James Moore

had almost the exact same situation a few years back. ended up putting up a vertical and yeah the noise went up but so did the DX contacts so i just deal with it lol. one thing that helped me a lot was adding a common mode choke right at the feedpoint — had a ton of garbage coming up the coax shield and it was making everything worse. made a ugly balun out of a few turns of coax through a couple stacked toroids and the noise dropped like 1.5 S-units. might be worth trying on your dipole too before you give up on it actually

Could be atmospheric ducting or some other weird prop mode. I dont pretend to understand all that stuff but when conditions get wonky like this its usually something meteorological going on. Try checking different times of day, sometimes you get surprised.

honestly the arduino alone is probably enough for what you're describing. i did almost exactly this a couple years ago with an uno and a 4-relay board, CI-V on my 7300 too. worked great. the web interface thing sounds cool in theory but you end up spending more time fighting the pi's wifi and the apache config or whatever than you do actually using the radio. i tried it once and gave up after a weekend. if you want a manual override just wire a rotary switch or a few pushbuttons in parallel with the relay outputs and handle it in the arduino sketch. way simpler. you can even add a small OLED to show which antenna is selected so you're not guessing. i used a SSD1306 128x64, plenty of libraries for it and it runs fine on the mega. the one thing i would say — put some protection on those relay outputs if youre switching anything with RF going through it. i killed a relay board pretty quick before i figured out the coax switch contacts were arcing a tiny bit during a transmit and feeding back weirdness through the control lines. a few TVS diodes and some ferrite on the control cable sorted it out.

i use all three but honestly LoTW is the one that matters for anything official. eQSL i kind of just have running in the background, my logging software uploads to it automatically so why not. some of the older DX guys wont do eQSL at all though so dont count on it for everything. the paper cards thing is kinda fun actually. i designed my own card through one of the online printers, came out really nice. you'd be surprised how many people still send and want paper cards, especially for certain rare contacts or if you work someone overseas. some dx peditions even send really elaborate cards. the bureau is slow, like sometimes takes a year or more for stuff to show up, but its cheap. direct is faster but you gotta send return postage or IRC coupons depending on where the other op is located

so ive been trying to get back into CW after maybe a 15 year break and things have changed a bit with my setup. picked up an old Bencher BY-1 paddle at a hamfest last month and im using it with the keyer built into my IC-7300 and something just feels off. like my dits are coming out cleaner than my dahs, or maybe the other way around, hard to tell when youre also trying to copy at the same time. i think the tension on the paddle might need adjusting but im not sure where to start. i messed with the gap a little and it helped slightly but now i feel like im squeezing too hard trying to make up for it. been practicing with the G4FON software which is great btw, but when i go to actually transmit its like my hands forget everything. anyone else gone through this coming back to CW after a long time away? wondering if its the paddle, the keyer settings, or just me being rusty

so ive been at this CW thing for about a year now and i started from basically zero. got up to 13wpm pretty quick actually, the first few months were great, every week i could feel myself improving. but now its like i hit a wall and i cant seem to push past 13 no matter what i do. my routine is pretty much just using the lcwo site for like 20-30 mins a day, doing the Koch method lessons. im on lesson 28 or so i think. i can copy most characters fine but when i try bumping the speed up to 15 or 16 the whole thing falls apart and i get frustrated and drop back down again. i know people say the jump from 5 to 20 is nonlinear and that it gets harder in the middle somewhere but man i didnt expect it to feel this discouraging. anyone else go through this plateau phase? did something specific actually help you break through it or is it just a grind it out situation

yeah i had the exact same situation when i started on linear birds, holding the arrow and trying to tune is basically a three-handed job. what finally helped me was just setting up a small folding table outside so i could at least put the laptop somewhere and not be completely juggling everything. sounds dumb but it made a real difference. also i taped a doppler cheat sheet to the table for FO-29 with the rough correction values at AOS, mid-pass, and LOS so i wasnt staring at gpredict the whole time the other thing — and this took me embarrassingly long to figure out — is that if you hear a carrier or signal in the passband that drifts opposite to what you'd expect, thats you. the inversion means your transmitted signal moves the wrong direction relative to ground-based stations which is confusing when youre monitoring your own downlink

haha yeah the bad connector thing has gotten me too. i now keep a spare pl-259 and some coax in my kit just because of stuff like that. congrats on the activation though, once you get that first one done they get way easier to plan for. i do mostly SOTA now but POTA is way more chill if you dont want to hike a mountain every time

I was in the same boat not that long ago honestly. What clicked for me was just opening DXwatch in one tab while I was on the radio and watching what showed up. After like an hour of seeing spots come in you kinda get a feel for how it works — callsign, frequency, who spotted it, sometimes a comment like "599 loud" or whatever. One thing nobody told me at first is that the spots arent always accurate. Like sometimes theyre dupes, sometimes the frequency is off by a couple kHz, sometimes its just completely wrong. So you still gotta tune around a bit even when you go to a spotted frequency. But its a huge head start compared to just scanning.

