Giovanni Rossi

So ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR dongle for about a year now, mostly just listening to NOAA weather and poking around the local repeaters, and im starting to hit the limits of it. The noise floor is pretty bad above like 500MHz and i cant transmit obviously which sometimes i wish i could for testing purposes. Been looking at either grabbing a HackRF One or stepping up to an SDRplay RSP1B or maybe the RSPdx. The price gap is real though. HackRF is around 300-350 for a legit one and the RSPdx is similar but the SDRplay stuff seems way more focused on receive quality from what ive read. The HackRF does TX which is appealing but the ADC resolution is only 8 bit which apparently matters a lot for weak signal work. Mostly want to use it with SDR++ or maybe HDSDR, pick up some utility stuff, maybe decode some satelite signals, and eventually do some passive radar experiments ive seen people do. Anyone gone through this decision and have thoughts? Did the SDRplay actually make a noticeable difference in what you could hear vs a decent RTL-SDR with a good LNA in front of it?

yeah the 2N2222 stack thing sounds appealing because you already have them but honestly getting 5 watts clean out of paralleled small signal transistors on 40m is more work than its worth imo. the IRF510 is like a dollar and the datasheet is well understood at this point. just go with it

yeah i went through this exact thing about two years ago. ended up putting up a 9 element M2 yagi for 2m on a separate mast pointing northeast toward the beacon cluster, and kept the colinear on the original mount for everyday use. honestly the yagi completely changed what 2m meant to me — i was suddenly hearing stations id never even known existed, tropo openings that before just sounded like noise floor suddenly had actual callsigns in them. the gain difference between a halfway decent colinear and even a modest yagi is not subtle on weak signal. you're also swapping receive noise figure considerations — a good preamp at the yagi feedpoint makes even more difference than the antenna gain itself sometimes. i run an SSB Electronics preamp right at the mast and that was probably the single biggest improvement i made to the whole station. if your shack is more than about 15 feet of coax from the antenna you are losing more than you think on 2m. switching between the two is pretty painless with a coax relay, i have mine on a footswitch which sounds silly but its actually great when youre in the middle of a qso. if your mast situation can handle a second mount even a small one, id say just do it. the X50 is a solid everyday antenna but for weak signal work it aint gonna cut it once you know what youre missing.

i just got my ticket in april and honestly hadnt even thought about nets until i read your post. is there a good place to find schedules? like an online list or something? i have my technician so i can do 2m and i've been kind of just listening around not really sure when anything is happening

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i check into the local 2m net pretty regularly but i still feel kind of awkward about the whole thing. like i know you wait for net control to call for check-ins and you say your callsign once clearly, got that part down. but what about when theres an open discussion topic or someone asks a question on the net and i actually have something useful to contribute? do i just key up when theres a pause or do i wait for net control to specifically ask for comments? i dont want to be that guy who steps on someone or comes in at the wrong time. also kinda related — is it rude to check in and then leave early if something comes up? like last week i had to leave about halfway through and i just kind of disappeared without saying anything. felt weird but i wasnt sure what the right move was. nobody said anything but still.

welcome to the dark side haha. seriously though this is exactly how it happens for most of us, you make that first QRP contact and suddenly your linear amp starts collecting dust. i built a little 40m CW rig back in 2011 from dead bug parts just to see if i could and that was basically it for me, been chasing QRP ever since. for the antenna question -- honestly a dipole is not leaving nearly as much on the table as you might think, the issue is usually height and orientation more than anything else. if you can get it up 30 feet or more and cut it to resonance for the band youre on youre going to do fine. where people really start squeezing extra performance out of QRP setups is with end fed half waves and a good tuner because you get a bit more flexibility for portable ops. there are some great threads over on the QRP-L mailing list if you haven't found that yet, old school but theres a ton of knowledge archived there.

