Ashley Anderson73

oh man i was so lost with this same stuff when i started. honestly what helped me most was just downloading one of those reference sheets and keeping it next to the radio. after a few weeks of actually using them it became second nature. QRZ is another big one, means 'who is calling me' but you hear people use it sort of as a general CQ sometimes which isnt really technically correct but whatever, everybody does it. 73 is one of those things that just feels weird to say out loud at first but you get used to it real quick

yeah technician is definitely where everyone starts, dont stress about skipping to general right away. most people do tech first and then upgrade when they feel like it, sometimes years later, sometimes a few months. for studying honestly hamstudy.org is what i used and it worked great, you just drill the question pool over and over until you're getting 85% or better consistently and you'll be fine on the actual exam. the real test is pulled from the same question pool so there are no surprises. when i went to take mine i was nervous for nothing, the VE team was really friendly and it took maybe 20 minutes total. just keep doing practice tests every day for a couple weeks and you'll pass no problem.

I went the other direction actually — had an RSP1A and ended up keeping the RTL-SDR dongles around for dedicated single-purpose stuff like having one permanently on ADS-B and another running on the weather sat frequencies. the SDRplay sits on HF. so maybe think about it less as replacing it and more like adding a better tool for a specific thing. also worth mentioning if you havent tried SDR++ yet, its cross platform and works with pretty much everything including SDRplay, way cleaner than SDR# in my opinion and the noise floor display is nicer to look at for long monitoring sessions. not that it changes your hardware question but software side its worth a look

yeah the fan thing drove me nuts at first too. what i ended up doing was dropping the power back to like 50-60 watts for general rag chewing and it stays pretty quiet most of the time. only spins up hard when im doing FT8 duty cycles at higher power which makes sense i guess. the waterfall really is a game changer coming from older rigs. i came from a TS-570 and honestly going back to it now feels like driving without mirrors. the 7300 isnt perfect — the close-in dynamic range gets some criticism from the serious contesters and theres a reason the IC-7610 exists — but for the money its hard to argue with. youll figure out the RF gain thing pretty quick, i run mine around 2 o'clock most of the time on a typical band with moderate noise.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely is confusing when youre starting out. so the short answer is no, you dont need all three, but each one has its own purpose depending on what youre going for. LoTW is basically the gold standard if you want to work toward ARRL awards like DXCC or WAS because it only counts confirmations from there for those awards. eQSL is more casual and some people swear by it but it isnt accepted for most of the big awards. paper cards are kind of the sentimental tradition of the hobby and yeah if someone sends you one its considered polite to send one back, but nobody is going to track you down if you dont. for uploading to LoTW — what logging software are you using? most of the popular ones like Log4OM or WSJT-X have pretty straightforward LoTW upload built right in once you get your certificate sorted. the certificate process through TQSL is a bit of a pain the first time but once its done its done. if you want i can walk you through it, just let me know what software youre on.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for maybe 3 months now. what helped me a lot was morse.ninja on top of LCWO because it has a different way of presenting stuff and i found mixing the two kept it from getting boring. also theres a youtube channel i stumbled on that plays QSOs at like 5wpm with the text underneath so you can follow along and it feels more like actual radio which is motivating. one thing nobody told me was that copying by hand and copying by typing feel completely different so pick one and stick with it for a while. i kept switching and it confused me more than anything

congrats man, and yes totally counts. everybody fumbles the first few times, Larry sounds like a good egg. my first qso was on a handheld too and i literally read my callsign off a sticky note i put on the radio because i was scared id blank on it. took me maybe a week before i could just say it naturally without thinking. the baofeng is fine to start on, get out there and talk to people thats the whole point. once you get comfortable on the repeater you'll probably want to try some simplex or maybe HF down the road but no rush, just have fun with it for now.

i had basically the exact same situation last year and went with the vertical. built mine out of a 31ft spiderpole with wire along it, fed with coax and a 1:1 choke balun at the base. put down 24 radials on the ground and i was pretty happy with it for 40m DX. worked into asia a few times during good openings and it definitely feels like it punches reasonably well. one thing i will say though is the vertical picks up way more local noise than my old dipole did. im in a suburban neighborhood and the RFI situation is annoying, hash from switching power supplies all over the place. the dipole i had before was quieter on receive. so just something to think about if you're in a noisy area.

