Mountain Ham

had almost identical symptoms on mine about a year ago. turned out to be a cold solder joint on the PA board near one of the driver transistors. it would intermittently lose contact and the radio would basically back off power trying to protect itself. you could actually see it with a magnifying glass once you knew where to look, tiny little crack in the solder around the base pin. now i'm not saying that's definitely your problem but the random nature of it and the fact that cycling power sometimes fixes it temporarily is pretty classic intermittent connection behavior. if you're comfortable opening it up and have a decent eye and a soldering iron, worth poking around. the 7300 service manual is floating around online and its pretty well documented. if not yeah, Icom service is the safe bet but they're slow right now no question

the latency thing with RemoteHams is real and honestly it comes down to the server side buffering settings more than your connection speed. there's a jitter buffer config in the server software that defaults to something way too conservative, i dropped mine down and the PTT clipping basically went away. you'll find it in the audio settings tab, not exactly obvious where it is on the Allstar bridge idea - i mean technically you could do it, app_rpt can take pretty much any audio source if you're willing to get dirty with the asterisk config. the issue is you'd be adding another encoding stage on top of whatever RemoteHams is already doing to the audio so by the time it comes out the other end on an RF link it's gonna sound pretty rough. for HF especially where you're already dealing with fading and noise that extra codec hit might not matter much but for anything SSB it kind of kills intelligibility. i tried something similar with an SDRplay RSPdx feeding into a VOIP chain and it was technically working but the audio was just not great

Wednesday at 8pm eastern I'm usually free, might try to swing by and check in sometime. I run a dipole so 40m should be fine from here in ohio. What kind of topics do you usually do? Just curious if its like a set theme or just whatever comes up. Also the ARRL has a net directory that might help get listed, i think you can submit your net info and they post it. Not sure how much traffic that actually drives but worth a shot maybe. I found a few nets that way when i first got my ticket and was just trying to figure out how this all worked.

so i've been putting off doing a proper mobile install for like two years now and finally just did it this weekend. got a Yaesu FT-7900R mounted under the dash, ran the power leads direct to the battery with the inline fuses and everything. antenna is a Tram 1185 dual band mag mount sitting on the roof for now until i can do a proper through-hole mount. here's the thing though — SWR on 2 meters reads fine, like 1.2 or so, but on 70cm it's jumping up to almost 2.5 on some frequencies. i checked the connector and it looks okay but im not super experienced with coax terminations. the pig tail on the tram is that RG-58 type stuff which i know isnt ideal. could that be the issue or should i be looking somewhere else first? i didnt use any adapters, just straight PL-259 to the radio. truck is a 2018 F-150 if that matters. hasn't caused any audio issues that i can tell but i want to get this sorted before i start using it more regularly.

oh man yes I went through exactly this and it took me way longer than I expected to be honest. the thing that finally clicked for me was stopping trying to consciously translate the dits and dahs into letters and just... letting the sound become the letter directly. easier said than done i know but the way i got there was basically just listening to a LOT of code without worrying about copying it. like put on W1AW practice transmissions or something from the ARRL audio files and just let it wash over you while you're doing dishes or whatever. also the Farnsworth thing - what it does is send the individual characters at a higher speed like 15 or 18wpm but puts longer gaps between them so you have time to process. the idea is you train your ear to hear the letters as sounds not as counted dits and dahs, but you still get the extra thinking time. slowly you shrink the gap. lcwo does this if you set the character speed higher than the overall speed. i went from about 5 to 12 that way over maybe 6 months of pretty regular practice, then 12 to 20 took another year but it came faster once i started actually getting on the air and doing it for real.

i went straight to a HackRF when i got into SDR and honestly looking back probably overkill for just monitoring. the RSP1B is probably the sweet spot for general HF listening if you want to step up from an RTL dongle. what software are you running, because SDR# with the right plugins makes a pretty big difference on HF too — the noise reduction stuff in there is actually decent

had almost the exact same thing happen with mine last fall. turned out my coax was picking up common mode current and basically becoming part of the antenna. the balun wasnt doing much because i hadnt wound enough turns, i think i had like 8 on the core and went to 12 and it helped a lot. not saying thats your issue but might be worth checking with a current probe or just temporarily clamping some ferrites on the coax right below the feedpoint to see if anything changes. probably still the height thing like the other guy said though

yeah the listening thing is the most underrated skill in pileup work, totally agree. most guys just TX TX TX without ever figuring out what the DX op is actually doing. some of them work a very predictable pattern, especially the more experienced DXpedition operators, they'll sweep methodically and if you're paying attention you can almost predict where they'll tune next within like 200hz. the other thing i'd add is partial calls. if you hear the DX come back with something like 'kilo uniform' and thats the first two letters of your suffix, jam your call in hard right there because he's looking for you specifically and the window is tiny. a lot of guys miss that because they're not listening closely enough to what the op is actually saying versus just waiting for a clear frequency to open up. also dont underestimate operating time. if its a real dxpedition they might be on for 10-12 days, the pileup on day one is insane, day 6 at 0300z it gets way more workable. ive worked stuff on 17m at weird hours that i couldnt touch for three days during the main rush.

