David Williams

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

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.

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?

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.

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 ive been putting this off for like two years but i finally dropped in a TCXO on my IC-7300 last weekend. for context i do a lot of FT8 and some WSPR beaconing and the stock oscillator drift was honestly not terrible but once you start doing long WSPR runs overnight you can see it wander a bit especially in the summer when the shack gets warm.
the mod itself isnt too bad if youre comfortable with fine pitch SMD work, theres a pads on the main board where the TCXO drops in and you pull a couple resistors. took me maybe 45 minutes with a good iron and a steady hand. used the Hy-Time part that a few people on the SDR forum were recommending. stability went from maybe plus or minus a couple hundred millihertz of drift over a few hours down to basically nothing i can measure. the reference stays rock solid now even when the temp in here swings 10 degrees.
anyway if anyones been on the fence about doing this i say go for it, just dont rush the SMD part. only thing i wish i knew beforehand is that you should recalibrate the radio after the install, took me a minute to figure out why my displayed frequency was suddenly a few hz off before i remembered id need to reset the ref.

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years now and after the storms we had last month i finally got serious about it. got a pelican case, my FT-857D, a small switching power supply, and a roll of coax. threw in a logbook and some pens. feels like im definitely missing something obvious but i cant quite put my finger on it.
the plan is mostly to be able to operate HF and maybe 2m if needed from anywhere, either running off shore power if available or off a battery. i do have a 40ah LiFePO4 i was going to toss in there. antenna situation is kind of up in the air still, was thinking just a EFHW with a 9:1 unun and some paracord to throw it up in a tree.
anyone else gone through this process? what did you end up wishing you had in the first week of actually needing it

ok so i just passed my technician exam last week and im still waiting on the FCC to process everything. the VE team said it usually takes a few days but ive been refreshing the ULS lookup like every hour lol. anyway my question is kind of two part i guess.
first part — does the sequential callsign process just happen automatically or do i need to do something? like do they just assign me whatever is next in the queue for my district or is there some form i missed. i read something about 1x2 and 2x3 formats and now im more confused than before.
second part — whats the deal with vanity calls. i know you can apply for a specific callsign but i dont really understand when you can do that. is it only after you already have a sequential one assigned first, or can you go straight for a vanity before you even get your first callsign. my uncle has been licensed since the 80s and has a really clean 1x2 call and id love something like that eventually but i dont even know if thats realistic for a new tech.
sorry if this is a dumb question, theres just a lot of conflicting stuff online and i trust you guys more than some random website that hasnt been updated since like 2009

so ive been running a diamond x50a on the roof for a while now and its always been decent on 2m but 70cm has always felt a bit weak compared to what guys at the repeater are reporting back. the coax run from the antenna down to the shack is probably around 40 feet of LMR-240, nothing crazy, goes through the attic and down the wall. connectors are all PL-259 which i know isnt ideal for 70cm but i did my best to keep the solder joints clean.
been wondering if the cable loss at 440 is just eating me alive or if theres something else going on. i tried a mag mount whip in the car and honestly the signal reports werent that different which seems weird. maybe the x50a just isnt that great on 70cm to begin with? i always assumed collinears were kind of a jack of all trades situation but maybe im expecting too much out of it.
anyone run a dedicated 70cm antenna just for that band and notice a real difference or is this kind of splitting hairs territory

yeah what he said. also worth downloading the arrl band plan pdf directly from arrl.org, thats usually the most up to date version for us allocations. just keep in mind the arrl band plan and the fcc rules arent exactly the same thing -- the arrl one is more like gentlemans agreement stuff about where certain modes hang out, the fcc part is the actual legal limit you cant cross. both matter but for different reasons

the RSP1B will absolutely feel like an upgrade over the rtl-sdr on HF, that's not even close. the direct sampling mod on the RTL dongles is kind of a hack and it shows — the noise figure is rough and the dynamic range suffers when you've got strong signals anywhere nearby. the RSP1B has proper front end filtering and better ADC dynamic range, you'll notice it almost immediately if you're doing serious HF listening.
that said, your antenna is going to matter more than the radio once you get past a certain baseline. if your feedline is lossy or your EFHW isn't tuned well you're going to hit that ceiling regardless. i'd say get the RSP1B, spend an afternoon in SDRuno which is clunky but works fine once you learn it, and then if you still feel limited look at the antenna side before blaming the radio. the HackRF comparison is kind of apples and oranges — hackrf is a transmit-capable SDR platform which is cool but its receive sensitivity is genuinely worse than the RSP1B, its a different tool for different things.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, tech class, and i thought i understood the privileges but the more i read part 97 the more confused i get. like i know i have HF privileges on 10 meters but only certain modes? and then someone at my club told me i can also operate on 15 meters with morse code but i cant find where that actually says that in the rules. also whats the deal with operating from a foreign country, my wife and i are going to mexico in the spring and i was wondering if i could bring my HT and use it there or if that completely different rules. i dont want to get in trouble with the fcc or whatever the mexican equivalent is. sorry if this is a dumb question im still figuring all this out