Amanda Johnson

i had almost the exact same experience last week, worked a few EU stations on 10 on saturday afternoon and thought wow this is amazing and then sunday nothing. thought my radio broke lol. so at least its not just you

went through this whole thing about six months ago and honestly the 18 day wait nearly killed me, kept refreshing the ULS like a crazy person lol. but it worked out fine, nobody else applied for the one i wanted and it went through smooth. the hardest part is just picking something that isnt already taken or in that post-expiration limbo where its technically available but hasnt cleared yet. ae7q shows that status pretty clearly though once you figure out how to read it

so ive been at this morse code thing for about eight months now and i honestly feel like im hitting a wall. started out with the Koch method back in the spring and got up to maybe 12-13wpm without too much trouble but now i just... cant seem to break through. ive read that there's some kind of plateau around here that a lot of people hit but knowing that doesnt really make it less frustrating. my practice routine right now is mostly just running the G4FON trainer for like 20-30 minutes a day, copying random characters, and i do a little bit of the QSO practice sessions on there too. i want to eventually get comfortable at 20wpm because id really love to get into contesting and work some of the CW-only portions of big contests. right now i can barely copy a slow ragchew without losing letters when my brain tries to think too hard about what i just heard. anyone who went through this have any advice? is it just a matter of grinding more hours or is there something specific i should be changing up? im starting to wonder if im practicing wrong somehow.

yeah the 386 is a pain, i built a direct conversion rig a while back and fought that chip for like two weeks. ended up putting a 10 ohm resistor and cap on pin 7 and that helped a lot, theres a note about it in the datasheet if you havent seen it already. also just double checking — you do have a cap on pin 1 and 8 for the extra gain right? sometimes that interacts weirdly with certain layouts and makes things worse even though it shouldnt in theory.

Just passed my Technician exam last week - super excited! Looking at getting my first handheld but getting overwhelmed by all the options and features. What features are actually important for someone just starting out? My budget is around $150-200, and I'd mainly use it for local repeaters and maybe some emergency preparedness. I keep seeing mentions of things like APRS, digital modes, and dual-band vs tri-band but honestly not sure what I actually need versus what's just nice-to-have. Any elmers willing to share what they wish they'd known when buying their first HT?

so i've been kind of interested in ham radio for a while now, like a few years honestly, but never actually did anything about it. my neighbor has a big antenna setup and we got talking and now i actually want to get my technician license but i have no idea where to start. do i need to go to a class or can i just study on my own? i looked up the FCC part and got confused pretty fast. also how hard is the test actually, like is it the kind of thing where you can cram for a week or does it take months? i dont want to sink a ton of time into this if im not sure i can pass it

Yeah the 10 minute rule can feel a little murky in a net context, totally get the confusion. The way I've always understood it is your callsign IS your ID -- so when NCS calls for check-ins and you say your call, that counts. You dont need to do a formal "this is W4XYZ signing off" every single transmission as long as youre giving your call. The FCC rule is basically just making sure you identify at least once every 10 minutes and at the end of a contact, and in a structured net your check-in and any response to NCS usually handles that naturally. The floor thing really does depend on the net. Some nets are very structured and you should absolutely wait for NCS to recognize you before jumping in. Others are more casual and a quick "W4XYZ with a question" after someone finishes is fine. I'd watch the pattern for a few weeks and you'll start to feel when it's ok to speak up. Honestly the fact that you're thinking about this stuff means youre already doing better than half the people who just kerchunk the repeater without identifying at all lol

this is something i went through last year actually. ended up building a 2x9el cross yagi setup for 2m, took me like 4 months to get everything sorted and honestly the mechanical side of pointing the antenna accurately was more of a headache than the RF stuff. you need decent azimuth and elevation control and the moon moves faster than you think especially at lower elevation angles. i was using a cheap rotator combo at first and the az accuracy was way off, kept missing windows. my first actual QSO was about 6 weeks after i got everything on air, worked a station in Japan during a contest weekend, cant remeber which one now. the signal was barely there on the waterfall but JT65 decoded it and we got the exchange done. kind of anticlimactic but also not at all if you know what i mean. anyway dont underestimate how much time you spend just on the mechanical and pointing software side of things, that was my biggest surprise

We ran a wildfire evacuation scenario last year that was eye-opening. It was crucial to practice the phonetics of medicine names in order to transmit them correctly. We had operators relay prescription information for "evacuees" with complex medication names - really tested our copy accuracy under pressure!

