Tom Anderson

okay so the Koch method is basically where you start with just two characters, learn those until you can copy them reliably at full speed (like 20wpm or whatever your target is), then add one more character at a time. the key thing people mess up is they learn at really slow speeds thinking itll be easier and then they have to relearn everything later because they memorized the timing wrong. you want to hear the letters as sounds not count the dits and dahs. honestly the best free resource i used was lcwo.net, its a little ugly looking but it does the Koch method properly and you can track your progress. just do lesson 1 until you hit something like 90% accuracy before moving on. 20-30 min a day is actually fine, more than that and your brain kind of stops absorbing it anyway. the frustrating part is the first couple weeks feel like nothing is happening and then suddenly it clicks, just gotta push through that part

so ive had my TS-590SG for going on 7 years now and honestly it still works great, no complaints really, but i keep reading about the IC-7300 and the IC-7610 and the new Icom stuff and wondering if im missing out. the SDR waterfall display stuff looks really useful for contesting and just general DX hunting. my shack is pretty basic — 590 into a LDG tuner, 100w into a fan dipole up about 35 feet, nothing fancy. i work mostly 40 and 20m, some 17m when the band cooperates. i do a handful of contests a year, nothing serious, and just ragchew otherwise. the question is whether the 7300 is actually a meaningful upgrade from the 590 or if im just falling for the shiny new thing. receiver wise is there actually a noticeable difference day to day or is this one of those things that only matters if youre in a competitive contest environment with big antennas. i keep going back and forth on this honestly

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly but the whole QSL confirmation thing has me completely turned around. like i understand the basic idea — you confirm the contact happened — but i dont understand why there are so many different ways to do it and which ones actually count for awards and stuff. i signed up for LoTW because i kept seeing people mention it but the whole certificate thing took me a while to figure out and honestly im still not 100% sure i set it up right. then someone at my club mentioned eQSL and said some people use that instead but some people look down on it? and then of course there are actual physical cards which i think look really cool but seem like a lot of work and postage. do i need all three or can i just pick one and stick with it. and if i want to go for DXCC someday does LoTW handle that or do i need paper cards too. sorry if this is a dumb question i just cant find a clear answer anywhere that doesnt sound like it was written for someone who already knows everything

so my 857d just stopped receiving on 20m yesterday, transmit seems fine though. other bands work ok. already checked the obvious stuff like attenuator settings and filters. antenna analyzer shows swr is good. anybody seen this before? im thinking maybe the front end but not sure where to start

You have two control points: the Windows sound level slider (set to 100%) and the WSJT-X Pwr slider for fine adjustment. FT8 can tolerate around -20 dB IMD in good conditions, but cleaner is always better.

congrats on the first one, that feeling of getting your 4 contacts and qualifying the summit never really gets old even after you've done a bunch of them. the reference format thing is almost certainly just a display quirk, the database accepts a few variations but they all resolve to the same summit internally -- as long as your region/association prefix and the summit number match you're fine. i wouldnt stress about it unless your points didnt show up correctly after a day or two. for spotting honestly a lot of activators just plan around the cell coverage issue. some people text a buddy who isnt on the summit to post the spot for them, thats probably the most reliable low-tech solution. APRS can work too if you've got that set up but it depends heavily on digipeater coverage in your area. i keep a backup plan of just calling CQ on a couple standard frequencies and hoping a regular chaser finds me, which works more often than youd think on 40m during a weekend.

so ive been licensed for a few months now and i keep hearing people on the local repeater just say their callsign normally like just the letters and numbers without doing the whole alpha bravo charlie thing and then other times people go full NATO phonetics every single time. i did my tech exam and learned the phonetic alphabet but honestly i wasnt sure if theres like a rule about when you have to use it vs when its optional. is it just a courtesy thing or is there actually a requirement somewhere in part 97 or whatever. i dont want to sound like an idiot either way

the backlight mod is kinda meh in my opinion, i did it on mine and yeah its brighter but it also draws more current and i do a lot of portable ops so i ended up reverting it. depends on your use case i guess. if youre mostly home station then sure why not.

