CQ Op

yeah the hybrid remote/linking idea comes up every now and then and it never quite works out as clean as you'd hope. the timing issues alone are a pain - HF remote already has inherent delay and when you stack internet linking on top you start getting feedback loops or people just talking over each other because nobody can tell when the channel is clear what are you actually trying to accomplish with it? if it's just so your friend can monitor your HF remote from his linked system there might be simpler ways to do that

so ive been trying to figure out if its worth the drive this year, last time i went i picked up a pretty decent HF rig for cheap but also spent way too much on random junk i didnt need lol. my buddy says the flea market tables have been getting smaller every year which is kind of a bummer. anyway if anyones planning to go and wants to maybe carpool from the columbus area let me know, gas isnt cheap and id rather split it with someone who actually wants to dig through tables of old coax and mystery connectors for 3 hours

so ive been listening to HF a lot lately trying to learn before i actually transmit and everyone is using all these codes and abbreviations and i can only figure out some of them from context. like i know QSL means confirmed or something and QTH is your location but then people say stuff like QRM and QRN and QSB and i have no idea what half of them mean or when you're actually supposed to use them vs just saying the thing in plain english is there like a standard set that everyone uses or do different modes have different ones, i hear them a lot on SSB but also see them in logs and stuff. also some guys on the local repeater use abbreviations that dont seem to be Q codes at all, like they'll say 73 or 88 and i know those are numbers not Q codes so is that a whole separate thing basically just trying to get a handle on all the shorthand before i embarrass myself when i finally key up

Oh man Field Day is absolutely the one to start with but yeah you missed it for this year. Mark June on your calendar and find a club that does a group activation — honestly that's the whole point of it, its a social thing as much as a contest and there's almost always someone to show you the ropes. You won't be alone making calls. For right now though, SOTA isn't really a contest at all, its more of an awards program where people activate summits and you call them from wherever you are (or you go up yourself). Very low pressure and the community is super friendly. The chasers on the other end are usually patient because they know activators are often struggling with portable gear on a windy hilltop or whatever. CQ WW is genuinely intense but theres nothing stopping you from just jumping on and working a few stations in the bottom of the hour when things slow down a bit. Mess up a callsign and move on, everyone does it. The only rule that actually matters is dont park on someone's run frequency and start calling CQ yourself. Just search and pounce for your first few times, way less stressful.

honestly similar boat to you, just started actually attempting EME contacts this past fall. the thing nobody really warned me about was the moon windows - like even when you have everything working you only have maybe a few hours where the geometry is actually favorable and the moon is high enough and not too much doppler shift happening. spent my first two weekends just figuring out the timing before i even worried about whether my signal was getting out Q65 on 2m is where its at right now for smaller stations, way better than JT65 for this. WSJT-X handles all of it and theres a whole schedule system on the EME2 reflector where people post skeds so you're not just calling CQ into the void. made my first EME qso with like a 4x9el array on the other end which tells you something about what the big guns can pull out of the noise. your 9700 is fine, preamp is everything

so ive been hunting parks for about 3 months now and finally decided its time to flip it around and do my first activation. planning to hit a state park about 45 mins from me, its listed as K-4872 i think, gonna double check that before i go obviously. my plan is to bring the ft-891 and my buddipole since i dont have a good portable antenna situation yet. was thinking 40m and maybe dabble on 20m if propagation cooperates. my question is more about the logging side of things — do i need to upload to POTA.app the same day or is there a grace period? i remember reading something about this but cant find it now. also do hunters generally expect you to spot yourself or do people spot you? i dont want to come across as one of those guys who just sits there calling CQ forever with nobody answering lol. anyway any tips appreciated, kinda nervous about the whole thing even though im not contesting or anything, just feels like a big deal for some reason

so i've been watching the solar flux numbers for a while now and yesterday was the first time in maybe 3 weeks i actually heard anything worth calling on 10 meters. worked a couple stations in south america and one in spain which honestly surprised me because the band had been basically dead every time i checked. SFI was sitting around 180 something i think, maybe a bit higher, i didn't write it down like i should have. my question is — is there a good way to predict when these openings are going to happen or is it mostly just luck and checking the band constantly? i know solar flux and the A and K indices matter but i feel like i dont really understand how to put it all together. like sometimes the numbers look great and nothing happens, other times it looks mediocre and i work 20 countries in an hour. what am i missing

nice work on 12 contacts for a first activation, thats solid. i remember my first one i was so flustered i almost forgot to log half of them lol. one thing that really helped me was downloading the HAMRS app for logging, it syncs up with POTA pretty cleanly and you can self-spot right from within it i think, or at least it makes the whole logging part way less painful than trying to do it in a notebook while operating portable.

