Sarah Mitchell94

Just joined our local ARES group and putting together my first go-kit. I've got an FT-991A and a Yaesu FT-65 picked out, but I'm really confused about power solutions. LiFePO4 batteries offer long life and stable performance, but they're pricey for someone starting out. Would a basic 12V sealed lead-acid work for now, or should I save up for lithium? Also hearing about solar panels for recharging batteries during prolonged emergencies - worth it for a beginner setup?

nice, i did almost the exact same thing in my Tacoma with a 7800R. only thing id add is maybe zip tie the coax somewhere under the hood so it cant rub on anything hot or move around. mine was flopping around near the alternator for a while before i noticed and i think thats what was causing some of the noise i was hearing on 2m. fixed it and most of the noise went away.

maybe its just me but 20m has been acting strange this week. yesterday around noon i could barely hear anything then suddenly it opened up like crazy around 4pm. heard stations i never hear normally. then today its dead again. solar cycle doing weird stuff or what?

yeah the net control confusion thing is super common and honestly it happens even to groups that have been doing this for years. we had almost the exact same situation during a tabletop we ran two winters ago except ours fell apart because our backup NC hadnt been told he was the backup NC — like he knew he was on the roster but nobody had actually briefed him on what that meant in practice. after that we started doing a short 5 minute briefing right before any activation or drill where we physically point at people and say "you're primary, you're secondary, you're tertiary" and repeat it out loud. sounds dumb but it made a huge difference. the message handling thing is real too. ICS-213 over voice is a skill that takes actual repetition and most people dont realize that until they're fumbling through it live. we built it into our monthly nets now, just do one or two practice messages each time even when nothing is going on, keeps people sharp.

so ive been running a TM-V71A in my truck for about 6 months now and honestly the hardest part of the whole thing wasnt the radio itself it was figuring out where to put the antenna. right now im using one of those magnetic mounts with a diamond NR770H and it works okay but i get a little bit of chassis noise when i accelerate and im pretty sure the ground plane situation isnt ideal on a fiberglass bed cover. been thinking about drilling through the roof which every experienced guy i talk to at the club says is the right way to do it but man that feels scary to put a hole in a perfectly good truck. also not sure how to route the coax without it looking terrible or getting pinched in the door. anyone done a through-roof NMO mount on a modern pickup? or is there another approach that actually works without the mag mount sliding around. happened to me once on the highway and that was not fun.

congrats on the first activation, 44 contacts in rough conditions is solid especially if you're running QRP or a compromise antenna. the logging thing tripped me up too when i started. wwff.us is the north american log aggregator basically, and yeah it does push to the global WWFF database but sometimes there's a delay of a day or two before it shows up on your profile over there. just give it a bit and check wwff.world to see your reference get logged. as for the community, honestly i find WWFF skews a bit more international than POTA. lot of european activity, german and polish operators especially seem very active. you'll also find that some references have a lot of history attached to them, national parks and biosphere reserves that have been activated hundreds of times going back years. the hunter side is real too, ive been chasing references for about two years and its actually become my main operating motivation. working someone from a nature park in finland or a wildlife reserve in australia on 20m is just a different feeling than regular DX somehow, i dunno theres context to it.

yeah the timing thing is huge and nobody really talks about it enough. what i try to do before i even transmit once is just sit on the frequency for a few minutes and figure out the DX op's pattern — are they going by region, working up the band, favoring certain calls. some of the really good DXpedition ops have a very predictable rhythm and once you lock onto it you can kinda anticipate when your shot is coming. the suffix-only thing works sometimes but honestly i've had more luck just sending my full call once, clearly, at maybe 80% of my usual keyer speed. a lot of people are hammering away at max speed and it just turns into mush in the pileup. slowing down slightly so your call is actually copyable seems to help more than raw power sometimes. i run about 400w into a 4-el yagi on 20 and i still find myself getting walked over by lid stations running a kw into a dipole if they have better timing than me. one thing i'll add — on phone pileups it's a totally different animal. i almost never bother calling at the start of a run, i wait for the pileup to thin a bit and then get in. the big gun stations will work each other at the start and then it opens up a little. patience is underrated.

