Emily Thomas

haha the shaky mic thing is totally real, i did the same thing. dont worry it goes away after like the third or fourth time. welcome to the hobby, the 2m repeater scene is actually a great place to start before you jump into HF which can get overwhelming fast. get that general ticket though seriously, it opens up so much more of the bands

M2 antennas typically use quality hardware but I'd suspect the relay or switching mechanism first. If you're using a relay to flip polarization, swap it with a known good one. The contacts might be making poor connection on one side.

so ive been putting this off forever but finally got around to doing the transmit mod on my IC-7300 to open up the TX range a bit. nothing crazy, just wanted to be able to hit some of the 60m channels more flexibly and honestly was curious what was under the hood anyway. the mod itself is stupid simple — pull two diodes on the main board, took me maybe 20 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself and staring at the board with a flashlight. what i didnt expect was that after reassembling everything the ALC behavior on my linear felt slightly different. not worse necessarily, just... different. could be my imagination or could be something changed with the drive characteristics when you open the TX range. anyone else noticed anything like that? im not complaining, just curious if theres an actual technical reason for it or if im chasing ghosts. the radio otherwise works great, audio sounds the same, receive hasnt changed at all that i can tell. also while i had it open i reseated the fan connector because mine would occasionally make a little buzz on certain frequencies and that seems to have fixed it. so overall glad i did it.

I went last year and honestly it was smaller than I expected but still worth the drive. Grabbed a MFJ antenna tuner for like $25 which was cool even if it needed a little cleaning inside. I think the afternoon activities depend on whether the club volunteers show up, its kind of hit or miss from what I heard.

so we finally did a full SET with our county ARES group and honestly it was a humbling experience. we simulated a major flood event cutting off the main EOC from several shelter locations and the idea was to establish and maintain comms using only simplex and a couple of linked repeaters that were running on backup power. what i didnt expect was how fast things fell apart when people started freelancing on frequencies. we had three different operators all trying to net control at the same time during the first 20 minutes because nobody was totally clear on who had that role when the primary NC lost comms temporarily. it was chaos, good chaos i guess because we learned from it, but chaos. the other big thing was message handling. we had a few newer hams who had never actually passed formal traffic before and when we started doing ICS-213 style messages over voice it slowed everything way down. not their fault at all, we just hadnt drilled that enough beforehand. the stuff that actually worked well was the go-kit operators at the shelter sites, they were solid. and the NVIS setup one of our elmers brought worked way better than i thought it would for county-wide coverage when the repeaters were being flaky. anyway curious if other groups have done similar exercises and what tripped you up the most. we're trying to build a better pre-exercise training program so any lessons learned from your end would be really helpful.

yeah propagation is one of those things that takes a while to really get a feel for, but once it clicks its kind of addicting to follow. you basically have it right though -- SFI tells you how much the sun is ionizing the upper atmosphere, and the K index (or A index if you want a longer term picture) tells you how disturbed the geomagnetic field is. high SFI plus low K is basically the magic combo for good DX on the higher bands like 15, 17, 10 meters. the tricky part is its not instant. a solar event can mess up conditions for a day or two after it happens, and sometimes the improvement after a storm can actually produce some really wild openings, people call it post-storm enhancement. i'd suggest bookmarking dxmaps.com and also checking the solar terrestrial activity report on hamqsl.com, they update pretty regularly and give you a feel for whats coming. once you start correlating what you see on the air with the numbers it starts to make more sense

ran RemoteHams for about two years with an IC-7300 and a rtl-sdr dongle as a secondary SDR at the shack. the SDR integration is actually pretty decent once you get the client configured right, main thing is you want to make sure your upstream bandwidth at the host end is solid because the SDR stream chews through more than you'd expect, especially if you set the bandwidth wide hotel wifi is hit or miss honestly. ive done sessions from hotels that worked great and others where the audio was choppy enough i just gave up. the software does have adaptive bitrate stuff but theres a floor below which it just falls apart. phone hotspot is usually more consistent in my experience because the latency is more predictable even if the bandwidth is lower the echolink/internet linking crossover question is sort of apples and oranges — those systems are designed to extend the RF side, you're basically connecting to a repeater or node that then goes over RF again. RemoteHams is more like you're sitting at the radio remotely, the RF part is still at your home QTH. some people do run both but theyre solving different problems

yeah i did almost exactly this with my 7300 and an arduino uno a while back. the serial timing issue you're describing sounds like a buffer problem to me — the CI-V output from icom radios can sometimes send incomplete frames if the radio is still mid-transaction when you poll it. what helped me was not trying to parse on the fly but just dumping everything into a ring buffer and then processing it after a short settling delay, like 50ms or so after the last byte comes in. took a bit of fiddling but it got reliable pretty fast after that. also double check your baud rate actually matches what the 7300 is set to in the menu, i spent like two days chasing a ghost problem that turned out to be the radio was set to 9600 and i had the arduino at 19200. felt pretty dumb about that one.

