Maria Garcia

haha the phonetic alphabet panic is real, i did the same thing on my first qso. dont sweat the baofeng thing either, we all start somewhere and it works fine for local stuff. once you get your general and get on 40m you're gonna wonder why you waited. welcome to the hobby

so ive been trying to get more into DX chasing and everyone keeps telling me to watch the cluster but honestly im a little overwhelmed by the options. ive looked at DXwatch, the DX Summit site, and QRZ has that little spot feed on the side of band pages too. are these all pulling from the same data or are they actually different networks? feels like sometimes i see a spot on one that doesnt show up on the other for like 5 minutes. also is there an app that does this decently on android? i downloaded a couple but they either look like they were designed in 2003 or they crash constantly. just want something i can glance at while im at the rig without having to keep a browser tab open. not trying to overthink this but it seems like there should be a cleaner solution by now

honestly i just use a cheap smart plug on the Pi and have it on a schedule to reboot every night at 3am. not elegant but ive had zero issues since i started doing that lol. not sure that helps your actual question

the IC-7300 parametric EQ can be a bit tricky to dial in for SSB voice. couple things id check — first, whats your TX bandwidth set to? if its on the wider setting (like 2.4khz or wider) and you have a lot of low mid energy it can really mud up the signal. try bumping it down to the medium setting and see if that cleans things up. also 200hz rolloff might not be enough, especially with a mic like the PR-40 which has a fairly pronounced low end proximity effect if youre getting close to it at all. i'd try a high pass somewhere around 300-350hz for SSB, sounds counterintuitive but voice intelligibility on HF really lives in the 500hz-2.5khz range more or less. the low stuff just eats up your power and muddies the waterfall. the compressor at 4 is probably fine, some guys go lower even. also make sure your TX monitor is on so you can actually hear what youre putting out, that alone changed how i approached my audio settings.

so i finally finished my first scratch built QRP rig, been working on it for about three months on and off. its a 40m CW transceiver based loosely on the bitx design but i kind of went off script a bit with the final amp stage. running about 4 watts out which im pretty happy with considering i had no idea what i was doing when i started lol took it out to the park last weekend with my end fed half wave and worked a guy in Ohio from Massachusetts which felt incredible for 4 watts. logged maybe 6 contacts in two hours which i know isnt amazing but for a first portable outing with homebrew gear i was thrilled anyway my question is about efficiency. the rig draws more current than i expected on transmit, like around 800mA from a 3 cell lipo. that seems high to me for 4 watts out but i genuinely dont know if thats normal or if my final stage is doing something wrong. the transistor gets warm but not scary hot. anyone have a sense of what class of operation i should be aiming for and whether this math even makes sense

honest question — does anyone actually use the tail-ending technique anymore or do the dxpedition ops just hate that now? i tried it a couple times and felt like i was just being rude but i read somewhere it can work if done right. not sure what the etiquette is these days

i just passed mine like three months ago, studied mostly on hamstudy and watched a few of the old gordon west videos on youtube when i got stuck on something. the math looks intimidating but for the actual exam you dont really need to derive anything, its mostly recognizing which formula applies and plugging in numbers. a few of the questions i genuinely had no idea about even after studying but theres enough buffer in the passing score that it didnt matter. just do it, the worst that happens is you take it again

okay so the honest answer is it depends on what you mean by "work EME" haha. if you mean random meteor scatter contacts then forget it, but actual moonbounce on 2m with JT65B — yeah a single yagi can do it but you need it to be a big one and your preamp situation has to be sorted properly. i ran a single 13el tonna for a while with about 800w and worked maybe 15-20 stations over a couple years, all with big gun stations on the other end. noise figure matters enormously, like genuinely the most important thing after antenna gain. you want sub 0.5dB at the antenna, ideally closer to 0.3 or lower. a good MGF1302 or ATF54143 based preamp right at the feedpoint makes a huge difference vs having it in the shack. coax losses at 2m are just brutal and every tenth of a dB counts. perigee is worth paying attention to — moon is closer so path loss drops a bit, maybe 2dB improvement which is meaningful when you're already marginal. and the activity windows around the major contest weekends like the ARRL EME contest in fall are when youll find the most stations. honestly just get on JT65 during a contest weekend and see what you can decode, thats the real test of your RX setup before you worry about transmitting

honestly the cluster felt the same way to me when i first started lol. just chaos. it gets easier once you know what youre looking at. one thing i'll say is dont stress too much about missing spots early on, thats just part of it and sometimes the pileup is so big when you do get there that being 2 minutes late doesnt really matter anyway. the station isnt going anywhere in the next hour usually.

