Jennifer Liu

the simplex coverage gap thing is something I feel like almost nobody actually maps out ahead of time. everyone just kind of assumes it'll work because the math says it should, but terrain does weird things and you dont really know until you key up and listen for an answer. we had a shelter site in our county that was behind a ridge just enough to make direct simplex to the EOC basically unusable, found that out during a drill and it was pretty awkward. ended up needing a relay station which then added complexity nobody had planned for. have you guys done any actual simplex coverage testing outside of drill conditions? even just driving around and keying up from the spots you'd expect to use can save a lot of headaches later.

so ive been licensed about 4 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly on 40m and some 2m local stuff. people keep mentioning QSL cards and LoTW and eQSL and honestly im not totally sure what the difference is or if i need to be using all three of them or just pick one i went ahead and made an account on LoTW because someone at my club said thats what most people use for DXCC credit and i uploaded a few of my logs from WSJT-X but i dont really understand what happens next. like do i just wait? does the other station have to also upload and then it matches automatically? and then the physical cards — ive gotten two in the mail already which was actually pretty cool, didnt expect that. but do i need to send cards back? is there some kind of etiquette i should know about? i dont want to be rude to people without realizing it. and is eQSL totally separate from LoTW or do they talk to each other somehow sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to figure out the whole confirmation system before i get too far into logging without doing things right

so ive been running my IC-7300 for about three years now mostly for FT8 and some SSB contesting and i always had this nagging feeling the frequency stability wasnt quite where i wanted it especially when the rig first warms up. you know that first 10-15 minutes where everything drifts around a little before it settles. anyway i finally pulled the trigger and did the TCXO-15 upgrade and i gotta say the warmup drift is noticeably better. like i used to watch my dial freq creep maybe 20-30hz over the first few minutes and now its pretty much locked from the moment i key up. not sure if this matters much for FT8 since the software handles a lot of that correction but for things like WSPR where you want to be spot on it feels like a real improvement. the install itself wasnt bad, main thing is just being careful with the tiny connector and not stressing the board. took me maybe 45 minutes including the time i spent second guessing myself and looking at the service manual twice. just wondering if anyone else has done this and whether they noticed anything else change — some people say it affects phase noise slightly but i honestly cant measure that at home so i dunno.

the UDP thing between N1MM and WSJT-X biting you is usually a port conflict or you've got logging enabled in WSJT-X itself AND N1MM both trying to write the same contact, check that setting first before you blame either program. i wasted like two hours on that exact issue last winter during FT8 roundup.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and a buddy at my club keeps telling me to just jump into CQ WW this fall and see what happens. honestly the whole thing feels a little overwhelming when i look at the rules page, like theres zones and multipliers and exchange formats and i dont even know what rig settings people run for a contest like that i did Field Day with the club last june which was great, we had a really solid setup in the park and i worked maybe 40 contacts on SSB which i know isnt much but it felt like a big deal at the time. SOTA activations ive done a handful of and those feel more relaxed obviously. but a full 48 hour contest situation is just a different animal does anyone have advice on kind of easing into something like CQ WW without embarrassing yourself or stepping on people constantly. also not sure if i should try SSB or try CW, my code is slow but im working on it. any thoughts welcome

DX Summit is another good one, its been around forever and the interface is pretty basic but it works. i actually prefer it to dxwatch sometimes just because its less cluttered. you can filter by band and by spotter continent which is actually really useful if you want to see spots from stations closer to your region since those are more likely to be signals you can actually hear. the app thing is hit or miss honestly. i tried a few and ended up just bookmarking the mobile versions of the websites instead, less stuff to install and they work fine.

