Mark Stevens

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.

congrats on the ticket and the first qso, that feeling of finally keying up for the first time is something you dont forget. i remember sitting there with my radio for like an hour before i actually did it and then felt dumb for being so nervous about it afterwards
the local repeater crowd is usually pretty welcoming, sounds like you found a good one. once you get comfortable on there you might want to look into getting your general and getting on HF, whole different world down there

so basically the callsign thing — yeah you should be phonetically spelling it out pretty much every time you ID, especially on HF where conditions can be rough and people mishear stuff constantly. on a local repeater where everyone knows you and the signal is full quieting you can get away with just saying it normally but even then a lot of people still do phonetics just out of habit
for names and stuff it depends. if your name is something like Bob or Jim nobody needs you to spell it out. but if youve got an unusual name or youre in a pileup situation where clarity really matters, phonetics just make sense. i usually say my name normal first and then if theres any confusion or someone asks me to repeat ill go phonetic. the main thing is just making sure the other station actually copied what you said, however you get there

so I've had my general ticket for about two years now and I've been making contacts here and there but never really with any purpose I guess. A buddy of mine at the club just got his DXCC plaque in the mail and now I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of chasing it myself. Problem is I don't really know where to start with the whole award credit system. Like I get that it's 100 entities confirmed but the LoTW stuff confuses me and I don't know if my old paper QSLs count or how to even submit anything.
I also saw there's WAS and WAZ and a bunch of other awards and now I feel like I should be chasing all of them at once but that seems like it would spread me too thin? Do most people focus on one first or just work everything and sort it out later. I'm running an IC-7300 into a dipole in the attic so my signal isn't exactly thundering out there but I have managed to work some pretty surprising DX on 17 and 20 meters.
Any advice from people who've done this would be really appreciated, even just knowing where to start would help a ton.

so i joined my county ARES group about 6 months ago and ive been going to the monthly nets and did the IS-100 and IS-200 courses online like they asked. feels like ive been doing a lot of studying and not much actual radio work if that makes sense.
anyway there's a big marathon coming up in our area next month and the EC said this will probably be my first real activation. mostly just packet and voice relay between aid stations and the finish line from what i understand. im not super worried about the technical side but i guess i dont really know what to expect in terms of like... how the day actually goes? do you just sit at your assigned spot the whole time or is there more moving around, do they give you a briefing beforehand, that kind of thing.
also is it weird to bring a handheld as backup even if they assign you a post with a mobile rig? i have my trusty vx-8 and id feel better having it just in case

not a dumb question at all, part 97 is genuinely kind of a maze when you first dig into it. the third party traffic thing trips a lot of people up. basically if youre just talking to another ham in another country, that's not third party traffic — that's just two licensed operators having a QSO, totally fine. third party traffic only comes into play when youre passing a message on behalf of someone who isnt a licensed amateur, like if your neighbor asks you to relay something to their cousin in another country through a net or whatever.
when that happens the country the other station is in has to have a third party agreement with the US, and there's a list of those countries on the ARRL website. some countries dont have an agreement so you just cant do it period, doesnt matter how simple the message is.
as for music — your club guy is mostly right. 97.113 prohibits broadcasting, which includes music intended for general audiences. the narrow exception people sometimes cite is like, music incidental to a retransmission of a space shuttle audio feed or something weird like that. for practical purposes just dont transmit music and youll be fine.

yeah i had the exact same thing happen with my 40m dipole last spring. kept second guessing myself thinking i measured wrong or something but it was just the inverted V thing. my ends were probably around 10 feet off the ground and it came in low too. ended up trimming maybe 18 inches total off both legs before it landed where i wanted it. just go slow with the trimming because obviously you cant put wire back on lol

