Ashley Wilson

Good instinct waiting that time out - 10 seconds of silence on a repeater usually means someone just let go of the PTT and is collecting their thoughts, or the squelch tail is still dying down. The general rule I always tell new folks is: if you haven't heard both stations say something like 'back to you' or 'go ahead' or one of them actually says QRZ, just wait. You're not missing much by being patient and you won't step on anyone. For breaking into a conversation that isnt a net, it's generally acceptable to wait for a gap and just say your callsign once, briefly. Most guys will hear it and say 'we have a station breaking, go ahead' or something like that. Dont key up and start talking - just ID yourself and let them invite you in. Some people get annoyed if you launch into a monologue without being acknowledged first. On the directed net thing - yeah that one's important. In a directed net, net control is running the show and you really do need to wait to be recognized. If you missed your window to check in at the start, just wait for NC to ask if there are any late check-ins, they almost always do that. You didnt do anything terrible, we all fumble it at first, but just keep that one in mind going forward.

oh man i remember this exact feeling, it took me probably six months before i felt even remotely okay about getting on the air with CW. but here's the thing — just get on. seriously. the 40m QRP calling frequencies and the slow-speed subnets like the SKCC calling frequencies are full of people who are patient and actually want to help beginners. nobody is going to judge you for sloppy fist when you're learning. for the paddle technique thing, the biggest thing that helped me was learning to relax my grip. like a lot of people death-grip the paddle when theyre nervous and it just makes everything tense and choppy. your fingers should barely be touching the paddles, you're not squeezing, just resting and letting small movements do the work. also check your keyer weight and speed settings — most built-in keyers in rigs like the 450D have adjustable weight and sometimes people leave it on defaults and that makes things sound weird. try bumping the weight down slightly if dits sound too heavy. also look up the G4FON trainer if you havent already, great for receiving practice. and honestly just get on the air. the hams on CW are some of the friendliest people in the hobby, partly because they all went through exactly what you're going through.

yeah i went through almost exactly this same thing last year with my 7300. ended up spending like two weeks tweaking instead of just asking someone sooner. one thing nobody mentioned to me for a long time was the bass rolloff filter in the menu — theres a setting in the audio chain that can cut some of the low end before it even gets to the EQ stage and i had it off for forever. once i found that and turned it on the muddiness mostly went away. not saying thats definitely your problem but worth checking if you havent dug into those menus yet, theres a lot buried in there

done a lot of these and honestly for 8-10 hours of real operations with that load profile you're describing, battery only is going to be a stretch unless you're bringing serious capacity. the 7300 on SSB voice averages out lower than peak but if you're doing any digital or long transmit periods it adds up fast. figure maybe 8-10Ah average per hour being conservative across everything you mentioned, so you're looking at needing 80-100Ah of usable capacity minimum and that's if you dont run anything to zero. the EU2200i honestly is the easy answer here. yeah it's a pain to drag out but once it's running you stop thinking about power and start thinking about actually doing comms, which is the whole point. you can also top off a battery bank while it runs so you get the best of both. chain link fence probably wont kill you if you keep the antenna away from it, i've worked with worse nearby and the linked dipole should do fine. just orient it so the wire isn't running parallel right above the fence line.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i keep getting confused about where i can actually operate on 40 meters. like i know theres a chart somewhere but every time i look at it i get more confused not less. my buddy told me generals can use most of 40 but then i heard someone on the radio saying something about the lower end being phone only or ssb only or something and i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere i shouldnt be. also whats the deal with band edges, someone in my local club said to stay away from the very bottom and top of the band but didnt really explain why. is that a rule or just like a courtesy thing? i mostly want to do some ssb ragchewing if that matters

yeah its basically its own little language and honestly you do just pick most of it up over time. QRM is interference from other stations, like man made noise, and QRN is natural static like from thunderstorms. easy way i remember it is QRM = man, QRN = nature. not perfect but it works. 73 technically means "best regards" and goes back to the old telegraph days, theres a whole history behind the numbered codes from like the 1800s. 88 is another one you hear sometimes which means love and kisses, mostly used between friends or a husband and wife on the air. and yeah "de" is from, so if you hear W1ABC de K4XYZ that means K4XYZ is calling W1ABC. you'll see it in cw all the time and sometimes people use it in voice too just out of habit i guess. arrl has a pretty solid list in their handbook and also on their website somewhere. once you start operating more it really does click fast.

