David Williams

Yeah I was nervous about my first net too but everyone was super friendly. One tip - if the net control asks "any late or missed check-ins" at the end, thats another chance to jump in if you missed it earlier. Our local net always does that and its less pressure than trying to get in during the main roll call when everyone else is checking in

You must create an FCC account and register your SSN in CORES before the session to get your FRN. Bring photo ID, cash/check for the exam fee, and arrive 15 minutes early. The VE team is often your first face-to-face contact with hams, and their enthusiasm will rub off on you!

congrats on the first activation, 44 contacts in 20 minutes on 40m is solid especially if conditions werent great. to answer your logging question — yeah you do need to submit to wwff separately, it doesnt auto sync from pota even if the reference overlaps. you upload your adif to the wwff logbook of the world type system, i think its called the WWFF logging portal now but it changes names occasionally so just check the wwff.net site. the good news is if you have a dual reference site you can submit the same log to both programs and get credit in both, which is nice. and yes the park to park thing absolutely exists in wwff, its kind of informally called a hunter-activator contact or sometimes people just call it a p2p like in pota. it should count for both of you, at least it did when i did one a while back. some of the wwff regulars are really into tracking those specifically.

been doing emcomm stuff for probably 15 years and honestly the battery question comes up every single time. my take — start with a sealed AGM, something in the 33ah range, because they're cheap, forgiving, dumb easy to maintain, and you dont have to babysit them the same way. once you get your kit dialed in and know what your actual power consumption looks like over a 12 hour deployment then you can think about upgrading to lithium if weight is a real concern. i see guys drop 300 bucks on a fancy lifepo4 before they even know what their radio draws and then they show up to an activation without a way to charge it because they forgot the charger profile is different. for programming — definitely dont just use your everyday chirp file. make a separate go-kit specific file, put your local ARES simplex frequencies at the top, then the primary repeaters, then mutual aid stuff. label everything clearly because when things get stressful you dont want to be scrolling through 200 memories trying to find the hospital net frequency. took me way too long to figure that out.

so i've been licensed for about 6 years now and have always kind of avoided CW even though part of me really wanted to learn it. finally pulled the trigger and started doing the lcwo.net lessons a few weeks ago and im actually making some progress, up to about 8wpm copying which feels slow but whatever. anyway my question is about paddles vs a straight key. i started on a cheap straight key and its fine for practice but i keep reading that most people move to a paddle with a keyer pretty quickly. i picked up a used MFJ-564 iambic paddle at a hamfest last weekend and im trying to figure out how to even hold my hand on it correctly. like do you squeeze both sides at once for the iambic stuff or what? i watched a few youtube videos and they all seem to show something slightly different. also wondering if the keyer built into my radio (ic-7300) is decent enough or if i should be looking at a standalone keyer. dont want to spend a lot of money on this until i know i'm actually going to stick with it which feels like a fair approach i think

okay so i've been checking into our local tuesday night 2m net for a few months now and i keep second-guessing myself on the ID thing. like i know the FCC rule is every 10 minutes and at the end of a transmission, but in practice on a net it seems like people just give their call when checking in and then don't ID again unless they have traffic or something to say. the net control usually reads everyone back so i figured that counts somehow? or does it not. also had a situation last week where two people were going back and forth during the roundtable portion and neither one IDed for probably 15 or 20 minutes. nobody said anything about it. is that just how it goes or was that actually a violation or what. i dont want to be that guy who corrects people but also want to make sure im doing it right myself.

Our club is starting early prep for Field Day 2025 on June 28-29, always the fourth full weekend of June, beginning at 1800 UTC Saturday and ending at 2059 UTC Sunday. The theme this year is "Radio Connects" which should make for great public outreach opportunities. We're considering adding a GOTA station this year to get more new hams involved. Any Class A or F entry may operate one additional GOTA station on any Field Day band, HF or VHF. What's been your experience with GOTA operations? How do you staff it effectively?Best bands/modes for new operators?Any special equipment considerations?

honestly the inverted-V with ends that low is probably hurting you more than you think. the low end wires are basically coupling into the ground and you're losing a lot of the pattern advantage. if you can get the center up higher, even to 45 or 50 feet, you'd notice a real difference before you go tearing everything down for a vertical. that said your buddy isnt wrong either. a vertical with a halfway decent radial system — doesnt need to be 120 radials, somewhere around 30-40 decent length ones gets you most of the benefit — will give you low angle radiation that an inverted-V at 35 feet just cant match. for DX on 40 you really want that low angle stuff. the dipole/inverted-V tends to favor shorter skip and near-vertical incidence which is great for regional contacts but if youre trying to work europe from the midwest the vertical has a real edge there. my suggestion, run both if you can. even a simple vertical temporary install with some random radials thrown on the ground would let you do a proper A/B comparison on a real pileup and you'd have your answer in like one evening of operating

JIS screwdrivers, this is the thing nobody tells you when you first start poking around in japanese rigs. i stripped two screws on an old IC-706 before someone finally clued me in. now i wont open anything without them. i havent done the 857 specifically but i did a similar TX unlock on an older 817 and the process is pretty much the same idea. those little radios are surprisingly well built inside considering how small they are. good on you for actually doing the osc trim too, most people skip that part.

