Mark Stevens

i just passed mine like two months ago so this is fresh for me lol. hamstudy was basically all i used, did maybe 3 weeks of studying maybe 20 mins a day and passed with only a couple wrong. the questions about repeaters and simplex and stuff like that were easy, the parts about like antenna polarization and some of the RF safety questions were the ones i had to really go over a few times. also just so you know the test itself is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass so theres a little wiggle room. oh and look up if theres a hamfest or club near you because sometimes they do free or cheap testing sessions and the folks running it are usually pretty chill, way less intimidating than i expected

okay so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech class) and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but i keep hearing people come through fine and when i key up nobody responds or acknowledges me at all. i programmed the offset correctly i think, 600khz down, and the output frequency is right because i can hear everyone. but i saw something on the repeater's website about a 100hz CTCSS tone and i honestly wasnt sure if that meant i needed to transmit it or receive it or both. my radio is a baofeng uv5r and i kind of just set the TDR thing and called it a day which was probably the problem lol. also separate question - is there like a standard way to join a conversation thats already going on? i dont want to be rude about it but i also dont know the proper way to break in. someone told me you just say your callsign during a pause but that seems too simple, is that actually right?

yeah the ceramic disc caps are almost certainly your problem, or at least a big part of it. the temperature coefficients on generic ceramic discs are all over the place, Y5V and X7R stuff can drift hundreds of ppm per degree C which in an oscillator circuit is brutal. NPO/C0G will make a huge difference, seriously night and day. i went through the exact same thing on a 20m QRP rig i built a couple years back, swapped out maybe four caps in the oscillator tank and the drift basically disappeared. the direction of drift being consistent (going low first) does kind of point to thermal as the culprit too so you're probably on the right track with that diagnosis. worth pulling the ceramics first before you go chasing anything else. also make sure your oscillator stage isnt getting heat from the PA - if they're physically close on the board that can cause exactly this behavior, the PA warms up fast and the oscillator just gets cooked slowly for the first few minutes of operation.

yeah youve got the right idea about which VFO moves. for a linear transponder you want to keep your downlink fixed and tune the uplink to compensate for doppler. the reason is that if you move the downlink you lose your own signal in the passband and then youre chasing your tail. gpredict should handle this automatically if you configure the transponder correctly in the tool - there's a transponder editor in the satellite config where you tell it the passband limits for uplink and downlink and whether its inverting or not. AO-73 is inverting by the way so if you tune up on uplink you go down on downlink, which trips people up a lot at first. also with a fixed yagi youre going to lose the signal near the horizon anyway so dont sweat the low elevation parts too much. the middle chunk of the pass is where you want to be making contacts. once gpredict has rig control working right it really does move things automatically, just make sure you have the right satellite config loaded and the doppler correction is enabled in the radio control panel, theres a checkbox that sometimes gets missed

yeah what he said. one thing i'd add is dont stress too much about a strategy early on, i spent way too much time early in my ham career reading about awards instead of just operating. your log is your best friend, log everything and upload to LOTW regularly and the picture of what you have will start to come together pretty naturally the G5RV at 25 feet isnt going to get you everything but you'd be surprised what you can work from a modest station when conditions cooperate. i worked something like 80 entities in my first year on a similar setup before i ever put up anything serious. just keep at it

so ive been putting this off for like two years but i finally cracked open the FT-857D last weekend to do the mars/cap mod and unlock the extended TX. not really planning to transmit outside the ham bands obviously but i wanted the flexibility for some emcomm stuff and also just to see what the rig could actually do on the lower freqs. while i had it apart i also swapped the electrolytic caps on the PA board because a couple of them were looking a little puffy, which honestly was more concerning to me than anything else. rig is probably 12 years old at this point. while i was in there i noticed the fan runs basically constantly even at low duty cycle so im going to look at whether there's a thermistor mod or a PWM controller i can tack in there to make it temp-controlled instead. anyone done that on an 857? also considering adding an external ALC line so i can run it more cleanly into my linear but haven't fully thought that through yet. the internal ALC on these tends to be a bit aggressive from what i've read. anyway curious if anyone else has gone down this rabbit hole with one of these rigs because there's a lot of conflicting info on the forums about the exact mod points

im in basically the same boat as you, got my ticket like 8 months ago. what helped me was just printing out the alphabet and taping it next to my radio for a while until i had it down. felt kind of dumb at first but whatever it worked lol. the repeater guys around here dont really use phonetics much either so i was confused too at first but then i got on HF and suddenly understood why they exist

so i finally got around to building a proper dipole instead of using that old vertical i borrowed from my buddy. used 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had lying around, cut each leg to roughly 16.5 feet for 40m, fed it with some RG-8X i had leftover. center insulator is just a piece of PVC i drilled holes through and used some stainless hardware from the hardware store, nothing fancy. here's the thing though — SWR at the low end of the band like around 7.0 MHz is sitting around 1.4:1 which honestly i expected to be worse given my first attempt. but when i go up to 7.3 MHz it climbs to like 2.8:1 and my radio starts complaining a little. i thought dipoles were supposed to be relatively flat across 40m? the antenna is only up about 25 feet at the apex, kind of an inverted V shape because i dont have two trees far enough apart. both legs slope down to about 8 feet at the ends. is this a length issue or is the inverted V shape doing something weird to the bandwidth? i checked my coax connections twice and they seem solid. using a Yaesu FT-891 if that matters at all. would trimming the legs help or would that just shift everything and make the low end worse?