oh man it absolutely gets more addictive, fair warning. i started with a little rockmite probably eight years ago and now i have a shelf full of homebrew stuff and a KX3 for portable work. the Tennessee contact is legit though, dont let anyone tell you 500mw contacts over short distances dont count, thats the whole game with QRP honestly, you learn so much more about propagation and antenna efficiency when you cant just crank the power up to cover your mistakes. the 4state kits are excellent by the way, good documentation and the community around them is really helpful if you get stuck. what band are you thinking about for your next build? 20m opens up a lot more possibilities for distance if you want to really stretch those milliwatts

the IRF510 warming up is pretty normal honestly, class C biasing on those things is a bit of an art. -35dBc on the second harmonic is marginal yeah, FCC wants -43dBc for transmitters above a certain power level. your LPF design might be the culprit — what cutoff did you use and how many poles? a 5 or 7 pole chebyshev at like 8-9 MHz should be getting you well past that. also check your toroids, if the core is saturating or the winding isnt tight you'll get intermodulation garbage that no filter fixes downstream. the gate bias thing — 3.8v sounds about right for class C operation but you really want to measure the drain current and work backwards. a lot of the EMRFD builds suggest biasing just below the conduction threshold and letting the RF drive do the work. might be worth spending an afternoon with a dummy load and a power meter just methodically going through the bias pot and watching output vs current. the IRF510 can do 10w no problem if you get it right, i ran one at 5w for years on 40m and it was fine thermally with a decent heatsink.

nah man i do this all the time. 75m late at night is great for that too, some of those roundtables go on for hours and honestly the conversations are just kind of comforting to have on in the background. reminds me of the old shortwave days before i got my ticket.

so ive been seeing some chatter on a couple other boards about Icom possibly announcing a new HF rig at Hamvention this year. nobody seems to know exactly what it is but some people are saying its a replacement for the 7300 line which honestly would be huge if true. the 7300 has been the go-to starter HF radio for like what, seven or eight years now so any replacement would have to be pretty compelling to get people to switch over. also heard 10 meters has been absolutely on fire lately, some guys in my club were working Europe on just 100 watts with modest antennas last weekend and said it was one of the best openings they'd seen in years. solar cycle 25 is really delivering. if you havent gotten on 10 recently and you have HF privledges its worth a tune around even if you dont normally hang out up there. anybody else heard anything about the Dayton announcements? or have any other news thats gotten you excited lately, band conditions wise or new gear or whatever. feel like its been a pretty good stretch for the hobby lately and curious what other people are tracking.

so i got my general back in april and ive been mostly just doing ragchews on 40m and some digital stuff but everyone in my local club keeps talking about CQ WW coming up and field day kind of already passed but they say theres always next year and honestly im just confused about all of it. like what even is the difference between CQ WW and ARRL sweepstakes because both seem to involve making a lot of contacts but the exchange info looks totally different and i dont know if my station is even set up right for any of it. i have a kenwood ts-590 and a wire dipole up about 30 feet, nothing fancy. been listening to some contest weekends just to hear what its like and it sounds absolutely chaotic, guys just firing off callsigns and numbers and i cant even follow along fast enough. is there a good way to practice before actually jumping in or do you just kind of throw yourself at it and see what happens. also heard people mention SOTA counts for some awards but is that a separate thing entirely or does it cross over with contests somehow. just trying to figure out where a newer guy fits into all this

so ive been watching the chatter on this for a while now and it seems like the IC-7760 is actually starting to ship to some dealers in europe and a few places stateside. saw a couple of unboxing videos pop up this week and honestly it looks like icom did something pretty interesting with the remote head design, like fully separating the RF deck from the control head over a single ethernet cable which is cleaner than i expected. also been a weird few weeks for band conditions — 10m has been absolutely wild the last couple days, worked a bunch of south american stations on SSB with like 100w and a dipole which almost never happens from my QTH in the midwest. not sure if its a flare or just the cycle peak doing its thing but whatever it is im not complaining. feels like 2001 again honestly. anyway back to the radio — has anyone actually put hands on a 7760 yet or is this still mostly pre-production hype? curious what the receive is like compared to the 7610 because thats what im running now and the panadapter on that thing spoiled me. wondering if the new one is a meaningful upgrade or just a form factor refresh with a fancier price tag.