yeah the pile-up thing is just reality unfortunately, especially if a spot is already a few minutes old by the time you see it. what helped me a lot was filtering by band and also paying attention to the spotter's call — if the spot came from someone in your general region it's way more meaningful than a spot from a JA station when you're sitting in the midwest. DXwatch lets you filter by spotter continent which helps quite a bit.
for the QRZ thing, yeah there's a spot feed on the site, its under the DX section i think. its fine for a quick glance but i personally find it a bit cluttered. most of the serious DX folks i know run something like DXKeeper with a cluster connection or use a dedicated telnet cluster through their logging software. once you get that set up it's way more useful because you can configure bandmaps and get audio alerts when something you actually need shows up. takes a bit of fiddling to configure but worth it once its running

so ive been messing with APRS for about two months now and got my TM-D710G set up with the internal TNC and everything seemed fine at first. my beacon was showing up on aprs.fi which was cool but then i noticed the position dot is like 4 miles east of where i actually am. i double checked my coordinates in the radio menu like three times and they match my actual location so im not sure what's going on there.
also running direwolf on a raspberry pi as a secondary igate and that one seems to place me correctly when i use that path instead. so something is definitely weird with how the radio is encoding the position or maybe its a datum thing? i dunno. the symbol is set to a house which is right at least. anyone run into this before with the D710 specifically or just APRS position weirdness in general

ok so ive been lurking on this site for a while and i finally decided i want to actually get my license but i honestly dont even know where to begin. like i looked up the FCC stuff and it was kind of overwhelming. someone at work has a ham license and he mentioned something about technician being the first one to get but beyond that i have no idea what im doing
is there like a standard way people study for this? i downloaded some app but im not sure if thats enough or if i need to buy a book or take a class or what. also how hard is the test actually, im decent with electronics but not an engineer or anything. and how do i even find where to take the test when im ready

yeah the pattern compression thing is real and its not just theoretical, especially if you're in a valley or have terrain in the mix. i went from an x50 to a GP-9 and honestly for the repeaters that were already solid, no real change. for the edge cases it helped maybe a little but not dramatically. the bigger variable for me ended up being coax — i had like 40ft of RG-8X which was fine but when i swapped to LMR-400 for the run i noticed more improvement than from the antenna change.
if that one repeater 34 miles out is actually important to you, a yagi on a cheap tv rotator is genuinely not that bad. i did that setup for a while, pointing at a linked system, and it worked great. pain to set up initially but once its done its done. just gotta commit to the feedline going to the rotator which adds another connector point to keep sealed.

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. so yeah theres three license classes, technician is the entry level one and thats all you need to get started, most people just do that first and then upgrade later if they want. the technician exam is 35 questions multiple choice and you need to get 26 right to pass, so theres actually a decent amount of margin for error which helps take the pressure off a bit.
for studying i always point people to hamstudy.org, its free and it pulls from the actual question pool that the test uses, so youre literally studying the real questions. theres also an app called Ham Radio Prep or you can just use the hamstudy app. the thing people dont realize is the question pool is public, all the answers are right there, so if you just grind through the practice tests for a couple weeks you should be fine even without deep electronics knowledge. some of the math questions can be skipped honestly if youre not comfortable because you only need 26 out of 35.
find a local club too, most of them run test sessions pretty regularly and some even do free license classes. arrl.org has a club finder. good luck, its really not as intimidating as it looks at first

the germany contact at 4w is pretty awesome actually. i run a KX2 mostly and the pileup thing is real, you kind of learn to be patient and also a little strategic about it. one thing that helped me was finding stations that are calling CQ with no takers rather than chasing pile-ups. if someone is just calling CQ and nobody's answering, your 5 watts sounds the same as anyone else's 100w to them. also what time of day were you operating, 20m can be really different mid afternoon vs evening depending on where youre trying to hit

the germany contact at 4w is pretty awesome actually. i run a KX2 mostly and the pileup thing is real, you kind of learn to be patient and also a little strategic about it. one thing that helped me was finding stations that are calling CQ with no takers rather than chasing pile-ups. if someone is just calling CQ and nobody's answering, your 5 watts sounds the same as anyone else's 100w to them. also what time of day were you operating, 20m can be really different mid afternoon vs evening depending on where youre trying to hit

