Amanda Johnson

the enclosure question is actually a real one and i'd honestly say yes, put it in a box first. i built something similar a while back and spent forever chasing a hum that turned out to mostly go away once i had a proper ground plane and lid on the thing. the LM386 is notorious for picking up all kinds of garbage if the layout isnt tight and the supply rail isnt clean. worth throwing a 470uF cap right across the supply pins if you havent already, and maybe a 0.1uF ceramic in parallel with it. also that 10uF cap on pin 7 of the LM386 (the bypass pin) makes a huge difference to the gain and the noise floor, a lot of people leave it off or use the wrong value. the 5 minute warmup on the oscillator is pretty normal for a free running LC design with no temperature compensation, i wouldnt stress too much about that for a bench receiver.

so ive been running WSJT-X for FT8 and JS8Call for a while now and just letting it log to its own log file, then periodically importing into Log4OM which i use for my main shack log. works okay but its kind of clunky and i always forget to do the import so my log is like 3 weeks behind. the thing is i also do some contesting, nothing serious, mostly the state QSO parties and occasionally SS when i have a weekend free. N1MM is obviously the go-to for that and i get that. but i hate having logs scattered across three different programs. WSJT-X doing its thing, N1MM when im contesting, and Log4OM as the master log. its a mess and ive definitely had dupes show up in my LOTW uploads because of it. anybody figured out a cleaner workflow here or is this just the reality of the situation? i looked at the UDP broadcast stuff in WSJT-X and it seems like Log4OM can receive that in real time which would help, but i havent gotten it set up yet. curious if anyone is actually running something like this cleanly.

honestly for mid-pack scores SO2R is probably more distraction than help until you really have your single radio technique dialed in. the guys making SO2R work well have usually been contesting for decades and they can almost run both radios without thinking about it. if you're still working on rate optimization on one radio, adding a second one just splits your attention in a bad way during a run. that said if you want to try it anyway the microHAM SO2R box is the gold standard but it is not cheap. ive seen people do decent SO2R setups with a station master deluxe and some careful antenna planning that cost a lot less. the antenna isolation piece is really where it gets complicated, you cant just plug in two radios and go, the intermod will make you miserable. bandpass filters are not optional they're mandatory. W3NQN or Array Solutions bandpass filters are what most serious contesters run, some people diy them but that's its own rabbit hole what antennas are you working with? that changes the answer a lot

same boat as you honestly, i just hit 100 entities confirmed on LoTW last month and it kind of snuck up on me. i wasnt really chasing it either and then i uploaded a bunch of old logs and suddenly had like 80 confirmed. WAS took me longer weirdly because i kept missing the same three or four states. Delaware was my white whale for like six months. one thing i'd say is don't sleep on 40m and 17m for chasing entities. everybody talks about 20m and yeah it's the workhorse but sometimes the pileups are just brutal and you can find the same station working a much thinner pile on 17. good luck with it, it's genuinely addictive once you start watching your totals go up

i did something like this but with a raspberry pi instead of arduino, mostly because i already had one sitting around and wanted to run fldigi on the same box. ended up being overkill honestly. for just driving relays arduino is probably the right call, pi gpio can do it but the timing is less predictable because of the OS getting in the way. the 500ms delay thing is fine for antenna switching, relays dont care and your SWR meter isnt gonna explode or anything. dont overthink the debounce.

so ive been a general for about three years now and everyone keeps telling me to just go ahead and get my extra but i keep putting it off because honestly the theory stuff intimidates me a bit. like i got through the general okay but some of the extra pool questions i looked at had me scratching my head. the stuff about filter design and impedance matching and some of the oscillator theory... i mean i understand the basic concepts but the math behind some of it is another level. my actual question i guess is how long did it take you to feel like you actually understood the material rather than just memorizing answers. cause i can probably memorize my way through it but id rather actually get it. does the ARRL extra class book cover everything or should i be looking at other resources too. and is the HF privilege stuff worth it on its own even if i never fully wrap my head around all the theory

yeah i went through exactly this about two years ago. the thing that finally unstuck me was the Farnsworth method -- basically you set your character speed high like 15 or 18wpm but the word spacing is slow enough that you have time to process. so your brain learns the characters at real speed but you get breathing room between them. G4FON does this i think, theres a setting for it. once i switched to that the plateau kind of broke on its own over a few weeks. also just fwiw i started actually getting on the air around 10wpm even though it was terrifying. found the slow net on 40m and just jumped in. people on those nets are incredibly patient and honestly that did more for my speed than any trainer software because the adrenaline makes you focus in a way a computer cant

