Tom Bradley

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and EME has always been kind of this mythical thing i thought was only for guys with huge yagi arrays and serious real estate. recently started reading more into it and apparently with JT65 and modern weak signal modes things have changed a lot from the old days of needing 100 foot dishes and kilowatts just to hear anything. my current setup is a 144mhz station, running about 200w into a pair of M2 5WL yagis stacked. antenna gain is somewhere around 18-19dBd i think. i keep reading conflicting stuff about whether that's enough to actually make contacts or if im just going to hear the big guns and never get through. also the preamp situation confuses me a bit — everyone says get the preamp at the feedpoint but im not totally clear on what noise figure i should be shooting for. .5dB? lower? does it matter as much if im running low power anyway? also curious if anyone has done EME from a suburban lot. i have pretty decent horizon to the east and south which i think is when moon is most usable but there are some houses maybe 15-20 degrees elevation in that direction so im not sure how badly that hurts. anyway just looking for a reality check before i start throwing money at this

so ive been doing portable VHF ops from a hilltop maybe 6-7 times a year, usually 2m and sometimes 70cm, and ive always just packed my 5/8 wave whip on a painters pole and called it a day. works fine for local stuff but i keep wondering if a small yagi would open things up more for tropo or just getting into repeaters further out. the thing is, setting up a yagi solo on a hilltop is kind of a pain, you gotta orient it, deal with the mast, polarization etc. with the collinear i just stick it up and its omnidirectional which honestly suits the kind of casual operating i do up there. but im leaving gain on the table obviously. anyone actually run both and have a real opinion on which made more of a practical difference? im not doing EME or anything serious, just trying to have fun and maybe work some stations a bit further out. ive been looking at the 5el M2 yagi for 2m as something portable but not sure its worth schlepping up a hill compared to just a decent collinear like a diamond X50 or similar

With CQ WW DX SSB happening October 25-26, I'm getting that familiar pre-contest anxiety. This is the weekend when "the entire world speaks the same language: CQ Contest" and HF fills like nothing else. I've been testing my gear religiously, but there's always that nagging feeling I've forgotten something critical. Any veterans have last-minute prep tips? My antenna analyzer shows everything's good, but propagation predictions look wild for this cycle. Anyone else planning to focus on the high bands if 10 and 15 meters stay alive for hours?

so ive had my technician for about two years now mostly just doing local 2m stuff and some APRS and i keep hearing people talk about HF and it sounds really cool but i dont really know what im getting into with the General exam. like is it way harder than the tech exam was? i remember the tech exam being not that bad but i was also studying pretty hard for a couple weeks with the hamstudy website. i guess my main question is how long did it take you guys to feel ready for the General exam and is there any specific part that trips people up the most. i feel like i barely understand propagation as it is and i keep reading stuff about the bands being open or closed and i dont really know what that means practically. someone at my local club said the electrical theory section is the hardest part but then someone else said it wasnt that bad. also once i actually get General what would i even need to get on HF, like do i need a whole new radio or can i do anything with what i have