Maria Chen

so ive been lurking on this forum for a while and finally pulled the trigger on building my first QRP rig from scratch. went with a pretty basic 40m single band CW design, nothing fancy, just wanted to understand the whole thing top to bottom before i moved on to something more complicated. took me about three weekends in the garage but i got it oscillating and making contacts yesterday which honestly i didnt think was gonna happen that fast. anyway the thing is putting out around 3 watts into my end fed and ive been getting some decent reports on 40m in the evenings, made it about 400 miles last night which felt pretty good for 3 watts. but im wondering about efficiency - like the final stage runs pretty warm and im not sure if thats normal or if im losing a lot as heat. im using a IRF510 MOSFET and the drain efficiency seems okay but i havent actually measured it properly, just going by feel and the fact that my 9v battery doesnt die as fast as i expected. also curious if anyone runs QRP portable and what kind of antenna situation they use when theyre out in the field because i want to take this thing hiking eventually. sorry for the wall of text, main questions are basically: is warm = bad for the final, and whats a good portable antenna setup for QRP

tried JS8Call a few months ago and my honest take is the UI is kind of a mess compared to WSJT-X, took me a while to figure out what was actually happening on screen. but once it clicked i did manage a few solid contacts on 40m. activity was there but you have to be patient like the other guy said. one thing i will mention is make sure your audio levels are dialed in before you transmit, i was running a little hot at first and my decodes were garbage until i sorted the ALC situation out. same issue i had when i first started with FT8 honestly, the IC-7300 USB audio can be fiddly if you havent set it up carefully.

Not a basic question at all, it took me a while to figure this out too when i first got licensed. Ok so here's the deal as i understand it — LoTW is run by the ARRL and it's really the gold standard for awards like DXCC and WAS. Contacts confirmed there definitely count. eQSL is a separate system, it's not affiliated with ARRL, and last i checked those confirmations don't count toward DXCC but they do count for some other awards like the eQSL ones obviously. Some people use both, some just do LoTW. Physical cards are still very much a thing and honestly a lot of the old timers really appreciate getting them. If someone sends you a card through the mail, yeah it's considered good practice to send one back. You don't need a QSL manager unless you're getting a huge volume of requests or operating a special event station or something like that. For most folks you just design a card (there are printers that specialize in ham radio QSL cards), keep a stack, and mail them out when you get requests. Some people write directly and some go through their bureau — the ARRL has a QSL bureau service for members which is way cheaper than mailing direct internationally. Honestly my suggestion is set up LoTW first since that's where the awards are, then decide if you wanna do the others. The TQSL software is a bit clunky but you'll get used to it.

dont overlook the LPF relays, ive seen those cause weird power issues on band changes on a few different Yaesu rigs. they get oxidized contacts and the insertion loss goes up enough to matter. probably not your main culprit if its happening across all bands but worth knowing. also what band is worst? if its noticeably worse on 10m vs 40m that tells you something different than if its flat across everything.

that sounds like a solid first go honestly. our group does a debrief but its usually pretty short, maybe 20 minutes at the next monthly meeting. i think it depends heavily on the EC and how much time they have. the groups that are really organized about it usually have a template they fill out, like an ICS 214 type thing, which makes the debrief easier because everyone has their notes already written down during the event rather than trying to remember after. one thing nobody told me before my first activation was how much of the job is just sitting there waiting and then suddenly everything happens at once. sounds like you figured that out pretty quick though.

That feeling you're describing after your first real activation - yeah that's completely normal and honestly if you weren't a little overwhelmed something would be wrong. I remember my first one was a bad winter storm back in maybe 2011 and I basically just tried to stay out of the way of the people who knew what they were doing while still being useful. That itself is kind of a skill. The thing that helped me most wasn't any specific course honestly. It was just showing up to every drill and exercise i could find, including the SET in the fall which a lot of people skip because it feels like homework. After you've done the same check-in procedures and message handling formats enough times they stop feeling like procedures and just become what you do. ICS-213 forms stopped feeling weird to me after about the third activation. Also - and this is something nobody told me early on - talk to your EC about what roles they actually need filled. A lot of newer folks assume they have to be a net control right away but sometimes just being reliable at a relay point or a shelter is exactly what the group needs. That's where I got comfortable before I ever tried running a net.

