Carlos Silva

so i've been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now and figured i'd just ask here because im going in circles reading old posts and antenna modeling forums that are way over my head at this point. quick background — i have a repeater site on a hilltop about 1100ft elevation, pretty clear takeoff in most directions but there's a ridge to the northeast that blocks a few towns i'd really like to hit. the current antenna is a hustler G7 collinear, 7dbd gain, been up there maybe 6 years and honestly it's probably fine but we're doing some maintenance work on the tower next month so it seemed like a good time to reconsider the whole setup. someone suggested we put up a yagi aimed at that northeast problem area instead and feed it off a separate port on the duplexer, which sounds reasonable on paper but im not sure how much gain we'd actually need to punch over that ridge vs just living with the coverage gap. the ridge isnt massive, maybe 200ft above the path between the repeater and those towns. anyone run a similar split setup? how do you handle the pattern difference when a mobile comes out of the collinear coverage and transitions into the yagi sector, does it just work or is there handoff weirdness with the duplexer loading?

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about confirming contacts and i honestly dont fully understand the whole system. like i know what a QSL card is, the paper ones, my elmer showed me a shoebox full of his from the 80s and they look really cool. but then theres LoTW which is the ARRL thing and eQSL which is a different website and i cant figure out if i need both or just one or what. i made a contact with a station in Japan last week on 20m, first real DX contact, and i really want to confirm it somehow. the other op mentioned LoTW at the end of the QSO. do i need to like upload a log file or something? and do i need to send a physical card too or is that just old fashioned now. i dont want to be rude to the other op if there's some expectation i dont know about also someone in my club said eQSL doesnt really count for awards which confused me even more. any help appreciated, still figuring all this out

LM386 is almost always the culprit for that kind of hum in my experience, not because its a bad chip but because you really have to baby it. the input pins are super sensitive and if you have any ground loops or even just a longish wire to your volume pot thats basically an antenna for picking up crud. try putting a 0.047uF cap from pin 7 to ground and also make sure pins 1 and 8 dont have anything across them unless you want the extra gain, the gain is 200x with the cap there and it just amplifies everything including your hum. also worth checking if your ground plane is solid or if youre doing point to point because a sketchy ground return path will do exactly what youre describing. the diode ring mixer could also be injecting some LO leakage back into the audio path depending on how close everything is physically. shielding the LO from the audio section helps a lot. but id start with the 386 stuff first, its the usual suspect.

yeah same boat as you a while back. the thing that actually helped me was just listening to a lot of code, like even when im not actively trying to copy it. theres an app called Morse Mania that i had on my phone and i would just run through it on my lunch break. also ham morse is another one people mention. you wont get it overnight and theres a week or two where it just sounds like noise and then something kind of clicks and you start hearing letters. its a weird process honestly

so ive been licensed for about two years now and ive mostly just done casual ragchews and some local nets but a buddy at my club keeps telling me i need to try CQ WW this october. i finally looked up the rules and honestly it seems a little overwhelming, like there's so much going on with zones and multipliers and i'm not even totally sure my station is set up well enough to compete with guys running kilowatts. i'm just running a 100w IC-7300 into a dipole up about 30 feet which i know isnt exactly a contest powerhouse but i figure i can at least participate and learn the ropes right? my main question is should i go in with a goal like a certain number of QSOs or just kind of see what happens. also not sure if i should focus on one band or jump around. any advice appreciated, even basic stuff is fine i really dont know what im doing here

id be down to carpool if you got room. i mostly want to dig through the junk tables hoping to find a decent mic or maybe an old HF rig that actually works lol. havent been to a hamfest in like two years since the one near me got cancelled and never came back

so ive been running a borrowed 590SG for about 8 months now while i saved up for my own rig and i genuinely love the thing. really solid receiver, the noise floor on 40m here is manageable even with all the garbage my neighbors smart meters throw out. but now that im actually shopping i keep second-guessing myself because everyone talks up the IC-7300 like its the second coming and the prices are actually pretty close right now used. main thing i do is mostly SSB ragchewing on 40 and 80, some occasional 20m DX when i get lucky, and ive been wanting to try JS8Call or maybe some FT8 but havent jumped in yet. not really a contester. my antenna situation is a dipole at about 30 feet and a end fed that i still havent tuned properly. is the 7300 touchscreen actually useful day to day or is it one of those things that sounds cool and then you never use it. and does the panadapter really change how you operate or is that also kind of overhyped for a casual operator like me

