Rajesh Patel

honest answer — i did grind the pool the first time and passed but didnt really understand half of it. then about a year later i actually went back and worked through the arrl extra class manual properly and it was genuinely eye opening. the transmission line stuff especially. it actually helped me troubleshoot an SWR issue i'd been ignoring for months because i didnt understand what was happening electrically. as far as the extra segments go it depends a lot on where you are and what youre into. on 75m the extra portion can be pretty active on weekends, and on 40m during contests you definitely notice you have more room to work with. but if youre doing digital modes it probably matters less since most of that activity is in the general portions anyway. i'd say do it for the knowledge more than the privileges, the privileges are kind of a nice bonus

yeah 40m in the afternoon is the move, especially if your activating somewhere in the east and trying to work midwest stations. i dont even bother with 20 after like 2pm anymore. also get a bigger battery lol i run a 4ah lipo and it lasts me all day at 10 watts

not a basic question at all, it trips up a lot of new folks. so the short version is — LoTW (Logbook of the World) is run by the ARRL and it's what you need for DXCC and a bunch of other ARRL awards. eQSL is a separate thing run by a private company and it has its own award system but it's not accepted for DXCC. they dont really talk to each other so yeah a lot of people use both. physical cards are still a thing and honestly i love getting them in the mail, some guys only do paper QSLs and wont upload to anything digital. for DXCC you can submit physical cards too, you just have to get them verified at a hamfest or mail them in. the bureau is a cheap way to exchange cards internationally through the ARRL system but it can take like a year or more to actually get stuff back. my suggestion for starting out — get on LoTW first since thats the most widely accepted for awards. the setup is a little annoying because you have to get a certificate, but there's good guides on the ARRL site. then eQSL is easy to set up and a lot of casual operators use it. dont stress about the physical cards right away unless someone specifically sends you one or asks for one.

Start with the Morse Mania app - it turns learning into an engaging game and set your practice tool to 25-30 WPM character speed to train your ear to recognize sound patterns, not individual dits and dahs. This prevents the trap of counting elements!

so ive been a tech for about 2 years now and mostly just been doing 2m/70cm stuff at the club and some APRS messing around. decided i want to actually get on HF and people keep telling me to just go take the general exam, shouldnt be too hard coming from tech they say. anyway ive been using the hamstudy.org thing and its going okay but some of the questions feel totally random to me, like the electrical stuff and the propagation questions kind of blur together. is there like a certain section i should really focus on or is it pretty evenly distributed on the actual exam. also whats the deal with the 35 questions, is it literally just random pulled from the pool or does it follow some pattern also once i pass, do i actually have to wait for my license to update in the ULS before i can get on 40m or whatever, or can i operate right after i pass at the session. i know theres something about the CSCE but im not sure exactly how that works in practice

so ive been at CW for about four months now and im using a Bencher BY-1 paddle into a MFJ-464 keyer and overall its been great for learning but i keep running into this thing where if i try to push past maybe 18 wpm everything just starts mushing together. like the dits start sounding like dahs or i get extra characters that i didnt send. not sure if its a paddle tension issue or the keyer settings or honestly just my terrible technique. i messed with the weight and ratio settings on the keyer a bit but i wasnt really sure what i was doing. someone at the club told me to try adjusting the contact gap on the paddle but it looked fine to me. is this just a practice problem or is there something i should actually be checking on the hardware side first before i blame my fist

so this is getting frustrating. had my 7300 back from the shop in march after the finals went out, they replaced both MRF101AN transistors and said it was good to go. well its doing it again. same symptoms — output drops to basically nothing, SWR alarm goes off even into a dummy load, and i can smell something faintly when i key up. checked the dummy load and its fine so thats not it. the tech who fixed it the first time said maybe i had a momentary high SWR event that killed them but i run an LDG tuner inline and ive never seen it go above like 2:1 for more than a second. im starting to think theres something upstream thats causing a voltage spike or maybe the driver stage is putting out too much and stressing the finals. i dont really have a good way to check driver output without the right equipment but wondering if anyone else has seen this pattern with the 7300 specifically. also worth mentioning i run it at 100w most of the time and its on a decent regulated supply, 13.8v dead stable. so its not a voltage issue i dont think. would love to hear from anyone whos dug into one of these at the component level.

so i finally did my first summit activation last weekend, W4T/SU-001, had been putting it off forever because i wasnt sure i had the right gear sorted out. ended up just throwing the KX2 in my pack with a linked dipole and hiked up saturday morning. conditions werent amazing but i managed 4 QSOs on 40m and then a few more on 20 once i figured out the antenna was a bit off resonance. got my 4 contacts and qualified the summit which felt pretty great honestly. couple things im not clear on though -- do i need to log the exact summit reference in the SOTAdata system or does the app handle that automatically when i import from my paper log? i was writing everything down by hand up there because my phone signal was basically nothing. also one of the guys i worked said he was "chasing" me and asked for my reference number which i didnt know off the top of my head, is that something i should have memorized before going up or is there a way to self-spot even without cell service? anyway it was a blast even with the cold, already looking at a few more summits in the area for this spring.

