Karen Williams

the ones i use pretty much every contact are QTH, QRM, QSB, and QSL. thats honestly like 90% of what comes up on a normal sideband qso. also QRP if someones running low power, youll see people say "im running QRP" meaning like 5 watts or under. and QRN when the band is noisy from weather. dont stress about memorizing the whole list, the obscure ones you can just look up if someone uses one you dont recognize

yeah what he said about LoTW being the main one for ARRL awards is right. one thing i'd add is that ClubLog is another one worth knowing about, some DXpeditions use it for online log checking and its free. i actually find myself checking ClubLog almost as much as LoTW these days just to see if a contact made it in before the cards even get confirmed. log4om should handle all of this pretty well once you get the LoTW certificate sorted out, that part is honestly the most annoying step but you only do it once. after that uploading is pretty painless.

POTA is the same way honestly, i did my first park activation at a state park like 20 minutes from my house and i was hooked immediately. something about just being outside with a radio and actually making contacts that hits different than sitting in the shack. my wife still doesnt fully understand why i drove 20 min to do the same thing i could do at home but whatever it makes sense to me lol

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals. the FCC part 97 is what actually matters legally — the ARRL band plan is just a gentlemens agreement, nobody enforces it. for 40m phone as a general you can operate from 7.175 to 7.300 MHz, and that 7.175 is your lower edge. now here's the part people mess up — that frequency is where your carrier needs to be, but your signal on SSB extends downward from the carrier on LSB. so if you're on 7.175 you're probably putting energy down around 7.172 or so which is technically outside your priv. most experienced ops will tell you to stay at least 3 khz above your lower limit just to be safe, so call it 7.178 and you're fine. the guys you heard on 7.150 might be extra class, or they might be DX stations — foreign hams have different allocations and the 7.100 to 7.200 range is actually shared with international broadcast in some regions which is a whole other mess. you're not imagining it, it gets complicated down there.

Welcome to POTA! You need to make 10 contacts for a successful activation, and it's good practice to upload the logs even for an unsuccessful activation because this way you reward the hunters. Your battery choice sounds fine - focus on having fun and getting those contacts!

New General getting ready to install my first mobile rig in the truck. I've been going back and forth between getting a 50W dual band or maybe a single band 2m with 65-80 watts. My concern is reaching repeaters while camping in some remote areas. Question for the elmers - is there really much difference in range between a 50w radio and a 65-80w radio? Would I be better off focusing my budget on a quality antenna instead? Planning to power directly from battery and definitely avoiding the cigarette lighter based on what I've read here. Looking at the Yaesu FTM-300DR but open to suggestions. Thanks!

oh man i went down this exact rabbit hole when i first got my general. ended up with like six browser tabs open at once and was more confused than helped lol. what eventually clicked for me was just picking one as my main and only checking a second one if i couldn't find a spot for something i really wanted to work. right now i mostly use DXwatch because i like the filter options for band and mode but honestly the QRZ one is fine too, just personal preference at that point. the phone apps are convenient when im not at the shack but i've noticed they can be a bit laggy like you said. there's also HamAlert which is kinda different — it notifies you when a specific callsign or entity gets spotted rather than you having to keep checking. thats been more useful for me than staring at a cluster feed waiting for something to show up

ok so ive been listening to hf a lot lately and people are constantly saying stuff like QSL and QRZ and QRM and i have no idea what any of it means. like is there a list somewhere? i tried googling it but i kept getting results that were just wikipedia pages that werent very helpful. also people say things like 73 and 88 which i gather are like greetings but im not totally sure. my elmer told me to just pick it up as i go but honestly that feels like it would take forever and i keep missing what people are actually trying to say during a contact. does anyone have like a plain english version of the most common ones you actually hear? not looking for the full international Q code list or anything just like the ones that come up all the time

ha i remeber my first qso i was shaking the whole time and completely forgot to give my callsign at the end so the other guy had to ask me again. been licensed 4 years now and i still get a little nervous calling into a new repeater for the first time. the FT-65 is a solid step up from the baofeng btw, good choice if thats the direction your going

yeah ive done almost exactly this with a yaesu g-450a. the nonlinear pot thing is almost certainly just wear on the resistive track, they get dead spots especially at the ends where it parks most of the time. what i did was just map it in software — take like 20 readings across the full rotation and build a lookup table in the arduino sketch, then interpolate between points. its not elegant but it works and you only have to calibrate it once. the analogRead values dont have to be linear as long as you know what they correspond to. the L298N should be fine for the motor drive but watch your current draw on startup, those old rotators can pull a decent spike and the 298N gets warm fast if youre not giving it adequate heatsinking. i fried one before i figured that out. for the hamlib integration on the pi side, rotctld is your friend. there are some sketches floating around on github that implement a serial protocol compatible with rotctld so wsjtx or any other hamlib aware program can just talk to the arduino directly over usb. saves you from needing the pi in the middle if you dont want it there.

so ive been licensed for about 12 years and EME has always been this thing in the back of my head that i figured id get to eventually. well im finally at a point where i have a decent setup and some property to work with and i want to actually try it for real instead of just reading about it forever. right now i have a single yagi on 2m, the M2 2MXP28, running about 400 watts into it. i know thats basically the floor for EME and probably not gonna get me many contacts with CW let alone SSB, but ive been reading about how JT65 and now Q65 have kind of changed what entry level EME looks like. like is my setup actually workable or am i kidding myself. the path loss on moonbounce is something like 252 dB on 2m right, so even with Q65 im wondering if one yagi at 400w is enough to work anyone besides the big guns with massive arrays. also i guess my bigger question is just the logistics. i need to know when the moon is up at both my QTH and whoever im trying to work, and ive been using VK3UM's EME calc software which seems to be the go-to. is that still what people use or is there something better these days. what do people actually use for scheduling contacts, is it all done through ping jockey or has that moved somewhere else. sorry for all the questions at once i just have a ton of them

not a dumb question at all, everyone starts somewhere. okay so the short version is there are three license levels in the US — Technician, General, and Amateur Extra. you have to take them in order, so Technician first. some people do what they call same-day upgrades where they pass Tech and then immediately sit for General at the same session, which is totally allowed. for studying most people use HamStudy.org or the ARRL study guides. HamStudy is free and honestly really good, it just drills you on the actual question pool which is what the test pulls from. the Technician pool is like 423 questions and they pull 35 for your exam, you need a 74% to pass. a lot of people with no background at all can get through it in a few weeks of casual studying, maybe less if you put some real time in. look up a VE session near you through the ARRL website when you feel ready. good luck