Jennifer Walsh53

You can apply for WAS through LoTW once you have all 50 states confirmed there - it's actually the easiest way since the ARRL staff makes the process painless when you have all your credits. Triple Play WAS requires 150 confirmations (50 states on phone, CW, and digital) and is a one-time award with many possible variations.

yeah the stereo headphone thing is the key and most people resist it way too long. i ran mono for probably my first three years of SO2R and wondered why my brain felt fried after 6 hours. once you separate the audio it's like your brain just... handles it differently somehow. less cognitive load even though technically you're processing more information, weird how that works. for the dead air between QSOs -- are you using the automatic CQ repeat in N1MM? you can set it so after you log the contact it just fires the CQ macro automatically after a configurable delay. i run mine at something like 1.2 seconds which feels a little aggressive at first but calms down once you're in a rhythm. the other thing is just rep honestly, i noticed my between-QSO gap shrunk a lot just from doing more sprints where you dont have time to be slow.

yeah the aprs.fi path display will actually tell you this if you click on a specific packet — it shows the path it took, so if it says something like WIDE1-1* with an asterisk that means the first hop got digipeated, if there's no asterisk anywhere it probably went direct to the igate. worth checking that first before assuming the digi is the problem. also 5w into a mag mount at a low QTH is gonna be rough for anything more than a couple miles to a digi depending on what's in between. I run 25w from the house into a slim jim up about 25 feet and even then one of the local digis is hit or miss depending on the season weirdly, probably foliage or something. you might just be dealing with the terrain issue you suspected.

so i joined my local ARES group about 4 months ago, been doing the weekly nets and a couple of the training exercises but this weekend is the first real activation ive been asked to participate in. its for a county-level emergency management exercise, not an actual disaster or anything but still, my EC said they want me on a shelter net as a message handler. honestly im a little nervous. i know the basics, i can pass traffic, i've practiced ICS forms in training but when its actually happening with real coordinators watching i get in my head a bit. anyone been through this kind of thing? is it pretty low key or does it move fast? my gear is ready, got the HT and my spare battery pack, just not sure what to expect in terms of how structured the actual operation is versus the training exercises we've done.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general) and i've been trying to use the local 146.940 repeater but i keep getting nothing back when i transmit. i can hear other people on it just fine so i know my radio is receiving ok. my HT is a Baofeng UV-5R and i looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it says the tone is 100.0 Hz. i put that in as the CTCSS tone but still nothing. not even a courtesy beep or anything. i also dont really understand the difference between encode and decode when it comes to tones — do i need both turned on? i thought you only needed to encode the tone when you transmit so the repeater opens up, but my elmer mentioned something about decode too and now im more confused than when i started. also not sure if theres like a proper way to call on a repeater, do you just key up and talk or is there some kind of protocol you're supposed to follow first. thanks in advance

so i finally finished the MTR-3B kit i've had sitting in a box for like eight months and took it out to the park last weekend for some SOTA-adjacent wandering (didnt actually activate anything, just wanted to test the rig in the field). figured i'd share some thoughts since i was in this exact situation not long ago trying to find info from people who actually used this stuff. first off the kit itself — i'm not a great builder, i've done a couple of small kits before but nothing with this many surface mount components. took me probably 12 hours spread across a few evenings and i had to reflow two joints that were giving me trouble on the sidetone circuit. if you're thinking about this one and you're nervous about SMD stuff, just go slow and use flux. seriously the flux made a huge difference for me. anyway once it was done i threw it in my bag with a 3ah lipo, my kx2 paddle, and a random wire antenna with a 9:1 unun and drove to the park. the thing is just absurdly small. like i keep picking it up and being surprised there's a radio in my hand. ran about 2.5 watts into 40m and made 7 contacts in maybe an hour and a half, two of which were into the midwest from the mid-atlantic which felt pretty good for that power level. battery barely moved the whole time. the only real issue i had was that my random wire setup was kinda sketchy — i think i need a longer counterpoise or something because i was getting some weird RF on the key at first. fixed it by repositioning things but i feel like my antenna situation needs work before i do this again. anyone have a good portable antenna setup they like for 40/20 that isn't a huge pain to set up alone?