Maria Rodriguez

You're in good shape with that setup! For 2m EME, the standard is Q65-60C mode (60-second sequences, submode C). Many ops work EME successfully with 50W and a single Yagi, especially when the moon is low on the horizon. Your dual array gives you at least 3dB more gain than a single Yagi, so 100W should definitely work.

so i've been working on this DC receiver for 40m for the past couple months, been using the NE602 as the mixer and a standard LM386 for audio amp, pretty standard stuff you see all over the place. got it mostly working but the audio is really muddy and i'm getting a ton of hum even when i touch the volume pot. i've gone over my grounding like three times and i think the layout is okay but something is clearly off. the RF side seems fine honestly, i can tune across the band and hear stations so the oscillator is working, the BFO is stable, whatever. it's just this audio stage that's killing me. i read somewhere that the LM386 is kinda sensitive to layout and you really need that bypass cap between pins 1 and 8 if you want any decent gain without oscillating but i added that and it didnt really help. also tried a 100uf on pin 7 to ground and still getting this low frequency hum. my power supply is a wall wart so thats probably part of it but ive built stuff with wall warts before and it wasnt this bad. anyone dealt with this or have thoughts on what to look at next

oh man i just did my second activation like two weeks ago and had the exact same confusion about the logging. took me forever to figure out the wwff portal honestly. one thing that tripped me up was making sure the date format in my ADIF was right, it rejected my first upload and i couldnt figure out why for like an hour. turned out to be a timezone thing in my logging software. just something to watch out for.

75-80 is honestly probably fine, the question pool is the question pool so if youre hitting that consistently you should pass. the actual exam isnt harder or easier than the practice tests because its literally drawn from the same pool, thats how it works. i was getting like 72% before i sat for mine and still passed with room to spare. for the reactance stuff — the way i always thought about it is that inductors resist change in current and capacitors resist change in voltage, and from there you can kind of reason through which one has higher reactance at high vs low frequencies. inductive reactance goes up with frequency, capacitive goes down. theres no real shortcut, i just drew it out on paper like 20 times until it stuck. the good news is on the exam youre only going to see a handful of those questions and if you get the rest right it doesnt really matter. the propagation stuff will make way more sense once you actually start using HF, which youre about to do so dont stress it too much. just memorize the general rules for the exam and the actual feel for the bands will come after.

im literally in the same boat right now, just finished a pixie last month and been trying to get my first contact. havent had luck yet but reading this is making me want to go back out and try again. what time of day were you operating? i keep trying in the afternoon and maybe thats my problem

Dynamic microphones often perform well in ham shacks because they reject background noise and handle high sound pressure levels without distortion. The PR-781 is specifically designed for amateur radio with excellent rejection of room noise. Perfect for most shack environments.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i mostly do HF on 40m and sometimes 20m when the bands cooperate. one thing that still trips me up is knowing when i should be using NATO phonetics versus just saying the letter. like if someone asks me to confirm a callsign do i always go full alpha bravo charlie or is that overkill sometimes i notice some guys on the air just say letters normally especially when the signal is strong and its totally clear, but then other times people will spell out every single letter phonetically even when theres barely any QRM. is there like an unwritten rule about this or does it just depend on conditions and personal preference. also someone told me once that using non-standard phonetics like using your own words instead of the NATO ones is frowned upon but i hear operators do it all the time so im confused about what the actual expectation is

honest answer? for most people who arent gunning for a plaque, the ROI on SO2R is pretty low. the setup cost and the mental overhead of managing two radios during a contest is significant and if your antennas are close together you're going to spend half the contest dealing with RFI on the second receiver anyway. the bandpass filters help a lot but they dont solve everything especially if youre on 15 and 40 simultaneously with antennas that are 30 feet apart. what actually moved the needle for me before i went SO2R was just getting really disciplined about rate on a single radio. like learning to tail-end properly, knowing when to switch from S&P to running and back based on band conditions, and honestly just logging faster so the pileups dont get away from you. N1MM has that rate meter and if you watch it obsessively for a few contests you start to internalize what good rate actually feels like vs when youre just spinning the dial and fooling yourself. i picked up probably 20-25% more contacts over a full weekend just from operating discipline before i ever touched a second radio.

yeah that's pretty much how it goes most of the time honestly. the activations where you're slammed with traffic are rarer than people think, and when they do happen you're real glad the boring ones trained you to stay focused. i've been doing ARES stuff for about twelve years now and the worst activations in terms of workload were flood events, those kept us genuinely busy. but a lot of the severe weather stuff is exactly what you described — long stretches of waiting punctuated by a handful of messages. the shelter coordinator thing is super common too. a lot of the agency folks have turned over since the last time ARES was called in so you get people who have no idea there's even a memorandum of understanding in place. our EC has been pushing hard to do annual face-to-face meetings with the served agencies just so everyone knows who we are before we show up at 2am in a vest with a radio.

