Tom Bradley

Setting up a new LEO satellite station and researching tracking software options. Gpredict can track unlimited satellites and display position data in lists, tables, maps, and polar plots, plus predict future passes. SatPC32 displays satellite footprints on world maps and outputs related text data. Orbitron allows tracking of ISS, ham satellites, and provides satellite pass prediction and orbits. I understand Orbitron and Gpredict control rotators but not radios, while SatPC32 can control both radio and rotator. Need seamless integration between tracking software and transceiver via CAT control for automated frequency adjustments. Which combination works best for serious LEO work?

the generator RFI thing is real and honestly kind of annoying to chase down. we had similar issues with a eu2200i at a go-kit deployment last year. ended up being a combination of the feedline acting as a receive antenna for the inverter noise and a grounding issue with the genny itself. what helped us the most was running the coax feedline away from the generator at roughly 90 degrees for as far as practical, and adding a few turns of the coax through a mix 31 toroid right at the radio end. didnt eliminate it completely but got it down to where it wasnt really an issue on 40m. on your power question, for 12 hours at 30+ amps you're not really getting away from a generator unless you want to haul like 400ah of batteries up a hill which sounds miserable. what we actually do for longer exercises is run the generator for the heavy lifting and keep a 100ah lifepo4 as a buffer/backup. generator charges the battery, battery runs the radios, generator noise is a little more isolated from the RF chain. works pretty well and if the genny craps out you still have a couple hours to figure it out. the NVIS setup sounds solid, 40 and 80 inverted V off a jackite is pretty much the go-to for that kind of work. just watch your apex height if you're trying to stay truly NVIS on 40, lower is actually better for that mode which is kind of counterintuitive.

just passed mine two months ago. grinded the pool, used hamexam dot org every day for about six weeks. did i understand every question, no. did i pass, yes lol. some of the theory did start to make sense just from repetition weirdly enough. the CW exemption stuff and the band privileges are actually kind of nice if you do any contesting, some of those extra-only segments are way less of a madhouse

so ive been messing with winlink express for a few months now and mostly its been fine for basic stuff but lately i keep having this issue where the connection to the RMS gateway establishes fine, i can see the handshake happen and the session starts, but then somewhere mid-transfer it just drops. doesnt matter if im sending or receiving. the message just sits there in the outbox marked as partially sent or whatever and i have to go in and manually clear it before i can try again. running vara HF on 14109 usually, sometimes i try pactor if the band is quiet enough. the gateway im connecting to is only maybe 400 miles away so path shouldnt be the issue. ive checked my audio levels about a dozen times and they look reasonable in the vara tuning window. my radio is an ic-7300 connected via the usb cable so no external interface or anything, just the built in soundcard basically. anybody seen this or know what im doing wrong. feels like it might be a timeout thing but i dont really know where to look for that in the config

I went with LiFePO4 batteries for stable performance and added a Goal Zero solar panel for extended operations. Game changer during our local SET exercise last fall when we were deployed for 6+ hours. Also suggest a small external antenna like a J-pole - super easy to deploy and much better than the rubber duck.

Congratulations on passing your exam! For a first HT, focus on the basics: dual-band VHF/UHF, decent build quality from a reputable manufacturer, and good battery life. The Yaesu FT-4XR hits the sweet spot for reliability, audio quality, and ease of use - perfect for learning the ropes without breaking the bank.

yeah what he said. i remember being totally lost my first few months, just nodding along on the repeater like i understood everything lol. one thing that helped me was just keeping a little notepad next to the radio and writing down anything i didnt recognize and then looking it up later. you pick it up faster than you'd think honestly. QTH is location btw, thats one you'll hear constantly. and QRP means low power which comes up a lot if you ever get into that rabbit hole

yeah the cluster world can feel like drinking from a firehose at first, totally get that. DXwatch and the QRZ spot network do pull from some of the same underlying cluster nodes but they each have their own filtering and aggregation going on so you'll see differences especially for weaker or more regional spots. neither one is the definitive source honestly. for what its worth i'd say just pick one and stick with it for a few weeks til you get a feel for the rhythm of it. DXwatch is fine, lots of people use it. the thing to watch for early on is spots marked with a lot of comments or from multiple sources in a short window — that usually means something real is happening. single spots from call signs you dont recognize could be anything. DXLab Suite is really powerful but its also a serious time investment to set up properly. if you're still getting your legs under you operating wise, maybe hold off and just use the browser tools. nothing wrong with that at all, plenty of experienced ops still just use a browser tab.

