James Taylor

QRZ is the one that tripped me up forever because it sounds like it should mean something about interference but nope, its just who is calling or sometimes used as like a general CQ type call on some repeaters. took me way longer than id like to admit to figure that one out also worth knowing QSY means change frequency, youll hear that in contests a lot or when someone wants to move a contact to a clear spot

I've been chasing both for years and you're absolutely right! WAZ is one of amateur radio's oldest and most prestigious awards, requiring confirmed contacts in all 40 CQ zones. Some zones like 23 (Mongolia, western China) are incredibly difficult depending on your location. Much more challenging than my first 100 DXCC entities.

JS8Call activity really does depend on time of day and which subband you're watching. I've had decent luck on 40m around 7.078 but you kinda have to just park there and wait. the heartbeat mode helps a lot once you figure it out because stations are basically beaconing even when nobody is actively calling. it's not like FT8 where there's always someone — more like HF chat where you might wait 20 minutes before someone wanders by. your audio level thing is probably fine if you've already done the ALC check on the 7300. that radio is pretty forgiving once you get the USB audio set right. i'd say give it a few more sessions before writing it off, maybe try 20m in the afternoon if 40m is dead. and yeah PSK31 is basically a ghost town now which is a shame because i actually liked it for keyboard to keyboard stuff. RTTY still has some life in contest season at least.

so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and honestly i mostly just use my HT for the local repeaters but ive been listening to HF a lot lately and really want to get on 40m and maybe try some SSB stuff. my buddy keeps telling me to just go take the General exam already but im not sure how hard the jump is from Tech material. i remember the Tech exam being pretty rough in some spots, mostly the math questions on antennas and stuff. is the General similar difficulty or worse? im using the HamStudy app right now and some of the questions about things like operating procedures and propagation i kind of get but then there's the electrical stuff and i start zoning out. anyone gone through this recently and have tips? also does it matter which band i should focus on learning first once i pass or is that a separate thing to figure out later

just went through this same learning curve a couple months ago. one thing that helped me was using the Winlink map on their website to look at which gateways near me were actually active recently vs just listed, some of those entries are pretty stale. also if youre doing this for ARES you might want to look at whether your section has any dedicated gateways set up specifically for emcomm use, some do and theres usually a nets or a contact who can tell you which ones are being maintained. the SignaLink and 7300 combo works well once the levels are dialed in, i run almost the exact same setup on 40 meters and it pretty reliably connects first or second try now.

Field Day is absolutely worth it, honestly its probably the best thing a newer ham can do to get comfortable operating under a little pressure with experienced people around. most clubs are super welcoming and youll learn more in one Field Day weekend than months of just sitting on your home station. bring snacks, wear comfortable shoes, and dont be shy about asking to jump on one of the radios. for SOTA yeah you got the basic idea right — there's a specific database of summits at sotadata.org.uk and each one has a point value based on how difficult it is, and you have to activate from within a certain distance of the actual summit. not just any hill unfortunately, but there are probably more activatable summits near you than you'd think. the chasing side is fun too if you dont want to hike right away, you can just work activators from home and get points that way. for contests before year end — ARRL Sweepstakes CW is coming up, then the phone version a couple weeks later. Sweepstakes is US/Canada only so the exchange is simpler, good one to practice on. CQ WW CW will also be huge if you want to try the morse side of things.

so ive been trying to learn CW for about 3 months now and i finally broke down and bought a cheap iambic paddle off amazon (yeah i know, not the greatest choice but im on a budget). the problem im having is that my dits and dahs keep running into each other and everything sounds like mush when i listen back to it. im using the built in keyer on my ic-7300 and i've messed with the speed settings but i cant quite figure out if its a technique problem or a timing setting problem or both honestly. i practice on the air sometimes when the bands are slow and a few guys have been patient with me but i feel like im just not improving fast enough. also tried fldigi and some online practice tools but going from keyboard sending to actually using the paddle feels completely different. does anyone have tips for where to start — like should i slow way down and just try to get clean characters first? im currently trying to send around 12-13 wpm but maybe thats too fast for where im at

so we finally did a proper simulated emergency exercise with our county ARES group and i honestly had no idea how much stuff would fall apart when you actually try to run real traffic under pressure. like i thought i knew the procedures but when the EC was throwing scenarios at us and people were calling in on different nets simultaneously it got messy fast. the biggest thing i noticed was that people defaulted to just chatting on the repeater instead of actually passing formal NTS traffic. we had one guy who kept giving situation reports in plain english which honestly was fine for local stuff but we were supposed to be practicing the actual message format for when things get handed off up the chain. nobody wanted to slow down and do it right when things felt urgent even though it was just a drill. we also had a net control operator who was genuinely excellent at keeping the frequency organized but the moment we simulated the repeater going down and switched everyone to simplex it was like herding cats. half the group couldnt even hear each other because nobody had really mapped out their simplex coverage beforehand. thats a huge gap we didnt know we had. anyone else done exercises like this and found similar issues? what did your group do to actually fix the discipline around message handling because i feel like we keep drilling and the same bad habits come back every time

honestly the DX argument alone sold me when i upgraded. during a pileup on like 14.000 to 14.025 you will notice the difference pretty quick, especially when some rare entity only shows up once in a blue moon and every general and tech is stuck listening from the edge. that said yeah a lot of the theory is kind of memorize and move on, i wont lie. the stuff about Q factor and selectivity i kind of crammed and then mostly forgot until i actually started building some antennas and it started clicking on its own. the exam itself wasnt as bad as i expected. i used the HamStudy site and just did practice tests every day for maybe three weeks and passed first try. if you already have a general background the jump isnt as brutal as people make it sound. i think the bigger value is that going through the material even at a surface level gives you enough vocabulary to actually read the ARRL handbook without feeling completely lost

so ive been chasing this one for about three weeks now and im starting to lose my mind a little. the rig receives perfectly, SWR meter on my antenna analyzer looks fine on the dummy load, but when i key up there is literally zero power output. not low power, not reduced power, just nothing. the TX indicator lights up, the ALC is showing some movement, but the wattmeter doesnt even twitch. i already swapped the mic thinking it might be a silly thing like that. checked the PA fuse on the board, looks fine visually. im not great with RF troubleshooting at the PA stage but i do have a scope and a decent DMM. the bias on the finals is something i havent checked yet because honestly i wasnt sure where to start. anybody dealt with this specific symptom before on an 857 or similar yaesu rig? wondering if its the driver stage or if one of the finals just went quietly.