i tried SO2R once during a state QSO party and it was kind of a disaster but i learned a lot. the bandpass filter thing the other guy mentioned is real, i didn't have them and it was rough. but also i hadn't set up any kind of interlocking so both radios could transmit simultaneously which is apparently very bad for several reasons the N1MM+ SO2R integration is actually pretty solid if you havent looked at it, theres a whole section in the docs about setting it up and it handles a lot of the switching logic automatically assuming your radio control cables are wired up right. that part helped me more than anything once i got it configured

yeah dont overthink it. the question pool is public and the exam is literally pulled straight from it so if you know the pool you know the exam. i did mine years ago with a printed study guide from the ARRL but these days the websites are way better. one thing i'll say is dont skip the rules and regs questions even if they seem boring, theres a bunch of them on the actual test and people sometimes blow past those thinking the technical stuff is more important. also just go take the exam sooner than you think youre ready, worst case you fail and you can retake it, most VE sessions let you do that same day if there are still seats. you got this

Before transmitting where operation could cause RF exposure exceeding limits in § 1.1310, licensees must take certain actions. OET Bulletin 65, Supplement B provides methodologies for amateur radio evaluation.

yeah 10 is the magic number for a valid activation. i was so nervous on my first one too, kept counting in my head after every QSO. honestly once you hit like 12 or 13 you can kind of relax and just enjoy it. one thing i'd add — next time try posting your spot on the POTA app or pota.app before you go on air, makes a huge difference in how fast the hunters find you. i went from zero contacts in 10 minutes to a steady pileup basically immediately once i started self-spotting. took me two activations to figure that out

congrats on passing the test, welcome to the hobby. okay so the baofeng thing is a bit of both honestly -- they're not terrible for hitting repeaters but the chirp programming software learning curve can be annoying at first, and some of them are known to spurious transmit outside the ham bands which is a legal thing worth knowing about. not saying dont get one, just know what you're getting into. my actual recommendation for a first HT if you can stretch to maybe $80-100 range is the yaesu ft-65 or the BF-F8HP if you really do want to stick with baofeng. the yaesu is just more solid, the menu system makes more sense, and the audio is noticeably better on repeaters. i gave my ft-65 to my daughter when she got licensed and it's taken a beating and still works fine. the kenwood TH-D74 and stuff like that is overkill until you know what features you actually care about. either way just get on your local repeater and start talking to people, that's the whole point right

so this has been driving me nuts for about two weeks now. im running an older Kenwood TM-D710A with the built in TNC and i've been watching my position on aprs.fi and it keeps placing me about 3 miles northwest of where i actually am. at first i thought it was just a propagation thing or maybe a digi was doing something weird but it's consistently wrong, like every packet shows up in the same wrong spot. the GPS unit i'm using is one of those little external pucks i bought off amazon a few years back, works fine for other stuff. i did double check the NMEA sentences coming out of it and they look right to me but honestly im not great at reading raw NMEA so maybe im missing something. the radio itself is set to internal TNC mode and beacon interval is at 5 minutes. i haven't changed any of the position settings manually so it shouldn't be overriding the GPS. anyone run into this before? is there a setting in the D710 that could cause it to cache an old position or something? or could the GPS just be feeding bad data even though the coordinates look reasonable to me?

the generator distance thing really depends on the generator and your antenna situation more than anything else. ive run a honda eu2200i probably 60 feet away from an operating position and had basically zero issues, but a buddy ran a cheaper predator unit and we had garbage on 40 even at 100 feet. the quality of the inverter circuit matters a lot. if you have a true sine wave inverter generator and you also run a decent ferrite choke on the charging cable right at the entry point to your operating position, you can usually get away with shorter distances than you'd think. for your runtime question — 100ah lifepo4 at 50-60w out of the radio, dont forget to account for the radio's actual draw at that output which is usually more like 15-18A on transmit at 50w depending on the rig, plus receive current plus whatever accessories you've got running. if you're doing maybe 20-25% duty cycle on transmit which is typical for a net control kind of role you're probably looking at an average draw somewhere around 6-8A. that stretches your 100ah pretty far if you keep the math honest. you might actually be fine without the generator at all depending on how chatty the exercise gets.