I was in the same boat not too long ago, the whole cluster ecosystem is kind of confusing at first. One thing that helped me was just installing the Ham Radio Deluxe software because it has a built in cluster window that you can filter pretty aggressively — by band, by mode, by continent, whatever. Might be overkill if youre just casually chasing dx but it changed how i use spots completely. Also there's a free web app called DX Summit that some people prefer, it's pretty clean and the band filtering is right there on the main page without having to dig around.

My output is full 100 watts PEP on SSB with average hovering around 35%, exactly where it should be with mic gain at only 5%. Don't chase the wattmeter - whatever it reads on CW carrier will be very close to peak power in SSB mode.

the stock mic that ships with most radios is honestly just ok. not terrible but not great either. the bigger thing i'd check first though is your TX bandwidth setting in the menu — on the 7300 there's a TX filter shape option and a lot of people leave it at the default which cuts off a lot of the presence frequencies that make voice sound clear and punchy. try widening it a bit and see what you get. also the speech processor on those radios is pretty sensitive, even at 4 it can start smearing the audio if your mic gain is already a touch high. i'd back the processor off to like 2 and bump mic gain up slightly and see if that cleans things up. the ALC barely moving thing is right but the interaction between processor and gain can get weird. honestly the best thing you can do is get a friend on a known good setup to give you actual audio reports on different settings, not just signal reports. S9 doesnt tell you anything about how you sound

Koch method is scientifically proven fastest - you learn characters one by one at full speed, mastering each before adding the next. I struggled with Farnsworth but Koch clicked for me after switching methods.

okay so ive been putting off learning CW for about three years now and i finally sat down and bought a cheap paddle off ebay and a MFJ keyer to go with my radio. been using the built in keyer on my IC-7300 actually but figured the external unit might give me more control over the timing. anyway my problem is the dits and dahs feel really inconsistent when i send. like sometimes a dit sounds perfect and then the next one is either way too short or gets swallowed. i have the speed set to about 12 wpm which i thought would be slower enough to feel comfortable but im still stumbling all over myself. is this a paddle tension thing? a timing adjustment on the keyer? honestly i dont even know where to start troubleshooting this. my elmer back in the day just said practice practice practice but that doesnt tell me much when i dont know if my technique is actually wrong or if something needs adjusting on the hardware side. also should i even bother with an external keyer or just stick with whats built into the 7300? not sure if that matters for a beginner.

so ive been running SSB for about two years now mostly on 40 and 20 meters and i keep getting reports that my audio is kind of muddy or boomy, one guy last week said i sounded like i was talking into a coffee can which is not exactly what you want to hear. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 which should be a decent combo right, and ive gone through the menu settings probably a dozen times at this point. current setup is TX bandwidth set to 2800 hz, i have the bass rolloff on the mic EQ cranked down but apparently not enough, and im running the compression at like 4-5 on the ALC. someone in my local club said maybe its a mic gain issue and the ALC is actually too high and thats whats causing the distortion, but honestly i dont fully understand the relationship between mic gain and ALC on this radio. i set the mic gain so the ALC is juuust barely moving and it still sounds off. anyone else gone through this with the 7300 or really any modern SDR-based transceiver where you have all these DSP options and you somehow make it sound worse than a 40 year old tube rig

"A vertical radiates equally poorly in all directions" often applies when the ground connection is lacking. If you can't lay down a spider web of radials, dipoles are often better choices. But your current setup sounds solid. What specific issues are you seeing that make you want to change?