First thing I had to deal with was a desk. I almost bought one of those cheap particle board computer desks but my husband talked me out of it, which was the right call. We ended up finding a solid-core door at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore for twelve dollars. Threw some basic metal legs on it and now I have a desk that's about 30 inches deep and six feet wide. That depth is something I did not know I needed until I had it. There's actually room to spread out the manual, have the radio, a notepad, and a cup of coffee without everything feeling like a Jenga tower. The radio I'm running right now is an IC-7300. I know, I know, everyone has one, but there's a reason for that — it's just a really solid starter HF radio and it doesn't require a ton of external gear to get on the air. Mine came used from a local club member who was upgrading, and I got it in great shape for a fair price. I've had it about four months and I'm still honestly learning what all the menus do. The built-in tuner is handy but it has limits, and I've been debating whether I need an external tuner depending on how my antenna situation evolves. Speaking of which, the antenna feed comes in through a hole I drilled in the exterior wall, which felt terrifying to do but was actually fine. I've got a bulkhead PL-259 connector mounted there with a little weatherproofing around the outside. Right now I'm running a used LDG Z-11 Pro II autotuner between the feedline and the radio, mostly because my end-fed wire out back is not exactly resonant on everything and the IC-7300's internal tuner sometimes won't commit to a match on 40 meters with the way I have things set up. The LDG handles it without drama. Power supply is a Powerwerx SS-30DV. I did a lot of reading before buying one and the main advice I kept seeing was don't cheap out on the power supply. So I didn't. It's quiet, it's clean, no RF noise issues so far. It sits on a small shelf I put together out of some leftover lumber, off to the right side of the desk where I don't have to look at it but can easily reach the knobs. Cable management is where things get real embarrassing real fast. I have a partial solution involving velcro ties and a surge strip mounted to the back of the desk, but there's still kind of a nest of coax and USB cables behind the radio that I try not to look at directly. The USB goes to my laptop for logging and digital modes. I use for contesting when I get brave enough, and WSJT-X for FT8, which was the first digital mode I tried and the one that made me understand why people talk about it constantly. It's genuinely wild to work stations in Europe at two in the morning with like 30 watts. Microphone situation is still evolving. The radio came with the HM-219 hand mic, which is fine, it works. But I picked up a used Heil PR-781 desktop mic at a hamfest a few weeks ago and I've been slowly figuring out how to get my audio set up the way I want it. I've gotten some good signal reports and some reports that I sounded "a little bassy" which I'm still tweaking. Audio is one of those things I didn't realize would have so much to it. There's a whole world of mic gain settings, speech compression levels, and passband adjustments that I'm just beginning to understand. One thing I did that I'm really glad about was buying a small label maker and labeling all my connectors and cables. Sounds incredibly boring but the first time I had to trace something at 11pm I was very grateful to past-me. Each cable coming into the back of the radio has a little label. Each outlet on the surge strip is labeled. It took about twenty minutes and it has saved me time and frustration multiple times already. Grounding is my current obsession and honestly my current anxiety. I've run a short ground wire from the radio chassis to a dedicated ground rod I had put in outside the shack wall, and there's a bulkhead panel where the feedline comes in that has its own connection to the same rod. But I've been reading more about station grounding and bonding and I'm starting to think I need to do a bit more work there. The stuff about RF ground versus safety ground and how they're different things — I'm still wrapping my head around it. It's one of those topics where you think you understand it and then you read more and realize you only understood part of it. I've also got a small whiteboard on the wall where I jot down frequencies, things I want to try, reminders about contests coming up. Low tech but it's been useful. There's a clock next to it set to UTC because I spent the first two months being confused about time zones and logging and I decided a dedicated UTC clock was just worth having. The shack is still not done, maybe it never will be, and that's kind of how I've come to think about it. Every time I get one thing sorted out I find three more things I want to improve or change or add. But compared to the kitchen table situation this feels like a legitimate station, and when I sit down and turn the radio on and start spinning the dial, it feels like the right kind of hobby. If you're setting up your own first shack and want to swap notes, I'd genuinely love to hear what you're doing. I'm figuring this all out as I go and other people's practical experience has been way more useful to me than any single guide or manual.

