Ashley Anderson73

Q65-30 sec periods really increase the number of QSOs compared to longer sequences. Shorter periods mean less thermal stress on your PA. The trade-off is slightly reduced sensitivity, but if you're running 300-400W you probably have enough margin. Also helps reduce Doppler issues and keeps the QSO rate up during good conditions.

so ive been on HF for about two years now and mostly do SSB on 40 and 20m and honestly my audio has always been kind of mediocre. people give me decent reports but occasionally someone will say i sound a bit muffled or that theres some odd processing going on. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 which should be a pretty solid combo and i have the mic gain set around 50-55% and the compression on maybe 3-4 on the ALC meter. i've watched a bunch of youtube videos but honestly a lot of them contradict each other. one guy says run zero compression for best audio fidelity, another guy cranks the speech processor and says that's how you punch through the noise. i really dont know who to believe at this point. also my TX bandwidth is set to the default which i think is FIL2 on the 7300, not sure if that matters. anyone have a go-to setup for the 7300 specifically or just general SSB audio advice? i feel like im leaving something on the table here.

Pro tip from a VE: Your exam will be 35 multiple choice questions from the 300 question pool, testing radio technology, operating practices, and regulations. Simple scientific calculators are fine. We usually have the results graded within 10 minutes - most of us have been doing this for years and want to celebrate with you when you pass!

i passed it like 6 months ago after being a tech for way longer than i should have been lol. honestly just did the qrz practice tests for maybe two weeks and passed with a few questions to spare. the electrical theory ones tripped me up at first but theres really only like a handful of actual formulas you need and once you see them enough times in the practice questions they stick. the HF stuff after is totally worth it btw, even just getting on 40m with a simple wire antenna was kind of a revelation after years of just hitting local repeaters

this is actually really reassuring to read because im still pretty new to the ARES side of things and every exercise i've been to felt kind of... too smooth? like everyone knew what was coming and it didnt feel real. sounds like your group ran something that actually tested people which is the whole point right. question — how did you set up the HF link part of it? that's something our group talks about wanting to do but we never actually have. was it just a couple guys with mobile rigs or did you have a proper portable setup deployed somewhere?

Just got my General license last month and I'm excited to start chasing DX! I've been reading about cluster spots but there seem to be so many different services - QRZ, DXWatch, DX Summit, The Holy Cluster. Which ones do you experienced DXers recommend? I mainly operate 20m and 40m SSB from my apartment with a wire antenna. Looking for something user-friendly that works well on mobile too since I'm often away from the shack. Thanks for any guidance!

honest answer — your elmer isnt wrong but hes not entirely right either. straight key is fine for learning rhythm and it forces you to think about timing in a way that paddles kind of handle for you automatically. but i wouldnt stress too much about which tool you use early on. what actually helped me was recording myself and listening back. painful but effective. on the iambic mode A vs B thing, basically mode A stops a character when you release both paddles and mode B squeezes out one more element. most people just pick one and stick with it and eventually stop noticing. i run mode B on my K3 and barely think about it anymore. if you're just starting out dont even worry about it, set whatever default is on your keyer and just practice. the biggest thing honestly is dont rush. 10 wpm with good fist sounds way better on the air than sloppy 15 wpm. send slow, send clean, speed comes naturally over time if you just get on the air and do it.

yeah the wind is no joke on exposed summits, ive had my pole just straight up fall over mid-qso. i use a bungee cord to tie it to my pack now which sounds dumb but works great. also look up the summit on the SOTA database before you go, sometimes people leave notes about good operating spots or where to actually set up and that saved me a lot of time on a few activations. the summit refs on the database also tell you the activation zone which is like within 25 meters vertical of the true summit so sometimes you dont even have to scramble to the very top which helps.

yeah its not just you, the bands have been doing this all month. the solar flux numbers look good on paper but the K index has been spiking a lot which basically wipes out the higher HF bands even when the SFI is healthy. i always check both — a flux of 160 means nothing if the K index is sitting at 4 or 5 because the geomagnetic disturbance just eats your F layer propagation alive especially on paths over the poles. the JA opening you caught sounds about right, that transpolar path to Japan can be really productive when conditions settle down after a disturbance, theres sometimes this sweet spot a day or two after a geomagnetic storm where the flux is still high and things calm down. i use the DX cluster and dxmaps.com to see where activity is popping up in real time, that helps a lot for knowing when to actually sit down at the radio instead of just hoping. your setup should be fine for working DX when the bands cooperate, a dipole at 30 feet isnt ideal but people work all over the world with worse

yeah the yagi wins every time for point to point work but youre right that it comes with tradeoffs. i ran a 6 element on 2m for a while doing portable and honestly the gain difference is noticeable even over relatively short paths, especially when you hit an obstacle or the other station is running low power. the issue is exactly what you said — you need to know roughly where to point it and if youre just calling CQ or trying to work a net with stations spread all around you then a collinear makes way more sense operationally. what i ended up doing for a while was running both — collinear on a lightweight fibreglass mast for general use, and the yagi on a separate small tripod for when i specifically knew i had a DX target or a weak station i wanted to nail down. pain in the neck to carry but it worked well. these days i mostly just use a 4 element tape measure yagi for 2m, its light enough that the tradeoff is worth it, takes about 3 minutes to put together. not as good as a proper aluminum element yagi but close enough for portable work and my back thanks me for it.

