Mark Johnson

Don't forget about eQSL too! CQ magazine accepts eQSL verifications for their DX Awards and WAZ. It won't help with ARRL DXCC, but if you're planning to chase multiple awards it's worth uploading there as well. Some DX ops are more active on eQSL than LotW.

oh man yeah i remember this exact feeling, i was stuck around 12-13 for what felt like forever. what finally broke me out of it was honestly just doing shorter sessions at a higher speed than i was comfortable with — like instead of 30 minutes at 13, i'd do 5 minutes at 17 or 18 and then take a break, let my brain process. felt like nothing was sticking but after a few weeks something just clicked. also the word farnsworth spacing thing helped me a lot. if you havent tried it, basically the characters come at full speed (like 20wpm character speed) but theres extra space between them so you get more time to think. LCWO lets you set this up. it trains your ear to hear the characters at the right speed without the overload of everything flying at you too fast. the goal is to slowly reduce that extra spacing over weeks until your brain catches up. it's slow going but it actually works differently than just turning up the speed and white knuckling through it. dont give up on head copy either, copying on paper actually slows you down mentally after a while because your brain gets focused on the writing instead of the listening

this is the kind of post i needed to read today, im fairly new to ARES (just got my general like 8 months ago) and we have an exercise coming up next month and i honestly didnt realize how complicated the net control side of things gets when you have a lot of stations. i kind of assumed it would be more organized than that? going to ask our EC if we can maybe do a short walkthrough of the check-in format before the actual exercise day. also didnt know tabletops were a thing for emcomm, thought that was more of a corporate emergency planning thing. are there resources for how to run one or does your group kind of make it up as you go

so ive been licensed for about three months now and i finally got a decent HT, a Baofeng UV-5R that my buddy gave me, and ive been trying to get into the local 2m repeater that the club runs. i can hear people talking on it just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me or respond. i checked the frequency and offset and those seem right based on the repeater directory listing. someone mentioned i might need to program a CTCSS tone but honestly i dont fully understand what that is or why the repeater needs it. like is it a password or something? i looked it up a little but the explanations i found were kind of technical and went over my head. also when i do program a tone, do i need it set on transmit only or receive too? the Baofeng menu is confusing me honestly. i dont want to do something wrong and bother people on the repeater before i know what im doing, any help appreciated

the hollow sound is almost always too much compression or the mic too close. i had the exact same issue and turns out i was just talking into the PR-40 like it was a stage mic, like right up on the grille. backing off like 4-6 inches made a noticeable difference. these side-address condenser type mics dont behave the same as the little dynamic desk mics that come in the box with radios. also dont sleep on the bass rolloff switch if your mic has one, some heil mics have a presence boost setting too that can help with that hollow thing. might be worth checkin the manual just to make sure you havent overlooked something physical on the mic itself before going deep into the radio menus.

totally normal to feel that way, i was the same way for a good year after getting my ticket. so the short answer is yeah you can absolutely just listen without checking in, thats perfectly fine on pretty much any open net. nobody's going to track you down for lurking. if you tune in late and want to check in, best practice is to wait until net control specifically asks for late check-ins or additional traffic — most nets do this at least once partway through. if you just key up in the middle of someone else's transmission thats where it gets awkward. and if he missed you it was probably just a propagation thing or he had a pile of calls coming in at once, dont take it personally. happened to me plenty of times. just try again next time, net controls are usually pretty patient with newer folks especially on the local stuff.

the generator noise thing is real and honestly the bonding fix works better in theory than when you're rushing a setup in a field. what we ended up doing for our group's go-kit is just keeping the eu2200i at least 50 feet away from the operating position if terrain allows, run a longer extension cord, and use it primarily to top off the lithium battery rather than running the radio directly off it. the radio stays on the battery the whole time and you just run the genny for maybe an hour here and there to keep it charged. that alone got rid of like 90% of the noise issues we were seeing on 40m without having to mess with ferrite chokes on every cable. as for the EFHW — totally fine for what you're describing. i've done 36 hour shifts on one and it does the job. the 9:1 unun does run warm if you're pushing power for a long time so just keep an eye on that. the trap vertical isnt worth the hassle IMO unless you're specifically trying to do something the wire antenna cant, which for basic NTS or emcomm voice traffic you probably arent.

