You might have done this yourself. After you speak on the radio, you released your PTT, then remembered that you needed to add one more thought, and pressed your PTT again to say what you just remembered. Well, that’s not so bad, right? I mean, we do it all the time on the phone. And I suppose that’s where the habit comes from, because we’re so used to speaking in full-duplex, which is that you and I can talk and hear each other at the same time.

This is a small annoyance known as double-keying. It can be irritating to the person you’re speaking with, especially if that other person believes it’s his or her turn to speak. The result is often that you two will be speaking on the radio at the same time, and unlike with a phone conversation, neither of you will have heard the other. Of course, this’ll require your friend to repeat what he or she just said.

Avoiding double-keying takes a little practice and a little patience. When you say something on the radio, then release your PTT, resist the temptation to press the PTT again, and train yourself to wait for the other person to respond before pressing yours. This might not come naturally, because we don’t talk that way, and we don’t use a PTT button when we’re on the phone.

It’s very possible that what you have to add at the end of your transmission is very important. Is it important enough to stomp on your friend’s transmission and cancel everything he or she said? Probably not. Now, are there times when double-keying is acceptable? Yes, if, for example, you’re delivering a training topic or telling a story over the repeater, it’s very acceptable to un-key, pause for a second, then resume, because nobody is expected to speak next except you. (By the way, there’s no need to say anything like pause for reset, although there’s no problem with saying it either.)

It doesn’t help a whole lot if you attempt to get on the air, and nobody hears you. Even if I have the very best equipment that money can buy, including a great antenna, and even though I feel certain everybody this side of Richland county can hear me, it’s still possible that they can’t. If you’re talking on simplex, your antenna could be oriented incorrectly, you might have a loose or corroded connection, you might not be speaking close enough to the microphone, or your battery is on its last breath.

If you’re trying to talk through a repeater, maybe your tone or offset isn’t set, maybe you are too far from the repeater to hold it open for proper communication, or maybe you have bumped the button, and you’re a little off-frequency, or maybe you just need to get out of the basement.

When you need to get on the air, especially in a hurry, it seems there are a number of obstacles that could hinder your otherwise perfect transmission. For that reason, one of the first things you should do before a net or a drill is to request a signal report. Maybe say:

This is W8ABC. Could I please get a signal report? and you’ll likely find one or more listening hams who’ll be happy to help you out by telling you how you sound.

You’re typically looking for three things as feedback to your transmission:

• The quality of your sound
• Your loudness
• And whether your audio is accompanied by any hiss or other noise.

A responding operator who can report these three sound properties is probably the most helpful. By the same token, you can offer the most help by reporting these same three qualities to people who are asking for a report.

On the other hand, those who say, “You sound fine” mean well, but might be just a bit too brief, and don’t give you a lot to go on, although it’s still kind of them to try and give you some sort of feedback. The brief exception is when a ham operator simply reports, “You’re coming in perfectly!” which, in a nutshell, means crystal clear audio, loud audio, and no perceptible background noise.

Once you do this, you’re relatively confident that the rest of your transmissions could easily be heard by those who need to hear them. Even after that, your signal or audio could still become less-than-perfect if you’re moving around, changing your antenna direction, or your battery starts failing. But, at least you’ve taken that initial step to ensure a smoothly running net or drill.

Just about every modern ham radio has two operating modes: Memory (also known as Channel) mode and VFO (also known as Frequency) mode. Memory or Channel mode is merely a set of memory channels that have a number of frequencies stored in them, along with the appropriate settings for each, such as offset, tone, and power level. You select each by simply scrolling through the stored channels. VFO or Frequency mode, however, doesn’t quite work the same way, and it’s often convenient to understand how to work it.

VFO stands for variable-frequency oscillator, which simply means that this mode will allow you to set your radio to almost any arbitrary frequency and other parameters needed for any desired type of operation on that frequency. That’s useful for manually tuning to a frequency, setting the parameters, and testing it before you commit it to a memory channel. Even though VFO mode is a kind of *scratch pad* location to get a frequency set up, most radios will preserve those settings in VFO, so that, after you turn off your radio, and then power it up again later, all the information you put into VFO will still be there.

Here are some of the parameters that can be set for a particular frequency:

• repeater offset
• repeater shift direction, such as plus, minus, or off
• ARS, which stands for automatic repeater shift, when it’s on, will automatically set your frequency offset and shift direction for *standard* repeater frequencies
• tone mode, such as TONE, TSQL, CSQ, DCS, and CTCSS
• tone frequency
• power level
• squelch level
• bandwidth, meaning wide or narrow
• Also, for HF radios:
• signal mode, such as AM, FM, LSB, USB, CW, and RTTY
• split, to indicate different transmit and receive frequencies

A number of other settings can be saved in memory, some can’t, depending on the radio model, but these are among the important ones.

As you can see, it might be difficult to remember all of the necessary settings, so it’ll take a little time and practice on your part, to manually set up your VFO set correctly for a given frequency on your particular radio. Once you get it set up right, you can then store the frequency and all the details in a memory channel, so that you can retrieve it later in Memory or Channel mode.

It’s helpful to know how to manipulate and program your VFO when you need to, without needing to rely on a manual or another person. Yes, it’s one more thing to learn, about amateur radio, but can be convenient, so that you’re not always dependent on somebody else to program your radio for you, especially when you’re not near a computer.