not dumb questions at all, this stuff confused me for a while too. the RMS gateways are just store-and-forward nodes basically — your message goes radio to gateway, gateway uploads to the CMS (common message server) over the internet, and sits there until the recipient connects and grabs it. so yeah it just waits on their servers, there's no push notification unless you're using something like a winlink hybrid network with a local telnet connection but thats a different thing. on the failed handshake issue, 20m can be really finicky especially mid-day depending on where you are and what time you're trying to connect. the Vara HF waterfall should show you whether you're actually seeing the gateway signal before you try to connect — if it looks clean and you still drop, could be a timing issue in your VARA settings or the gateway was just busy with another session. only one connection at a time per RMS node so if someone else grabbed it first you get bumped. try a different gateway, the RMS relay list in Winlink Express updates pretty regularly and you can sort by distance and band. as for retry, Winlink Express will usually let you know if the session failed and you can manually retry, it doesnt auto-retry silently as far as i know. the message stays in your outbox until you get a confirmed transfer so at least you wont lose it.

honestly for a casual contester i wouldnt bother with SO2R until single radio operation feels completely automatic. like if youre still thinking about logging or CW sending or whatever during a run, adding a second radio is just going to wreck both your rate and your sanity. the guys doing SO2R well have been contesting for years and even then it took them a while to get smooth at it. one thing that helped my rate a lot more than any fancy setup was just getting better at the rhythm of a run, keeping the exchange tight, not chatting, calling CQ again fast after a QSO. sounds obvious but i was definitely leaving time on the table with sloppy exchanges early on. also knowing when a band is actually about to open or close from experience, you get a feel for it after enough contests and you can position yourself better.

so ive been noticing 20m acting really strange the past couple weeks. some days it's absolutely dead, cant raise anyone in europe from the midwest no matter what i try, then randomly like tuesday afternoon it just opened up and i was working stations left and right into spain and portugal with no effort at all. been licensed for about 8 months so i honestly dont have a great baseline for what normal looks like. been trying to follow the solar flux index stuff on the spaceweather sites but i dont totally understand how to read it in terms of what to actually expect on what bands. like i know higher is generally better but how high is high enough to bother trying 10m or 15m? and do geomagnetic conditions matter more than the flux number or is it both? im also trying to figure out when to even bother with 40m for DX vs just using it for local rag chews anyway if anyone has good resources or just wants to explain how they personally use the solar data to decide what band to operate on id really appreciate it. feel like im kind of flying blind right now

yeah i just did mine a few months ago so i remember what it was like being in your spot. i used the Ham Radio Prep app and thought it was pretty good, there might be a small cost for the full version but i think theres a free tier too. i also watched some youtube videos when i hit questions i didnt understand, especially the electrical theory stuff which trips a lot of people up. took me maybe 3 weeks of casual studying and i passed with room to spare. the test site i went to was super chill, the examiners were all friendly and encouraging, dont stress about it

honestly i just run both at the same time on different bands, FT8 on 20 doing its thing while i poke around on JS8 on 40. the G90 should handle that fine if you have a way to split audio or just run two instances pointed at different soundcard channels. i dunno i find FT8 kind of meditative in a weird way, like watching a waterfall and seeing callsigns pop up from places you wouldnt expect. but yeah for actual human interaction JS8 is way better when you find someone to talk to. the relay mesh stuff is cool too if you ever dig into that side of it.

yeah the two-program problem is real and honestly most people i know just accept it to some degree. what i do is keep Log4OM as my main station log and have WSJT-X pointed at it via the UDP broadcast — Log4OM listens on port 2237 by default and you just tell WSJT-X to send to that address. once thats set up WSJT-X contacts drop straight into Log4OM in real time, no manual importing. took me maybe 20 minutes to figure out the first time but now it just works. N1MM i only fire up for actual contests and then i export from there afterwards and merge into Log4OM. its a bit of extra work after a contest weekend but its like 10 minutes and i only do it a few times a year so it doesnt bother me. the duplicate checking in Log4OM is decent enough that i havent had problems with it. Log4OM 2 specifically is pretty solid for general logging, the interface is a bit busy but you get used to it. clublog integration works well too if you care about that.

that feeling you described when they handed you the assignment is totally real and basically everyone goes through it the first time, doesnt matter how many drills you've done. drills are almost too low stakes in a way, nobody's really stressed so your brain doesnt go into that same mode. on the debrief question — it really varies a lot by group. our section does a written AAR within a week of any activation, EC sends out a form and then we go over the highlights at the next monthly meeting. but ive been to other counties where yeah, people just kind of drift off and nothing formal happens. which is a shame honestly because thats where you catch the stuff that almost went wrong before it actually does go wrong next time. if your EC isnt doing it might be worth just quietly asking if thats something the group wants to start. sometimes it just takes one person to bring it up.

honestly the question pool approach works fine for passing the test, theres only like 426 questions and the actual exam pulls 35 from that pool so if you grind through them enough times you start recognizing the right answers. hamstudy.org is what i used and it tracks which ones youre getting wrong and keeps drilling you on those. i think i spent maybe 2-3 weeks just doing practice exams every night for 20-30 minutes and i passed with a 32 out of 35. the math stuff is not as bad as it looks, the ohms law questions are basically the same formula rearranged three different ways and once you see that it clicks. dont stress about understanding every single thing deeply, the tech exam is mostly just recognizing the answer not deriving anything from scratch.

