Steve Anderson

The WaveTalkers YouTube series covers this exact setup really well. They have a great video on dual mode packet/VARA FM RMS gateways with digipeater sections around 37-41 minutes. Saved me hours of troubleshooting when I was getting started.

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. honestly my advice is just focus on DXCC first since its kind of the big one and the others will fill in naturally as you work more stations. WAS is actually pretty easy to knock out if you spend a few weekends on it, especially during contests when all 50 states are on. WAZ takes a bit more patience depending on your location and which zones are hard to hear from where you are. for the unconfirmed ones — if the other op isnt on LoTW you can try a traditional QSL card through the bureau or direct. some of the rarer ones respond to direct requests pretty quickly actually because they want to help people get the credit. just send an SASE or a couple dollars for return postage if its a DX station. its old school but it still works and ARRL accepts paper QSLs for DXCC credit too, you just gotta send them in for checking which has a small fee attached. 100w and a dipole is totally workable for DXCC honor roll eventually, takes longer but plenty of people have done it. propagation does a lot of the heavy lifting

had almost the exact same thing happen to my 7300 last year, different cause but same symptom. mine turned out to be one of the finals was partially blown, like it wasnt totally dead but it wasnt pulling its weight either. rig still transmitted fine, sounded ok, just low power. had to send it in because i wasnt comfortable replacing finals on that board myself, the SMD work on those things is not fun. just something to keep in mind if the bias adjustment doesnt fix it.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, got my technician and just upgraded to general last week actually. been hanging around the local club and doing some HF now and everyone just throws around all these abbreviations constantly, like QSL, QRZ, QRM, QSB and a bunch of others i cant keep track of. i know QSL is like a confirmation card thing but thats about it honestly. is there like a definitive list somewhere or do people just kind of pick these up over time? also what does 73 mean, i see that everywhere too. and someone said 88 to a lady on the air and i didnt know what that was either. feel kinda dumb asking but i figure someone here has been through this before

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, technician class, and i mostly just listen on the local repeater and occasionally check in to the weekly net. but everyone keeps throwing around these weird letter combos and abbreviations and half the time i have no clue what theyre saying. like QSL, QRM, QTH, i kind of figured out QSL means like... confirming something? but i dont really get the logic behind any of it or where it all comes from. also people sometimes say 73 at the end of conversations which i assume is like goodbye but why 73 and not just goodbye. is there some kind of master list somewhere or do you just kind of pick it up over time. sorry if this is a dumb question

My first hamfest was intimidating but everyone was super friendly. Look for the forums and exhibits too, not just the flea market. I learned more in one day than months of YouTube videos. Have fun!

Had the exact same symptoms on my TS-590S! My original power cable was a mess - crappy fuse holders and connectors resulted in a 2.4V drop at 100W, bringing supply voltage down to 11.4V and causing massive power drop-off. Made a new cable with 10mm² wire and no fuse holders - problem solved.

Don't forget spurious emissions! The FCC defines spurious emissions as frequencies outside necessary bandwidth that can be reduced without affecting transmitted information. Your rig might be clean on the fundamental but harmonics could be violating other services. Regular equipment checks are essential.

yeah the ARRL net directory is kind of hit or miss tbh. i found a net listed there a while back, tuned in for like three weeks in a row and heard nothing. turns out they'd moved frequencies and nobody updated the listing. the POTA thing the other person mentioned is great, i got into that last summer and its kind of addictive. you can even check into some of those activations if the activator sets up a contact logging session and you're hunting them — counts as a park contact on your log. not exactly a net but its a similar kind of regular on-air activity thing. just throwing it out there since you mentioned special events

i just passed mine two months ago so this is pretty fresh. i brute forced maybe 60% of it and actually tried to understand the other 40% and that felt like a decent balance. the transistor biasing questions and some of the filter rolloff stuff i just flat out memorized because i couldnt make heads or tails of the theory behind them in a reasonable amount of time. no shame in that, the exam doesnt care how you got there the extra subbands thing honestly the biggest deal for me was just having it done, like the credential felt complete if that makes sense. i dont think my actual on air experience changed dramatically the week after i passed but knowing i can operate anywhere feels good

