John Martinez

good writeup. we did something similar for our county ARES group and the jackite pole with a random wire or EFHW has become kind of the standard recommendation because anyone can set it up without much practice. the chameleon stuff is nice but honestly a 49:1 unun and some wire gets you 90% of the way there for a lot less money if budget is a concern for newer folks coming into emcomm. one thing i'd add about the generator noise, your bonding and grounding comment is underrated. ive seen people drop several S units just by running a proper RF ground and making sure the generator frame, the radio chassis, and the antenna counterpoise are all tied together properly. people overlook that and then blame the generator when half the problem is floating grounds all over the place.

yeah you basically have the concept right. the RMS gateway is running software (usually RMS Packet or RMS Relay depending on the mode) and it does act as that bridge between your RF session and the Winlink CMS servers on the internet. so your radio connects to the gateway via packet, the gateway is connected to the CMS via the internet, and the CMS is what actually stores and routes the messages. if the gateway loses internet during your session thats probably why you're dropping. for the audio levels with the Signalink, thats almost always the culprit when sessions are flaky. the TX knob on the Signalink should be pretty conservative, i usually set mine so the radio's ALC is barely moving, maybe just a flicker. people crank it and then the audio is overdriven and the modem on the other end just cant decode it cleanly. also make sure you're in Packet Winlink mode in Winlink Express and using 1200 baud on VHF, not VARA FM unless the gateway specifically supports it, you have to check the gateway listing. and yes to your last question, the recipient just gets a normal looking email. it comes from your callsign at winlink.org, so like [email protected] or whatever, and it shows up as totally regular email on their end. might land in spam the first time depending on their provider but thats about it.

oh wow didnt even know that radio was out yet. im pretty new to all this (just got my general a few months ago) so im still running a used FT-891 which works fine for me but its fun reading about the new stuff. is 10 meters usually that active or is this more of a special thing happening right now? i tried tuning around up there a few times and heard some stuff but wasnt sure if i was doing something wrong when i couldnt hear much.

yeah i did almost exactly this about two years ago, was using a pi 3B+ though not the zero. the serial communication between the pi and arduino is honestly not that bad once you get pyserial sorted out, the main headache i had was baud rate mismatches taking forever to figure out because i kept forgetting to set it the same on both ends, pretty embarrassing in retrospect. for the antenna switching i ended up using a small relay board that the arduino controls directly based on commands from the pi. works great, latency is basically nothing you'd ever notice. the temp monitoring thing i did slightly differently — i just used a DS18B20 sensor wired straight to the pi's GPIO and skipped the arduino for that part. no real reason you couldn't do it either way though. the zero w might feel a little sluggish if you're also trying to run a GUI or anything heavier alongside it, but for headless scripts talking serial and doing logging it should be totally fine. i'd still maybe grab a pi 3 if you find one cheap just for the headroom.

the RTL-SDR will take you pretty far tbh, people underestimate them. but if noise floor and blocking dynamic range actually matter for what you're doing then yeah theres a real gap between the two. i'd also say look at whether you actually need HF native or if you can keep using the upconverter, because the RSP1B doing direct HF sampling is a different experience than that whole converter chain.

drilled NMO on three different vehicles over the years and honestly once you do it right the first time you dont think twice about it. the key is getting a proper weather tight mount, i use Larsen mounts and have never had a water issue. just make sure you're going through a spot without a headliner brace underneath, shine a flashlight up there first or tap around to find solid vs hollow spots. lip mounts work ok but yeah being off-center on the roof does affect your radiation pattern, probably not enough to matter for hitting a local repeater 10 miles away but if you care about performance its not ideal. and some lip mounts have a longer cable path which can pick up noise from the door area depending on your vehicle. for a truck id just go through the roof center and be done with it, you can always fill the hole with a rubber grommet if you ever sell the truck and want to remove it.

so ive been a general for about two years now and people keep telling me to just go ahead and do the extra but honestly i look at the question pool and some of that stuff just seems way out there. like the stuff about transmission lines and filter design and whatever impedance matching stuff... i use an HF radio mostly for casual contacts, some SSB on 40m and occasionally 20m when conditions are decent. i dont really build my own equipment or anything like that. i guess my question is partly about whether the exam is as hard as it looks and also whether the extra privileges are actually useful for someone like me who isnt doing anything crazy. i know you get access to more of the band but is it really that much more room? feels like 40m is never that crowded when im on anyway also does anyone know if the theory you study actually sticks around and becomes useful later or is it just memorize and forget kind of thing

oh man i remember that exact feeling, sitting there with my hand basically on the PTT button and just not being able to push it. what finally got me was realizing that net control has heard every possible mistake and they genuinely don't care, they're just happy people are participating. for check-ins on most voice nets it's just your callsign, said clearly, maybe twice if the band sounds noisy. some nets want name and location after net control acknowledges you, but you'll usually hear the format from the first few check-ins before you go. just listen to how the first couple people do it and copy that. seriously that's all there is to it. as for the special event station thing — those are usually separate, you'd tune to whatever frequency they listed and just call them like any other contact, they're almost always super easy to work because they're specifically set up to hand out contacts. your tech privileges might limit you on HF depending on the event but a lot of those are on VHF/UHF anyway or they'll have a tech-friendly frequency listed.