so ive been running a diamond X300 at my place for about three years now and honestly its been fine for what it is, decent gain, no complaints. but im moving my main station to a hilltop property i have access to about 12 miles outside of town and i want to do this properly this time. the location is exposed, probably 900ft elevation gain over the surrounding area, so wind loading is going to be a real concern especially in winter. been looking at the Comet GP-9 and the Diamond X510 mostly because i know both brands and trust them but the price gap is noticeable depending on where you buy. the GP-9 is rated something like 12.5dBd on 70cm and the X510 is close but not identical on paper. has anyone actually A/B'd these in a real installation or am i just splitting hairs at this point. my main use is going to be linked repeater access and some simplex work, not contesting or anything serious. also curious about the mounting situation — i have a 2 inch schedule 40 pipe already at the site, about 10 feet above a concrete pad. wind here gets nasty in december through february, we've had 80mph gusts on record up there. not sure if either of these antennas is actually rated for that or if the spec sheets are just optimistic.

im kind of in the same boat so take this with a grain of salt but what helped me was recording myself on a voice recorder app and then listening back. hearing it externally instead of just feeling it in my hand was kind of eye opening honestly. i was cutting my dits way too short without realizing it. also someone on another forum mentioned using a straight key for a while just to get the rhythm feel before going back to the paddle and i tried it for like two weeks and it actually did seem to help, not sure if thats just placebo or what but figured id mention it

For multi-band QRP work, I'd strongly recommend 9 MHz IF - plenty of crystal filter options available and you can get good selectivity with relatively simple ladder filters. The MC1496 mixers work well at this frequency too.

yeah what he said but also dont forget some repeaters have different tones for input and output. most just use one tone but ive run into a few that had seperate encode and decode tones which threw me off when i was starting out. also if you hear static or weird noises when people are talking it might be because your radio isnt decoding the tone properly

I had the same opening here in the midwest, worked a G station and a DL back to back which was pretty cool since I only got my license last year and don't have many European contacts yet. Honestly I had no idea what was happening I just happened to be spinning the dial and heard all this activity around 28.5 MHz and jumped in. Didn't realize until after that the band had opened up. Maybe I should be paying more attention to those solar indices you mentioned, I kind of just turn on the radio and hope for the best lol

that frequency thing would have gotten me too honestly. our EC keeps telling us to program all the alternates and I keep putting it off, this is a good reminder. glad it went okay overall. what kind of go-kit were you running? I'm still trying to figure out what's actually essential vs what's just nice to have.

so i've been running a little handheld velcroed to the dash for like two years now which i know is embarrassing but i finally pulled the trigger on a proper mobile setup. picked up a used FT-7900R and spent last saturday running coax and doing the power wiring the right way, straight to the battery with an inline fuse and everything. the antenna situation is where im not totally sure i did it right though. i've got a NMO mount drilled through the roof which was terrifying by the way, but the coax run i did goes kind of under the headliner then down the a-pillar and under the carpet to the radio under the seat. total run is maybe 12-13 feet. i used some RG-58 i had laying around because i figured the run was short enough it wouldnt matter much. is that actually okay or should i swap it for LMR-400 or at least RG-8X? i dont wanna redo the whole thing but i'll do it if i really should. also when i key up on 2m the SWR reading on the radio itself shows like 1.3 which seems fine but on 70cm it jumps to around 2.1. antenna is a Tram 1185 dual band. is that normal for that antenna or did i maybe not get the NMO connection tight enough?

yeah this is something i struggle with too, im mostly a VHF guy and came to HF kind of late so big pileups still feel chaotic to me. one thing that actually helped me was working a few of the smaller DXpeditions first just to get the feel for how it works before going after the really rare ones. like ive worked a bunch of the pacific island activations where the pileup is maybe 100 people instead of 10,000 and that gave me a way better sense of the flow without it being so overwhelming. also getting a decent antenna made a bigger difference than anything else i tried, went from a random wire to a 3 element yagi and suddenly i was actually in the game instead of just making noise

the CW requirement being gone means theres really no reason not to do it at this point imo. i put it off for years thinking it was gonna be brutal but the pool isnt as bad as people make it sound. some of the theory is genuinely interesting if you care about electronics at all. the extra HF segments matter more on 40 and 75/80 than people realize, especially if you do any phone operation down low where the band is less congested on the extra portion. that said if you just want to ragchew on 14.225 forever then yeah maybe it doesnt change your life. depends what you wanna do with it i guess