Susan Clark

the internet linking part through RemoteHams is kind of its own rabbit hole. its not really echolink compatible in the traditional sense, its more like the platform lets registered nodes connect to each other and someone with a gateway can bridge it to a local repeater if they set it up that way. ive seen a few clubs do it to let members operate the club station remotely during nets which is actually pretty slick. separate registration isnt required per se but the node owner has to configure what access you have, so if youre trying to link into someone elses system youre dependent on them having set it up right on their end. your own station is simpler, you just register it and control who can connect. personally i still run my own RigCtl setup for HF because i want full control over everything and i dont love having my station accessible through a third party platform even with the access controls. probably paranoid but thats where im at. for SDR only remote access though RemoteHams is honestly pretty hard to beat for the effort involved.

yeah what he said about smart beaconing is the real fix tbh. i used to have mine set to a fixed interval and i was beaconing like crazy sitting in a parking lot. switched to smart beaconing and my packet rate dropped way down when stationary and coverage on the map actually got better because the digis weren't as congested with my junk. path i run WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 and its worked fine from central valley out into the sierra foothills which is a pretty similar urban to rural transition

yeah the RSP1A is a noticeable jump from the rtl dongle for HF, especially with that noise floor difference. the 14-bit ADC vs 8-bit makes a real difference when you're trying to pull weak signals out. that said your attic wire is definitely holding you back too, so dont expect miracles just from the hardware swap. SDR++ works fine with the RSP1A, you just need the SDRplay API installed and it picks it up no problem. i barely touch SDRuno anymore honestly. the only time i open it is when i want to use their notch filter stuff which is pretty decent for dealing with broadcast interference on 49m. but for day to day use SDR++ is way cleaner to work with. one thing to watch for is strong signal handling — if you're near any AM broadcast towers the RSP1A can still get a little wobbly without a filter in line. i run a simple high pass on mine and it sorted that out pretty much completely

so we ran a simulated disaster exercise last Saturday, county-wide thing coordinated with the local ARES group and the OEM office. the scenario was a major ice storm taking out power and cell infrastructure across the northern part of the county for 72+ hours. i've done a few of these before but this one felt a lot more realistic than past drills and honestly it exposed some stuff i wasn't expecting. biggest thing for me personally was how fast my Go Kit battery situation fell apart on paper. i thought i had like 18 hours of runtime figured out but once we actually started simulating continuous net operations with the FT-891 running at 50w for several hours... yeah that math changed pretty quick. also we had a guy show up with a radio he'd never actually used on a net before, like he'd had his ticket for two years and mostly just listened on the repeater. watching him try to handle formal Winlink traffic under simulated pressure was kind of a wake up call for everyone including him, he was a good sport about it though. the thing that went really well was our liaison with the Red Cross shelter. we had a pre-agreed message format and the volunteer there actually knew what to expect from us which made everything smoother. lesson from previous drills apparently. curious if anyone else has run exercises recently and what surprised them. especially interested in power management stuff since thats clearly where i need to work

Q65 is particularly effective for EME on VHF and higher bands with better performance than JT65. The narrower bandwidth helps significantly on 432 MHz where full 360-degree Faraday rotation is possible. I've seen 2-3dB improvement switching to Q65-60B.

oh man i just did my second one last month and the nerves dont totally go away but its such a good time. one thing that caught me off guard my first activation was just how much people WANT to work you, like once you get spotted the pileup comes fast and if youre not used to running a pileup it can feel overwhelming. just slow down, work them one at a time, nobody expects you to be a DX contest station out there in the woods haha. also bring more battery than you think you need, i always underestimate how long i end up staying once i get into it

so ive been running my 7300 for about two years now and always kinda wondered about the TCXO upgrade. the stock oscillator is fine honestly but i do a lot of digital modes and FT8 especially and i kept reading threads about how the frequency stability improves noticeably with the TXCO-2 option unit installed. finally bit the bullet last weekend and did it myself, the install is pretty straightforward once you pull the top cover, just a small board that drops into a socket near the front left if i remember right. honestly the difference on the waterfall is pretty visible to me. before i'd occasionally see my own signal drift a tiny bit over a long FT8 session especially when the rig was still warming up, now it just locks in and stays. could be confirmation bias i guess but i dont think so. also noticed the CAT control feels a bit snappier but that might be unrelated, maybe i just imagined that part. anyway wondering if anyone else has done this mod or any other internal upgrades to the 7300. i know some people do the fan mod too to quiet it down, havent messed with that yet. curious what people have found actually makes a difference vs stuff that sounds good on paper but doesnt change much in practice.