this is making me want to finally build one of those michigan mighty mite kits ive had sitting in a drawer since like 2021 lol. did you have any trouble with the audio on yours, i've heard the LM386 can be kind of noisy if you're not careful about the layout

yeah the stock hm-219 mic on the 7300 is pretty mediocre honestly, it tends to be kind of boomy especially if youre close to it. the biggest thing i noticed when i switched to a desk mic was just how much easier it was to shape the audio consistently because you're always the same distance from the element. but even before going that route, the TX eq on that radio can help a lot if you know what youre doing. basically for SSB voice you really dont need anything below about 300hz, its just muddiness that doesnt help readability. i cut pretty hard below 300, leave the mids mostly flat and add a small boost maybe 3-4db around 2.5khz which is where speech intelligibility lives. also make sure your speech processor is set AFTER you get the mic gain right — like set your mic gain so youre hitting about 50-60% on the ALC without the compressor on, then turn compression on and it should only be adding a few db of average power not slamming the peaks. also worth asking someone to record your audio off the air and play it back to you, way more useful than going by verbal reports in a qso

hamstudy is exactly what most people use honestly, you're already on the right track. two or three weeks is plenty of time for tech, i think i studied maybe a week and a half before my exam and passed no problem. the pool of questions is fixed so what you're practicing is literally what will be on the test, just different combinations. the electrical theory stuff you don't need to fully understand for the exam, you can just memorize the answers and move on. some people say you should actually learn it and yeah eventually that's useful but for getting the ticket just passing is fine. you can always go back and learn the why later once you're actually on the air. when you find a test session check if it's with a VEC club near you, a lot of them are free or just a few bucks. and if you pass tech that day some clubs will let you just go ahead and take the general exam right after for no extra fee, might as well try it if you feel good

so I just passed my technician exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to get as my first radio. I've been doing way too much reading and now I'm more confused than when I started honestly. Everyone seems to have a strong opinion and a lot of it contradicts each other. Some people say just get a Baofeng UV-5R to start because its cheap and you can learn on it without worrying about breaking something expensive. Other people act like suggesting a Baofeng is basically a war crime and tell you to get a Yaesu or Kenwood right away. I dont really know what the difference is in terms of day to day use, like will I actually notice a huge difference on the local repeater? I plan to mostly use it for hitting the local 2m repeater and maybe some simplex around town. Not doing any serious emcomm stuff or anything like that, just want to get on the air and talk to people. Budget is flexible I guess, I could do $50 or I could do $200 if there's actually a reason to spend the more. Anyone been through this recently or remember what they started with?

Great question! I participate in local and national emergency drills regularly and follow updates from ARRL. I do a full kit deployment monthly and equipment checks every two weeks - charge batteries, test radios, inspect cables. Takes 30 minutes but saves hours when it counts.

For PSK reporter spots, a quorum of three different spotters must be reached for the same combination of callsign/band/mode until spots are processed - this prevents erroneous alerts due to spotters with a misconfigured band. It's more reliable than single-spotter cluster reports and gives better propagation data.

honestly just say your callsign and wait for the net control to acknowledge you, thats really all you need. most local nets are super casual, they'll come back to you and ask for your name and location if they want it. you were right that it varies -- some nets have a specific format they announce at the start, so if you listen to the preamble at the beginning they usually spell it out. for bigger nets like the ARRL nets or traffic nets it gets a little more structured but even then net control walks you through it. just jump in, worst that can happen is they ask you to repeat something. everyone there was a first-timer once and most net controls are pretty patient about it

Yeah this is something our club struggled with too until we started doing monthly nets specifically for this. We pick a scenario like power outage or severe weather and practice reporting procedures, health and welfare traffic, that kind of thing. Also got connected with our county emergency management office - they actually want to know what ham resources are available. The ARRL has some good materials on emergency communication but nothing beats actually doing it. Maybe suggest your club start doing some tabletop exercises?

so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra. like i mostly do HF and some 2m stuff, nothing crazy. but i keep hearing people say the extra theory is actually useful to know even if you dont care about the extra HF privileges that much. the thing is i looked at some of the question pool and some of it is pretty dense. like the stuff about filter design and transmission line theory and some of the oscillator stuff honestly goes way over my head right now. im not an engineer or anything, i just got into this hobby a couple years ago after my neighbor showed me his setup. so i guess my question is, do you actually USE the extra theory stuff in practice or is it more just good to have as background knowledge? and also is the test as hard as it looks or does it get easier once you actually sit down and study it. im using hamstudyorg and it seems manageable but some of those questions feel like they came from an EE textbook