Mike Thompson

yeah hamlib with gpredict is exactly what you want, and it does work with the 9700 though the setup is a little fiddly. you basically run rigctld pointed at the 9700 over USB and then tell gpredict the port and baud rate in the radio interface settings. once that's connected gpredict will push doppler-corrected frequencies to both VFOs automatically — VFO A for downlink, VFO B for uplink — so you can actually focus on the operating instead of chasing frequencies the whole time. the trick with linear transponders that took me a while to figure out is that you still need to manually find yourself on the downlink first before you transmit much, and keep your uplink power way down. people blast way too much power into these birds and it compresses the transponder for everyone. like 5-10w to a decent yagi is usually plenty, sometimes less. if you can hear the beacon clearly youre probably in good shape signal wise. polarization loss on LEO passes is real and kind of random depending on the geometry. circular polarization helps a lot but even with linear yagis you can work most passes if the antenna tracking is solid, youll just have some fades. dont sweat it too much until the hamlib stuff is sorted, that'll make a bigger difference right away.

I'm a newly licensed Tech and want to get started with CW but feeling overwhelmed by the different approaches I'm seeing. The Koch method and Farnsworth timing seem to be mentioned everywhere, but I also see people talking about mnemonic phrases and other approaches. What would experienced CW operators recommend for someone starting completely from scratch? Should I pick one method and stick with it, or combine approaches? Any specific software recommendations would be great too - there seem to be tons of apps and programs out there.

so ive been playing around with a few different cluster spotting tools lately and wondering what other people actually use day to day. i started out just using the cluster on QRZ which is convenient since im already on there looking stuff up anyway, but then someone in my local club mentioned DXwatch and i checked it out and it seems like a lot of the same spots show up but not always at the same time. my question is basically whether theres any real advantage to running both or checking both regularly or if one consistently has fresher spots than the other. i know some of the big contest guys have like 5 things open at once but for casual DX chasing on HF is that overkill. also has anyone used the DX toolkit app on android, saw it mentioned somewhere and curious if mobile cluster apps are even worth the trouble compared to just using a browser.

Bit of a tangent but have you considered just skipping the RTL entirely and using the 7300's built-in spectrum scope streamed via the audio/control interface? I know it's not as wide a view but it's one less thing to troubleshoot. I run a remote IC-705 and honestly gave up on SDR panadapter stuff over internet links because the latency mismatch between the rig audio and the spectrum display drove me nuts. By the time the spectrum shows a signal the audio is already halfway through it. If you really want the wide panadapter view, some guys are using SDR-over-network locally at the remote site and just running WebSDR or SDR++ with a local network stream, then VNC-ing into a box there for the display. Adds complexity but the SDR traffic never has to traverse your internet link which eliminates the bandwidth problem entirely. Just something to think about.