Robert Martinez

Gpredict's robust design works well across Linux, BSD, Windows, and Mac OS X, and it's free software under GNU GPL. For contest operations, I need the visual flexibility. SatPC32 is great but Windows-only limits me during portable ops.

The Extra segments are usually toward the center of the phone portions where antennas have better SWR. On 20 meters, that bottom 25 kHz from 14.150-14.175 is prime real estate for DX work, especially during contests when the General portion gets packed.

so i was just spinning around 28mhz last tuesday afternoon, not really expecting much, and suddenly the band just... opened up. like completely. i was hearing stations from south america, europe, even caught what sounded like a JA station calling CQ for a bit before he faded out. im running maybe 100w into a wire dipole up about 25 feet which isnt exactly a killer setup and i was still making contacts left and right. ive been licensed since 2019 so i kind of missed the bottom of the last solar cycle and never really got to experience good 10m propagation before. is this what its always like when the flux is up? i checked pskreporter and the map was just lit up. solar flux index was sitting around 180 or so that day i think. curious how much higher it can actually get and whether we're near the peak yet or still climbing.

honestly for your situation id say skip the Baofeng for now, not because theyre terrible but because the programming software is a pain and the receiver isnt great — you'll pick up a ton of interference on busy areas and it can get frustrating fast when youre still learning the ropes. the FT-60 is a really solid choice for a first radio, its built like a tank, the audio is loud and clear, and its genuinely straightforward to use without diving into the manual every five minutes. been recommending it to new hams in our club for years and i dont think anyones come back complaining. the TH-D75 is awesome but its also like $500+ so that seems outside what you're looking at. if you really want APRS built in and dont mind spending more the D75 is hard to beat, but you could also just grab an FT-60 now and do APRS later with a phone and a cable or a dedicated tracker. no rush to have everything at once when youre just getting started.

Many IC-7300 owners struggle with aggressive ALC behavior that reduces average power output compared to other transceivers. The key insight is that proper ALC setting should peak around 1/4 to 1/2 maximum, never more - shoot for maxing at 1/4 with occasional peaks hitting 1/3. Unlike older rigs where any ALC indication was bad, the IC-7300 manual states to "adjust the device's output level to be within the ALC zone" for SSB data modes. This SDR architecture requires different operating techniques than traditional analog transceivers. For consistent results: disable compressor temporarily, use Menu > Meter to monitor ALC while speaking normally, and adjust mic gain to stay within the 1/4 range. Pushing ALC too hard makes it overly aggressive and actually cuts average power.

Good morning all! I'm seeing solar flux can vary from as low as 50 or so to as high as 300, and we're currently at 175 according to HamQSL. As a relatively new General class op, I'm wondering if this is worth firing up the rig for some 10m DX hunting this afternoon? Background: I've got a modest antenna setup - just a simple wire dipole about 20 feet up. Been mostly sticking to 20m and 40m since getting my upgrade, but keep hearing about how great 10m can be when conditions are right. Any advice from you Elmers would be appreciated!

I've had my IC-7300 for about 18 months now and it's been solid. The overshoot issue only matters if you're running an amp - for 100W barefoot operation it's a non-issue. The waterfall display alone makes ragchewing so much more enjoyable.

honestly the height thing matters more than people give it credit for on 40. your inverted V at 30ft feedpoint is only getting like half wave height at most and those drooping legs are hurting the low angle performance more than the antenna type itself. ive run both at my place and a flat dipole at 50ft absolutely hammers a quarter wave vertical for anything beyond about 2000 miles, at least in my experience here in the midwest. the vertical had an edge on some really shallow angle stuff but it was noisy as heck compared to the dipole. if you can get that dipole up to 50-55ft flat or close to it id try that before spending the weekend burying radials. just my two cents, terrain and local noise plays into this a lot too so your results might differ.

With so many new licensees joining our hobby, I thought I'd share a structured approach for teaching NATO phonetics that's worked well at our club. Key steps I recommend: Start with the concept: standardized words reduce confusion from noise, accents, and similar-sounding lettersEmphasize proper pronunciation - each syllable equally, don't drop final consonantsPractice with their own callsign firstExplain why it's critical for emergency communications and working unfamiliar accentsWhat teaching methods have worked best for your club or elmering sessions?

