Sarah Thomas

so i passed my general back in the spring and ive been trying to work on my CW ever since. started with the Koch method using LCWO and got up to about 13wpm receiving but i just cant seem to break through that wall. i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes i skip a day or two if work gets crazy. sending is actually not bad, i feel pretty comfortable around 10-12wpm sending but receiving anything faster than 13 just turns into mush in my head. i know people say the jump from 5 to 13 is actually the easy part and the jump to 20 is where it gets hard, and man they werent kidding. i read somewhere that you have to stop hearing individual dots and dashes and start hearing whole words as sounds, like how you recognize a word when someone says it without spelling it out. i get the concept but i dont know how to actually make my brain do that. anybody been through this and come out the other side? feels like im spinning my wheels

im kind of in the same boat as you, been licensed about a year and a half and still figuring out the cluster stuff. one thing i noticed is that the QRZ app shows spots but theres sometimes a bit of a delay compared to just watching DXwatch directly in a browser. not sure if thats a me problem or just how the app works. i started using DX toolkit on my phone which someone at a hamfest told me about and it seems a bit more realtime but honestly i flip between all of them and it gets confusing fast lol

yeah i did almost exactly this with an ic-7300 about a year ago. the band data voltage thing is straightforward enough but the timing issue you're describing is real and a simple delay fixed it for me — i think i landed on around 80ms before triggering the relay and that was enough for the rig to finish its internal switching. the pop was gone after that. not elegant but it works and the arduino doesnt care about wasting 80ms sitting there. one thing i'd warn you about with the pi zero is that linux isnt real-time so if your timing ever needs to be really tight you can get weird jitter. for antenna switching it's probably fine since youre not talking microsecond precision, but i tried to use a pi for ptt keying once and the latency was all over the place. for a web interface and monitoring though the pi is way better than trying to bolt ethernet onto an arduino. maybe keep the arduino doing the actual relay switching and have the pi just watching and logging — have them talk over serial or i2c. thats how my current setup works actually and its pretty solid.

We started doing monthly "show and tell" meetings where members bring homebrew projects or interesting gear to demo. Gets people talking and sharing knowledge naturally. Plus the new folks see what's possible in the hobby.

so i heard theres supposed to be a decent sized swap meet happening somewhere around the dayton area next month, someone at club meeting mentioned it but i spaced out and forgot to write down the details. anybody know what im talking about? i been wanting to pick up a used HF rig for a while and figured a swamp meet would be a good place to start without getting totally ripped off on ebay

ok so ive had my tech license for about 3 months now and i thought i understood the band privileges but now im second guessing myself. i was reading something online about HF and it said techs can use some HF frequencies but then someone at my club meeting said techs are basically limited to VHF and above except for a small slice of 10 meters. so which is it? and also is there like a simple version of part 97 somewhere because i tried reading the actual FCC document and it made my head hurt. i just want to make sure im not accidentally transmitting somewhere i shouldnt be, i dont want to get in trouble or step on someones QSO without knowing

had almost the exact same thing happen to my 7100 a couple years back, different radio i know but same era Icom architecture more or less. mine turned out to be a fried input protection diode right at the antenna port. cost me like $2 in parts and an hour of careful soldering. the hard part was just finding the right diode spec in the schematic. if you dont have surge protectors on your coax lines coming into the shack this is a good reminder to add them, learned that the hard way myself.

