Karen Johnson

yeah the cooling on the 857 is pretty marginal for sustained TX. i did a fan upgrade on mine about three years ago, just sourced a 12v fan with a higher flow rate and wired it to run at lower voltage most of the time with a small resistor in line so it doesnt sound like a jet engine at idle, then direct 12v when the temp gets up there. pretty simple mod honestly and the thermal behavior is noticeably better. i also added a small heatsink to the PA module itself, theres just barely enough clearance if you keep it thin.
the preamp mod you're thinking of might be the one where you piggyback a MAR or similar MMIC on the front end, ive seen it done but never tried it myself. my stock RX on the 857 has always seemed fine for what i do so never felt the urge.

Break down information into the 10 sub-pools of questions, and flashcards are a great way to memorize. I made my own using Quizlet for the antenna types - dipole, Yagi, vertical, etc. Just making the cards helps retention.

honestly the best advice i got when i started chasing DXCC was to just work everything you hear and sort it out later. dont worry too much about strategy early on, the first 100 confirmed come faster than you think once you're actually paying attention to the pileups. LoTW confirmations have gotten a lot better over the years too, a lot of DX stations upload pretty regularly now so you might already have more confirmed than you realize if you havent checked in a while.
as for WAS and WAZ at the same time — yeah why not, a lot of contacts count toward all of them. working a station in say Wyoming for WAS might also tick off zone 3 for WAZ, its the same QSO. the ARRL mixed it all together for a reason i think. just log everything, use TQSL, and let the software tell you where you stand. i wouldnt apply for the actual award cert until youre comfortably over the minimum just in case a few confirmations fall through or something gets questioned, give yourself a little cushion.

had almost the exact same thing happen to a friends FT-991 a couple years back. turned out one of the band filter relays had actually welded itself shut from the transient and was routing signal into the wrong path entirely. transmit still worked because the TX path went around it somehow. might be worth checking the band switching relays too if the TVS stuff checks out fine, just something to keep in mind before you go too deep into the RF amp section.

yeah 20 has been doing some weird good stuff lately. i caught a zone 26 opening two weeks ago that had no business being as good as it was, running just 100w into a wire dipole and i was getting through on the first or second call most times. i think people underestimate how important the K-index is compared to the flux honestly — i've seen flux in the 180s get completely wrecked by a geomagnetic storm and then turn around and see flux in the 140s with a K of 1 and have a fantastic time. both matter but when the K goes above like 3 or 4 i basically give up on the higher bands and just park on 40.
BV9P is a nice catch btw, that one sat in my needed list for a long time. what time did you work them, i might try to get on tonight if theres any carry over from yesterday

honestly the question pool thing isnt as bad as it looks. the actual exam pulls 35 questions from specific subelements so you're not memorizing all 400+, theyre grouped and each group only contributes a set number to your test. hamstudy.org is probably the most useful free resource out there, it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those specifically. i passed after about two weeks of doing maybe 20-30 minutes a day on there.
for the electrical theory stuff, dont overthink it. a lot of people just memorize the formulas and the relationships without really understanding the underlying physics and thats totally fine for the tech exam. like you dont need to truly understand why a half wave dipole is a half wave dipole, you just need to know that it is and roughly what the feedpoint impedance is. the antenna questions are worth pushing through though because they come up a fair bit and some of them are kind of logical once you get the basic patterns down.

so the FCC allocations are what legally matter, and for general on 40m you've got SSB privileges starting at 7.175 MHz up to 7.300. the 7.125 to 7.175 segment is also general but that's phone too, though honestly a lot of that lower chunk sees heavy CW and digital traffic so you might get some dirty looks operating voice down there even if technically allowed. the band edge thing is a real concern — running right on 7.300 for example is risky because your signal has sidebands and if any of that drifts above the allocation you're technically out of band. most people just stay a few kHz inside to give themselves a cushion. 7.200 area is usually pretty active for general SSB if you just want to find a QSO

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think im finally getting somewhere but wanted to see if anyone else has gone down this rabbit hole. basically i have an old prop pitch rotator that a buddy gave me and the original controller is toast, like completely dead, so i figured instead of buying a replacement controller i'd just build one around an arduino mega since i had one sitting in a drawer.
the motor is a dc brush type so i wired up an H-bridge module, one of those cheap L298N boards, and im feeding position feedback from a 10k pot i coupled to the rotator shaft with some 3d printed gears. the analog read from the pot goes into one of the arduino's ADC pins and i'm mapping the voltage to degrees which seems to work pretty well on the bench. the part im stuck on is the software side — i want it to accept AZ/EL commands over serial so it plays nice with logging software, specifically i want to hook it into ham radio deluxe eventually but honestly even just being able to send a heading from a terminal would be enough for now.
has anyone written anything like this or know of a library that handles the rotator protocol stuff? i looked at the EA4TX interface but thats a whole separate thing i'd rather not buy if the arduino can just do it natively. also wondering if a pi would be better for this since then i could run a web interface from it and not need a pc at all to control it.

