Folks, just looking for opinions. While activating Tonelagee EI/IE-003 today I had a situation where cell coverage was really poor and while my SSB self spot has managed to get through at the end, I had some difficult time to get any attention till then, particularly while the contest was on.
Now wondering, am I right that CW RBNHole picks up and spots in case an alert was pre-set? Then, for SSB operation, does it make sense to pre-set an alert while the coverage is good, say before heading to site. Then, in case of no cell coverage, run a CW CQ SOTA on your SSB freq (say 14.333). RBNHole picks that and spots, it’ll be displayed as CW CQ on SSB portion of the band, so should sound a bell for SSB operators?
Kind of emergency self spot in case anything else fails?
Check out sotamat app on your smartphone. It’s using ft8 network.
Once your account is all set up, you select the summit in the app and it plays the corresponding ft8 sequence from your phone speaker to the radio , while keying the radio on ft8 frequency.
The ft8 beacons will get the ft8 bit and sotamat will post a spot for you on sotawatch, as rbn would do.
Suprisingly, it is not a big issue on VHF for me Peter. In my area I usually find good EI/GW people without self spotting I am now mostly concentrating on HF activations and it was a random case yesterday, when I’ve lost about half an hour trying to get myself noticed
Trying to give as much as possible to both CW and SSB folks though! The problem to ask the last person on CW is I wouldn’t know the freq I am going to. Say yesterday I was wandering around 14270-14340 several minutes just in efforts to find a relatively clear channel, it wasn’t easy during that contest.
I realise you’re new to HF but you need to get some process into what you intend to do. You need to know which contest is on when and which bands/modes. Big SSB contests means you’re pushed to 60/17/12m for SSB. Big CW contests push you to 60/30/17/12m. You cannot compete with a weedy QRP portable signal so don’t waste your time. Whilst other contests are annoying, many are local or single band or limited such that you have to make some concesions but there’s normally some escape. And you have to accept that sometimes you cannot operate SSB because the bands are full of big signals. So just do CW. And vice versa.
What’s the expression that Tom loves… “If you fail to prepare then you should prepare to fail!”
Yeah, running SOTA HF for a couple of month only. I am well aware of bands and contests though, however never thought about that from a portable operations perspective. Looks to be something to be careful with. Although it worked fine last time after the spot came through.
I often check this calendar before planned SOTA weekend activations to see what I might be up against on the hf bands! WA7BNM Contest Calendar: 8-Day Calendar
aprs2sota has gotten me out of a hole or two. It helps a lot to have messages already stored on the handset though, at least for the FT3D. And you need to remember how to send messages via aprs !
I will definitely explore the SOTAmat, looks like a great idea.