Amanda Johnson

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?

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.

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 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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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