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals. so the short version is the FCC part 97 allocations are the actual law — those are the hard limits you absolutely cannot cross. the ARRL band plan is basically a gentlemens agreement, nobody is going to fine you for being on a frequency the band plan says is for something else, but you might get an earful from other operators. for 40m as a general you can do phone from 7.175 up to 7.300, below that is CW and digital only for you until you get your extra. the band plan stuff like keeping certain frequencies open for certain nets or modes, thats just courtesy really. the band edge thing is worth paying attention to though even with a stable radio — the issue isnt just your drift, its that if youre on say 7.300 and your signal has any sidebands or your dial isnt perfectly calibrated you could be putting energy outside the allocation. most people just stay a few khz inside the edge to be safe, like dont hang out on 7.299 calling CQ all day

so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and people throw around QSL, QRM, QSY and a bunch of others constantly and i kind of know what they mean from context but not really. like i know QSL is confirm or something and QSY is change frequency but what about all the others. is there a standard list somewhere or do people just kind of use whatever. also are there some that are more common than others because i feel like i hear QRN a lot but never looked it up. just trying not to sound like a complete idiot when i finally get on the air

yeah 40m JS8 on a saturday afternoon is probably the worst time to check, most people are out doing stuff. try like 8 or 9pm local and you'll probably see more traffic. also make sure you're on the right offset, i think the standard calling freq on 40 is 7.078 but double check that because i might be slightly off on the number. i'll be honest i mostly stick to FT8 because my operating time is limited and i want to actually make contacts when i sit down, but i get the complaint about it being hollow. RTTY contests are kinda fun if you want something in between — you can actually type stuff and its still pretty capable in marginal conditions. not weak signal magic like FT8 but respectable. give the RTTY roundup a shot sometime if you havent

so i've been wanting to do satellite stuff for a while and last week i actually sat down and did it. got gpredict running, had my ft-817 out, printed the frequencies for AO-73 beforehand. the pass was like 8 minutes, max elevation something like 34 degrees which seemed decent. here's the thing though -- i knew doppler correction was a thing but i didn't really appreciate how fast you have to be tuning. like i was hunting around the linear transponder passband trying to find my own signal coming back down and by the time i thought i heard something close to it the frequency had already shifted enough that i lost it again. i never actually confirmed a qso, heard a few other guys working each other fine which was frustrating. im using a pair of arrow antennas actually just the one dual band arrow, pointing manually. so my question is basically -- do people just get good at the doppler tuning through practice or is there a smarter way to do this without going full computer controlled radio. i dont really want to rig up CAT control just for occasional satellite work but maybe thats the only real answer

i was in the exact same spot like 8 months ago and ended up with the Radioddity GD-77 which is kind of a middle ground — does DMR digital too which turned out to be actually pretty cool once i figured it out. not sure if thats in your budget range though. anyway whatever you get just make sure it covers the 2 meter and 70cm bands and youll be fine for most repeaters around you. the fancy stuff can wait

im kind of in the same boat as you, just got my general last spring and trying to figure all this out. i went to a ARES meeting a few months ago and one of the elmers there said the antenna thing is basically the eternal debate lol. he uses a buddistick for portable HF and swears by it but another guy said they're fiddly to tune and he'd rather just throw wire in a tree. honestly the thing that stuck with me was he said whatever antenna you pick, practice deploying it at home first. like actually time yourself. because if you cant do it in the dark in your backyard you definitely cant do it under pressure at some EOC parking lot you've never been to before. that made a lot of sense to me even if i havent fully taken my own advice yet

Been using an RTL-SDR dongle with SDR# to monitor my signal during contests. Many stations have very clean signals from properly tuned transceivers and power supplies. The difference between clean and splattered signals is immediately obvious on the waterfall display.

this will actually be my first hamfest if I end up going, been licensed about 8 months now and keep hearing people talk about how great Dayton is. little intimidating honestly, dont even know what im looking for yet. maybe just antennas and cables or something for the shack

The next Ham Radio will be held again in Friedrichshafen, Germany, from Friday, June 27, to Sunday, June 29, 2025. I'm seriously considering making the trip this year - heard it's an incredible experience with hams from all over the world. The flea market alone looks amazing from the photos I've seen online. Anyone here been before or planning to attend? What should I definitely not miss? Thinking about camping in the RV area but not sure what to expect.