dont stress too much about understanding all of it at once, i spent like my first year just making contacts and logging them in WSJT-X without really knowing what i was chasing and then one day i looked at my log and realized i already had like 60-something entities confirmed on LoTW without even trying that hard. FT8 makes it pretty easy to pile up entities fast if you dont mind that mode. some people dont, personal preference thing. the VE7 wont count as DX for DXCC purposes btw since canada is basically domestic contacts in terms of entities for US hams — actually wait i might be wrong about that, i think canada does count as an entity, someone correct me if im wrong lol

so i've had my FT-857D for probably 6 years now and i always kind of knew about the mars/cap mod to open up the TX range but never bothered because honestly i mostly just work HF and the occasional VHF simplex. but i picked up a second one cheap at a hamfest last month and figured id try the mod on that one first before touching my main rig. the mod itself is dead simple, just a couple of diodes on the main board, theres a dozen writeups online and they all basically say the same thing. took me maybe 20 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself and staring at the board with a flashlight. after that the rig transmits way outside the ham bands which i obviously dont plan to use, but the more useful thing for me was that the RX opened up too and i can now monitor some stuff i couldnt before without a separate scanner. anyway the second thing i did was the internal fan mod because that stock fan is genuinely annoying when youre doing any kind of extended operation. swapped it out for a quieter 12v fan and did a simple resistor mod to slow it down a bit at lower temps. havent had any heat issues and its so much quieter now. just curious if anyone else has done other mods to theirs, ive seen some stuff about the CAT interface and maybe improving the stock mic preamp but havent dug into those yet.

so i've been doing FM sats for about a year now and finally decided to jump into the linear transponder stuff. picked up AO-73 last weekend during a decent pass and actually made a contact which i was pretty stoked about, but i have some questions because im still confused about a few things. first off the doppler correction — i was using gpredict and it was shifting my uplink and downlink frequencies automatically but i couldn't tell if it was doing both correctly. like the downlink seemed fine but i kept hearing my own signal drifting around. is that normal or am i supposed to manually tune one of them while letting the software handle the other? i've seen people say you should tune the downlink by ear and let gpredict handle the uplink but that seems backwards to me also my signal was way too strong at the start of the pass, i could hear myself crushing other stations. backed off the power but then i couldn't hear myself at all. what's a reasonable starting point power-wise for a handheld yagi setup, i'm running maybe 5 watts into a cheap arrow antenna

yeah i just went through this last year, was totally lost at first too. i ended up using an app called Morse-It or something, honestly cant remember the exact name but there are a few good ones. the thing nobody told me was that plateaus are completely normal, i got stuck around 10 words per minute for like two months and thought something was wrong with me lol. then it just kind of clicked one day also just listening to actual on-air CW even before you can copy it helps weirdly, just tune around 14.050 or wherever and let it wash over you

so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra class exam. i know it opens up more spectrum and all that but honestly i dont even use most of what i have access to now. the theory stuff on the practice tests is pretty intense, like the filter stuff and the oscillator questions, im not an engineer and some of it just looks like gibberish to me my main thing is HF and i mostly just do some casual SSB on 40 and 20 and a little digital. not really into contesting or anything. is it worth grinding through all the theory or is general basically fine for what most people actually do day to day. also does passing the extra actually make you a better operator or is it just a piece of paper at that point

so i finally got my technician last month and ive been listening to the Tuesday evening net on the local repeater for a few weeks before i got brave enough to check in. checked in last night and the net control guy was super nice, but then afterward one of the other guys on the frequency kept transmitting over people? like he would just key up while someone else was mid-sentence. i didn't say anything but it made me wonder if i misunderstood something about how nets work. is that normal? should i have said something? also when i checked in i said my callsign and my name and that i was a new ham and the net control asked if i had traffic. i said no because i didnt know what that meant at the time lol. now i know it means like messages to pass or whatever. just feeling my way through this stuff. any tips for net check-ins would be great honestly

the farnsworth thing really does work, and i wish someone had told me to do it from day one instead of two years in. the idea is your brain needs to learn to recognize the characters as whole sounds before it can keep up at speed — if you build muscle memory at slow character rates you basically have to unlearn it later which is painful. so yeah crank the characters up to like 20wpm and use the word spacing to give yourself breathing room, then slowly tighten the spacing over weeks. it feels wrong at first and you'll miss a lot but that's fine, just let the letters you catch register and dont stress about the ones you miss. the on-air stuff being harder than practice is completely normal by the way. practice recordings are clean, consistent, usually good fists. real operators have their own timing quirks, QRM, fading, all of it. the only fix for that is more on-air time honestly. the 40m slow speed nets are great for this, there's usually one running most evenings and people are genuinely patient with newer ops. just get on and make noise, nobody's judging