Patricia Wilson

If you have a generous radial system, the vertical can do at least as well as a dipole in many circumstances. Your 32 buried radials should be performing well. Elevated radials (4 quarter-wave wires at 8-10 feet) can match that performance with much less copper and labor, but require more mechanical support.

welcome to the hobby, just wait till you try HF and work somebody in another country for the first time, thats when it really gets you. i still remeber my first DX contact and it was just some guy in canada but i was absolutely thrilled anyway

yeah the band plan stuff can be confusing because the ARRL band plan and the actual FCC allocations are two different things. the FCC part 97 rules are the legal ones, the ARRL plan is more of a gentlemans agreement type thing. for 40 meters as a general you can use phone on 7.175 to 7.300 MHz, below that is CW territory for generals. so if you wanna do SSB stick above 7.175.
on the ID thing your club buddy is right, you only have to ID when you transmit. part 97.119 covers that. no transmission means no ID required. and for accidentally going into the wrong segment, honestly if its a one time thing and youre not causing interference the FCC isnt going to show up at your door. they have bigger fish to fry. that said try not to make a habit of it because some of the CW ops on the lower end of 40 will definitely let you know about it, not always politely either

so i decided to finally go for my technician license after hanging around a local club for a few months and everyone says just memorize the question pool but honestly im not sure thats the best way to go about it? like i bought the ARRL handbook but its way more than i need right now and i feel like im drowning in info about stuff that wont even be on the test
is there a specific study guide people actually recommend or is the free stuff online good enough. i found hamstudry.org i think it was called and did a few practice tests but my scores are all over the place, like 70% one time then 55% the next which is kind of discouraging. the actual exam is 35 questions right and you need like 26 to pass? someone at the club told me the electrical theory part trips up most new people and honestly yeah that ohms law stuff with the formulas is where im losing points i think
anyway just wondering how others approached it and roughly how long it took before feeling ready to actually sit for the exam

the workflow question is the right one to be asking honestly. a lot of guys get fixated on the hardware side and then get into the contest and have no idea what to actually do with the second radio. the basic idea everyone starts with is run on radio 1, S&P on radio 2 during the gaps. sounds simple, falls apart immediately when the run suddenly gets busy again and you're mid-QSO on R2
what helped me was just practicing the band change decisions first without worrying about rate. like getting really deliberate about knowing exactly when band conditions justify splitting attention vs when you should just be hammering the run. grayline on 40 going long while 20 is still good is an obvious case. mid-afternoon doldrums on 20 is another. but there's a feel to it that's hard to explain
also the logging software integration matters a ton — if you're not already deep into N1MM+ with all the SO2R config stuff sorted out before the contest starts you will spend the first hour messing with settings instead of operating

so ive been messing around with this idea for a couple weeks now and im not sure if im overcomplicating things. basically i have an old CDE Ham IV rotator thats still mechanically solid but the controller box has seen better days, the pot is flaky and the meter is basically useless. instead of tracking down a replacement controller or paying for one of those aftermarket units i was thinking about just building something around an arduino mega i have sitting in a drawer.
the idea is pretty straightforward, read the pot voltage with the analog input, drive the rotator motor through a relay board, and then talk to the PC over serial so i can feed it into ham radio deluxe or whatever. ive seen a few projects online that do basically this but they all seem to have slightly different approaches and some of the code looks pretty old and probably written for earlier arduino IDE versions.
has anyone actually done this and used it for serious operating, like contesting or satellite work where you really need the heading to be accurate and responsive? im a little worried about the pot noise causing jitter in the position reading and whether simple averaging in software is good enough or if i need to do something more aggressive with filtering. also not sure if the mega is even the right board for this or if something like a pi zero with a proper ADC hat would be more accurate.
any experience here would be appreciated, even if its just "dont bother it was a nightmare"

Just picked up my first dual-band HT and I'm having trouble accessing our local 2m repeater. I can hear the repeater output just fine, but when I transmit nothing comes back. The repeater directory shows it needs 141.3 Hz tone but I must be doing something wrong in the programming. Any FT-70 owners have step-by-step instructions for setting the transmit tone? I've read the manual three times and I'm still lost!

If you have a generous radial system, the vertical can do at least as well as a dipole in many circumstances. Your 32 buried radials should be performing well. Elevated radials (4 quarter-wave wires at 8-10 feet) can match that performance with much less copper and labor, but require more mechanical support.

ha, yeah the Q code thing threw me off too when i started out. the ones you'll actually hear constantly are QTH (your location), QRM (interference from other stations), QRN (static/natural noise), QSB (signal fading), QRT (shutting down, going off air), QRZ (who's calling me), and QSO which just means a contact or conversation. QSL is yeah, confirming the contact, and people also use it to mean the actual card you mail someone. once you get those down you'll cover like 90% of what comes up in normal ragchewing.
for the number stuff, 73 is just "best regards" basically, kind of like saying goodbye but friendlier. 88 is love and kisses, traditionally used toward YLs but honestly its just casual now. OM means old man which sounds rude but its just how hams refer to each other, and YL is young lady regardless of actual age. dont overthink it, you pick it up fast just from being on the air.