the other guy said, it shows all that status info in one place

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few months now. i have a station at my parents place about 90 miles away, kenwood ts-590sg, a decent triband yagi up about 40 feet, and i want to be able to run it from home when band conditions look good. right now i just have a VPN into a raspberry pi and i use some janky combo of hamlib and a webcam pointed at the rig which honestly works but its embarrassing how ugly the whole thing is. someone at the club mentioned RemoteHams and i looked into it a bit. seems like theres the regular remote client software and then theres the SDR side of things where you can expose the station as kind of a software defined radio endpoint? i dont fully understand how that part works. like is it streaming the raw IQ data or is it doing something else. and can other people actually access your station or is that only if you set it up as a public node or whatever they call it. also the internet linking piece confuses me — is that more like EchoLink/AllStar type stuff baked in or is that totally separate. ive been using AllStar for a few years so im not a stranger to VoIP linking but this seems like a different beast entirely. anyway just wondering if anyone has actually run this setup long term and whether its stable enough to actually trust for contesting or if its more of a casual ragchew type solution. my upload at the remote site is only about 15 megabit which i dont think should be a problem but wanted to sanity check that too.

Don't get overwhelmed by the 700+ questions - you only need 37 correct out of 50! You don't need to know the answers to all questions in the pool, just most questions for each topic. Focus on Quiz Mode in apps like HamStudy.org after you've gotten familiar with the material. Retrieval practice - pulling information out of your head - is far more effective than just reading.

yeah the ALC thing is exactly what got me when i first got my IC-7300. manual kind of implies you want to see some ALC action but didnt really clarify how much is too much. took me way too long to figure out i was overdriving it. one thing i'll add that nobody ever mentions — just monitor yourself. plug headphones into the monitor jack if your rig has one, or even better find somebody local willing to give you honest feedback while you key up. reading S-meters and ALC meters is useful but actually hearing yourself through someone elses ears is a completely different thing. i thought i sounded fine for over a year and then a buddy recorded me off his receiver and played it back and i was horrified lol. all that low end mud that i couldnt hear on my own end was super obvious from the other side.

yeah what he said about encode only is right. I made the same mistake when I started, had mine set to tone squelch which means encode AND decode and I thought my radio was broken for like two weeks lol. just flip it to tone or CTCSS encode only and youre set. also side note — if you're still not getting into the machine after that, sometimes repeaters have specific courtesy tones or timing things and if you're letting go of the PTT too fast your audio might be getting cut. some repeaters have a short hang time before the squelch tail drops so try holding the key a half second after you stop talking before releasing. probably not your issue here but worth knowing.

so ive been licensed about 3 years now and mostly just did local stuff and some casual HF but lately ive been getting really into DX and honestly the DXCC thing has kind of taken over my brain a little. right now im sitting at 87 confirmed on Logbook of the World and another 20 or so that ive worked but havent confirmed yet, waiting on QSL cards from a couple of them. my question is sort of about strategy i guess. does it make more sense to focus on getting to 100 confirmed first before worrying about anything else, or should i start thinking about WAS and WAZ at the same time? i feel like chasing all three at once would be chaotic but i dont want to miss opportunities either. some of the rarer ones obviously count for DXCC and maybe WAZ at the same time so it seems like theres overlap. also — for DXCC specifically, do QSOs on different bands all count toward the basic 100 or do they have to be on different entities? im a little fuzzy on how the whole credit system works when you work the same entity on multiple bands. like ive worked Japan probably 15 times on different bands, does that just count as one entity toward the basic award? sorry if this is a basic question, ive read the ARRL rules page but it kind of made my head spin a bit.

so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local FM repeater but im not having much luck. i can hear people on it just fine but when i try to transmit nobody seems to hear me or at least nobody responds. my HT is a baofeng uv-5r and i set the offset i think correctly, the repeater is on 146.940 so i set my radio to that frequency and there's a minus offset right? but the CTCSS thing is where i get confused. the club website says the tone is 100.0 hz but i dont totally understand if i need to set that as my transmit tone, my receive tone, or both. i tried a few different settings and still nothing. also someone told me i should announce my callsign and wait a second after the beep or something? i dont want to be rude or step on anyone so i've kind of just been lurking on the frequency for a few days trying to figure out the etiquette before i jump in. any help would be really appreciated, still trying to figure all this out

I run ESSB for local ragchews with great results - ESSB exceeds 3kHz up to 4-5kHz for enhanced audio. But I switch back to standard 2.7kHz for DX and contest work. Know your audience and band conditions. Wide audio doesn't help when signals are weak anyway.

