James Moore

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

yeah the menu mod is software only, theres a specific button combo at startup that unlocks the extended menu on most firmware versions. on mine it was holding the fast and lock buttons while powering on but it varies by firmware revision so you'll want to look up the exact sequence for whatever version you're running. gives you access to some of the alignment menus and a few extra display options, nothing earth shattering but its nice to have.
good call on the caps by the way. i did mine about a year ago after i noticed the audio was getting a little muddy at higher AF gain settings, turned out one of the caps in the audio section was starting to drift. these radios are old enough now that preventive recapping is just smart maintenance. did you do the internal speaker or just the PA board?

is it running hot at all? mine did something similar after a really long contest weekend and it turned out the thermal pad on one of the PA transistors had kind of shifted and it was going into thermal limiting way earlier than it should. not saying thats definitely it but worth feeling around the heatsink area after a transmission and seeing if anything seems unevenly hot.

Have you looked at the Alpha Delta DX-CC? It's an OCF that works great on 80/40/20/10 without a tuner. A bit heavier than wire but the time savings during setup make it worth it for EmComm work.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

so our ARES group has a county-level exercise coming up in about three weeks and i've been tasked with putting together a portable station that can run for 12+ hours without shore power. been doing this a while but honestly every time i set up for a long field deployment i second-guess myself on the power side.
right now i'm thinking a 100ah lithium battery with a 30a solar panel as a trickle top-off during the day, and then i have a small honda eu2200i as a backup if we really need it. the radio is an IC-7300 which draws maybe 20-22 amps at full power transmit but we're mostly going to be running 50-60% for net control stuff so probably averaging closer to 8-10 amps with receive cycles factored in.
the antenna situation is where i'm less sure. i have a buddipole that i've used a ton but i'm also thinking about just throwing up a linked dipole on a 31ft spiderpole — way simpler to tune and honestly more efficient i think. we'll mostly be on 40 and 80 for local and regional traffic, maybe some 20m if we need to reach the state EOC.
anyone done similar setups for a long exercise? my main worry is that 100ah wont be enough if we have a cloudy day and the solar doesn't contribute much. i dont want to be cranking the generator all afternoon because that draws attention and is just annoying.