honestly dont overthink it, the tech exam really isnt that bad once you get into it. the question pool is public and the actual test questions come straight from it so theres no surprises. I used HamStudy dot org when I was studying and it was really good, it kind of tracks which questions youre getting wrong and drills you on those more. took me maybe 3 weeks of studying a little bit each night and I passed no problem. the hardest part for most people is probably the electrical theory stuff like ohms law and some of the antenna questions but even that stuff clicks after a bit. dont bother trying to understand every single concept deeply right away, just get familiar enough to recognize the right answer and youll be fine for the test, you can learn the deeper stuff after you get on the air

so ive been fighting with this for about three weeks now and im at my wit's end. background: i have a remote station running at my parents place about 80 miles away, IC-7300 hooked up through RemoteHams RRC-1258 mkII, and separately ive got a local repeater linked via EchoLink into the system so club members can monitor HF from the club repeater. sounds complicated because it kind of is. the problem is the audio drops out on the SDR side specifically. not the rig control, not the PTT, just the audio from the SDR receiver i added last year (its an RSPdx running SDRuno via virtual audio cable to the RemoteHams software). the drops are random, sometimes every 20 minutes sometimes three hours go by fine. ive already checked the obvious stuff - cable between RSPdx and the PC up there is solid, VAC buffer is set to 500ms, the internet connection at that end is fiber so its not a bandwidth thing. what im wondering is if the issue is somewhere in the audio routing where the EchoLink client is also trying to grab audio resources at the same time. both are running on the same machine up there which is probably my first mistake. anyone dealt with something like this or have a sane way to isolate which part of the chain is dropping the audio?

I was in almost the exact same spot maybe two years ago. Took me forever to figure out that LOTW confirmations don't just automatically apply to your award — you still have to go in and actually apply through the ARRL system and pay the fee. Felt kind of obvious in hindsight but nobody told me that part and i sat there thinking i was almost done when i hadnt actually started the application at all. Hawaii on WAS was my white whale for a while. Finally got it during a contest weekend, think it was a guy running a pile on 15 meters. Alaska i got weirdly fast on 40 SSB one random Tuesday evening so who knows.

so i was poking around online last night and apparently Icom made some kind of announcement about a new transceiver, saw it mentioned on a couple different sites and then someone posted about it on one of the facebook groups i'm in. havent had time to dig into all the specs yet but from what i can tell it looks like it might be positioned somewhere between the 7300 and the 7610 which honestly would be pretty interesting if the price point makes sense. anyone else been following this? i know the 7300 has been the go-to recommendation for basically everyone for years now and i always figured Icom would eventually fill that gap. curious what the more experienced guys think about whether this would actually be worth it over just grabbing a used 7610 or waiting for prices to drop on whatever this new thing is. also completely unrelated but 10 meters has been absolutely bonkers lately, worked like 8 countries last weekend just running barefoot on a dipole which i dont think ive ever done before, solar cycle is really delivering right now

yeah the collinear gain argument kind of falls apart once you're on a summit because you actually want some vertical pattern control too — a collinear with 6dBd or whatever is squishing your pattern down toward the horizon which is great for flatlands but on a hill you might actually be shooting over stuff you want to hit. a yagi gives you real gain AND you can tilt it if needed. just my take anyway. i did a SOTA activation last spring with a borrowed 7el 2m yagi and it was kind of eye opening how much difference it made compared to my usual vertical

the PR-40 is a large diaphragm condenser-style dynamic and it does have a pretty pronounced proximity effect if youre too close to it, which will give you exactly that boomy sound you're describing. most people put their mouth like 2-3 inches away but with that mic you probably want to back off a bit more than you think, or angle it slightly off-axis. even just moving it 4-5 inches changes the low end a lot. on the 7300 TX eq i started with cutting somewhere around -6 to -8dB at 100hz, leave the mids pretty flat or bump them slightly around 1.5k, and roll off above 2.8k or so. honestly the best thing you can do is get someone to give you a live report on a sideband frequency and just tweak in real time. the waterfall on the 7300 can also give you a rough idea of where your energy is concentrated if you watch the TX monitor. also yes the TX bandwidth matters — 2.4k is fine for general use but some guys narrow it to 2.0k for more punchiness, just depends what youre after

yeah what he said, and also ICS forms. get familiar with ICS-213 specifically because youll probably be handling written messages in that format. the training courses touch on it but actually filling one out under a little pressure is different. maybe practice a few before you go. I did my first activation about three years ago for a flood event and mostly I just sat at a desk monitoring a couple frequencies and relaying traffic between the EOC and a shelter about 8 miles away. not glamorous but it mattered. just stay calm and trust your training

DC receivers are sensitive to LO stability issues. If your local oscillator isn't locked properly to the signal you want, you'll get frequency offset problems that sound like what you're describing. Consider adding a PLL or using a more stable reference.

