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

omg yes i caught part of that opening, im pretty new (got my general like 4 months ago) and i had no idea 10m could do that. my elmer told me it had been mostly dead for years so i never really bothered with it. tuned in and heard all this european stuff just pouring in and i didnt even know what to do at first lol. managed to make two contacts before i fumbled the exchange and kind of gave up but still, super cool to actually hear what a real opening sounds like vs just reading about it

yeah JS8Call has a bit of a learning curve mostly because the user base is pretty spread out compared to FT8 which basically everyone piled into. the activity tends to cluster around certain nets and times rather than just being a free-for-all like FT8. 40m does have some traffic but honestly 80m late evening has been better in my experience, especially for domestic stuff. the store and forward relay thing is actually pretty neat once you get the hang of it, messages can hop through other stations even if you cant hear the destination directly. but if you just want a casual keyboard to keyboard chat then yeah PSK31 or even Olivia makes more sense, the conversational flow is just better for that use case. JS8Call kind of sits in this weird middle ground and i think a lot of people havent figured out what they want to use it for yet including me honestly.

im in basically the same boat as you, got licensed last year and spent way too long confused about all this. what finally made it click for me was thinking of LoTW as the "official" one for serious awards and eQSL as more of a casual digital card thing. like you'll get confirmations way faster on eQSL because people check it more casually but it doesnt count for as much. and yeah physical cards are definitely still alive lol, i sent out maybe 30 cards after a portable operation i did and got probably half of them confirmed back by mail over the next few months. theres something genuinely nice about it even if its slow. some DX stations only do paper cards through their country's bureau which adds like another layer of complexity but youll figure that out when you get there

ran a RemoteHams setup for about two years before i moved and actually got to put up a real tower. the RRC boxes are solid, not gonna lie, setup is kind of fiddly the first time but once its dialed in it just works. the latency thing on SSB is real though — anything above like 80ms round trip starts to feel weird for phone operating, you kind of develop a habit of pausing more than you normally would. CW through the keyer emulation is actually really good, i was surprised. the SDR side i only played with briefly, used it for monitoring while the main radio was tied up, worked fine for that. dont know how it holds up for serious use. for a cable connection at 40 miles out youre probably fine as long as your buddy isnt streaming 4K at the same time you're trying to work a pileup, hah. QoS settings on his router would help if he'll let you mess with it.

Memory channels are great, but don't overlook other features. The FT-60R's 1000 channels come with better build quality, clearer audio, and more accessories available. If budget allows, it's worth the investment for durability. That said, the UV-5R remains unbeatable in value for learning the basics.

the stock mic on the 7300 isnt bad at all honestly, the bigger issue most people have is mic gain set too high. if your ALC is pinning consistently youre probably overdriving it and that's where the 'tunnel' sound comes from — compressed to death and starting to clip. try backing the mic gain down until the ALC barely moves on normal speech peaks, like occasional flickers rather than sitting up in the red. the TX EQ in the 7300 is actually pretty decent, i run a slight boost around 2-3kHz and roll off below 200Hz, cleans up the low end rumble and helps with intelligibility on the other end. speech compression is useful but more than about 4-5dB of it and youre usually making things worse not better. a lot of guys crank it thinking more compression equals louder but it just makes you sound harsh. for monitoring your own audio — the 7300 has a monitor function you can enable to hear yourself through the speaker with a slight delay, which is handy. but the best real-world check is finding a patient buddy on a linked repeater or just on 40m and doing an actual A/B with settings. dont trust just one report, get a few opinions from stations running decent rigs of their own.

I had similar QRZ timeout issues until I switched to HamQTH as backup data source. SWLog integrates with multiple services including ClubLog, eQSL, QRZ, Ham365, and HamQTH - maybe PoLo has similar fallback options?

yeah the backup net control thing is such a classic drill failure and it happens almost every single time until a group gets burned by it enough. we had the exact same problem in our AUXCOMM exercise back in the spring, took us almost 20 minutes to sort out who was running the net and by that point in a real disaster you've already lost momentum and possibly lost contact with people who needed help. what we do now is we actually have a written activation order posted in the group's shared drive and everyone who might serve as NC has a printed copy in their go-kit. sounds overly formal but when things are chaotic you really want someone to be able to just look at a piece of paper and say ok it's me, I'm running this. the other thing that helped us a lot was running shorter more frequent tabletop exercises in between the big drills so people stay sharp on the protocols without having to wait for the once-a-year county event. on the battery front — I switched to running my HF rig at 25W for most traffic passing situations and honestly the signal reports didn't suffer much at the distances we're working. cuts consumption significantly. also started keeping a second battery in the kit specifically as a reserve, dont touch it unless the primary drops below 30 percent or whatever.

We've definitely seen Q65 activity increasing significantly on 2m EME, especially weekends. The signal averaging feature in Q65 is remarkable - it tracks received sequences and pieces information together over multiple transmissions for successful decodes. Measured about 2-3dB improvement over JT65B in marginal conditions at our contest station.

144.990 is the standard but honestly check if theres a more active gateway in your area, some areas have moved to VARA FM and the old packet gateways dont get much maintenance anymore. i went through the same thing trying to connect to a gateway that technically existed on the map but the sysop hadnt touched it in like a year. switched to VARA FM and it connected first try once i got the audio levels sorted on the Signalink. the adjustment pots on those things are fussy, tiny little adjustments make a big difference.