Amanda Davis

haha yeah it can feel like a whole different language at first, totally normal. the Q codes originally came from maritime and telegraph use, so some of them are a bit weird when you think about them in context of voice operation. QRM means interference from other stations, QSB is signal fading, QTH is your location, QSL means confirmed or acknowledged. theres definitely a list on the ARRL website and honestly just googling "ham radio Q codes list" will get you a pretty solid reference page. OM just means old man and its not rude at all, its like saying buddy or friend, been used forever. YL means young lady and its used for any female operator regardless of age which some people have opinions about these days but its generally not meant as anything bad. you'll also hear ES which just means "and", HI HI which is like laughing, and 88 means love and kisses which you mostly hear between operators who know each other. honestly after a few months of listening you just absorb most of it without even trying

I'm a Technician looking to upgrade and trying to understand the practical differences in HF privileges. I know General class licensees get access to over 83% of all amateur HF bands, but what does that mean in real terms? Specific questions: Can I operate phone/SSB on 20 meters as a General?What about digital modes like FT8 - are there restrictions for Techs?Emergency communications - do I need General for HF emergency nets?Looking for practical examples of what I'll be able to do after upgrading that I can't do now.

went through this exact same thing last year. I was a KD8 and really wanted something cleaner. ended up getting a 1x3 in the W4 block on my second try which im pretty happy with. first application I lost out to someone else on the call I wanted, second time I picked something a little less obvious and it went right through with no issues. AE7Q.com is your best friend for this whole process btw, way easier than trying to navigate ULS directly to find whats available and see the application history on calls youre interested in. you can see if a call has had a lot of previous applicants which is a decent indicator of how competitive it might be

for antennas on that kind of hilltop deployment what are you planning to run. i ask because sometimes the antenna choice matters more than anything for a field exercise, like if youre going to be doing any NVIS work on 40 or 60 for regional comms a low dipole actually helps you and you dont need a big mast situation. just curious what the site looks like for supports. on the power thing yeah LiFePO4 is kind of the answer for most field work if the budget is there. the weight per amp-hour is just so much better than AGM and you dont have to baby them. two 100Ah cells should cover your math pretty comfortably with margin assuming your duty cycle estimates are anywhere close.

the inverted-V is honestly probably your best starting point, especially if youre not going full DX mode. as long as the apex is up there — ideally 40 feet or higher — it'll work fine, maybe lose a couple dB over a flat dipole but nothing that'll actually matter in real life. the angle of the legs does affect the radiation angle a little but again, for general operating you wont notice. the vertical thing about noise isnt a myth though. if you're in a suburban area with switching power supplies and all that garbage everywhere, a low dipole will often outperform a vertical on receive just because of its rejection pattern. but if you put up a vertical with a proper radial field — and i mean actually 30-60 radials on the ground, not 4 or 8 — it can be a seriously good antenna especially for dx because of the low takeoff angle. the problem is most people slap up a vertical with a handful of radials and wonder why it sounds mediocre.

Don't overthink the questions! The test isn't designed to keep people from getting licensed - it ensures you can use the technology responsibly. Read each question carefully and eliminate obviously wrong answers first.

so ive been sitting on 40m most evenings this week and its just dead. like not even the usual chatter around 7.200 or wherever. dunno if its propagation or just people giving up or what but it feels different than even a few months ago. maybe everyone moved to ft8 and i just missed the memo lol. not complaining exactly just curious if its the same where you guys are or if im just unlucky with timing

js8call is genuinely good but yeah you're right that the activity level is the main problem. its kind of a chicken and egg thing where people dont hang around because no one else is there. best times ive found are weekend mornings on 40m and sometimes 20m in the evenings. there are also some nets that run it specifically so worth looking those up, the js8call groups io page has a schedule i think. decode sensitivity is a bit behind ft8 from what i can tell, like you're not gonna pull -24 dB signals out of the noise the way wsjt-x does. its built on a similar foundation but ft8's timing and the way it encodes is pretty optimized for pure sensitivity whereas js8call trades some of that off for the free text capability. still works fine with a modest setup like yours though, the ic-7300 is more than enough. if you already have the audio interface sorted for ft8 the setup is pretty painless since js8call uses the same basic soundcard approach. i'd say fire it up and just leave it running while you do other stuff, you'll start seeing contacts trickle in.