Outstanding work down there! The coordination issue between state ARES groups is something we've been discussing at the section level. We're working on better mutual aid agreements and standardized procedures. Your after-action report will be valuable for planning future responses.

okay so i just got my technician license last month and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but nobody ever seems to hear me. i can hear other people talking just fine, crystal clear, but when i key up and say my callsign nobody responds. at first i thought maybe the repeater was just busy or something but this has been going on for like two weeks now. someone at the club meeting mentioned CTCSS tones and i think thats my problem but im not totally sure how they work or how to program them into my radio. i have a baofeng uv-5r (i know i know, everyone says get a better radio but its what i could afford to start). the repeater directory shows a tone of 100.0 hz but i dont really know where to go from there in the menu system. also is there some kind of protocol for getting on a repeater for the first time, like do you just start talking or is there something you're supposed to say first?

so i was up late last night just scanning around and 6 meters was absolutely lit up with stations, heard a bunch of DX coming through from europe which i wasnt expecting at all for this time of year. caught a few JA stations too which was a nice surprise. propagation has been doing weird stuff lately and i cant tell if its just the solar cycle ramping up or something else going on. anyway while i was messing around on PSKreporter watching the spots come in i saw someone in one of the facebook groups mention that Icom is supposedly announcing something new at a trade show next month. nobody seems to know exactly what it is but theres a lot of speculation its a new HF rig in the IC-7300 price range. i dunno how reliable that info is but figured id mention it here since people always seem to know stuff before it goes official. anyone else been taking advantage of the 6m openings? curious what youre running for an antenna up there, im just on a 5 element yagi which feels pretty modest compared to some of the setups people talk about.

had a 590SG for about a year before i sold it and got the 7300 and tbh both are good radios but i dont regret switching. the roofing filter on the 590 is genuinely better on paper and if you ever get into contests you might notice it but for ragchewing and digital modes the 7300 just wins on usability. one thing nobody mentions enough is the 7300's built in audio processing is actually pretty decent for tx as well, people on the other end have commented my audio sounds clean without a bunch of external processing. only gripe ive had is the 7300 display can wash out a bit in direct light if you have a window near your desk, had to reposition things in my shack. minor thing but worth knowing

Zero ALC is the way to go. Some rigs start to splatter with even very small ALC indication, likely due to poor quality control and improper bias voltages. Back that gain down until you see no ALC movement on voice peaks - you'll still get full 100W PEP.

If APRS interests you, consider the Kenwood TH-D75A despite the higher cost. Built-in GPS, excellent APRS functionality, and it supports D-STAR for digital experimentation. It's an investment but will definitely grow with your interests. I've had mine for two years and still discovering features!

okay so the chart thing is actually kind of the wrong approach, at least thats what most people will tell you. the whole idea behind learning CW the modern way is you train your ear to recognize the sound of each letter as a whole sound, not count out dots and dashes. if you start counting youll hit a wall pretty fast once speeds go up even a little. the thing most people recommend now is the Koch method, theres a free program called LCWO dot net that uses it and you just work through letters one at a time starting at like 20wpm from the beginning which sounds insane but it works because your brain learns the rhythm not the pattern. also G4FON has a free trainer for windows that a lot of older hams still use. honestly just pick one and use it every single day even if its only 10 minutes, consistency is way more important than marathon sessions. took me probably 4 or 5 months to feel comfortable enough to actually try making contacts but i wasnt super diligent about practicing every day either

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into a local 2m net last Tuesday and honestly it was a little overwhelming. i knew the basics, like when the net control calls for check-ins you give your callsign, but i wasn't sure about the timing. like how long do you wait after someone finishes talking before you key up? i jumped in a couple times and i think i doubled with someone but i couldn't really tell. also is it normal to just say your callsign once or do you say it phonetically? the net control guy was super nice but the whole thing moved fast and i felt like everyone else just knew what they were doing automatically. also at the end when they asked if anyone had announcements i wanted to mention a hamfest coming up but i chickened out lol. do you just key up and say you have an announcement or do you wait to be called on? nobody really explained that part. been licensed about 4 months now (general) so im not brand new but nets are a whole different thing than just ragchewing on a repeater