Jessica Davis

congrats on the ticket first of all. so the short answer is yeah there IS a real difference in receive quality and durability, its not just snobbery. the front end on the cheaper Baofengs can get overloaded pretty easily if you're near any strong signals, and in a busy RF environment that can be annoying. that said if you're just hitting a local repeater from your car or your backyard it probably wont matter much in day to day use. the FT-65 is a solid choice for a first radio honestly, its not complicated, it feels like a proper radio in your hand, and Yaesu has been making HTs for a long time. CHIRP works with both of them though i seem to recall the Baofeng being a bit more finicky depending on the cable you get — lots of counterfeit cables floating around for those. whatever you end up with, get the genuine programming cable from a reputable place or youll spend a frustrating evening wondering why your computer doesnt see it. the other thing id say is dont agonize too much, just get something and get on the air. you can always grab a second radio later once you know what you actually want.

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 with the direct sampling mod for a while now, mostly just listening to HF, some shortwave utility stuff, checking out the 40m band when im not on the air. it works ok but the dynamic range is pretty rough when there's a strong local AM broadcast station a few hundred kHz away and it just kind of blobs out everything near it. been looking at the RSP1A as an upgrade, the 14-bit ADC and better front end filtering sounds like it would help a lot with that. but im also wondering if i should just save up more and look at the HackRF instead even though i know that's more of a transmit-capable thing and not really optimized for receive. i mostly just want cleaner HF reception, some medium wave DX on nights when the band's good, maybe decode some digimodes off the air passively. anybody gone from RTL-SDR to RSP1A and actually noticed a real difference in a noisy RF environment? my QTH is suburban so there's a fair amount of crud on the lower bands. running SDR# right now but ive been messing with SDRuno a bit since that's what the RSP stuff uses natively.

been listening more lately and seems like some guys use alpha bravo charlie for everything while others never bother. my call has some tricky letters in it and im never sure if i should spell it out phonetically or just say it normal. what do you all do?

I've been running FT8 on my IC-718 at 100W but keep getting reports that my signal is 'wide' from other ops. The PSK Reporter shows my signal spreading well beyond the standard FT8 bandwidth, and I suspect I'm overdriving the PA causing IMD issues. I've heard that keeping power below 50W helps maintain linearity, but I'm not sure about the proper interface level settings. What's the best practice for setting drive levels? Should I be monitoring IMD values, and what's considered acceptable for FT8 decoding?

i switched from ft8 to js8call for basically the same reason and yeah i like it a lot more but the activity thing is real, some days on 20m i'll sit there for an hour and maybe get two or three responses. 40m evenings are better. if you want guaranteed contacts ft8 is still king but if you want to actually talk to someone js8 is worth learning

had almost the exact same issue with a regen i built, turns out my filter toroids were wound so loosely the coupling between turns was doing weird stuff. i ended up just buying a pre-wound filter kit because i got frustrated but probably not the answer you want lol. the shielding thing is real though, even a altoids tin over the mixer section helped mine a lot. good luck with it, these things are annoyingly finicky but when they finally work its pretty satisfying

not a dumb question at all, everyone goes through this. so the Q codes actually go way back to like maritime and telegraph days, they were designed so operators could communicate across language barriers since the codes mean the same thing regardless of what language you speak. QRM is interference from other stations, like man-made noise, whereas QRN is natural static like from a thunderstorm. QSB is when your signal is fading in and out, which happens a lot on HF. there's a ton of them and yeah there are lists all over the place, the ARRL website has one and honestly just googling QCode list will get you there fast. 73 is not actually a Q code, its just an old telegraph abbreviation that stuck around. it means best regards basically. some people say 88 which means love and kisses but thats usually reserved for close friends or a spouse. 72 is a thing in QRP circles too.

yeah dayton is worth the drive at least once if you havent gone, i went a few years back and just wandered the flea market for like 3 hours, picked up an old hf rig for cheap that needed some work but that was half the fun. our club does a hamfest every october, nothing huge but usually a decent turnout and the tailgating is where the real deals are tbh. check the arrl website they have a hamfest finder that actually gets updated pretty regularly, that how i find most of the smaller ones near me

your take on the hackrf is mostly right for receive-only use. its fine but the noise figure isnt anything special and for just listening theres no real reason to pay that premium. where it shines is if you get into anything that needs wideband TX, portapack stuff, signal replay, that kind of thing. for HF DX listening its overkill in the wrong direction lol i jumped from rtl dongle to the RSP1C about two years ago and didnt regret it but i also did my antenna work first so hard to say exactly how much was the radio vs the antenna

