Maria Santos

yeah the jump is noticeable, not gonna lie. i went from the same RTL-SDR v3 to an RSP1A a couple years back and the HF situation improves quite a bit. the dynamic range difference is real, especially if you're anywhere near a strong AM broadcast station. the RTL just gets stomped and you end up with all this IMD garbage across the band. the SDRplay handles it way better. not perfect, still need a good antenna and maybe a bandpass filter depending on your situation, but its a cleaner experience overall. for what you're describing though, weather fax, APRS, general scanning, i mean honestly the RTL might be fine and youre just chasing a problem that a better antenna would fix first. before i spent the money on SDRplay i wish someone had told me to try a simple 9:1 unun on a random wire, that cleaned up my HF listening more than swapping hardware did initially. HackRF is a different thing entirely. the receive performance is actually worse than a good RTL-SDR in a lot of ways, its a wide open architecture meant for flexibility and transmit capability not sensitivity. dont buy it if you just want to listen better.

so i was poking around on the icom site yesterday and noticed they quietly put up some info about a new HF rig, not sure if anyone else caught this yet. Cant find much discussion about it anywhere which is weird because usually this stuff blows up fast on the forums. Might have just been a regional release or a preview thing, im not 100% sure what stage its at. Also completely unrelated but 10 meters has been absolutely wild this past week. Worked a bunch of south american stations with basically no effort on tuesday morning, like signals were just sitting there S9. Hasnt been that good in months from my location at least. If youve been sleeping on 10m lately its worth checking in the mornings before work or whatever. Anyone else keeping an eye on new gear coming out? feels like theres been a lot of activity lately between the Icom stuff and i heard Yaesu has something in the pipeline too but that might just be rumor. Would be curious what people actually want to see in a new rig at this point, seems like the big three are kind of chasing the same features.

the ft-818 is such a great little radio for that stuff. ive been doing POTA mostly, havent worked up the nerve to hike anywhere with the gear yet but this is making me want to try. did you alert ahead of time on SOTAwatch or just show up and start calling?

so ive been licensed for about 8 years now mostly doing HF and some VHF contesting but EME has always been this thing in the back of my mind that i never really pursued. recently retired and now i actually have time to dig into it properly. problem is every time i start reading about it i end up down some rabbit hole and three hours later im more confused than when i started. what im trying to figure out is whether its even realistic to do 2m EME with a modest setup. im not talking 4x9el yagis or a dish, more like maybe a single long yagi or two yagis. i know the path loss is brutal, like 252 dB or somewhere around there at 144 MHz which is just kind of insane when you think about it. but ive been reading about people doing it with JT65B on WSJT-X and apparently the weak signal modes have changed things a lot from the old cw moonbounce days. my main questions are what kind of antenna gain do you realistically need to work anyone, and does my preamp placement matter as much as everyone says it does. ive got a pretty quiet rf environment out in the country so noise shouldnt be a huge issue. any pointers appreciated, been reading the W5UN stuff and the EME2000 project pages but its a lot to take in

yeah i was in the same boat not that long ago. the thing that helped me was just listening to the net for a few weeks before i ever checked in so i kind of knew the rhythm of it. also some nets have their preamble posted online if you can find it, that way you know exactly what format they want before you even key up.

honestly for FM intermod the first thing id try before spending money is just a good bandstop filter, you can get dedicated FM traps for like 10 bucks and they make a surprising difference even with the cheap dongle. not saying dont get the SDRplay, its a genuinely better piece of hardware, but if the main complaint is FM bleed its worth throwing a filter at the problem first and seeing how much is left over. i run a HackRF for stuff where i need to transmit (its technically capable of TX though its not exactly a precision rig) and kept my RTL-SDR around for dedicated ADS-B because its basically disposable at that price. different tools honestly.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still feel weird about when to use phonetics vs just saying the letter normally. like if someone asks me to confirm a callsign do i spell out the whole thing in NATO phonetics every single time or is that overkill in some situations i was on a local 2m net last week and the net control asked me to confirm my call and i just said each letter normally and he had to ask me to repeat it twice because apparently one of the letters didnt come through clean. so i get why phonetics exist but then other times i hear guys on the repeater just rattle off their calls without phonetics and nobody has a problem is there like a general rule people follow or is it just vibes and experience

yeah totally get that feeling. i had a similar thing happen on 20m a few weeks ago, ended up talking to this retired teacher in New Mexico for like 45 minutes. he had all these stories about running a packet radio BBS back in the day. i was just gonna do a quick check in and then bam, suddenly its midnight lol. thats why i got into this in the first place honestly

honestly the thing that finally made it click for me was lowering my expectations for radio 2 during busy runs. like i stopped trying to work anyone hard on radio 2 when the rate on radio 1 was above like 80-90/hr or whatever. if the run is hot just ride it. radio 2 becomes way more valuable when the run frequency gets quiet and youre sitting there waiting 10-15 seconds between callers anyway. thats when you can really dig into S&P on the second radio without missing anything. also N1MM has that SO2R helper window thing that shows you the state of both radios, make sure youre actually using that because it helps with the cognitive load a bit. i think there's also a setting for auto-sending on the run radio after a qso which basically buys you a few more seconds to work radio 2 before you have to pay attention again.

