Jennifer Lee

ok so ive been licensed for about a year now, technician first then got my general back in the spring, and i still feel kind of awkward every time i key up on HF. like i know the basics but theres this whole unwritten rulebook that nobody really explained to me at the licensing class and i keep second-guessing myself. the thing thats been bugging me most lately is figuring out when its appropriate to just call CQ on a frequency versus checking into a net. like i found a few nets on 40m that i check into regularly and thats been great, the net control guys are super patient and i feel comfortable there. but when i want to just ragchew or practice operating outside of a net i get nervous about stepping on someone or not doing it right. i listened to some guys on 20m last weekend just having a long QSO and they sounded so natural about it, calling each other by callsign and doing proper signal reports and everything. how do you get to that point where it just feels normal? and is there like an actual rule about listening before you transmit or is that just courtesy? because i have heard people just jump right in and start calling CQ without seemingly checking first and that drives me nuts. anyway sorry for the rambling post, just hoping someone with more experience can kind of walk me through how they think about it

oh man i did the same thing on my second activation, forgot to re-spot and my rate just died, sat there for like 20 minutes calling CQ with nothing. checked the cluster and sure enough i had fallen off. lesson learned haha. the hunters really do depend on it more than i expected going in.

Before starting any transmission, spend a few minutes listening to ensure the frequency is clear. I was in your shoes six months ago! The first time is always nerve-wracking, but once you do it, you'll wonder why you waited so long. Don't worry about mangling someone's call sign - we've all done it, and the ham community is quite forgiving on this.

so ive been going back and forth on this for probably two months now and i need someone to just tell me what to do honestly. my situation is i have a decent sized backyard, maybe 80 feet end to end if i stretch it diagonally, and im trying to decide whether to put up a simple 40m dipole fed with coax or just do a vertical with a decent radial field. i already have a 33ft fiberglass mast from a previous attempt at a 20m vertical that didnt really go anywhere. the thing is i mostly work local and regional stuff, some nets, occasionally try to get into some DX when conditions are right but im not like a serious DX chaser or anything. my noise floor here is pretty bad, suburban neighborhood, lots of switching power supplies and led lighting and whatever else the neighbors are running. ive heard dipoles can be a bit quieter on receive because of how they reject noise from off the sides but i dont know if thats actually significant in practice or just something people say. height is going to be limited either way, probably 30 feet at best for the dipole center or the vertical top. am i overthinking this or does it actually matter that much at that height

okay so i passed my technician exam like two months ago and ive been mostly doing 2m and 70cm stuff but someone at the club mentioned i can do some HF too? i honestly didnt pay that much attention to that part when i was studying because i figured id just upgrade eventually but now im kind of curious what the actual rules are i looked at part 97 briefly but honestly that document is not easy to read and i kept getting lost. something about phone privileges on 10m and also some CW stuff? i just dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere im not supposed to. is there like a simple breakdown somewhere or can someone just explain it

mile 18 medical tent getting busy tracks, that's usually where people hit the wall and things get interesting. good experience to have even if it was a little hectic. one thing i'd add — ask your EC about doing some simplex range testing before the next activation if you havent already. nothing worse than finding out your HT doesnt quite reach the relay point during an actual event. we learned that the hard way at a bike race a few years back, operator at the finish line could barely copy the guy at the water station 3 miles out and we had to scramble.

just wanted to say im in basically the same boat so you're not alone lol. been sitting at like 7wpm for ages. someone told me to try the Morse Mania app for just drilling individual characters until they feel automatic and that helped a little bit. i think part of my problem is i still count dits and dahs sometimes instead of just hearing the whole character as a sound, like you know the way you recognize a word in english without sounding out each letter. havent fully gotten there yet but its getting better i think

I stuck with my sequential 2x3 from General and never looked back. Sure, it's longer, but it has my initials in the suffix which makes it memorable. Vanity calls often include personal significance like initials or meaningful words. Don't overthink it - both paths work fine for regular operating.

