Amanda Johnson

ran the D710G for about three years in my F150 before switching to a different setup and honestly it was rock solid. the built in TNC is the big thing — you just plug into the GPS antenna port and youre beaconing in like ten minutes, no messing around with bluetooth tncs or cables running everywhere. scanning is solid too, and dual receive is genuinely useful on that radio not just a checkbox feature. audio is loud enough for highway use, i had mine mounted in the dash with the speaker facing sort of upward and it was fine. only gripe is the remote head cable is kind of short and i had to get an extension to get the head unit where i wanted it on the dash. the 400 is nice but for aprs heavy use i'd still lean toward the 710 just because it's all self contained and the mapping stuff on the touch screen on the 400 always felt a little gimmicky to me personally. your mileage may vary obviously

The KB6NU No-Nonsense study guide PDF is free and shows correct answers in bold with incorrect ones grayed out. Read through it first, then take practice tests. Use the glossary for unfamiliar terms - many questions use technical language you might not know.

oh man i went through exactly this, it took me probably a year to get from 5 to 15 and then another few months to push past 20. the thing that actually helped me the most was just completely ignoring the idea of copying everything perfectly and forcing myself to sit with uncomfortable speeds. like set lcwo to 13wpm even if you only catch 30% of it and just do that every day. your brain will eventually start to catch up, it just takes longer than you expect. also the biggest thing people dont talk about is that copying on paper actually slows you down eventually. once i switched to just listening and mentally acknowledging each character without writing anything down it clicked a lot faster. you want the letters to just pop into your head automatically, not go through this whole decode-write cycle. took me a while to trust that but its really the way to go once you get past the absolute basics. also honestly 20 mins a day is fine, consistency beats long sessions every time at least thats been my experience

so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi 4 for the past few months trying to get it to do... well, everything. started out just wanting a direwolf setup for APRS and packet but then i started thinking about using it to control my antenna switch, log contacts automatically, maybe tie into weather station data for the shack display. you know how it goes, scope creep happens fast. anyway the actual APRS side works great, direwolf is pretty solid once you get the audio levels sorted out which took me longer than i want to admit. my issue right now is the gpio stuff for the antenna relay switching. im using a 5v relay board i grabbed off amazon, 4 channel thing, and i cant get the logic levels quite right — the pi's gpio is 3.3v and the relay board wants 5v trigger. most of the time it works but occasionally a relay just kind of... chatters? not great when youre switching between bands mid-contest. was wondering if anyone has gone down this road and whether its worth adding a proper level shifter or if theres a relay board that plays nicer with 3.3v logic. also open to being told im overcomplicating this and should just buy a hamlib-compatible switch.

this tripped me up for a while too. check what SSID the other station is using versus what you have in your message destination. APRS messaging is pretty picky about that — if hes running as W1ABC-9 and you address the message to W1ABC it wont deliver properly even though the callsign looks right. also worth checking if the destination station is actually IGated and connected to the APRS-IS, because if hes RF only and there isnt a good digipeater path between you the messages can just die in the ether. the position beacons work because they dont need an ACK and they spread around more aggressively. also double check your KPC-3+ firmware version, there was some weirdness with older versions and how they handled the message ack retries. cant remember the exact version off the top of my head but it was discussed on the aprssig mailing list a while back.

As someone new to HF, can you explain what makes SFI 158 good? I see numbers thrown around but don't understand what they mean for actual operating. Solar-flux numbers range from 60 to 300, and the upper HF bands are reliably open only when certain minimum levels are met. How high is "high enough"?

the deer thing is so real, i had a whole family of turkeys just wander through my operating spot last spring, completely unbothered. one of them almost knocked over my mast support i think it bumped the guy line. anyway welcome to WWFF its kind of addictive once you start looking at the map and realizing how many references are within driving distance

So I finally picked up a used Yaesu FTM-400 and I want to get it properly installed in my F-150 before the next club net. Ive done a handheld for years but this is my first real mobile setup and I dont want to mess it up right out of the gate. My plan is to run the power leads directly to the battery with an inline fuse, which I think is the right way to do it. The radio is going in the center console area kind of between the seats. The part I'm not sure about is the antenna situation. I was thinking about a NMO mount on the roof but my wife is not thrilled about drilling a hole in a relatively new truck. Are the lip mounts actually decent or am I going to take a big hit on performance? I've heard mixed things. Also wondering about cable routing — do most people go through the firewall or find another way in. Any tips from people who've done this before would be really appreciated, especially if you've had good or bad experience with those no-drill mount options.

so i just passed my technician exam last week and now im trying to figure out what handheld to buy and honestly its overwhelming. everyone on youtube seems to be pushing the baofeng uv-5r because its cheap but then i see people saying its garbage and to save up for a yaesu or kenwood. im not really sure what i even need it for yet, probably just local repeaters and maybe some simplex stuff if i can find people to talk to around here. my budget is like 60-80 dollars to start but i could stretch to maybe 150 if theres something way better in that range. does the more expensive stuff actually make a difference for a beginner or am i overthinking this? also i keep seeing people mention chirp and i have no clue what that is. do you need special software to program these things or can you just punch frequencies in manually

so we've got a county-wide ARES exercise coming up and i've been tasked with setting up a portable HF station at the EOC annex site which is basically a parking lot with a picnic shelter and zero shore power nearby. been doing this for a few years but never had to run fully independent for an extended period — previous exercises were always somewhere with at least a 20amp circuit we could tap into. current plan is running my IC-7300 with a Chameleon MPAS Lite vertical on a tripod, which usually works fine for portable ops. the antenna isnt my main concern honestly. what im trying to work out is the power chain. i've got a 100ah lithium (Bioenno) that i normally use for sota and that's great for a few hours but this exercise runs 8 hours and we're supposed to be transmitting periodically throughout, like check-ins every 30 min plus some traffic nets. someone in the club suggested renting a small generator but i've never tried running radio gear off a generator and i'm a little worried about the noise. another guy said just get a second battery and run them in parallel. third option I was thinking was a folding solar panel to top off the Bioenno during the day since the exercise is outdoors and june weather here is usually sunny. what would you guys actually do in this situation? i want something reliable but i dont want to drag a ton of gear out there either.

yeah done almost exactly this, though i used a different rotator. the jumping ADC readings when the motor runs is almost certainly noise on your supply rail coupling into the analog reference. throw a 100uF cap across your Vcc and GND right at the arduino and a smaller ceramic like 100nF close to the AREF pin if you're using an external ref. also if your motor driver and arduino are sharing the same supply that's gonna cause you problems, run them off separate regulators even if they share a common ground. the pi plus arduino combo is honestly what i ended up with too. pi runs hamlib and a little flask server that talks to my logging software over the network, arduino handles the PID loop for the motor and just accepts a target azimuth over serial. works really well once you iron out the noise stuff. the latency between the pi sending a command and the antenna actually moving is maybe a second or two which is totally fine for HF work.