so ive been messing with Winlink Express for a few weeks now and i think i mostly understand the concept but actually getting a session to go through has been hit or miss. im using a TNC-Pi with my 2m radio pointed at what should be a local RMS gateway and sometimes it connects fine, sometimes it just sits there throwing errors about no response or session timeout or whatever.
my main question is about gateway selection — i know you can sort by distance in the gateway list but does signal path quality matter more than raw distance? like theres one gateway 12 miles away but its basically line of sight blocked by a ridge, and another one thats like 28 miles but supposedly on a hilltop. been going back and forth on which to set as my default. also not sure if i should be using the VHF-FM channel or trying to set up an HF winlink session for better coverage, i have an HF rig but havent tried to configure a pactor or vara session yet.
also the message handling side is confusing me a bit — i get that its basically email but the addressing with the WL2K suffix and how it routes through the CMS servers, does the gateway forward everything automatically or do i need to trigger that somehow. feels like i set it up right but im not 100% sure messages are actually going anywhere

so ive been licensed for about 8 years mostly doing HF stuff and some weak signal VHF but ive always been fascinated by moonbounce and i think im finally at a point where i want to seriously try it. the problem is every time i start reading about what you need it kind of spirals out of control and i get overwhelmed and go back to working 40m or whatever.
from what i understand the minimum viable setup on 2m EME is something like a decent sized yagi or array plus a low noise preamp right at the feedpoint, and then you need to be running JT65 or Q65 these days? i was reading some old stuff about CW EME and that seemed absolutely brutal, like guys running kilowatts into arrays of 4 yagis for hours to make a single contact. is that still a thing or has digital basically taken over.
my biggest question is honestly the antenna. i have maybe room for a single long yagi on a good az/el mount — thinking like a 9 or 10 element on 2m but i dont know if thats enough to even hear anything. my lot is decent, no trees in the way of the moon path, and i have a good view to the east and south which i think matters for lunar windows. anyone actually done EME with a minimal single yagi setup or is that just a fantasy

i run both depending on what im doing and just do the ADIF import thing after contests, been doing it that way for like three years and never had a major problem. the duplicate detection when importing is usually good enough. only time it got weird was during a state QSO party where i worked some stations on both SSB and FT8 and the import got confused about the mode field but i just sorted it out manually.

we ran something similar at our club's 2m machine years ago, had a DB224 omni plus a single 5el yagi off a hybrid combiner aimed at a valley about 15 miles out that the omni just couldn't reach properly. worked pretty well honestly, the main thing you have to watch is port isolation on the combiner — if you skimp on that you'll get intermod garbage coming back into the receiver and it takes forever to diagnose because it looks like random noise.
the transition you're worried about is basically a non-issue in practice. mobiles just hear the repeater louder when they're in the yagi footprint and quieter when theyre not, there's no actual handoff happening, it's passive. the duplexer doesnt know or care which antenna path the signal came from. where it gets complicated is if you're running two separate receive antennas going into a preamp combiner rather than a passive hybrid, then you really need to think about phasing and isolation more carefully. but if you're just combining TX only on both and using the collinear for RX, keep it simple.

so ive been a tech for about a year and i keep hearing people talk about CW and how great it is and i kind of want to learn but i have no idea where to begin. like do i just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or is there some other way people do it. i tried printing out a chart and staring at it for a couple days but nothing is really sticking and i feel like im doing it wrong. is there like a recommended speed to start at or does that not matter at first. also does anyone actually use a straight key when learning or do i need a paddle right away, i dont even own a key yet so im kind of starting from zero here

so i was up at K-1234 doing a pota activation yesterday afternoon and kept getting this weird buzzing noise every few minutes on 20m. it would last maybe 10-15 seconds then disappear. didnt hear it on 40m at all. wonder if it was something in the park or just band conditions? was using my usual endfed with the 9:1 balun about 20 feet up in a tree
anyone else notice anything funky yesterday around 1800z? worked about 30 contacts but that noise was really annoying