David Davis

is your mic gain cranked up? i know it sounds basic but i had a weird tx drop issue that turned out to be ALC clipping hard and the radio basically protecting itself. wasnt quite the same as yours but worth checking. also the 7300 has that TX inhibit function, any chance something external is triggering it?

the fan thing is just how it is with that rig, runs warmer than you'd expect for solid state. mine does the same and ive never had a heat issue but it did suprrise me at first coming from a Ten-Tec that ran cool forever. good radio though, congrats on the find from an estate sale, those are usually well kept.

Log4OM absolutely does real time UDP from WSJT-X, you dont need to do the manual import thing at all. go into WSJT-X settings under the reporting tab and set the UDP server to 127.0.0.1 and the port to 2237 which is the Log4OM default, then in Log4OM you turn on the UDP server in the settings and it just starts populating as you make contacts. took me maybe 10 minutes to set up and ive had zero problems with it for like two years. as for N1MM — your club buddy is right that its an amazing piece of software but honestly if you're not doing serious contesting its probably overkill and the learning curve is real. i use N1MM exclusively during contest weekends and Log4OM the rest of the time. best of both worlds, just export from N1MM after a contest and import into Log4OM. the ADIF export from N1MM is clean and Log4OM handles it without any weirdness in my experience.

so ive been on SSB for about a year now mostly on 40m and 20m and honestly the audio quality thing has been bugging me for a while. people keep telling me i sound muffled or like im talking through a tin can and i cant figure out if its my mic gain, the compression, or just the stock mic that came with the radio (its an IC-7300 for reference). i've messed with the TX bandwidth settings a bit and tried setting the high cut filter around 2700hz and low cut somewhere around 100hz but i honestly dont fully understand what im doing there like does anyone have a go-to set of mic gain and compression settings they actually use? i know every voice is different and every shack is different but there has to be some starting point that isnt just wild guessing. ive read a bunch of conflicting stuff online where some guy says max compression is the way to go for DX and then somebody else says any compression at all is destroying your audio. also my ALC is always pinning which i think is bad? or maybe not? idk someone told me to watch the ALC bar but didnt explain what i was actually supposed to be watching for any tips appreciated. not looking to buy a $400 heil mic right now unless thats genuinely the only answer

yeah the repeater going down drill is one of the best things they can do honestly. most ARES groups never practice simplex and then when they actually need it nobody knows their own coverage area. we did something similar about two years ago and discovered that our designated backup simplex frequency had terrible coverage from the fire station which is kind of important to know before an actual disaster right. for traffic handling the only thing that really helped me was just doing it over and over. the local NTS net runs every night and even if you only check in once or twice a week just handling a few formal messages gets you comfortable with the format. also writing fast enough to copy -- i eventually just started using a tablet and stylus because my handwriting under pressure is basically illegible. some purists dont love that but it works. the point of the exercise is to find the gaps before they matter, sounds like yours did exactly that.

yeah I use all three and have for years. LoTW is kind of the gold standard for award chasing, eQSL is more casual and has some neat artwork on the cards people design, and paper QSLs are just fun. i have a whole wall of them in my shack and some of them are genuinely beautiful pieces of paper from places like Heard Island or some tiny Pacific atoll. dont stress too much about the LoTW setup, just block out like an hour one evening and go through it. the hardest part is waiting for the ARRL to mail you the confirmation code which takes a few days. after that you just upload your log through tqsl and it handles everything. i do it after every contest weekend basically out of habit now

So i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me, been sitting on the idea for months and just never got around to it. I wasnt sure what to expect honestly, ive done a handful of SOTA activations before so i kind of knew the general drill but WWFF felt different somehow — like more relaxed? nobody was racing to a summit or anything, i just set up my little linked dipole between two trees and started calling on 40m. Got 44 contacts in about two hours which i think is enough to qualify the reference, had a few folks who specifically said they were hunting WWFF which was cool. One guy called in from somewhere in Europe which i was not expecting at all on a random Saturday afternoon with a 100w setup. The park itself was gorgeous too which i guess is kind of the whole point of the program. Anyone else doing these? feels like theres not as many activators as SOTA but the pile ups when they do happen seem really enthusiastic. thinking about doing a few more this summer at some wildlife refuges near me.