The classic N0SA has long been my favorite, but I do love my AME Ultra Porta Paddle. Just picked up the Modern Morse Nameless and time will tell. For POTA work, either of your choices will serve you well. The 3D paddle will get you going immediately without breaking the bank, and you can always upgrade later if you catch the paddle bug!

the mushy audio thing is almost certainly doppler thats just a hair off, and it could also be that the other station isnt correcting properly either — on a linear bird both ends have to be doing their doppler homework or it sounds like garbage. one thing that helped me a lot was to not fully trust the automated hamlib control at first and instead tune manually on the downlink to find a clear signal and then just ride it by ear. gpredict is good but the timing of updates through hamlib can lag a tiny bit depending on your polling interval. on the inverting transponder thing — remember that if you tune UP on the uplink your signal moves DOWN in the passband on the downlink. so when youre listening for yourself, put out a carrier and tune around until you hear it come back, it takes a few passes to get a feel for it. honestly once it clicks it becomes pretty natural. FO-29 is a bit easier to start with imo because the passband behavior feels more predictable to me than AO-73 sometimes, especially with the AGC doing weird things when theres a strong station in the passband.

congrats on the first successful build, that always feels good. the QCX is a pretty solid design for getting into QRP, Hans does good work. on the battery question -- for something like that rig pulling maybe 800mA to 1A on transmit, you honestly dont need a huge capacity pack for a few hours of casual operating. a 2200-3000mah 3s should get you through a solid afternoon. the discharge rate thing is really more of a concern for stuff that spikes hard on transmit like an FT-817 or something with a bigger final, the QCX is pretty gentle in comparison. the voltage droop question is actually worth paying attention to though. the QCX finals are pretty efficient but the output will fall off some as voltage drops, especially once you get below like 11v on a 3s pack. not dramatically but you'll notice it on the wattmeter. just keep an eye on it and dont let it sag too much. some guys add a little voltage display to their portable kit just for that reason. solar is great but you kinda need to think about regulation -- a cheap mppt controller and a small panel works fine, just dont let the panel voltage float too high into the rig directly. seen guys fry stuff that way

I used the Gordon West book when I studied back in the day and it was fine but honestly the question pool has changed since then so I'd verify whatever book you get is for the current pool which I think runs through 2026 or somewhere around there. One thing I'll say is don't skip the band plan and operating procedure questions even if they seem boring, there are quite a few of them and people sometimes focus too much on the electronics bits and then get tripped up on the more procedural stuff. The rules and regs section is also worth paying attention to because a lot of it is just common sense once you read it carefully but if you just try to brute force memorize you might mix things up under pressure. Either way the test really isnt that hard, most people pass on the first try if they put in even a modest amount of study time.

so ive been noticing the last couple weeks that 17m and 20m have been really inconsistent for me. some mornings i wake up early, fire up the rig, and theres just... nothing. like complete deadband. then ill check the solar flux and its sitting around 140-150 which should be decent right? but then other days when the flux is like 120 i hear EU stations booming in at S9. i dont get it. im not new to this hobby but propagation still feels like black magic to me sometimes. been trying to use pskreporter and DXmaps to figure out when the openings are happening but i feel like im always just missing the window by like an hour. anybody else having this kind of frustration or is there something im not looking at that would help me time things better?

okay so ive been trying to get Winlink Express working for like the past three weeks and i'm at my wits end. my setup is a IC-7300 feeding into a SignaLink USB, running Winlink Express on windows 10, and im trying to hit a Vara HF session through one of the RMS gateway nodes that shows up in the channel picker. the map shows a couple stations within range, probably 300-400 miles out, signal should be fine most days. the problem is it connects — like i can see it handshaking — and then just drops. sometimes i get a partial session and i can see it's exchanging some protocol stuff but then the whole thing just times out and i get a failed session error. ive checked my audio levels in the SignaLink probably fifty times. ive gone through the VARA setup wizard, got the modem registered. PTT seems to be keying correctly from what i can tell watching the rig. what i havent done is set up my own RMS relay node, which i've been thinking about anyway since there isnt a great gateway in my county. but i want to get the client side working first before i go down that rabbit hole. anyone run into this kind of intermittent session dropout thing? is this a timing issue or am i just getting unlucky with propagation windows?