okay so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, general class, and i feel like every time i think i understand what frequencies im allowed to use something comes up that confuses me again. my friend told me i cant use certain digital modes on certain parts of the band and i honestly dont know if hes right or if hes mixing it up with technician privileges or whatever. like i get that part 97 exists and theres a band plan but the band plan isnt actually law right? its just like a gentlemans agreement? or is some of it actually in the FCC rules? im specifically asking because i want to start doing some js8call stuff and someone in another group told me i had to stay below a certain frequency on 40m for digital but i cant find where that actually comes from also separate question kind of — if i accidentally transmit on a frequency im not supposed to, like by mistake, how much trouble can i realistically get in? is that even something the FCC actually cares about or are they too busy

congrats on the first one, 90 QSOs is a solid effort especially if condx were anything like they've been here lately. yeah the 44 contact minimum is right, thats what you need for it to count as a valid activation in the WWFF program. the upload thing tripped me up too when i started. what software are you using to log? if youre on HAMRS or even just a spreadsheet, there are a few quirks with how the WWFF reference gets exported into the ADIF. i ended up just manually editing the ADIF file in notepad to make sure the WWFF_REF field was in every record, bit tedious but it worked. pretty sure some of the newer versions of logger apps handle it automatically now though. once you get a feel for it the whole thing becomes pretty addictive honestly. i started trying to activate references that hadnt been activated before, theres still a heap of them sitting at zero in the database which is kind of wild. great excuse to go bushwalking with a radio on your back too.

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i get on HF occasionally and i keep hearing and seeing people use all these abbreviations and Q codes and i only know like a handful of them. like QSL i know means acknowledged or like confirming the contact, and QTH is your location, but then people throw out stuff like QRM and QSB and QRN and i have to look them up every single time which kind of kills the flow of the conversation especially in CW where things are moving fast. is there a good way to actually learn these or do you just kind of absorb them over time? also whats the difference between using them in voice vs CW because i feel like on SSB sometimes people say them kind of weirdly like theyre showing off or something, i dont know. and then theres all the non-Q stuff like 73 and 88 and OM and YL and XYL and i only recently figured out what XYL meant lol. anyway just wondering how people got comfortable with all of this

yeah absolutely, 40m at night is just different. theres something about the way the band opens up after dark, you get all this activity coming in from everywhere and half the time im not even logging just listening to some old timer talk about his antenna farm for 20 minutes. its honestly meditative in a weird way. had one of those nights last week actually, ended up on there til almost midnight just chatting with a guy in tennessee about his dipole setup.

yeah made that exact jump about a year ago, went from the v3 dongle to the RSP1B and on HF it really is night and day. the direct sampling workaround on the RTL is kind of a hack and you can tell — strong local AM broadcast stations were just trashing everything nearby for me, the IMD was awful. the RSP1B has actual bandpass filtering and the ADC is just fundamentally better so strong signal rejection is way improved for 40m and 80m specifically you should notice cleaner noise floor and being able to pull weaker stations out that were just getting buried before. WSPR decoding improved for me too, more spots per session. SDRuno is the native software for SDRplay stuff and its a bit of a learning curve if youre coming from SDR# but it works well once you figure out the layout. some people run the RSP1B with HDSDR or SDR# via the ExtIO plugin which also works fine if you dont want to switch software only thing i'd say is manage expectations a bit — its still a receive-only SDR, youre not getting HackRF transmit capability or anything. but purely as a listen-to-HF device its a solid step up and $120 is pretty reasonable for what you get

i went through pretty much the same frustration a while back. one thing that got me was i was trying to connect during a time when that particular gateway was apparently down or the sysop hadnt updated it in a while — the frequency list in the program doesnt always reflect real-time status. there's a map on the winlink.org site where you can see which gateways have been active recently, worth checking that before you spend an hour trying to hit a node that nobody's maintained since 2021 lol with a 9700 and a yagi at 15 miles you should have zero problem getting through on Vara FM once the basic config is right

i upgraded last spring after sitting on my tech for like 4 years, wish i had done it sooner tbh. the exam itself was fine, passed first try. the math questions i just kind of brute forced by memorizing which answer went with which question, not gonna pretend i actually understood all of it. what nobody told me though was how different HF actually feels compared to VHF. like you think you know what radio is and then you throw up a wire antenna and work somebody in italy on 20 meters and its just a completely different thing. even with a modest setup, dipole in the backyard, the bands can be pretty wild. 10 meters has been opening up lately which is good for new generals since its easy to hear stuff from far away when its going.

