David Wilson

i upgraded last spring after being a tech for like 3 years lol shouldve done it way sooner. the general exam felt about the same difficulty as tech honestly, maybe slightly more math but nothing crazy. i used the gordon west book and just did practice exams until i was consistently hitting like 85% or above and then just went and took it. hf is a completely different world man. first time i made a contact on 40m with just a wire antenna in my backyard i was kind of amazed it even worked. you'll figure out the band stuff as you go, propagation is kind of its own rabbit hole but thats part of the fun i think

I used to do that but 40m in the morning where I am gets pretty rough with the noise from my neighbors HVAC or something, never totally figured out what it is. Might try again this winter when the band opens up different. The new zealand thing is cool though I havent heard anything that far yet.

the "drill the hole" crowd isnt wrong but they're also usually the guys who bought a dedicated radio vehicle and dont care about resale or have a 20 year old beater. for a newer truck i totally get it. i ran a lip mount on my 4runner for about 18 months, it was the Tram brand one i think, worked okay but the antenna did wobble more than i liked at highway speeds which probably wasnt helping anything. eventually went to a stake hole mount in the bed rail which gave me a much more solid connection and didnt require drilling the cab. might be worth looking at that option depending on your truck. some beds have pre-existing holes you can work with. anyway on the ground plane question the trunk lid works, people do it all the time, just make sure your coax run isnt picking up a bunch of noise from whatever electronics are back there.

congrats on getting it going, that's the hardest part honestly. the hum is almost certainly a combination of both things you mentioned. wall warts are pretty noisy and the LM386 is notorious for picking up every bit of supply noise if you dont decouple it properly. the classic fix is a 250uF cap from pin 7 to ground and make sure you've got a 0.047uF from the output to ground through a 10 ohm resistor or it'll oscillate like crazy. also check if you have any decoupling right at the NE602 supply pin, that thing is surprisingly sensitive to supply noise too. a 100uF electrolytic in parallel with a 0.1uF ceramic right at the chip goes a long way. try a 9v battery as a quick test, if the hum drops significantly then yeah its your supply and you can sort that out properly rather than chasing ghosts on the board.

yeah 4 QSOs is exactly the minimum so you're good, activation counts. congrats on the first one. the wind thing is brutal, i had the same issue on a ridge activation and ended up just running a sloper straight off the pack because i couldnt deal with the mast anymore. honestly sometimes simpler is better up there

so ive been messing around with RemoteHams for about 3 months now and overall its pretty solid but theres this one thing thats been bugging me since day one. the audio sync is just slightly off when i use the SDR remote mode versus when im using the traditional rig control path. like maybe 200-300ms difference and it doesnt sound like much but when youre trying to copy CW at anything above 20wpm it becomes a real problem because your brain keeps trying to process it at the wrong rhythm. my setup is a IC-7300 at the remote end running through a Raspberry Pi 4 with the RemoteHams server software, the internet link is a 25mbps upload connection which should be more than enough. ive tried tweaking the audio buffer settings in the client and gone up and down from 50ms to 200ms and nothing really fixes it, the SDR waterfall and the audio just seem to want to live in different universes. anybody else run into this or is it something specific to the 7300 and how the server handles the IQ data versus the regular audio stream? wondering if im better off just ditching the SDR mode entirely and going back to straight audio for the CW stuff at least

our club is doing a carpool if that helps, we usually leave friday morning to get there for setup day. shoot me a message if you want details, theres usually like 4 or 5 of us and we split the hotel cost which makes it way more reasonable

80-90ms is totally fine for HF work, ive run CW contests through worse. the SDR panadapter idea is solid though, I added an SDRplay to my remote last year and it changed how i operate honestly. being able to see the whole band while transmitting is something i didnt know i was missing until i had it. the bandwidth thing is real tho. if you start pulling a wide IQ stream AND running RCForb audio youll feel it. i had to throttle my sample rate down to like 2 MHz or so just to keep things smooth. still plenty of spectrum to look at.

