Mike Johnson

yeah im in a similar situation built a 20m dipole last spring and skipped the balun and never had any issues but i also only run 100w. the feedpoint weatherproofing thing bit me though, mine started acting up around 8 months in and when i took it down the solder joint had some green corrosion on it and the swr had crept up to like 2.8. now i just use a short piece of pvc pipe as a strain relief and wrap everything pretty aggressively with the self amalgamating tape. seems to be holding up better so far anyway

Man I remember my first one, county flood response back in maybe 2019. Honestly the thing that surprised me most was how much waiting there is. You spend a lot of time just sitting at your assigned position making sure the net control knows you're there, and then suddenly things get busy for 20 minutes and then quiet again. The training really does kick in though — when traffic starts moving you kind of just go into the mode and it works. The nerves mostly went away once I had my first actual message to pass. On the logging question, most groups I've worked with default to paper for field positions just because laptops die and software crashes and you dont want to be fumbling with a frozen screen when someones relaying coordinates. Some net controls use winlink or a spreadsheet but at the position level its usually a standard ICS 309 on a clipboard. Just bring a good pen and a backup pen, sounds dumb but ive been caught without one and it's embarrassing.

JS8Call is definitely not dead but you have to know where to look and honestly have some patience. the 40m and 20m calling frequencies see decent activity, more so in the evenings my time at least. it's not FT8 levels obviously but if you sit on the waterfall for 20-30 mins during a decent propagation window youll usually see something. the conversations you can have are worth it imo, had a 45 minute back and forth with a guy in Finland last winter talking about his antenna farm, that kind of thing just doesnt happen on FT8. the latency takes getting used to since each transmission takes longer than FT8s 15 second slots, but once you adjust your expectations its actually pretty enjoyable. think of it less like contest operating and more like a slow CW QSO. your IC-7300 and dipole setup should be totally fine for it, the mode is genuinely weak signal capable, ive made contacts with it that i wouldnt have pulled out on SSB or even PSK31. as for RTTY yeah pretty much contest-only these days, BARTG and the big CQ RTTY events are active but outside of that its sparse. not complaining though, i love RTTY contest weekends.

so ive been sitting on this decision for like three months now and i keep flipping back and forth and honestly its driving me crazy. background is im upgrading from an old FT-450D which has served me well but i want something with a better receiver and ideally a waterfall i can actually use without an external panadapter. the 7300 seems like the obvious choice for the price and everyone and their dog recommends it, the waterfall is genuinely useful from what ive seen at the club and the DSP filtering is supposed to be excellent. but then i get on here and read about the 590SG's analog front end and how it handles strong signal environments better and i start second guessing myself again. i mostly do domestic HF, some CW, maybe getting into FT8 more seriously. not really a DXer chasing rare ones. has anyone actually run both of these side by side or switched from one to the other? not looking for specs i can read on eham, more like real world stuff — does the 7300 actually fall apart when there's a strong adjacent signal or is that more of a theoretical concern for the kind of operating most of us actually do

The Baofeng is totally fine to start, ignore the gatekeeping. I used one for almost a year before I got my first real HT and honestly it did everything I needed for local stuff. Once you get comfortable on the repeater you'll wonder why you were ever nervous about it. My first QSO was so short and awkward but the other guy was really patient with me. Just say your callsign clearly and youll be good.

im in basically the same boat as you lol, got my tech call last month and already thinking about what i want when i upgrade. following this thread because i had no idea you could apply for multiple at once. also didnt realize there was a waiting period on expired calls, i just assumed you could grab anything that showed as available

yeah that charge and coast method is pretty much what most of us do for overnight stuff. run the eu2200i for a couple hours when the battery gets down to maybe 50%, get it back up to 90ish percent, shut it down. honda at that load is going to be pretty quiet anyway especially in eco mode but silence is silence when youre trying to sleep or if youre near other people. one thing i'd look at is your feedline on 80. if you're getting high SWR or weird behavior it might just be the dipole is too short for 80 even resonant - the linked dipoles can be finicky with the link geometry. or could be a common mode issue on the coax, which gets worse in field environments where your ground situation is totally different from home. toss a few snap on ferrites near the feedpoint if you havent already, sometimes that alone cleans things up a lot. i've been running a similar setup for county emergency stuff for a few years and that was the fix for me on 75/80.

