Karen Williams

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

I run dual IC-7600s with great success. You absolutely need proper band-pass filters - I use the 6-band VA6AM set with their HP triplexer. The IC-7600 front end handles the filtered signals without overload issues. Start with the filtering before any switching box.

ok so ive been lurking on this hobby for like two years watching youtube videos and listening to my neighbor talk about it and i finally just decided to actually do it and get licensed. problem is i dont really know where to start with studying. i looked at the FCC website and it was kind of overwhelming and then someone mentioned the question pool and im not sure if i should just memorize answers or actually try to understand the material. i dont have a huge technical background, i took physics in high school like 15 years ago and barely remember any of it. is the technician exam actually hard or am i overthinking this. also how long does it realistically take to study before i feel ready to take the test

the noise issue you mentioned from last year is real and honestly the main reason i switched to pure battery for anything comms-related. even a supposedly "clean" inverter generator will sneak hash onto the bands if your feedline runs anywhere near it. i keep the generator for non-radio loads only now — fans, lights, charging reserve batteries — and just run the rig directly off lifepo4 through an anderson powerpole distribution block.
100ah should be plenty for a 7300 if youre not running 100 watts the whole time. i typically see maybe 18-22 amps peaks on transmit at full power, way less if you drop to 50w which honestly is fine for most exercise comms anyway. with the laptop and fan factored in youre probably looking at maybe 10-12 amp average draw depending on duty cycle. do the math and you should be fine through dinner at least. bring a second battery if you can swing it though, just peace of mind.
chameleon in heat i havent had problems with but i always make sure the base isnt sitting on asphalt or anything that'll radiate heat back at it. grass or dirt and it's been fine for me in july deployments.

so i've been lurking on this forum for a while and finally pulled the trigger on a QFX-40 kit back in january, took me way longer than it should have to build it because life kept getting in the way but i finally finished it up a few weeks ago and did my first real portable outing with it saturday.
went up to a state park about 45 minutes from my house, threw a random wire up in a tree maybe 30 feet or so, and just started calling CQ on 40m with 5 watts. honestly did not expect much. i've always run 100w from the shack so this felt like showing up to a knife fight with a strongly worded letter.
ended up making 11 contacts in about 3 hours, including one guy in texas who was running QRP himself and gave me a 579. i was so stoked i almost knocked my water bottle into the rig. the whole setup — rig, paddle, battery, tuner — fit into a small daypack and the battery lasted the whole session with power to spare. i think im hooked. already looking at the ubitx and the mountain topper as next builds/purchases.
anyone else do a lot of SOTA or just general portable QRP? curious what antennas people are using out in the field, i feel like my random wire situation could be a lot better.

okay so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i read the band plan on the arrl website but honestly it just confused me more. like i understand i have privileges starting at 7.175 for phone but then i see people talking way lower than that and i dont know if theyre extras or what
also whats the deal with the band edges, someone at my club said to stay away from 7.300 but didnt really explain why. is it just that you might drift over or is there a legal thing about it
sorry if this is a dumb question im still figuring all this out

Log4OM v2 actually handles the WSJT-X integration pretty well these days, way better than it used to be. you set up the UDP port in WSJT-X to point at Log4OM and it picks up the logged contacts automatically, decodes come in, award tracking updates, all of it. i switched from N1MM as my main logger about a year and a half ago and havent looked back for general operating.
that said i still fire up N1MM when a big contest weekend comes around because honestly nothing touches it for that, the bandmap and the rate meter and all the contest specific stuff is just in another league. what i do is run both but only one at a time, and after a contest i export the ADIF from N1MM and import it into Log4OM. little annoying but it takes maybe five minutes and then everything is in one place. the DXCC tracking in Log4OM is genuinely really good once you get your existing log imported and confirmed statuses sorted out.
the one thing id warn you about is the initial setup of Log4OM can feel overwhelming, theres a lot of config screens and if you poke around in the wrong order you can end up with duplicate lookups or the cluster feed going weird. just take it slow and follow the wiki for the WSJT-X setup specifically

yeah 44 unique callsigns is correct, same contact on multiple bands counts separately though which helps when youre struggling to get the numbers. spotting yourself on the WWFF spotting network ahead of time makes a huge difference, a lot of hunters are watching that constantly. also post on the WWFF Facebook group a few days before, the hunters on there are pretty active and will put you in their calendar basically. i do a lot of activations in state forests and once you get a reputation for being a reliable activator people start showing up for your spots pretty quick.
40m is almost always better than 20m for domestic contacts in my experience, especially in the morning. sounds like you figured that out yourself anyway. congrats on the first one

i talked to one of the club guys at the repeater net last week and he said they're still planning on it but having venue issues. something about the fairgrounds wanting more money. they might move it to that community center on maple street but its way smaller

I've been reading about how SO2R is a must if you want to maximize your contest score, and rate versus multiplier strategy guides were useful before SO2R but not anymore. This got me thinking about how contest strategy has evolved.
In the "old days" you had to choose between running for rate or searching for multipliers, but with SO2R you can theoretically do both simultaneously. However, I'm finding that it was a weekend of one radio CQing and the second radio always tuning, never really had two bands open enough to try 2BSIQ - it was old-fashioned SO2R.
How do current top contesters balance rate optimization with multiplier hunting when propagation doesn't cooperate for true dual-band operation? Are there specific techniques for maximizing the efficiency of the "search and pounce" radio during slow periods on the run frequency?