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

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

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?

congrats on the build, QMX is a great little rig. to answer your antenna question -- yes, antenna absolutely matters more at QRP levels, probably more than anything else you can do. when youre running 100 watts you can kind of mask a mediocre antenna with brute force but at 4 watts every dB counts. that end-fed will work fine but if you can ever put up a dipole at a decent height or try a vertical with a good ground system you'll notice the difference pretty quick.
as for which band to start on, 40m is solid especially for regional stuff and in the evenings. but honestly 20m during the day when conditions are decent is where QRP really shines for me, i've had contacts across the atlantic running 5 watts and it never gets old. just watch the propagation forecasts, when the bands are cooperating QRP feels like magic and when they're not it can be frustrating. stick with it though, you'll develop a feel for it.

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 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

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.