Susan Clark

so ive been running FT8 for about 8 months now and i get it, its great for the quick contact and the DX you can work is insane compared to anything else ive tried on HF. but it always kind of felt hollow to me, like i worked a guy in Kazakhstan and then... thats it. no exchange, nothing. just signal reports and grid squares. a buddy at my club mentioned JS8Call and said its basically the same weak signal thing but you can actually type back and forth like a real QSO. so i downloaded it and set it up last weekend. and yeah its genuinely pretty cool. slower obviously but you can actually have a conversation. worked a few guys on 40m in the evening and we talked about antennas and weather and whatever for like 20 minutes. felt way more like ham radio to me personally. anyway my question is more about the technical side of it. is JS8Call actually as sensitive as FT8 or is it a compromise because of the longer messages? i know FT8 can pull stuff out of the noise that you just cannot hear at all, wondering if JS8 gives that up to allow the free-text format. also curious if anyone runs both simultaneously on different bands or is that asking for trouble with the sound card setup.

Honestly, I've been ARES-only for 8 years and never felt limited. RACES almost never starts before an emergency and is normally shut down shortly after the emergency clears. Most real-world activations I've seen have been straight ARES operations. But if your local EM wants it, probably worth doing to maintain good relationships.

im kind of in the same boat as you honestly, been licensed about 8 months and the propagation thing is still pretty mysterious to me. i downloaded an app called HamSphere or maybe it was Ham Radio Propagation, i forget, and it gives you predictions but half the time the bands do the opposite of what it says lol. i think someone in my club mentioned that 17m has been more reliable than 20m lately for european contacts in the afternoons, might be worth trying if you havent already. my elmer keeps telling me to just get on and listen for 10 minutes before giving up on a band, which is actually pretty good advice i think

i just soldered directly to my first dipole and ran it for like a year before i bothered adding a balun, honestly worked fine for general rag chewing. if youre just getting started and want to see if the concept works before going deeper into the build i wouldnt sweat it too much. you can always add the balun later once you decide if you like the antenna. trim it in like 6 inch increments once you get it up, use a cheap antenna analyzer if you have one or just key up lightly and check SWR. the whole build took me maybe two hours including scrounging for wire in the garage

yeah i had the same confusion when i first started. what helped me was just asking the net control operator directly after the net was over, like on the side or even via email if they have a club contact. most NCS folks are happy to explain it and honestly they'd rather you ask than keep guessing. the one running our wednesday net actually spent like 20 minutes walking me through how they handle traffic and late check-ins. people in this hobby are usually pretty patient about that stuff

im pretty much in the same boat as you, got my tech like 6 weeks ago. what helped me was just downloading the actual Part 97 rules as a PDF and using ctrl+F to search for stuff. its still dense but at least you can find the specific section pretty fast. section 97.301 is where the frequency allocations live i think

yeah what he said about the logger is right. i did my first activation a few months ago and the wwff.co site felt confusing at first but once you do the upload once its pretty straightforward. one thing i'll add -- make sure your ADIF has the right reference number in it, i think theres a field called WWFF_REF or something like that, some logging software puts it in automatically if you set it up right but i had to manually add it the first time using ADIF master or whatever its called. also dont stress too much about only getting 12, i think the minimum for a valid activation is 44 contacts but you still get credit in the log for the ones you did make, and some people just do partial activations for fun anyway. next time you go back to the same reference those contacts add up over multiple visits i believe.

this is something i've been trying to figure out too. I just got my general a few months ago and worked my first DX last month on 15 meters, some station in the Canary Islands which I was pretty excited about. but i have no idea how people seem to know when openings are going to happen. do most people use a specific website for propagation or is there an app that's actually good? I downloaded one but it just shows a bunch of numbers and I dont really know what threshold means what.

hamstudy is honestly fine for passing the test, thats pretty much what most people use now. your uncle isnt wrong that the ARRL book has good info but its way more than you need just to pass the tech exam, its kind of overkill for that purpose. the memorizing without understanding thing -- look i wont lie, plenty of people do exactly that and pass just fine. but if you have even a little time, the ohms law stuff is actually really simple once someone explains it properly. there are some youtube videos, i forget who does them, where they just draw it out visually and it clicks pretty fast. it'll also make the antenna questions make more sense instead of just being random numbers you have to remember. either way youll probably pass, the tech pool isnt that brutal.

i was in the same boat about 8 months ago and the third party thing tripped me up too. one thing that helped me was just downloading the actual part 97 document and using ctrl+f to search for whatever specific thing im confused about rather than trying to read the whole thing front to back, that way is just brutal honestly. and yeah the ARRL band plan is way easier to read than the FCC version for figuring out where you can operate

Check that you don't use any clone Arduino or ATMEGA – some don't have any EEPROM at all, some have flash installed which is obviously not compatible. I had the exact same issue with a cheap Nano clone last year.

yeah the difference is real, at least on HF. i ran the RTL-SDR V3 in direct sampling mode for a while before getting an RSP1A and it wasnt even close on 40m. the RTL just gets hammered by strong local stations and you get all this intermod garbage showing up where it shouldnt be. the SDRplay handles that a lot better, the RSP1A has those extra front end filters and it shows. SDRuno has gotten better but i still use HDSDR with the ExtIO plugin for the RSP because im just used to it. SDR# works fine too if you install the right plugins. honestly the software is kind of whatever once you get it configured, the hardware difference is the part that matters. if youre doing WSPR or FT8 monitoring on 40m and 80m the cleaner noise floor on the SDRplay is going to make you happy. probably worth the $130 or whatever they go for now.

Don't get hung up on power output - there isn't much difference in range between a 50w radio and a 65-80w radio. Focus on your ERP (Effective Radiated Power) - that's power output times antenna gain. A good dual band mobile antenna with 3dB gain effectively doubles your power. You're on the right track with battery power - makes all the difference!

also worth double checking your SSID situation. if youre sending messages they have to be addressed exactly right, like if the other guy is running -9 as his mobile ssid and you're sending to just his callsign without it the message just kind of floats off into nowhere. APRS messaging is weirdly picky about that stuff compared to just position beacons which are more forgiving.

been trying to work AO-91 this morning and the transponder seems shifted down about 2khz from where it should be. doppler correction is on in my software and i double checked the keps are fresh from yesterday. anyone else noticing this or is it just me? using ft-857d with arrow antenna if that matters

haha yeah the antenna situation on exposed summits is always a fun surprise. i use a linked dipole on a 20 foot crappie pole and that solves most of the tree problem. the wind noise thing is real too, i ended up getting one of those cheap foam windscreens for my mic and it helped a lot. you'll get the hang of it fast, first couple activations are always a little chaotic

inverted-v's are a bit tricky because the angle of the legs affects the feedpoint impedance, and at 45 degrees youre already compressing it quite a bit from the flat dipole's nominal 73 ohms. the closer the legs get to vertical the lower the impedance drops, which is why you sometimes see worse swr even after trimming to the right frequency. 2.1:1 isnt terrible honestly, most tuners handle that no problem, but if you want to chase it down further try raising the apex a few feet if you can and see if the legs can be a bit more spread out. also 4 inches off each side total is 8 inches off the overall length which is a pretty decent jump, might try 2 inches per side next time and give it a few minutes to settle before measuring again. what analyzer are you using?