Northern Ham

yeah we had almost the exact same generator problem at a public service event a few years back. turns out the guy's genny had a floating neutral and it was just pumping crud everywhere. bonding fixed most of it but we ended up just running the HF stuff off batteries the rest of the event and only using the generator for the laptop and the APRS setup which didnt care as much. one thing i'll add — whatever battery system you settle on, make sure everybody in the group actually knows how to use it. sounds dumb but we had a new member nearly run a 100ah agm flat down to nothing because he didn't realize the radio was pulling more than expected and there was no low voltage cutoff on the setup. lifepo4 is more forgiving but still, a simple battery monitor on the panel saves headaches. the victron bmv series is what most of our guys use now, accurate and you can actually trust the state of charge readout unlike those cheap percentage meters.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely takes a while to absorb. so the Q codes originally came from maritime and commercial telegraphy, they were designed so operators could communicate across language barriers quickly in CW. ham radio kind of adopted them and a lot of them stuck around especially on HF and in CW operation. you're right that QSL is acknowledgment or confirmation, QTH is location, QRM is man-made interference (other stations basically), QRN is natural static, QSB is fading signal, QRZ is who is calling me, QRP means low power operation and a lot of guys use that as an identifier for their whole operating style now. QRO is the opposite, running high power. honestly the ones you'll hear constantly are probably QSL, QTH, QRM, QRN, QSB, QRZ, and maybe QRT which means shutting down or going off the air. the other stuff like 73 and 88 are procedural codes, totally separate origin. 73 is best regards, 88 is love and kisses which is usually only sent to someone you actually know. DE just means from, like W1ABC DE K5XYZ means K5XYZ is calling W1ABC. AR means end of transmission basically. those are prosigns and they come from the old telegraph era too. once you start doing more CW contacts it all becomes second nature pretty fast.

For DX work, stick to 2.4kHz max. At more than 6kHz separation, distortion should be at least -40dB compared to passband signal. Poor quality SSB is defined as width greater than 6kHz at 40dB down. Extended SSB (ESSB) might sound nice locally but creates problems in contests and DXpeditions.

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new generals. so the FCC part 97 rules are what actually matter legally, the ARRL band plan is more of a gentlemens agreement on top of that. for general on 40m your phone privileges start at 7.175 MHz and run up to 7.300, and CW you can use most of the band but check the actual part 97 table to be sure. the band edge thing your elmer mentioned is real and important. the issue is your signal has a certain bandwidth, so if you park your dial right at say 7.175 and your SSB signal is maybe 3kHz wide, part of your audio could be splashing below into territory you're not supposed to be in. most people just leave a little cushion, like set up at 7.178 or so and you're fine. technically it's a legal issue if you go outside your allocation, not just courtesy. the radio doesn't always know where the edges are, that's on you to manage.

so the Tri-County hamfest is coming up on the 14th and im debating whether its worth the drive, its about 2 hours from me and last time i went a few years back it was kinda underwhelming honestly, mostly old CB gear and not much in the way of actual ham stuff. but a buddy from the club said they supposedly have more vendors this year and there's gonna be a VE session in the morning which i need anyway for my upgrade exam. anybody been to this one recently or know if its gotten better?

yeah this was confusing to me too when i first got my ticket. what clicked for me was realizing the cluster is basically one big network and all those sites are just different windows into the same data more or less. so you're not really missing out if you use one over another, its more about what interface you like. i just have a browser tab open to DXwatch most of the time and thats honestly been enough. the one app i actually keep on my phone is HamAlert — you set up triggers like "alert me when ZL is spotted on 20m" and it pings you. that thing is pretty great if you have a target entity you're hunting, saved me from missing a few rare ones

so we finally got enough people together to run a proper simulated emergency scenario through our county ARES group and honestly it was kind of eye opening. the scenario was a major flooding event that took out the repeater infrastructure and we had to coordinate shelter-to-shelter traffic using simplex and some winlink on HF. i've been licensed about 6 years and thought i had a pretty good handle on things but man, when you actually try to pass formal message traffic under simulated stress it's a different animal. biggest thing i noticed is how much time gets wasted when operators aren't sure of their net control procedures. we had two people try to call in at the same time on the same frequency for like a solid minute because nobody had really internalized when to wait and when to just go. and the ICS forms stuff — i know everyone groans about paperwork but when the served agency rep asked for a resource status update we kind of fumbled around for way too long before someone had the right form filled out. also learned that my go-bag setup was way overconfident. thought i had enough battery but running the HF rig plus the VHF handie plus trying to keep my laptop going for winlink — drained faster than i expected. going to rethink the power budget before the next one. anyone else run similar drills lately? curious what caught you off guard.

honestly the thing that surprised me most building mine was how much i was overthinking the radio part and not thinking enough about the boring stuff. like yeah the rig matters but you also need a way to charge that battery when its been three days, some kind of antenna mast situation because not every location has a tree or a fence to work with, and food and water for yourself if youre gonna be running a station for hours. i went through three or four versions of my kit before i settled on something i was happy with. first version was way too heavy, second was too minimal and i kept wishing i had things, current one is in a rolling duffle bag and weighs about 30 pounds which feels like the right tradeoff for me personally. your mileage will vary depending on whether you're driving to a site or potentially humping it in on foot. also strongly suggest joining your local ARES or RACES group if you havent already, doing drills is genuinely useful and you get to see what other people brought and kind of reverse engineer what works. thats how i figured out i was way overcomplicating my antenna situation

Great writeup! Our biggest issue was operators forgetting to eat during the exercise. Do not skip meals just because things are busy. You may not think that you need to eat anything, but volunteers have suddenly fainted without feeling any early symptoms that something was wrong. Had to remind everyone that self-care is part of good EmComm practice.

