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

so ive been messing around with AMSAT stuff for a few weeks now, got my antennas sorted out (pair of yagis, az/el rotor) and im finally getting solid passes on FO-29 and the AO-7 when its in mode B. the issue im running into is the doppler correction. i understand the concept, like the uplink and downlink shift in opposite directions because of the linear transponder being inverting, but when im actually in a pass i feel like im always chasing my own tail trying to stay on frequency. my radio is an IC-9700 and i have gpredict running on a laptop doing the doppler tuning automatically but something feels off. like my downlink drifts one way and i push my uplink the other way and then i lose myself in the passband completely. been reading about how you lock onto a beacon first but AO-7 doesnt really have a useable beacon most of the time depending on which mode its in. is there a better workflow for this? i feel like im missing something fundamental about how to set the rig up with gpredict. does anyone actually have the IC-9700 CAT control working smoothly for sat work or is it kind of a pain

One thing I never see people mention is documentation. Like actual printed documentation in the kit — your callsign, frequencies for the local nets, any ICS forms you might need, contact numbers. Your phone dies, the laptop dies, you still have paper. I keep a little binder in mine with the repeater directory for the surrounding counties and the net scripts we use locally. Seems old fashioned but every single time we do a drill somebody ends up borrowing mine because they only had it on their phone. Also power adapters. Do you have a way to charge the radio from your car if the solar isnt keeping up? A proper cable from the battery to the cigarette lighter or direct to the car battery, whatever your setup needs. That and honestly food and water for yourself if you might be there a while, I know thats not radio stuff but ive seen operators get useless after 6 hours because they didnt eat anything

I tried to get the UDP thing working between WSJT-X and N1MM once and gave up after an hour, so you're not alone there. Ended up just doing the manual ADIF import like you and yeah the duplicate issue bit me a couple times during a pileup when I wasnt paying attention. Havent tried Log4OM yet but this thread is making me want to. Does it handle satellite logging at all or is that a whole other thing

psk31 was so good for that kind of casual conversation thing. i kind of miss when 20m had a constant stream of PSK31 QSOs going on a friday night. FT8 really did just vacuum up all those ops. i still fire up fldigi sometimes just to see if anyones around on PSK and occasionally you find a pocket of activity, usually older guys who never switched over. havent tried JS8Call myself but this thread is making me want to. does it work okay with a regular soundcard setup or do you need anything special interface wise

yeah the hum thing would bug me too. have you checked for a ground loop? if your radio and your computer or anything else is all plugged into different outlets or power strips that can cause exactly that kind of low level hum. i chased one of those for like three weeks before i figured out it was my monitor of all things coupling into the mic cable somehow. try keying up with everything except the radio powered off and see if the hum goes away, thats usually how i start narrowing it down.

so ive been running an old TS-570 for probably 8 years now and it still works fine honestly but i kept seeing people rave about the 7300 and finally last month i just bought one. figured id share some thoughts since i spent way too long reading comparisons before pulling the trigger. first thing — the waterfall. i knew it was supposed to be good but actually using it day to day is a different thing. found a few stations on 40m last night just by watching signals pop up that i would have completely missed scanning by ear. thats probably the biggest practical difference for me so far. audio on receive is noticeably better than the kenwood, cleaner somehow, though i suspect some of that is the DSP and i havent really dug into the filter settings yet. the touch screen takes some getting used to, i keep accidentally changing things when im just trying to rest my hand near the rig which is annoying. one thing i wasnt expecting — the built in antenna tuner is pretty limited. works fine for stuff thats close to resonance but i have a 40m dipole i sometimes use on 15m and the internal tuner just gives up on it. ended up leaving my LDG tuner in line which kind of defeats the purpose. not a dealbreaker but worth knowing if youre coming from a rig with a more capable tuner. overall really happy with it. shack looks a lot less cluttered too since i got rid of a separate audio interface i was using, the USB audio in the 7300 works great with WSJT-X right out of the box pretty much.

nice, 11 contacts on your first go is pretty solid actually. i totally bombed my first one because i forgot to spot myself and just sat there calling CQ into nothing for like 20 minutes before i figured out what was going on lol. make sure you get the SOTA spotter app on your phone before the next one, makes a huge difference

for repeater work at 80 miles the yagi is kind of overkill unless the terrain is really rough — most of the time a decent collinear on a high point will get you there. where the yagi really shines for me is ssb weak signal, like if youre trying to work a grid on 144.200 then yeah you want that directional gain and front-to-back ratio. but for mixed casual use i'd honestly just run the collinear and save yourself the headache of rotating it every few minutes during a qso

same boat as you like six months ago lol. what finally clicked for me was just focusing on getting LoTW set up and uploading every QSO i make. then you can see what you have toward each award without committing to anything. i was like 30 states in before i even realized i was making progress on WAS. DXCC felt really intimidating at first but once you hit like 50 confirmed it gets kind of addictive. the fees arent terrible, worse things to spend money on

so ive been at this for about 4 months now and i started with the Koch method at 5wpm which honestly felt fine, got all the characters down pretty quick and was feeling good about myself. then i pushed up to 10 and it got harder but manageable. now im sitting here stuck around 10-12wpm and 20 just seems like some mythical thing that only people who were born in 1950 can do lol i practice with the LCWO website mostly, like 20-30 minutes a day which i know maybe isnt enough but thats what i can fit in. i can copy single characters okay but actual words just fall apart on me especially if theres a long word or my brain hiccups on one letter and then i lose the next three trying to recover. does that ever stop happening or is it just part of it forever also i read somewhere that you should practice at a higher character speed even if your overall word speed is slower — like the farnsworth method or whatever its called. anyone actually do that and did it help or is it just one of those things people say on the internet