CQ WW is absolutely wild your first time, not gonna sugarcoat it. the bands are packed wall to wall and if you havent heard 20m during a major contest weekend you are in for a surprise. but honestly that chaos is also what makes it fun, theres always someone to work and you can rack up contacts pretty fast once you get the exchange down. for CQ WW phone its just your callsign, signal report, and your CQ zone. pretty simple once you do it a few times. on the SOTA question, yeah people do try to combine things but its kinda tricky. SOTA has its own activator and chaser rules and a summit to summit contact during a contest can count for both but you have to log them correctly for each program separately. some guys love doing it that way, get the summit points AND contest points in one trip. just depends how organized you want to be about it. my advice for your first CQ WW though is just get on the air, dont overthink the strategy, and have fun with it. even a few dozen contacts your first time feels great.

congrats on the first one, the 44 QSO thing trips up a lot of people starting out — some folks dont realize WWFF has a higher minimum than POTA (which is just 10) so you actually did the right thing without necessarily knowing why which is funny. on the logging question, HAMRS should have a field specifically for the WWFF reference if you're in the right program mode, but if you just threw it in notes it might not export properly to the ADIF. what i usually do is open the ADIF file after in a text editor and just check that the SIG and SIG_INFO fields are in there — SIG should say WWFF and SIG_INFO should have your reference number like KFF-1234 or whatever it is. if they're missing you can add them manually before uploading to the WWFF database, its not that hard once you see the format. the wwff.net upload tool is pretty forgiving about some stuff but it does need those fields. and yeah, carrying gear half a mile in light rain is just part of the hobby at this point, i think of it as the price of admission. wait till you try one in actual mud season.

so ive been messing with remote station control for about 6 months now and i think i finally have a decent setup but wanted to get some input from people who actually run this stuff day to day. my shack is about 40 miles from home, its at my brother in laws property out in the sticks so the antenna situation is way better than my HOA nightmare back home. right now im running RemoteHams RCForb server on a windows box out there with a Kenwood TS-590SG and it works pretty well most of the time. latency is usually around 80-90ms which is fine for HF but id really like to add an SDR front end so i can do some panadapter style monitoring even when im not actively transmitting. was thinking about tossing an RTL-SDR or maybe a SDRplay RSPdx into the mix and running it through the same internet link somehow. the part where i get confused is the linking side of things. ive seen people tie this stuff into echolink or IRLP nodes and im not totally sure if that makes sense for what im doing or if thats a completely different animal. like is there any reason to have an echolink node at the remote site or does that just add more points of failure. the upload bandwidth out there is only about 15 mbps so i dont want to saturate the pipe if multiple things are going at once. anyone running a similar hybrid setup, curious how you handled the SDR piece specifically

so i've had my FT-857D for a few years now and always heard about the mars/cap mod to open up the TX range and i finally just did it last saturday. the whole thing took maybe 20 minutes once i had the radio apart which honestly was scarier than the actual mod. just that one diode removal and boom, transmits well outside the ham bands now. not that i'm gonna use it outside the bands obviously but i do some emcomm stuff and our served agency has some freqs that are technically outside normal allocation so it's nice to have the flexibility. the radio itself seems to work exactly the same, RX is fine, TX power output looks the same on my wattmeter. no weird issues or anything. i also went ahead and replaced the stock fan while i had it apart because i'd read that the thermal management on these isn't great when you're running digital modes for extended periods. used a slightly higher CFM 12V fan and it does seem to run cooler when i'm doing JS8Call or Winlink for a while. that part felt more actually useful than the TX mod honestly. anyone else done mods on the 857 or similar rigs? curious what other upgrades people have found actually make a noticeable difference vs stuff that sounds cool but doesn't really change anything in practice

no hard rule that says you have to use phonetics every time, its more of a practical thing. on a clear local repeater where everyones coming in full quieting you can usually just say your call sign normally and people will catch it fine. phonetics matter more when conditions are rough, like on HF when theres qsb or noise, or when youre trying to get your call into a pileup and the dx station needs to copy you correctly. the NATO alphabet is the standard and most ops know it cold but yeah youll hear regional variations. sugar for sierra is an old one, some guys have been doing it that way for 40 years and theyre not changing. it can be confusing if you dont know what to expect but youll pick it up. the main thing is just be consistent and clear, phonetics are a tool not a requirement

