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