yeah the learning curve on SO2R is real. took me a couple seasons before i stopped feeling like i was juggling chainsaws. what you described is basically the right mindset though — radio 2 isn't a second run radio, its an opportunity finder. you let it scan while you're holding a run frequency and then jump on the mults or new Qs when your run goes quiet for a few seconds. the thing that helped me most was getting the interlocking sorted so the radios were actually protecting each other. without that you're just hosing your own ears and probably your front ends too depending on your antenna situation. do you have any kind of interlocking or are you just being careful about timing manually? cause that might be where the last bit of efficiency is hiding. N1MM has decent SO2R support if you're not already using it and the focus timing stuff in there made a real difference for me once i understood how to set the delays properly for my particular radios.

went through this exact thing last year so I can tell you from experience — just go ahead and apply for the vanity, no reason to wait. I got my sequential call assigned (it was fine, nothing wrong with it) but I had a specific call in mind that had belonged to a relative who was a ham back in the day and I wanted to get it as a memorial call basically. the process was pretty straightforward once I figured out the ULS interface which is... not the most intuitive thing in the world lol. one thing worth knowing is that calls become available on a rolling basis as licenses expire or get cancelled, so if the call you want isn't available right now it might show up later. there are tools online that track when specific calls are gonna open up. anyway dont stress too much about messing something up, the worst that really happens is your application gets rejected and you just try again

im kind of in the same boat as you, just started building mine out a few months ago and its a rabbit hole for sure. one thing somebody at my club told me that I thought was smart — dont just build the kit, actually practice deploying it. like time yourself, see if you can actually get on the air in under 10 minutes from a cold start because thats sort of the benchmark they told me to shoot for at our ARES group. I had stuff packed but had never actually set it up outside until one Saturday morning and realized my coax connectors were in the wrong pocket and I had no idea where my frequency reference card was. kinda embarrassing but better to find that out at home than during an actual activation

welcome welcome. yeah the baofeng on a local repeater is a totally fine way to start, dont let anyone give you grief about the radio. i did the same thing when i first got my ticket. bill sounds like a good guy, theres usually at least one or two people on every repeater who make a point of welcoming newcomers. once you get comfortable on 2m you might wanna look into HF, completely different world but super addicting

the straight key vs paddle debate is one of those things that goes around forever in CW circles. my honest take after 30+ years of sending - start with the straight key long enough to understand timing and what good code actually sounds like when you make it yourself, maybe a few weeks, then move to a paddle. the keyer will handle a lot of the timing mechanics for you once you get there and most people find their speed picks up faster with a paddle setup anyway. for a starter keyer the MFJ units get a bad rap sometimes but they work fine to learn on. lots of people also really like the Begali or Vibroplex paddles but those are serious money for someone just starting out. honestly a cheap set of paddles off amazon combined with a decent keyer IC like whats built into most modern radios will get you going just fine. the important thing is the paddles feel comfortable in your hand and have adjustable tension. and for the love of everything practice copying more than you practice sending - your ear has to be ahead of your hand or youll plateau fast.

so i just passed my general last month and got my first callsign through the sequential process, ended up with something like KD9 followed by a pretty clunky suffix. totally fine, i get it, thats just how it works. but now im reading about vanity calls and im kind of lost on how that whole system actually works. like do you just apply and pick whatever you want? or is there a list of available ones? i saw something about a filing window and groups and i honestly couldnt make heads or tails of it. someone at my local club mentioned that if a callsign has been inactive for a couple years it becomes available but im not sure if thats accurate. also does it cost money? i thought i remembered reading the FCC charges something now for vanity applications but i might be mixing that up with the $35 licensing fee they started charging a while back. not even sure i want to bother with a vanity call honestly, my current one is fine, just curious how it all works cause a few guys at the club have really clean 2x1 calls and im wondering if those are just lucky sequential draws or if they went through the vanity process

yeah the logging thing is a real struggle, we ran into the exact same problem during our SET last year. what ended up helping us was having whoever is handling radio NOT also be responsible for the formal log — even if it's just one extra person with a clipboard writing down times and message numbers. if you really can't spare the body, some guys use a voice recorder running in the background so they can reconstruct the log afterward, not perfect but better than gaps. the battery thing drives me absolutely nuts. we actually made it a rule that every go-kit gets a quick check the night before any activation or drill, not just a 'yeah probably fine' kind of check but actually power it on and verify. took one embarrassing moment at a real weather event to get everyone on board with that. sounds like your group had a pretty realistic experience honestly, the messy first hour is kind of normal and if you came out of it with a list of things to fix that's a win in my book.