Here's the typical flow: arrive 15 minutes early, check in with VEs, fill out Form 605, take exam (usually 45 minutes max), then wait while they grade it. Results are transmitted to FCC within 1-2 business days for weekend sessions. Most sessions are very relaxed - the VEs want you to succeed!

honestly the SO2R rabbit hole is real and it will eat your weekends before you ever use it in a contest. i went through this about 4 years ago and what i found was that my single radio discipline was the bigger problem — i was losing way more time to inefficient band changes and not having a second radio wasnt really the issue. what actually helped me more was just getting serious about run strategy. if youre losing a run freq, the trick is to have your second VFO already parked on a fallback spot before you need it — you should basically never be searching blind when a freq dies. and on the mult side, keeping a separate window with a cluster filtered to new mults only so you can pounce fast without breaking rhythm. that said once my operating was tighter i did eventually build out SO2R with a pair of K3s and an antenna switch matrix and yeah it does add QSOs, probably 15-20% for me in CQWW. but the bandpass filter situation is non-trivial, especially if your antennas are close together. i run Dunestar 600 filters and still had to do a lot of placement work to get the intermod down to acceptable levels. if your antennas are on the same tower youre going to feel that pain hard.

34 entities already and you didnt even know you were chasing it - thats honestly how most people start lol. i was the same way, looked at my log one day and realized i was halfway to 100 without really trying. one thing i'd add is dont sleep on LoTW confirmations from contacts you made a while back. sometimes people upload logs months or even years later and suddenly youve got new confirmations sitting there. worth checking in every so often even on old contacts. also club log is worth setting up if you havent already, a lot of dx expeditions use it for their online log checking and OQRS which is how you request QSL cards from them directly. the card vs LoTW thing is its own whole discussion but for chasing DXCC credits most people do a mix of both now

haha yeah my first activation i brought like 15 pounds of stuff and used maybe 3 of it. took a few trips to figure out what i actually needed vs what i thought i needed. now i basically just do the kx3, a 40m EFHW on a 20 foot mast and thats honestly it for most summits. the shoelace thing is a classic move by the way, ive done it twice

S2S on your first activation thats awesome. i did my first one like 3 years ago and totally fumbled the exchange because i wasnt ready for how fast the chasers come in. the counterpoise thing is real, i just clip mine to a tent stake now, way easier than finding a rock every time. what antenna setup were you running exactly, just curious if it was an end fed or something else

so ive been running Log4OM for general shack logging for maybe two years now and honestly i like it a lot, the QSO management and the clublog integration works pretty well for me. but every time contest season rolls around i end up installing N1MM on a separate machine because thats just what everyone else seems to be running for things like SS or CQWW and i want to make sure the exchange stuff is working right without having to be the weird guy on the network who cant sync rates properly. anyway the thing thats starting to annoy me is that i also run WSJT-X pretty regularly, mostly FT8 on 40 and sometimes 60 when the band is doing something interesting, and getting WSJT-X to play nice with Log4OM over UDP is mostly fine but i feel like ive got three different programs doing three different jobs and none of them talk to each other as cleanly as id like. like the dupe checking across both logs is kind of a mess when i switch modes. does anyone actually use N1MM as their daily logger too or is it really just a contest thing in your shack. im wondering if theres a cleaner way to handle this or if everyone just kind of accepts the multi-software situation

so i finally got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been listening to the local 2m net every tuesday night trying to figure out how it all works before i actually try to check in. i think i understand the basic idea but there's a few things that are still tripping me up. like when the net control calls for check-ins, do i just say my callsign once or do i say it twice? i've heard people do both and i dont want to step on anyone or do something embarrassing. also is there some specific format i should use or do i just say my call and my name or what? one guy last week said his callsign, his name, and his location but someone else just said their callsign and nothing else. i couldnt figure out if that second person was someone the net control already knew or if that's just how some people do it. also i'm a little nervous about accidentally transmitting while someone else is talking. i have a baofeng (i know i know) and sometimes theres a delay before i can tell if the frequency is clear. any advice for a new guy trying not to make a fool of himself on his first check-in would be great

for what its worth the linked dipole vs fan dipole thing kind of depends on how much your feedline run is and how picky your tuner is going to be. i ran a fan cut for 40/80 last summer for a SOTA thing, totally different context i know, but once you get the element lengths trimmed out it really does just work. the only pain was the drooping elements catching on stuff during setup in the dark. one thing nobody talks about enough for generator setups is RF getting into the generator itself or the grounding situation. we had weird noise on 40m at one exercise traced back to the generator frame not being bonded to the station ground at all. threw in a single stake and a short run of #12 and it mostly went away. might be worth thinking about ahead of time rather than troubleshooting it at 0300 during the exercise.

