Robert Kowalski

so i finally got around to building a simple 40m dipole out of some #14 stranded wire i had laying around in the garage. cut each leg to roughly 33.5 feet, which i calculated from the old 468/f formula, and fed it with some RG-8X i had on hand. the center insulator is the part im not super confident about though. i just used a piece of scrap PVC pipe about 6 inches long and drilled holes through it to tie off the wire and attach the coax braid and center conductor. it seems sturdy enough but im wondering if there's a better way people do this or if the pvc will cause any issues long term, especially with UV exposure out here in arizona where things just kind of disintegrate if you leave them outside too long. also the SWR came out around 1.4:1 at 7.150 which honestly surprised me, i expected to have to trim more. the whole thing is kind of an inverted V shape with the apex at about 35 feet up in an oak tree and the ends coming down to about 8 feet off the ground. running it into an old TS-570 and the tuner barely has to do anything which feels like a win. anyone done anything clever for center insulators on homebrew dipoles? i see people talking about using SO-239 chassis connectors directly on the insulator which seems like a cleaner solution but also seems like it might let moisture in around the connector over time

Our club is organizing our annual swap meet and we're debating table prices. Last year we charged $20 per 8-foot table and had about 45 vendors. Some members want to raise it to $25 to cover rising hall rental costs, but others worry we'll lose vendors. The nearby city club charges $15 but their venue isn't as nice. What's everyone else seeing for table prices lately? We're in the Southeast if that matters.

General class lets you participate in HF contests and special events exclusive to General and higher licensees. The contest action is where HF really shines - you'll work more DX in a weekend contest than months of casual operation. Plus you get access to more than 83% of all amateur HF frequencies.

not dumb questions at all, everybody goes through this. the CTCSS thing trips up a lot of new folks with the baofeng/chirp combo. so basically — tone means you're transmitting a subaudible tone so the repeater opens up, and tsql means your radio will also squelch your receive side unless it hears that tone coming back. for hitting a repeater you generally only need to set the transmit tone, not tsql. if you set tsql and the repeater doesn't send a tone back (a lot of them dont) then you wont hear any output at all even if the repeater is working fine. double check in chirp that the tone column for that channel has 100.0 and the tone mode is set to Tone, not TSQL. as for the etiquette stuff — yeah there's kind of an unwritten rhythm to it. most regulars know each other and leave gaps between transmissions so others can break in if needed. for a net specifically, wait till the net control opens it up for check-ins, they usually say something like "are there any stations wishing to check in" and thats your moment. just say your callsign phonetically and wait. you'll get the hang of it real fast, the people on most local repeaters are pretty welcoming to new hams.

Good writeup! Icom's process is the most destructive - you have to carefully remove very small diode(s) from one of the boards in the radio. Yaesu's is the least destructive - you create a solder bridge across one or more open pads on one of the boards. That's why I stick with Yaesu rigs for MARS work.

I'm a new General and been hearing different phonetics on the air. Some ops use the standard NATO alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie), others use custom words like "America Boston Canada." When should I stick to NATO vs. use alternatives? Also noticed DX stations sometimes switch between different phonetic sets during the same QSO. What's the strategy behind this?

oh man the 10-12wpm wall is real, that hit me hard too. what finally broke it for me was honestly just forcing myself to not write anything down for a while. like i would sit and listen to QSOs on 40m and just try to follow the conversation in my head without a pencil in my hand. at first i caught maybe one word in ten but after a few weeks something shifted and my brain started grouping sounds into whole words instead of individual dits and dahs. the other thing that helped was setting LCWO to like 20wpm character speed with extra spacing between letters, the Farnsworth method i think its called. your brain learns the rhythm of each letter at speed but you still have time to process. it feels like cheating but it really does work. took me probably 4 more months of consistent practice after that to get comfortable around 18-19wpm. never quite cracked 20 on a cold copy but in a real QSO i do fine because context helps so much. dont give up, the plateau is just your brain rewiring itself. its happening even when it doesnt feel like it.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me, KFF reference, and honestly it was a blast. spent about 3 hours out there with my KX2 and a random wire up in a tree and made like 34 contacts which i think is more than enough to validate the reference. a few people spotted me on the parksnpeaks app and that helped a lot with the pile-up. my question is about logging — im using HAMRS on my phone for field logging but when i go to upload to the WWFF database i keep getting confused about the format. do i need to submit the ADIF somewhere specific or does it go through the same portal as POTA? i know WWFF and POTA are related but not the same thing and i keep getting them mixed up. also does the hunter who contacts me need to do anything special to log it on their end, like do they need to know the KFF reference number to get credit? also side note the whole experience of just sitting in the woods with a radio was incredible, way better than operating from home. the noise floor out there was practically nothing and i worked a station in germany on 17m which i never would have done from my HOA nightmare of a backyard