honestly i went through the same thing last year and just pulled the trigger on the RSP1A and dont regret it. one thing i'll add is that the SDRplay software SDRuno has gotten a lot better over the last year or so, used to be kinda buggy but recent versions have been pretty stable for me. also works fine with SDR# and HDSDR if you dont want to deal with SDRuno. if you really want to go deep on HF and you're eventually thinking about decoding stuff like WSPR or doing any kind of signal monitoring the cleaner front end really does matter. you'll start hearing things on 40m and 80m that just werent coming through on the dongle

yeah what he said. i'll just add that when i was new i found it really helpful to just pull up the actual ARRL band plan chart and keep it open while i was operating. it clicks a lot faster when you're looking at it while you're actually tuning around. also worth knowing that 40m is kind of a wild west band especially at night with all the dx coming in so you'll hear all kinds of things that might seem like they're in the wrong place, sometimes they are and sometimes the band plan looks different in other countries

so i finally got around to building a dipole instead of just complaining about my vertical not working on 40m. cut two legs to about 33.5 feet each for 40m resonance, used some old 14 gauge stranded wire i had laying around from an electrical project, fed it with RG-8X through a choke balun i wound myself on a piece of PVC using a mix of turns i found on some random webpage (probably not ideal). got it up in kind of an inverted V config with the apex at about 30 feet off the ground, ends are maybe 8 feet up tied to some fence posts. SWR is sitting around 1.4:1 at 7.150 which honestly surprised me, thought itd be way off. but i cant figure out why its reading higher on the low end of the band, like around 7.020 its closer to 2.1:1. shouldnt it be lower SWR down there if the antenna is cut a little long? or did i mess up my math somewhere. the legs might not be exactly equal length, i measured but the wire stretches a little when tensioned. also using a cheap nano VNA to check, not sure how much i trust it but it seems consistent at least

ground bus would definitely help, point to point on perf with no real ground plane is asking for trouble especially in the AF stages. but my first suspicion with a hum that tracks volume is the power supply rejection on the NE602 isnt great to begin with and if your decoupling near that chip is light youll hear it. try putting a 10uF electrolytic and a 0.1uF ceramic right at pins 8 and the ground pin, as close to the chip as you can physically get them. like within a cm if possible. also check that your audio amp stage has its own local decoupling, sometimes people decouple the RF stuff and forget the AF board needs it too. the 2N3904 VFO thing shouldnt cause hum per se, you might get drift but not 60hz garbage. so i'd look at the AF chain pretty hard. what are you using for the audio amp stage, discrete or something like an LM386?

I made the same mistake when I first applied! You need to independently research the application databases before deciding to file - the FCC licensing staff cannot provide assistance in determining availability. Check RadioQTH or AE7Q before submitting.

your math is right, 468/7.15 gets you there. one thing i'd say — cut each leg a little long, maybe an extra foot on each side, and trim from there. way easier than trying to splice wire back on if you go too short. with stranded 14 AWG the velocity factor is close enough to solid that it wont make a meaningful difference at those frequencies. on the feedpoint question, honestly either works fine. ive used both over the years. the PVC homebrew thing is perfectly serviceable and probably more weatherproof if you do it right with some self-amalgamating tape over the connector. the cheap plastic center insulators are fine too but the cheaper ones can get brittle in UV after a couple seasons. if you're already building from scratch id just go the PVC route, costs basically nothing and you get to say you built the whole thing yourself which is half the fun of it anyway. inverted-V on 40m from 35 feet is going to work fine. you'll have a slightly higher angle of radiation vs a flat top but for anything within a few hundred miles its actually decent and the lower impedance makes it a bit easier to match. have fun with it.

yeah the two-tab thing works but it does get chaotic when the bands are busy. what a lot of folks do is use something like DX4WIN or even just the built in cluster tools in their logging software — Log4OM actually has a cluster window built in if you dig into the settings a bit, it'll show you spots and flag new ones based on your existing log automatically. so you'd know right away if its a new one without having to flip tabs for phone stuff i like DX Toolkit on android, its not perfect but it pulls spots and lets you filter by band and mode which helps a lot. HamSphere has some tools too but i dont really use that. honestly once you get the cluster feeding directly into your log software it changes everything, you stop chasing dupes and start actually finding the good stuff

Used LCWO exclusively and took 44 hours to reach lesson 40 at 10% error rate, but count 50-100 hours if you want to be comfortable at 20wpm. The progress tracking kept me motivated when I felt stuck.