From the DXpedition side, wide splits often happen when operators don't properly manage their rhythm. The nature of a DXpedition pileup mirrors the skill of the DXpedition operator. A carefully managed pileup will run with little disruption to the remainder of the band and minimize frustration. Better to use geographic splits (EU/NA/JA) than just keep expanding bandwidth and irritating non-DXers.

The 7300 is constantly sold used because it's probably the best selling HF radio in history - there are thousands out there. I picked up a clean used one for $900 and it's been fantastic for both contesting and casual operation.

im kind of in the same boat, went with a vertical last year and tbh the radial situation is annoying. i did 24 and its fine but every time i mow i clip one and have to fix it. the dipole would have been simpler in retrospect. that said on 40 at night with a vertical the low angle radiation is real, i was working europe pretty regularly last winter which surprised me for how modest the setup is. depends what you want i guess

A vertical is a dipole with half of its length buried in the ground or "mirrored" in its counterpoise system. Radials provide the essential ground connection that creates the "other half" of the antenna. Currently running a 33-foot vertical with 32 buried radials, each 33 feet long. Some newer OCF Vertical Dipole Antenna designs feed a high-aperture radiator in a balanced configuration - the antenna works against itself, not against a buried radial field, resulting in lower losses and smaller physical footprint. Considering upgrading to an elevated radial system or switching to a no-radial vertical design. Has anyone done A/B comparisons between traditional ground-mounted radials versus elevated counterpoises? Looking at real-world performance data on 40M and 20M specifically.

Setting up my RemoteRig 1258MkII units between home and remote QTH (~120ms ping through rural Starlink). Having issues with CW sidetone delay making it nearly impossible to send clean code with the 120ms latency through the link. Started experimenting with the built-in keyer function to generate local sidetone. The audio muting feature (LF delay ms) seems promising to eliminate the delayed radio sidetone. Anyone else working CW through high-latency satellite internet with similar setup?

Excellent timing on this post! Setting up FT8 for the first time on my 991A. CAT control as well as PTT via one USB cable from the computer to the radio. SWEET! The built-in sound card interface really makes this radio shine for digital modes. No external interfaces needed.

RG-58 over 12 feet shouldn't cause a SWR issue like that on 70cm, higher loss yes but it won't reflect power back and inflate your SWR reading that dramatically. More likely the coax connector at the antenna base or wherever you terminated it. Even a tiny amount of moisture or a bad solder joint at PL-259 will do exactly what you're seeing — fine on 2m, noticeably worse on 70cm because the wavelength is less forgiving of connector issues. I'd pull the coax connections, inspect them closely, and if you soldered the PL-259 yourself just redo it. Also double check the NMO to antenna connection, sometimes those can work loose especially with vibration from driving. The 2.1 to 2.4 range you're seeing on 70cm is honestly not terrible for a mobile install, won't hurt the radio, but if you want it tighter then start with the connectors before spending money on new coax.

Just made the switch to a vertical dipole myself after getting frustrated with radial deployment. Setup time went from 15 minutes to about 5. Haven't noticed any significant signal difference in my POTA activations. The convenience alone makes it worth it for me.

I've used both extensively on SOTA peaks. The vertical dipole is definitely more convenient - no radials to mess with. Performance-wise, I noticed maybe 0.5-1 S-unit difference favoring the GP, but the convenience factor makes the dipole my go-to for quick activations.

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and im starting to get into chasing awards and confirming contacts and honestly the whole QSL system is kind of overwhelming me. like i get the basic idea, you worked someone and you both confirm it. simple enough. but then theres LoTW which is the ARRL thing, and eQSL which is a completely different site, and then actual physical cards which i guess people still mail? and some awards only accept certain ones? i signed up for LoTW a while back but the whole certificate process with tqsl was honestly confusing and i wasnt sure if i did it right. i have uploaded a few logs but i dont know if any of them actually matched with the other station. is there somewhere you can see your confirmed count or does it just show up when you apply for an award also is eQSL worth bothering with separately or do most serious dx chasers just use LoTW. i dont want to maintain like three different things if i can help it. and are people still actually mailing paper cards in 2024 or is that mostly just a nostalgia thing at this point

yeah its not a legal requirement in part 97, its more of a strong convention. the reason everyone pushes NATO phonetics is because theyre specifically chosen to be distinct from each other even on a bad signal — like November and Mike arent going to get confused the same way N and M would if you just said the letter. your "D as in dog" is totally fine and honestly most ops wont care, but the problem comes up when the band is noisy or youre working someone whos not a native english speaker. Delta is gonna land better than Dog in a pileup at 3am with a S7 noise floor trust me. dont stress about correcting yourself, everybody does it