one thing nobody told me when i was starting out with this - make sure your system clock is accurate, like within a few seconds. vara is pretty tolerant but i had a situation where my connections kept dropping partway through a session and it turned out my windows clock had drifted by almost a minute and a half. NTP sync fixed it immediately. probably not your problem but worth checking before you go too far down the troubleshooting rabbit hole

so ive been using Log4OM for general logging for about two years now and i really like it for day to day stuff, managing QSOs, awards tracking, integration with clublog etc. but every time contest season rolls around everyone just tells me to use N1MM and i keep putting it off because i dont really want to learn another piece of software just for weekends. tried to use Log4OM during the last CQ WW and honestly it was kind of a mess, the rate wasn't showing right and i couldn't get the dupesheet to update fast enough when things got busy on 20m. also the exchange macros felt clunky compared to what guys in the club were describing with N1MM. maybe i was doing something wrong but it just didnt feel snappy. the other thing is i run WSJT-X a fair bit for FT8 and Log4OM handles that integration pretty well, it just pulls the QSOs in automatically. im worried if i switch to N1MM for contests i lose that workflow or have to do some janky import thing after. anyone actually run both and have a sane way to handle this, like maybe use N1MM just for contests and then import back into Log4OM as the master log? or is that going to create duplicate headaches. just wondering what other people actually do day to day

so ive been messing around with RemoteHams for a few months now and got the basic remote station control working okay, can key up the rig from work and all that, but im trying to figure out if theres a clean way to tie in an SDR frontend so i can actually see the panadapter remotely instead of flying blind on the audio waterfall thing my current setup is an IC-7300 at the home QTH, running the RemoteHams RRC-1258 client/server pair and that part is solid, latency is manageable on my home fiber but when i tried to also push the SDR IQ stream over the same link it got ugly fast, choppy audio and the waterfall was basically useless what im wondering is whether anyone has actually gotten a panadapter or standalone SDR — like an RTL-SDR or an SDRplay — working alongside the RemoteHams link without killing the bandwidth budget. i read somewhere about using SDR-Console with a remote server instance but wasnt sure if that plays nice with the audio routing RemoteHams is already doing or if you end up fighting yourself with virtual audio cables everywhere also semi-related but has anyone linked their remote station into a repeater or echolink node, sort of as a backup access method if the main RRC link goes down? feels like it could work but might be a nightmare to set up and keep stable

oh man i didnt even know about this one. is there a website or anything? im still pretty new to all this and havent been to a hamfest yet, my elmer keeps telling me i need to go just to see whats out there. mostly curious if there's usually any HF gear or if it's mostly VHF/handheld stuff at the smaller ones

yeah im planning on going, me and a couple guys from the local club usually carpool down. from what i heard on the repeater last tuesday they are still doing the tailgate swap meet but you gotta register for a table ahead of time now, no just showing up with stuff in the trunk like the old days. honestly the vendor hall is kinda the same every year but you never know what some old timer is gonna drag out of the garage for the flea market tables.

Knowing the bands, knowing how the propagation predictions may affect their properties and knowing when to operate and where paths are likely to be open and at what times gives stations a real edge over many others. Set up automatic band-checking every 10 minutes during slow periods. Quick CQ on 15m while running 20m can reveal unexpected openings. Don't abandon a decent run without checking!

Start with the Koch method - learn at 20-25 WPM character speed but only 2 letters at first. Add another character when you hit 90% accuracy. Morse Mania app is excellent for this and free for basic features.

yeah the tone thing tripped me up too when i first started. one thing that helped me was thinking of it like the repeater is sleeping and the tone is just what wakes it up. once its awake it re-transmits whatever you say on a different frequency so people farther away can hear you. pretty neat really when you think about how old this technology is and it still just works. and honestly dont worry too much about ettiquette at first, most repeater regulars are pretty chill about new hams. the main things are just dont key up while someone else is transmitting, leave a pause between overs so people can jump in, and id yourself every 10 minutes or at the end of a contact per FCC rules. thats basically it. you'll pick up the rest just by listening for a while which sounds like youre already doing

honestly hamstudy.org is where i'd send anyone starting out, just go there and start drilling questions. the technician pool isn't huge and the site tracks what you're getting wrong so you can focus on the weak spots. most people i know were ready in like 2-3 weeks of casual studying, maybe an hour a day or so. the test itself is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass, and yeah theres a fee, usually around $15 depending on who's running the exam session but some clubs do it cheaper. some arrl clubs even do online remote testing now which is convenient if you dont have a session nearby. dont stress too much about the math questions, theres only a handful and honestly the formulas are pretty intuitive once you see them a few times. the question pool is public and the actual exam questions come straight from it so what you study is literally what shows up on the test