I just did my first SET last month and had the same worries. Bring extra paper, spare pencils, and don't forget your callsign book for phonetics. The experienced operators are super patient and helpful during the exercise. Once you learn the basics, practice by teaching others what YOU have learned!

rotctld on the pi is honestly not that bad once you get it set up, ive been running a similar setup for a while now. the main headache is just making sure the serial port permissions are right so gpredict can actually talk to it without sudo. theres a udev rule you can add that fixes it permanently. that said if youre already comfortable with arduino i dont see a reason to switch, just wire it up and grab one of the existing sketches and modify it. half the fun is messing with it anyway.

the waterfall addiction is real lol. i did the same thing for the first week just tuning around watching signals pop up. good radio, i've had mine since maybe 2019 and only issue i ever had was a firmware thing that got patched. make sure you're on the latest firmware if you havent already checked.

yeah qrz dxwatch has been wonky lately, probably server issues on their end. i usually keep multiple tabs open - dxwatch, dx-cluster.net, and sometimes the reverse beacon network if im looking for weak signal stuff. oh and if you use fldigi or wsjt-x they can connect directly to telnet clusters which updates way faster than any web interface

so i've been trying to get more into DX chasing lately and someone at my club mentioned using cluster spotting networks to find active stations. i downloaded a couple apps and also have QRZ open on my laptop but honestly im a little confused about how all these tools are supposed to work together. like right now i have DXwatch open in one tab showing spots coming in every few seconds, and then QRZ in another tab where i look up the callsigns to see who they are and where they're located. is that basically the workflow everyone uses or am i overcomplicating this? also i noticed some spots on DXwatch show up that are like 20-30 minutes old by the time i tune to the frequency and the station is long gone. is there a way to filter for more recent spots or should i be using a different cluster tool altogether? i tried the DX Toolkit app on my phone too but i havent figured out how to set my home grid yet so the distance/bearing stuff isnt calculating right. might just be user error on my end. anyway any advice from people who actually chase DX regularly would be great, still pretty new to all this.

Please remember Do not discuss the topics of politics, religion, or make disparaging remarks. While you and the person you are talking to may share certain beliefs, there are hundreds of other listeners that probably have differing opinions. Typically this results in hams turning off their radios and reduces group participation.

yeah that sitting and waiting thing is real and honestly it never fully goes away. i've been doing ARES stuff for going on 12 years now and you still get those long stretches where nothing is moving. the temptation is to start chatting or checking your phone or whatever but keeping that discipline on frequency is actually part of the job even when it feels like nothing is happening. sounds like your EC had things organized well. a lot of the time a smooth activation looks boring from the inside and thats exactly how its supposed to go. the messy ones where youre constantly busy usually mean something upstream isnt working right. your instinct to just stay quiet and monitor was correct, unless you were told to check in on a schedule just listen and be ready. good first activation honestly, you learned the right lesson early.

I'm trying to understand the relationship between uplink and downlink frequencies on AO-73's inverting transponder. The specs show 435.150-435.130 MHz uplink maps to 145.950-145.970 MHz downlink, but I'm having trouble visualizing where my signal appears. If I transmit LSB on 435.140 MHz, should I expect to hear my signal on 145.960 MHz USB? The inverting relationship means as you tune uplink higher, downlink decreases but the math isn't clicking for me. Running an IC-9700 and just want to make sure I understand this correctly before my first linear bird attempt. Any clarification would be appreciated!

the battery math isnt too scary if you think it through. 200ah at 12v is 2400 watt-hours theoretical, but you really shouldnt drain lifepo4 below maybe 20% so call it 1900 usable. if your average draw is say 15 amps when you factor in receive time and the laptop and everything, thats roughly 12 hours. probably close but tight. id bring at least one more battery or have the generator as backup and just run it outside around the corner with a long extension cord — most 2200 watt generators will handle that load no problem and you can stick it far enough away that it isnt right in peoples faces. on the NVIS question yeah a low 40m dipole works well for that, just make sure you're actually getting it low enough, like under 30 feet, otherwise it starts acting more like a regular dipole. some guys in our group use an end fed halfwave on a single fiberglass pole which is fast to set up and works decent for NVIS. the buddipole is fine but kind of fiddly to get tuned right under pressure during an exercise in my experience.

did the same filter about a year ago and yeah it does make a real difference, not placebo. the stock filter is fine for casual operating but once you're in a pileup or a contest environment you really start to notice where the 7300 falls short compared to a radio with a proper narrow roofing filter from the factory. the FL-5000 doesnt fully close that gap but it helps. as for the AGC mod — i looked into it pretty deep and ended up not doing it. the consensus i kept seeing was that the 7300's DSP is doing so much of the heavy lifting anyway that hardware AGC tweaks can actually introduce some weird artifacts if you don't get the time constants exactly right. i messed with the AGC settings through the menu instead and found a combination that works pretty well for SSB. theres a thread on the 7300 yahoo group from like 2019 that has a really good breakdown of the attack and decay values people have settled on.