honestly on HF i pretty much always use phonetics for the callsign at least on first contact. too many times ive had a guy think my E was a B or whatever and then the whole QSO starts off with wrong info in his log. repeaters are more forgiving since the audio is usually cleaner but even then if someone asks you to repeat just go phonetic, saves the back and forth. november and uniform are annoying i agree, i still occasionally say november when i mean uniform if im tired lol. just drill them when youre driving or whatever, thats how i did it

oh man 40m for DX is great but you really need to be at it around sunrise and sunset your local time, like the hour or two window around those times is when the magic happens for paths to europe or the pacific depending which direction you're working. i worked JA almost every morning last winter on 40 ssb around my local sunrise, almost like clockwork when conditions were even halfway decent. during the day though yeah its pretty much a local band, skip is too short for much else

25 feet apex on 40 is pretty low yeah, youre gonna get a lot of high angle radiation which is great for regional NVIS type contacts but not so great if youre trying to work DX to the northeast or anywhere really. the inverted V configuration also narrows the pattern compared to a flat top so youre already giving up some in that direction depending on which way the wire runs. raising just one end wont help as much as youd think, the apex height is really what matters most for that high angle stuff. if you can get even 10 more feet on that center point youll notice a difference. i ran mine at 35 feet for a couple years and it was a night and day improvement over where i started at around 28. on the balun, 8 turns on a 43 mix toroid is on the lighter side for 40m, most guys wind 10-12 turns to get the impedance up high enough to be effective. might be worth rewinding it. the W1JB stuff on common mode chokes is worth reading if you havent gone down that rabbit hole yet.

yeah the alert thing is huge, i did my first activation without alerting and sat up there for almost 45 minutes before i finally got my 4 contacts. next time i alerted and had them in like 10 minutes. also self-spotting from the summit if you have cell service is a game changer, there's an app called SOTA Goat that lets you spot yourself and see incoming spots. good luck, what summit are you doing if you dont mind saying?

so ive been sitting on doing the mars/cap mod on my FT-857D for probably two years now and last saturday i finally just did it. pulled the radio apart, found the diodes, clipped D900 like every guide says and put it back together. took me like three hours because i kept second guessing myself and re-reading the same forum posts over and over. anyway it works, i can now TX outside the ham bands which was mainly the point because i do some MARS stuff with my local group and the workaround we had before was kind of a pain. audio sounds the same to me on HF, havent noticed any difference in receive either. one thing i wasnt expecting is it seems like the ALC behavior changed slightly on 10m but that could just be me imagining things, hard to say. anybody else done this and noticed anything weird after? also thinking about doing the internal speaker mod at some point because that stock speaker is genuinely awful. or just live with it and use headphones i guess

the m2 stuff is nice but probably overkill for /p unless you're doing serious weak signal work. i use a cheap 5el yagi i built from a jpole design i found on the internet and it works fine for 2m ssb from a summit. took maybe two hours to build and weighs almost nothing. cant speak to the dual band question since i just run separate antennas for 2m and 70cm but thats probably more hassle than its worth for most people

yeah 20m has been pulling that late afternoon trick for a while now, its a greyline and seasonal thing combined i think. the path to europe from the midwest shortens up as the season changes and you get that weird window where the D layer absorption drops off right around sunset your time but europe still has some daylight left. flux in the 140s is actually pretty solid, better than we had for a long time, but high flux doesnt automatically mean stable conditions — you can get enhanced but also more volatile propagation when things are active the JA opening on 17 doesnt surprise me at all. transpolar paths can do funny things and sometimes one station's takeoff angle just catches it while a guy a few miles away hears nothing. what antenna are you running? if youre on a dipole at low height you might actually be favoring higher angles which can work against you on some of those longer paths but sometimes helps on scatter type openings. worth checking dxmaps.com and pskreporter during those windows to see what the actual propagation footprint looks like in real time

yeah dont bother with the osc mod unless you're doing serious weak signal vhf or something where every hz counts. for normal HF use its overkill. the fan mod tho, that i'd do on every single one of those radios before anything else. good call doing them together while you had it open.

Remember you can get up to 9 questions wrong and still pass! Don't stress too much - at 80-85% you're well above the passing threshold. Maybe 5-10 more practice exams should do it.