so i finally did my first parks on the air activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house and honestly i was kind of nervous going in because ive heard people say the 10 contact minimum feels stressful when youre not sure if youll get spotted or whatever i brought my ft-891 and a random wire antenna i just threw up in a tree, ran it up maybe 20 feet which wasnt ideal but it worked. spotted myself on the pota.app and within like 5 minutes i had a small pileup going on 40 meters. ended up with 34 QSOs in about an hour and a half which felt really good for a first time out the thing nobody told me is how important it is to just call CQ POTA and say the park reference number clearly. i kept forgetting to say K-5765 and a few hunters asked me to repeat it. also logging on paper first then uploading to the site later was way less stressful than trying to use software in the field, at least for me anyway if anyones been on the fence about trying an activation i'd say just go do it, the hunters are super patient and helpful. already planning my next one

welcome to the hobby man, that first qso feeling is something else isnt it. i still remember mine, i was so flustered i forgot to give my callsign twice and the guy on the other end had to ask me again. dont worry about the baofeng, everyody starts somewhere and for hitting a local repeater it does the job fine. once you get comfortable you'll probably want to upgrade to technician... wait you already have that. i mean you'll wanna look at getting your general so you can get on HF, thats where things really open up. stick around and ask questions, people here are pretty helpful

so ive been chasing DX seriously for about two years now and for the longest time pileups just felt like a wall i couldnt get through. like i'd hear a rare one come up, throw my call in, and just get buried every single time. been doing a lot of reading and experimenting lately and i finally had a breakthrough working VK9 last weekend so figured id share what clicked for me and see what you guys do differently. the biggest thing that changed for me was actually listening before transmitting. i know that sounds obvious but i mean really listening — figuring out where the DX is actually listening, not just where everyone else is calling. so many guys just tune to the split frequency and blast away without even confirming where the DX is working. i spent like 10 minutes just watching the pattern before i even keyed up and figured out he was consistently pulling calls from about 3 up. threw my call there and got through on maybe the 4th or 5th attempt which for me is basically a miracle. also timing has been huge for me. sending my call once, clearly, and then waiting. not tail-ending endlessly or doubling with everyone else. i run an IC-7300 into a hexbeam at about 35 feet which isnt a big gun setup by any means so i cant just overpower the pile. have to be smarter about it. curious what techniques others use especially if you're running modest power, dont have a stacked yagi situation going on.

im in basically the same boat lol, been at it since january and hovering around 6-7wpm. following this thread because i need all the help i can get. one thing i did try was the W1AW code practice transmissions on shortwave which was cool because it felt more real than a computer, even if i was only catching maybe half of it at the faster speeds.

dont stress too much about memorizing all of them, i been licensed 6 years and there are still Q codes i have to look up. the ones that trip people up sometimes are QSY which means change frequency, and QRT which means im shutting down or stopping transmission. you'll hear QRT a lot when someone is signing off for the night like "going QRT" meaning theyre done for the evening. oh and QRP is kind of its own whole culture thing, low power operating, theres entire communities built around running 5 watts or less. so if someone says theyre a QRP op they usually mean thats their whole thing not just that theyre turning down the power at that moment

weight adjustment on most keyers just makes the elements slightly longer or shorter overall, it doesnt change the 3:1 ratio between dits and dahs, that ratio stays fixed. what it does is add a little extra space or squeeze things together depending which way you go. some people like a slightly heavier weight especially at higher speeds, personal taste really. the tension thing though — yeah absolutely check that. if the paddle is too loose you'll get contact bounce and extra dits sneaking in, too tight and you fatigue your hand fast and tend to over-squeeze. for a BY-1 theres a little set screw on each paddle and you just want it so the paddle returns crisply without feeling like youre fighting it. i usually set mine so i can just barely feel the magnet pulling it back. takes a few minutes to dial in but makes a huge difference in how clean your sending sounds. record yourself again after you adjust it and you'll probably hear improvement right away.

good thread. i'll just say from my experience with a couple small DXpeditions that from the other side of the pileup the thing that stands out most is ops who send their call once, clearly, and then wait. you'd be amazed how many people send their callsign like 4 or 5 times in a row and it just blends into mush on our end. one clean transmission of your call at normal speed is almost always more readable than someone hammering it repeatedly. also if the DX comes back to someone and you keep calling anyway, i personally would sometimes just skip past the whole mess and work the next frequency just to punish the lid behavior lol. not very diplomatic but after hour 14 of a DXpedition you start doing petty things.

ok so ive been licensed about 3 months now (technician) and i finally got my first HT, a Baofeng UV-5R, and im trying to access a couple of the local repeaters listed on repeaterbook. some of them i can hear just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me or the repeater doesnt open up. i went through the settings and i think i have the offset right but im not totally sure about the CTCSS stuff. from what i understand you need to transmit a subaudible tone to access most repeaters, is that right? but on repeaterbook some listings show a tone and some dont. if theres no tone listed does that mean its open carrier or is the info just missing? also one of the local guys told me i need to set the tone on transmit only and not on receive but i wasnt sure why that matters. my radio has options for like tone, ctcss, dcs and i honestly have no idea what half of them mean. just trying to figure out the basics before i embarrass myself too much on the air

Building my first SO2R setup with two IC-7300s and running into serious interstation interference on adjacent bands. Currently testing with 40M on radio 1 and 20M on radio 2, but getting significant desense on the receiving radio when the other transmits. Phase noise from the exciter output seems to be the main culprit - similar to what others have reported with older rigs. Looking at commercial band-pass filters vs. homebrew stubs for isolation. Band filters are clearly essential for SO2R operation, but budget is tight. Has anyone tried the Array Solutions Six-Pack for antenna switching combined with basic BPFs? Also considering separate receiving antennas to improve isolation. Station is suburban with 40M dipole and tri-band beam at 50ft. Any recommendations for minimum viable filtering setup that won't break the bank?