Lisa Chang

so ive had my tech license for about a year and a half now and mostly been doing 2m stuff, some DMR, joined a local club. but lately ive been hearing people talk about HF and honestly it sounds way more interesting than i expected. like the idea of actually talking to people across the country or whatever without any repeaters or internet linking just sounds really cool to me. anyway i want to upgrade to general but i dont really know how the exam compares to the tech exam. i remember the tech pool wasnt too bad, took me maybe two weeks of studying with that HamStudy website. is the general pool a lot harder? and is there stuff i actually need to understand or can you just memorize answers the same way? i feel like i remember someone saying the electrical theory gets heavier but im not sure. also what even opens up exactly, like which bands am i allowed on as a general vs what i have now sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to figure out if this is like a weekend project or something i need to really buckle down for

oh man this brings back memories, i went through the exact same thing about three years ago. first thing id say is turn off iambic mode for now — seriously just use single lever or turn the squeeze mode off until you actually understand whats happening. iambic is great once you get the hang of things but it can really mess with your head when youre still internalizing the characters. slow it way down, like painfully slow, 5 wpm or whatever the keyer will let you do. and dont practice random letters, learn the short ones first, E T I A N M and build from there. a lot of people swear by the Koch method where you actually start at full speed for just two characters and add more as you get them right but honestly at the very beginning just getting clean dits and dahs matters more than anything. the cheap paddle will be fine for learning, your brain cant even tell the difference yet at this stage so dont spend money on gear right now

so i've been poking around 10m for months and mostly getting nothing, maybe some regional stuff on a good day, but yesterday afternoon i worked like 8 stations in Europe and then a couple in South America within maybe 45 minutes and then it just... died. totally flat again. i'm in the midwest for reference. i've been watching the solar flux numbers on that spaceweather site and it was up around 190 or so which i guess is pretty high? i honestly dont fully understand how to read all the indices. like i know higher SFI is generally better but then theres the K index and A index and i get confused about which one matters more when im actually trying to decide if its worth sitting down at the radio. is this just what we should expect right now being near the solar max or whatever? and how do people actually predict when these openings are gonna happen, is there like a good resource or tool that isnt super complicated

so i finally finished my first scratch-built transmitter, been working on this 40m CW rig for like three months off and on. based loosely on the EMRFD designs but i kind of went my own way on the PA stage because i couldn't find the exact transistors they called for and just used some 2N3553s i had in the junk box. thing actually keys up and i can hear myself on the receiver so that part works. output is somewhere around 2-3 watts which is less than i wanted but whatever, its a start. the problem is when im monitoring on a separate rx there's this kind of splatter or maybe chirp, hard to describe — sounds almost like the note isnt clean when i first key down, like there's a little glitch at the start of each element. keying waveform maybe? i dont have a scope right now which is making this harder to troubleshoot also the whole thing runs pretty warm even at those power levels which makes me think the transistors arent biased right or the impedance matching into the PA is off. anyone been through something similar with a homebrew TX? especially curious if the key clicks and the heat are related or two totally different problems

not crazy at all, the receive audio on the 7300 took some getting used to for me too. i came from an FT-991A not a Kenwood but same deal — the icom DSP has a kind of bright, almost clinical sound by default. what worked for me was pulling down around 2.5-3kHz in the parametric EQ and bumping the bass shelf a little. feels more like listening to SSB is supposed to sound if that makes sense. the ATU thing is a real limitation though. icom kind of buried that in the specs and a lot of people dont realize until they're trying to match something weird. i ended up adding an LDG external tuner for anything outside a pretty narrow SWR range and the 7300 just plays nice with it, you basically bypass the internal one and let the LDG do the work. been solid since. the waterfall spoils you fast. i borrowed a friends radio last year that didnt have one and it felt like flying blind honestly.

yeah timing is probably 80% of it honestly. ive also heard people say to try calling with just your suffix during a really thick pileup, especially if the DX op seems to be picking up partials. not sure if thats universally good advice or just situational but it worked for me once on a pretty decent DXpedition from the pacific a couple years back. the vertical thing doesnt surprise me at all. a good vertical with a proper ground system or elevated radials can be surprisingly competitive, especially on the lower bands where low angle radiation matters and a lot of directional antennas actually have worse performance than people think once you account for their takeoff angle on a real lot. its way more about timing and operating skill for SSB pileups in my experience, beyond maybe needing enough power to actually be heard over the noise floor on their end.

so we have a county-wide ARES exercise coming up and im trying to nail down the power situation before we deploy. last time we ran off a cheap harbor freight genny and had noise problems across like half the HF bands, just garbage S7-S8 hash on 40m no matter what we did. tried ferrites, tried the usual stuff, didn't really help much. this time around I'm debating whether to just go full battery and solar instead of dealing with the genny headache. we'd be running an IC-7300 as the primary HF station and probably a second position with a 2m/70cm setup for local coordination. the 7300 pulls maybe 20-22A on transmit at 100W which is a lot to ask from batteries if the exercise runs 8+ hours with decent traffic volume. the portable antenna situation is also kind of a mess — we have a few end-fed halfwaves that work fine but getting them up in a parking lot or field with no trees nearby is always the adventure. anyone running those SOTAbeams or the MFJ telescoping mast things for field ops? or just doing the fiberglass squid poles? curious what people are actually deploying and how its holding up in real conditions not just backyard tests

so ive been chasing VP6R for what feels like forever and i finally got them in the log last night on 17m. wanted to write up what actually worked because i spent like 3 days failing before something clicked. the big thing honestly was just listening way longer than i wanted to. i kept jumping in too early before i really understood where the DX op was listening. everyone talks about working split but if you dont actually figure out where in the spread theyre pulling calls from youre just adding noise. i noticed the op was consistently coming back to stations about 2 kHz up from where most of the pile was camping, so i just parked there and waited for a gap. also and this sounds dumb but timing your call to end right as the DX finishes their last dit made a huge difference. i was always calling a half second late before. like you can kind of anticipate when theyre going to stop transmitting if you listen to the rhythm of how theyre working the pile. running 100w into a hexbeam from a second floor balcony, nothing crazy. not a big gun by any stretch. curious what other techniques people have found that actually move the needle, especially for the guys not running kilowatts into stacked yagis

