QRP Guy

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now and cant really make up my mind. i just put a Yaesu FT-7900 in my 2018 F-150 and its working fine but the antenna situation is kind of a mess right now. im running a NMO mount on a mag mount temporarily just to get on the air but i know i need to do this properly at some point. the problem is i really dont want to drill through the roof if i can avoid it, not because im scared of it exactly but this truck still has payments on it and i just feel weird about it. ive been looking at the lip mounts that go on the rain gutter area but the F-150 doesnt really have a traditional gutter so that complicates things. someone at the club mentioned a stake pocket mount in the bed but id be worried about the antenna being back there and the ground plane being weird. what did you end up doing on your truck or SUV, and did the location actually matter that much for everyday VHF/UHF use around town and hitting repeaters? im not doing anything exotic just local stuff and maybe the occasional simplex

Don't feel bad - we've all been there! Our local club does regular nets, tabletop exercises, and live drills every month. I suggest starting with monthly practice until it becomes second nature, then maybe every other month. The key is making it routine so your gear doesn't surprise you when you need it most.

yeah the scope thing is real, i did the same thing when i first got mine. just watching the bands for like half an hour doing nothing. my wife walked in and asked if i was actually doing anything and i had no good answer. on the audio difference — i think its partly the DSP implementation. the 7300 does a lot of processing that older analog-heavy rigs just dont do, so voices on SSB can sound a bit more processed or sterile depending on how you have the filters set. try playing with the IF filter width and the treble/bass adjustments in the menu, theres more tweakability in there than people realize at first. i eventually got it sounding closer to what im used to but it took a while finding the right combination. the receiver itself is genuinely excellent once you dial it in, dynamic range on 40m in particular is really solid for the price point.

the thermal drift thing is almost certainly your problem, yeah. crystal oscillators are really sensitive to temperature and if your PA is sitting right next to it on the same board thats gonna be your main culprit. i built a similar rig years ago and had the exact same issue until i put the oscillator in its own little shielded enclosure with some thermal insulation between it and the PA stage. some guys will actually oven the crystal but thats overkill for a QRP rig honestly. also worth checking if the crystal itself is an AT cut — those have better temp stability than some of the older surplus crystals that might be in that '78 handbook design. if its some random surplus FT-243 type crystal you pulled from a junk bin thats also gonna drift more than a modern HC-49 or whatever. separate the boards first though, thats the easy fix and probably solves most of it.

congrats on passing general! i went through this same thing about a year ago. one thing i'll add — definitely use ae7q.com like the other guy said, it shows you pending applications too so you can see if someone else is already going after the call you want before you bother applying. saved me from wasting an application cycle. also just keep in mind once you submit you kind of just have to wait and refresh obsessively for 18 days which is its own kind of torture. i got my vanity on the first try but a friend of mine had to apply like three times before he landed one because he kept picking calls that other people wanted too. if you pick something a little more obscure your odds go way up.

that warbling with nothing connected and it being sensitive to touching the coil — my first guess would be the LM386 is oscillating at a low frequency. those chips are notorious for being finicky, especially if you dont have that 10 ohm resistor and 0.047uf cap in series from pin 7 to ground. a lot of people skip that because it seems optional in the datasheet but it really isnt if you want stable gain. also check if you have any feedback path between your output and input ground, even a tiny bit of common impedance in the ground wiring can cause exactly what you're describing. try lifting the LM386 section completely and seeing if the warbling stops — if it does thats your culprit for sure.

so i finally did my first summit activation last weekend, took me forever to actually commit and just go do it. been talking about it for like two years lol. anyway i packed way too much stuff, brought the ft-818 plus a backup HT and like three different antennas and my pack was absolutely killing me by the time i got to the top. should have just brought the end fed and called it a day. managed to get my four contacts though which felt amazing honestly, one guy chased me from three states over on 40m SSB which i wasnt expecting at all. had a little trouble getting spotted on SOTAwatch at first because i forgot i had no cell signal up there and had to use APRS to self-spot which i had only half set up on the TH-D74 before i left. got it working eventually but wasted like 20 minutes messing with it on the summit which was kind of annoying when the weather was starting to look iffy. overall totally worth it, planning to do a P2P with a buddy next month if we can coordinate schedules. anyone else use APRS spotting regularly for activations or do you mostly rely on cell

yeah just use the wire you have, get it in the air and see what happens. you can always tweak it later. my first dipole was made from whatever i had laying around and it worked. just make sure your center insulator can actually handle the tension if you're pulling it between two points, that's where i screwed up my first one — the plastic cracked in the cold and the whole thing dropped in january lol