I'm still pretty new to HF but I've been listening more than transmitting and yeah the noise on 40 has been a lot. I actually thought something was wrong with my setup for the first couple days. Ended up being just... conditions I guess. Still learning how to read the propagation charts but they dont always match what I'm actually hearing either which is confusing.

ok so i finally passed my general last month and ive been trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i know theres a chart somewhere but honestly it confuses me more than it helps. like i see people say dont operate near the band edges but nobody explains why or what counts as near. i was going to try some SSB around 7.250 but then someone in a net said something about staying away from 7.300 and i didnt really understand what they meant. is 7.250 fine or am i going to accidentally stomp on someone important or go out of my allocation or something

the FT-60 is honestly hard to beat for what you're describing. yeah its more than a baofeng but the receiver is way better, you'll notice it immediately if you're ever in a fringe coverage area trying to hit a repeater. build quality is just in another league too, thing is basically a tank. i dropped mine off a tailgate onto pavement and it still works fine years later. the menu system is a little quirky but once you program it in with chirp its not that bad. for hiking i think the durability alone makes it worth the extra cost. wouxuns are decent too, better than the cheap baofengs, but if youre stretching your budget anyway the yaesu just has that reputation for a reason. thats just my two cents though, plenty of people are perfectly happy with cheaper radios on local repeaters

i'm in almost the exact same spot right now lol, like 11wpm on a good day. someone in another thread mentioned just jumping straight into real QSOs on 40m even if you miss half of it, said that forced his brain to adapt faster than any software practice. havent tried it yet because honestly the idea terrifies me but maybe thats the point

honestly the NMO through hole is night and day vs mag mount and ive done both on multiple vehicles. the mag mount ground plane is only as good as the contact patch under the magnet and on modern vehicles with thick clearcoat it's often not as solid as you'd think even if the swr looks ok. swr can look fine and you're still losing signal to a mediocre ground connection. that said, your dropouts on hilly terrain are almost certainly just terrain. no amount of antenna improvement is going to let you hit a repeater that has a hill between you and it, that's just physics. what a better mount might get you is slightly better performance at the edge of coverage, like when you're just barely in range it might stay quieter a bit longer. the larsen is a solid choice, ive used the nmo150/450 for years. the diamond is fine too but the larsen feels more robust physically, the whip is stiffer. either way get the NMO installed properly and you'll feel better about it even if the practical difference on that repeater is modest.

this is the kind of post i needed to read honestly, im working toward my ARES registration and have been a little nervous about participating in a real drill because i dont want to be the person slowing things down. good to know even experienced folks run into issues. the 8 minutes on the freq thing doesnt sound like much but yeah i can see how that adds up when youre trying to relay messages about like actual emergencies

so i've been doing SOTA for about a year now and someone in my club mentioned WWFF and i kind of fell down a rabbit hole reading about it. decided to just go for it last saturday at a state forest near me that's apparently already in the database as a reference, KFF-something i forget the exact number right now. overall it went really well, ran about 2.5 hours on 40m and 20m with my KX2 and a random wire up in a tree. got way more contacts than i expected honestly, people were really hunting me which was cool since im used to SOTA where sometimes you're calling for a while before anyone picks up. ended up with like 47 QSOs which i think is more than enough for a valid activation. my questions though — do i need to submit the log anywhere specific or does it just go through ADIF upload somewhere? and also i saw something about needing a certain number of contacts with hunters to count as activated, is that 44 contacts or is the 44 thing something else i read wrong. also can you activate the same reference multiple times or is it a one and done deal like some parks programs

The first weekend I participated in an SSB contest I heard a TON of people making contacts down in those parts of the bands I wasn't allowed to transmit in. These frequency privileges allow Extra Class operators to more easily work DX stations and operate under less crowded conditions.

so i decided i want to get my technician license and honestly i have no idea where to start. i bought one of those gordon west books at the hamfest a few weeks ago but i kind of just flipped through it and it felt like a lot to absorb all at once. someone at work told me the question pool is public and i should just memorize the answers but that seems kind of wrong? like i want to actually understand what im studying not just pass by guessing. but then again i dont know how much of the electrical theory stuff i actually need to know day to day. anyone have a good method they used when they were prepping for their tech exam, does the gordon west book actually work or is there something better