honestly my biggest breakthrough was getting a second radio for RX only so i could monitor the DX frequency while also watching the split. sounds overkill but even just using SDR# on a websdr to see the pileup visually on a waterfall changed how i understood what was happening. you can literally see the op moving and where the density is lowest. also dont underestimate what a good antenna does in a pileup vs raw power. i upgraded from a dipole to a modest 2el and it was night and day, not because i was louder necessarily but because i could actually hear the DX better and time my calls properly. half the battle is just copying what theyre doing clearly enough to respond intelligently

so i finally pulled the trigger on one of those QSX kits ive been eyeing forever and spent about three weekends getting it together. im not the best with a soldering iron but i took my time and it actually fired up on the first try which honestly shocked me. took it out to the local park yesterday with a random wire antenna thrown up in a tree and made four contacts on 40m running like 4 watts. the furthest was somewhere in ohio and im in virginia so not huge dx or anything but man it felt completely different from sitting in the shack with the big radio. anyway i guess my question is — for people who do a lot of portable QRP, whats your go-to setup for antennas? i kind of just winged it with the random wire and a 9:1 unun i had laying around and it seemed to work okay but i feel like im leaving a lot on the table. also is it worth trying to get the efficiency up on the rig itself or is the antenna always going to matter more?

so we finally got our county ARES group to do a proper simulated emergency exercise last saturday and wow there were some things that went sideways that nobody expected. the scenario was a major flooding event that took out the main EOC building so we had to operate from a mobile command trailer instead. seemed simple enough on paper. biggest thing we learned honestly was that nobody had actually tested the trailer's power setup under real load conditions. we had like four stations running plus the laptop for logging and the inverter started making a noise nobody liked about 45 minutes in. turns out the shore power connection at the trailer had a bad ground and we were essentially running half the exercise on battery backup without realizing it at first. could have been way worse. the other thing that caught us off guard was simplex coverage from the trailer location. we just assumed we'd hit the main repeater fine but the terrain between the trailer and the repeater site is way more problematic than anyone thought, we basically had a dead zone for anyone stationed at the south end of the county. had to scramble and set up a portable digipeater which worked but we werent really prepared for that to be necessary. anyway curious if other groups have had similar surprises during exercises and what changes you made afterward. we're trying to write up a proper after action report and want to make sure we're not missing anything obvious that other groups have dealt with

honestly the General exam isnt that bad, dont psych yourself out. yeah there's some electrical theory but its not like you need to derive anything from scratch, the question pool is fixed so HamStudy works great for it same as Tech. i'd say give yourself maybe 3-4 weeks if math makes you nervous but plenty of people knock it out in 2. the ohms law stuff that shows up is pretty basic, like P=IE type stuff, if you can do simple multiplication and division youre fine. as for HF privileges, General gets you a ton. you get big chunks of 40m, 20m, 15m, 10m and more, honestly most of the good DX action happens on 20m and you have full access to most of it as a General. Extra opens up a few more slices at the edges of the bands where there's sometimes less QRM but its not like youre locked out of DX as a General. i worked like 60 countries in my first year as a General before i even thought about upgrading. just go do it, the exam is the easy part lol

bring snacks and a folding chair if you can, nobody ever mentions that part lol. i showed up to my first one standing at a parking lot gate for four hours and my feet were done by noon. small thing but makes a huge difference. the radio stuff you'll figure out fast, the hardest part for me early on was remembering proper net discipline when things got even slightly busy — like fighting the urge to just key up and say something instead of waiting for net control to call on you. your EC has probably covered that in training but it hits different when it's real traffic moving

so ive been licensed about 3 years now and just kind of dabbled in HF here and there but lately ive been really getting into DX chasing and i submitted my first batch of cards to ARRL last month. got confirmed for 67 entities which honestly feels pretty good for just starting to pay attention to it. my question is about the mixed vs phone vs digital credits — like when i work a station on SSB and then later work the same entity on FT8, does that count toward my mixed total or does it only bump up my digital and phone totals separately? i thought i understood this but reading the rules again i confused myself. also does LoTW and paper QSL count the same toward the total or is one weighted differently? i feel like ive been uploading to LoTW but not everyone confirms there so im wondering if i should be sending more physical cards too. also tangentially — is WAS worth chasing at the same time or should i focus on DXCC first. im working split focus right now and feel like neither is moving fast enough lol