Planning to hit my first hamfest this weekend at the local VFW hall. I've been licensed for about 8 months now (KJ4XYZ) and finally ready to check one out. What should I bring besides cash? I heard you need exact change for most vendors? Also wondering about parking - do these things get crowded early? Any must-have items a new Tech should look for?

so ive been messing around with RemoteHams for the past few weeks trying to get my home station accessible from work and honestly its going better than expected but i still have a few things driving me nuts the latency on the audio path is workable, maybe 200-250ms which is fine for SSB but trying to do any CW above like 15wpm is pretty rough, i keep getting jumbled characters because the timing just isnt consistent. i know thats kind of expected but wondering if anyone has found a way to tune the buffer settings to help with that. im running the server software on a dedicated machine with a pretty solid upstream connection, like 50mbps up so i dont think its a bandwidth issue the other thing is the SDR side of it — ive got an RTL-SDR hanging off the same machine doing panadapter duty and it works but its kind of clunky how the two interfaces interact. has anyone integrated something like SDR# or HDSDR into the RemoteHams setup cleanly, or are people mostly just using whatever comes built in also curious if anybody is running internet linking alongside this for local club repeater stuff, like IRLP or AllStar running on the same box. wondering if there'd be resource conflicts or if thats just not something people do

so i passed my general back in the spring and immediately started working on code because honestly thats the main reason i got into ham radio in the first place, the idea of CW just seemed really cool to me. started with the Koch method using lcwo.net and got up to about 13wpm pretty fast, like within the first couple months i was copying most characters okay at 13. but now im completely stuck. every time i try to push to 15 i just fall apart, miss letters, lose the whole word, then panic and miss the next three. ive been practicing maybe 20-30 minutes a day which i thought was enough but maybe not? i dont know if its a technique problem or just need more time or what. someone told me i might have hit the 'plateau' that everyone talks about. is that a real thing or just an excuse lol for context im starting to hear some of the common words as whole sounds now which i think is good? but single letters im still kind of sounding out in my head which slows me down. any advice from people who went through this would be really appreciated

yeah the inverted-V does change the impedance a bit, somewhere around 50 ohms or a touch lower depending on the included angle of the legs. if your legs are sloping pretty steeply the Z can drop noticeably. with the apex at 30 and ends at 8 feet over what kind of span horizontally? that matters a lot for figuring out the angle. if youre closer to 90 degrees between the legs you're probably still in decent shape, more like 120 degrees and the Z starts to creep up a bit. on the choke balun question, i've done both and honestly for a simple 40m dipole a few turns of coax wound through a ferrite toroid works great and its compact. i usually do 8-10 turns through a mix 31 or mix 43 core right at the feedpoint. the 1:1 choke just keeps the common mode off the feedline and it makes a real difference. you can also do the air-wound coax choke (like 8 turns in about a 6 inch diameter coil) taped right there at the center insulator and thats worked fine for me on 40 and 80. simpler to build if you dont have toroids handy.

I keep hearing about staying away from "band edges" but I'm not sure I understand why. If the FCC says 14.000-14.350 MHz is the 20m band, why can't I use 14.000 exactly? What's the technical reason behind this advice? Looking for a clear explanation of: What causes frequency driftHow sidebands workPractical operating guidelines

good writeup. one thing i'd add from doing some DXpedition operating myself (nothing as exotic as VP6, mostly caribbean stuff) is that from the DX end the pileup sounds absolutely nothing like what you'd imagine from your home station. its genuinely just a wall of noise and you're pulling out fragments and syllables, not full callsigns most of the time. so the guys who are slightly off frequency from the main blob, even just a couple hundred hz, stand out way more than they probably realize. doesnt have to be a lot. and timing matters enormously, the ops who are good at this stuff will tell you the same thing — they notice the guy who waits a beat before calling more than the guy who just hammers his call continuously through the whole exchange. also antenna makes a huge difference that people dont talk about enough. 100w into a yagi pointed right at the operation is going to do a lot better than a kilowatt into a dipole, all else being equal. i know not everyone has a beam but if youre serious about working rare DX its probably the best investment you can make, more so than chasing amplifiers.