Great question! I learned this the hard way when I was new - got a friendly reminder from another op that my SSB signal was drifting into the CW portion of 40m during a long ragchew. Now I always give myself that safety margin and focus on enjoying contacts without worrying about accidentally straying out of bounds.

nice work getting out there. i only did my second activation like two months ago so still pretty new to this myself but the spotting yourself thing is huge, i didnt do it my first time and just sat there calling CQ for like 40 minutes with nothing. lesson learned pretty quick lol. which band were you running mostly? i've been sticking to 40m because it seems like the chasers are always there but curious what worked for you on that summit.

honest answer? a bit of both. i studied the actual concepts when i went for extra a few years back and yeah some of it stuck and actually made me better at understanding why certain things work the way they do, like finally getting why your feedline length can matter in certain situations or why a particular filter topology gets used in a receiver design. but i wont lie, there were definitely some questions i just memorized because the underlying math was gonna take more time than i had. the privileges are real though. those extra segments on 75 and 40 meters especially, thats where a lot of the dx action is, and being able to operate there without stepping around generals is genuinely useful. if you're into CW on 80m the extra portion is noticeably less crowded. worth doing imo, dont let the theory scare you off too much, you dont have to understand every single derivation to pass

ran a GP-9 for about 4 years on a similar exposed hilltop site, roughly 1100ft, and it held up fine through two winters that knocked other stuff around. the wind loading specs on the comet documentation are actually fairly conservative in my experience, the antenna itself isnt the problem usually its whatever youre mounting it to. your 2 inch pipe setup should be solid as long as the base mount is done right and you dont have a lot of slop in the mast clamps. as far as the actual RF performance difference between those two antennas in your use case — honestly for repeater access and local simplex you probably wont notice a meaningful difference. the extra dB on paper from the GP-9 on 70cm is real but its fractional and your location advantage is going to do way more work for you than a half dB of antenna gain. if price is a factor just get whichever one is cheaper at the time, both are solid antennas.

so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been doing local stuff on 2m and some APRS. but honestly i keep hearing people talk about HF and making contacts way out of state or even internationally and it sounds really cool. i started looking at the General exam pool and honestly some of it looks intimidating, especially all the stuff about propagation and the electrical theory questions. the Tech exam wasnt too bad but this feels like a big jump. my question is basically how much time did you guys spend studying before you felt ready and is there a good way to focus on just the stuff thats actually gonna be on the test vs like, trying to learn everything from scratch. i dont have an HF rig yet so i cant really practice any of it hands on. also is the band plan stuff something you just have to memorize or does it kind of make sense once you understand propagation better

have you tried listening to see if you can hear the tone the repeater is putting out? some radios can detect ctcss on receive. also double check that youre actually transmitting the tone - on some radios theres separate settings for transmit tone and receive tone squelch. 103.5 is pretty standard around here though so that should be right. might be worth driving closer to the repeater site if you can, sometimes fringe coverage means the repeater can hear you fine but your signal isnt strong enough to open it up properly

had something similar on an older 7200 years back and it turned out to be a dried out thermal pad on the PA transistors — the pad had basically crumbled and wasnt making good contact with the heatsink anymore so the junction temp was spiking even though the heatsink itself felt fine externally. the protection circuit was doing exactly what it should, just wasnt obvious from the outside. on the 7300 i'd check the thermal interface between the finals and the chassis heatsink before you go too deep. icom's assembly on that generation could be a bit hit or miss with thermal compound application from what ive read. not a hard fix if thats it, just a bit fiddly to get to. also worth checking if the APC circuit is doing anything weird — some guys have had the APC pot go flaky and cause similar symptoms but usually that shows up more erratically than what you're describing.