not to derail but have you looked at using an arduino mega instead of the pi for this kind of thing? i know pi is more flexible but for something that just needs to react to serial data and flip relays an arduino is way more reliable in my experience, boots instantly, no OS to worry about, and you can write a dead simple state machine that defaults everything to a known state on power up. i use one to control a 6-position antenna selector and it just works, never had a weird crash or anything like that in like 3 years of use. not saying pi is wrong for it, just that ive had way fewer headaches going the microcontroller route for anything that needs to be reliable. if you do stick with the pi though the watchdog suggestion is solid.

so ive been messing around with running my home station remotely for about 6 months now and finally got something that mostly works but im curious if anyone else has gone down the RemoteHams route with an SDR backend instead of a traditional rig my setup is kind of weird — i have an RSPdx feeding into SDR++ on the server side and then im bridging the audio through RemoteHams RCForb client on the other end. the latency is actually pretty tolerable on my home fiber connection, like 80-90ms round trip, but when i try to connect from my work laptop on their corporate wifi it gets ugly fast. not sure if thats a QoS thing on their end or if RCForb just handles jitter differently than something like WebSDR would the internet linking side of things is where it gets complicated. ive got an Allstar node running on the same machine and im trying to figure out if theres a sane way to tie the SDR audio path into the Allstar audio without creating some kind of horrible feedback loop or ground loop nightmare. i know people run Allstar and RemoteHams on the same box but every post i find is like 4 years old and half the links are dead anyone done something like this recently? what are you using for audio routing on the server side, virtual audio cable type stuff or are you patching it in hardware

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, got my technician and just upgraded to general last week actually, and i keep hearing people on HF use all these weird codes and abbreviations and honestly i just smile and nod on the radio but i have no clue what half of it means. like QSL i kind of get, it means like confirmed or acknowledged right? and QTH i think is your location? but then people say stuff like QRM and QRN and QSB and i just get lost. and on CW its even worse because its just a wall of letters that i cant parse at all even when i slow it down with the decoder. is there like a good reference somewhere or does this just come with time? also does anyone actually memorize all of these or do you just pick up the common ones as you go along. someone told me there are like hundreds of official Q codes which seems insane to me

went last year and yeah the outdoor fleamarket felt smaller to me too, though i still managed to find a bunch of coax connectors for basically nothing and grabbed an old MFJ tuner that actually works fine. the crowds on saturday were brutal honestly, i'd go friday if you can swing it. your club carpool thing sounds like the way to do it, way more fun than driving solo

so i passed my technician exam back in early march and just been sitting on my baofeng listening to the local repeater for like three weeks now, too nervous to actually key up. today i finally just did it, called out on the 147.195 repeater and this guy named Gary came back to me right away. we talked for maybe 10 minutes about my antenna setup and he gave me some tips about the local club. honestly my voice was shaking a little lol. anyway just wanted to share because ive been lurking here forever and you guys kind of helped me get through the exam studying so thanks

don't stress about it, the pre-registration thing is totally optional — some people do it so hunters know to look for them on the spots page, but plenty of folks just show up and then spot themselves manually once they're set up and on the air. the pota.app has a self-spotting feature right in the app which is super handy if you have cell service at the park. the permit question is more park-specific and honestly most people just set up at a picnic table or in the parking lot and nobody says anything. that said a few state parks do technically require you to have something — usually just a day use pass you'd buy at the entrance anyway. i'd just call the park office quick and ask if amateur radio operation is allowed, most rangers are pretty chill about it and some have never even been asked before. better than getting there and having someone ask you to leave. for your first one i'd just focus on getting 10 contacts which is what you need to count as a valid activation. 40m SSB is probably your best bet in the morning, the band should be decent. good luck, the first one feels a little chaotic but once you make that first contact you'll relax right away.

i tried SO2R for the first time last sweepstakes and kind of regretted it mid-contest lol. not because it doesnt work but because i hadnt practiced enough before just throwing it at a real contest. spent like the first two hours fighting with the radio focus in N1MM and accidentally sending CW on the wrong radio twice which was embarrassing. ended up just unplugging the second rig and finishing on one radio like usual. what i'd probably do differently is set the whole thing up and just practice the workflow before a real contest, maybe during a smaller sprint or even just casually operating. the muscle memory for switching focus between radios while keeping a run frequency alive is genuinely a separate skill from just being good at contesting. your mileage may vary but i think if you're already a strong single radio operator the ceiling is there and SO2R is the right next step, just give yourself time to not be terrible at it first