yeah what he said, the nerves are totally normal. i've done probably a dozen activations over the years and the first one always sticks with you. just trust your training and follow your EC's lead, they'll tell you where to be and what to do and you just execute. the EOC folks are usually pretty patient with the radio side of things too, they just want the comms to work and they're not judging your technique. one thing that helped me early on was keeping a simple paper log even when i was also doing Winlink, just so i had something to fall back on if the laptop decided to do something weird. which it will at some point, always does

yeah part 97 is rough to read cold, dont feel bad. the short version for tech on HF is you get CW privileges on 80, 40, 15 and 10 meters, and then on 10 meters specifically you also get phone and image modes between 28.300 and 28.500 MHz. so yes you can do SSB on 10m but only in that segment. digital modes fall under different emission type designators but for practical purposes if youre running something like FT8 youre using a data mode and your privileges there depend on what the band plan allows for tech class at that frequency. the ARRL has a frequency allocation chart thats way easier to read than the actual Part 97 text, i'd just google arrl technician privileges and you'll find a color coded chart that makes it pretty clear. that said its worth eventually actually reading 97.301 and 97.305 because those are the actual rules that matter if you ever get questioned about it

wait you worked germany at 5 watts with a dipole in trees?? thats crazy i didnt think QRP could actually do that. im just getting started and have been nervous that low power would mean i cant contact anyone. maybe i should look into those QRP Labs kits, they seem pretty well regarded from what ive read. how hard was the build really, im ok at soldering but not like super experienced

so ive been licensed for about three months now and i finally feel comfortable enough to try getting on some of the local FM repeaters but im running into something i dont fully understand. i programmed in the frequency and offset for the repeater listed in the repeaterbook app and i can hear people just fine, but when i key up nobody seems to hear me. or at least nobody responds. i looked it up and i think it might be a CTCSS tone issue? the listing shows 100.0 Hz as the tone but i wasnt sure if i need to encode that, decode it, or both. my radio is a baofeng uv-5r and i honestly have no idea what i set it in the menu, there are so many options and the manual is terrible. is there like a standard way most repeaters work with these tones? or could there be another reason nobody is responding — like maybe im just not making it into the machine

the mixed total is basically your best of all modes combined for each entity, so if you work Namibia on SSB that goes in your mixed AND your phone totals. then if you later work them on FT8 it bumps your digital total but your mixed stays the same since you already had it. the totals are separate trophies/endorsements but mixed is just the umbrella. LoTW and paper QSL are equal weight for credit purposes, ARRL doesnt prefer one over the other as long as the QSL is valid. that said LoTW confirmations come back way faster and you dont have to wait for cards to arrive or deal with the buro. on the WAS question — honestly do both at the same time. a lot of the states you need for WAS you'll work anyway just calling CQ or in contests, might as well log them properly and upload everything. i finished WAS before i hit 100 entities on DXCC just because domestic stuff is easier to confirm.

so ive been doing morse code practice for about 3 months now and im stuck around 8-9 wpm and it just feels like im hitting a wall. i started with just the Koch method using the G4FON trainer and it was great at first, letters came pretty quick, but now i feel like im just... treading water i guess. i can copy most characters fine but when i try bumping the speed up even a little i fall apart. what i really want to know is how long did it realistically take people to get to 20wpm because everything i read online sounds either super encouraging (like 6 weeks) or super discouraging (like years) and i cant tell which is closer to the truth. im putting in maybe 20-30 minutes a day most days. also is there a point where it just kind of clicks and you stop counting dits and just hearing words? because right now i feel like im still processing individual letters and its slow

yeah the LM386 is notorious for being finicky, it'll oscillate or pick up garbage if you're not careful with the bypass caps. the thing that helped me most on a similar build was putting a 0.047uf cap directly across pins 1 and 8, that limits the gain a bit but cuts down a lot of the instability. also 10uf from pin 7 to ground, some people skip that one and it makes a difference. the other thing i'd check is whether your audio ground and your RF ground are connected at the same single point. on perf board its really easy to accidentally end up with ground loops because you're just running wires wherever they fit. i had a hum on my 80m DC receiver that turned out to be exactly that, had two separate ground returns coming back to the power supply at slightly different points and the difference in potential was enough to cause trouble. running off battery and still getting hum is interesting though. if it persists on battery id start wondering if its actually 60hz or something else at a similar frequency, like maybe the VFO has a spur or something. worth checking with a scope if you have access to one.

i ran SO2R for the first time last NAQP and kind of gave up on it halfway through lol. not because it doesnt work but i realized my logging software keyer integration wasnt set up right so every time i switched focus between radios N1MM was sending on the wrong one. spent like 20 minutes fixing it during the contest which was just dumb, should have tested more beforehand. the actual SO2R when it worked felt great though, found a couple mults on 15 while holding a run on 40 that i definitely wouldve missed otherwise

log4om is great dont get me wrong but if you care about contesting at all just keep n1mm. log4om contest support exists but its not really in the same league, at least not for the bigger contests. i tried using it for a state qso party once and the exchange handling was just awkward compared to what im used to.