Working on optimizing my 432 MHz EME station and running into some discrepancies in my link budget calculations. Average loss for Earth-Moon-Earth path is 252.5dB for 144MHz, varying ±1dB monthly as range to Moon changes. Scaling this to 70cm should give me roughly 261dB path loss. Current setup: 4x19-element array (~19dBi), 750W, 0.6dB NF preamp, but still struggling with weaker stations. For successful EME contact on 144MHz, sky noise in direction of Moon must be ≤500°K. Is galactic noise the limiting factor here? Also seeing significant Faraday rotation at 432 MHz - full 360° rotation possible. Should I be considering circular polarization or just accepting the losses?

nice work getting out there. i was super nervous about my first one too and ended up sitting on the summit for like 20 minutes before i got the courage to call CQ lol. the chasers are all really friendly though once you get going. one thing i'd add is download the SOTA spotter app if you havent already, makes self-spotting way easier when youre fumbling around with cold fingers on a mountaintop. i tried doing it through the website browser on my phone the first time and it was kind of a pain

yeah 10m has been something else this cycle honestly. i remember when it was basically a dead band for like 5 or 6 years and now its almost hard to find a clear frequency on a good afternoon. i worked 47 countries on 10m last month alone, which is more than i worked in the previous three years combined on that band. the JA path has been opening up real nice in the mornings too if you catch it early enough, usually around 0100-0200 UTC from here in the midwest. as for the icom thing i saw the same rumor floating around on one of the facebook groups. someone posted what looked like a leaked spec sheet but honestly it could be anything, people fabricate that stuff all the time. i'll believe it when there's an official announcement. the 7300 is still doing everything i need it to do so im not exactly in a rush.

check if the igate is internet connected first — a lot of igates in rural areas are technically running but the guy's internet went down and nobody noticed for six months. aprs.fi shows them as active for a while after they go offline, it doesnt update instantly. you can also try aprsdirect.com which sometimes has fresher data. also your path looks fine but one thing worth checking is whether you have your SSID set correctly and that you havent accidentally put a space in the callsign field or something dumb like that. ive seen people chase their tail for days over a trailing space in the config. the digipeater will repeat the packet but if the callsign is malformed aprs.fi might not index it right. if you want to verify the digi is actually passing your packets, see if anyone else can hear you on RF downwind of the digi. or honestly just post your callsign here and ill check if anything is showing up that you might be missing on your end.

made that exact jump about two years ago and yeah the RSP1B is noticeably better on HF, not like night and day everywhere but on 40m and 80m especially the noise floor dropped enough that i was actually pulling stations i couldnt even see on the waterfall before. the ADC is just better, 14 bit vs the 8 bit in the rtl dongles and that makes a real difference when you have strong BC stations nearby stomping on everything. SDRuno took me a week or so to get comfortable with honestly. the workflow is different, lots of floating windows and it can feel overwhelming at first. but once you get a layout saved it's not bad. i do still use SDR# sometimes with my old v3 for quick stuff just because its faster to fire up. if you're already comfortable with gqrx you'll figure out SDRuno eventually, just give it time before you write it off. that said your antenna point is valid. i upgraded my antenna around the same time and honestly cant fully separate which improvement came from where. might not be a bad idea to put the money there first if your feedline situation isnt great either.

I have not been able to get my RTL-SDR to work as a panadapter with my Kenwood TS-570DG or Yaesu FT-920. I have tapped the proper location for the 1st IF and inputted proper frequencies in HDSDR but display shows nothing but random lines. Can be frustrating to get working properly - make sure your tap point and IF frequency are correct.

yeah sprint SO2R is kind of its own beast. the QSY rule basically means you're constantly getting kicked off your run frequency anyway so the whole rhythm you'd normally build just doesnt exist. i ran SO2R in the NCJ sprint a few years back and came to pretty much the same conclusion you did — the second radio was mostly a distraction. what i found works better is using the second radio purely as a band scope, just listening, not transmitting. that way you can hear when 80 opens up or a big gun clears out a frequency without actually trying to coordinate two simultaneous QSOs. your brain isnt juggling two transmit paths and you still get some of the rate benefit from knowing where to jump next. probably not true SO2R but honestly in a 4 hour sprint i think its more effective than trying to go full two-radio mode