Rajesh Patel

the handshake timing out like that is almost always audio levels in my experience. too hot going in and VARA just cant decode it properly even though the carrier looks fine on the waterfall. in Winlink Express go to the VARA HF settings and pull your TX audio down — i run mine around 40-50% and it made a huge difference. also check that youre not running any windows audio enhancements on the SignaLink input, those will wreck the signal even if it looks okay visually. also worth checking the RMS status page on the winlink.org site directly, some gateways go down for days without much notice. i had one near me that was my primary for months and one day it just stopped being maintained. ended up having to go to something 1200 miles out which wasnt ideal but it worked.

oh man i remember this exact stage, it feels like youre fighting the paddle more than using it. honestly for where you are right now i wouldnt even worry about iambic A vs B, that distinction starts mattering more when youre up around 20+ wpm and doing a lot of squeeze keying. at 8-10 wpm just practice sending individual letters cleanly and get your muscle memory sorted first. for the weight setting — most keyers default to something like 50% which should be fine to start, but if your dahs are feeling long try bumping the weight down just a little and see if that helps. could also just be the paddle tension being set a bit loose so your fingers are accidentally holding the dah paddle a hair too long. tighten the tension screw just slightly and see if that cleans it up. the MFJ keyers have a little quirk where the knobs are super sensitive so dont go crazy with adjustments. honestly the best thing i ever did was just get on the air even when i sounded terrible. QRS nets are out there and people are patient. dont wait until you think youre ready because that day never comes lol

yeah thats pretty much exactly what i do actually, Log4OM for everything outside contests and N1MM when a contest weekend rolls around, been doing it for probably two years now and its not as painful as you'd think the trick is i just export from N1MM to ADIF after each contest and import it into Log4OM, takes maybe five minutes and ive never had a serious dupe problem because the callsigns and dates are different enough that the software figures it out, only time i got a weird duplicate was when i worked the same station in a contest and then again on WSJTX a week later and Log4OM flagged it which is actually what you want the WSJT-X integration in Log4OM is solid, UDP logging works fine, just make sure you set the port correctly in both programs and dont have N1MM running at the same time or they'll fight over the port, learned that one the hard way during a FT8 roundup when i forgot to close N1MM first

so ive been messing around with AO-7 and some of the other linear birds for a few months now and i think i finally understand the basics but the doppler thing is still tripping me up. like i get the concept, the satellite is moving so the freq shifts, but im confused about which VFO to adjust and when. i have an IC-9700 and im using Gpredict for tracking which works great for az/el but im not 100% sure if i should be letting it auto-correct both uplink and downlink or just one of them. the passes ive had where i could hear myself in the passband were mostly okay but a few times i drifted and couldnt find my own signal again. someone on a local net said to only manually tune the downlink and let the uplink stay fixed but that doesnt sound right to me. also not sure if it matters but im running about 5 watts to a handheld yagi which has been enough to get into the bird most times i think any advice from people who actually work these regularly would be great, im not trying to be the lid who blows through the whole passband

so i've been messing with Winlink Express for about a month now and i finally got a connection going through a local RMS gateway on 2m packet, which felt like a huge win after fighting with the soundcard config forever. but now that im actually connected and can send/receive emails i realize i dont really understand how the whole thing works under the hood and im getting confused about a few things. first question is about the RMS gateways themselves — when i connect to one locally, is that node just acting as a relay to the CMS servers on the internet, or does it actually store messages locally too? i ask because i was reading about hybrid network stuff and it sounds like messages can sit on the gateway for a while if the internet is down, which is obviously the whole point for emcomm situations. but i cant tell from the Winlink Express interface whether my gateway is actually in hybrid mode or just a straight pass-through. second thing is i tried switching to HF using Vara HF on 40m and i can see gateways in the list but every time i try to connect to one a few hundred miles away it either times out or i get like 3 bps and it just hangs. my antenna situation on 40m is not great (dipole in the attic) but i wasnt expecting it to be this bad. is there some trick to picking which gateway to try, or do people just scan through them until something works?

ok so I just got my technician license like three weeks ago and ive been trying to get into the local 2m repeater listed in the repeater directory. The thing is I can hear people talking on it just fine but when I key up nobody seems to hear me or acknowledge me at all. I did the whole "this is [callsign] listening" thing a couple times and nothing. My radio is a baofeng UV-5R and I programmed the frequency in but I honestly am not 100% sure I set the CTCSS tone right. The directory listing shows a PL of 100.0 and I think I set it but maybe I got the wrong menu or something. Also a side question — is there like a rule about how long you should wait between transmissions before jumping in? I dont want to be that guy who steps on someone mid conversation. Any help appreciated, been trying to figure this out for days.

ok so I just passed my technician exam about three weeks ago and my sequential call came through last week, I got a 1x3 call in my district which is fine but honestly its kind of a mouthful and I was looking at the vanity call process on the FCC site and now im more confused than before I started. from what I can tell you have to wait until your license is actually in the ULS database before you can apply, which mine is now, but then I started reading about the application windows and how group A calls go first and group B etc and I dont really understand where a brand new tech falls in all that. like am I even eligible to apply for a shorter call or do I have to upgrade first? also does anyone know roughly how long the process takes once you submit? I saw something about a 18 day waiting period but wasnt sure if that was still current. just trying to figure out if its worth doing now or if I should wait until I get my general or extra.