I started eme about 5 years ago and yeah the initial investment is pretty steep. went with 4x17el yagis and a 1kw sspa which ran me about 15k all in including the az/el rotators. but honestly once you hear your own signal coming back from the moon for the first time its all worth it you might be able to work some of the really big stations with less but dont expect much. maybe try finding someone local who's already on eme and see if you can operate from their station first to get a feel for it

so ive been a general for about 2 years now and people keep telling me to just go ahead and get my extra but honestly every time i look at the question pool it just seems like a ton of really dense theory stuff that i dont really understand and im not sure how much of it actually matters in practice. like the stuff about delta loops and transmission line theory and some of the filter questions... i get that theres more HF privileges with extra but i already have access to most of the bands i actually use. is it worth grinding through all that material just to unlock a few more khz on 75 and 40 meters or whatever it is? and does knowing all that theory actually make you a better operator or is it just trivia for the test

im in the same boat as you pretty much — did my first WWFF activation like two months ago after doing POTA for a while. the log submission part confused me more than the operating honestly. i used ADIF and uploaded to the WWFF logbook system but it took me a couple tries to get the format right. there's a guide on the wwff.us site that helped a lot once i actually sat down and read it properly lol one thing nobody told me was that you should double check if your reference is active in the WWFF database before you go, a few refs i looked at were listed but not fully registered yet or something. the 44 QSOs went fine for me once i got spotted on the DX cluster

I'm pretty new to all this, just got my technician last spring and I've been slowly working toward my general, so a lot of the Hamvention stuff is still kind of overwhelming to keep up with. But the 10 meter thing caught my attention because my elmer keeps telling me to get on HF as soon as I upgrade and he specifically mentioned 10m being a good band to start on when conditions are decent. Good to hear it's been active. I'll have to look up what solar flux actually means at some point, I kind of just nod when people bring it up haha

I've done this with my airspy. Use the CAT controllable option for radios that have a CAT/CIV interface to control frequency, mode, filters and select TS-2000 emulation in your SDR software first. Then configure a virtual COM port pair and point RemoteHams to one end.

forget the dots and dashes on paper thing, seriously. that approach will just get you stuck translating in your head forever. the Koch method is the right idea — basically you learn each character as a sound, not as a pattern you count. start with just two letters, get them to like 90% accuracy, then add another one. the key is learning at a higher speed from the beginning, like 15-20wpm even if the spacing between characters is stretched out. that way you never have to relearn later. LCWO dot net is free and does exactly this, its been around forever and a lot of people have learned with it. just do like 10-15 minutes a day consistently and you will make progress, way more than doing an hour once a week. the hardest part honestly is just not giving up around the time you hit the letters that sound similar, like B D and 6 all start to blend together for a while but it clicks eventually. took me probably 4 months of daily practice to get to where i could actually copy simple QSOs, so dont expect overnight results

congrats on the first one, that feeling when you hit 44 is real isnt it. yes once your log is uploaded and processed the hunters credits are assigned automatically, you dont need to do anything extra on their end. just make sure your ADI file has the right reference number in there, thats the bit people mess up most often — the field needs to be exactly right or it wont match. for spotting, definitely use the WWFF cluster as well as the main ones. a lot of dedicated hunters specifically watch wwff.eu or the app and they might miss you otherwise. i usually spot on both just to cover my bases. some folks also post a quick alert the day before on the WWFF facebook groups which helps people plan to listen out for you.

I just passed mine like two months ago and the theory wasnt as bad as i expected once i started actually going through the ham study resources and not just the flash cards. the impedance matching and transmission line stuff actually clicked for me once i watched a couple youtube videos on it. the question pool is only so big so if you put a few weeks in you'll be alright

The Si5351 is solid for this application - I've used it in similar builds. For the transmitter chain, Steve Weber's design is hard to beat and gives clean 4-6W output across all HF bands. Consider his low-pass filter board design too.

