Michael Thompson

Welcome to the rabbit hole haha. So the short answer is there's no required order, you can chase all three at the same time and honestly with FT8 you probably already have more progress than you realize. WAZ has 40 zones total based on the CQ zone system — you can look up a map and it starts to make sense pretty quick once you see it visually. For what its worth i'd say get yourself signed up for LoTW if you havent already because a huge chunk of the confirmations you need for DXCC pretty much require it these days, especially for the rarer entities. A lot of DX stations only upload to LoTW and dont bother with paper cards anymore. Once you have an LoTW account your logs from WSJT-X can sync up and youll start seeing what you actually have confirmed vs just worked. 38 states on 100 watts into a dipole is solid for 8 months. WAS is definitely achievable from a suburban setup, just takes patience on the harder ones like Delaware and Rhode Island that dont pop up as often. Dont stress too much about the order, just keep logging and the credits add up faster than you think.

been listening on 40m for a few weeks now and keep hearing QSL this and QRT that... i know QSO means contact but there's like a million of these things. is there some master list somewhere or do you just pick them up over time? seems like everyone knows what QRZ means but im lost half the time when guys are using abbreviations

had basically this exact debate last spring. went with the dipole inverted-v style off the 33ft mast and honestly it works fine for what i do. the noise thing is real, my neighbor two houses down has something that makes a terrible buzzing on 40 and i can actually point the antenna to null it a bit. not perfect but noticeable. one thing though — if you go inverted-v make sure your apex angle doesnt get too shallow or the feedpoint impedance starts drifting and it gets harder to match. i keep mine at like 120 degrees or more and it loads up pretty cleanly on my tuner. anyway just build both eventually, wire is cheap

the waiting thing is so real. i did my first SET last year and thought i was prepared but then our group got called out for a real thing this past summer (nothing major, just backup comms for a search and rescue thing) and yeah it was a lot of sitting in a parking lot with the radio on. not complaining though, i'd rather be there and not needed than not there at all i guess. also your point about the health and welfare traffic is interesting — we haven't done much of that in our training nets and im wondering if i should ask our EC about running some practice sessions with that specifically. feels like a skill that atrophies if you dont use it.

For fill-in coverage, an old TNC and 2m mobile in a box works great. Program it to digipeat only packets with specific callsigns in the path. I used one for a ski race where HT coverage was sketchy - put it in the parking lot and suddenly everyone could get through reliably.

so we ran a simulated disaster drill on saturday, county-level thing coordinated with the local emergency management office. i've been doing ARES stuff for about three years now and i thought i had a pretty good handle on how things would go but honestly this exercise showed me how wrong i was about a few things. the scenario was a major flooding event that took out most of the repeater infrastructure in the south part of the county. we had to fall back to simplex way faster than anyone expected and i'll be honest, a lot of us were fumbling around trying to remember our pre-planned simplex frequencies. like we had them written down somewhere but nobody had actually practiced using them under simulated stress conditions before. the other thing that got me was how bad our net control handoffs were. our primary NCS had to "go off the air" at the 45 minute mark per the scenario script and the backup took probably 3-4 minutes to get organized and take over. in a real event that gap could matter. we also had one guy show up with a radio that hadnt been programmed with the updated frequencies from like two months ago so he was basically useless for the first half hour while somebody helped him sort it out. anyway im curious if anyone else has done these kinds of exercises and what surprised you the most when things didnt go the way you thought they would. i feel like i learn more from these drills than from any training session.

As a new General, I appreciate this reminder! I've caught myself using "Sugar" instead of "Sierra" from my police scanner days. Clear pronunciation and accuracy really do make the difference - especially when propagation is marginal.

okay so the chart thing is actually what most people do first and it kind of works against you later on. what you really want is to hear each letter as its own sound, like K sounds like dah-dit-dah and you want your brain to just hear that and think K without going through some chart in your head. the Koch method is probably the most recommended way to go about this and theres a free program called Just Learn Morse Code that does it pretty well, or G4FON if youre on windows. basically you start with just two characters at a fairly high speed, like 15 or 20 wpm, and you only add a new character when you can copy those ones reliably. the key thing people always say is dont start too slow because then your brain learns the wrong thing and youll have to unlearn it later which is a huge pain. LCWO.net is another good one and its in the browser so nothing to install. honestly the first few weeks are kind of rough and it feels like nothing is sticking but it does click eventually, just takes time and consistent practice, even 15 minutes a day is better than an hour once a week

Are you laying them on the ground or burying them? I've found that even 4-6 elevated radials at 8-10 feet can outperform 32 ground radials in some situations. Might be worth experimenting before adding more ground wire.

