Ashley Wilson81

oh man congrats on the first contact. im also pretty new and have been eyeing QRP kits but wasnt sure if 5 watts would actually be enough to make contacts or if id just be frustrated spinning the dial. this is kind of encouraging honestly. what length did you cut your random wire to

yeah the 40m band can be a bit of a mess to wrap your head around at first. so the deal is the FCC gives you a frequency allocation which is basically the legal limit of where you can operate, but the band plan is more of a gentlemens agreement about where different modes tend to hang out. for generals on 40m your phone privelege starts at 7.175 and goes up to 7.300, the cw and data stuff goes from 7.025 to 7.125 for generals. below 7.025 is extra class only.
the band edge thing is real and worth paying attention to. your signal isnt just sitting on one exact frequency, it has width to it. ssb voice takes up maybe 2.5 to 3 khz, so if youre transmitting with your carrier at say 7.299 youre probably splattering audio outside the band which is a no-no. most people say stay at least 3 khz inside the edge to be safe, so 7.297 or lower for upper 40m. the reason you might hear ssb lower in the band is either dx stations operating under different ITU region rules or somebody who doesnt know better or doesnt care.

yeah what he said about the inverted V, that's basically what we do for every deployment. honestly for a 12 hour exercise the bigger headache in my experience isnt the antenna its keeping everyone's equipment from draining the battery bank faster than you planned. someone always shows up with a laptop that hasnt been charged and a phone they want to run off the system and suddenly your load calculations are out the window.
id put a clamp meter on the whole system early in the exercise just to see what your actual draw is vs what you estimated. also the eu2200i is fine but bring an extra 5 gallons of gas minimum, those things are efficient but 12 hours is 12 hours and youll probably run it more than you think.

I ran a trunk lip mount on my old Civic for probably three years and honestly it was fine. The ground plane thing is real but in practice for hitting repeaters youre not gonna notice much difference. The antenna isnt perfectly centered but you still have metal around it and it works. My signal reports were always decent.
The clamp itself, just make sure you get a decent quality one, the cheap no-name ones can crack or strip after a while especially in cold weather. I used a Comet one and it held up really well. One thing to watch is where you route the coax through the trunk seal, take your time with that part because if water gets in it can cause issues down the road. I used a bit of self amalgamating tape around the entry point and never had a problem.

yeah mixed is definitely the right call first, thats how pretty much everyone does it. get that first DXCC plaque and then the mode endorsements kind of fill in naturally over time as you keep operating. i chased phone and CW separately after getting mixed and it was a lot more fun having something to specifically hunt on each mode rather than just generically logging everything
the LoTW vs paper card thing never really goes away unfortunately. some of the rarer entities only have paper options and some DXpedition teams are better about uploading than others. i usually give it 6 months after a major DXpedition before i start worrying, and for regular stations in rare countries i just accept that the bureau is what it is. some guys pay for direct cards to speed it up which can be worth it for a hard to get one but i wouldnt bother for common entities
87 confirmed in 3 years is solid by the way especially if youre on a modest station. what are you running antennas wise

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now, mostly just poking around on airband and occasionally looking at ACARS and ADS-B and whatever else catches my eye. its been a great little dongle for the price but im starting to feel the limitations, mostly on the lower HF stuff where the direct sampling mod only gets you so far.
ive been going back and forth between picking up an SDRplay RSPdx or just jumping straight to a HackRF One. the price gap isnt huge if you consider what youre getting but theyre pretty different animals from what i can tell. the SDRplay seems more like a serious receiver and the HackRF is more of a do-everything swiss army knife thing but not quite as sensitive on receive. is that a fair read on it? im not planning to transmit anything with it, i just want better dynamic range and actual coverage down to like 1khz or whatever the RSPdx specs say.
also running SDR# right now on windows and wondering if ill have driver headaches switching to either of these. ive heard the SDRplay API is pretty solid but the HackRF on windows can be a bit of a pain depending on the software. anyone gone through this comparison recently?

the hollow sound on a direct conversion receiver is almost always one of two things in my experience — either your audio filtering is letting through a ton of RF that the LM386 is partially rectifying, or you have a ground loop somewhere in the enclosure. the LM386 is notorious for being sensitive to layout, pins 1 and 8 especially. did you put a cap between those for extra gain? if you did and your layout isnt tight it will oscillate or just sound terrible.
also check what value you have from the NE602 output to the LM386 input. a lot of people use too low a value coupling cap and it rolls off the low end making everything sound thin and hollow. try something like 1uF there and see if it helps. and make sure pin 7 on the LM386 has a bypass cap to ground, 10uF usually does it. the rumble you're hearing could be hum getting in through the supply if that isnt well bypassed

oh yeah been there, and honestly it's almost always technique before equipment at that stage. the paddle is probably fine. what happens when you speed up is your muscle memory hasn't caught up yet and you start squeezing too hard or anticipating the next element before you've finished the current one. iambic mode especially will bite you if your timing is slightly off because it'll insert elements you didn't mean to.
what really helped me was the K7QO code course — it builds speed gradually and forces you to hear the whole character before you move on. the other thing i'd say is don't chase speed for its own sake right now, focus on clean spacing. a 15 wpm signal with good spacing is way more readable than a sloppy 20. and yeah mess with the paddle tension a little, some people like it lighter than the factory setting, but go one thing at a time or you'll drive yourself crazy.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house. been putting it off for months because honestly i was nervous about the whole thing, setting up in public, people walking by asking what you're doing, all that. but man it was actually really fun.
i ran about 87 QSOs in just under 3 hours on 40m SSB with my KX2 and a random wire up in a tree. the pile wasn't crazy but there were definitely moments where people were calling over each other and i had to slow down and work them one at a time. first time i've ever had anyone actually want to talk to me on radio lol.
couple things i'm not sure about though. when i log, do i need to put the park reference in every single log entry or just somewhere in the header? i was using HAMRS on my phone and i think it does it automatically but i want to make sure the upload to the POTA website is right. also is there a standard way to announce your park reference on air? i was just saying the park number after my callsign each time but i heard another activator doing it differently.
also one random thing — a guy came up to me while i was operating and asked if i was a spy. so that was fun.

so i decided i finally want to get my technician license after years of just listening on a scanner and i picked up the ARRL technician manual at a hamfest last weekend but honestly its kind of overwhelming. like there's so much in there and i dont know if i should just memorize the question pool or actually try to understand all the theory stuff. i looked up ham study dot org and some people swear by it but other people say just read the book cover to cover first. im worried about the electricity and math parts mostly, i was never great at that in school. the exam is in about 6 weeks at a local club session and i really dont want to fail in front of people lol. anyone have a good approach that actually worked for them?

yeah i do this all the time honestly. ive got the radio on like background noise half the evenings. sometimes i'll hear something interesting and actually grab the mic but mostly just letting it run. 40m has been weird for me lately, lots of noise from somewhere, think its my neighbors new solar inverter setup but havent confirmed that yet. still enjoyable though.

Equipment failures may be a mere annoyance if you're only doing fun operating, but if it were a situation that really mattered, like in a disaster, a failure with no solution can have very serious consequences. I do monthly power-on tests and quarterly full deployments in the backyard.