just got done doing almost the same install last month lol, different radio but same truck generation. i ended up going with a Lido mount that clamps to the side of the console and honestly it's been solid. the radio sits kind of at an angle toward the driver which makes it easier to see. took maybe 20 minutes to put together which was a relief after watching some of the fabrication videos online that made it look like a whole weekend project

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and ive been slowly figuring out the whole QSL confirmation thing and honestly its more confusing than i expected. when i first got on HF my elmer told me to sign up for LoTW which i did but then i started hearing about eQSL and people still sending paper cards through the bureau and im not sure whats the point of having all of these at the same time like right now i have maybe 60 or 70 contacts logged in WSJT-X and ive uploaded them to LoTW but only like 15 have confirmed back. does that mean the other people just arent on LoTW? and should i also be uploading to eQSL separately or does one feed the other somehow also the paper card thing — i got a few cards in the mail from people and they're really cool to look at, but do i need to send one back every time? i dont even have cards printed yet. is it rude not to reply to a paper card someone sent you

oh man yes bring the extra battery, always always always. you'll think you packed enough and then the event runs two hours longer than planned or net control asks everyone to stay on longer than expected. i've been doing ARES support for county fairs and half marathons and stuff for probably 12 years now and i still throw in one more pack than i think i need every single time. as for the waiting — yeah, honestly a lot of it is just sitting there. especially at an outer post. you might go 45 minutes between anything meaningful and then suddenly net control is rattling off a welfare check or a lost kid situation and you need to be sharp. so i usually bring something to read or just chat quietly with whoever's nearby if there is anyone, but keep one ear glued to the radio the whole time. don't let yourself zone out. thats the thing that gets newer operators, you get bored and then you miss your callsign on the net. also make sure you do a radio check with net control before the event kicks off, don't assume your HT is hitting the repeater well from your spot — i've had sites where i needed to move six feet to get a clean signal in. good luck this weekend, you'll do great

yeah the simplex thing gets everyone. we did something similar a couple years back during a SKYWARN activation exercise and the path loss between neighborhoods that look close on a map is brutal with a 5 watt HT. one guy was literally two miles away and completely unreadable. after that we mapped out a handful of relay positions and now we actually practice using them which helps a lot. the ICS paperwork stuff is real though. i've been doing emcomm stuff for probably 15 years and the documentation discipline is genuinely the hardest part to get people to take seriously during drills. everyone wants to do the radio stuff and nobody wants to be the guy filling out forms. but served agencies actually care about that paper trail more than they care about your antenna setup, learned that the hard way when we supported a county EOC exercise and the emergency manager basically ignored our radio traffic because we couldn't hand her a clean log afterward.

so we finally did our county SET last saturday and honestly it was a real eye opener. we had maybe 14 operators show up which is better than last year but we still had some pretty significant gaps when things started to get complicated in the scenario. the scenario was basically a prolonged power outage combined with a communications failure at the EOC — nothing too exotic, the kind of thing that actually happens. what caught us off guard was how quickly the net control situation got messy when we had three different served agencies all trying to check in at the same time and nobody had really established clear priority traffic procedures ahead of time. i mean we had them written down somewhere but under even mild simulated pressure people kind of forgot. the other thing that got me was battery power. we talk about this constantly at meetings but when it came time to actually run on battery for the full four hour exercise, two of our operators ran low way sooner than expected because they hadnt actually tested their setups under real load before. one guy had a great radio but was running a tiny little gel cell that had been sitting in his trunk for probably two years. lesson learned the hard way i guess. curious if other groups have found good ways to build traffic priority into muscle memory during training, or if there are tabletop exercises that work better than doing full SET style activations for that kind of thing. we want to do quarterly drills this year instead of just the annual one.

ferrite cores. seriously just go nuts with them on every cable coming out of that generator. i had almost the exact same problem with a different inverter genny a couple years back and wrapping the DC output cable with a bunch of mix-31 toroids right at the genny output dropped the noise floor noticeably. also check that your ground rod at the operating position is actually bonded to the radio chassis and not just sitting there looking pretty — ive seen people pound a rod in and then not actually connect it to anything and wonder why its not helping lol. the battery isolation approach works too but like you said runtime becomes a thing. i just bring two batteries and rotate them personally, bit old school but it works.