Run the math first - your 8A load means 192Ah per day. With only 200Wh usable capacity, you'll need constant charging regardless of method. I'd lean toward the Honda for primary with solar as supplemental. The EU2200i is whisper quiet and you can schedule charging during designated periods.

the bandwidth setting absolutely matters and its probably the first thing id look at. on the 7300 try bumping your TX bandwidth up a bit, the default fil settings can be pretty conservative and cut into your lows and highs more than you might want. a lot of guys settle around 100-2800 or even 100-3000 hz for general ragchewing, gives you a fuller sound without being splatter risk. you can monitor it yourself if you get a friend to give you an honest on-air report while you tweak. on the compression thing, i side more with keeping it light. maybe 4-5 on the meter peak is fine but the second you start seeing it smashing constantly you're probably hurting intelligibility more than helping. the PR-40 is a dynamic mic and it responds really well to proper mic technique anyway so if you're keeping good consistent distance you may not even need much compression at all. also double check your mic EQ settings in the menu, theres a parametric EQ in the 7300 that most people never touch and it can make a huge difference in shaping your voice to cut through better.

so ive been fighting this for about a week now and im starting to wonder if im just missing something obvious. running a TM-D710G in the shack connected to a mag mount on the roof, position is set manually in the radio since i dont have a GPS hooked up to it yet. the beacon is definitely going out — i can see it hitting aprs.fi and showing up in the heard list from a couple of the local digipeaters — but the position its showing is like 40 miles northwest of me out in the middle of nowhere. i went back and double checked the lat/lon i entered in the radio and it looks right to me, at least the degrees part. wondering if maybe i fat-fingered the minutes or the N/W hemisphere designator somewhere. gonna check again tonight but wanted to see if anyone else has run into this and what the usual culprit is. the symbol is showing up correct at least (house icon) so its not a total disaster

the thing nobody talks about enough is just patience and not getting frustrated and doing dumb stuff lol. ive watched guys on remote setups with like a kW and a stack just calling over and over on the wrong vfo and never getting through while some dude with a dipole in another part of the split window gets through in 10 minutes. reading what the DX station is actually doing matters more than raw power most of the time, at least until propagation gets rough. also — and this is kind of situational — if you can find out what logging software the DXpedition is using sometimes you can tell patterns in how they're working the pileup. some ops running DXlog or similar will systematically sweep through the split range and some just go wherever they hear the strongest signal. changes your strategy a bit.

i went through this exact same thing like 8 months ago lol. what helped me was just spending like an hour on AE7Q before doing anything, you can search available calls and see what formats youre eligible for. made it way less confusing once i could actually see the options instead of just reading about it in the abstract. my vanity came through in about 4 or 5 days after the window closed if i remember right

oh man i was stuck at exactly 13 for a while too, felt like hitting a wall. what finally worked for me was the high speed exposure thing but not exactly how your club guy described it. i didnt try to copy at 25, i just listened to QSOs on 40m where guys were running maybe 18-20wpm and just tried to pull out callsigns or a word here and there. not stressing about copying everything, just getting my ears used to real code at speed. after a few weeks of that alongside my normal practice sessions i noticed 15 started feeling a lot less panicky. also someone on here mentioned LCWO dot net if you havent tried it, you can set character speed and overall speed separately which is huge. so you can have characters sent at 20wpm speed but with longer gaps between them. helps your brain learn the right sound for each letter without the overall pace being overwhelming. took me from 13 to 18 in maybe 3 months doing that along with the on-air listening. youre not stuck, the plateau is real and almost everyone hits it somewhere in that 12-15 range from what ive seen.

honestly the theory stuff looks scarier than it is. yeah there are questions about LC circuits and transistor biasing and some filter stuff but the question pool is still a question pool, you know what i mean. if you spend a few weeks going through the material on hamstudy or wherever and you actually try to understand the concepts instead of just drilling the answers, it clicks faster than you'd think. i used the ARRL extra class manual and worked through the math sections even though i was never great at math and it was fine. took me maybe six weeks of casual studying. as for the privileges, depends what you want to do. the extra portions of 40, 20, 15 are noticeably less crowded, especially during contests when general class is basically a wall of noise. if you do any DX chasing that alone is worth it. plus CW on 80 gets better real estate. its not just bragging rights but i get why it might feel that way if you're happy where you are.

so ive been doing HF contesting for about 4 years now mostly single radio and last cycle i finally got a second radio set up properly with a bandpass filter setup between the two so the RFI situation is at least manageable. running an IC-7300 on run and an old FT-950 on S&P and i thought id just naturally get faster but honestly my rate has been pretty inconsistent and sometimes feels worse than when i was just working one radio hard. i think the issue is im spending too much mental energy deciding when to switch over and by the time i do the frequency on the run radio has gone cold or i missed a multiplier on the other band. like the timing of when to break away from the run to go grab a mult is something i cant figure out. is there some rule of thumb people use or is it just something that clicks after enough contests? i did CQWW SSB last year and my score went up but i felt like i left a lot on the table. also curious if people run different audio setups — right now ive got the run radio in my left ear and S&P in the right and its workable but maybe not ideal. any tips from people who've actually made SO2R click for them would be appreciated

Your IC-7610 has excellent RTTY DSP processing, so AFSK will work great. Make sure you understand the NET and AFC settings in MMTTY - AFC is useful when CQing to track off-frequency callers, but turn it off when S&P to stay exactly on frequency. Also set your power to about 80W if entering 100W class - RTTY is 100% duty cycle!