okay so first thing, no morse code requirement anymore, that went away years ago so dont worry about that. for most people the Technician license is where you start, its the entry level one and once you pass that youre good to transmit on VHF and UHF which is plenty to get going. the question pool is like 425 questions and the actual exam pulls 35 from that, you need 26 right to pass. honestly if you use hamstudy.org and just drill questions for a week or two most people can pass without too much trouble. some folks also use the Gordon West book or the ARRL study guide, i used the ARRL one back when i got mine and it was fine but hamstudy alone is probably enough for a lot of people. the main thing is just dont overthink it, the questions repeat a lot and once you see the pool enough times it starts to click. find a local club too, they usually run exam sessions and sometimes have free study nights which helps a ton if youre the kind of person who does better not just reading alone

so ive been running Log4OM for about a year now for general logging and i really like it, the interface is clean and the LoTW sync works great for me. but every time a contest comes around i end up switching over to N1MM and then spending like 20 minutes trying to remember how i had everything configured last time. its kind of annoying. the thing is i also use WSJT-X pretty regularly for FT8 and FT4 and i have that piped into Log4OM through UDP just fine, works without much fuss. but when i fire up N1MM for say the ARRL DX contest or sweepstakes, i feel like im managing two completely separate universes and stuff doesnt always sync up right. dupes from my Log4OM general log dont carry over obviously and i just end up with this messy situation where i have to do a manual merge after the fact. anyone else dealing with this kind of split workflow? im wondering if i should just commit fully to N1MM for everything including day to day logging, but honestly the general logging features in N1MM feel kinda clunky compared to Log4OM. or is there some way to get them talking to each other better that im not seeing. ive read some stuff about ADIF exports and imports but that feels like a bandaid not a real solution

ok so ive been licensed about 4 months now and i still feel weird about phonetics. like sometimes on the local 2m repeater people just say letters normally and sometimes they go full NATO alpha bravo charlie and i cant figure out when youre supposed to do which one. my elmer told me to always use phonetics but then i hear people not doing it all the time and its confusing. also is it a rule or just like a suggestion? i looked in part 97 and couldnt find anything that flat out says you have to. and does it matter if youre on HF vs VHF? feels like HF people are way more strict about it but maybe im imagining that

not dumb questions at all, this stuff is genuinely confusing when you first get into it and honestly the ham radio community does a terrible job explaining it to newcomers so the short version is LoTW is the gold standard for most awards, especially DXCC which is the big one from the ARRL. if you're doing FT8 and WSJT-X is uploading automatically then yeah you are already confirming contacts, that's exactly how most people do it now. your QSO gets uploaded, the other station's QSO gets uploaded, the ARRL matches them up and boom it's confirmed. you can check your confirmed count on the LoTW website under your account. eQSL is a separate thing, some people use it some don't. it counts for certain awards but not DXCC. i personally keep it active just because some operators only use eQSL and it takes like two minutes to set up the auto upload from most logging software. more confirmations never hurts. paper cards and the bureau — the bureau is basically a bulk mail forwarding system run by ARRL and affiliated clubs. instead of mailing cards directly to someone overseas which can cost a dollar or more per card, you send a batch to your division bureau and they sort and forward them internationally for almost nothing. it's slow, like months sometimes, but if you want physical cards it's the cheap way to do international QSLs. for domestic stuff most people just mail direct. honestly for FT8 i wouldnt stress about paper cards unless you really want them for display or a specific award that requires physical QSLs. LoTW covers basically everything that matters award-wise.

special event stations are super easy, honestly easier than you'd think. you just listen for them calling CQ or look them up on a spotting network if you're into that, then call them just like any other station. a lot of times they're set up specifically to hand out contacts so they want to work as many people as possible. some of them offer a certificate or QSL card if you send in a log extract after, which is kind of a fun thing to collect. for finding nets, the ARRL has a net directory but i'll be honest its a bit clunky to navigate. a lot of people just ask around on local repeaters or in their regional groups. your club probably has a list too they just never think to hand it out to new members. worth asking whoever runs the tuesday net cause they usually know whats going on in the area better than any website.

the unprogrammed radio thing would have driven me crazy lol. we made a rule that everyone in our group has to verify their programmed freqs against the current channel plan at least a week before any activation or drill so theres time to fix it. sounds obvious but yeah. im pretty new to all the ARES stuff, just got my general last spring, but i sat in on one of these drills as an observer and it was honestly kind of overwhelming. there was so much going on at net control and i couldnt really follow what the net manager was trying to do. do you guys do any kind of orientation for newer members before throwing them into a drill? i want to actually be useful if something real happens not just standing around confused.