David Park

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new generals. so basically the FCC part 97 rules give you the legal limits — those are the actual frequencies you're licensed to use for a given mode and license class. the ARRL band plan is more like a gentlemen's agreement, nobody's going to arrest you for running phone in the CW portion but you'll get an earful from some old timer for sure on 40m specifically, general class phone starts at 7.225 MHz so that's the lower edge of your phone privileges. the band edge thing is a real concern though — your rig's frequency display shows your carrier or dial frequency but your actual signal has sidebands that extend above and below that. on LSB which is what you'd use on 40m, your signal actually extends about 3 kHz below your displayed frequency. so if you tune to 7.125 which is right at the tech/general boundary, your voice is actually going down to like 7.122 or so and you'd be operating outside your privileges. most people just stay a few kHz inside the edge to give themselves a buffer and avoid any accidental out-of-band operation honestly just download the ARRL band plan pdf and keep it handy for the first few months, it starts to make sense once you're spending time on the air

so ive been trying to build my first real dipole from scratch for 40m, just plain old 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had sitting around from some old lamp cord, cut each leg to roughly 33 feet based on the 468/f formula. coax comes up from the shack, i soldered the center conductor to one leg and braid to the other, taped it all up with self-amalgamating tape pretty well i thought. the issue is my swr is sitting around 2.8:1 at 7.150 and i cant seem to get it lower than that no matter what i do. tried trimming a bit off each side but its just not behaving like i expected. the antenna is about 20 feet up, inverted V config, apex tied off to a tree. im using a ft-891 and a basic swr meter in line. not sure if its the height, the wire type, the coax length, something with the feedpoint... honestly i dont know where to start. any ideas what the usual culprits are for this kind of thing

These deletions are purely administrative housekeeping. §97.27 was duplicative of statutory provisions for license modifications, and §97.29 dealt with obsolete paper license procedures. No operational changes for current licensees - your digital license and ULS procedures remain the same.

the node question honestly doesnt matter much for casual use, theyre all pulling from the same aggregated data pretty much. if you're using something like Log4OM or even WSJT-X you can plug in a telnet address directly and filter right there in the software which is way cleaner than the web interface. for DXwatch specifically yeah there's a band filter dropdown, its kind of small and easy to miss, top right area of the cluster view i think. took me forever to notice it too. the real tip i'd give you is to also look at the dx summit site — dxsummit.fi — which lets you filter by band AND by spotter continent so you can see who's actually being heard from your part of the world rather than wading through spots from JA stations hearing things you'll never reach. makes a huge difference.

same boat as you when I did my first install, spent way too long reading about perfect roof center placement and then just picked a spot that was easy to drill. been using it for two years no complaints. the repeaters dont care lol

I've been running both modes side-by-side for months. FT4 is twice as fast with 7.5 second transmissions versus FT8's 15 seconds, but you really notice the sensitivity difference on 40m during high noise periods. FT8 consistently decodes stations that don't even show up in FT4's waterfall.

Ham Radio Prep's practice exams are exactly like the real test, and their dashboard shows exactly where you need more work. Worth the money if you want structured learning with progress tracking. I also made flashcards for the stuff I kept missing - repetition is key.

Just got my Technician license last month and picked up a BaoFeng UV-5R. I'm having trouble getting into the local repeater on 146.940 MHz - I know the input tone is 123.0 Hz, but I keep getting the dreaded silence when I key up. The repeater directory shows it as 123.0 CTCSS required, but I'm not sure if I'm programming it right. Even though your radio may be transmitting and receiving on the correct frequencies for a particular repeater, you won't be able to access the repeater if you're not also transmitting the CTCSS tone the repeater has been programmed to respond to. Can someone walk me through the UV-5R setup? Also, should I be hearing the tone on the repeater output, or is that filtered out? Thanks for any help - 73!

yeah check the deviation first like the other guy said but also — have you tried running direwolf on a PC with a cheap SDR and just monitoring your own packets locally? like set up a receive-only direwolf instance and see if it can even decode what you're putting out. if direwolf cant hear you then nothing else will either. that diagnostic step saved me like a week of confusion when i was first setting up my station.

14 hours on batteries is doable but you have to be real about your numbers. two rigs at 100W output are gonna pull maybe 20-22A each on transmit, less on receive obviously but if you're doing any kind of digital modes or running winlink your duty cycle is higher than you think. rough math on a 200Ah LiFePO4 at say 50% average load is still gonna be tight and that's before the laptop and any lighting or accessories people inevitably plug in because someone forgot to charge their phone lol. generator wins for an op that long in my opinion, the EU2200i is quiet enough that it wont kill you and you can parallel a second one if you ever need more headroom. the inverter output is clean enough for the rigs too, ive never had RFI issues from it at a reasonable distance.

honestly the ARRL Ham Radio License Manual is pretty decent for actually understanding the concepts, not just memorizing. it walks through the reasoning behind most of the rules and the tech stuff makes a lot more sense when you know why the band plans are set up the way they are. that said i also used HamStudy dot org which lets you track which questions youre missing and focuses your practice on the weak spots. the regulatory stuff does kind of blur together at first, the trick i found was to just do a ton of practice tests until the wrong answers start to feel obviously wrong, if that makes sense. took me about three weeks studying maybe 30 minutes a night before i felt ready. the actual test felt easier than the practice ones which was a nice surprise. just go schedule it, worst case you take it again and its only like 15 bucks

I've found success with N1MM+ using virtual COM port pairs. The trick is setting up the CAT control timing properly - when frequency is updated over a link with high round trip time (>100ms) performance will be less than optimal with Sync selected, so select Async. The disadvantage of using Async is an 'elastic band' effect while tuning.

yeah what the previous guy said about bidirectional igating is the thing. i ran into this exact same issue when i set up my first igate. most igates running aprx or even some direwolf configs are only listening and not gating back down. look at aprs.fi and find the igates near you, click on them and see if it says RF-only or bidirectional. if all your local ones are RF-only then messages from the internet side are just never gonna make it back to RF and to whoever your trying to reach. its kind of a frustrating gap in APRS infrastructure honestly, not enough people running full bidirectional igates.

so we have a county ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and i'm trying to nail down the power situation before i haul everything out. last time we did this i ended up running a honda eu2200i for the whole weekend which worked fine but it's loud and you go through gas faster than you think, especially if you're running an IC-7300 plus a laptop plus some lighting. ended up making two gas runs which was annoying. this time im considering just going with a big lithium battery setup instead. i've been looking at the jackery 1000 plus and some of the more purpose-built stuff like the bioenno packs but honestly not sure if a 1000wh battery is actually enough for a 36 hour activation if we're transmitting regularly on HF. we're not running a linear or anything, just the radio at maybe 50-75w and the laptop, but it adds up. antenna wise we'll probably put up a linked dipole on a 31ft spiderpole which has always worked well for us on 40/80/20. nothing fancy. the real headache is the power. anyone done a full weekend activation on batteries only without a genny on standby? curious how it actually went in practice not just the math on paper

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i keep going back and forth on this. like sometimes i hear people on 2m just saying letters normally when they give their callsign and other times everyone is doing the full NATO thing. is there a rule about when you have to use phonetics or is it just kind of a preference thing? i was on a local repeater last week and someone corrected me for NOT using phonetics and i felt kind of dumb but then the next day i heard a bunch of guys just rattling off callsigns with regular letters and nobody said anything. im confused about when its actually required vs just good practice