I've been studying Q codes but keep hearing other abbreviations on CW that aren't Q codes. Things like 73, CU, FB, OM, ES and others. Are these standardized or just informal ham slang? I found a reference that says 73 means "best regards" but I'm hearing it used almost like "goodbye." Also seeing things like "best 73s" which seems redundant if 73 already means best regards? Can someone explain the most common non-Q code abbreviations and proper usage?

yeah the club is doing the carpool again, Bill mentioned it at the last meeting but i think you missed it. pretty sure hes coordinating through the repeater net on thursday nights if you want to get on and ask him directly. as for the tables i honestly have no idea, i remember last year they sold out pretty fast so you might want to check the hamfest website sooner rather than later

yeah the post-contest ADIF import workflow is pretty much standard for most people i think. N1MM for the contest, then dump it into whatever your main logger is after. Log4OM handles the import cleanly in my experience, havent had any field mapping issues with it. one thing worth checking if you want to keep trying with Log4OM during contests — make sure the UDP listener port in Log4OM matches exactly what WSJT-X is broadcasting on and that nothign else on your machine is grabbing those packets first. had a weird situation where an old JTDX install i forgot about was sitting there listening on the same port and causing all kinds of weird behavior. took me embarrassingly long to figure that out

so i just got my technician license a few weeks ago and ive been listening on the local repeater and also trying to get into HF a bit and everyone keeps throwing around all these abbreviations and codes and i can barely keep up. like QSL, QRM, QSO, 73, 88 and a bunch of others i cant even remember now. i know 73 means best regards or something like that but thats about it. is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just kind of pick these up over time? also some of the older guys on the net use abbreviations i cant even find when i search for them, not sure if those are just local things or what. just feel like im missing half the conversation every time i check in

yeah the 386 thing is real, i went through like three of them on a pixie clone before i gave up and just used a TL072 with a little feedback network. way less drama. sounds better too IMO. one thing nobody mentioned to me when i was starting out with DC receivers is that 60hz hum can also come in through the antenna if youre picking up mains radiation from house wiring, so even a perfect power supply wont help if your antenna is running near the house. not saying thats your issue but worth ruling out by just trying a dummy load and see if the hum changes.

welcome to the cycle 25 party lol, seriously though this is exciting stuff and you picked a good time to be on hf. i remember back in the low flux years where 10m felt like a parking lot, like you could park a truck on the band and nobody would notice for weeks at a time dont sleep on 12m either when conditions are up like that. a lot of people ignore it and sometimes it stays open even a bit longer than 10 toward the end of the day. just my experience anyway

so we had a pretty bad storm roll through last week and ever since my 7300 just isnt receiving anything. transmit seems fine actually, put it on a dummy load and power output looks normal on all bands, SWR meter responds, but the receive is just dead. like completely silent, not even noise floor. tried the obvious stuff, reset the radio, checked all the connectors, swapped to a different antenna, nothing. the weird thing is the S meter does flicker occasionally when i key up from the other radio in the shack, so maybe something is getting through? or maybe thats just RF getting into the chassis somehow, i dunno. i dont have a full schematic for this thing yet but im thinking either the preamp got fried or maybe something in the antenna switching relay. anyone dealt with this before on an Icom? im decent with a soldering iron but not sure i want to start poking around blindly without some direction.

had something similar on an older 7200 years back, turned out to be a cold solder joint on one of the driver stage connectors. the symptom was almost identical — brief dropout, no fault indication, came back on its own. the intermittent nature is the giveaway really, proper failures tend to stay failed. if you can get the board out and hit the likely suspects with a reflow iron under magnification that would be my first move before going further. the PA driver area on icom gear from that era had some known issues with thermal cycling cracking joints over time, dont know if thats still the case on the 7300 but worth a look. also check the internal fan connector if you havent, ive seen weird stuff happen when that gets flaky and the thermal management starts doing unexpected things even if temps look ok externally.

so i've been licensed about 3 years now and honestly 10 meters has been pretty hit or miss the whole time i've been on the air. got my general a while back and kept hearing people talk about how great 10m is during solar max and i was kind of skeptical because every time i checked it just sounded dead to me. but yesterday afternoon i flipped over to 28.400 just on a whim and holy cow there were stations everywhere. worked a couple guys in south america, one in spain i think, and some kind of expedition station i didn't catch the full callsign of. sfi was up around 180 which i guess is pretty good? i dont really know how to read the solar flux numbers all that well, like at what point does it actually make a difference for 10m vs just being wishful thinking also the k-index stuff confuses me a bit. i saw it was at 2 yesterday which i think is good but i dont fully understand why geomagnetic stuff matters for HF. anyone want to explain it in plain english because the stuff i find online is either too basic or way over my head