i had almost the exact same setup last year, ft-7900 and mr77 on a nmo roof mount. one thing i found out the hard way is that the cable run matters a lot more than i expected. i had a tiny kink in my rg58 going through the b-pillar and it was causing weird swr readings and the audio on receive sounded a little off on weak signals. once i rerouted with lmr-240 and was more careful with the bends everything got noticeably better. might not be your issue but worth checking if you ever pull the headliner back for something else anyway

so i've been doing this more lately, just throwing on headphones and tuning around 40m after dinner, not really trying to make contacts or anything just... listening. picked up a couple guys in texas chatting about their antennas for like 45 minutes last night. didnt even key up just enjoyed it. kinda nice honestly, sometimes i forget why i got into this in the first place and then i have a night like that and it clicks again. anyone else do this or am i just getting weird in my old age lol

so i heard the local club is doing a table swap thing before the main event on saturday, pretty sure its at the fairgrounds parking lot starting around 7am. havent been to one of these in maybe two years since everything was cancelled and i honestly forgot how much i miss just wandering around looking at other peoples junk lol. anybody here planning to show up? i need a decent SWR meter and maybe some coax connectors if someone has a box of PL-259s they want to unload cheap

the bandpass filter thing doesnt have to kill your wallet if you build them, there are kits out there and the W3NQN designs are pretty well documented. i built a set for like 80 bucks in parts and they work fine for my station. the expensive ready-made ones are nice but not required to get started. one thing nobody really talks about enough is the logging software side — make sure whatever youre using actually has solid SO2R support with the radio switching keyed to the right port or youll drive yourself insane. n1mm handles it well but you gotta set it up right before the contest not at 0001z when everything starts.

so i've been running a Yaesu FT-7900 in my pickup for about three weeks now and 2 meters is working great, SWR is like 1.3:1 all across the band which i'm happy with. but 70cm is sitting around 2.1 to 2.4 depending on where in the band i am and i cant figure out why. the antenna is a Diamond NMO mount dual band whip, i think it's the X50 or something close to that, mounted on the cab roof with a through-hole NMO so the ground plane should be solid. i trimmed the antenna to what the instructions said but maybe i did something wrong? or maybe the coax run is the issue. i used RG-58 which i had laying around and the run is probably 12 feet from the antenna down through the cab to the radio. i've seen some people say RG-58 is fine for these distances and others say use LMR-400 or at least RG-8X. starting to think maybe thats it but wanted to ask before i go buying more cable. also just to mention, the radio does work fine on 70cm, i can hit the local repeater no problem, just the SWR reading is bugging me and i dont want to damage anything running it like this.

i just did this like 4 months ago, went from tech to general. the part that tripped me up was the operating procedures and some of the regs around HF, like which portions of the bands techs can already use vs what general opens up. theres more overlap than i expected. but yeah just grind practice tests, thats really all it is. i think i studied maybe 2 weeks total, maybe less. one thing nobody told me before i upgraded -- make sure you actually have an HF rig lined up or at least a plan because i passed the exam and then realized i had no antenna and no radio and just sat there with a shiny new callsign doing nothing for two months lol

yeah i went through exactly this about two years ago. ended up keeping both in the kit honestly. the collinear stays on the pole the whole time for fm/repeater stuff and the yagi comes out when i want to work weak signal or when somebody is really on the edge. the arrow dual band is pretty light so its not a huge deal to throw it in the bag. the thing people dont tell you about using a yagi for repeater work is that multipath can actually get worse on some paths if youre right at the edge of a ridge, the null from the pattern can bite you. for ssb and digital weak signal stuff though its a completely different situation, the yagi makes a massive difference. if your activations are mostly fm repeater contacts i probably wouldnt bother, but if you ever want to get into vhf contesting or even just working the occasional ssb dx from a hilltop the yagi is worth every ounce.

dont feel bad at all, first activations are always a little rough. the self-spotting thing on pota.app is the right move but you gotta make sure your callsign and the park reference are entered exactly right or hunters wont see you in their filters. also 14.250 is a phone frequency on 20m so thats fine but a lot of POTA activity especially ssb tends to cluster around 14.260 to 14.280 range, worth trying different spots if youre not getting hits. the other thing i'd say is just keep calling even when it feels dead. sometimes there's a little lag between when you spot yourself and when hunters notice. and honestly yeah asking a friend to spot you remotely is totally normal and accepted, people do it all the time especially if theyre monitoring the cluster anyway. nothing weird about it at all.

that florida contact on 5w is not surprising at all once you get a feel for propagation — 40m can do some crazy things especially in the late afternoon. welcome to the QRP rabbit hole by the way, fair warning it gets expensive in a different way than regular ham radio does, you end up wanting like six different tiny rigs for different bands lol. for portable antennas im a big fan of just a simple resonant dipole cut for whatever band im planning to work. yeah you have to retune or swap wires for different bands but theyre dead simple, no tuner needed, and you dont have to worry about common mode current or whether your counterpoise is long enough. i carry mine rolled up on a piece of PVC with the center insulator taped to it, weighs almost nothing. some guys swear by the end feds and they do work but you really want a decent 49:1 or 64:1 unun and a good counterpoise or youre leaving signal on the table. on the rig question — i wouldnt rush into a KX2 or X6100 right away. the QCX is going to teach you more about operating efficiently than any fancy radio will. when you only have CW and 5 watts you learn to actually listen before you transmit, work weak signals, all the stuff that makes you a better operator. i ran a bitx40 for almost two years before i got anything fancier and i dont regret it at all.