so i just passed my technician exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to get. ive been reading threads on here for like two hours and now im MORE confused than when i started lol. everyone seems to have a different opinion and i cant tell if the cheap baofeng stuff is fine or if ill regret it. my main thing is i just want to be able to talk on the local repeaters and maybe eventually do some APRS stuff if i can figure it out. i dont really have a big budget, probably $50-80 range to start. someone at my club mentioned the UV-5R but then someone else said i should save up for a Yaesu or Kenwood. i dont know enough yet to know what actually matters vs what's just people being snobby about brands you know? any advice from people who actually use these things day to day would be really appreciated

so ive been chasing this one for a few weeks now and its driving me nuts. my 7300 started dropping output gradually, first i thought it was an ALC issue or maybe i had the RF power knob turned down (yeah i checked, i'm not that far gone yet) but even with it cranked all the way i'm seeing maybe 18-22 watts into a dummy load. SWR is flat, the rig doesn't throw any error codes, TX indicator lights up fine, everything looks normal except the power output is just... sad. i've already reseated the connectors i could get to without a full teardown, checked the PA heatsink and it's not hot at all which is kind of what worries me actually -- like if one of the finals was thermally shutting down that would make sense but it never even gets warm. my dummy load is a bird 43 so that's not the problem. anyone dealt with this before? i'm wondering if it's the driver stage or maybe a bias issue. dont really want to send it to icom if i can avoid it, the turnaround has been terrible lately from what i hear.

yeah i went through this exact same thing last summer. had a 6 element yagi i built from a design in the ARRL handbook and an Arrow dual band jpole and honestly at my usual hilltop the yagi was noticeably better for anything beyond maybe 40 miles. inside that range both were totally fine. the thing is a yagi on 2m really starts to shine when you're trying to hit a distant repeater or work a station that's just barely in the noise — like you can actually pull them out and have a real QSO instead of just barely acknowledging each other exist that said i eventually switched to just bringing a small mast and a lightweight 3 element yagi i made from a tape measure, the classic fox hunting design. weighs almost nothing, sets up in like 5 minutes if you're practiced at it, and gives me enough gain for most hilltop work. the directive systems stuff is good but it might be more antenna than you need for casual activations unless youre specifically trying to work weak signal or rover stuff

yeah CO in a trailer is no joke, dont skip that part. one thing i'd add - if your solar panel is just not cutting it because of clouds, have you looked at adding even a small second panel? like a cheap 100w folding panel could be the difference. not as a replacement for the genny plan but just to take some load off. i run my portable station off two 100ah lithiums and a 300w of panels and for a 48hr thing as long as im not running digital modes at full blast all day it mostly keeps up even with mediocre sun. but your load sounds heavier than mine with the laptop and fan factored in. anyway the hybrid thing makes sense, thats what i'd do

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now and honestly its been great for just poking around, listening to ACARS, doing some weak signal stuff with WSJT, whatever. but im starting to hit the walls on it especially on HF and im trying to figure out if i should step up to an SDRplay or just go all in and get a HackRF. the thing is i dont really need to transmit. like at all. i just want better dynamic range and coverage below 24MHz without having to use the direct sampling hack which works but kinda feels janky. the RSP1A seems to hit that sweet spot but then the HackRF is only like $50-60 more depending where you get it and at least i'd have TX capability if i ever wanted it. anyone run both? the SDRplay driver situation on linux always seemed kind of annoying from what i remember reading but maybe thats changed. and does SDR++ play nice with the RSP1A these days because i really dont want to go back to SDRuno if i can avoid it

Both work well but consider your activation style. If you're hiking far, the EFHW wins on weight. If you're doing vehicle-supported activations where you can bring more gear, the Wolf River gives you more options for chasing propagation changes during longer activations.

yeah what he said, also dont overlook some of the smaller contests if CQ WW feels like too much. there are state QSO parties happening basically every weekend in the fall and those are way more relaxed, fewer stations competing and people are generally pretty patient with slower ops. i did the Pennsylvania QSO party my first time and it was a really good way to learn the rythym of contest operating without feeling like youre getting run over. also re: SOTA — if you like activating you might want to check out the SOTA contest events they do sometimes, i think theres a WW Flora Fauna thing too. different vibe than HF contesting but still scratches that competitive itch a little

im kind of in the same boat as you so take this with a grain of salt but one thing that helped me a bit was just listening to high speed code even when i cant copy it at all. like just having it on in the background while im doing dishes or whatever. not sure if theres actual science behind it but it stopped feeling like alien noise after a while and i started recognizing a few common words like CQ and 73 without even trying. also LCWO dot net has a great word training mode if you havent tried that yet, copying common words is way more motivating than random letters for me at least

ok so i passed my general last month and ive been trying to figure out what frequencies i can actually use. i read through part 97 on the fcc website and honestly it just made me more confused. like theres all this language about emission types and authorized bandwidths and i dont really know how to translate that into what i can actually do on my radio. my main question i guess is — if im running SSB on 40 meters am i good? and also whats the deal with the no business communications rule. i work from home and sometimes i wonder if i could just use the radio to like coordinate something with a coworker but i sounds like that would be illegal? i dont really understand where the line is. also saw something about third party traffic and international contacts and now im even more lost. sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to not accidentally break any rules

congrats on passing and making that first contact, the first one is always the weird one haha. dont worry about not understanding the antenna stuff right away, half the hobby is just picking that up over time by listening. you'll start recognizing terms pretty quick. which repeater are you on if you dont mind me asking, im always curious what's active in different areas.

