Kevin Park

not a dumb question at all, took me a while to get comfortable with all of it too. the Q codes go back to like early telegraphy days, way before voice was even a thing, so theres a ton of them but honestly on the air you only hear maybe a dozen or so regularly. QSL means acknowledged or confirm, QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural static/noise, QSB is fading signal, QRZ is who is calling me, QTH is your location. those are probably the big ones you'll hear most. 73 is the standard goodbye, means best regards basically, and 88 is love and kisses which you only really hear between close friends or sometimes between operators who are married to each other or whatever. ARRL has a full Q code list on their site if you want to go down the rabbit hole but honestly you'll just absorb the common ones pretty fast from listening.

so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra. like i mostly do HF phone and some digital stuff, nothing super exotic. a buddy of mine keeps telling me the extra is worth it just for the extra band segments but honestly when i look at what i'd have to learn — like all the filter theory and the transmission line stuff and the impedance matching formulas — i start to wonder if i'm going to actually use any of that or if its just trivia to pass a test.
anyone gone through it recently and found the theory actually useful in practice, or is it mostly just memorizing stuff to get the ticket and move on? i dont have an engineering background so some of those questions in the practice exams look pretty intimidating to be honest.

Looking to upgrade my knowledge for the new 2026-2030 Technician question pool. The new question pool is available now, but I'm wondering what resources work best for understanding the concepts rather than just memorizing.
I used HamStudy.org for my original tech license years ago, but curious about other platforms. What combination of study guides, practice tests, and videos helped you the most?
Planning to take the exam in a few weeks and want to make sure I'm fully prepared!

Okay so i passed my technician a couple months ago and ive been listening to the local 2m repeater for a while now trying to figure out how it all works before i jump on. I think i understand the basics — you transmit on one frequency and it comes out on another — but the CTCSS thing is where i get lost.
My radio shows a bunch of tone options and i looked up the repeater on the repeaterbook site and it says 100.0 Hz. So i set that and i can hear people fine, but i kerchunked it once just to see if i was hitting it and somebody came back pretty quick saying who just kerchunked the machine. I felt terrible and just stayed quiet.
So like, what is the actual right way to get on a repeater for the first time? Do i just call CQ or is that weird on a repeater? And does the tone go on transmit only or both? I dont want to make people mad again before i even really get started here.

okay so i passed my general exam like three weeks ago and im still trying to figure out exactly what frequencies im allowed to use. i know theres a chart somewhere but every time i look it up i get confused because some sources say different things or the chart looks different depending on where i find it. like i understand technician gets basically nothing on HF except a little bit on 10m but general opens up a lot more right? but then there are these areas that say "general" and areas that say "amateur extra only" and i cant always tell if the frequency im on is okay or not. also someone at my club mentioned something about phone vs cw privileges being different segments and that made it even more confusing. is there like a simple way to understand this or do i just need to memorize the whole chart

so this has been driving me nuts for a few weeks now. my 7300 will run fine, full 100w out, and then somewhere around the 20 minute mark it just starts pulling back power on its own. not all the way down, like maybe 40-50w, sometimes less. no fault codes showing up on the display that i can see. ALC looks normal before it happens, SWR is fine, feedline is fine, antenna hasnt changed.
at first i thought it was the finals getting hot and the radio protecting itself but the fan seems to be running fine and the heatsink on the back isnt even that warm when it happens. i pulled the bottom cover off and watched it do it once and nothing looked obviously wrong. no capacitors bulging, no burn marks, nothing smells.
i did notice the internal temp sensor reading climbs a little faster than i expected but idk if thats normal for this radio or not. anybody dealt with something like this before? wondering if its worth pulling the PA board or if im missing something obvious before i go that far.

the listening thing is huge and most people skip it completely, they just key up and start calling right away. ive watched guys in pileups for years and the ones who actually break through fast are almost always the ones who spent 5-10 minutes just observing first. figure out the ops rhythm, is he working by region, by number, does he always come back a little high in the split or low, all that stuff matters way more than just running more power.
on the partial call thing, honestly i go back and forth on it. some ops hate it and won't come back to a partial, others clearly work partials all day long. if i can hear the op picking out fragments i'll try it but if it sounds like he's copying full calls i just send the whole thing. i run a KPA1500 so i'm not exactly hurting for signal but even with the amp i've had pileups where i called for 45 minutes and got nothing until i changed my timing. timing is probably the single most underrated thing in a pileup, just slightly off the tail of the QSO not on top of it

i just passed mine like three weeks ago so this is fresh for me lol. the transmission line stuff was the part that almost got me, the Smith chart questions in particular i kind of just memorized my way through those without fully understanding them which i know is not ideal but whatever it worked. the RF safety questions are actually pretty straightforward once you read through the material once or twice.
the 40m extra segment alone made it worth it for me because thats where i do most of my digital modes and it gets real congested in the general portion sometimes. so yeah i'd say go for it, worst case you learn some stuff even if you dont pass right away

honest answer — yeah there's lower hanging fruit first. SO2R done right is probably a 10-15% rate improvement for a mid-tier station and setup but the overhead to get it working cleanly is substantial. if you're losing rate because your run frequency technique is soft or you're not multiplier hunting efficiently in the right windows, fix that first. the two radio thing really shines when you already have your single radio game dialed and you're just looking to squeeze the last bit out of the slow hours.
that said the bandpass filter thing isn't as bad as it sounds if you're on different bands that are well separated. 20 and 40 with a decent set of filters like the Array Solutions or even the ICE bandpass filters, you can make it work without totally destroying your wallet. the audio mixing is honestly the harder thing to get comfortable with psychologically. running two decoders in your head at once takes practice and some people never really get comfortable with it. i ran SO2R for the first time seriously at CQWW a couple years ago and i probably lost as much time fumbling with the setup as i gained in rate the first 6 hours.

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into a local 2m net last tuesday night and i think i maybe did it wrong? the net control asked for check-ins and i just said my callsign once and then kind of waited. a couple other people gave their call and their name and location and i felt a little dumb sitting there. nobody said anything to me about it but im still not sure if theres like a standard way to do it that i missed.
ive been licensed about 4 months now and i mostly just listen but i figured checking into a net would be a good way to actually get on the air and practice a bit. is there some kind of script people use or does it depend on the net? the guy running it seemed friendly enough he just moved on pretty quick. also do you always have to give your full callsign or do people just use the suffix sometimes on local stuff