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out 40 meters but every time i look something up i get a different answer. like the FCC part 97 says one thing and then theres the ARRL band plan which seems different and then people on the air are operating in places that dont match either one specifically i keep seeing SSB activity down around 7.150 and even lower sometimes and i thought generals couldnt go below 7.175 or something like that. and whats the deal with the band edges, someone told me to stay away from 7.000 and 7.300 but didnt really explain why. is that a rule or just a suggestion also theres like a whole section of the band where i can barely hear any activity during the day, is that normal or am i doing something wrong on the receiver end

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. i'd say just jump into CQ WW even if you only make 20 contacts, nobody cares how many you make and the casual ops are totally fine with slower exchanges. the serious contesters will just move on quick if you're slow but thats normal and not rude it's just how it goes SOTA is really its own thing, more like a hiking program that happens to involve radio. i do a few activations a year and its a completely differnt experience than sitting at a contest station for 24 hours. both are great but pretty differnt motivations if that makes sense

hamstudy is honestly the move, don't overthink it. the question pool is public so there's no reason not to just drill it. but if you want to actually understand the stuff — and I get why you would — Gordon West's book breaks things down pretty well in plain english, especially the electrical theory sections. the Ohm's law stuff seems scary at first but once it clicks it clicks. I did about two weeks of studying maybe 20-30 minutes a day and felt pretty solid going in. the test is 35 questions and you need 26 right so there's actually a decent margin for error. just don't skip the band plan and operating rules stuff, that trips people up more than the tech stuff does in my experience.

30 feet on 40 is totally workable, dont stress about it too much. yeah you're not going to have the low angle radiation pattern that would help with dx but for general ragchewing and even some decent dx on good nights it'll do fine. i ran an inverted-v with the apex at 25 feet for about three years and worked a bunch of europe and japan on it, granted conditions were better back then but still. the inverted-v shape actually helps a bit by bringing the current maximum up higher relative to a flat-top at the same apex height, so its not as bad as it sounds. the bigger thing im thinking is your 1.4:1 after trimming — that's pretty decent but make sure you're measuring that at the radio end with the feedline included because sometimes the coax length can do weird things to what you're seeing at the rig versus what's actually at the feedpoint. if you have a way to measure at the feedpoint directly that'd confirm it's actually resonant where you think it is.

yeah what you're doing works but you'll want to get logging software that pulls in the cluster feed automatically, it makes a huge difference. i use Log4OM and it connects to a telnet cluster node directly so spots just pop up color coded based on whether i need the entity, need a new band slot, already confirmed, etc. took me maybe an afternoon to get it configured but now its just part of how i operate. as for busted spots, absolutely normal unfortunately. the clusters are only as good as the humans spotting. some guys fat finger the callsign, some spots are old and the station QSY'd ten minutes ago. the general rule i follow is if a spot is more than 15-20 minutes old i dont even bother unless its a really rare one where ill at least go listen. and always listen before you transmit, you'd be surprised how often the frequency is completely empty by the time you get there. over time you start recognizing which spotters are reliable too which helps.

so i finally did my first park activation last weekend at a local state park, been meaning to do it for months. packed up the KX2 and my end fed halfwave and figured id be good to go. got out there, found a nice picnic table under some trees, got everything set up and... couldnt get the antenna tuned on 40m at all. turns out i forgot the counterpoise wire at home sitting on my workbench. spent like 20 minutes trying to figure out why the SWR was garbage before i realized. ended up just running 20m which actually worked out ok, made 12 contacts before the battery gave out. so counts as an activation i guess but not what i had in mind

went through this exact process like six weeks ago actually. the 31 day window thing is right, and honestly for most calls that arent super desirable you'll just get it no problem. i applied for a 1x3 with my initials and had zero competition. the tricky part is if you're going after something really short or a call that belonged to a famous op, those tend to have people fighting over them. one thing i'd add - there are some third party sites that let you search available calls and show you what's open by district and license class, way easier to use than ULS for just browsing around. AE7Q's callsign database is the one most people seem to use. saved me a lot of headache when i was trying to figure out what was actually available to me as a general

so i've been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and got me curious about it. i looked up some stuff online but honestly i dont really know where to begin with the whole licensing thing. i know you have to take a test but thats about it. is there like a standard book people use or do you just use websites? also how hard is the test actually, i'm not great at electronics stuff but i can study if i know what to focus on. any help would be appreciated

congrats on the first activation man, 16 contacts for a first time out is honestly pretty solid especially if you were fighting antenna issues. dont sweat the frequency thing, that nervousness goes away after a couple activations i promise. just listen for 10-15 seconds, ask if the frequency is in use, and if nothing comes back you're good to go. most of the time the hunters are more patient than you think. on the 2-fer question — yeah you submit two separate log files, one for each park reference. the POTA website handles it fine, you just make sure each QSO has the right park tagged in the log. some logging software like HAMRS or the POTA specific apps make this pretty easy to track in the field. biggest thing is confirm both park boundaries with the official reference maps before you go, ive seen people do a 2-fer only to find out they were like 50 feet outside one of the boundaries the whole time.