Robert Taylor

Congrats on passing the exam. Okay so here's my honest take — the Baofeng hate is a little overblown but it's not totally without merit. The radios themselves work fine for what you're describing, the issue is more that the programming software is a bit of a mess and the menu system will make you want to throw it against a wall at first. That said I started on one and have zero regrets, I just eventually outgrew it. For your budget the UV-5R or the slightly nicer UV-82 are perfectly fine. If you can stretch just a little bit, like to the $100-120 range, the Yaesu FT-65 is genuinely a step up in terms of build quality and receiver performance and it doesn't feel like a toy. The FT-60 is great too but they're getting harder to find new and used prices have gone up. For hiking and local repeaters you really dont need APRS yet, dont let the feature list on the fancy radios distract you. Get something cheap enough that you wont be heartbroken if you drop it on a trail, learn how repeaters work, figure out what you actually want from the hobby, then upgrade later when you know more about what matters to you.

congrats, the baofeng is fine for getting started just so you know some repeaters are picky about the tones so if you ever get ignored thats probably why. also once you upgrade to general and get on HF its a whole different world. took me about two months after my tech ticket to go ahead and study for general and i wish id done it sooner honestly

congrats on the Japan contact, thats a great first DX. so the short answer is it kinda depends on what awards you care about. LoTW is basically essential if you want DXCC or any of the ARRL awards since thats the only electronic confirmation they accept. eQSL is more of a community thing and some awards recognize it but its a different world from LoTW. paper cards through the bureau still matter for certain things and honestly some older operators really prefer them, theres a whole culture around collecting them. for your Japan contact id just be patient. a lot of DX stations especially in Asia upload to LoTW in batches, some do it monthly or even less often. i had a JA station confirm on LoTW like 4 months after the contact so dont stress about it. if you really want the card you could try sending a direct card to his callsign with a self addressed envelope and a couple dollars for return postage, thats still how a lot of DX chasing works for the rare ones

Koch method is genuinely the way but you have to trust the process even when it feels like nothing is happening. the thing that tripped me up for the longest time was exactly what you described — falling back into counting elements the moment speed goes up. what helped me was setting the character speed high, like 20wpm, and just accepting that I was going to miss a lot at first. the spacing between characters is what you reduce over time, not the character speed itself. that's the Farnsworth method and it basically forces your brain to hear the whole character as a sound instead of counting pieces. for practice time, honestly 15-20 minutes focused is worth more than an hour of half-paying-attention. I used to do it right after dinner every night and just stuck with it. once I could copy single characters reliably I switched to the word lists on lcwo and then just started listening to W1AW code practice transmissions which are free and they publish what they sent so you can check yourself. took me about 8 months total to get comfortable around 15wpm and another few to push past that, but it does click eventually.

yeah what he said about connectors is real, that bites everyone eventually. but also -- whats the repeater input, is it on the east side of town? because if the chimney is blocking you in that direction thats gonna hurt way more than coax loss. i had my gp-6 on a chimney mount for like two years wondering why one repeater was always scratchy and turns out the brick was just in the way. moved it to a mast on the peak and night and day difference.

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 with the direct sampling mod for HF for probably 8 months now and honestly its been decent for what it is but im starting to wonder if the SDRplay is actually worth the jump in price. the sensitivity difference is supposed to be pretty significant but i cant really find a good apples to apples comparison that isnt either a product page or someone who clearly got the SDRplay for free to review it. my main use case is just monitoring 40m and 80m during the evenings, some WSPR decoding, and occasionally poking around the MW broadcast band. not doing anything crazy. running SDR# on windows and ive played around with GQRX a little but keep going back to SDR# mostly out of habit i think. anyone actually made that jump and regretted it or thought it was worth it? the RSP1A specifically, not the RSP2 or the dx version, those are way out of what i want to spend right now

so i passed my technician exam last thursday after studying for like 3 weeks and i was pretty nervous to actually key up the mic but today i just went for it on the 147.315 repeater in my area and someone came back to me right away which honestly caught me off guard lol. guy named Bill (W4something i didnt catch the suffix) talked to me for like 10 minutes asking where i was from and what radio i had. i just have a baofeng uv-5r for now which i know isnt fancy but it worked fine. anyway just wanted to share because it felt like a bigger deal than i expected it to. planning to eventually get on HF once i upgrade to general but for now the local repeater stuff is keeping me busy