Welcome to the hobby! I recommend the Icom 2730A dual band mobile. I have two of them and have encountered no issues with them. They have a 50-watt output. For a no-drill option, consider NMO lip mounts or third brake light mounts if your truck has the right setup.

I keep a laminated card with all the NATO phonetics velcroed right next to my radio. been licensed 11 years and I still glance at it sometimes for weird letters like X or Z because honestly when do you ever say xray or zulu in normal life. the muscle memory just isnt there for some of them. one thing i'll add is that the phonetics matter way more on HF than on local repeaters where signals are usually pretty solid. when youre working a pileup or doing a dx contact with someone in another country and theres noise and fading all over the place, proper phonetics can mean the difference between getting in the log and having to repeat your call six times. i've heard people make up their own phonetics too which honestly just causes more confusion, had a guy say november alpha november charlie yankee once and it took me a second to realize he was just spelling nancy. stick to nato

the AllStar idea at the remote site is interesting but you'd basically be relaying HF through VoIP through AllStar which is kinda a mess of latency stacked on latency. i mean it CAN work, ive seen club setups where they do something like this for nets but the audio quality ends up being pretty rough by the time it gets through all those hops. echolink might actually be simpler if the goal is just occasional access for club members who dont want to deal with the RemoteHams client. honestly though for the latency problem on your SSB — what router are you running at the remote site, and have you done any QoS config to prioritize the audio packets. that made a bigger difference for me than any software setting.

so i just passed my technician exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to get. ive been reading threads here and elsewhere for like two weeks now and somehow feel MORE confused than when i started lol. everybody seems to have strong opinions and half of them contradict each other. like some people say just get the cheap baofeng uv-5r and learn on that, other people act like youre committing a crime if you buy one. then theres the yaesu ft-60 which seems popular but its kind of old now? and ive seen people mention the vx-6r but that ones pricier. i mostly want to use it for local repeaters and maybe some simplex chatting, possibly GMRS crossover stuff down the road. nothing crazy. i dont have a base station or anything yet this would literally be my first radio ever. does dual band even matter for a beginner or is that just a nice to have thing. sorry if this is a really basic question i just dont want to spend money on something dumb

EchoLink is very popular but has one fundamental flaw that makes it less than desirable for repeater linking - the potential for feedback loops. We've seen nets collapse when multiple EchoLink nodes create ping-ponging. IRLP's reflector system is much more stable for group communications and emergency nets.

okay so i've been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly i'm a little lost about how all this works. like are these completely separate award programs or do they overlap somehow? i've been logging contacts pretty carefully since day one because someone told me to do that, and i've worked maybe 35-40 different countries so far which i think counts as entities? and all but like 4 or 5 US states. but i have no idea how to actually submit for any of these or what the difference between confirmed and worked means in practice. also i saw something about LoTW and i set that up but i'm not sure if my logs are actually syncing right. i uploaded a file last week and only like 12 of my QSOs show as confirmed even though i know i've talked to a lot of people who use LoTW. is that normal or did i mess something up? sorry if this is a dumb question, i just feel like every time i read about this stuff i end up more confused than when i started

the internet linking dependency bothered me too at first but honestly after running it for a while its not really different from depending on your ISP in general — if the pipe goes down youre down regardless. the RemoteHams servers have been more reliable for me than my home internet which says something i guess. one thing nobody really talks about is the RF monitoring side when you go SDR remote. you can actually have a pretty wide panadapter view which is kind of nice for spotting activity before you tune in, feels more like sitting at a real station than the old way of just streaming a single frequency. prob not answering your exact question but its a thing i appreciate

so my neighbor is a ham and got me interested and I decided to just go for it and get my ticket but honestly I dont even know where to start. I looked up the question pool online and its like 400+ questions and I dont know if I should just memorize all of them or actually try to understand the material. someone told me to use hamstudy.org but then someone else said to get the ARRL handbook or study guide or whatever its called. is there a faster way to do this? I work full time so I dont have hours every day to study. also does the actual test have the exact same questions as the question pool or are they like reworded versions