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  • Field Day vs POTA vs SOTA: What’s the Difference and Which to Try First

    Part of our Getting On The Air guide. These three activities all get lumped together as portable operating, but they have genuinely different formats, goals, and time commitments, and knowing the differences helps you pick the right starting point. ARRL Field Day: One Big Annual Event Field Day happens once a year, the fourth full…

  • QRP Contesting: Making the Most of Low Power

    Part of our Getting On The Air guide. Running QRP in a contest sounds like a self-imposed handicap, and in a sense it is, but most major contests reward that handicap with scoring multipliers that make QRP a genuinely competitive, satisfying category rather than just a novelty. Why the Multiplier Matters Most contests that offer…

  • The 10-10 International Net: A Niche Award Worth Knowing

    Part of our Getting On The Air guide. The Ten-Ten International Net is a club built entirely around one band, 10 meters, and if you have caught the 10 meter bug during a good solar cycle opening, it is one of the more fun and approachable niche communities in the hobby. What Ten-Ten Actually Is…

  • Worked All Continents (WAC): The Other Big Award

    Part of our Getting On The Air guide. Worked All Continents sits in an interesting spot between Worked All States and DXCC: harder to complete than WAS since it requires genuine international contacts, but far more achievable than full DXCC since you only need six confirmations, not over a hundred. What WAC Actually Requires The…

  • Worked All States (WAS): How to Track and Claim It

    Part of our Getting On The Air guide. Worked All States, usually just called WAS, is one of the most approachable awards in the hobby, and it is a genuinely satisfying long-term goal for anyone who operates HF regularly, without needing rare DX or contest-level effort to complete. What the Award Actually Requires WAS requires…

  • FTX-1 Optima vs IC-7300 Mark II: Which One Should Live In Your Shack

    I run both the Yaesu FTX-1 Optima and the Icom IC-7300 Mark II. Here’s how they actually compare on connectivity, heat during FT8, portability, and VHF/UHF coverage.

  • LoRa APRS: A Different Take on Long-Range Tracking

    Part of our Getting On The Air guide. LoRa APRS blends two technologies that most hams already know separately, traditional APRS and LoRa radio hardware, into something that behaves a bit differently from either one on its own. How It Differs From Traditional APRS Standard APRS runs on 144.390 MHz in the US using AFSK-modulated…

  • Getting Started with JS8Call: Setup and Your First Contacts

    Part of our Getting On The Air guide. JS8Call takes the weak-signal decoding strength that made FT8 popular and points it at a completely different goal: real keyboard-to-keyboard conversation over HF, not just a quick exchange of signal reports. How It Differs From FT8 FT8 is built around a rigid, automated exchange format, callsigns, grid…

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