honestly same boat as you like 2 years ago. i'll just say dont give up around the 10wpm mark because i quit for like 4 months and when i came back i had to start almost over. real code on the air helped me more than any software, even if i only got maybe 60% of a qso i kept at it. W1AW practice broadcasts too if you havent tried those, they have sessions at different speeds and you can find recordings online.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year and a half now and honestly its kind of become background noise at this point, just let WSJT-X run and collect grid squares whatever. but a buddy of mine at the club keeps going on about JS8Call and how its more useful for actual communication not just the exchange thing FT8 does. my question is whether its actually worth learning another piece of software and another mode or if im just going to end up with a half-configured setup that i never use. i already have PSK31 sitting there that i rarely touch since FT8 kind of ate everything. what are people actually doing with JS8Call in practice, like is there a real community on there or is it mostly empty freqs and tumbleweeds running an IC-7300 into a linked dipole setup, not doing anything exotic, just trying to figure out if this is worth my time before i go down another rabbit hole

so i built a crystal radio about two years ago when i first got into this hobby and it actually worked pretty well, pulled in a couple AM stations with just a long wire out the window. figured since that went okay i'd try something more ambitious and started working on a superhet receiver from a design i found in an old ARRL handbook from like 1978 or so. im using a 455khz IF strip and the first IF transformer i wound myself on a torroid which probably wasnt the smartest move to start with but here we are. anyway the thing sort of works — i can hear something on 40m but theres this constant birdie around 7.1 that i cant seem to get rid of no matter what. shielded the IF can, tried moving the oscillator section further from the mixer, even wrapped the whole board in foil for a test and it's still there. my gut says its oscillator radiation getting back into the antenna input but honestly i dont really know enough yet to diagnose this properly. has anyone gone through something similar building their first superhet from scratch? starting to wonder if i should've just bought a kit instead of rolling my own completely.

so i've been putting this off for like two years and finally just sat down and studied for a couple weeks and went and did it. passed with a 32/35 which i was pretty happy with. dont have a radio yet, just a baofeng on the way from amazon which i know everyone has opinions about but its what i can afford right now. anyway just wanted to say hi, been lurking here for a while reading old threads and you guys have been really helpful without even knowing it. hoping to get my first QSO on a local repeater once the thing shows up. any tips for like, what to actually say the first time you key up? i know the basics from studying but actually doing it feels different

yeah i was pretty much in the same boat last year. what helped me was just picking one net and sticking with it long enough to actually know the net control and the regulars, once you do that it feels way less like a formality and more like actually talking to people you know. the tuesday night 2m net i do has turned into kind of a social thing at this point, same handful of guys every week. the special event stations are fun but dont stress about missing them, there's always another one. i worked a lighthouse one last august and the operator on the other end was super chill about giving me the details for the QSL card. most of those ops are happy to slow down for newer folks.

Honestly the FT-60 is worth stretching the budget for if you can swing it. I've had mine for like seven years and the thing is a tank, dropped it off a tailgate onto asphalt and it still works fine. The receiver is noticeably better than the cheap chinese radios, and when you're trying to hit a repeater that's marginal or pull in a weak signal it actually makes a difference. The menu system also makes sense as a human being which is more than I can say for some of these other radios. That said if $80 is really the limit the UV-5R will absolutely get you on the air and let you figure out what you actually want. A lot of people start there and its fine. Just don't expect the audio or the front end to be stellar. Either way you're going to have fun, welcome to the hobby.

so ive had my tech license for about 2 years now and mostly been doing VHF/UHF stuff, some local repeaters, a little APRS. but ive been hearing people talk about HF and honestly it sounds way more interesting. i figure i should just go ahead and get my General already. my question is i guess how hard is the exam compared to Technician? i remember the tech exam being pretty straightforward but some people are telling me General has a lot more math and electrical theory stuff and that kind of thing makes my eyes glaze over. i dont have an engineering background or anything like that. i work in landscaping lol. also is there a particular study method that works or should i just grind the question pool? i downloaded HamStudy already and been messing with it but im not sure if thats enough or if i should get a book too. any advice appreciated, just dont want to walk into the exam and embarrass myself

yeah what he said about the speaker mic is real, that was a thing i learned the hard way at a bike race a few years back lol. also bring snacks and water for yourself, i always forget and end up standing there for 3 hours running on fumes. the served agency folks sometimes have food but dont count on it and just a heads up, sometimes these events run long or the schedule shifts and you end up staying an extra hour or so. not saying it will happen but worth having a plan for