Ashley Anderson

first thing id check is whether your audio levels are calibrated right for the TNC. the D710 internal TNC is decent but it can be fussy about the deviation, and if youre overdriving it the packets will decode garbage on the other end even though your TX light looks fine locally. there's a built in packet monitor mode on that radio — turn it on and watch what youre actually decoding vs what you think youre sending. also double check the path. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is standard and should be fine but i've seen people accidentally fat-finger WIDE1-1 as WIDE1-2 which screws everything up and wastes hops. the one-time beacon you saw two days ago might have just gotten lucky hitting a digi at the right moment if your signal is marginal. id also look at what RF range the nearest digi is claiming to cover and see if youre actually inside it, sometimes the coverage maps on aprs.fi for individual digis are optimistic.

so ive been licensed for about 14 months now and i keep hearing people talk about CQ WW like its this massive deal and honestly after looking at the scores from last year i get why. the numbers are just wild. anyway i signed up to do a single op entry this weekend, just low power from my home station which is nothing special, an IC-7300 into a dipole up about 30 feet in my backyard. i dont really have expectations of placing anywhere but i figured it would be a good way to actually use the bands for something and practice my exchange my biggest worry honestly is just keeping up with the rate when it gets busy. i tried doing a small sprint a few months ago and i fell apart pretty fast when the pile got going. do you guys just slow down and ask for repeats or is that gonna kill your rate too much? also not sure if i should be running or search and pounce the whole time, seems like running is better for points but i cant hold a frequency for anything with my setup also field day was my first real contest experience and i loved it but that felt way more relaxed than this seems like it will be, there were people around helping and stuff. this is just gonna be me and the radio for 48 hours lol

the message routing thing actually clicked for me once somebody explained that the CMS is just a central store — think of it like a mail server sitting up in the cloud. every RMS gateway you connect to, no matter which one, just delivers your message to that same CMS. so it really doesnt matter if you hit a gateway 5 miles away or 50 miles away, your message ends up in the same place either way. you dont register with specific gateways, Winlink Express just scans for whats available on the frequency and connects to whatever responds. the reason you hit a different one the second time was probably just propagation or the closer one was busy or offline. as for running your own RMS — yes its a whole separate thing but not as scary as it sounds. you run RMS Packet or RMS Relay depending on what mode youre doing, and for HF with Vara HF you'd be running RMS HF. hardware wise you need a radio obviously, a decent TNC or sound card interface, and a machine that stays on. the sysop application is through Winlink.org and they do vet you, its not just open to anyone. for a county ARES deployment it makes a lot of sense to have local infrastructure so youre not depending on somebody elses node staying up.

wow that's really cool, i just got my tech license a couple months ago and have been looking into joining ARES but wasn't sure if i'd actually be useful since i dont have much experience yet. did they have you doing anything specific to prep beforehand or was it just the regular monthly nets and that was enough?

so ive been trying to get my APRS setup working for about two weeks now and im just not seeing my beacon show up on aprs.fi or getting heard by any digipeaters in my area. running a TM-D710G into a decent vertical on the roof, set to 144.390, 1200 baud AFSK, everything looks right to me on the radio side. the radio shows it's transmitting — the TX light comes on every few minutes — but nothing ever shows up on the map. i borrowed a handheld and stood outside and i can hear other peoples packets coming through fine so i know 144.390 is active around here. checked the path and im using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. volume level on the TNC side seems okay but honestly i have no idea what i'm doing when it comes to audio levels and maybe thats the whole problem. anyone been through this before

Hey welcome to the hobby, dont stress too much about this stuff it all clicks pretty quick. So the CTCSS thing — the tone on transmit is what the repeater needs to hear from you to open up the squelch on the input side. You got that part right with the 100.0. The receive tone is different, thats for YOUR radio so it stays quiet until the repeater actually transmits something with a matching tone. Some repeaters put a tone on their output, some dont. If youre hearing the repeater fine already your squelch is probably just set to carrier squelch on receive which works perfectly fine. The receive CTCSS setting is really only useful if youre in an area with a lot of interference and you only want your radio to open up for that specific repeater. Most people dont bother with it honestly. As for breaking into a QSO — just wait for a pause between transmissions, key up briefly and say your callsign. Like just "W1XYZ" or "W1XYZ monitoring" and theyll usually invite you in. Most guys are happy to have another person join the conversation. The main thing is dont key up in the middle of someones transmission, wait for that gap. Some repeaters have a bit of a tail after someone unkeys so you can hear when the channel is clear.

hey welcome to the hobby, the CTCSS stuff trips up a lot of new hams. so basically the tone you program into your radio is what the repeater uses to filter out noise and interference — without it the repeater might not open at all, or in some cases it opens but doesnt retransmit you. sounds like you got that sorted out. as for nobody responding, yeah honestly most repeaters are pretty quiet during the day unless there's a net or something going on. the way to get on is just key up and say your callsign and say you're monitoring or just say "[callsign] listening" and see if anyone comes back. dont be shy about it. some guys hang out on repeaters for hours and will absolutely respond if they hear someone new. morning and evening drive times tend to be busier too if people commute. the weird noise on the other repeater — could be a few things. maybe it's linked to another system and you were hearing audio from somewhere else, or maybe the tone you have is slightly off and the repeater is doing something funky. id double check the tone listing and make sure its set to encode only (not encode and decode) unless you want your radio to squelch on that tone too.

