Sarah Chen

yeah what he said about the inverted-V changing impedance is real, i went through the same thing with my first 20m build. one thing i'll add is that proximity to your fence post and any nearby metal or the ground itself is going to pull the resonant frequency down a bit from what the formula predicts. 468/f is really just a starting point in free space, real world installations almost always come out a bit long. try trimming maybe 3-4 inches off each leg and remeasure, bet it moves in the right direction.

so ive been running a diamond X50 on the roof for about two years now and it works fine for hitting the local 147 repeater but theres one machine about 40 miles out that i can just barely key up on a good day, like if the weather is right and i run 50w from the shack. been thinking about whether a yagi would actually help here or if im chasing my tail. the thing is the repeater is roughly NNW from me and my house kind of blocks that direction at low angles, i think. i put the X50 up pretty high, maybe 30 feet on a chimney mount. the other option i was thinking was just a longer collinear, like the X200 or maybe a Comet GP-9, get a couple more dB of gain and see if that does it. but someone at the club last week was saying a 5 element yagi pointed at that repeater would wipe the floor with a collinear for a fixed path and i cant really argue with that from a pure gain standpoint. the problem is i dont really want a dedicated antenna just for one repeater, i use 2m pretty broadly for the club nets and occasional simplex. so i guess my question is, has anyone gone down this road and figured out a good compromise? or is a yagi just overkill for repeater work in general when youre not doing weak signal stuff

so ive been messing around with remote station control for about six months now and finally got a decent setup going but im curious if anyone else is running RemoteHams RCForb or the SDR remote stuff for anything beyond just casual listening. my situation is i live in an HOA nightmare so the remote shack at my dad's property about 40 miles out is basically my only option for real HF operation. the latency isnt terrible on a good day, maybe 150-200ms round trip which is workable for SSB but CW is kinda rough unless you go full QSK and just deal with it or run a keyer at the remote end. i set up a Raspberry Pi out there running a bunch of stuff and the audio path is actually the part that gives me the most headache — the codec settings in RCForb are a bit buried and i never quite know if im optimizing them or just making things worse. also thinking about tying in some IRLP or Echolink nodes for VHF/UHF linking through the same internet connection out there but not sure if that's going to create a bandwidth nightmare or if it's actually fine in practice. anyone done both at the same site? the upload at that location is only about 15 Mbps which should be plenty but i've been surprised before.

so ive been chasing summits for about 6 months now and finally decided to try my first activation this coming saturday. picked out a local summit that's only a W4V reference, 2 points i think, figured i'd start easy. but i have some questions that the SOTA database and the reflector havent really answered for me in a way that makes sense. first thing — do i have to be exactly on the summit or just within the activation zone? i know theres a 25 meter rule or something but i want to make sure im not disqualified if i set up slightly below the actual peak because the top is really rocky and not great for antennas. second thing is about the spotting — do i need to post a selfspot on SOTAwatch before i start calling or can i just start on a frequency and hope chasers find me. ive seen people use the RBN to get auto spotted but im not sure how that works with SSB since im not doing CW yet. running a Yaesu FT-818 with a homebrew linked dipole if that matters. also does anyone have tips for keeping a log in the field, i tend to fumble around with paper when im cold and nervous

I went SDRplay RSP1A a few years back and havent looked back. The difference on HF is real. My RTL still gets used for ADS-B because why not, its fine at 1090 MHz, but for anything below 30 MHz the RSP wins pretty easily. You can actually use it without a separate upconverter which is nice. One thing nobody mentions much — the SDRuno software that comes with it is actually pretty decent now, it was rough when i first got mine but theyve updated it a fair bit. You can also use it with SDR# or GQRX or whatever you prefer which is good because software lock-in is annoying. For FT8 monitoring just pipe it into WSJT-X via virtual audio cable and it works great.

same thing happend to me when i got my ticket last year, couldnt even remeber to say my callsign at the end and the guy on the other end had to ask me again. felt like an idiot but honestly everyone starts somewhere. whats your HT? im still using a cheap baofeng and trying to figure out if its worth upgrading yet

im pretty new to this too so take what i say with some salt but i downloaded an app called HamSatDX or something like that... actually no i think it was just called HamAlert, you can set it up to notify you when certain dx stations get spotted on certain bands. saved me from missing a few openings when i was just sitting at work. someone on here mentioned it a while back and its been pretty useful honestly even if i dont fully understand all the settings yet