Welcome to the club of humbling first activations. I've been doing POTA for about two years now and I still have trips where something goes sideways. Last month I drove all the way out to a wildlife refuge, got everything set up beautifully, perfect weather, and then realized I had grabbed my logging tablet without the charging cable and it was at 4 percent battery. Ended up doing paper logging with a receipt from my glovebox and a pen I found under the seat, which actually worked fine but was not what I planned. One thing that really helped me early on was making an actual physical checklist that lives in my go-bag and never leaves it. Sounds obvious but until I did that I was always reconstructing the list from memory the night before and always forgetting something. Also for the pileup anxiety thing — it genuinely does get easier. After maybe your fifth or sixth activation something clicks and you stop hearing it as a wall of noise and start being able to pick calls out. Just keep going out there.

yeah 4 contacts is all you need for the points. nice work getting it done on a windy day, i bailed on an activation once because the weather turned and i always regret it. what part of the smokies was it? ive been wanting to do a few in that area

the latency question really depends on your path more than the software tbh. ive had RemoteHams sessions that felt totally transparent and others where there was this annoying 300-400ms tail on everything that made CW basically unusable. same software both times, different routing on different days. if your remote site and operating location are both within the same metro area youll probably be fine but if theres a bunch of hops across the country all bets are off. never tried running it alongside internet linking stuff so cant help there

so i was just sitting here doing some casual monitoring yesterday afternoon and 10 meters absolutely exploded open around 2pm local time. i was hearing stations from south america, europe, even caught what sounded like a JA station for a few minutes before it faded. logged a few contacts with my old IC-7300 running about 80 watts into a dipole in the attic which honestly i keep expecting to be totally useless but keeps surprising me. also noticed the solar flux index has been climbing pretty steadily the last couple weeks which i guess explains it. been a while since ive had a run like that on 10, maybe since the last solar cycle peak? hard to remember. anyway if you havent checked 10m lately might be worth tuning around, conditions seem to be trending in a good direction heading into the fall also slightly off topic but did anyone see the announcement about the new Icom IC-905 being more widely available now? been curious if anyone has actual hands on time with it, the microwave band stuff looks interesting but im not sure i understand the use case well enough yet to justify anything like that price tag

congrats and welcome to the hobby. that first time you key up is nerve wracking for basically everyone, doesnt matter how old you are or how long youve been studying. i remember sitting in my car in a parking lot for like 10 minutes before i finally pressed the PTT the first time. felt ridiculous afterwards because yeah everyone was super welcoming. the baofeng is fine to start out, dont let anyone give you grief about it. once you get the hang of things and decide what direction you want to go with the hobby youll have a better idea what you actually want to upgrade to. some people stay on VHF/UHF and some get the HF bug real bad. either way youre in for a good time. get on those nets when you can, great way to practice and meet people in your area.

Learn the code by its sound - avoid mnemonic methods like the plague! Use the Farnsworth Method with letters at your target speed (say 18-20 WPM) but spacing slowed down to give thinking time. Start with LCWO.net or MorseCode.World for structured lessons. You'll be making contacts within 3-6 months with consistent daily practice.

so i just passed my technician exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to get and honestly the sheer number of options is kind of paralyzing me. ive been reading threads on here for a few weeks and everyone seems to have really strong opinions about everything right now im looking at the baofeng UV-5R because its cheap and seems like everyone has one, but then i keep seeing people say to just spend a little more and get something better. the yaesu FT-60R keeps coming up but thats like 3x the price for someone just starting out. and then theres the whole chirp programming thing which i havent even gotten into yet mostly i want to hit the local repeaters, maybe do some simplex with a friend who lives about 8 miles away, and eventually get into APRS if thats even possible on a basic HT. am i overthinking this or is there actually a meaningful difference between the cheap stuff and the mid range radios for what im trying to do

Don't forget to check if the repeater also transmits a tone on the output. If it does, you can set up tone squelch (TSQL) so your radio only opens up when it receives that specific tone from the repeater. Really helps cut down on noise and interference.

yeah the chart thing doesnt really work, at least not for most people. the whole point of the koch method is you learn to hear the characters as sounds rather than counting dots and dashes in your head, because if youre counting youll never get fast enough to actually use it. LCWO dot net is what i used, its free and you can set it up to do koch from the beginning. starts you with just K and M and you get those down before adding more letters. the key thing everyone says and its actually true -- learn it at full speed from the start, like 15-20 wpm character speed even if the words come slow. if you learn at 5 wpm youll just have to relearn everything later. also just be patient with yourself, it took me probably 4 or 5 months of messing around maybe 15 mins a day before i could actually copy anything useful. some people get it faster. morse code trainer app on android is decent too if you want something on your phone for commuting or whatever