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and i keep telling myself im going to put together a real go-kit and then never actually do it. last week there was a pretty bad storm in our area and the local ARES group got activated and i just kind of sat there feeling useless because my setup is basically just my shack radio and a power strip. not exactly portable. anyway i finally ordered a Pelican 1510 case and i've got an IC-7300 at home but obviously thats not going in the kit, so i picked up a used FT-857D which i think makes sense since it does HF/VHF/UHF all in one. also grabbed a 20ah LiFePO4 battery from bioenno. so the radio and power situation i think is okay but im not really sure what else needs to go in there. i know i need an antenna situation sorted out obviously but thats where i start to get fuzzy. do i do a linked dipole, a vertical, one of those end-fed things? and then beyond antennas what else do people actually find themselves reaching for during an actual deployment. not just stuff that sounds good on paper but stuff you actually used. also should i be thinking about a separate VHF/UHF HT in there or does the 857 cover that well enough on its own

so ive been running a diamond x50a on my roof for a couple years now and it does fine for the repeaters i use most but theres one about 45 miles out that i can hit sometimes and sometimes not, usually depends on weather i think. a buddy at the club was telling me i should just build or buy a yagi and point it at that one repeater and forget about the collinear but the thing is i also use that antenna for local stuff and monitoring the national calling freq so i dont really want to give up the omnidirectional coverage. was thinking maybe put up a second coax run and switch between them depending on what im doing, but then i get into the whole feedline loss thing and i dont know if a yagi mounted at the same height as the x50 would actually outperform it toward that one repeater by enough to matter. the repeater is on a hilltop and im in a bit of a valley so line of sight isnt great. maybe this is more of a terrain problem than an antenna problem honestly. anyone dealt with a similar situation, like mixing omni and directional on vhf and switching between them?

the math looks scarier than it is tbh. most of the formulas you just need to know what to plug in where, you arent deriving anything from scratch. get the ARRL extra class manual or just use HamStudy and grind the practice tests and youll be fine. i did it in about six weeks studying maybe 20-30 min a day.

oh man i just started checking into nets like two months ago and i was so nervous the first time. totally fumbled my callsign on the first try lol. but yeah netlogger is the thing, someone at my club told me about it and it made a huge difference for finding active nets. some nets have been running the same night and frequency for like 30 years which is kind of wild to think about. i dont know about the special event station you mentioned but i want to find one to work, sounds fun

I went through exactly this about three years ago and honestly the setup pain is real but it's a one-time thing. The bandpass filters are non-negotiable if your antennas are anywhere near each other -- I tried to skip that step and the 7300 was picking up everything the second radio was doing, totally unusable. Fletcher or W3NQN style filters are what most people run and yeah they cost money but you do it once and forget it. The actual operating skill is a separate learning curve from the station wiring and in some ways harder. Running a frequency on one radio while S&Ping on the other sounds simple until you're actually doing it at 150 contacts an hour and your brain starts doing weird things. I dropped my rate the first couple contests I tried it because I was so focused on managing both radios I forgot to actually work stations efficiently. Give yourself like two or three serious efforts before you judge whether its working for you. For your specific setup, the 7300 and 590 should play together okay with decent filtering and N1MM handles SO2R pretty well once you get the COM port stuff sorted. There's a good setup guide on the N1MM wiki that walks through the radio control config. Don't skip the part about setting the SO2R audio switching up properly or you'll go crazy trying to monitor both bands at once.

first thing id check is whether its actually a frequency error or if your reference oscillator drifted again. even with the TCXO they can wander a bit especially with that kind of duty cycle — heat is not friendly to those things. try leaving the radio off for a few hours then power it up cold and see if the offset is the same, more, or less. if it changes with temperature then youre probably looking at the oscillator. there's a calibration procedure in the service manual (not the user manual, the actual service manual which you can find if you look around) where you can trim the reference against a known good signal like WWV on 10 or 15 MHz. some guys use GPS disciplined references but WWV works well enough for a sanity check. if after that the thing is still off then yeah something else is going on and it might be worth pulling the covers and checking for anything obvious — cold solder joint, maybe something on the RF board near the IF filter section. though honestly on a 7300 thats pretty involved, the board layout is not super friendly for probing around.

so our ARES group has a county-level simulated emergency exercise coming up and im putting together a portable station for the first time on my own, ive helped set up for others before but never been the guy responsible for the whole thing start to finish my plan right now is to run a KX3 or maybe borrow the clubs IC-7300 depending on whats available, and for HF i was going to throw up a linked dipole on a 31ft spiderpole, which has worked fine at field day. the part im not sure about is power. the site we're at has no shore power so its either a generator or battery based i was leaning toward a 50ah lifepo4 battery with a 30a solar controller and a 100w panel, which should be more than enough for a low power setup running maybe 50w most of the time. but someone in the group keeps insisting we need a generator for "reliability" and honestly i get where hes coming from but dragging a genny out to a park for a 6 hour exercise seems like overkill to me anyone run extended field ops purely on battery and solar without running into problems? the exercise runs from like 0800 to 1400 so about 6 hours, partly cloudy forecast