yeah what he said about TX is right. i set up my ic-7300 on RemoteHams last year and once you get the audio latency dialed in its actually pretty usable. biggest issue i had was my upload speed at home was only like 5 meg and that caused some issues with the audio codec dropping out during contests but for casual operating its fine. the SDR remote thing i messed around with briefly but tbh if youre gonna put in the effort to set something up remotely i'd just go full radio. the pure SDR receive stuff is cool for like monitoring or if you want people to be able to tune around without worrying about them keying up, but for actually getting on the air its not what you want. rolling your own with a VPN and remoterig is totally doable but RemoteHams honestly just handles a lot of the annoying stuff for you especially if your home IP changes or you're behind CG-NAT which is a whole other nightmare

so i've been mostly a 40m and 80m guy for years because honestly the higher bands just felt dead whenever i checked them. but yesterday afternoon i was just spinning the dial on 10m kind of out of habit and suddenly there were signals everywhere. worked a couple stations in Brazil and one in Spain without even trying that hard, running like 50 watts into a dipole. been checking the solar flux numbers on and off and i know we're supposedly in a decent part of the cycle right now but i never quite know how to read all that stuff properly. like i see the SFI number and the K index and A index but im not always sure what combination of those means i should actually bother jumping on the higher bands. is there a rule of thumb anyone uses or do you just check the DX clusters and see whats actually happening also curious if anyone else has been seeing good conditions on 15 or 12m too because i havent spent much time there

welcome to the hobby, dont worry this trips up pretty much everyone at first. the CTCSS tone (sometimes called PL tone) is basically a sub-audible signal your radio sends along with your voice that tells the repeater to open up and retransmit you. without it the repeater just ignores your signal even though you can hear it fine on the output. on the uv-5r you want to go into the menu and look for T-CTCS, that sets your transmit tone. set it to 100.0 and you should be good to go for that repeater. the R-CTCS setting is for receive side squelch which most people leave off unless you need it for a specific reason. as for getting on the air, the usual thing is to just say your callsign when there's a pause between conversations. like literally just key up and say your call and then let go. people will recognize you're there and someone will usually come back to you. if there's a conversation going on just wait for a break, they usually leave a pause between transmissions for that reason. jumping in mid sentence is the main thing that annoys people so just be patient and you'll be fine

so ive been licensed since 2011 and honestly pileups have been my achilles heel the whole time. i could hear the DX just fine, my signal reports on regular QSOs were always decent, but the moment there was a pileup i just got walked over every single time. spent years thinking it was my antenna situation (tribander at about 35 feet, modest suburban lot) but i dont think thats really the whole story anymore. anyway VK0EK came around a few years back and i got skunked completely, same with a few other decent ones. but last month there was a pretty good activation from a place i wont name yet because im still not sure the log is uploaded and i dont want to jinx it, but it was on the deleted countries list. spent three days working it and finally got through on the fourth attempt on 17m SSB of all things. what actually changed for me was stopping the whole spray and pray thing where you just keep calling every two seconds. i started really listening to where the DX was actually pulling callers from, timing my calls to when the pile seemed to thin out a little (like right after they complete a QSO and before the next big wave hits), and i moved UP in the spread instead of sitting at the bottom where everyone else piles on. also trimmed my exchange down to basically just my callsign, no signal report, nothing extra. the op doesnt need your 59 before they even acknowledge you. curious what techniques other folks have had luck with, especially on SSB because CW pileups seem a little more structured and readable to me but SSB is just chaos half the time

i passed mine like three months ago so this is still pretty fresh for me. i used HamStudy like the other guy probably mentioned but i also watched some youtube videos from a channel called Ham Radio Crash Course which helped things click for me when i was just reading wasnt doing it took me about three weeks of casual studying. the actual test felt way less scary than i expected, it was 35 questions and i think i only flagged like four of them to go back to. you'll be fine just put in the reps on the practice tests until you're consistently hitting like 85 percent or better and you're ready

oh man i was wondering the same thing! i'm still pretty new to nets and was looking forward to getting some practice with check-ins but when i tune in on tuesdays its just dead air. if anyone knows the new schedule please post it here, im sure there are others wondering too

few things to check — first, what's your TX deviation set to? the D710G has a separate deviation setting for packet and if it's too high or too low the digi will hear you but the decode will fail. should be around 3-3.5 kHz for 1200 baud APRS. you can verify it with a service monitor or honestly just ask someone nearby to tell you if your packets are decoding clean with something like Direwolf on their end. also check that your symbol and overlay are set right, sometimes people get the position format wrong, like using compressed vs uncompressed and having a typo in the lat/lon. aprs.fi will sometimes just silently drop a malformed packet. if you have a way to see the raw packet string before it goes out, compare it to what a known-good station looks like. the D710 menu is kinda buried but you can see the raw data in one of the screens. and yeah WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is correct for most areas, nothing wrong there. the intermittent digi response is suspicious though, might just be terrain or the digi is only hearing you sometimes.