so ive been trying to learn CW for about 3 months now and i finally got myself a set of paddles (cheap Bencher clone off ebay) and a MFJ keyer to go with the radio. practiced a lot on the software and thought i was doing ok but when i actually try to use the paddle setup in real life my sending sounds like garbage. like i squeeze for a dit and get a dah, or i try to send a letter and the timing is completely off and it sounds like noise.
i think part of it is i keep accidentally squeezing both sides at the same time which sets off that iambic mode thing where it alternates dits and dahs and i dont want that. is there a way to turn off iambic mode or do i just have to practice until my fingers stop doing weird things? also my keyer speed is set around 13 wpm which i thought was reasonable but maybe thats part of the problem too
anyone else go through this phase or did i just buy the wrong setup to start

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for logging contacts and chasing DX but honestly after a while it starts feeling like youre just exchanging signal reports with robots. like there's no actual communication happening, just macros firing back and forth until you get a 73 and move on.
started messing around with JS8Call a few months back because i wanted something that could actually let me type a real sentence to somebody. the weak signal performance is still pretty solid — not quite FT8 territory but way better than PSK31 on a bad band day. my issue is that activity levels are pretty thin, especially on 40m during the day where i used to find a lot of FT8 traffic. i found a handful of regulars on the JS8Call nets but it's definitely more work to find someone to ragchew with.
curious if anyone here has done a serious comparison of the two in terms of actual on-air time. like do you find js8call worthwhile enough to keep the rig dedicated to it or do you just fire it up occasionally. also wondering how it stacks up against the old PSK31 crowd — i know PSK is basically dead in some parts of the band but there's still some activity on 20m around 14.070 if you know where to look.
not trying to start a whole FT8 is ruining ham radio debate, i actually like FT8 for what it is, just wondering if the js8call experiment is worth sticking with

I started with a Kent single paddle about 6 months ago and love it. Take it slow. Practice slow is the best advice I got. Try both single and dual lever to see which you like best - maybe visit a hamfest to test drive different models first.

honestly the thing i use most that i never expected to need is a small spiral notebook and a couple sharpies, not just regular pens. when youre outside in rain or weird conditions fine point pens skip and you look like an idiot trying to write down traffic. also zip lock bags, i have a whole stack of them in mine. sounds dumb but they save everything when it rains.
as for HF, depends what you want the kit FOR. if youre doing ARES or RACES work locally the HT and a spare battery is probably fine, but if you ever want to be self-sufficient for more than a day or if local infrastructure is down and you need to reach someone further out then yeah having some HF capability is worth it. the KX2 is a great choice for that, it doesnt add that much weight honestly. i run a KX3 in my kit and yeah it adds a bit but ive used it when repeaters were down after a bad ice storm and it was the only way i was getting through to EOC.
one more thing — dont forget a way to charge everything. usb power bank is fine but think about how youll recharge THAT if powers out for 3 days. solar panel even a cheap one is worth having somewhere in the kit or at least in the car.

Congrats on passing Tech! HamStudy.org has excellent flash cards and practice tests with explanations - I used it daily for 3 weeks. Focus heavily on antenna theory and propagation, those killed me on my first attempt.

honestly the fact that you showed up at all puts you ahead of a lot of people, dont be too hard on yourself. but yeah getting organized makes a huge difference when things get real.
for what its worth, the way i think about it is plan for 72 hours minimum without being able to recharge anything. thats kind of the standard emergency management thinking — 3 days self sufficient. your 30Ah battery is a decent start but you gotta actually measure your radio's draw at typical operating power. the 857 is not exactly known for being efficient on receive so i'd run some numbers before assuming you're set. i usually keep a small folding solar panel in my kit too just in case, even a 50 watt panel gives you something to work with.
on antennas — i keep a few options because you honestly dont know what environment you'll be in. a simple linked dipole rolled up, a magmount for the vehicle, and a small yagi for 2m if i need to hit a specific repeater that's marginal from where im at. pre-program everything you can think of, all the local repeaters, simplex calling freqs, NOAA, all of it. in a real event your brain is doing a thousand other things and muscle memory on the radio matters.
and i'd say get the one kit really solid before adding a second radio. redundancy is great but a half-finished kit with two radios is worse than one complete kit.