Karen Thompson

the TQSL certificate request thing tripped me up too when i first did it, just make sure the address you use matches your FCC license exactly or it can cause headaches. also clublog is another one worth knowing about, lot of DXpeditions use it and you can check if your callsign is in their log before anything even gets confirmed, saved me a lot of wondering more than once.

dayton is still worth it honestly. went last year with a buddy and yeah the outdoor flea market is hit or miss depending on weather but we found some really decent deals on coax and a few older HF rigs. the indoor stuff has gotten more commercialy but theres still a lot of cool vendor booths. only thing is parking is kind of a pain now compared to how i remember it being. if your driving 6 hours id say just do it, make a weekend of it

oh man i remember that feeling exactly, dont worry about it. the pause thing happens to new checkins pretty often, net controls are generally used to it. the format varies a little net to net but usually you just wait for them to ask for checkins, then unkey and give your callsign phonetically, your name, and your location. some nets also want to know if you have traffic or announcements. thats really it. after you check in just listen and wait for them to call you back.
the handheld is totally fine, plenty of people run into nets on HTs. if youre hitting the repeater you're good. the baofeng gets a bad rap in some circles but if it works it works. just make sure your audio isnt too hot or too quiet, that tends to be more of an issue with those than anything else. try again next week, it gets easier fast once you've done it a handful of times.

honest answer — it took me about 18 months from zero to solid 20wpm copying in real QSOs, but i wasnt super consistent about practice either. the thing that helped me most was switching from copying every letter to just writing down whole words when i caught them and letting the rest go. sounds wrong but it trains your brain to stop panicking about missed characters.
also the Farnsworth method if you havent tried it — basically the characters come at 20wpm speed but with longer gaps between them. so your brain learns the sound of each character at the target speed without you having to process them that fast in a row. G4FON does this. i ran characters at 20 and spacing at 10 for a long time and it really did help the transition feel less brutal. the plateau you're hitting around 8 is super common, a lot of people call it the 10wpm wall even though it hits different for everyone. just keep going honestly.

so this has been driving me nuts for about three weeks now. my 7300 will just cut out mid transmission, sometimes after 30 seconds sometimes after like 8 minutes, completely random. when it drops it doesnt shut off fully, the display stays on, audio comes back on receive, but TX power goes to zero and the ALC is doing weird stuff. key up again and sometimes its fine, sometimes it just does it again immediately.
before anyone asks — yes i checked the fan, its spinning fine. yes i checked the SWR on the antenna, running under 1.5:1 on 40m where this happens most. the PA finals arent getting crazy hot from what i can tell by feel on the case. i did a factory reset last week which changed nothing. power supply is an Astron RS-35M putting out a steady 13.8v under load, checked it with my meter while keyed up and it doesnt sag more than a couple tenths.
the part that has me confused is that it seems worse when the shack is warmer, like today it was maybe 75 in here and it dropped out four times in an hour. a few weeks ago when it was cooler outside it ran a whole contest session with no issues. thermal issue somewhere is my guess but i cant figure out where to start poking around. anybody dealt with something like this on a 7300 or similar SDR-type radio?

so i finally finished my first real homebrew superhet receiver, been working on it off and on for about 4 months now. its a pretty basic design, single conversion, IF at 455kHz, nothing fancy but i wound all the coils myself and etched the board by hand with the toner transfer method which was honestly more satisfying than i expected.
anyway its actually receiving stuff which is kind of amazing to me considering how many times i thought id killed it on the bench. 40m is coming in decent, 80m is a little deaf but i think thats an antenna situation not the radio. the problem im running into is this weird image rejection issue, im hearing stations at what i think are image frequencies and its getting confusing trying to figure out whats actually what. i know image rejection is a known thing with single conversion designs but i wasnt expecting it to be quite this bad. read that a proper preselector filter would help but i havent built one yet.
also the audio stage is a little buzzy, not terrible but noticeable on strong signals. using an LM386 for the audio amp which i know isnt everyones favorite but its what i had. is that just a noise floor thing with the 386 or is there something i can do without replacing the whole audio section?

so i finally finished my first real homebrew superhet receiver, been working on it off and on for about 4 months now. its a pretty basic design, single conversion, IF at 455kHz, nothing fancy but i wound all the coils myself and etched the board by hand with the toner transfer method which was honestly more satisfying than i expected.
anyway its actually receiving stuff which is kind of amazing to me considering how many times i thought id killed it on the bench. 40m is coming in decent, 80m is a little deaf but i think thats an antenna situation not the radio. the problem im running into is this weird image rejection issue, im hearing stations at what i think are image frequencies and its getting confusing trying to figure out whats actually what. i know image rejection is a known thing with single conversion designs but i wasnt expecting it to be quite this bad. read that a proper preselector filter would help but i havent built one yet.
also the audio stage is a little buzzy, not terrible but noticeable on strong signals. using an LM386 for the audio amp which i know isnt everyones favorite but its what i had. is that just a noise floor thing with the 386 or is there something i can do without replacing the whole audio section?

From a technical standpoint, band plans define specific frequencies to prevent interference, with the FCC dividing spectrum into bands for specific uses. The mode separations also help with receiver design - CW operators can use very narrow filters, while phone requires wider passbands. Always check current band plans before operating!

dont worry about it too much, honestly most nets are pretty forgiving especially for newer hams. the format really does vary a lot from net to net. some want callsign, name, and location, some just want your call, and a few of the more formal traffic nets have a whole thing where you state whether you have traffic or not. best thing you can do is listen to a couple rounds before you check in so you can kind of mirror what everyone else is doing.
as for the short suffix thing, yeah people do it on casual ragchew type stuff but for a net i'd stick to your full callsign at least until you're a familiar voice. net control needs to get it in the log and its just cleaner. you didnt do anything terrible, seriously, showing up and keying up is 90% of it for the first few times.