I hit the same wall! Try SOTA or POTA chasing - the exchanges are simple and operators are patient with beginners. Send QRS or just '?' if you need them to slow down. Real QSOs helped me more than any practice software.

so ive been trying to figure out if its worth making the drive out to the Tri-County fest this year. last time i went was maybe 3 years ago and the swap tables were actually decent, picked up an old Kenwood HF rig for like nothing. heard this year they got a bigger venue which hopefully means more parking because that was a nightmare last time. anybody else planning on going or know if the club is doing a special event station there again?

yeah i do this all the time, its basically how i decompress after work. 40m is my go-to for exactly that reason, always something going on even if its just background chatter. i had a solid hour last tuesday just listening to a roundtable somewhere in the midwest, didnt even key up once just kind of enjoyed hearing people talk about nothing propagation on 40 has been a little weird lately i think, some nights its wide open and i'm hearing europe at weird hours, other nights its like the band just doesnt exist past 200 miles. solar stuff probably but i havent kept up with the flux numbers recently

honestly it took me probably two full contest seasons before SO2R felt anywhere close to natural. first year i think i actually put up worse scores than my SO1R setup because i kept getting confused about which radio i was transmitting on and made a bunch of dumb mistakes. the RFI problem between radios is real too, especially if your antennas arent well separated — i had a situation during SS phone where my 20m signal was getting into the second receiver so bad i could barely copy anything on 40. that said once it clicks it really does make a difference. not just for running rate but for S&P too, you can be calling CQ on one band while hunting mults on the other and thats where you really start pulling ahead. the key thing nobody tells you up front is that the SO2R controller and your logging software integration has to be solid or the whole thing falls apart. i use N1MM+ with a Microham MK2R and that combo has been rock solid for me. if your keyer and radio switching isnt automated and synced to the log you'll go nuts trying to do it manually. so yeah worth it if youre serious, but budget time to set it up properly before a contest not the night before like i did the first time

so ive been sitting on doing the mars/cap mod on my FT-857D for like two years now, always nervous about voiding the warranty (which is already long gone lol) and just general anxiety about poking around inside a radio i actually use daily. finally bit the bullet last weekend. for anyone who hasnt done it, its pretty straightforward once you get the thing open — theres a diode on the main board you either remove or short depending on what you want to do, the Yaesu service manual has the details. took me maybe 45 minutes including the time i spent second guessing myself and looking at the board with a flashlight trying to figure out which one was D4003 or whatever it was. anyway the reason i did it wasnt just for extended TX, i mainly wanted to mess with the receive on some of the utility stuff below the ham bands. and honestly its working great for that. also been thinking about doing the internal fan mod because this thing runs hot when im doing digital modes for more than like 20 minutes. anyone done the fan upgrade on one of these? ive seen a few writeups but theyre pretty old at this point and im not sure if the links to the replacement fans are still valid.

yeah i ran into the exact same headache a couple years back. what i ended up doing was just committing to N1MM for everything and honestly it wasnt as bad as i thought. the everyday logging stuff works fine once you get used to the interface, which admittedly looks like it was designed in 2004 and never updated but hey it works. the WSJT-X integration is actually pretty solid if you set up the UDP broadcast correctly, N1MM will pick up the spots and log them automatically so you dont have to do the whole import dance. takes maybe 20 minutes to configure if you havent done it before. the one thing i will say is that for pure station management stuff like awards tracking and QSL management Log4OM is genuinely better, its just not a contest logger. so some people run both and sync via ADIF export but if youre trying to simplify i get why that sounds annoying. for me just having one program open that handles everything during a contest weekend without switching gears was worth it even if i gave up some of the nicer award tracking features.

I just joined ARES a few months ago and havent been to a real exercise yet, only the orientation stuff. this is kind of intimidating to read honestly haha but also good to know what to expect. is there a good resource for learning the ICS-213 forms before my first actual drill? I looked on the ARRL site a bit but got kind of lost.

yeah i just did this like four months ago so still pretty fresh for me. i used hamstudy and also watched some youtube videos when i didnt understand a concept, there's a few channels that break down the electrical theory stuff which is the part i found most confusing. the questions about ohms law and that kind of thing. but honestly a lot of the test is rules and regulations which you just kind of memorize. one thing i'd say is just find a local club and ask about exam sessions, some of them do walk in testing and its like 15 bucks or something. took me maybe three weeks of casual studying and i passed first try so it's definitely doable around a busy schedule

so ive been at this for about 3 months now and i feel completely stuck. started with the Koch method using LCWO and got up to 5wpm pretty comfortably but now every time i try to bump it up even a little bit everything just falls apart. im copying fine at 5 then i jump to 7 and its like my brain just stops working, i miss letters and then i lose the next two trying to figure out what i missed. ive been practicing maybe 20-30 minutes a day which i know probably isnt enough but thats all i can squeeze in with work and the kids. should i just keep grinding at 5 until its totally automatic or is there a better way to push through this wall? i really want to get to 20wpm eventually, maybe even enough to work some DX on 40m without embarrassing myself. any advice welcome, ive read a bunch of stuff online but everyone seems to say something different