im in basically the same boat lol been at it about 6 months and just moved to paddles last month. the extra dits thing happened to me too and someone told me to slow way down first, like 10 wpm, and just get the muscle memory for the squeeze before bringing the speed back up. also there's a thing called the dit-dah memory that mode B does where it remembers if you squeezed and adds one more element and yeah its confusing at first. hang in there it does click eventually or so i'm told haha

so ive been doing CW for about 8 months now and i finally bought a halfway decent paddle (Vibroplex clone, nothing fancy) and hooked it up to my old K3NG keyer build. the keyer itself works fine i think but im getting these weird extra dits squeezed in when im trying to send letters like C and K. started wondering if its me or the iambic mode B behavior. i came from using a straight key so the whole squeeze keying thing is still pretty foreign to me. i can send maybe 15 wpm on a good day with the straight key but the paddle at the same speed feels like im fighting it. should i just switch to mode A or is there some trick to getting used to the squeeze thing that i'm missing. also my paddle tension is set pretty light, maybe thats part of it?

honestly the question pool method works, dont feel weird about it. thats basically how everyone does it. the pool is public and the exam pulls straight from it so if you can answer every question in the pool you will pass, full stop. ham study dot org has a free practice exam simulator that randomizes them and it tells you which sections you're weak on which is super helpful for what actually trips people up -- the math isnt as bad as it sounds because theres really only a handful of formulas and the numbers in the answer choices are usually pretty distinct so even if you half remember how to do it you can eliminate wrong answers. reactance and the decibel stuff is where people get weird. just memorize that every 3db is double or half the power and every 10db is 10x, that covers like 80 percent of those questions right there propagation is honestly interesting once it clicks. 40m for regional stuff at night, 20m for the daytime DX, 10m when conditions are good which they actually are right now with the solar cycle being where it is. once you get the ticket just get on 40m in the evenings and start listening, youll learn more in a week of actual operating than from any book

went through this exact same thing last year, the ULS interface is a little clunky but once you find the vanity application section its not too bad. one thing nobody told me was that if the call you want is already taken obviously you wont get it, but if someone let their license lapse there can be a waiting period before that specific call becomes available again — i think its around 2 years after expiration? so sometimes a call looks gone but might open up eventually. theres a few websites that track available and soon-to-be-available vanity calls which helped me a lot, just search around and youll find them.

so the short version is the FCC allocation is the actual legal limit, the ARRL band plan is more like a gentlemens agreement about who operates where within that. you wont get your license revoked for ignoring the ARRL plan but people will definitely get annoyed at you. for 40m general phone you can operate from 7.175 up to 7.300, that lower chunk below 7.175 is extra class only for phone. the band edge thing is real though, you want your signal fully contained within the allocation so if youre running SSB you gotta think about the sideband width. on upper sideband your carrier is the lower frequency so if your dial reads 7.300 your signal is actually going above that which is out of your allocation. most people just stay a few khz below the edge to be safe, so like 7.295 or so on the high end. on the low end for generals 7.175 is your floor for phone so id stay at 7.178 or higher just to leave room

yeah building the measuring jig is honestly half the fun and its not that complicated. theres a design thats been floating around for years, basically a simple series circuit with a resistor and you measure the frequency where the crystal resonates by looking for the dip on a scope or even just listening for the null. G3UUR method i think its called. i sorted a batch of 10MHz crystals that way a while back and got four that were within about 50Hz of each other which was good enough for a 4-pole filter. your 7.2 MHz crystals might be fine or might be all over the place depending on where they came from. surplus crystals are a crapshoot. but even if you only end up with 4 usable ones out of a bag of 20 thats still a win. the filter math isnt too bad once you get into it, W7ZOI has written a lot about this and his stuff holds up. just be patient with the termination impedance because getting that wrong is usually why homebrew filters sound weird or have a weird passband shape.

so i just passed my technician exam last week and got my first callsign, its a sequential one that starts with KD9 and honestly its fine but kind of long and i was reading about vanity calls and now im down a rabbit hole i cant get out of lol from what i can tell the FCC assigns sequential calls automatically after you pass your exam, and then separately you can apply for a vanity call through the ULS system if you want a specific one? but i dont totally understand how the sequential process works — like does it just go through a list and give you the next available one in your district or is it more complicated than that. and also when can i apply for vanity, is there a waiting period or can i do it right away also saw something about different license classes getting priority for certain call formats, like 1x2 or 2x1 calls. im assuming as a tech i cant get a 1x2 but i honestly dont know. any help appreciated, this stuff is weirdly hard to find clearly explained anywhere

could also just be a dirty or intermittent PA relay contact. i know that sounds too simple but ive seen 857s do weird power output stuff from exactly that. worth spraying the relay contacts before you go too deep into the board. the relays on those rigs arent exactly military grade if you know what i mean.