Finally got my ticket last month and looking to attend my first hamfest. There's a few coming up in my area - RARSfest, SEA-PAC, and a winter swapfest in Brighton. I've heard the flea market is where the real deals are found, but I'm not sure what to look for or what prices are reasonable. Should I bring cash? Any tips for a newcomer who doesn't want to look completely clueless walking around?

so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been doing local stuff on 2m and 70cm, some APRS, joined a couple nets. its been fun but honestly i keep hearing people talk about HF and working DX and i feel like im missing out on the whole point of ham radio kind of anyway i downloaded the question pool and started going through it and some of it makes sense but a lot of the electrical theory stuff is really tripping me up. like i get ohms law fine but when it gets into reactance and impedance matching and all that my eyes kind of glaze over. do i need to actually UNDERSTAND all of it or can i just memorize the answers and pass and then learn the rest later also whats the deal with HF privileges once you pass, do you get everything right away or is there some waiting period or additional steps. i honestly dont even know what bands i would have access to versus an Extra class

congrats on the ticket first of all. so the baofeng debate is basically endless and honestly both sides have a point. they work fine for listening and basic repeater use, the build quality is just not great and the transmit audio can be pretty mediocre. for what you're describing though, local repeaters and hiking with your brother, a uv-5r or one of the uv-82 variants would get you on the air for like 30 bucks while you figure out what you actually want. that said if you can stretch to the ft-65r you probably wont regret it. yaesu's audio is noticeably better and its just a more solid radio in hand. the vx-3r is tiny which is cool but the battery life suffers for it. dual band absolutely matters, most areas have both 2m and 70cm repeaters and you'll want access to both eventually. and yes get familiar with chirp sooner rather than later, programming these things by hand is possible but annoying, chirp makes it take like 10 minutes instead of an hour

congrats on getting that sorted, a proper NMO mount really does make a huge difference over mag mounts especially for regular daily driving. your SWR numbers sound great on the power cable routing, the main thing to watch out for is keeping it away from anything that gets hot, so exhaust components, the heater box, that kind of stuff. running near other wiring harnesses is generally fine as long as the insulation isnt damaged anywhere and youre not zip tying it so tight against a sharp edge that it could wear through over time. i like to add a little split loom anywhere the cable might rub against metal just for peace of mind. the inline fuse close to the battery is the right call, a lot of people skip that and then wonder why things go sideways

same here, been real slow. i just got my tech about 3 months ago and im still figuring out when the bands are actually open so maybe im just not timing it right. someone at my club said 40 gets better in winter? not sure if thats true

went through this exact same thing last year. the ae7q site that the other person mentioned is genuinely the only way to do this without losing your mind, i spent like two weeks confused before someone pointed me to it. i ended up getting my vanity call on the second try after someone else nabbed the first one i wanted in the lottery. just gotta keep at it

yeah the bands have definitely been all over the place. honestly after 30 years of doing this i still get surprised sometimes. the solar flux index gives you a rough idea of ionospheric conditions but its really the K and A indices that tell you if geomagnetic activity is messing things up -- high K index especially will just kill the higher bands and sometimes 40m too depending on how bad it gets. sites like spaceweather.com or even just the WWV broadcast at 18 minutes past the hour will give you those numbers. the thing nobody tells you early on is that propagation prediction software like VOACAP is actually really useful for planning, not just checking in the moment. you put in your location, target, power, antenna, and it spits out a probability chart by hour. its not perfect but it helps you figure out when to even bother pointing at a certain part of the world. the guys who always seem to work the dx arent necessarily luckier, they just know when to show up.

yeah pretty much everyone i know does exactly that — Log4OM or whatever for day to day stuff and then flip to N1MM when a contest weekend comes around. N1MM is just purpose built for contesting, the rate meter, the dupe checking, multiplier tracking, all of it is tuned for that workflow. trying to contest in Log4OM is like using a swiss army knife when you need an actual saw. for the WSJT-X thing, you can actually run both at the same time if you configure the UDP ports right. WSJT-X can broadcast to multiple listeners so Log4OM catches your everyday FT8 QSOs and N1MM gets it too if you have a contest running. takes about 20 minutes to set up once and then you kind of forget about it. i had the same problem you describe where stuff was landing in the wrong N1MM log but that was me not paying attention to which config i had loaded, not really a software bug.