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. okay so the technician is where everyone starts, you dont need the general or extra until you want HF privileges which is the longer range stuff. the tech exam is 35 questions multiple choice and honestly its not that bad if you use hamstudy.org, just grind the question pool for a week or two and youll be fine. the questions repeat a lot. dont bother buying a radio until after you pass, mostly because once you're studying you'll figure out what bands interest you and that changes what you'd want anyway. find a local club too, a lot of them do free license classes and the elmers there can answer stuff way faster than googling. the ARRL has a technician manual but some people find it overkill just to pass the test

so i finally did my first POTA activation yesterday at the state forest near me, been putting it off for months because i kept second guessing my setup. ended up just throwing the KX2 and a random wire in my backpack and heading out. forgot my coax adapter so i had to MacGyver something with electrical tape which worked surprisingly okay but the SWR was kinda ugly on 40m. managed to get like 9 contacts in about an hour and a half before it started raining, didnt hit the 10 to qualify so i gotta go back. honestly wasnt even that frustrated about it, just kinda fun to be out there doing radio stuff in the woods ya know

I went through basically the exact same thing with my first inverted-V, obsessed over getting the SWR perfect and eventually a guy at my club just told me to stop worrying about it. 1.8 isnt going to hurt anything and on 40m you probably wont notice a difference in signal reports vs a 1.1 match. the antenna is up and it works, which puts you ahead of a lot of people. I spent like three weekends tweaking mine before I just accepted it and started actually using the thing to make contacts. one thing though — how is the feedline routed? if the coax is just drooping down along one of the legs for a while that can skew your readings depending on where your analyzer is. might be worth checking that if you havent already.

yeah the 60m power dropoff thing is a known annoyance, some guys just run reduced power on that band and call it a day but if youre doing board work anyway makes sense to address it. i did the TX mod on mine like two years ago and it's been fine. never touched the roofing filter though, honestly my ears arent good enough anymore to care about that level of adjacent rejection haha. getting old is rough on the hobby in ways nobody warns you about.

So i finally pulled the trigger and scheduled my first ever Parks on the Air activation for tomorrow morning at a state park about 45 minutes from my house. K-2254 if anyone wants to hunt me, ill be on 40m probably around 7.260 or wherever i can find a clear spot, maybe dip into 20m if conditions look decent. I've done a bunch of hunting from home which honestly got me hooked on the whole thing but activating is a completely different beast apparently. I got my KX2 all charged up, random wire antenna cut for 40m, a few extra batteries just in case. I'm planning to get there around 9am local and set up, maybe do a spot on the POTA website before i start calling. My main worry is just not getting the 10 contacts needed. Like what if nobody hears me or i pick a frequency thats already occupied and dont realize it. Also not sure if i should just stay on one band or jump around. Anyone done a bunch of activations have advice for a first timer? Dont want to blow it on my first try haha

one thing that tripped me up when i was new was that some of these get used as questions and answers depending on how you say them, like QRN? means is there static, but just saying QRN means there IS static. same with a lot of them. took me a while to figure out context matters a lot. also youll hear QSY which just means changing frequency, and QRZ which is who is calling me. that one gets used at the start of a pileup a lot and it confused me for the longest time because it sounds like it should mean something more complicated

same thing happend to me like 3 months ago haha, i was shaking a little when i first keyed up which is embarassing to admit but whatever. the guys on our repeater were really cool about it too. what HT did you end up getting?

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and when i first got on HF i was pretty careful about using phonetics every time i gave my callsign, like Kilo Foxtrot whatever etc. but i noticed a lot of the more experienced guys on the local repeater just say their call letters normally without spelling them out phonetically, and sometimes they dont even give their full call, just the last couple letters. is there like an unwritten rule about when you actually need to use them vs when its just overkill? i dont want to sound like im reading from a checklist every time i key up but i also dont want to drop bad habits early on. my elmers kind of glossed over this part

i went through basically the same thing last year. one thing that got me was i had the IC-7300 USB audio levels set wrong and VARA was connecting but then dropping before the session completed, took me forever to figure out it was just a mic gain issue in the windows sound settings. worth double checking that if you start getting partial connections.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and the weak signal performance is honestly kind of mind blowing when you first see it work, pulled a ZL station once on 80mw into a random wire which still feels unreal. but after a while it starts to feel like im just exchanging signal reports with strangers and there's no actual... conversation happening you know? like it's almost more of a data collection activity than ham radio. so somebody on my local repeater mentioned JS8Call and i set it up last weekend. spent maybe 4 hours on 40m with it and i think i get what its trying to do but i had a really hard time finding activity. decoded a few stations but nobody responded to my CQ and i only saw maybe 2 or 3 exchanges happening in the whole session. is the JS8Call community just that small or am i looking at the wrong bands or times? i was on 7.078 which i thought was the standard frequency. also somewhat related — does anyone still run PSK31 regularly? i used to love it back like 15 years ago, felt like the perfect middle ground between cw and phone, and i occasionally see it on the waterfall but activity seems pretty thin compared to what it used to be. feels like FT8 kind of ate everything else's lunch.

not sure if this is related but i've seen a few 7300s with dodgy ribbon cable connectors causing weird intermittent behavior, not exactly power drop but odd stuff. might be worth reseating all the internal connectors while you have it open. also what power supply are you running it off? i know it sounds basic but ive seen a supply that measured fine under light load completely fall over at 100w and the radio does all kinds of strange things trying to compensate. just throwing it out there.