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now, mostly HF stuff with some 2m weak signal on the side, and ive always been kind of fascinated by the idea of moonbounce but every time i start reading about it i get overwhelmed and close the tab lol. figured id just ask here because the wiki stuff is dense. my current 2m setup is a 7 element yagi and an IC-9700, which i know is nowhere near enough but im wondering like... whats the realistic minimum to even attempt a contact. ive seen people say you can do it with a single yagi and JT65 now which honestly sounds insane to me. is that actually true or is that the kind of thing where technically possible means 1 contact in 6 months if youre lucky. also the elevation rotor situation confuses me. do you absolutely need az/el or can you work the moon during certain windows with just azimuth. my current rotor is just a regular TV antenna rotator that i hacked together for the yagi so thats obviously not going to cut it even for az. been looking at the Yaesu G-5500 as a starting point. anyway just trying to figure out if this is something i can realistically work toward without building a 10m dish in my backyard

honestly hamstudy alone got me through it no problem, i didnt buy any book. the way that site works with the adaptive learning thing it kind of figures out what youre weak on and keeps hammering those questions which is pretty useful. for the math stuff you really dont need to deeply understand it, the tech exam only has like a handful of calculation questions and if you just practice them enough times the pattern sticks. ohms law is just V=IR and the power formula, thats pretty much it for what shows up. the stuff i'd actually pay attention to is the operating rules and regs stuff because those questions are worded weird sometimes and they'll catch you if you're just half paying attention. also antenna and feed line basics show up more than you'd think. give yourself another week of daily practice sessions on hamstudy and you'll probably be ready, most people pass the tech exam without too much trouble if they put in a few weeks of casual studying.

ok so i've been chasing rare DX for like 6 years and honestly for the first 4 of those i was just doing it wrong. firing my call into a massive pileup at the exact same time as everyone else, getting nowhere, getting frustrated. you know how it goes. anyway i finally had a decent run of luck recently working a few top-100 entities that had been sitting blank on my log for ages and i think i've actually figured some stuff out worth sharing. or at least worth talking about because i'm curious what other people do differently. the biggest thing for me was learning to actually listen to where the DX station is actually pulling calls from. like really listen. if he just worked a W6 and then a W7 he might be sweeping west coast, so just shut up and wait. half the pileup doesnt do this and they just blast away constantly and all they're doing is creating QRM for the guy who actually has a shot. also i stopped trying to send my full call every single time. sometimes just the suffix works way better when the band is just absolutely wall to wall. the DX op knows what he's doing, if he comes back with 'kilo?' you're already halfway there. split operation stuff too — i always used to park right at the bottom of the split range thinking that's where everyone listens but that's exactly wrong. the dx station often slides up when the bottom gets too crowded. i started following where he was actually pulling calls from by watching the waterfall and adjusting accordingly rather than just guessing. curious what techniques other people swear by, especially for real low-band pileups where it gets absolutely insane

not sure about the specifics of the handoff thing but i run a similar setup with an SDR connected through RemoteHams and honestly the software is a bit finicky about audio in general. i had a problem for weeks that turned out to be my router doing something weird with UDP packets during periods of low activity, like it was aggressively closing the connection and the audio had to renegotiate. putting the server PC in the DMZ fixed it for me but obviously thats not for everyone depending on your situation at the station end.

i just got my general so 40m is kinda new territory for me. been listening a lot more than transmitting lol but yeah there's definitely a lot going on down there. still trying to figure out when to just jump in on a frequency without stepping on someone

honestly the general isnt that bad, just takes a bit more time than tech. the electrical theory stuff does look scary on paper but the way the exam works you really just need to recognize the right answer, not derive it from scratch. i used hamstudy.org and just drilled questions every day for maybe 20-30 minutes for about a month and passed no problem the stuff about HF propagation and the band privileges is pretty interesting once you get into it, like it actually starts making sense why certain bands work better at different times of day. that part almost felt less like studying and more like just reading about something cool. the impedance and reactance stuff i just kinda memorized the formulas and moved on, didnt stress about fully understanding it if you passed tech in 3 weeks you can probably do general in 4 or 5, maybe less if you put in the time. just dont overthink it

so ive been messing around on 10 and 12 meters more than usual lately because someone in our club mentioned the solar flux has been climbing and honestly i didnt really pay attention to that stuff before but now im kind of obsessed with checking spaceweather.com every morning before i even get coffee yesterday i worked a station in japan on 10m with just my dipole and like 50 watts and i almost fell out of my chair. ive been licensed for about 3 years and that was genuinely the best DX ive ever gotten, didnt even need to fight for it, he just came back to me first call. i know thats not a huge deal for a lot of you but for me it was kind of a moment my question i guess is how do you guys actually track when conditions are good enough to bother trying for DX? like is solar flux the main thing to watch or is there other stuff i should be looking at? the A and K index confuse me a little still, i sort of understand that lower is better for the K index but thats about where my knowledge stops