so ive been thinking about this a lot lately after the last CW sprint where my rate was pretty decent on radio 1 but i kept fumbling around trying to get radio 2 doing anything useful. like the theory is solid, while one radio is sending your exchange the other is hunting for a new mult or just scanning for a run frequency, but in practice my station just wasnt keeping up with my brain. part of it is probably the SO2R setup itself, im running a microHAM MK2R+ and two K3s which honestly should be plenty capable, but the interlock timing between the two rigs when theyre close in frequency is still driving me nuts. ive got bandpass filters on both but i think im still getting some bleedthrough on 40 because the antennas are not exactly ideal separation. anyway the actual question i guess is — at what point in terms of rate does SO2R actually start paying off vs just killing your focus and making you slower overall. ive read that some guys dont even bother with the second radio during a run until they drop below like 80-90/hr but that seems high to me. curious what others are actually doing

I just got my technician license in March so I'm still pretty new to all of this but I've been reading about the IC-7760 too just trying to learn what's out there. Probably way out of my budget for a while but it's fun to follow along. I didn't even know 6 meters could open up to Europe from the US, I thought that kind of thing was only on like 10 or 15 meters. Is that an Es opening or something different? My elmer mentioned sporadic E once but I still don't totally understand when to expect it or how to know when it's happening.

yeah running EchoLink and your SDR audio on the same machine is asking for trouble honestly. windows audio session management is just kind of garbage when multiple apps are competing for the same virtual devices especially if VAC is involved. ive seen VB-Audio Cable do weird things when another app briefly grabs exclusive mode on the device - it just silently drops samples and you dont notice until the stream completely falls apart. what i would try first is setting the SDRuno audio output to a dedicated physical USB audio adapter instead of routing through VAC to RemoteHams, and leave VAC only for the EchoLink path. it adds a tiny bit of latency but the streams stay isolated. also check if SDRuno or the RSPdx driver has any power management stuff on the USB port - windows will sometimes throttle USB audio under load and with an RSPdx doing wideband that port is working hard. device manager, USB root hub, uncheck allow computer to turn off this device. probably wont fix it completely but its a good first step before you start pulling the whole chain apart.

totally normal confusion, chirp labels it as Tone for transmit-only which is what you want for most repeaters. you only need to encode the tone on your TX side so the repeater opens up. the receive tone (TSQL in chirp) would be for filtering out noise on your end and most people dont bother with that unless the band is busy or there are multiple repeaters close in frequency. so just make sure the Tone column in chirp has 100.0 and the Tone Mode column says Tone and youre good. double check you saved and wrote to the radio after changing it, that gets people all the time. as for jumping into a QSO, yeah just wait for a gap between overs and then key up and say your callsign. something like just your call sign is fine, most folks on a repeater will recognize you're trying to check in. if its a roundtable going back and forth they'll usually work you in on the next pass. dont worry too much about messing up, everyone on a local repeater remembers being new.

yeah so the short answer is you really do need to correct both if you want to be serious about it, but the practical reality is most people running handheld yagis and a single radio just track the downlink and manually nudge the uplink occasionally. the linear transponder inverts the sideband so as your uplink goes up in freq your downlink comes down, which messes with people's heads at first. if you transmit USB on the uplink you receive LSB on the downlink side, just how it works with an inverting transponder. for gpredict on linux its honestly fine, ive been using it for years. the doppler tuning interface can talk directly to some rigs via hamlib which helps a lot. the tricky bit with a single radio like the 818 is you cant easily do full duplex monitoring of your own downlink while transmitting, so youre kind of flying blind on whether you're in the passband. if you can borrow or beg a second receiver even a cheap SDR dongle it changes everything. plug that into gpredict for the downlink and use the 818 for uplink and suddenly it all starts clicking into place. AO-73 scheduling is worth checking before you go out, the transponder isnt always on.

