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.

was in the exact same spot as you about a year ago haha. what finally made LoTW click for me was watching a youtube video walking through the TQSL setup step by step because the written instructions on the ARRL site are honestly kind of confusing if youre new to it. one thing i'll add is that if you use WSJT-X for FT8 or any of the weak signal modes, there's a setting to automatically upload to LoTW after each session which is really convenient. i turned that on and basically forgot about it and now i have like 800 confirmed contacts in there without doing much at all. paper cards i still love getting in the mail, theres something about holding an actual card from a station in like japan or south america that just feels different than a digital confirmation. i got my cards printed through a place online, wasnt that expensive for 100 cards, and i just try to send one back whenever someone sends me one direct

yeah this trips up a lot of new hams, dont worry about it. so the short version is you only need the CTCSS tone on your transmit side — the tone you're sending TO the repeater. the repeater has a tone squelch so it wont open up unless it hears the right tone from you, thats why you can hear it but it cant hear you (well, it hears you but ignores you basically). your receive side doesnt need a tone set unless you want to filter out other traffic, which honestly on a busy repeater some people do but you dont have to. double check what tone the repeater actually needs though. 100hz is common but some around here use 88.5 or 127.3 or all kinds of things. the repeater directory is usually right but sometimes its outdated. if your club has a website or a trustee listed you can reach out and just ask. also worth double checking your offset is correct — 2m repeaters are usually plus or minus 600khz depending on where in the band you are. if the offset is wrong you might be transmitting on the input but listening on the wrong output or something weird like that.

this is really interesting to read, im just starting to get involved with our local ARES group and havent done a SET yet. is it pretty common for the first one to go kind of rough like this or do more experienced groups run them pretty smoothly? also what does the debrief process look like afterward, do you do a formal AAR or is it more just talking through what happened

So ive been trying to get Winlink working properly for about two weeks now and im starting to lose my mind a little. Background: im running a IC-7300 into a SignaLink USB, using Winlink Express on Win10, and ive got Vara FM configured. My station is in the midwest so there are a handful of RMS gateways within reasonable range — or should be anyway. The problem is the connection just drops partway through sending a message. Sometimes it completes the handshake fine and starts transferring and then just falls apart. Other times it wont even finish connecting. I checked the audio levels about a dozen times, got the SignaLink trim pots set where they should be according to every guide i could find. ALC looks okay on the radio. Vara shows the connection starting and then... nothing. Is this a gateway issue or am i doing something dumb on my end? I checked the RMS status map and the nearest one shows green but i dont know how current that is. Also not sure if it matters but im connecting on 144.990 which i think is the standard around here but maybe its not?

the generator isolation thing you described is smart, that's exactly what i do. the eu2200i is pretty clean to begin with but you still get hash on certain bands especially if the load changes — running the radio off the battery with the charger maintaining it eliminates like 90% of that headache. just make sure your charger itself isnt noisy, some of those smart chargers are awful on 40m. on the antenna question — painters poles work but they're a pain to keep vertical without a lot of guying and in a parking lot you dont always have great anchor points. i've had decent luck with a telescoping squid pole lashed to whatever is already there, a fence post, a sign pole, whatever. for 80m you kinda need the height anyway so even getting the center up 25ft helps more than you'd think. linked dipoles are a solid choice, more so than a trap dipole for multi band field work in my opinion just because there's nothing to break or get waterlogged. for the 6 hour exercise on battery alone, a 40ah lifepo4 running a 7300 at maybe 60-70% of rated draw you're probably looking at 4-5 hours comfortable depending on how much you transmit. i'd run the generator for an hour mid-exercise to top off and then you're fine. no reason to run it the whole time if you dont have to, saves fuel and your ears.

took mine last spring, came from Tech same as you. i will say the propagation questions were the ones that got me because i just didnt have any real world context for it yet. like sure i knew what a skip zone was from reading but i hadnt actually used HF so it was all abstract. i ended up just drilling the pool until the numbers stuck. 65% on practice tests is actually pretty reasonable this early, dont panic.

okay so i've been licensed for about 8 months now (tech, studying for general) and i thought i understood the basics of Part 97 but this third party traffic thing has me completely turned around. like my neighbor isnt licensed and was asking if he could just talk to his cousin in another state through my radio and i said i thought that was fine as long as i was there but then i looked it up and now im not sure at all theres something about a third party agreement between countries for international stuff? but what about domestic, like both people are in the US, is it just fine then? i feel like i read something about the control operator always being responsible which makes sense but i dont know if there are other restrictions im missing. also does it matter what band or mode or is the rule the same across the board sorry if this is a basic question, ive tried reading the actual Part 97 text and honestly its not exactly light reading

Extras get 28% more usable HF spectrum than Generals during solar minima. During contests, those extra frequencies can make the difference between a good score and a great one. I use the Extra-only segments regularly for DX pileups - much less crowded than the General portions!

oh man this brings back memories. my first exercise was a complete mess and i had been an extra class for like 5 years at that point. knowing the rules and actually functioning under simulated stress are two totally different animals. the ICS thing tripped me up the same way you described -- in a real deployment the served agency people dont always know what we need either so it can be this weird dance of trying to be helpful without stepping on toes or going rogue on the radio. one thing that helped me a lot was volunteering for net control during exercises instead of just being a field station. when you're the one trying to manage the net you really quickly figure out what makes a station easy to work with versus a nightmare. clear traffic, proper prowords, keeping your transmissions short and readable. after i did NCS a few times i became a much better field operator just from understanding what the other side of the mic is dealing with. the message format stuff will click eventually. i'd recommend looking up some of the old ARRL radiogram practice stuff if you haven't already, even just drilling the format in your head so it becomes automatic helps a ton when you're nervous. the real disasters don't give you time to look anything up.

I've been comparing different DX cluster websites and can't decide between DXWatch and QRZ's DX Cluster for my main spotting source. DXWatch seems to have better filtering and the map view is nice, but QRZ integrates so well with their callbook lookups. The QRZ interface feels a bit dated though. What's everyone's experience? Are there other cluster sites I should consider? I mainly chase DX on 20m and 15m.