yeah the Farnsworth thing is exactly right, you've got the concept. the idea is your brain learns the sound of each character as a whole chunk instead of counting dits and dahs, which is what trips most people up when they try to go faster. if you learn R as dit-dah-dit you'll always be counting and you hit a wall around 8-10wpm. if you learn it as a sound, like the rhythm of it, then speed becomes more possible. what really helped me was doing head copy on actual QSOs, not just practice software. i used to just tune around 40m in the evenings and try to copy callsigns even if i missed everything else. after a few weeks i got faster just from hearing real code at real speeds. also the Koch method if you havent tried it, start with 2 characters at like 15 or 20wpm until you can copy them perfectly, then add one character at a time. its slow going at first but it pays off. took me almost a year to get comfortable at 20 but i was only practicing maybe 15 mins a day so your mileage may vary

the jitter buffer thing is almost always the culprit in my experience with RCForb. 32kbps OPUS should be totally fine for that upload speed, thats not your problem. what i'd look at is whether your router is doing any kind of traffic shaping or QoS that might be randomly throttling UDP packets — OPUS over RemoteHams uses UDP and some consumer routers get weird with it, especially if you have other stuff happening on the network at the same time. also check if you have any kind of antivirus or firewall that might be doing deep packet inspection. had a situation a while back where my security software was basically adding random latency spikes to UDP streams and it drove me nuts for weeks before i figured it out. the drops werent consistent which made it really hard to diagnose. as for the Allstar + RemoteHams question, technically you can do both but you probably want to be careful about audio routing so you dont end up with a feedback loop or double-keying situation. i havent personally run both simultaneously but i dont see why it wouldnt work if you get the PTT logic sorted out correctly.

Don't worry about it! Following the opening comments, the Net Controller may then describe how check-ins will be accomplished, e.g., by call sign prefix. The NC will then call for check-ins and, after a suitable period, he/she should then acknowledge those received and ask for any additions or corrections to call signs. For most nets, just your call is fine initially - they'll ask for details if needed.

yeah the tape measure yagi thing is legit, i made one for fox hunting and used it on a hilltop once for kicks and the difference versus my mag mount whip was pretty obvious. wasnt even pointed perfectly and was still pulling in a guy like 40 miles out that i couldnt hear at all from the car in the valley. one thing i will say about mobile setups — roof center mount makes a bigger differnce than people expect, like more than switching antenna brands in my experience. if your NR770H is on a mag mount off to one side you might be losing a db or two just from the ground plane being uneven. not saying thats your problem but worth thinking about before buying new gear

so ive been going back and forth on this for about two months now and i keep changing my mind. currently running a cheap baofeng handheld in the truck just clipped to the dash which honestly works fine for local repeaters but i want something actually mounted properly. the two radios im looking at are the yaesu FT-7900R and the icom ID-5100A. the 7900 is cheaper and i know a few guys at the club run them without any complaints, but the 5100 has the D-STAR stuff built in and there's actually a D-STAR repeater maybe 20 miles from here that gets decent use. my question is really whether D-STAR is worth the extra money for just doing local and maybe some travel. i dont do any serious digital modes or anything like that, mostly just ragchewing and checking into the tuesday night net. also slightly worried about the install on the 5100 because the touchscreen head looks like it might be a pain to mount somewhere useful in my F-150. anybody dealt with that? the 7900 seems more straightforward.