yeah there's definitely a learning curve with this stuff, nobody explains it upfront. the Q codes go back to like telegraphy days so theres a ton of them but in practice you really only hear maybe 15-20 regularly on the air. QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural noise like static, QSB is when your signal is fading in and out, QTH is your location, QSL means confirmed or yes i received that, and QRZ means who is calling me basically. once you start hearing them in context they stick pretty fast. as for the other stuff, 73 just means best regards or goodbye basically, its the standard signoff. 88 is hugs and kisses and some people get real particular about who they say that to lol. OM means old man which sounds rude but its just what guys call each other, YL is young lady. if someones wife or girlfriend is a ham shes usually called XYL. its a whole little vocabulary honestly, just takes a few months of listening and it clicks

yeah same thing happend to me when i started, couldnt remember anything i was supposed to say. honestly the repeater guys have heard it all before so dont sweat it. i upgradd to general about 6 months after getting my tech and thats where things really got fun, you can actually talk to people farther out on HF. anyway welcome aboard

Don't give up! Circuit design is all about experimenting with methods that work for you and that you can understand. Try building it on copper clad board first to minimize parasitics. The switching waveform at the drain is critical - scope it if you can.

the inversed passband thing genuinely took me way longer than it should have to internalize so dont feel bad. i kept trying to chase my signal the wrong direction and just chasing myself out of the passband entirely lol one thing nobody told me that helped a lot — listen for a distinctive voice or CW and just watch where they are in the passband relative to where you're transmitting. if you can hear yourself at all that's the main goal for the first few passes, actual QSOs can come later. also FO-29 has a bit wider passband if you want something slightly more forgiving to practice on, though it's not always active

I'd recommend getting radio programming software and cable so you can more easily program repeater and memory channels - makes the HT much easier to use since you can simply toggle through your stored channels. Search for RT Systems (commercial, easy to use) or CHIRP (freeware, less friendly) for your specific model.

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a setup and showed me some stuff and i got hooked. i looked online and theres like a million different study guides and apps and i honestly dont know which ones are actually worth using versus just being garbage. do i need to memorize the entire question pool or is there some logic to it that makes it easier to understand? also how hard is the actual test, ive heard some people say it's super easy and others say they failed it a couple times before passing so im not sure what to expect. i think theres a local club that does testing but i havent contacted them yet

Just got my General and want to build my first emergency go-kit after reading about all the recent hurricane responses. I'm looking at the Yaesu FT-891 for HF and probably a dual-band handheld for VHF/UHF. My biggest questions are about power - should I go with LiFePO4 batteries or stick with traditional lead-acid for now? Also, what's a good compromise antenna for 20/40m that packs reasonably small? Budget is around $1500 to start.

the suffix-only thing is clutch and honestly underused. most of the serious DX ops i know do exactly that, send the suffix, listen, send full call only if they come back with a partial or a ?. you're cutting your transmission time way down which means you can try more often in the same window and you're not clogging up your own frequency slot for 5 seconds every call. the other thing that made a big difference for me was really studying the op's rhythm before i jumped in. some of them have a very predictable pattern — work someone, ID, QRZ, listen for maybe 3 seconds, then start pulling. if you can time your call to land right in that listen window you're ahead of the guys who just call continuously. continuous callers are actually the worst to compete against ironically because the op hears them as noise after a while. also if the DXpedition has a website or a cluster spot with operator names, sometimes you can look up that op's known preferences. some of them strongly favor certain parts of the split, some work by region, some are known to dig for weak signals vs just picking the strongest. that kind of meta info is worth more than another 100 watts honestly.

so i finally got my general last spring and joined the local ARES group a couple months ago. been going to the nets and doing the weekly check-ins but this weekend is apparently going to be an actual activation for a pretty big community event, like they're expecting 15,000 people at this outdoor festival and they want us to handle comms between the medical tent, parking, and the main stage area. my EC gave me a brief rundown but i think i missed some stuff and im kind of nervous about screwing something up. like do i just bring my HT and wait to be told where to go? i have a little experience with ICS from a class i took but ive never actually done this in a real deployment situation. also not sure if i should bring my own feedline and antenna stuff or if the group has that handled. any advice from people who have done this before would be really helpful