Rajesh Patel

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 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

I went for the first time last year and honestly had no idea what to expect. It was kind of overwhelming but in a good way I think. Didn't buy anything because I didn't really know what I was looking at half the time but I talked to a bunch of people and got some ideas for antennas I want to build. Might try to go again this year if I can get the time off work.

Taking my first VE exam next week and getting nervous! I already have my FRN from the FCC CORES system and registered for the session. What should I bring and expect on test day?
I know it's 35 multiple choice questions with a 74% passing score, but are there any test-taking strategies that help? Can I really retake it the same day if I fail?

that ohio contact on 400mw from virginia is genuinely solid, good propagation or not. 40m was being weird all last week so you picked a decent day if you got through at all.
for a next build i'd honestly look at the ubitx if you want something more capable but still a project. it's not as elegant as some of the single band stuff but you get a lot of bands and the community around it is huge so when something goes wrong (and something always goes wrong) theres usually someone who had the exact same issue. alternatively if you liked the simplicity of the rockmite style, the 4state qrp group stuff is really well documented and the kits are reasonably priced. i built their 1watter a few years back and it was a good weekend project.
the kx2 is nice but yeah its a different thing entirely. theres something about dragging out a rig you built yourself that a commercial radio just cant replicate, at least for me.

I did my first WWFF earlier this year too and had the same confusion about the logging. One thing i noticed is that the wwff database can take a little while to show your activation as valid, like dont panic if it doesnt show up immediately after you upload. Also make sure your ADIF has the correct reference number in the right field, i think i had to manually add it in hamrs because it wasnt automatically populating or something like that, been a while so i dont remember exactly.

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.

so ive been trying to get more into DX chasing and someone at the club mentioned i should be watching the cluster spots but honestly i dont even know where to start. i pulled up DXwatch on my laptop and it makes sense enough but is there a decent phone app that ties into that stuff? like i want to be able to glance at spots while im in the shack without having to have a whole browser tab open
also does QRZ have something built in for this or is that a separate thing entirely. i know QRZ has the logbook and the lookup stuff but i wasnt sure if they had live spots. been a ham for about 8 months so still figuring all this out, appreciate any pointers