honestly i went the cheap route first with a 35ah AGM and regretted it immediately lol. thing weighs a ton and i threw my back out carrying it plus my radio case up two flights of stairs at a served agency drill. switched to a 30ah LiFePO4 and never looked back. yes its expensive upfront but your back will thank you one thing nobody told me when i was building mine — get a good Anderson Powerpole distribution block in there from the start, not an afterthought. trying to retrofit that stuff later when everything is already zip tied down is a nightmare. also label every single cable because six months from now you will not remember what goes where, trust me

Ham Study is the go-to, yeah. I'd also say dont overlook just finding a local club and asking if they do license classes, a lot of clubs run free sessions and sometimes they even cover the exam fee. plus you get to meet people which honestly is half the point. the test itself isnt bad, I think I saw one guy pass it after studying for like four days. understanding the material helps more than pure memorization in my opinion because some of the questions are worded weird and if you actually know why the answer is right it clicks faster. once you get your ticket come back and ask about the general exam, that ones a bit more involved but the path is the same really

the self spotting thing is a real issue on certain summits yeah. few options — APRS spot works great if you have a TNC or a radio that can do it, the KX2 cant do that natively but you could carry a cheap baofeng with an APRS tracker. or honestly just call CQ on 14.285 or wherever and the chasers will find you fast once somone hears you and posts to SOTAwatch. the chaser network is surprisingly active, especially on weekends. dont stress too much about the 4 QSOs, once you get one the pile usually takes care of itself. also your link dipole plan sounds solid. id bring the 20m option for sure, 40m gets weird during the middle of the day especially in summer. good luck on your first one, the first activation is kind of addictive

yeah the message traffic thing is so real, same exact problem we had when I joined our local group a few years back. what ended up working for us was doing a short 20-30 minute net on a weeknight, nothing fancy, just passing a couple of NTS-style messages around and then debriefing what went wrong. kept it low stakes and people actually started looking forward to it because the screwups were funny and you learned something. the handoff issue though — we fixed that by having the incoming NCS do a full read-back of active stations and any pending traffic before the outgoing NCS goes QRT. takes like two minutes and its saved us from confusion more than once. also helps to have someone shadow NCS during a real exercise before they do it solo, even experienced operators get flustered when theres actual simulated urgency going on. sounds like a solid first drill honestly, 14 operators showing up is nothing to sneeze at. a lot of groups struggle to get half that.

yeah good question and it confused me for a while too. the short answer is they're mostly pulling from the same underlying DX cluster network but they have their own filters and sometimes their own spot submissions so you'll get slight differences in what shows up and when. DXwatch is pretty solid for just watching whats happening, QRZ spots are kind of integrated into their whole ecosystem so if you're already using QRZ logbook it makes sense to stay there but neither one is really "better" for just finding DX. for a phone app honestly i've been using DX Toolkit on android for a couple years and it does cluster spots reasonably well, you can filter by band and mode which is huge when you're only interested in 17m or whatever. there's also Ham Radio Deluxe if you want something that ties into logging but thats overkill if you just want spots. cluster spotting from your phone while mobile is totally fine, just glance at it when you're stopped obviously haha

so ive been using the hamstudy.org site and also got the ARRL technician manual but honestly im kind of overwhelmed. theres like 400+ questions in the pool and i dont know if i should just memorize all of them or actually try to understand the material. some of the electrical stuff is going over my head a little bit, like the ohms law questions i kind of get but then theres stuff about like decibels and antenna theory that im just blanking on. has anyone taken it recently and can tell me what tends to show up more or less? i know technically any question from the pool can be on the test but some of it seems way more important than others. also is the ARRL book worth reading cover to cover or is that overkill for just passing the test

im basically in the same boat as you, started taking DXCC seriously maybe 8 months ago and yeah clublog is kind of a daily ritual now lol. the thing that helped me most was just joining a DX club because people there are constantly talking about who's uploading to LoTW and which expeditions are good for confirmations and stuff like that also just a heads up — some rarer entities take forever to get confirmed in LoTW if they ever do at all. i've got a few QSOs with stuff that probably wont ever confirm electronically so eventually i might have to go the paper QSL route for those which is kind of a whole other thing to figure out