David Davis41

Just picked up an IC-705 and planning to take it up some local summits. Love the idea of having HF through 70cm coverage in one compact package, but I'm struggling with the antenna tuner situation.
I know the biggest weakness of the IC-705 is the lack of an internal antenna tuner for the HF bands, so I'm looking at external options. The LDG Z-817 seems popular but adds weight and complexity.
Anyone running EFHW antennas successfully without a tuner? What bands are you getting good SWR on?

had the exact same thing in my Silverado when i first put my 2320 in. drove me nuts for like a month lol. ended up being the ground like the other guy said but i also had to move where my coax was routed because it was running too close to some of the truck's wiring harness and picking up noise that way too. took a while to sort out but its dead quiet now. mag mounts on modern trucks can be a pain because the roof isnt always making great contact through the paint

so i just got my general last spring and ive been on HF for maybe 6 months now mostly just ragchewing on 40m and doing some SOTA stuff on my hikes. a buddy at my club keeps telling me i need to try CQ WW this october and i honestly dont really know what to expect. like i understand the basic idea, contacts and zones and multipliers, but ive never actually sat down for a full contest before. is it completely overwhelming for a first timer or is it kind of fun even if you're not super competitive about it? i dont have a great station, just a modest dipole and a 100w rig, wondering if its even worth trying or if ill just be calling into the void all weekend
also is there much difference between doing CQ WW SSB vs the CW one in terms of difficulty for someone who's still pretty slow on code

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general) and everyone keeps telling me i need to try a contest to really get comfortable operating. CQ WW SSB is coming up at the end of october and i figured maybe i'd give it a shot but honestly the whole thing is kind of overwhelming to look at from the outside.
like i get the basic idea, you make contacts and log them and theres some kind of multiplier system for zones or countries or something. but i dont really understand how you actually operate during one. do you just sit on a frequency and call CQ contest or do you tune around and answer other peoples CQ? also is it rude to jump in as a total newbie when all these serious contesters are going at it? i feel like id be in the way
also been looking at Field Day results from this past june and SOTA stuff too, those seem a little more relaxed? or am i wrong about that. anyway any advice on just getting started would be great, even if its just "dont worry about your score just get on the air" which is probably the answer lol

yeah you pretty much had QRM and QRN right, QRM is interference from other man-made signals like another station bleeding over or someone keying up nearby, and QRN is natural stuff, lightning crashes, static from weather that kind of thing. QSY is definitely change frequency, you'll hear that one a lot especially when someone wants to move a contact to a less busy part of the band.
the ARRL publishes a Q code list and its in the back of the handbook if you have one, also just searching "Q codes list" will get you a dozen decent pages. honestly though most of the common ones you'll just absorb after a while. QTH is your location, QSL is confirm/acknowledge, QRZ means whos calling me or sometimes people use it wrong to mean who is that. QRP means low power which a lot of guys run intentionally. 73 is best regards basically, old telegraph thing, and 88 is love and kisses which you mostly hear used between operators who know each other or sometimes a husband and wife team. de just means from, so like W1ABC de K4XYZ means K4XYZ is calling W1ABC.
dont stress too much about sounding clueless, everyone was there once and most hams are pretty patient with new folks

congrats on the general. the 40m phone thing is straightforward once you see it laid out — generals get 7.175 to 7.300 for SSB and the extra class folks have everything from 7.125 on up. so just stay above 7.175 for voice and you're fine. the "edges of the band" comment your club guy made is probably more of an operating practice thing than a strict legal requirement, like some people get touchy about operating right at 7.175 because you can accidentally splatter into the tech/general CW portion if your rig isn't clean. not a regulation exactly but worth being aware of.
on the power question — 1500w PEP is the max for HF in most situations, that's your Part 97.313 limit. the 200w thing applies to certain bands like 30 meters specifically, that one's capped at 200w by international agreement so the FCC built it into Part 97. also 10 meters above 28.5 has some restrictions depending on sunspot activity... actually no wait that's not a rule that's just a practical thing. anyway point is read 97.313 carefully, it breaks down the exceptions band by band. you're probably fine just running normal power on 40.

so i finally finished putting together a MTR-3B kit over the past few weekends and honestly i was not expecting it to actually work on the first power up but it did, made a contact into ohio from pennsylvania on 40m running maybe 3 watts and i was pretty stoked about that. the whole thing just amazes me that you can do that with basically nothing.
anyway i do have some questions. im getting what sounds like a little bit of receiver hiss or maybe background noise that i didnt expect, not sure if thats just the nature of the radio or if i did something wrong in the build. also the battery situation is confusing me a little — right now im using a 3s lipo i had sitting around from an RC hobby thing and it seems to work but i dont know if thats the right call long term. anyone run these on lipo and had issues? and one more thing, whats a good way to get spotted without a phone or internet out in the field, i know SOTA activators manage it somehow but i havent figured that out yet.