so ive been putting this off for months but i finally sat down last weekend and built a center-fed dipole for 40m out of some 14awg stranded wire i had laying around from an old project. used a choc block connector as a temporary center piece which i know isnt ideal but i wanted to get something up fast. the formula i used was the standard 468/f and for 7.150 that gave me about 65.5 feet total, so roughly 32.75 per side. my question is about the feedline situation. i ran about 50 feet of RG-8X from the center down to the shack and im getting a decent SWR around 1.4:1 at my target freq which honestly i was surprised by. no balun yet, which i know people are gonna jump on me for. does it matter that much if im just doing casual SSB, like am i gonna have RF issues or is it more of a noise/pattern thing? also the antenna is only about 18-20 feet up which i know is low for 40m but thats the best i can do right now with the trees i have. overall though im pretty happy with it, the wire cost me nothing and it loaded up fine on my 7300. just wondering if i should bother with a choke balun before my next session or if i can wait til i have time to wind one properly.

the callsign registration thing -- yeah you do need to be in the Winlink system. but honestly if you just send a message through the client it usually auto-registers you on first successful connection. you dont need to go do anything manually beforehand unless your password isnt set up, which you do through the winlink.org website under account settings. if you havent done that go do it first because without a password set you'll get rejected at the CMS level even if the RF link is fine. as for RMS vs gateway, every RMS node you see on the map is a sysop-run station that has an internet connection back to the Winlink CMS servers, so yeah they're all full gateways. there's no relay-only nodes in that list, those would be something different like a Winlink peer to peer setup which is a whole other thing. the 40m connection issue on 80 miles is a bit tricky because you're right in that awkward skip zone during certain times of day. have you tried closer to local noon or just before sunset? 40m can be weird for near-vertical-incidence stuff at that distance. also check your VARA settings, theres a max connections per hour or a session timeout in there that bites people sometimes. and make sure the gateway frequency in your channel list matches whats actually listed on the RMS relay list, not just what the map shows, those can sometimes be stale.

I just use the DXWatch mobile site in my phone browser. Works great and no app to install. The responsive design is pretty good and you get all the same features as the desktop version.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, went up to W6/NC-424 which is only about a 2 mile hike but still counts and i was pretty nervous about the whole thing. brought my KX2 and a wire dipole i threw up in a tree and honestly it worked way better than i thought it would. got my 4 contacts no problem, actually ended up with like 11 QSOs before my fingers got too cold to type the log on my phone. anyway i have some questions for people who do this regularly. first, how strict are people about the activation zone? i was maybe 25 feet outside what i thought the boundary was and moved back but wasnt totally sure i was reading the map right. second, does it matter what bands you use for the log to count? i did mostly 20m SSB but someone told me CW contacts count more or something? and third, what app are people using to spot themselves, i was using SOTAwatch but it felt clunky on my phone in the cold with gloves on. overall it was an awesome experience and im already planning the next one. my wife thinks im crazy for hauling radio gear up a mountain but she doesnt get it lol

so ive been licensed about 4 months now and i keep hearing people talk about nets and how great they are for getting on the air regularly but i honestly have no idea what to do when i actually try to join one. like i found a local 2m net that runs tuesday nights and i sat there with my HT listening for like 20 minutes but when the net control asked for check-ins i just froze up and didnt say anything what exactly are you supposed to say when you check in? do you just give your callsign or is there some specific format? and what happens after you check in, do they call you back and you have to say something or can you just listen? i dont want to mess up the net for everyone else while im figuring it out also slightly unrelated but does anyone know if theres a good resource for finding nets in your area, i found one on a local club website but i feel like there must be more out there

nice work getting those contacts, AO-73 was one of the first ones i worked too. one thing that tripped me up early on — make sure you're accounting for the transponder inversion. AO-73 uses an inverting transponder so if you tune your uplink higher your downlink goes lower, which makes the doppler correction feel really counterintuitive when you're first learning it. i was going the wrong direction for like three passes before someone on the mailing list pointed it out to me. gpredict should handle this automatically if you have the transponder configured correctly in the satellites file but worth double checking that the inverting flag is actually set.

that ohio contact on 5w from a homebrew rig is something to be proud of honestly. once you get a taste of it you kind of ruin yourself for the big radio stuff haha. i ran 5 watts from a summit in vermont last fall and worked a station in england and i still think about it. for antennas in the park i really like a linked dipole if you have two trees roughly in the right place. cut for 40 and 20, just clip in or out the links, no tuner needed which keeps your losses down and when youre running 5w you really dont want anything wasting power in a tuner. the efhw transformers are also popular for this kind of thing and they pack down tiny, mine is literally in a film canister. takes a bit more fussing to get right but once you dial it in its great. the random wire with a tuner absolutely works but yeah like you said you are probably losing a watt or so in the matching network depending on how well the tuner is doing its job. keep tweaking that bitx, mine went through like six different versions of the audio board before i was happy with it