I let my membership expire after they unilaterally cancelled my paper QST. I’m still mad about that, and the steady trickle of other news doesn’t make me want to go back.

Hopefully someone or some other business will buy them. Hate to see them go.

For POTA contacts I’d just fix it.

In a contest that would be cheating.

Some clubs meet in person and on zoom simultaneously, does your local one? I’d get in contact with them anyway, someone might have a loaner rig you can use to get on the air and see what interests you the most.

Parks on the Air and Summits on the Air are popular an a lot of fun, but you’d need a radio first.

With some basic tools you could build your own radio from a kit.

My reading of the state park map is that the park is on the ocean side of route 1, so that’ll eliminate going up any real hills. I’m not really familiar with that section of the coast, though.

It also sounds like you want an excuse to expand your antenna collection. Go for it! Antenna experimenting is fun. Set up two, and try some A/B testing, or use WSPR or RBN.

Its an interesting problem you’ve found. As a frequent SOTA op, its not one I encounter :D

To get NVIS just use your regular 40m antenna, but set it up closer to the ground. Depending on your mast height, it might be NVIS already.

What park is it? Maybe there’s a spot off the beach you could operate from?

I’d get an SSB capable radio unless you’re only interested in FSK modes.

A j-pole is a half-wavelength vertical with a quarter-wavelength matching section on the bottom.

It turns out that the 70cm band is about 3x the frequency of the 2m band (150MHz * 3 = 450MHz, close enough to each band). So the 2m the long leg of the j-pole is 3/4 wavelength (1/2 + 1/4 matching section), and on 70cm the long leg is 2.25 wavelength (3/2 + 3/4 matching). Both are an odd number of quarter waves, as we expect. The ham who made that briefing probably discovered in their testing that the matching stub wasn’t good for both bands, so they added a second one for 70cm.

This is not a novel design, Arrow Antennas has been selling one like it for years (https://www.arrowantennas.com/osj/j-pole.html)

I’m excited to see the new digital modes people bring to ham radio, or invent.

It’s pretty easy to create it if you want it. I’ve made a few communities 🤷‍♂️

This has been my experience using multiple HTs on the same band.

Do you really want to run JS8call? JS8Call and the Fundamental Problem with EmComm in Amateur Radio: Why I stopped using JS8 and why I think you should too.

If you missed the broadcast, I got a recording: https://youtu.be/IgbggcpxrC0 The CW ends ~4:22 and I decode it after that, so stop there if you want to do it yourself.

If you’re just looking to build stuff, there are plenty of circuits to find on the web.

And +1 on building being more fun than operating!

What do you want to do? Just build anything?

Maybe we should start a contesting community 🤔

I’d assume availability is based on having clear frequencies. Probably big cities are more congested than rural areas. Though that could probably be somewhat mitigated by power restrictions. But really I have no idea.

Communications have been important since people started making armies. Plenty of battles and wars would have gone differently if messages could have been passed faster. Wireless has only gotten more critical since WWI.

I suppose this war has just shown the importance of radio and brought it to people’s attention. There’s an interesting podcast, From the Crow’s Nest, that talks about radio (and electromagnetic stuff in general) in the modern military.

As long as it doesn’t turn into a 75m net. I don’t need to hear about your medical issues 😂

I’ve tried doing digital with a raspberry pi and using VNC viewer on my phone to control it. It’s worked at home, but I’ve had issues with the sound card and CAT interface on summits. Still don’t have it working well.

For logging, I like pen and paper, since I can’t type fast enough on my phone. I wrote a little python logger (on GitHub somewhere) to make it easier to get logs in the formats needed for SOTA/POTA/contests.