so i finally passed my tech exam after studying for about 3 weeks and honestly i was way more nervous about keying up for the first time than i was about the actual test. i have a baofeng uv-5r that my cousin lent me and i found the local repeater frequency and just kind of sat there for like 20 minutes before i said anything finally just said my call sign and that i was a new ham looking for a contact and this older guy came back to me right away, walked me through everything super patiently. we talked for maybe 10 minutes about where i lived and how long i'd been studying. it was nothing fancy but i was shaking the whole time for some reason. anyway just wanted to introduce myself, im KD9 something something i always forget the last two letters lol

This scared me when I first got licensed too! The key is understanding your station setup. Local control means you're physically at the controls. Remote control means you're controlling indirectly but still responsible. Don't let unlicensed people operate without supervision!

so i finally got to participate in a proper ARES simulated emergency test last saturday and honestly it was kind of an eye opener. ive been licensed for about three years now and done some basic net check-ins but never anything like an actual SET before. our EC had us set up a kind of scenario where the county EOC had lost landlines and internet and we had to pass formal traffic between three different served agencies using only HF and VHF. the part that humbled me the most was ICS forms. i thought i knew what an ICS-213 was but actually filling one out under pressure while someone is reading you traffic on 40 meters and you're trying to log it and acknowledge and not step on anyone... that's a different thing entirely. i made a mess of the first two messages and had to ask for fills which felt embarrassing but honestly probably good practice. the other thing i didnt expect was how much the simplex fallback mattered. we lost the repeater early in the exercise on purpose and suddenly half the team couldnt hear each other and we had to scramble. my HT with rubber duck was basically useless at that point. note to self: bring the slim jim next time. anyway curious if others have done these exercises and what kind of things caught you off guard the first time around. also wondering if anyone has good resources for practicing message handling at home before the real thing.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and seeing what the bands doing but honestly after a while it feels like just watching a database fill up. you exchange grid squares and signal reports and thats... it. not really a QSO in any meaningful sense to me anyway. someone on a local net mentioned JS8Call and i downloaded it last week and have been poking around. the interface is a little rough and it took me a while to figure out the heartbeat messaging stuff but once i got it i kind of liked the idea of it. managed to have an actual back and forth with a guy in colorado about his antenna setup which was cool, felt more like a real contact. my question is basically does anyone run both regularly and how do you decide which to use. also is JS8Call activity concentrated on certain frequencies or does it vary a lot by band. ive only seen it really busy on 40m so far but maybe im just not looking at the right times. and does the relay/store-forward stuff actually work reliably or is it more of a proof of concept thing at this point

same thing happened to me when i started, drove me crazy. turned out my transmit audio was way too hot even though the ALC looked okay on the radio, the issue was the output level setting in WSJT-X itself was cranked up and it was causing IMD on my signal that you cant really see on the waterfall but other stations can hear it basically as a splattered mess. try turning the power slider in WSJT-X down to like 50% and see if your response rate improves. theres a thread on the WSJT-X reflector about this thats worth reading.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and finally got my HF rig sorted out (icom 7300, picked it up used) and now im staring at my backyard trying to figure out what to put up first. the lot is maybe 80x120 feet, got a few trees i could use for end supports. i keep going back and forth between just throwing up a simple dipole for 40m since thats where a lot of the activity seems to be, or going with a vertical since i keep reading that they have lower takeoff angles for dx. the thing is i also have pretty wet clay soil which i heard is actually good for a vertical ground plane? but running 16 or 32 radials sounds like a LOT of work. a dipole i could probably do in an afternoon. anyway im not trying to work serious dx right away, mostly just want to get on the air and make contacts. what would you guys do in my situation