congrats on the first activation, thats always a good feeling when it clicks. on the reference question -- yeah you want the exact format from the database, like W4T/SU-001 with the slash and leading zeros on the number. the log submission on SOTA Reflector and the main database doesnt really auto-correct it, if you get it slightly wrong it can cause the points to not associate properly. worth double checking before you submit if you havent already, just pull up the summit page and copy paste the reference directly. for the partial callsign -- honestly just leave it out. i know it stings a little but logging an incomplete call can cause headaches for the chaser if they go to claim their points and the suffix doesnt match up right. happens to everyone at some point, especially if theyre calling while youre already partway through a pile. if you caught enough to recognize the call you could always post on the reflector asking if anyone chased you that day and worked it out that way, sometimes chasers check those posts. and dont feel bad about the easy hike, some of the best SOTA experiences ive had were on quick accessible summits. the hard ones are fun too but theres nothing wrong with building confidence on the shorter ones first.

Oh man, everyone freezes the first time, seriously dont beat yourself up about it. I remember my first check-in I said my callsign backwards somehow and then just dead-keyed for like two full seconds before I said anything. The net control guy still teases me about it years later. Most voice nets around here follow a pretty similar pattern — when NCS calls for check-ins you just say your callsign phonetically, maybe your name and location depending on what the net asks for, and then say whether you have traffic or announcements. If you dont have anything just say "no traffic" and thats totally fine. Checking in with nothing to say is completely normal and actually encouraged — it helps NCS know who's active on the repeater and builds the membership rolls if it's a club net. You're not wasting anybody's time at all. If you can find the net's script or format online (a lot of clubs post them) it helps to just read along the first few times until you get the rhythm of it. After like three or four check-ins it becomes second nature.

I had the same confusion when I started! You'll hear these Q-codes in voice modes and at club meetings, so even if you're not a CW operator, you'll want to know them. Practice listening on the bands - you'll pick up the natural flow quickly. Don't worry about sounding perfect at first, we all learn by doing!

yeah what he said. also worth knowing that 40m gets weird at night with all the international broadcasters and stuff bleeding in from shortwave so even if you're technically in the right spot it can be a mess. i spent like 20 minutes calling CQ around 7.250 one evening wondering why nobody answered and then realized there was a spanish language broadcast station basically on top of me lol. anyway the band plan stuff is worth printing out and taping near your rig for a while til it just becomes second nature

Sounds like you're further along than most people ever get honestly. The Baofeng idea is solid, i keep a UV-5R in mine just as a backup scanner/monitor radio even if i wouldnt trust it as a primary. Cheap insurance. The antenna thing is real though. I'd really encourage you to practice setting up whatever wire antenna you're planning before you actually need it. I spent an embarrassing amount of time at my first SET trying to figure out why my end-fed wasn't loading right and it turned out i had the feedpoint connector half loose. Not the moment you want that to happen. Even just throwing it up in the backyard a few times until it feels automatic makes a huge difference. One thing i dont see you mention is documentation — like not just frequencies but a written operating procedure card for yourself. When you're tired or stressed it's amazing what your brain forgets. I have a little laminated sheet that walks me through startup checks in order, sounds dumb but ive used it more than once. Also depending on where you are, look into your local ARES group if you havent already. They sometimes do go-kit check-in exercises and its a good way to find the gaps before an actual event.

Modern radios have excellent safeguards including transmit timeouts and automatic shutdown on network loss. I also use voice-activated power switches for additional safety. The convenience factor far outweighs the risks if you set it up properly.

keep the 590 and fix the antenna, full stop lol. i see this question like every few months on here and it's almost always the same answer. the 590sg is genuinely a fantastic radio and the 7300 isnt some massive leap forward its just different. unless youre botching contacts because of your receiver i wouldnt touch it

Most mobile apps are just wrappers around web clusters anyway. I still prefer DX Summit by OH8X for reliable current and historical DX activity in a mobile browser - better filtering and more stable than most apps I've tried.