The ITU adopted the NATO phonetic alphabet developed in the 1950s to be intelligible and pronounceable, and is generally understood by all amateur radio operators around the world. When you say "Whiskey Seven Alpha Bravo Charlie," they copy perfectly. Use the standard—it works from Albania to Zimbabwe. For DX work, always start with NATO - it's what they're expecting to hear.

so i dont really have a question or anything i just noticed ive been spending like way more time just listening on 40m in the evenings than actually doing anything productive. not even calling CQ, just kind of... sitting there. tuning around. its almost meditative i guess? picked up a guy in Missouri chatting with someone in Georgia about fishing and just listened for like 45 minutes. didnt even key up. anyway if anyones on 7.235 around 9pm central id probably hear you, not that im promising to actually respond lol

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i keep hearing people use these weird shorthand things like QSL and QTH and QRM and honestly there are so many i cant keep track. i know QSL means like... confirming contact? and QTH is your location but beyond that im totally lost. someone told me there's a whole list of them but every time i look it up i just find like a massive table with hundreds of codes and i dont even know which ones actually get used vs which ones are just technically in the rules somewhere but nobody actually says. also is it just Q codes or are there other abbreviations too because ive seen stuff like 73 and 88 and DE and AR and all that. are those the same thing or different. sorry if this is a dumb question im still figuring all this out

so i've been mostly a 40m and 80m guy for the past couple years because honestly the higher bands just felt dead whenever i checked them. but yesterday afternoon i was spinning the dial on 10 meters just out of habit and suddenly there were stations everywhere. worked a few south americans and even heard something that sounded like it might have been europe fading in and out on the east end of the band. checked the solar flux after and it was up around 180 or so which i guess is decent? im still kind of fuzzy on how to actually read those numbers and what they mean for which bands are gonna be open. like i know higher is generally better but is there a threshold where 10m really starts to come alive vs just being occasionally useful. also does the K index matter as much as the flux or is that more for like aurora stuff on VHF anyway just excited, havent had a 10m pileup experience in a long time and forgot how fun it is when the band is cooking

yeah the flux has been all over the place this cycle, we're getting some decent peaks but then it just falls off. honestly the best thing i ever did was start checking the A and K index along with the solar flux number — the flux tells you roughly how much ionization the sun is pumping out, but the A and K index tell you if geomagnetic conditions are calm or stirred up. you can have a high flux day and still get garbage propagation if the K index is up around 4 or 5 because of a coronal mass ejection or something hitting the magnetosphere. for 17m and 20m from the midwest into europe you're generally looking at a window around your sunrise or a few hours after, and then again in the late afternoon. but yeah it varies a ton. i use the DX maps site and also just listen — if i hear anyone at all on 20m in the direction i want to work, the band is probably at least marginal. cluster helps but it doesnt tell you if conditions on YOUR path are good, just that somebody somewhere can hear somebody.

I'm the trustee for a small club repeater and we're looking to add internet linking capability. AllStarLink seems popular as a dedicated computer node with support for EchoLink and other VoIP clients. IRLP has restrictions - it can only connect to one node at a time but seems more stable. What are your experiences with these systems? Looking for reliability and ease of use for club members. We know about the linking delays requiring two-second pauses, but wondering about maintenance and user-friendliness. Any recommendations for a mid-size club (about 50 active members)?

so ive been licensed for about 3 years now mostly doing HF and some local 2m stuff but i finally decided to try working the LEO birds after watching a few youtube videos and honestly i had no idea what i was getting into. picked up a used FT-847 a while back and it supposedly does full duplex which is great but the doppler correction is killing me. im using gpredict to track the pass and it shows me the doppler shifted frequencies but i cant figure out the workflow to actually keep up with it in real time, like do i just constantly twist the dial? feels like im chasing my tail the whole pass. tried AO-73 last weekend during a decent pass, like 47 degrees elevation, and i could hear signals briefly but couldnt get any contacts. i think my uplink was way off because i could hear myself on the downlink maybe twice and then lost it. running a 7 element yagi for 70cm uplink and a 9 element for 2m downlink, both handheld which is probably part of the problem honestly. is there a simpler mental model for how to handle the doppler or do people mostly just use rigs that have computer control for this? i feel like im missing something obvious

i was in the same boat when i started lol. ended up just doing all three because why not. LoTW took me maybe a week to get going once i mailed in my request, the ARRL sends you a file you load into their tqsl software and after that its pretty painless. i use log4om and it can upload to both LoTW and eQSL automatically which is nice so i dont have to think about it. paper cards are still a thing for sure, i got one last month from a guy in Romania which was awesome, he had this really nice card with a photo of his shack on it. i dont send paper cards to everyone but for dxcc entities i need or just cool contacts i try to. the IRC thing is kind of outdated now i think, most people just tuck a dollar or two in there for return postage and that usually works fine internationally

i went through this exact same thing a few months ago. ended up getting a baofeng to start just because i wasnt sure if i'd stick with the hobby and didnt want to spend more. chirp does work with it, that part is fine. honestly my only complaint is the battery feels a little cheap and the squelch knob is kind of stiff but it got me on the air and on my local club's net and that was the point. if you end up really getting into it you'll probably want something better eventually anyway so maybe just start cheap and see where it goes