Carol Davis

welcome to ARES, glad you made it out. the ICS stuff can feel overwhelming at first but honestly once you do a few drills or even just shadow someone at a served agency exercise it clicks pretty fast. the main thing to internalize early is that during an activation you're basically a resource under someone else's command structure, not just a ham doing your own thing, and that changes how you think about communication discipline on the net. for the ARRL manual yeah its worth having but i'd honestly say the most practical thing is to take the free FEMA ICS-100 and ICS-700 courses online first. they're not radio specific at all but they give you the vocabulary so when your EC talks about an EOC or a section chief you know what they mean. took me maybe 3 hours total for both. after that the radio stuff makes a lot more sense because you understand where you fit in the chain. also just keep showing up to meetings and ask questions, your EC and the experienced members will teach you more than any document will

so ive been chasing rare DX for about 6 years now and honestly pileups used to just destroy me. id call and call and nothing, just a wall of noise. had a couple guys at the club tell me the usual stuff, listen first, tail-end, split operation blah blah but it never really clicked until this past winter. what actually changed things for me was really paying attention to the DX station's rhythm. like every operator has a pattern, how long they listen before coming back, whether they favor certain parts of the split window, how they handle partials. once i started actually logging that mentally instead of just hammering the key it started making way more sense. also -- and this sounds dumb but -- i stopped calling on every single cycle. id skip one, listen to where he was pulling calls from in the split, then place my call maybe 1-2 kHz away from where the crowd was piling up. not always worked but definitely improved my hit rate. running 100w into a 4-element yagi at 45 feet so not exactly a big gun setup but its gotten me some decent ones. anyone else have techniques that actually work vs the stuff you read in the books that sounds good but doesnt pan out in practice?

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (technician) and i finally got my baofeng programmed with a few local repeaters from repeaterbook. most of them work fine but theres one i keep trying to hit and i just cant get it to open up. i can hear other people talking on it just fine but when i key up nobody responds and i dont think im actually getting into the repeater at all. i checked repeaterbook again and it shows a CTCSS tone of 100.0 Hz for the input. i have the tone set in my radio but im not sure if im setting it right — like do i need tone encode only, or encode AND decode? ive seen settings for like tone squelch vs just tone and its confusing me. also someone at my club mentioned something about a courtesy tone, what does that mean and am i supposed to wait for it before i talk? also general question — is there like an unwritten rule about how long you should wait before jumping in on a repeater? i dont wanna step on anyone or come across as rude. still figuring all this out.

so i finally picked a summit to do my first activation and im pretty nervous about the whole thing honestly. the peak is W6/NS-306 and its only like a 2 mile hike in so nothing crazy, but ive been going back and forth about gear for weeks now and i think im just overthinking it at this point. my current plan is to bring my FT-818 with a 3ah lipo, a linked dipole cut for 40 and 20, and just a telescoping fiberglass pole to get it up in the air. i've been practicing setting up the antenna in my backyard and it goes up pretty fast so thats good. im planning to self-spot on SOTAwatch before i leave the trailhead so people know im coming, and then also maybe try to post from the summit if i have signal. my main questions are really just — do i need to stay in the activation zone the whole time or can i work people from anywhere on the summit? and also is 4 QSOs really all you need to count it as an activation? feels like a low bar but i dont want to stay up there all day if conditions go bad or weather rolls in. also should i bother with CW or just stick to SSB since im more comfortable there, im only like 6 months into my general ticket so cw is still pretty rough for me any advice appreciated, really want to get this one in the log