One thing we learned from recent hurricane responses is the importance of interoperability. Amateurs demonstrated their adaptability by communicating successfully with a multitude of amateur, commercial, public service, EMA, Salvation Army and Red Cross radio systems and personnel. Make sure your exercises include coordination with other agencies, not just ham-to-ham traffic.

oh man park to park contacts are the best part of hunting honestly, you should have seen the excitement on my end when i got my first P2P haha. dont stress too much about the QSO rate thing, ive seen people get competitive about it but the whole point is just being outside and making contacts. some parks are also just way more popular and get spotted constantly so they get a flood of hunters right away. your 14 from a random state forest is probably harder earned than someones 50 from a super popular national park tbh

Just got licensed and feeling overwhelmed by all the Q codes I'm hearing on the air. I understand they're useful abbreviations, but there seem to be dozens of them! Which Q codes are absolutely essential for a new General class operator to learn first? I'm particularly interested in QSOs on 20m and 40m CW, and want to avoid embarrassing myself in my first contacts. Should I memorize them all at once or focus on the most common ones?

oh man this is something ive been meaning to do too so im watching this thread. one thing my elmer told me that stuck — he said dont forget a headlamp. like specifically for the kit, not just assuming you have one somewhere. he showed up to a midnight exercise and couldnt see anything he was doing for the first half hour. sounds obvious but yeah

Building my first homebrew superhet receiver for 40m and having issues with IF alignment. Using MC1350 IF amps with ceramic filters at 455kHz. Getting decent sensitivity but AGC seems to pump on strong signals. Anyone else experienced similar issues with MC1350 AGC circuit? Running 12V supply, tried different time constants on AGC filter but still getting that pumping effect. Following the datasheet pretty closely but wondering if there's something I'm missing in the bias setup.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and EME has always been this thing in the back of my mind that seemed completely out of reach. like i just assumed you needed a massive dish and a kilowatt and a room full of preamps and DSP gear. but lately ive been reading more about the JT65 stuff and it sounds like maybe the barrier isnt as insane as i thought? right now im running a pretty modest 2m setup, 100w into a single 9el yagi, which i know is nowhere near what people usually talk about for moonbounce. ive seen some guys mention doing it with 4 yagis and around 400w which sounds more achievable for me eventually. my main question is really what the weak link tends to be in a budget EME setup — is it the antenna gain, the power, or the receive side noise figure? because i feel like i could save up for a solid GaAsFET preamp pretty reasonably but adding antenna arrays is a whole other project. also is there a minimum elevation your antenna needs to reach, i ask because my yagi only goes to about 40 degrees and im not sure if that limits when the moon is accessible from my QTH. any experience here appreciated, not looking to work DX6 entities on EME or anything just want to make a contact or two and say i did it

honest answer -- mine went through like four versions before it settled into something i actually use. first version was way too heavy, had the 857 plus a power supply plus way too much coax and connectors, took me 20 minutes just to find things in the bag. now its much leaner. what i settled on is the FT-891 in a small pelican-style case with a 30ah lithium iron phosphate battery, a few lengths of RG-8X with PL-259 on both ends, a simple end-fed wire antenna rolled up in a ziplock, and a notebook plus pens because you'd be surprised how often the digital stuff fails or gets complicated and paper just works. i keep a printed copy of local repeater frequencies and ARES net info taped inside the lid. the battery rotation thing is real, i set a calendar reminder every 6 months to actually run the kit through its paces, charge everything up, make sure the SWR is still reasonable on the antenna. its easy to forget and then you pull it out during an actual activation and the battery is half dead. learned that one the not fun way during a flooding event a couple years back, showed up with maybe 40% charge and had to beg a neighbor ham for a jump start basically. dont overthink the radio choice though. the 857 is fine if thats what you have. the key is knowing it cold so you can operate it half asleep at 2am under stress.

so this has been going on for about three weeks now and i cant figure it out. mid-transmission the radio just drops out of TX, like the ALC is doing something weird or the PA is folding back, hard to tell. power output just collapses to almost nothing for maybe half a second then comes back. happens on all bands but seems worse on 40m. doesnt matter if im running 50 watts or pushing closer to 100. i already checked the obvious stuff, antenna SWR is fine, tried two different antennas actually, reseated all the connectors on the back, did a full reset. fan is spinning, no overtemp warnings showing up on the display. i pulled the lid and nothing looks obviously burned or swollen. the finals look okay to my eye but im not really qualified to say for sure. anyone dealt with this before on a 7300 specifically? i see some threads about the driver board being a weak point but they were all from like 2019 and the radio has been revised since then supposedly. just not sure if this is something i can chase down myself or if im looking at sending it to a service center.