not sure about the exam session but our club is gonna have a table there if you want to stop by. we're always looking for new members lol. also heads up the parking situation has gotten kind of bad early on so get there when the doors open if you actually want the good stuff before the dealers pick it clean

yeah the frequency coordination thing gets me every time. we had almost the exact same problem in our group a couple years back and what finally helped was we laminated a small card with the primary and secondary freqs, PL tones, and a brief net flow and just made it mandatory that the card lives in every go kit. simple fix but you wouldnt believe how much smoother things ran after that. the battery thing is honestly harder to solve because you cant really enforce it. we started doing a quick equipment check at the start of every drill — not in a military way, just "hey everybody key up once on your HT and tell us your battery level" and that at least creates some accountability. had a few people show up embarrassed after that and start taking it more seriously. the frequency thing though really does come down to training frequency. no pun intended. if you only look at the plan once a year during a drill it wont stick. we try to run a short net on our simplex fallback freq once a month just to keep the muscle memory there.

yeah the wall wart is almost certainly your problem, or at least a big chunk of it. those switching supplies are noisy as heck and even with filtering they can get into the audio stage. i had the exact same issue on a regen i built a few years back and just dropping in a linear regulated supply made like 80% of the hum go away overnight. a 7812 with a good 2200uf cap on each side and maybe a small .1uf ceramic right at the board power pins should clean it up a lot also worth checking if the hum changes at all when you touch the enclosure or move the audio cable around. if it does youve got a grounding loop somewhere in the signal path. the copper tape thing helps for RF shielding but it doesnt do much for audio frequency noise unless its actually connected to your circuit ground properly at one point

Extra Class gives you access to additional frequencies in the lower segments of 80/40/20/15 meter bands—often considered choice territory for contacting DXpeditions and contesting. You get access to all available amateur band frequencies, removing the limitations faced by General Class operators on these bands, which allows more room to navigate during crowded conditions.

so i finally built my first dipole from scratch, been putting it off forever because i kept thinking it would be more complicated than it is. used some 14awg stranded wire i had laying around from an old electrical project, cut it to roughly half wavelength for 40m which came out to about 66 feet total, 33 feet each side. center insulator is just a piece of PVC i drilled holes through and the ends are tied off with some nylon rope to trees at maybe 25 feet up — its not perfectly flat, kinda droops in the middle which i've read is fine. fed it with RG-8X down to the shack and when i check it on the analyzer it shows SWR around 1.4:1 at 7.150 but then it climbs pretty quick toward the band edges, like 2.8:1 at 7.000 and maybe 2.5 at 7.300. resonant point seems to be around 7.2 which is close enough i guess but i thought it would be flatter across the whole band. is this just what a dipole does or did i screw something up with the feedline length or maybe the height is hurting me. the antenna is also slightly sloped because one tree is taller than the other, not sure if that matters. overall though it actually seems to work, made a bunch of contacts yesterday including one into ontario which felt pretty good for a wire antenna ive never made anything before.

yeah the polling loop is almost certainly your problem. if your loop has any delays in it at all, even a delay(1) somewhere, that adds up fast. switch to hardware interrupts on one of the dedicated interrupt pins, 2 or 3 on the mega, and you'll get your response time down to microseconds instead of whenever the loop decides to check. i did something similar for a remote antenna tuner controller and the difference was night and day. the cap on the relay coil is fine by the way, thats standard flyback protection, wont cause timing issues. you probably also want a snubber diode across the coil if you havent already, 1N4007 works fine. as for the pi vs arduino question — i run both actually, arduino handles all the real-time stuff like PTT and switching, pi handles the higher level stuff like running wsjt-x and logging. they talk over USB serial. that way you get the best of both, the arduino doesnt care if linux hiccups for half a second

What's your experience with the PWM motor control? The motor board operates silently and isn't subject to mechanical wear like relays. Thinking of upgrading from my relay-based setup for smoother operation.

Even with digital systems, lots of operators still like getting real physical cards - there's something about holding one in your hand. I do both - immediate gratification with LoTW/eQSL, then paper cards for the special ones I want to display.

Welcome to the hobby! To join ARES/RACES you must complete 5 online courses in most areas. The FEMA requirements vary by state and county - your local Emergency Coordinator will tell you exactly what's needed for your area. Best to contact your local EC first before diving into all the coursework.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, went up W6/NS-XXX (one of the easier ones near me, not gonna say which cause i dont want it getting crowded lol) and honestly it went smoother than i thought it would. got my 4 QSOs in about 20 minutes on 20m SSB with the old ft-817 and a linked dipole i threw together from some instructions i found online. anyway my questions are kind of scattered so bear with me. first off the summit reference thing — how strict are they about the activation zone? i was like maybe 30 feet below the actual high point because there was this rocky outcrop that i really didnt want to scramble across with the radio gear. the sotamaps thing showed i was still in the zone but i wanted to double check that the zone is calculated from topo data and not like someone physically going out and measuring it. also do most people self-spot on the reflector or do they pre-announce on the SOTAwatch alerts? i kind of just winged it and called CQ for a while before someone finally came back to me. felt like i was shouting into the void for the first bit. and one more thing — is there a good way to work chasers on 2m FM if youre not sure what repeaters are around? i brought my HT but barely used it.