Welcome to your first SET! Don't be overly concerned with problem solving during the exercise. What's more important is that you experience problems and learn to be flexible and adapt. The goal is to learn, not be perfect. Your nervousness shows you're taking it seriously - that's a good thing!

yeah what he said about the sidebands is the main thing. i learned this the hard way when somebody came back to me and said i was bleeding over into some weird digital segment. was embarrassing. now i just mentally subtract a few kHz from whatever the edge is and call it good. also worth noting that 40m is kind of a weird band internationally — the ITU regions have different allocations so if youre working DX sometimes the other station is operating perfectly legally on their end but theyre outside your allowed range. just something to be aware of, not really a problem for stateside stuff

I'll vote for the Icom IC-2730A if you can stretch the budget slightly. With its rugged construction and reliable performance, the Icom IC-2730A is a versatile choice for ham radio enthusiasts looking for a compact and powerful dual-band mobile radio. Plus you get dual band capability which is handy.

timing is everything honestly. ive worked some pretty rare stuff with 100w and a wire antenna just because i figured out the op's pattern before the guys running kilowatts did. there was one memorable VP8 operation where the op was clearly working by number and half the pileup didnt notice for like 20 minutes, so i just waited until he was on my number and got through pretty clean. the partial call thing is interesting too — on cw especially if the op comes back with just a partial like "3T" you need to resist the urge to immediately blast your full call back. just send the missing portion once, clearly, and let him complete the qso. i see people send their full 6x6 call back at 30wpm in a panic and it just buries everything. also on ssb i've had good luck with sending just my suffix when the op is clearly fishing around, gets you to stand out if everyone else is sending full calls. the split listening part is something a lot of newer ops dont practice enough. knowing where in the split window the op is actually pulling calls from takes a few minutes to figure out each time. some expeditions publish their listening range but honestly just listening for a few qsos before you start calling saves a lot of wasted effort.

nice work getting out there. i did my first one earlier this year and was also confused about the log thing for a while. one thing i didnt realize at first is that you should also spot yourself on the WWFF spotter or pota spots or whatever while youre actually activating so hunters can find you in real time, makes getting to 44 a lot easier than just calling CQ into the void. i didnt do that my first time and it took way longer than it needed to lol

congrats on the first activation, 34 QSOs is solid especially if conditions werent great. on the logging question — the SIG and SIG_INFO fields in ADIF are really what you want for WWFF, SIG would be WWFF and SIG_INFO gets the actual reference like KFF-1234 or whatever country prefix you're in. some logging software handles this automatically if you set up a WWFF activity but if youre doing it manually just make sure those fields are there before you upload to the WWFF database. for the hunters, they dont have to know its a WWFF activation for your count to be valid. your QSO total is your QSO total regardless of whether the other station is actively hunting. where it matters is on their end — they need the reference logged correctly to claim the contact for their own awards. but plenty of people just stumble onto an activation frequency and work you without knowing, happens all the time and those count just fine for the 44 minimum. the spotting thing ive had mixed results with the wwff site from mobile too, using parksnpeaks or pota spots as backup is totally reasonable and a lot of hunters watch those anyway

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general) and im trying to get into DX chasing a bit more seriously. a buddy at my local club mentioned i should be using cluster spotting but honestly the whole ecosystem is kind of confusing to me. like i have a qrz account and i can see the logbook stuff, but someone mentioned dxwatch separately and then theres also the dx cluster thing built into some logging software and i dont really understand how they all relate to each other. right now what i do is i have dxwatch open in a browser tab and just kind of watch it scroll and then if i see something interesting i go tune to that frequency. is that basically how people use it or am i missing something? feels like im just reacting instead of being strategic about it. also does the qrz bandscope thing actually work well for anyone? i tried it a few times and it seemed hit or miss on whether the spots were current any tips appreciated, not sure if theres a better workflow here

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i mostly just do 2m and 70cm stuff, some APRS, talked on a few repeaters. but ive been reading about HF and honestly it sounds way more interesting than i expected when i first got my license. a buddy at the club keeps telling me to just go for general already and stop messing around on VHF. my question is how hard is the general exam compared to tech. like i remember the tech exam being pretty straightforward but i heard the general has more math and electrical stuff in it. im okay with math but im not an engineer or anything. also how long did people study before taking it, i dont want to spend months on this if i dont have to. are there any good free resources or do i need to buy a book