Field Day is absolutely the right place to start, you're not wrong about that at all. It's run more like a community event than a cutthroat contest — most clubs are happy to have new ops sit down and make a few contacts, and nobody's going to judge you for being slow or asking questions. I brought my nephew to one three years ago when he had just gotten his ticket and he made like 40 contacts over the weekend and was hooked after that. CQ WW is a whole different animal. The pace is relentless, especially on phone, and if you're not used to rapid-fire exchanges it can really throw you. Not saying don't try it, but maybe sit in on Field Day first, get comfortable with the rhythm of contest operating, and then take a swing at something like ARRL November Sweepstakes which is a bit more forgiving than WW in my opinion. As for SOTA — yeah it's pretty different. It's not a sprint contest, more of an ongoing program where you hike to summits and activate them. There's a points system and people chase activators from home, but the pace is totally relaxed and casual. Lots of people do both contesting and SOTA, they scratch different itches. Your FT-710 and dipole will serve you just fine for chasing SOTA activators from home if you want to dip your toe in without doing the hiking part yet.

so i've been building this direct conversion receiver for 40m over the past few weeks, based loosely on the old Neophyte design but with a few mods. got the VFO stable enough, mixer seems to be doing its thing, and i can actually hear stations now which is more than i could say two weeks ago. the problem is the audio is really muddy and there's this low frequency rumble underneath everything, like a hum almost but not 60hz exactly, closer to maybe 120 or so. i've got a simple audio amp stage after the mixer using a LM386 and i know those things are noisy but this seems worse than it should be. decoupled the power supply pins with a 250uf cap and a 0.047 going to ground and it helped a little but not enough. also getting a lot of what i think is AF feedback, when i turn the volume up past about half the whole thing kind of oscillates. i built it ugly style on a piece of copper clad and the layout is probably not great. anyone dealt with this kind of thing with the LM386, is it just a garbage chip or am i missing something obvious

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i finally started checking into the regional 2m net on thursday nights, the one that runs around 8pm local. mostly just been listening but last week i actually checked in and gave my callsign and location and it went fine, net control was super patient with me fumbling through it. my question is kind of dumb maybe but when do you actually say you have traffic vs just checking in for the roster? like i dont have anything to pass most weeks, im just checking in to be counted and practice. do i just say no traffic or is there a specific way to phrase it? also the net control asked if i was a short timer and i wasnt sure what that meant, had to look it up after. felt a little embarrassed but oh well. also on a different note, has anyone done one of those special event stations? i saw there was one coming up for some anniversary of a local club and i was wondering if its worth trying to make contact with them just to get the certificate or whatever they send out. never done that before either.

so ive been messing with Winlink Express for about three weeks now and i finally got a connection to go through last night, felt pretty good. im running an IC-7300 into a SignaLink USB and using VARA HF which after about two hours of level adjusting actually seems to work pretty well. my question is more about the gateway side of things. when i open up the channel selector it gives me this list of RMS gateways sorted by distance and signal reports and i genuinely dont understand how to pick the right one. like is closer always better? i connected to one about 200 miles away last night and it worked fine but there was one 40 miles away that kept timing out. does the propagation to the gateway matter the same way it does for regular contacts or is there something else going on with how Winlink routes stuff once it gets to the RMS end? also kind of confused about the whole Winlink vs CMS thing. i get that messages go from my radio to an RMS gateway and then somehow end up at the CMS in the cloud but what actually happens if i send an email to like a regular gmail address, does it just go out as normal email from there or is there some delay or filtering thing happening. trying to set this up for our ARES group and want to make sure i actually understand it before i try to explain it to anyone else.

same thing happened to me last weekend, was tuning around 15m and thought it was totally dead then literally 5 minutes later there was a VK station absolutely booming in. got him on the second call which never happens lol. i think the band openings can be really short sometimes, like 20-30 minutes and then its gone. i use the DX heat map on dxmaps.com now and it helps a lot for catching those windows before they close

ok so i passed my general exam about 3 weeks ago and ive been trying to figure out exactly what frequencies im allowed to use. i keep reading part 97 and honestly it just makes my head spin. like i understand theres phone and CW segments but when i try to look at the actual band plan i feel like im missing something. my main question is about 40 meters i think. i was told by someone at my club that general class cant use the full 40m phone portion and there are some restrictions but then someone else said something different and now im just confused. also is there anything special i need to know about transmitting near the band edges? i feel like ive heard people talk about keeping your signal within the band but i dont fully understand what that means practically speaking for like a SSB signal