James Holloway

ARRL will have new study materials including The ARRL Ham Radio License Manual and Tech Q&A by May 2026. I'd wait for those official guides if you're not testing until August. The print materials are usually more thorough than online resources.

yeah the 100ah lifepo4 should be totally fine for that. rough math — 60w out of the radio means maybe 12-13 amps draw at 12v when transmitting, probably half that on receive. if youre doing a typical net scenario youre not keyed up constantly so your average current is way lower than peak. 6-8 hours a day over two days, even with the laptop and signallink thrown in, you probably wont touch 50% depth of discharge total if youre not being careless. the thing i would think about though is what happens if someone else needs power. always seems like there's one person at these exercises who shows up with a dead tablet or wants to charge their handheld. i usually bring a small 12v to usb panel just for that stuff so it doesnt come out of the main battery. keeps things clean. on the antenna placement thing with the feedline — if youre using ladder line or open wire you have way more flexibility on where to put the pole relative to the rig, but if youre feeding it with coax just bring an extra 25-50ft and eat the small loss. better than fighting the geometry all day.

congrats on wanting to try it, EME is probably the most satisfying thing ive done in 30 years of hamming. to actually answer your question though — the IC-9700 is fine for a starting point, the receiver is decent enough. the weak link is almost always going to be antenna gain and feedline loss, not the radio itself. for a realistic entry level 2m EME setup most people run something like a single long yagi, we're talking 9 to 12 elements minimum, preferably more like a 15-17 element design with good f/b ratio. a single yagi you'll hear signals from the big guns pretty easily with JT65B but actually completing a two-way contact is going to be tough. two yagis stacked makes a real difference. four yagis is where you start feeling like you can work whoever you want on a decent pass. power matters too. 100 watts into a single yagi into the moon is painful. if you can swing an SSPA or even an old tube amp to get to 500w-1kw at the feedpoint that changes things a lot. key thing is minimize feedline loss, like seriously use the best coax you can or go hardline, every tenth of a dB you lose before the antenna is basically throwing money into the ocean. preamp right at the feedpoint is also non negotiable, a good LNA with maybe 0.4-0.5dB noise figure will change your receive situation dramatically. first contact is surreal. mine was with a station in japan and i sat there for like 10 minutes just kind of not believing it worked

yeah totally get the overwhelm on this, i felt the same way starting out. honestly the ones you'll hear constantly are pretty manageable. QTH is your location, QSL means confirmed or acknowledgement (like yeah i got your transmission), QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural static/noise, QSB is when your signal is fading in and out, QRZ means who's calling me, and QRP is low power operation. those come up all the time. the number codes like 73 are just old telegraph shorthand that stuck around. 73 is best regards, not really goodbye exactly but people use it that way. 88 is love and kisses, usually sent to someone you know well. DE just means from, so when you hear W5XYZ DE K4ABC that's K4ABC calling W5XYZ. ES means and. so you'll see stuff written like ur 599 es good wx which means your signal report is 599 and the weather is good. dont stress about memorizing everything at once, you pick it up just from being on the air. after a few weeks the common ones just click.

For QRP work, that 9Ah Bioenno is perfect. Having a stable power source that will keep your gear running for hours allows you to focus on making contacts and enjoying the scenery rather than constantly checking voltage levels. The investment is worth it - these batteries last for years with proper care.

I've been using both for about six months. The HackRF One is fantastic for learning DSP concepts and experimenting with modulation schemes, but honestly, my $20 RTL-SDR dongle with an LNA4ALL preamp outperforms it significantly on receive. Software like SkyRoof supports RTL-SDR, Airspy, and SDRplay devices for satellite tracking and receiving ham radio satellites.

so ive been keeping an eye on spaceweather.com and the solar flux index has been creeping up the past few days, sitting around 180-something yesterday which honestly i havent seen in a while. fired up the rig this morning just on a whim and 10 meters was absolutely alive. i mean like, worked a station in Japan without even trying, just called CQ and he came back to me first call. running like 100 watts and a simple dipole up about 25 feet. been licensed since 2019 and i dont think ive ever experienced a genuine long path opening like that. kept the radio on all morning and caught a few EU stations too, one guy in Italy who had a massive signal, honestly louder than most stateside contacts i make on 40. anyway i guess my question is — is there somewhere better than spaceweather to track this stuff in real time? and does anyone know if this is likely to keep up or was this just a fluke. i know we're supposed to be heading into higher solar max territory but i never really understood how quickly conditions can change day to day.

had almost the exact same thing happen when i first set mine up, turned out to be a grounding issue between the SignaLink and the radio chassis making the audio path noisy in a way that only showed up on certain signal levels. probably not your problem but worth checking if you havent already. the closer gateways might just be running tighter tolerances or different Vara configs too, some sysops really dial their setups in.

oh man i remember my first activation, i also froze when more than two people called at once lol. it just takes a few times before your brain figures out how to pull one callsign out of the noise. some people say work by number during a pileup but i never really got the hang of that myself, i just kind of listen for whoever is loudest and go from there. also 40m end fed in a tree is basically the classic POTA setup at this point, you really cant go wrong with it. im curious what you used for your portable power setup if you dont mind me asking, im still trying to figure out what battery to bring on my next one.

been running a ts520 for like 15 years and finally ready to upgrade to something with digital modes built in. narrowed it down to these two but cant decide. the icom seems more popular but the yaesu has more bands built in which might be nice down the road anyone made this jump from tube era stuff? wondering if the learning curve is gonna be brutal or if its pretty straightforward once you get past all the menu diving

honestly the sprint is probably the worst contest to learn SO2R on because the exchange is so fast and everybody's moving around so much. id try it first in something like SS or a DX contest where the run frequency is a bit more stable and you have more time between exchanges to actually look around on radio 2. in sprint you barely have time to breathe between contacts let alone manage a second vfo. dont get discouraged by one bad attempt with that particular contest format.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and im starting to work more contacts and people keep asking me if im on LoTW or eQSL and i honestly dont even fully understand the difference between all of them. i know QSL cards are the physical cards you mail or send through a bureau but then theres LoTW which is the ARRL thing and then eQSL which seems like its separate and some people act like its not as legit? idk basically im trying to figure out if i need to sign up for all three or if one is good enough. im not chasing any awards right now just trying to be a good operator and confirm contacts properly. also the LoTW setup looked really complicated with the certificates and stuff, is it actually hard to get going or am i overthinking it