the upconverter path is kind of a dead end imo, youre adding another piece of hardware and another potential noise source. i skipped the RSPplay and went straight to a HackRF and dont regret it, though that's probably overkill if you just want to listen around shortwave and 40m. HackRF lets you transmit too which is a whole other rabbit hole but the recieve performance is actually not as good as the SDRplay for pure listening, noise figure isnt as good. so kind of depends what direction you want to go with it.

bring both and decide when you get there is my vote. I know that sounds like a cop out but seriously the situations you end up in at these exercises are never what you planned for. I've shown up expecting shade trees and ended up in a gravel lot with zero anchor points, or the opposite where a simple wire in a tree woulda been perfect but I left the wire at home because I overthought the antenna selection. the generator question — I keep mine in the truck as backup but I've only actually fired it up maybe twice in the last year of exercises. mostly the battery carries it fine. one thing i will say is make sure your dc-dc charger can also take input from the generator if it ends up running, some setups get weird when you have both a solar input and a generator input going through a combiner and then into the battery, had a weird voltage spike situation once that I still don't fully understand what happened

oh man i was literally just looking into WWFF last week trying to figure out the difference between it and POTA myself lol. from what i can tell WWFF has more international references which is cool if you want to chase DX parks? like people activating in europe and australia and wherever. POTA seems more north america focused although i think they've expanded too. anyway im not much help on the logging question but wanted to say cool that you got it working, gives me confidence to try my first activation soon. did you pre-spot yourself on the wwff spotter before you started or just start calling and hope for the best

so we ran a simulated disaster exercise through our local ARES group this past Saturday and honestly I wasnt prepared for how different it felt from just ragchewing or contesting. the scenario was a major flooding event that knocked out cell towers and we had to establish comms between the EOC, a couple of Red Cross shelters, and the hospital. on paper it sounds straightforward right well it wasnt. first thing that happened was our net control guy had a family thing come up last minute so someone had to step in cold, and that person (not gonna name names lol) hadnt really practiced net control procedures much. traffic got jumbled fast, people were doubling up, and we had one station that just could not hear anybody because of some local noise issue that nobody had tested for beforehand. we lost probably 20 minutes just sorting that out. the big lesson for me personally was that I had never actually tested my go-kit under real operating conditions. like I had everything packed and thought I was ready but when I actually set it up in the field my coax was too short to reach a good window position and I had forgotten a spare fuse for the rig. nothing catastrophic but in a real event those little things add up anyone else done these exercises recently, curious what kinds of things caught you off guard the first time you participated in one of these. or if youre just getting into ARES and thinking about joining up, honestly just do it, the learning curve is worth it

not a dumb question at all, most people start the wrong way actually. the chart thing is pretty much the worst way to learn, youre basically trying to translate in your head and it slows you down forever. what you want is to learn by sound from the very beginning, like your brain needs to just hear dah-dit and think R without any in-between steps. the thing most people swear by is the Koch method, basically you start with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you only add a new character once youre hitting something like 90% accuracy on the ones you already know. LCWO dot net is free and does exactly this online, theres also a phone app called Morse Mania that a lot of beginners seem to like. the key thing is short sessions every day, like 15 minutes is way better than an hour on the weekend. your brain needs repetition over time not cramming. you dont need a physical key to learn to receive which is where most people start anyway. transmitting comes later and thats a whole other thing to figure out once you can at least copy code in your head.

so ive been doing contests seriously for maybe 3 years now, mostly single op on 20 and 40, and my rates are decent but i keep hitting this wall around 100-110 qsos/hr during the good runs and i cant figure out if the ceiling is me or my setup. been reading a lot about SO2R lately and honestly it seems like a massive rabbit hole before you even get to the operating part. my current setup is an ic-7300 and a ft-891 that i use for mobile, so technically i have two radios but making them play nice without cooking each other or my ears seems like a whole separate project. ive seen guys running full SO2R with band decoders and antenna switching matrices and it looks more like an engineering project than a ham radio setup. is the rate improvement actually significant enough for a guy doing like 5-6 contests a year to justify that investment, or is this more of a serious competitor thing where you're trying to shave points off a top-10 finish? also curious if anyone has opinions on whether improving CW speed or just working on S&P vs run strategy would give me more bang for the buck before i go down the SO2R rabbit hole. feels like there might be lower hanging fruit i'm missing.