yeah 10m has been really something this fall, i worked about 14 countries last weekend during a contest just casually operating, nothing serious. the flux was up around 190 which is not insane but apparently enough to get some nice F2 propagation going in the afternoon hours. your best bet is just to have pskreporter or DX maps open on your phone during the day so you can see when things are perking up without having to be glued to the radio. on the icom thing, from what i read it's more of a flagship replacement than just a refresh, supposed to have a dual receiver setup and some upgraded roofing filters. pricing is gonna be steep i'm sure. honestly i'm still happy with my 7300 for now, hard to justify the upgrade unless you're doing serious contesting or DX chasing. but new gear announcements are always fun to read about even if i'm not buying anything lol

the ALC thing trips a lot of people up. you really dont want it pinning on voice peaks, thats where you start getting splatter and the distorted sound that makes you hard to copy. ideally on SSB the ALC should be just tickling the top of the range on peaks, not slamming it constantly. if its riding high the whole time you're probably driving the mic gain too hard on the 7300 specifically the parametric EQ is actually pretty decent for what it is. i run a high pass shelf around 200hz to clean up the low end rumble, small cut around 500hz where muddiness tends to sit, and a gentle boost around 2.5k for presence. took me a few sessions to get it dialed in by recording myself with an SDR on a second receiver which is honestly the only real way to hear what you actually sound like on the air. trying to judge your own signal from reports alone is kinda useless also make sure TX bandwidth is set to at least 2.4khz if not wider for rag chewing. some guys have it narrowed way down thinking it helps and it really just kills intelligibility

Don't forget you can also administer all three amateur radio license examinations as an Extra. That's a nice privilege for giving back to the community. Plus having access to all frequencies and modes on the HF bands means you'll never feel limited as you explore new aspects of the hobby.

congrats on the first activation, always a good feeling when you qualify especially with weather breathing down your neck. on the antenna thing — 40m is usually more forgiving with a random wire but 20m can be picky about the length and what its tuning against. if youre not cut for anything in particular and the tuner is doing a lot of work, sometimes 20m just kinda suffers. worth experimenting with the length or maybe trying an EFHW cut for 20/40 if you want dual band coverage without fighting the tuner. for the chasers — they log their own contacts on sotadata separately, your submission doesnt automatically credit them. most active chasers know this and log as they go but some newer ones miss it so if someone thanks you and asks about it just point them to the logging page. and for self-spotting when youre solo with bad cell signal, a lot of people use APRS to push a spot, or some guys carry a Garmin inReach and use that. there are also some simplex frequencies people use to get a buddy on the ground to spot for you but that requires some coordination beforehand obviously.

yeah the gateway thing trips everyone up at first. closer isnt always better because you still need a decent signal path to the RMS station, its HF so all the usual propagation stuff applies. that station 40 miles away was probably on a band or frequency that just wasnt working well for that distance at that time, classic skip zone type issue. the channel selector score takes into account recent successful connects from other users so a higher scoring gateway further away can actually be a much better bet. on the CMS question -- once your message hits any RMS gateway it gets forwarded to the Winlink CMS servers over the internet on the gateway operators end, you dont have to worry about that part. from there if youre sending to a regular email address it just goes out like normal internet email, theres usually maybe a minute or two of handling time but nothing crazy. the main thing to watch for with ARES use is that Winlink messages to and from internet email addresses can sometimes get flagged as spam depending on the receiving server, so its worth doing a test with your actual group members email addresses before you count on it in a real activation. VARA HF is the right call by the way, makes a huge difference over plain Winlink PACTOR if you dont have the hardware modem.

im actually not sure if its the same weekend as the arrl thing our club is doing but if you go maybe check if theres any VE testing scheduled, i think they usually do a session in the morning and my buddy is trying to get his general before the end of the year

ok so i just got my general and im trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i know theres a band plan but honestly the arrl band plan and the actual fcc allocations seem like two different things and i cant figure out which one actually matters legally. like if i tune down to 7.000 or up near 7.300 am i going to blow past the band edge or is there some buffer i should know about. also someone at my club told me to never transmit right on the band edge because of something with carrier frequency drift or whatever, is that still a thing with modern rigs. im using a fairly new radio so i figure its probably fine but wanted to ask here before i do something dumb