Considering adding external panadapter capability to my FT-991A using the G4HUP PAT70 buffer amplifier kit from SDR-Kits. The PAT70 (70MHz version) is specifically designed for the FT-991A's IF frequency and is available from SDR-Kits in the UK. The upgrade from 991 to 991A apparently made it easier to tap the IF since the mod goes on the back of the existing panadapter PCB. Plan to use this with an RSP1a and HDSDR for a wideband display. The IF frequency is 69.450MHz in the FT-991A. Has anyone here performed this modification? Particularly concerned about the conductive sponge in the bottom cover and proper isolation with Kapton tape. Questions: Installation difficulty level? Any gotchas with drilling the rear panel? Software recommendations beyond HDSDR?

so the waiting period thing — you're thinking of the old system. there used to be a 60 day wait after initial license grant before you could file for a vanity but that went away a while back. now you can apply for a vanity pretty much as soon as your license shows up in the ULS and is in Active status. the $35 fee is separate from whatever you paid for the original license yeah, each application is its own thing with the FCC. as for not getting your first choice — yeah the fee applies regardless of outcome because you're paying for the application not the specific call. so if you apply for something that's already taken or gets snatched up in the same filing window you still paid for the attempt. the way the vanity system works there's actually a 30 day filing window and if multiple people apply for the same call in that window it goes to a tiebreaker based on relationship to the previous holder first, then just random selection i think. 1x2 calls in the 7 district are pretty competitive but not impossible, worth checking ae7q.com for availability searches, way better than trying to dig through ULS directly.

so ive been on 20m and 17m pretty regularly the past few weeks and something feels off. like some evenings the band is absolutely dead and then out of nowhere i work a JA station with a 59 report like its nothing. then the next day same time same freq and i cant even hear europe. been doing this long enough to know bands fluctuate but this feels more erratic than usual. i started checking the solar flux index more carefully and its been bouncing around a lot, saw it go from like 140 down to 112 in just a few days. does that kind of drop normally cause that much inconsistency or is there something else going on? also noticed some geomagnetic storm warnings on the space weather sites but honestly i still dont fully understand how that affects HF differently than solar flux does. any of you guys been catching any good DX windows lately or is it just me having inconsistent luck

oh man yeah totally. i went almost six months barely touching the rig and then one night i just flipped it on during a storm and ended up on 80m and it was like... why did i ever stop doing this. something about the static and the voices coming in and out just hits different. glad youre back at it

Looking for advice on tackling the new Amateur Extra question pool that went into effect July 1, 2024. The new pool incorporates significant changes compared to the 2020-2024 version with 82 new questions created and 101 questions eliminated. What are the main topic areas I should focus on? I've heard the math can be challenging. Any recommended study materials that cover the updated pool? Planning to take the exam in the next few months.

the annoyed old timers thing is real lol, dont worry about it too much. some of them act like using 'November' instead of just 'N' is some sacred duty. it's not. that said the point about it becoming habit is legit — i used to just say letters and then i got on HF and completely fell apart trying to give my call during a contest because i hadnt practiced and suddenly B and P sounded the same through the noise also worth knowing you dont have to use phonetics for numbers, nobody says 'niner' in casual conversation on a local repeater, well okay some people do but you know what i mean

not directly related to your EQ question but one thing that helped me a lot was just doing a proper on-air recording and actually listening back to myself. most modern SDRs make it easy, just have someone near you record your signal on a WebSDR or a local club member with a second radio. i was convinced my audio was fine for like two years before i actually heard a recording and was like oh no. sometimes the issue isnt even settings, its mic placement or background noise getting picked up. the PR-40 is cardioid but it still picks up more room than you'd think if your shack has hard surfaces bouncing sound around.

yeah 40 has been kinda garbage on and off for me too, been blaming the solar stuff but honestly i dunno. tried calling CQ a few times this week and got nothing then out of nowhere worked a guy in New Mexico which i wasnt expecting at all. bands are weird lately

DXpeditions are supported by donations from those seeking verifications, but that doesn't mean you need to donate thousands. Many successful Honor Roll ops got there through persistence and being ready when rare ones come on. Consider digital modes like FT8 for working weak signals too.