Jennifer Walsh53

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.

yeah you basically just absorb them over time honestly. but the ones you absolutely need day to day are probably QSO (a contact or conversation), QTH (your location), QRM (interference from other stations, like man-made), QRN (natural noise, static that kind of thing), QSB (signal fading), QRZ (who is calling me), and QSL which yeah means confirmed or understood depending on context. when someone says QSL on voice theyre usually just saying roger or got it, not necessarily talking about the card.
the 73 thing is just best regards, comes from the old telegraph days and nobody really knows why 73 specifically but its just what it is. 88 is used sometimes too but thats its own can of worms lol. ARRL website has a full list if you want to go down that rabbit hole, i think its in the handbook too. honestly though just hang around on the air and it clicks pretty fast, nobody expects a new general to know every single one

im in the same boat as you actually, been studying for about a month now. what helped me was doing hamstudy for the question pool but also watching some youtube videos when something totally didnt make sense to me. there's a few guys on there that explain the ohms law stuff pretty well with like visuals and stuff. the tech exam isnt super hard from what i can tell, most of the questions are pretty straightforward once youve seen them a few times. good luck to you

have you tried just listening to actual qso recordings? like not trying to copy everything just having it on while you do something else. i dunno if thats scientifically proven or whatever but i swear it helped me get used to the rhythm of real traffic. there's some good stuff on the web, morse code ninja has a ton of free material at different speeds. his word lists at 20wpm with the long spacing helped me more than any trainer tbh

So ive been trying to get Winlink Express working for about two weeks now and I feel like im close but something keeps going wrong with the connection to the RMS gateway about 40 miles from me. Im running a 2m setup, Kenwood TM-V71A into a Signalink USB, and the audio levels look reasonable in the software. I can see the gateway in the session list, frequency shows 144.990, I initiate the connection and it starts the handshake but then just... times out. Sometimes I get a partial connect and it downloads like 3 packets then drops.
I went through the audio calibration thing in Winlink Express like three times. PTT keying looks right on the radio, I can see the TX light hit. Tried both VARA FM and ARDOP, VARA FM seems to get a little further but still drops. My antenna situation is a jpole up about 20 feet which has always worked fine for local repeater stuff so i dont think thats the problem but honestly who knows.
Anyone dealt with flaky connections to a gateway like this? Is there something in the RMS configuration on my end I might be missing, or is this more likely just a propagation/path issue to that particular node? Also not sure how message handling works once it does connect — like if i have messages pending does it automatically pull them or do I have to do something specific to trigger that.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and dabbled in a lot of modes but EME keeps coming up in conversations at the club and i finally sat down and read through some stuff online and now im both really excited and kind of overwhelmed. like the basic concept makes sense — bounce your signal off the moon, someone on the other side of the planet hears it — but the actual requirements to do this seem pretty intense depending on who you ask.
what i keep running into is wildly different answers about how much antenna and power you actually need to make it work. some people say you can do it on 2m with a single yagi and 100w if you use JT65 or Q65, other guys are saying you need a stack of four or more yagis and a kilowatt minimum. i get that more is always better but is there like a realistic minimum that actually produces contacts and not just frustration. my backyard isnt tiny but im not going to fit a 10-element dish back there either.
also curious how the scheduling and timing stuff works in practice. i know the moon has to be in a mutual window for both stations but do most people just hang out on the skeds pages and wait, or is there a more active calling frequency thing happening. any insight from people actually doing this would be appreciated, i dont want to spend a bunch of money and then find out i have the wrong expectations.

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?