so i passed my general about a year ago and ive been slowly working on CW ever since. started at 5wpm with the Koch method and honestly that part went pretty smoothly, was actually having fun with it. but somewhere around 13wpm i just hit this wall and i cant seem to break through no matter what i do.
im practicing maybe 20-30 minutes a day with the G4FON trainer and i can copy most letters fine when im relaxed but the second i feel any pressure or try to push the speed up even a little bit i just fall apart and start missing stuff. feels like my brain just cant keep up and then i panic and miss even more. its a really frustrating cycle honestly.
anybody been through this? how did you actually get from like 13 to 20wpm? im starting to wonder if theres something fundamentally wrong with how im approaching this or if its just one of those things that takes way longer than people say it does

so we finally got our county ARES group together for a proper tabletop exercise, been trying to coordinate this for like six months with everyone's schedules. the scenario was a major flooding event, levee breach, bridges out, cell towers down — pretty realistic for our area honestly given what happened back in 2019.
what surprised me was how fast the communication plan fell apart in the simulation. we had this whole ICS structure mapped out, nets assigned, frequencies designated, and within like the first twenty minutes of the scenario people were just... going around the system. calling directly to whoever they thought had the answer instead of going through net control. i get why, it feels faster in the moment, but it creates this massive pile of uncoordinated traffic and net control loses situational awareness really quick.
the other thing that caught us off guard was how much we'd assumed about interoperability with the county EOC. turns out they had updated their communication protocols sometime last year and nobody had looped in the ARES group. so we were referencing an outdated resource list the whole time. kinda embarrassing but better to find that out in a tabletop than during an actual event.
anybody else done these kinds of exercises recently? curious what gaps you found in your own plans, especially around message handling and ICS integration. we're already planning a follow-up exercise that's more radio-on-the-air rather than just tabletop.

I actually had a pretty decent run on 40 Tuesday night, worked a few guys in Canada and one station down in Florida which was cool for me since im in Ohio. Maybe try later in the evening like 9 or 10pm local, thats when I usually start hearing more. Also what direction is your dipole oriented? that matters more than people think

so i've been meaning to do this for like two years and after the storm we had last month that knocked out power for three days i finally got serious about it. i pulled out my old pelican case and started throwing stuff in but i feel like im definitely forgetting something obvious.
what i have so far: my FT-857D, a coax jumper, my j-pole antenna rolled up in a bag, spare fuses, a notebook and pens, a copy of the local repeater frequencies. i picked up one of those 40ah lifepo4 batteries last fall so thats in there too with the anderson powerpole cables. i think i have a charger situation figured out but honestly not totally sure how long that battery will last running the radio at 100w vs like 25w, haven't actually done the math yet.
what do i always see people forget? i feel like there's some dumb thing i'm going to leave out and not realize it until i actually need to use this thing in a real situation

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i notice everyone on HF uses the nato phonetic alphabet like alpha bravo charlie etc when they're giving their callsign or spelling something out. my question is is this actually required or is it just like a convention people follow? i asked my elmer and he kind of gave me a wishy washy answer about it being standard practice but didnt really say if the FCC requires it or whatever
also i've heard some old timers use completely different words sometimes like they'll say something other than the standard ones and i cant always tell what they're saying. is there a reason for that or are they just doing their own thing
im using a baofeng on 2m mostly right now but i want to get into HF so trying to learn the right habits before i do

the doppler thing -- yeah there's definitely a sweet spot near maximum elevation where the rate of change slows down a lot. you'll be cranking the dial like crazy near AOS and LOS especially on a high elevation pass, but mid-pass on something like SO-50 at 70cm you can sometimes go 30 seconds without touching it and still be close enough. on a low pass like you described (8 deg is rough btw, i wouldnt sweat not getting through) the geometry is different and the rate stays pretty compressed the whole time since you never really get that overhead geometry. honestly just keep at it with heavens-above or grab gpredict if you want something more dedicated, it'll show you the doppler curve visually and it kinda clicks after you see it a few times
the buzzing carrier is almost certainly someone with their squelch open keying their radio without realizing it, or a poorly programmed HT that fires the PL tone constantly. happens on every SO-50 pass it seems like. some people just have no idea their radio is even doing it

so we finally pulled off a county-wide simulated emergency exercise last Saturday and honestly it went better than I expected but also revealed some stuff we really need to work on. The scenario was a multi-day flood event where all normal comms infrastructure was assumed down — cell towers, internet, the whole thing. We had net control set up at the EOC, three relay stations out in the field, and something like 14 operators scattered across the county checking in and passing traffic.
The good stuff first — our net control operator (shoutout to Dale, K9DPF) kept things moving really well even when we started throwing curveballs at him like a simulated repeater failure mid-exercise. Switching to simplex was a bit bumpy but we got there. Passed probably 40-something ICS 213 forms over the air which felt like good practice.
Where things fell apart was honestly the message handling. We had two or three operators who weren't super comfortable with formal traffic format and it slowed everything way down. One guy was just reading his radiogram header out of order which caused confusion on the receiving end. And we had a situation where a relay station missed a handoff completely and a message just kind of disappeared for like 20 minutes before someone noticed.
My question for folks who've done a lot of these — how do you handle operator training for message handling without making it feel like homework? We're a pretty volunteer-heavy group and I dont want people to tune out. Thinking about doing shorter focused drills but wondering what's actually worked for other groups.