congrats on the ticket first of all. okay so honestly for getting on local repeaters at your budget the yaesu ft-65 is a really solid choice and i'd lean toward that over the baofeng just for build quality and the receiver being noticeably cleaner. the baofengs work and tons of people use them but the front end can get a little overwhelmed if theres any RF noise around which in some areas is a real issue the wouxuns are good too, kind of in between. but if i were handing something to a new ham and saying here learn on this, the ft-65 is pretty hard to argue with at that price point on the antenna thing — yeah the stock rubber ducks that come with most HTs are kind of mediocre but for hitting nearby repeaters they're usually fine to start. once you know you're going to stick with the hobby a nagoya NA-771 is like 12 bucks and genuinely makes a difference. not urgent though, get on the air first and worry about that later

So I finally managed to work VK9 last month but it took me like 3 hours of trying before I got through and honestly I'm not even sure what I did differently at the end that made it work. I've been licensed about 4 years running 100w into a trap vertical in the backyard and pileups just destroy me. I feel like I'm doing everything right — listening to where the DX is transmitting, trying to figure out the split, waiting for the right moment — but I just get walked over every single time. The thing that really gets me is the stations with big linears and beams just seem to punch right through no matter what. I know I can't compete with a kw and a 5 element yagi but there's gotta be technique stuff im missing too. Like when do you actually transmit? do you just call constantly or wait for a gap? I've seen people say to tail-end but every time I try that I still get buried under 40 other guys. Would upgrading to even a small beam make that much difference or is this mostly a power thing at this point. Genuinely curious how the guys who run qrp manage it at all.

so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but nobody seems to hear me. i can hear other people talking just fine but when i transmit nobody responds. did some googling and i think it might be something to do with a CTCSS tone? my radio is a baofeng uv-5r and i honestly have no idea what tone to use or even how to set it up. the repeater directory listed it as having a 100hz tone but i dont know where to go from there in the menu. also is there like a standard way to call out when you first get on a repeater or do you just start talking? i dont want to be rude or interrupt someone mid conversation without knowing it

yeah the maintenance thing is real, i gave up on my homebrew setup after about a year because i got tired of driving out there every time something dumb happened. switched to a commercial remote solution and while its not perfect at least i dont lose a weekend to it anymore. cant speak to RemoteHams specifically but the general principle is the same — you trade control and flexibility for convenience, and depending on your situation that might be the right call. 40 miles is far enough that your time has value.

the antenna isolation question is the real one and honestly its what stops most people from actually pulling off SO2R cleanly. the short answer is you need somewhere between 40-60dB of isolation between the two antenna ports depending on your band combo and even then youre probably going to want bandpass filters in line. the 4O3A or the Array Solutions stuff works but its not cheap. running 40 and 15 simultaneously is way more forgiving than trying to do 20 and 15 where the harmonics start getting ugly. that said for SS specifically where youre stuck to one band at a time per the rules youre mostly using radio 2 for listening and spotting yourself mentally, not actually transmitting on it. so the isolation thing is less catastrophic than in a multi-band contest. you can get away with a lot more slop in that scenario. on your S&P vs running question — i usually give myself a hard mental limit of like 3-4 CQs with no answer before i start moving. in the second half of SS especially sunday morning you really have to be more aggressive about hunting mults because the rate just isnt coming back to you on a run frequency, at least not at 100w. the guys running legal limit can hold a freq longer because they can pull the weaker stations through but at your power level mobility is your friend

so ive been trying to get my APRS setup working for about three weeks now and im at my wits end. running a TM-D710G with the built in TNC, path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. i can see my beacon going out on the radio display and i can hear other stations being decoded fine but when i check aprs.fi i dont see myself showing up at all, or sometimes i show up once and then disappear for like 45 minutes even though my beacon interval is set to 2 minutes. theres a digi about 8 miles from me that i can hear just fine — i can see it digipeating other stations on the display. so its not like i'm totally off in the weeds here. i checked my callsign and SSID like four times. the only thing i havent really dug into is whether my deviation is off or something. also running a mag mount on the car, which yeah i know isnt ideal but it worked fine for voice. anybody run into something like this or have a checklist i should work through? feels like its something dumb i'm overlooking.