honest answer is it depends on what you want out of the hobby. for me studying for extra is what finally made antenna theory click, like i spent years just putting stuff up and hoping it worked and after going through all the transmission line stuff and impedance matching for the exam i actually understood why my tuner was doing what it was doing. so the learning was worth it even if i dont operate in the extra-only segments all that often the math looks worse than it is. most of it you can get by understanding the concepts well enough to narrow down the answers, you dont have to be able to derive everything from scratch. i used the hamstudy site and just drilled questions for maybe 3 weeks and passed fine. some of the filter stuff and the oscillator theory i still dont fully get but i know enough to recognize the right answer the privileges thing is kinda whatever on most bands but if you ever want to do any serious cw contesting the extra portions of 40 and 80 are where a lot of the action is so theres that

so we ran a simulated disaster drill with the county ARES group on saturday, pretty standard stuff — pretend the EOC needs health and welfare traffic relayed because all the cell towers are down, you know the scenario. but man, a few things went sideways that i wasnt expecting and i think its worth talking about. first thing was our net control guy had a total brain freeze on message formatting. we all practice it but when you put someone in a stressful fake scenario it just... evaporates. the ICS-213 forms we brought were the wrong version too, the county EOC had updated their forms and nobody told us. that was a fun conversation. the bigger thing though was propagation just was not cooperating. we had guys trying to hit the 2m repeater from about 12 miles out and getting into the machine just fine normally, but we'd set up in a parking lot to simulate being away from home and suddenly that extra 15 feet of elevation you get from your tower at home makes a huge difference. a couple of us ended up going simplex which worked better than expected actually. anyone else run exercises recently and find something that completely surprised them? feel like every time we do one of these i learn something i thought i already knew

JS8Call timing thing is just how it works unfortunately. the turnaround is much slower than FT8 by design because it's optimized for weak signal copy not speed, so yeah you're gonna have gaps. the normal heartbeat mode i think is like 15 seconds per transmission which sounds fast but when you're going back and forth on a conversation it adds up. there's a turbo mode that speeds it up but then you lose some of the weak signal advantage. as for PSK31, honestly it's not dead but it's pretty sparse. i still hear a few guys on 14.070 on weekends and sometimes late evenings on 40. the problem is critical mass — everyone left for FT8 and PSK31 never recovered. VARA and winlink stuff pulled away a lot of the people who wanted actual text exchange too. if you want ragchewing on a digital mode and dont mind the slower pace, JS8Call is probably your best bet right now. stick with it, find the watering holes, some guys are on there pretty regularly.

congrats on the first one, WWFF activations are a lot of fun especially when you get that first european in the log from a field site. on the log submission question — yes you generally do upload separately if the park is in both programs. WWFF has its own log upload system at wwff.co and it wants an ADIF with the WWFF reference in there. POTA goes to pota.app as you know. they dont automatically share data or anything like that so if you want credit in both programs you gotta do both uploads. some guys find this annoying but it is what it is. for spotting, the wwff.co website has its own spots page and theres also a facebook group that gets used a fair amount depending on your region. using pota.app is totally fine though and a lot of hunters watch both. i usually post to both just to get more ears on the frequency. and yeah the exchange is really casual, no formal thing like a contest. signal report, your callsign, the reference number is really all anyone needs. some hunters ask for the reference specifically so they can log it right but theres no mandatory exchange format.

did this on mine too, similar experience. one thing i'd add — when you go back in for the spectrum analyzer measurements dont be surprised if the numbers look less impressive than what you're hearing. sensitivity improvements on the low bands are weirdly hard to quantify with MDS measurements because so much of it is about how the radio handles the overall noise environment not just raw noise figure. at least thats what my elmer keeps telling me and it sort of makes sense when you think about it. also watch the solder joints around that area, the board isnt fun to work on and the pads are small. i lifted one the first time i tried a similar mod on a different radio and spent an afternoon fixing it. go slow and use flux

I've been using both for years and honestly LoTW is the gold standard if you care about awards like DXCC. Most serious DXers use it and ARRL endorses it so your confirmations actually count for awards. eQSL is more social and has a nice web interface but not all contests accept it for credit. If you're just starting out id say get on LoTW first - yeah the setup is a pain with the certificate stuff but once its done your logging program can upload automatically. I use N1MM+ and it just pushes contacts right up after each session.