Contact materials matter less than you think at QRP/100W levels. I like a "tight" key, where there is very little key movement AND little or no noise. The cw morse is noisy and settings are a bit crude no fine threaded screw adjustments. Try before you buy if possible - paddle feel is very personal!

this might be a dumb question but for Field Day do you have to be licensed to participate or can i come and just kind of watch and maybe try? im still studying for my technician and my uncle said i could come with him to his club's event but i wasnt sure if i could actually touch the radio or if id just be standing around. either way id probably go just to see what its like in person

so ive been at this for about three months now, just got my general and been trying to actually get on cw which was kind of the whole reason i got into ham radio in the first place. i picked up a used bencher paddle off ebay and im running it into an old MFJ keyer i borrowed from a club member. the problem is everything i send just sounds... off. like the dits and dahs kind of run together sometimes and other times theres this weird gap in the middle of characters that shouldnt be there. ive messed with the weight and speed settings a bunch but i cant seem to find a setting that just feels right. im probably sending around 12-13 wpm which i know isnt fast but it should still sound clean right? is this a paddle gap adjustment thing? i honestly have no idea how tight the contacts are supposed to be. the previous owner might have set it up weird. or is this more about my hand technique and i just need more practice. been using the G4FON trainer to practice receiving and im actually doing ok there, its just the sending that feels sloppy.

Be courteous to new operators and offer help when appropriate. Remember, we all started somewhere; patience and encouragement go a long way. I try to gently correct mistakes I hear rather than jumping on someone for protocol errors.

Ground mounted vertical with 60 radials doesn't quite match a dipole for DX in most cases, and for stateside contacts can be down several S units. At 18 feet you might get away with fewer radials but they're still needed for efficiency.

so ive been messing around with this idea for a while now and finally started putting something together on the bench last weekend. basically i want to use an arduino mega to handle all my antenna switching automatically based on what band i QSY to — right now im manually flipping relays and its getting old real fast especially during contests when im bouncing between 40 and 15. the plan is to read the band data output from my radio (its an IC-7300 so the CI-V bus is available) and then drive a relay board to select the right antenna. ive got a raspberry pi 4 running fldigi and some logging software already so im thinking maybe the pi handles the higher level logic and just sends commands down to the arduino over USB serial. the arduino then does the actual relay switching since i dont really trust the pi's GPIO for anything timing critical or that has to be electrically isolated from the RF side. has anyone actually done something like this or am i overcomplicating it? i feel like the CI-V parsing on its own is gonna be a pain but there seem to be some libraries floating around. also not sure if i need opto-isolators between the arduino and the relay board or if the relay board i got already has them built in — its one of those cheap 8-channel ones off amazon so who knows.

New General here, excited to start working HF! I've been reading about staying away from band edges when transmitting. Why exactly should I avoid operating right at the edge of my allocated frequencies? My radio seems perfectly capable of transmitting there. What's the technical reasoning behind this common advice? Also, how far inside the band edges should I stay as a good practice? Looking for some practical guidance from experienced operators.

so ive been at this for a while now and i cant seem to push past about 13wpm no matter what i do. started learning morse back in the spring, got to 5wpm pretty quick which felt great, then climbed up to around 10-13 over the summer but now its like i hit a wall and nothing is working. i've been using the lcwo website which i really like, and i do the koch method sessions maybe 4 or 5 times a week for like 20-30 minutes each time. the problem is i keep having to mentally sound out the letters and count dits and dahs in my head which i know is wrong but i cant stop doing it. someone at the club told me i need to just go faster even if i make tons of errors but that feels really discouraging when im copying maybe 40% at 18wpm. has anyone actually made it through this plateau and gotten to 20 or above? how long did it take and what finally clicked for you? i really want to get on the air with cw, not just do practice sessions forever

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. i looked it up and apparently you need a license which i kind of expected but i dont really know what that involves. like is it hard? do you have to know morse code or is that not a thing anymore? i tried reading the FCC website and honestly it just confused me more also not sure if i should go straight for the technician or if theres something easier. any advice would be helpful, i dont have any electronics background really just kind of interested in the hobby

ive been having the same problem! thought it was my internet at first but everything else loads fine. really frustrating when you want to get your activation uploaded while you still remember all the details. might start keeping better paper logs as backup

so ive been licensed for about three years now mostly just doing local stuff and some SSB on 40m but lately ive been getting more into DX and i think i want to actually go for the DXCC award. i have maybe 30 or 40 countries confirmed already just from random contacts but i never really paid attention to which ones counted or made sure to get QSLs back. from what i can tell you need 100 confirmed entities and you submit through LoTW which i just set up last month. my question is does the stuff i already worked count if the other station also uploaded to LoTW even if i didnt have an account yet? and also should i be trying to chase WAS and WAZ at the same time or just focus on one thing. feels like it could get overwhelming real fast