honestly i was in the same boat when i first got my ticket and what helped me was just finding a study guide PDF that had part 97 broken down in normal language. ham study dot com or similar sites sometimes have that kind of thing. also the question pool for the general exam actually teaches you a lot of the rules stuff if you wanna get a head start on upgrading anyway

ok so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get into the local 2m repeater but nobody ever seems to hear me. i can hear other people just fine on the output but when i transmit nobody responds and i dont get any kind of courtesy beep or anything from the machine itself. my buddy who helped me study for the test mentioned something about CTCSS tones but i honestly glazed over during that part. from what i can piece together its like a sub-audible tone you have to send along with your transmission so the repeater knows youre a legit signal and not just noise? but im not 100% sure if ive even set one up on my radio. its a baofeng uv-5r and ive been poking around in the menu but the options are kind of confusing honestly. the repeater is listed on repeaterbook with a 100.0hz tone and i think i found something in the menu called T-CTCS but i dont know if thats the right one or if i also need to set the receive side too. also is there some kind of etiquette i should know before i just start transmitting? i dont want to be that guy who keys up at the wrong time or interrupts someones conversation. any help appreciated

Don't just look at the power output of the radio - focus on the ERP (Effective Radiated Power) of the system, which is computed by multiplying the power output by the antenna gain. For power, yes, run direct to battery with proper fusing. Do not confuse DC grounding which is best done at the radio with RF grounding which needs to be done at the feed point - you want the car body to be the ground plane.

i have a hackrf and tbh for pure listening it kind of underwhelmed me, especially on HF. yeah you can do all kinds of cool stuff with it and the transmit side is fun once you're licensed but the noise floor drove me a little crazy when i was trying to do any serious decoding below 30 MHz. ended up keeping it for portapack experiments mostly havent used the RSP1B specifically but a buddy has one and it seemed solid, he does a lot of NOAA APT decoding and some HF utility stuff and has no complaints

not a dumb question at all, it tripped me up too when i went through it. so the way it works is there's a 30 day filing window — actually wait, i think they changed it, it might be shorter now, someone correct me if im wrong — anyway within that window everyone who applies for the same call is treated equally, its not first come first served within that period. after the window closes if theres only one applicant they just get it. if theres multiple applicants it goes to a tiebreaker based on license class and a few other things, and yeah if its still tied after all that then it does come down to a random selection, so kinda lottery-ish at the end but not purely random from the start. and yes the FCC does charge fees now, i want to say its $35 for a vanity application but double check that on their site because it changed a while back and i dont want to steer you wrong. the ULS system is a bit clunky but once you figure out where everything is its manageable. good luck, hope you snag a good one

not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely confused me for the first year or so. the short version is LoTW is run by the ARRL and it carries the most weight for their awards like DXCC — a lot of DX stations will only bother with LoTW because it's more verified. eQSL is kind of a separate thing that some people use but it's not accepted for DXCC, though some other awards do count it. so if chasing DX or working toward DXCC eventually is something you want to do, LoTW is the one to get sorted first. the TQSL thing is annoying at first but once you get your certificate loaded and figure out the upload process it becomes pretty routine. if you log with something like Log4OM or WSJT-X there's usually a way to automate the uploads which helps a lot. i'd say sit down for an hour with the ARRL's setup guide and just push through the certificate stuff, it's worth it. paper cards are kind of their own thing — some people love them and some DX entities basically require a physical card for certain awards or confirmations. the bureau is slow, like months sometimes, but it's basically free. direct mail is faster but you're paying postage both ways if you include a SAE. honestly i still like getting a nice card in the mail even though everything's digital now, there's something satisfying about it

yeah definitely solder that feedpoint if you can get up there safely. the twisted connection works for a while but moisture gets in and then you start seeing the SWR creep up over a few weeks, especially if you're in a humid area. i use a small stainless bolt through the center insulator with the wire looped around it and then soldered, then the coax shield and center conductor soldered to each respective wire. cover the whole thing with coax seal or even just a big glob of silicone before you tape it. ive had feedpoints last years doing it that way. the inverted V shape is actually not bad at all, a lot of guys prefer it for the more omnidirectional pattern vs a flat top. 1.4:1 is totally workable, your tuner will handle that no problem. if you want to tweak it just trim a little off each leg evenly. for the wind movement just check that your halyard or rope isnt chafing anywhere, thats usually what fails first not the wire itself.

Are you getting registered users access set up correctly? I have my servers set to have users be registered before they can 'spin the knob', so send me a PM if you want your call on the user list for privileges. Many connectivity issues stem from permissions not being configured properly on the server side.