so ive been doing contests for maybe 4 years now, mostly CQWW and sweepstakes, running single op single radio and generally putting in a decent score but nothing spectacular. a buddy of mine keeps telling me to try SO2R and honestly ive been curious but also kind of skeptical that the complexity is worth it for someone who isnt seriously trying to place top 10 in the world or whatever my current setup is an ic-7300 as the main rig and i have an old ft-950 collecting dust that i could theoretically press into service. the issue i keep running into is the bandpass filter situation — i know you basically cant run two radios without serious filtering or youre just going to have one desensing the other all day. i looked at the 4o3a stuff and the dx engineering filters and yeah the price adds up fast what im really wondering is whether the rate improvement is actually noticeable at my skill level or if SO2R only really pays off when youre already fast enough that youre sitting idle waiting for answers and need something to do with that dead air. like is there a minimum rate where it starts making sense to bother

so ive been a tech for about a year now and i keep reading about CW and how it opens up so much of the bands and people seem really passionate about it so i figured id give it a shot. problem is i have no idea where to start. like do i just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or is that totally the wrong approach? i downloaded some app but it just throws random letters at me and i cant tell if im doing it right or not. also someone told me i should learn the sounds not the patterns but i dont really understand what that means in practice. is there a specific speed i should start at or does it matter? honestly any advice would be helpful because right now i feel like im just spinning my wheels

Roof mounting consistently outperforms trunk placement - the difference in coverage is significant. I've done the same comparison on multiple vehicles and always see better performance with roof mounting. The ground plane effect is much more effective with the antenna centered on a large metal surface.

yeah the paper vs digital forms thing comes up in our group too, some of the older guys really prefer paper because it doesnt need power or wifi and thats a fair point honestly. but the tablet thing is nice when it works. i think as long as your EC is happy with what youre using its fine either way. also just want to say good on you for doing the training before jumping in. ive seen people show up to activations who barely know whats going on and it makes more work for everyone. the fact that youre already thinking about improving your programming and your ICS knowledge after one activation is a good sign.

okay so the short version is techs do get some HF but its pretty limited. on 10 meters you get phone and image from 28.300 to 28.500 MHz and thats probably the one most people actually use. for 15m you only get CW, and same deal on 40m and 80m — CW only and only in small slices of those bands. the 200 watt thing you're thinking of is real, techs are limited to 200 watts PEP on 10m phone i believe, not the full 1500. honestly just grab the actual part 97 pdf from the fcc site and ctrl+f for section 97.301 which covers authorized frequencies by class. its a lot clearer than the band charts once you sit down with it for a few minutes. the arrl chart is fine but it compresses a lot of info into a small space and can be hard to parse when you're new to this stuff

so this has been bugging me for about three weeks now. i picked up my 7300 after a lightning storm (not a direct hit, just nearby, had everything unplugged but apparently not fast enough) and ever since then the audio on transmit sounds like garbage according to everyone on the repeater and on 40m SSB. i can hear myself fine in the monitor but people are saying its like... clipped and buzzy? one guy said it sounded like i was talking through a tin can underwater which is a bit much but ok. i pulled the mic gain down thinking maybe something got fried and was now overdriving but that didnt help. tried a different mic too, same thing. RF power output looks fine on the meter, SWR is normal, receive is totally normal. just the TX audio that's messed up. my first thought was the finals but if the power output is normal would the finals even cause an audio distortion issue? or am i thinking about this wrong. wondering if something in the modulator section or maybe the DSP board took a hit. anyone dealt with something similar after a storm event?

The FCC is relying on amateurs to perform their own station evaluations, requiring only a simple statement on Form 610 with no additional paperwork from amateurs. For your setup, check the power thresholds in Table 1 of OET Bulletin 65 Supplement B first - many HF stations at 100W actually qualify for exemption depending on frequency and antenna height.

so we've got a county-level exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and i've been tasked with putting together the main field comms position. we're talking a full go-kit deployment, probably 6-8 hours of operation, mix of HF and VHF/UHF, and the site we're using has zero shore power. i've done smaller stuff before but nothing this sustained. my current thinking is to bring the Honda eu2200i and run everything off that with a battery float in parallel — basically keep a 100ah LiFePO4 topped off the whole time so if the genny craps out we dont lose comms. the radio load should be pretty manageable, running an IC-7300 on HF and a couple of 2m/70cm mobiles for the local nets, maybe 50-60 watts average with reasonable duty cycle. the antenna situation is where im still going back and forth. i was going to bring the SOTAbeams linked dipole for HF since it sets up fast and i can tune it for 40 and 80 without the analyzer, but the club also has an NVIS fan dipole specifically for the kind of short-skip distances we'd be working. the NVIS one is heavier and more of a pain to get up but honestly probably more appropriate for the actual mission. dont know if the extra setup time is worth it for a one-day exercise vs just throwing up something quick and having more time to actually operate. anyone dealt with similar tradeoffs? specifically curious about the generator/battery combo and whether the parallel float approach actually works as clean as i think it will in practice.

nice, i keep meaning to do that mod. been putting it off because my soldering iron is kind of garbage and i dont trust myself not to lift a pad. might just send it out to someone at this point