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.

the single yagi thing is real, people do work EME on 2m with a single long yagi but you have to be realistic about who you can work. you're mostly going to be working the big stations — the guys with 4x or 8x yagi arrays or dish setups. they can hear you even when you can barely hear them, thats kind of the nature of it with asymmetric setups. with an 11el and 200w on JT65 you will make contacts, it just might take some patience and picking the right windows when the moon is in a good position for both of you. on the preamp question — yeah it matters a lot more on EME than basically any other mode because you're dealing with signals that are already right at the noise floor. something in the 0.3 to 0.5 dB NF range is what people are chasing, the SSB Electronic or Kuhne preamps are popular and they mount at the feedpoint which is where you want it. every tenth of a dB genuinely counts up there. and yes get a sequencer even for modest power, protecting the preamp from your own TX is not something you want to learn the hard way.

Welcome to the hobby, dont stress too much about it. The CTCSS thing is pretty simple once it clicks — basically the repeater has a tone squelch on its input so it ignores signals that dont carry the right subaudible tone. If you have the wrong tone programmed on your radio, the repeater just wont open up at all. Most repeater directories are pretty accurate but sometimes they're out of date, so worth checking the repeater's own website or QRZ if it has a listing there. As for when to talk — on a quiet repeater you literally just key up, say your callsign, and say youre listening or just say something like "W1XYZ monitoring" and let go. Totally normal. If the repeater gives you a courtesy beep or a tail after you unkey, thats usually a good sign youre getting in. Some repeaters also ID themselves every so often which helps confirm youre actually hitting it. You're not being rude by just calling out, thats exactly what the repeater is there for.

Transmitter calibration errors and frequency drift during operation can cause you to transmit illegally out of band. On VHF/UHF, I typically stay at least 25 kHz from the band edges - your radio's frequency stability and antenna SWR can both affect where you're actually transmitting.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech class) and im still trying to figure out the repeater thing. theres a 147.xxx machine about 12 miles from me that i can hit pretty reliably but half the time nobody comes back when i call. i programmed in the offset and everything but i wonder if the CTCSS tone is the issue. the repeater directory lists it as 100.0 Hz but sometimes i key up and the repeater doesnt even open. like i can hear it squelch tail when others use it but when i transmit nothing happens. also someone told me i should wait a few seconds after the squelch tail before keying up again — is that actually a thing or were they just messing with me? and whats the deal with linked repeaters because someone mentioned this machine ties into some kind of network on weekends and i have no idea what that means for how i should operate on it. sorry if these are dumb questions im just trying to not be that guy who annoys everyone on the local repeater lol

so ive been going back and forth on this for a couple weeks now and i think im just confusing myself at this point. currently have a 40m dipole up about 25 feet, fed with coax, nothing fancy. it works okay but i feel like im missing contacts especially to the west coast, im in ohio so that's like a 2000 mile shot or whatever. a guy at the club keeps telling me to put up a vertical with radials and itll dramatically improve my low angle radiation for dx. which makes sense on paper. but ive also read that a dipole at low heights actually has a pretty high takeoff angle so maybe thats my problem more than the antenna type itself. if i could get it to 50 feet would that be worth more than switching to a vertical at ground level with a decent radial field. i dont have a ton of space for radials anyway, yard is maybe 60x80 feet. just trying to figure out what the smart move is here before i spend money or time on something that wont actually help.

so ive been licensed about two years now and mostly just done local stuff and some casual HF but a buddy at my club showed me his DXCC certificate last meeting and honestly it kind of lit a fire under me. i had no idea how deep the rabbit hole went with all these awards. i started looking into it and now im confused about the difference between chasing DXCC vs WAS vs WAZ because they all seem to overlap somewhat? like if im logging contacts for one am i automatically making progress on the others or do i have to do something special. also does it matter what mode — im mostly doing SSB right now but ive been thinking about trying FT8 because everyone says thats where the DX is these days. and one more thing, do i need to be submitting QSLs the whole time or can i go back and claim credits from old contacts. i have like 8 months of logs sitting in WSJT and HAMRS that i havent done anything with yet

so the Tri-County fest is saturday and im debating whether its worth the drive, last year the swap meet tables were kinda picked over by the time i got there around 10am. thinking of going earlier this time. anybody been in recent years and know if the vendor turnout is decent? also heard the local club is doing some kind of fox hunt in the afternoon but i cant find info on it anywhere on their site

so i finally did my first real POTA activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from home. been putting it off forever because i kept thinking i needed more gear or a better antenna situation but i just threw the ft-891 in a backpack with my end fed halfwave and a little mast and drove out there set up in like 20 minutes which surprised me, the antenna went up in a tree no problem and i had a little camp chair and ran off a 20ah lifepo4 battery. worked 12 contacts on 20m in maybe 40 minutes, could have kept going but i had to get back. cw woulda been faster i know but i did SSB cause im still building up my cw speed honestly the hardest part was logging on my phone while also operating, i was using hamrs and kept fat fingering the callsigns. anyone else use a physical log out in the field or is the phone thing just something you get used to

so we have a county ARES exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and im trying to nail down my go-kit power situation before then. ive been running off a 100ah lifepo4 for most portable ops but the exercise is supposed to run 18 hours straight and i just dont think ill have enough headroom especially if they want me running a 100w station the whole time. currently thinking either i bring a small honda eu2200i and charge the battery while operating, or just go straight generator power through a good line filter and call it a day. the noise issue is what keeps making me hesitate on the generator route — last time i tried running my ic-7300 off a cheap inverter generator at a campout it was awful, s3 or s4 hash all over 40m. the honda is supposedly way cleaner but ive never personally tested it. on the antenna side i have a buddipole and a resonant 40m inverted vee i can hang from a 31ft jackite pole. the vee is obviously better for 40 but setup time is longer. trying to figure out if its worth the extra 20 minutes on setup for what might be a mostly local net situation anyway. anyone done longer emcomm exercises with similar constraints and have thoughts on what actually matters vs what you think will matter beforehand

so i've been licensed about 8 months now and i've kind of fallen down the rabbit hole of checking into nets. started with the local 2m club net on tuesday nights just to get comfortable talking on the radio and now i have like a whole notebook page of different nets i try to catch during the week. the ARRL phone net, a couple of traffic nets, the 10m net on wednesday mornings when the band cooperates which is not always honestly. anyway my question is does anyone have a good way of keeping track of all of this without losing your mind. im trying to figure out if theres a website or something that has like a searchable database of nets because i know there are way more out there than i've stumbled onto by accident. also curious if anyone does special event station stuff and how you even find out when those are happening, i feel like i always hear about them after the fact