the LM386 is notorious for that kind of noise honestly, those things pick up everything. but if you already swapped it out and it's still there then yeah my first suspicion would be the wall wart. a single cap isn't always enough, try an LC filter or even just a 78L09 to drop it down and regulate it properly, that alone has fixed similar stuff for me more than once. also with dead bug on bare copper clad you really want to think about where your ground returns are going — if the audio ground and the oscillator ground are sharing a long trace back to the supply you'll get all kinds of garbage coupling in. star grounding is kind of a pain to retrofit but worth it. what value cap do you have on the rail right now and where physically is it relative to the NE602?

yeah im planning on going, dragging my buddy along who just got his tech license last spring. he doesnt really know what to expect so itll be fun watching him see all the old boat anchors and stuff for the first time lol. i think the swap meet is still early, like 7am or something before the main hall opens. bring cash cause half these guys dont do venmo or whatever

honestly its not that bad if you already passed Tech, a lot of the material builds on stuff you probably already picked up. the question pool is bigger and theres more about things like operating on the HF bands, some basic electrical theory, feedlines, that kind of stuff. propagation questions show up a fair bit and some of those can be a little tricky if you've never thought about skywave and ionospheric stuff before but they're not impossible. same approach works fine — hamstudy or qrz practice tests, just do them until you're consistently hitting like 85% or better and you'll be fine. i think i studied for maybe 3 weeks before i took mine, passed with room to spare. the thing that got me more than anything was the band privilege questions, just knowing which frequencies General class can actually use vs Extra. theres a chart in the ARRL handbook that lays it all out and i basically just memorized that. once you get it though, HF is a completely different world. worked my first european station the weekend after i upgraded and i was hooked. totally worth the effort

not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely confused me for a while too when i first got into chasing awards. short version is LoTW is the one that counts for ARRL awards like DXCC and WAS, so if thats your goal that's the one to focus on. eQSL is separate and doesnt count for DXCC credit but some people use it for other awards and some just like it. paper cards are still used for DXCC too but you have to mail them to the ARRL for checking which is kind of a pain and costs money, most people just do LoTW now for that. the reason you only have 12 confirmations is probably just that not everyone uploads to LoTW regularly. some guys batch upload once a month or even less often, and some DX stations especially have a manager who handles it and it can take forever. theres not much you can do about that except wait. you can also check on qrz or hamqth if a station has a listed LoTW percentage which tells you how likely they are to upload. i still request paper cards for anything rare just because i like having them, but for everyday contacts LoTW is really all you need for chasing awards. get your logs uploading consistently and the confirmations will come in over time.

so anyway ive only been licensed about a year and a half and i kind of feel what your saying from the other side. like i got into it mostly through WSJT-X and some guys at my club made me feel like that wasnt real ham radio which was a bit offputting ngl. still love it though and eventually found some people who were cool about it

so ive been on SSB for about two years now and honestly my audio reports are all over the place. some guys tell me i sound great, others say im muffled or that theres this low hum they cant quite place. ive got an IC-7300 which supposedly has decent DSP onboard and i run a Heil PR-40 into it which everyone says is the gold standard mic for this kind of thing but i still get inconsistent reports. my shack is in the basement and i wonder if thats part of it — concrete walls, some RF floating around from the feedlines running through the ceiling. ive got the mic gain set around 50-55% and the compression is on but only like 2-3 bars showing, i read somewhere you dont want to overdrive it. transmit bandwidth is set to 2.4k which seems standard. am i missing something obvious here or is this just one of those things where every station hears you differently based on their own rx setup also noticed the hum gets worse when my monitor is on so maybe thats a ground loop thing? i dunno, been meaning to chase that down for a while. just curious what other people do to get consistently clean audio on SSB because it feels like black magic sometimes

yeah what he said about the path. i went through the same thing when i set mine up, was using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 because thats what some old guide online said and one of the guys at a hamfest looked at my config and was like dude you dont need that in this area. switched to WIDE2-1 and honestly my packets show up more consistently not less. kinda counterintuitive but the channel congestion thing is real especially if your local digi is busy. one other thing — make sure your transmit audio level going into the radio from the GPS/TNC side is actually calibrated right. i had my D710 doing weird stuff for weeks and it turned out the deviation was way off and half my packets were getting decoded wrong downstream. theres a way to check it but i forget exactly where in the menu it is off the top of my head, maybe page through the advanced settings.

the koch method is basically where you start learning at your target speed from day one instead of going slow and then trying to speed up later. the idea is your brain learns the rhythm of each character as a sound rather than counting dots and dashes. counting is a trap, seriously dont do it, you'll just have to unlearn it. for actually getting started i'd say just use the LCWO website, its free and its set up specifically around the koch method. you just work through the characters one at a time and it wont move you to the next one until you hit like 90% accuracy on the current set. its kind of tedious honestly but it works. i also used the Morse Trainer app on my phone during commutes and stuff, any practice time adds up. you really dont need a key at all in the beginning, just focus on copying what you hear. most people spend weeks just on receive before they even touch a paddle it does take a while but its not as bad as people make it sound if you're consistent. like 15 minutes a day is way better than an hour once a week