the power thing is real and it trips up a lot of people starting on the linears. you want maybe 5 watts into a decent yagi as an absolute ceiling, honestly less if you can manage it. the transponder on AO-73 has an AGC that will compress everything if one station is hogging the passband, so if youre running 25w you're basically just making everyone else quieter including your own downlink. its a shared resource and the transponder doesnt care who you are. for the doppler on a split-frequency transponder it takes some practice but the trick i use is to find a beacon or another qso already in the passband and use that as your reference point to check how much youre off. SDR# or even just SDRConsole running alongside your logging software helps a ton if you have an SDR dongle lying around, you can watch the whole passband at once and find a clear spot before you even key up. gpredict will do the doppler correction automatically if you connect it to your rig via hamlib but that's a whole other rabbit hole.

so ive been using N1MM pretty much exclusively for like 3 years now and its great for contests, no complaints there, but outside of contest weekends its kind of overkill and the interface just feels clunky when im doing casual rag chews or keeping track of dx confirmations. a buddy suggested Log4OM and i messed around with the demo for a bit and it does seem a lot more polished for day to day stuff. the problem is i really dont want to maintain two separate logs. ive seen people mention exporting ADIF back and forth but that always makes me nervous about dupes or messed up timestamps, especially when WSJT-X is also throwing FT8 contacts into the mix. right now WSJT-X writes to its own log and i manually import that into N1MM every week or so which is already kind of annoying. does anyone have a workflow that actually works cleanly for all three of these? like N1MM for contests, Log4OM as the main shack log, and WSJT-X feeding into something sensibly? or am i just overthinking this and should pick one and stick with it

yeah the buzz is almost definitely common mode, the coax shield is carrying some of the return current and it ends up radiating back into the shack. a simple choke at the feedpoint will fix it, i usually just wind about 8-10 turns of the coax on a 4 inch diameter form, something like a PVC coupler or even a coffee can works. for 40m you dont need anything exotic. some guys swear by the ugly balun method, just coil the first few feet of coax right below the feedpoint into a bundle and zip tie it, works surprisingly well in practice even if its not as clean as a wound choke. the solder job on the SO-239 matters more than people think too — twisted wire under tape is gonna cause you grief eventually especially if theres any moisture. worth taking the connector apart and soldering it properly if you havent already. the sloper part is fine, actually slopers can have a little directivity which isnt a bad thing at all.

so ive had my 7300 for about two years now and finally got around to doing the mars/cap mod to open up the tx range a bit. pretty straightforward honestly, just the jumper on the board, took maybe 20 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself with the screwdriver. but while i had it open i also noticed a few other things people talk about doing and im kind of on the fence about some of them. the one im most curious about is the fan mod, swapping the stock fan for a quieter one or running it off a different voltage to slow it down. mine isnt obnoxiously loud but on long digital modes sessions it does spin up and its just kind of there in the background. has anyone actually done this and noticed a real difference or is it one of those things that sounds better on paper than it actually is in practice. also saw some stuff about the ref clock upgrade for better frequency stability, some tcxo replacement deal. i mostly do ft8 and some ssb ragchews, not sure if that level of precision even matters for what im doing but curious if anyone has done it and whether the rig felt any different afterwards. probably overthinking this stuff but i had it open anyway so now i keep looking at it like theres more to do lol

im kind of in the same boat as you so take this with a grain of salt but one thing that helped me a little was doing the G4FON trainer and just running it every morning for like 15 minutes instead of these long marathon sessions. i read somewhere that shorter more frequent practice beats long occasional sessions for this kind of memory stuff. no idea if thats scientifically true but it seemed to help me anyway. still not at 20 myself so maybe dont listen to me lol

Don't give up - that plateau is normal! I practiced 15 minutes daily with W1AW code practice sessions. The QST text really helped because it flows naturally. Soon you forget the sounds of the letters and hear whole words instead. With more and more practice your brain doesn't even think, you are writing down or typing the text without concentrating. Took about 6 weeks to break through to 15 WPM consistently.