so we finally did a full SET with our local ARES group and honestly it went better than i expected but also exposed some pretty embarrassing gaps that i think are worth talking about here the scenario was a major ice storm that knocked out power to about 60% of the county, repeaters on backup power, EOC activated and we needed to pass health and welfare traffic as well as logistics messages between three different served agencies. sounds manageable right well the first thing that fell apart was net control. our primary NCS operator had to drop out like 20 minutes in because of a real life thing and nobody had really practiced stepping up to that role. there was this awkward 10 minute gap where people were kind of just checking in and not sure what to do. our EC eventually jumped on HF to hold things together but it was messy second thing — and this one really got me — was that two of our operators showed up with gear that wasnt programmed for the served agency simplex frequencies. they had the repeater stuff but not the simplex fallback channels. in an actual event that could be a real problem anyway the after action review was actually really good and people were honest about what didnt work. curious if anyone else has done SET exercises and what the biggest surprises were for your group

honestly i had the same thought about FT8 like six months ago and went back to RTTY for contests and it felt way more alive even if the mode is ancient. but for weak signal js8call is the move if you want two way conversation. ran it portable with like 5 watts into a wire antenna from a state park and was still getting responses which was kind of wild. the software is a little quirky and the UI takes getting used to but its not bad once it clicks

Started with a Baofeng UV-5R myself to get acquainted with amateur radio, learned to program it using Chirp software. Later upgraded to a Yaesu FT-60R with RT Systems software - it's an older model but still rock-solid. If you go Baofeng, definitely get programming software and cable so you can easily load repeater channels instead of manual keypad programming.

yeah this is completely normal, almost everyone hits a plateau somewhere in the 12-15wpm range. what you're describing sounds like you're still processing letters individually instead of hearing words and phrases as chunks. the brain needs time to make that switch and you can't really force it. one thing that really helped me was doing head copy with actual QSO recordings instead of just the trainer. sites like lcwo.net have word training and i'd also recommend just tuning around 40m in the evenings and trying to copy real on-air stuff even if you only get half of it. the rhythm of real operators is different from a machine and it kind of unsticks things. also dont obsess over bumping the speed up, sometimes staying at a speed that feels almost too easy for a week or two and really cementing it does more than constantly pushing the ceiling. i know that sounds backwards but it worked for me. i went from stuck at 13 to comfortable at 18 in about two months once i stopped fighting it.

dont overthink it, thats my advice. i spent way too long reading about contesting before i actually tried it and then when i finally just sat down during a contest and started calling CQ or answering stations it all clicked pretty quick. you might only make 20 or 30 contacts your first time and thats totally fine, the point is learning how it flows. the pileups can be a bit wild but you dont have to chase the big DX stations right away, just work what you can hear clearly

so i passed my technician exam about three weeks ago and ive been trying to figure out what handheld to get and honestly the amount of choices is kind of paralyzing. i keep reading comparisons and then going down rabbit holes and then i end up more confused than when i started my main thing is i want to be able to hit the local repeaters and maybe eventually do some APRS stuff once i figure out what that even fully means. budget is probably around 100-150 bucks give or take. ive seen people talk about the baofeng uv-5r a lot and also the yaesu ft-65 and the wouxun stuff but i genuinely dont know if theres a meaningful difference for someone just starting out or if im overthinking this also does the stock antenna on these things actually matter that much? someone at my radio club said to just immediately replace it but idk if thats necessary right away or just a nice to have

Just upgraded to General and planning my first HF base station. Looking at the ICOM IC-7300 for about $1,000 with 100 watts HF output or the Yaesu FT-991A which does 100 watts on HF and 50 watts on 2M/70cm. The IC-7300 seems popular but it's ONLY an HF radio. Should I go for multi-band capability or stick with HF-only? Also wondering about power requirements - do I need 240V service for 100W rigs or will 120V work?

Not dumb at all! PL tone is just another way of saying CTCSS (Continuous Tone Coded Squelch System). Think of it like a key that unlocks the repeater - without the right tone, the repeater won't repeat your transmission. Each repeater uses a specific frequency like 88.5 Hz or 146.2 Hz and you'll find that info in repeater directories or on radiodashboard.com. You only need it for repeaters, not simplex. Set your radio to transmit the tone and you should be good to go.

im kind of in the same boat as you so take this with a grain of salt but i've been using an app called Morse Mania on my phone and its actually been pretty decent for just getting started. i do it on my lunch break mostly. only been at it three weeks so i cant say if itll get me to actually making contacts but at least im starting to recognize a few letters without thinking too hard about it which feels like progress the one thing i noticed is if i skip a day or two i feel like i forget stuff pretty fast so consistent short sessions seems better than doing an hour once a week or whatever

yeah what he said on the coulomb counter, way better than guessing. the other thing id add — dont overlook documentation. I know it sounds boring but having a laminated sheet with your frequencies, your ARES contact numbers, net schedules, all that stuff right in the kit means you're not fumbling around when things are actually stressful. i learned that one the hard way during a flood activation a couple years ago, couldn't remember the simplex fallback freq and my phone was dead so.

I've been tracking my QSL statistics and the direct QSL method seems to be the most effective (63% success rate so far). The second most-successful method was LOTW, although way down at 18%. In fact, this number was double the rate of eQSL (9%). Bureau delays might push more toward electronic.