As someone who upgraded last year, the biggest difference is reliability. General opens up the magic of HF bands and connects you with operators around the globe. 10m can be fantastic but it's solar cycle dependent. With General privileges, there's always a band that's working somewhere in the world. Worth every minute of study time.

so ive had the 7300 for about three weeks now coming from an old Kenwood TS-440S that i ran for like 15 years so take my impressions with that grain of salt i guess. first thing that hit me was just how different the whole SDR-based receiver feels, like i could actually see signals on the waterfall before i even heard them and that took some getting used to honestly. the 440 i just kind of tuned by ear and muscle memory so this is a different workflow. the built in ATU handles my off-center fed dipole pretty well though it struggles a bit at the edges of 40m when conditions are weird, not sure if thats the antenna or the tuner or just propagation being propagation. audio out of the speaker is way better than i expected for a desktop rig, not tinny at all. one thing that threw me off is the touch screen in a cold shack — i have an unheated garage setup and my fingers apparently stop working below 50 degrees which makes tuning around in the winter kind of annoying. probably a me problem. anyway just wanted to share since i saw a lot of people asking about this radio and most reviews are from youtubers who use it for like three days and call it a comprehensive review

so i've been working on this dc receiver for about two months now, started from scratch on a piece of copper clad using the ugly construction method. got the basics working — DBM mixer with a couple of 1N4148s, a colpitts vfo running around 7mhz, and ive been picking up stations which honestly still feels like magic every time it happens. the problem im running into is the audio. i've got a TL072 opamp stage after the mixer but theres this really annoying hum in the output and i cant quite pin down where its coming from. its definitely 60hz related, goes away if i touch the ground plane in certain spots which makes me think its a grounding issue but ive already redone the ground connections twice. also getting some microphonics when i tap the board near the vfo area. using a wall wart for power which i know probably isnt helping. might switch to a battery to see if the hum clears up. anyone dealt with this kind of thing with TL072 audio stages? or should i just bite the bullet and use something like an LM386 instead, i know its noisier but maybe simpler to get working.

yeah you're not missing anything, they really are pretty different tools. FT8 and FT4 are basically contact-making machines, the protocol is so rigid theres almost no room for actual communication, which is kind of the point — it works when nothing else does. JS8Call is more like a messaging system that happens to use a weak-signal waveform. the latency is painful compared to FT8 but if you want to actually type words to someone across a noisy path its genuinely useful. i know some emcomm folks use it for exactly that reason. as for PSK31, yeah its mostly dead on 20 and thats just the reality post-FT8. you'll occasionally find activity on 80 meters still, and there's still some on 40 late at night, but the waterfall that used to be wall to wall PSK signals around 14.070 is just... not there anymore. i miss it a little honestly, there was something nice about actually having a conversation in real time. FT8 is efficient but its not really hamming in the traditional sense if you know what i mean.

yeah i had the same issue when i switched from FM to HF, took me a while to figure out that SSB audio is just a completely different animal. one thing nobody told me was to make sure youre actually on the right sideband for the band youre on. i know that sounds obvious but i was running USB on 40m once for like 20 minutes before someone politely told me. doesnt affect audio quality directly but you sound absolutely terrible to everyone else lol the bandwidth thing you mentioned is worth playing with more though. i ended up somewhere around 2.8kHz for general ragchewing and tighten it up if the band is crowded. also make sure youre not standing too close to the mic, i was practically eating mine and it was causing all kinds of low end buildup

congrats on the first one. i blew my first attempt completely because i forgot the coax adapter and had to just sit up there eating my sandwich and calling it a "survey hike" to my wife. at least you got the 4 contacts. the ft-818 is a solid choice for SOTA, i run mine on a 3ah lipo and it lasts forever on low power

i just passed mine in march so pretty fresh in my memory. the math questions are the ones that tripped me up at first but most of them are the same formula over and over just with different numbers plugged in, like once you get reactance and resonance calculations down you're basically set for a chunk of them. the filter stuff i just memorized the shapes honestly, highpass lowpass bandpass whatever, not sure i could actually design one but i knew which answer to pick. for what its worth i operate pretty similar to you and i still think it was worth doing just to say i did it, and my local club has a few people who only really talk to extra class holders which sounds elitist but they know a ton and its been good for me to be in that circle lol.