oh man i went through this like 6 months ago and was equally confused lol. one thing that tripped me up is that your current callsign stays active while your vanity application is pending so you dont have to worry about losing it or going dark or anything like that. once the vanity gets approved it just switches over and you update your QRZ and youre good to go. i ended up getting a pretty clean 1x3 in the 7th district which i was stoked about, took maybe two weeks from application to showing up in the system. the ae7q site that people always recommend really is worth bookmarking, it kind of demystifies the whole thing once you poke around it for a bit

sounds like you're off to a solid start honestly. the things that always catch people off guard when they actually deploy -- and i say this from having done a few ARES activations over the years -- are the little comfort and logistics stuff, not the radio gear. like a headlamp with extra batteries, a decent pair of gloves if it's cold, some kind of rain protection for yourself and the gear. nobody thinks about that until they're standing outside a shelter at 2am. for the radio side of things your instinct about vhf/uhf being the workhorse is pretty much right for local served agency work. HF is great and i love it but for EOC support and shelter comms you're mostly going to be on 2m or 70cm working repeaters or simplex. that said if you ever want to do any regional traffic or backup linking to distant EOCs then HF matters. depends on your ARES group's actual plans though -- worth asking your EC what they actually train for. one thing i'd add to the kit pretty soon is a way to charge everything. a small solar panel or a power bank that can handle a proper 12v output makes a big difference after day two of no grid power. and document your frequencies somewhere on paper, dont rely on being able to pull up a repeater directory if your phone is dead.

i had the exact same problem on my 857 for like a year before someone at a hamfest just handed me a Heil headset and i never looked back. not saying you have to spend money but the element in those aftermarket mics is genuinely tuned for voice comms in a way the stock ones just arent. the HC-5 element in particular cuts some of that low end mud and helps your voice punch through without sounding harsh. anyway thats my two cents, the gain tip above is solid though, definitely start there before buying anything.

yeah the 7300 out of the box eq is pretty flat which sounds good on paper but the PR-40 already has a lot of low end and that combo can definitely sound muddy especially on 40m where there's already a ton of noise and stations are cranking their bass trying to sound like a broadcast announcer. your instinct to look at the tx eq is right. what i'd do is pull up the tx equalizer in the menus and start rolling off below about 300hz pretty aggressively, like -6 to -8dB at the lowest shelf. you really dont need anything below 300hz for intelligibility on SSB, its just adding mud and eating into your modulation headroom. then maybe add a little presence around 2-3khz, not a ton, just a dB or two. the goal is to sound punchy and clear not warm and full, that's AM territory. also make sure you're not talking directly into the capsule on the PR-40, that mic is sensitive enough that off-axis at like a 45 degree angle works better for a lot of voices, reduces the proximity effect. took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out with mine.

yeah what he said about hamstudy is right but i'll add -- dont just grind through questions without actually reading the explanations when you get one wrong. i made that mistake early on and just kept clicking through without absorbing anything, then when i hit a question on the actual exam that was worded slightly differently i second guessed myself on stuff i had technically seen a hundred times also the band plan questions, just spend an extra few minutes on those because knowing where you can and cant operate as a tech is actually useful info you'll want anyway once you're on the air. the rest of the regs stuff kind of sinks in after a while. good luck, the exam isnt that bad

congrats on the first activation, 10 contacts in 35 minutes on a first go is solid. the park reference thing — yeah just the K number is all you need for domestic parks, if you were doing an international one it'd be a different prefix but you're good. for the QSY question, thats really just kind of a judgement call depending on how your pileup is going. a lot of activators will call out on their spotted frequency something like "QRV 20m after this" and then finish up their run before moving, that way you don't lose momentum but you're also letting the hunters know you're coming. the guy calling 6 times is unfortunately just kind of a thing that happens, some hunters get really into it and lose track of themselves a bit. once you've done a few activations you get pretty good at just acknowledging the partial calls and moving through the pile without it rattling you. two-fer planning is super fun by the way, there are a few good resources on the POTA subreddit where people share maps of overlapping boundaries if you haven't found those yet.

so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero W for a few months now trying to get it to handle some of the boring stuff at my station — mainly auto-logging contacts to my cloudlog instance and eventually maybe triggering my antenna relay board based on what band im on. got the CAT control talking to my 7300 over USB and for the most part it works but every couple hours or so the serial connection just kind of dies. not fully dies like the port disappears, more like it stops responding and i have to restart the python script. checked dmesg and dont see anything obvious, no USB errors or anything like that. im using pyserial and the baud is set to 19200 which is what the radio wants, flow control is off. ive got a powered hub between the pi zero and the radio because i read somewhere the zero doesnt like powering much off its own USB. still getting the hangs though. anyone else been down this road with a pi and a 7300 specifically? wondering if this is a known thing or if im doing something dumb