Maria Santos

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.

yeah the tone thing trips up a lot of new folks. so CTCSS is basically a subaudible tone your radio sends along with your transmission, and the repeater uses it to decide whether to open up or not — keeps it from keying up on random noise or signals from far away. the 100.0 in the listing means you need to program 100.0 Hz as your transmit tone (sometimes labeled CTCSS T or Tone or TX CTCSS depending on the radio or software). you dont necessarily need to set a receive tone unless you want to squelch out anything that comes through without it, but most people leave that off.
in chirp there should be a Tone Mode column — set that to Tone, then set the CTCSS Freq to 100.0 and make sure youre saving it to the right channel. double check your offset direction too, most 2m repeaters are plus 600 kHz but some are minus, the directory should say.
on the etiquette side — if theres a conversation going on, wait for a pause between transmissions, key up and just say your callsign and say youre monitoring or standing by. most people are pretty welcoming, especially to new hams. just dont step on someone mid-sentence and youll be fine.

so the short version is part 97 is the law, the ARRL band plan is just a gentlemans agreement that most people follow to keep things organized. you wont get your license revoked for ignoring the band plan but you might annoy a lot of people.
for general on 40m you get phone privileges from 7.175 to 7.300 MHz. below that down to 7.025 is CW and digital modes for generals too. the band plan further divides that up into where people typically do SSB vs where the digital stuff hangs out but again thats not law.
the band edge thing is about your signal splatter. if youre running SSB and you tune right to 7.175 your actual transmitted signal depending on your sideband and audio extends a few kHz, so you could actually be transmitting below your privileges without meaning to. most people say stay at least 3 kHz inside the edge to be safe. 7.125 is in the extra class segment so as a general you really cant be there on phone, your buddy was right to flag it.

i just did this like four months ago so pretty fresh for me. i used hamstudy and also watched some youtube videos from a channel called Ham Radio Crash Course which helped a lot for the concepts i wasnt getting just from reading. the electronics stuff tripped me up at first, like the ohms law questions and antenna length calculations but once i saw someone actually explain it visually it clicked. the test itself was way less scary than i expected, the VE team at my session were super friendly. just do like a hundred practice questions a day for two weeks and you'll be fine probly

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

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.

so ive been putting this off for like two months and finally just did it saturday. cut a basic 40m dipole out of some 14awg stranded wire i had laying around from an old extension cord project, used a SO-239 chassis connector i pulled from a parts bin for the center insulator and just drilled it through a piece of scrap pvc. total cost was basically nothing which was the goal.
anyway got it up in an inverted-v config, apex is around 28 feet off the ground which i know isnt ideal for 40 but its what the tree gave me. ran about 35 feet of RG-8X down to the shack. trimmed it according to the 468/f formula and ended up cutting each leg to roughly 33.2 feet and the SWR is sitting around 1.4:1 at 7.200 which honestly surprised me, figured id be way off.
my question is the feedpoint impedance on an inverted-v is lower than a flat dipole right? ive read like 50-50 ohm vs closer to maybe 70 at the feedpoint for flat, but with the angle i have (legs are drooping pretty steeply, maybe 120 degrees included angle) does that mean im actually closer to a 50 ohm match naturally without any matching network? or am i just getting lucky with the SWR reading and the coax is eating the mismatch. been second guessing myself on this one.

yeah man totally know that feeling. i came back after about a year off and the first contact i made i totally blanked on my own callsign for a second, just sat there like an idiot. 40m has been pretty decent here in the evenings lately too, got a nice long chat with a guy in tennessee last thursday that went on for like 45 minutes, we just talked about antennas the whole time which is kind of funny but thats half the hobby right there anyway

yeah the hybrid network thing confuses a lot of people at first. basically Winlink Express will try RF first if you have a channel selected, but if the propagation is garbage or your timing is off it'll silently fall back to CMS over internet. if you want to force RF-only you need to go into the session settings and specifically choose "Vara HF" or "Pactor" or whatever modem you're using as a dedicated session type instead of the hybrid option. that way it wont fall back and if the connection fails it just fails, which is actually what you want for testing purposes.
the attic dipole might honestly be fine depending on your band and time of day, 40m in the midwest you should be hitting something. pull up the RMS list on winlink.org and look at what stations are showing recent activity near your grid square, then manually enter that frequency rather than letting it scan. the auto channel scan takes forever and sometimes locks onto a station that's technically in range but has a horrible path.
for your gateway question - technically yes you can run RMS Relay on the same machine but it's kind of a pain and they really do recommend a dedicated setup, especially if you want it to run 24/7. the sysop software (RMS Packet or RMS Trimode depending on what you're doing) needs the radio to itself basically. lots of people run it on a cheap mini PC or an old laptop they had lying around.

yeah the frequency spreading thing took me a while to figure out too. i used to just go like 5 up and wonder why nothing happened. some of these pileups on a real rare one the spread can be 15-20 khz wide on 20m and the bottom end is just completely unusable. i tend to go higher than feels comfortable now honestly.
also not sure if this is controversial but i do think antenna matters more than people admit when they say its all technique. i put up a 2 element wire yagi last year and the difference in pileup results was pretty noticeable, like it wont make a bad operator good but all else equal more signal in the right direction does help. your tribander at 35 feet is probably doing ok though depending on your takeoff angle situation

the NF thing is not intuitive at all, i spent like two weeks confused about the same thing when i started poking around EME. basically think of it this way — the signal coming back from the moon is so far down in the noise that every tenth of a dB you can shave off your system noise figure is actually meaningful. i run a Lunar-Link preamp right at the feedpoint with like a 0.15dB NF and even that small improvement over my previous setup made a noticeable difference in what WSJT-X was decoding.
your 500w and dual yagi setup honestly sounds like a reasonable starting point. i made my first EME contact with similar power and a single 17el yagi, it took a while and i had to sked with patient operators but it happened. just get on the ON4KST logger and let people know your grid and your setup and youll find someone willing to work you.