ok so i've been checking into our local 2m net for about three months now and i think im starting to get the hang of it but theres one thing that still trips me up. when the net control calls for check-ins i usually just wait until i hear my call or a break and then key up, but last week a guy just started talking during a pause and the net control didnt seem to mind at all. like he just jumped right in between two other stations and gave his traffic and it was fine apparently? i asked my elmers about this and got kind of different answers. one said you should always wait to be recognized, another said it depends on the net and whether its directed or not. which honestly i kind of understand but also doesnt fully clear it up for me. what are the rules here, or is it more like unwritten stuff that varies by net? i dont want to be the guy who steps on someone or comes across as rude when i dont mean to be

i had the exact same setup on 40 for about two years before i upgraded to a fan dipole. the coax choke thing i never bothered with at first and then one day i noticed my computer was picking up my transmissions through the audio cables and someone on the net told me it was likely common mode. wound about 12 turns on a piece of PVC pipe and the problem went away, so make of that what you will. the inverted V angle probably doesnt matter much at your power levels for most contacts, ive worked europe on 100 watts with mine sitting at similar heights so dont overthink it

Stick with the hairpin match - it's the elegant solution here. Lower impedance Yagis around 30-35 ohms do offer better performance and are easily matched with a hairpin. Start with a hairpin length of about 6 inches, spaced 1 inch from the driven element center. Fine-tune by adjusting length and spacing. Much better approach than compromising the antenna design just to hit 50 ohms directly.

so ive been messing around with setting up a remote station for a few months now and finally got something resembling a working setup. running a IC-7300 at the home QTH with RemoteHams client software and its mostly fine for SSB but i started thinking about whether i could integrate an SDR into the mix for panadapter stuff while operating remote. like have the SDR running at the shack and pipe that spectrum view back to wherever im sitting with the laptop. the latency thing is killing me though. im on a decent connection at both ends, maybe 50ms round trip, and voice is usable but when i try to have the SDR waterfall updating at the same time it just gets choppy and sometimes the whole thing falls apart. wondering if anyone has actually solved this or if im just trying to do too much over one pipe. also separately - has anyone linked a remote station into an Allstar or EchoLink node? i have a 2m radio at the site too and thought maybe i could tie that in somehow but i honestly dont know if thats redundant or actually useful. feels like it might be useful for emcomm stuff but im not fully sure where im going with that idea yet.

yeah the 468 constant gets you close enough that you usually only need minor trimming, especially on the lower bands where a few inches doesnt matter as much. i built a 40m dipole a couple years ago the same way and i think i cut it maybe an inch and a half shorter total to hit where i wanted it. the inverted V does drop the feed impedance a bit compared to a flat top so sometimes people get a slightly better match at like 45 ohm-ish but honestly at 1.4:1 you're not losing sleep over that. one thing i'd suggest is put a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint if you havent already, even just a few turns of coax through a mix 31 toroid or snap on. the coax shield can radiate and mess with your pattern plus it can bring rf back into the shack on 40 where common mode is a real thing. i skipped the balun on my first build and had all kinds of weird rf in the audio on certain freqs.

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now, got a Kenwood TM-D710G in the truck and it works fine for seeing other stations and the occasional message, but my own packets dont seem to be making it to aprs.fi half the time. i can see myself occasionally but then ill go dark for like 20-30 minutes even when im driving through an area that definitely has digipeaters — i can see them beaconing on the display. im running WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path which i thought was pretty standard. smartbeaconing is on, set to something like 5mph low speed up to 60mph high speed with corner pegging turned on. the radio is set to 1200 baud which is correct for VHF APRS right. i dont have a TNC issue because i can see other traffic decoding fine on the waterfall when i hook it up to a laptop. is there some setting on the digi side that would cause it to hear me but not gate? or am i doing something dumb on my end. genuinely stumped here

honestly for just getting started and hitting repeaters the baofeng UV-5R will work fine, people give it grief but it does what it says it does at that price point. the real issue is programming it without chirp is kind of a pain and the transmit audio isnt amazing but nobody on a repeater is going to hang up on you because of it. i used one for almost a year before i upgraded and i dont regret it, taught me a lot about what i actually wanted in a radio that said if you think youre going to get serious pretty quick the FT-60 is just a better radio in every way, receiver is way cleaner, built like a tank, audio is louder and clearer. ive had mine for years and its been to places i wouldnt bring anything i cared about. worth the extra money if you can swing it

so ive had my general for about 8 months now and somebody at the club meeting last week was telling me i should just go ahead and upgrade to extra. honestly i wasnt planning on it anytime soon because i remember how much studying i had to do just to pass general and the extra exam sounds like a whole other level of pain. my main thing is i mostly do HF, some 40m and 20m SSB, occasionally i'll try to work some DX when conditions are decent. i guess my question is like... is the extra class actually worth it for what i do or is it more of a just to say you have it kind of thing. the theory stuff on the exam looks pretty brutal, all that filter design and transmission line math. i was looking at the question pool and some of it went right over my head does having extra actually open up that much more spectrum for someone who mostly hangs around the popular HF bands anyway, or am i overthinking this