I went down this rabbit hole last year. ended up switching to a raspberry pi running a dedicated remote server instead of the windows box and the latency got noticeably better, probably because theres less background garbage running. not saying windows is the problem necessarily but the pi just sits there and does nothing except handle the radio stuff so its more predictable i guess. the WebSDR comparison is a bit apples to oranges though since that's receive only, if you want transmit you're kind of stuck with something like RCForb or maybe Hamlib + a custom setup if you're into that sort of thing. there's also that whole EchoLink / IRLP internet linking rabbit hole if you want to get into repeater stuff remotely but thats a totally different animal than what you're doing

yeah the doppler thing on linear birds is genuinely the hardest part when you start out, most people dont realize how fast the frequency is shifting especially near AOS and LOS when the satellite is coming over the horizon at you. mid-pass when its more or less overhead the rate slows down quite a bit so that's usually the easier window to work the trick a lot of people use is to tune the downlink to keep a signal in the passband and let that be your reference, basically forget about the uplink doppler for a moment and just make sure you can hear yourself in the transponder first. if you can hear your own signal come back you know you're in the right spot. two radios definitely helps but plenty of people do it single radio with a bit of mental gymnastics. gpredict can actually drive some rigs via CAT if your 818 supports it through a USB interface, that takes a lot of the pain away honestly

yeah i just did this like two months ago, was a Tech for almost two years before i finally got around to it. honestly the hardest part for me was the stuff about operating privileges and which frequencies you can use where because theres a lot of it and it all kind of blurs together. the electrical theory wasnt too scary if youre already comfortable with the Tech level stuff. one thing though, once you actually get on HF its a totally different world than repeaters. i wasnt ready for how much just listening matters before you start transmitting, spent a good week just tuning around on 20m trying to figure out how people were finding each other and what the conventions were. nobody really explains that part in the study guides

so i passed my technician exam last tuesday and been spending the whole week just listening on the local repeater trying to get a feel for how people talk. finally keyed up yesterday and said my callsign and a guy came back to me right away, we talked for maybe 10 minutes about his antenna setup and honestly i had no idea what half of it meant but it was still really cool. feels weird hearing your own callsign on the air for the first time, like it doesnt feel real yet. anyway just wanted to say hi to everyone here, been lurking on this forum for a couple months while studying. glad to finally be on the other side of it.

so i've been chasing rare DX for probably 8 years now and for the longest time i just could not break pileups to save my life. running 100w into a dipole doesnt help obviously but even after i got the amp i was still getting nowhere on the bigger pileups. VP8, 3Y, all that stuff just felt impossible. what finally clicked for me — and i feel dumb it took this long — is listening way more carefully to where the DX station is actually pulling callers from. like not just the general split range but the specific few khz he keeps going back to. i started parking just a tiny bit above or below that sweet spot instead of right in the middle of the herd and my hit rate went way up. also timing. watching the rhythm of how the DXpedition operator is working and calling right as he finishes a qso instead of just shouting into the void constantly. the other thing is sending my callsign once, maybe twice, and then shutting up. i used to just keep hammering and that's exactly wrong apparently. let the op actually hear a gap. i know this sounds obvious but when you're excited you just key up over and over. curious what other people do, especially on ssb vs cw. cw pileups feel completely different to me, way more orderly somehow even when theyre not

so i was at work when apparently 10 meters just absolutely lit up last thursday afternoon, saw a bunch of posts about it after the fact and was pretty bummed because ive been waiting for a decent opening on that band for like two months now. my antenna situation isnt great for anything below 20m but 10m i have a pretty solid dipole up and it just... never opens when im home. anyway aside that i did catch a little bit of the tail end around 6pm local and managed a couple of south american stations which was nice but nothing crazy. was anyone else on during the peak? curious what was getting worked because the cluster was going nuts from what i could see on pskreporter after the fact. also seen some chatter about the new icom ic-905 actually starting to ship to dealers in more places, anyone here actually gotten hands on one yet? the microwave bands stuff is way outside my current budget but still interesting to follow

so i've been meaning to post about this for a while but kept forgetting. did anyone else see the announcement from Icom about the IC-905 getting some firmware updates that actually address the ALC issue a bunch of us were complaining about? i haven't had a chance to install it yet but a few guys at the club meeting last thursday were saying it made a noticeable difference on 2.4 GHz. would be curious if anyone here has tested it. also completely separate topic but 10 meters has been open almost every afternoon this week, like genuinely wide open, i worked a handful of South American stations yesterday just running 100 watts into my wire antenna and the signals were 59 plus. solar flux has been sitting pretty high and i know we're still riding the tail end of cycle 25 being active so maybe that's why but it feels different than last year. if you havent been on 28 MHz lately seriously just tune around for a bit, even with modest antennas its worth it. anyway just thought id share, anything else going on that people have heard about? feels like theres been a lot of activity in the hobby lately between new gear and the bands being cooperative for once.