alternator whine like that in the audio is almost always a grounding problem in my experience, even when you think the grounds are good. the firewall bolt sounds fine but id double check that you have a really solid connection there, like actually scrape the paint off down to bare metal before you put that ring terminal on. also the radio chassis itself needs its own dedicated ground, not just relying on the power cable negative. some guys also run into trouble when the coax shield isnt grounded at the antenna end properly, worth checking if your NMO mount is actually making good contact with the roof metal. the LMR-240 is fine, that shouldnt be causing issues. one other thing, try the radio on a totally separate battery outside the car just to confirm its actually RF/alternator noise and not something internal to the radio. narrows it down quick.

I went through the same thing about a year ago. What got me was the question pool actually has a lot of stuff that starts to make sense if you watch a few YouTube videos on the theory side rather than just drilling flash cards. Like the stuff on impedance matching finally clicked for me when i saw someone draw it out visually instead of just equations. The exam itself felt easier than the General honestly, maybe because I spent more time preparing. And yeah the privileges are real — I work some DX stations now that I couldn't even hear properly from the general segments before, partly because of where the DX tends to congregate on certain bands.

yeah i ran into something similar when i was linking my station through echolink for voice and trying to do remote control at the same time, total mess trying to get the timing right across two different latency paths. ended up just separating the functions entirely. not exactly the same as what your doing but the PTT tail issue sounds like what happens when the VOX in the audio chain and the actual PTT signal arent synchronized properly. does your rigctld setup have any keying delay configured? some rigs add a small settling delay before actually dropping carrier and if that isnt accounted for in the software side it stacks up weird

yeah i do exactly that, N1MM for any serious contest operating and Log4OM as my main shack log the rest of the time. the ADIF export from N1MM is pretty clean and Log4OM imports it without much drama, ive only ever had issues when i forgot to check for dupes before importing and ended up with a handful of doubled QSOs but thats a me problem not a software problem. Log4OM's integration with WSJT-X is genuinely good once you set up the UDP port correctly, it basically just listens and logs everything automatically so you dont have to touch anything during an FT8 session. the lerning curve on N1MM looks steep but honestly for contesting its hard to argue with it, the bandmap, the dupe checking, the S&P vs run mode switching, its all just there and works. for everyday logging though its kind of overkill and the interface isnt exactly friendly if youre just working a pile on 17m on a tuesday afternoon. so running both makes sense to me, just build a habit of doing the import after every contest and youll be fine

yeah i ran basically the same setup you're describing for a while, N1MM for contests and Log4OM for everything else. the ADIF transfers were annoying at first but once you get in the habit of exporting after every contest and importing into Log4OM its really not that bad, takes maybe two minutes. the duplicate checking in Log4OM will catch most of the obvious ones. the WSJT-X integration with Log4OM works through UDP just like it does with N1MM, you just have to make sure you dont have both programs open and listening on the same port at the same time or you'll get weird behavior. i made that mistake once and ended up with some QSOs going into N1MM when i thought i was logging to Log4OM. just something to watch. overall though Log4OM is way nicer for day to day stuff, the cloudlog sync and the award tracking alone made it worth it for me

i made that exact jump like two years ago and dont regret it but i'll be real the learning curve with SDRuno threw me off for a while. coming from SDR# it feels like someone designed the UI after staring at a rack of vintage test equipment. took me a weekend to figure out where everything was. once you get it dialed in though it's solid and the RSP1B handles MW and HF without any extra hardware which was the main thing for me. no more upconverter box sitting on the desk.

haha yeah field day can get crazy with all the opinions flying around. honestly the most important thing is just getting on the air and having fun. ive been doing fd for like 15 years and the years we stressed the least were usually the most successful for digital just make sure you have good computer to radio interface and know your software ahead of time. practice at home if you can. everything else is just details that work themselves out