I’ve been checking in daily to the Illinois ARES Wellness Net each day, SSB, on 3905 kHz. It has been an excellent opportunity to work out the bugs in my HF rig. It is a good way of being heard as still among the living in the Illinois amateur radio community. My first experiences were exercises in listening. On HF, the preamble to these nets mentions that they are “informal, directed nets,” though a more formal net is hard to imagine. The net features three operators, at three locations throughout the State, one North, One South, and one in the middle. The middle has, so far, consistently been Shelbyville. All three ops listen, and if necessary relay info to the other ops. The net ops take turns, starting in either the North or South. I could hear the call for alphabetic check-ins, ‘alpha through foxtrot,’ for example. It took some listening to ascertain that the alphabetization was by callsign suffix. My early responses were in the wrong part of the alphabet, and hampered by “RF in the shack.” I re-grounded my equipment, and kept on checking in. K9QOO helped me out with an air-check, proving that the problem was not resolved by tweaking audio gain. I worked barefoot at first, ie., without amplification. Once my shack had a better RF ground established, I increased power to my barefoot limit of 100 watts on the ICOM 7300. Propagation and noise factors vary daily. It was informative to hear the net ops also struggling with such issues. I added amplification, using an Ameritron AL-80B. “RF on my audio,” was the report from the op. I added some ferrite to my mic line. At last, at around 600 watts, I got the coveted “good signal” report from the op. Lately, I’ve been checking in early in the pre-net phase which begins at 11:30 CDT every day. It’s been well worth doing.