Sarah Anderson

so ive been wanting to get into satellite work for a while now and finally got a setup together this weekend. im using a FT-847 for both uplink and downlink, two separate yagis (one 2m one 70cm) and i built a simple az/el mount out of some TV rotors. tracking with gpredict and it seems to be working pretty well, the antenna follows the pass okay. the issue is when i actually got on a linear transponder sat - think it was AO-73 - i could hear signals down on the downlink but my own signal sounded really weird. like there was this warbling or fluctuating thing going on and i couldnt hold a QSO for more than a few seconds without somebody telling me i was drifting all over. ive got doppler correction set up in gpredict feeding CAT to the radio but im not sure its actually working right because the shift doesnt feel right. is this a common thing when starting out or did i mess up the doppler config somewhere? i had the sat mode set to inverting linear which i think is right for AO-73. honestly not sure if the problem is the doppler correction, the antenna tracking, or something else entirely. any help appreciated

congrats on passing the tech exam, welcome to the hobby. okay so the baofeng question comes up basically every week and honestly the answer is more nuanced than either camp admits. the UV-5R will absolutely work and get you on repeaters no problem, but the programming software is kind of a pain and the build quality is what it is. if you drop it a few times you might find out the hard way. that said i started with one and used it for almost two years before upgrading. the thing i'd say is if budget is genuinely tight, get the baofeng and spend the leftover money on a better antenna like a nagoya NA-771 or something similar — you were actually right about that, a decent aftermarket antenna makes a bigger difference than people expect especially in hilly terrain. if you can swing another $100-150 though, the Yaesu FT-65R is just a noticeably better radio. menus make sense, audio is clearer, and it feels solid in your hand. thats the one i'd probably hand a new ham today. the TH-D74A is great but its honestly a lot of radio for a first HT. the APRS stuff is fun but id say get comfortable with basic VHF/UHF ops first and then decide if you want those features later. you can always add a phone-based APRS setup pretty cheaply in the meantime.

yeah the inverted V geometry definitely affects the feedpoint impedance compared to a flat top dipole, the legs being angled down compresses the radiation resistance a bit which tends to narrow the SWR bandwidth. 40m is a fairly wide band so even a well-cut flat dipole can show that kind of swing across the whole 300 kHz. your 1.4 at the bottom tells me the antenna is resonating somewhere around 7.0 or maybe slightly below — if you actually want it centered more like 7.15 you might try trimming just a little off each leg, like 2-3 inches at a time and keep checking. trimming brings resonance up. i wouldnt worry too much about 2.8:1 on the high end honestly, the 891 should handle it fine with its internal tuner and if youre mostly doing SSB in the phone portion youre probably fine as-is.

so i finally pulled the trigger on one of those QFT-90 scratch kits ive been eyeing for like two years and spent most of last weekend at the kitchen table with my soldering iron and a magnifying glass trying not to mess up the SMD components. my wife thought i had lost it completely. anyway got it all assembled and fired it up tuesday night expecting nothing and it just... worked. like immediately. i was putting out about 4 watts on 40m and made a contact with someone in ohio which doesnt sound like much but i live in vermont so that felt pretty good to me. im kind of hooked now. i never really understood the appeal of running low power before, i always just assumed more watts = more better, but theres something really satisfying about making a contact when you know youre running 5 watts or less. feels like it actually means something? i dont know how to explain it. anyone else got into kit building late and just totally fell down the rabbit hole? also curious if theres a good resource for learning more about the antenna side of things because i think my wire dipole is probably leaving a lot on the table.

yeah i went through this exact thing a couple years ago. ended up with a 5 element yagi on a short boom, think it was a WA5VJB cheapie I built myself, and honestly the gain difference over a collinear is night and day on 2m SSB when you're pointed the right direction. the key word there being pointed. if you're doing a fixed sked with someone you know where they are and its fine but just calling CQ and spinning it around by hand gets old fast. what i eventually settled on is bringing both. collinear stays up on the mast for FM and general calling, yagi comes out when i find a direction worth working. adds maybe 10 minutes to setup but you get the best of both. the elevation does help a ton but there's no substitute for real gain when you're trying to pull out a weak SSB signal 200 miles out

so ive been using a $25 RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now mostly just listening to aircraft and poking around on HF with the direct sampling mod and honestly it works way better than i expected for the price. but ive been reading a lot about the SDRplay RSP1A and wondering if the jump is actually worth it for someone who isnt doing anything super critical, just general SWL stuff and scanning the local repeaters and occasionally trying to decode some digital modes the main things i keep seeing mentioned are the dynamic range and the front end being less prone to overload which i can kind of relate to because i live pretty close to a couple FM broadcast towers and sometimes things get messy on the dongle even with a filter. but at like $110-120 for the RSP1A vs $30 for the rtl it feels like a big leap when i dont really know what im missing anyone gone from one to the other and noticed a real world difference or is it more one of those things where on paper the specs are better but in practice you cant really tell unless youre doing something specific

so ive been messing with RemoteHams for a few months now trying to get a proper remote setup going at my brother in laws place about 40 miles out. he's got way better RF environment than me, basically zero noise floor, so it makes sense to put the radio out there. running an IC-7300 and feeding it through the RemoteHams client software which honestly works better than i expected for the most part. the issue im running into is the latency when i try to link it through their internet linking side. on a good day its maybe 200ms which is fine for SSB but when it spikes — and it does spike — it gets pretty unusable. tried tweaking the buffer settings in the client but it feels like im just guessing at this point. also noticed the SDR remote feed and the actual control channel seem to get out of sync sometimes, like the audio is slightly behind where the rig actually is tuning-wise if that makes sense. anyone else dealt with this? wondering if its a QoS thing on his end or if there's something baked into how RemoteHams handles the stream prioritization. his router is just a standard ISP provided box so maybe thats the culprit. or is there a way to run a dedicated VPN tunnel and bypass some of the RemoteHams relay infrastructure for lower latency

so ive been doing CW practice for about 4 months now and i started from zero, got up to 5wpm pretty quick with the Koch method and the G4FON software. felt great at first. but now im sitting somewhere around 7-8wpm and i just cant seem to push past it no matter how much i drill. im spending maybe 30-40 minutes a day on it which i thought was enough but maybe not? the weird thing is when i copy random 5-letter groups i do okay but the second someone sends actual words or a QSO exchange my brain just locks up. like i KNOW the characters individually but stringing them together into meaning is a whole different animal. i read somewhere that you have to train your ear to hear whole words not individual letters but i dont really know how to practice that specifically. anyone been through this wall and come out the other side? would love to know what actually worked for you and roughly how long it took. im not in a huge rush but it would be nice to actually get on the air for some real CW QSOs before i lose motivation entirely

so ive had my tech license for about two years now and mostly been doing vhf/uhf stuff, some DMR, a little bit of satellite which was cool but kind of a rabbit hole. anyway my buddy keeps bugging me to get on HF with him and i figured maybe its time to actually go for the general upgrade. my question is i guess how different is the general exam from the tech? like is it way more math heavy or is it mostly just memorizing the question pool again? i remember the tech wasnt too bad but some of the electrical theory stuff tripped me up a little. also is there stuff specifically about HF operating procedures i should know or is it more just rules and regulations type questions? ive been looking at hamstudy.org which is what i used for tech, seems like they have the general pool on there too. anyone have tips or is just drilling the questions enough to pass or do you actually need to understand the material

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i enjoy the weak signal aspect of it but honestly the whole thing feels more like a logging exercise than actual operating. like yeah i worked ZL2 on 40m at 3am with -18dB and that was cool but theres no... interaction? just signal reports and 73 and done. anyway i been looking at JS8Call and it seems like it fills that gap, you can actually send text back and forth and it still works at pretty low signal levels. the tradeoff is obviously its slower and the bandwidth situation is a little different. im running an IC-7300 into a trapped vertical and my noise floor here in the suburbs is pretty bad, usually sitting around S5-S6 on 20m during the day. has anyone switched over to JS8Call as like a primary digital mode or do most people just use it alongside FT8? also curious if PSK31 is just totally dead at this point or if theres still activity somewhere. i remember when that was THE digital mode and now i never hear anyone mention it

been getting more into contesting lately and honestly i had no idea how many there were until i started keeping track. did my first CQ WW SSB last october and it was kind of overwhelming but also really fun, managed to work like 40 countries which i know isnt much but felt like a big deal to me at the time. been doing some SOTA activations on the side too which is a totally different vibe but i love getting out on a summit with a pack radio and just making contacts with people who are hunting from home. anyway Field Day is coming up and im trying to figure out if i should join a club group or just do it solo portable. i did 1E last year by myself with a wire antenna in a park and it went okay but i feel like i missed the social aspect. anyone have thoughts on that? also curious what people think about ARRL Sweepstakes, ive never done it but heard it can get pretty intense with all the section multipliers and stuff. is it worth jumping into as someone who still doesnt really have a contesting setup dialed in yet?

yeah dont do the dots and dashes chart thing, that way lies madness honestly. what you want is to learn by sound from day one so your brain associates the letter with a sound not a visual pattern. the Koch method is what most people recommend and thats basically what lcwo does — it starts you with just two characters and adds more as you get them right. the key thing is to set your code speed higher than you think you should, like 15 or 20 wpm character speed even if the overall word speed is slower, because that way youre hearing the rhythm of the letter not counting dit dit dah in your head. i used lcwo for a few months and it got me to where i could copy slow QSOs. just do like 10-15 minutes a day consistently and dont skip days, thats really the whole trick. there's also an app called Morse Mania that some guys swear by if you want something on your phone for the commute or whatever. just be patient with yourself, some letters will click right away and others will haunt you for weeks, that's just how it goes

not a dumb question at all, this stuff can be confusing because the ARRL doesnt exactly make it super obvious how it all works together. yes you can absolutely mix LoTW confirmations with paper QSL cards for the initial DXCC application, you just need 100 confirmed entities total and the cards get checked either at a convention or you can mail them in though mailing feels a little nerve wracking to me personally with irreplaceable cards. 67 confirmed already is a solid start honestly, some of those rarer ones you might have worked casually are gonna be harder to get again so dig through that shoebox sooner rather than later. for WAS vs DXCC i'd say just work everything and log it all, the bands will tell you what you're getting. some nights you'll be hearing nothing but US stations and that's WAS progress, other nights the DX is rolling in. no reason to artificially limit yourself. WAZ kind of takes care of itself once you're deep into DXCC hunting anyway.

honestly the click moment is real, it does happen. one day i was copying and i realized i had written down a whole callsign without thinking about any individual letter and it kind of surprised me. hard to say exactly when it happened though. im not a fast op by any means, maybe 15wpm on a good day, but i found that actually getting on the air helped way more than any trainer software. even just listening to slow CW nets or LCWO practice files of real qso text made a difference because real conversations have like... rhythm and context that random letter groups dont have. your brain starts to predict words and that speeds everything up

omg same, i worked my first ever european station on 10m like two weeks ago and i was shaking a little honestly. im pretty new too so reading this thread is helpful. gonna go look up that spaceweather site now