congrats on the activation, 48 QSOs for a first time out is solid especially on a nature reserve that probably isnt super well known yet. sounds like you did everything right operationally for the log upload — if you're in the US you'd typically go through wwff.us for the domestic side of things but the contacts still end up in the global wwff.world database either way so hunters worldwide can get credit. the ADIF needs to have the reference number in there, i usually put it in the MY_SIG_INFO field and set MY_SIG to WWFF, that's what the database expects. some logging software like Log4OM or HAMRS can handle this automatically if you set up an activity before you start logging in the field which saves a headache later if you activated a reference that needed the minimum 44 QSOs to count as a valid activation you should be good. just double check the specific reference requirements on the wwff.world site cause some national programs have slightly different rules but 44 is the standard for most

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now and i cant really make up my mind. currently running an RTL-SDR v3 with SDR# and its fine for most stuff but i keep hitting the noise floor on HF and the 8-bit dynamic range is just killing me when theres a strong broadcast station nearby wiping out everything else the HackRF is tempting because of the TX capability even though i know its only half duplex and the noise figure is pretty rough, something like 25dB i think without an LNA in front of it. but the frequency coverage is insane, like 1MHz all the way up to 6GHz which would be great for the satellite stuff i want to play with the RSP1B from SDRplay on the other hand has much better dynamic range, 14-bit ADC i believe, and the noise floor is way lower but its RX only obviously. i mostly want to do NOAA/Meteor-M passes, some aircraft monitoring, and maybe poke around at some of the amateur satellites. do i actually need TX for any of that? probably not right now but i feel like ill want it eventually anyone run both and can actually compare them from real use rather than just spec sheets

yeah CTCSS is basically a sub-audible tone your radio transmits along with your voice — the repeater won't open up unless it hears the right tone, it's how they filter out interference and random noise. most repeaters list their tone on the repeater directory, like repeaterbook.com is usually pretty accurate. once you find the tone for your local machine just program it into the T-CTCS setting on the baofeng, there's a bunch of youtube videos that walk through programming those radios step by step because yeah the manual really isn't great. as for etiquette — kerchunking means just keying up to test if you hit the repeater without identifying yourself, which is technically illegal and also just annoying to people already on frequency. if you want to test if you're getting in, just say your callsign and something like "testing" and you'll usually get a response from someone. to join a conversation in progress, wait for a pause between exchanges and just say your callsign, people will usually acknowledge you and bring you in. most repeater users are pretty welcoming to new folks so don't stress too much about it.

yeah single yagi EME on 2m is absolutely real, people do it regularly. the weak signal digital modes basically changed everything for small stations. Q65 has kind of taken over from JT65 for EME at this point so make sure you're current on that, the WSJT-X software handles it and it gives you a bit more margin than JT65 which matters when you're running minimal antenna. the IC-9700 is a solid starting point, its receive performance is decent but you really do want a good LNA right at the feedpoint, like 0.3-0.5dB NF territory, because your system noise figure is basically the whole game. something like a SSB Electronic or a DG0VE style unit, plenty of options. and yes keep your coax run short or go with heliax if you can because every tenth of a dB actually shows up in whether marginal stations decode or not. for tracking honestly yes you want an az-el setup for serious work, trying to hand-crank it or guess at moon position is frustrating fast. a yaesu G-5500 is the classic combo, used ones come up on qrz classifieds pretty often. pair it with some free tracking software like MacDoppler or PstRotator and youre set. its not cheap to do right but its not a giant dish either. done properly a 9 or 11el yagi station can work hundreds of stations over time, you just accept that youre the small gun and some days the big stations dont hear you

I went through the exact same thing a couple years ago. ended up with a Kenwood TH-D74A which was probably way overkill for a new tech but I have zero regrets, it does D-STAR and APRS and the audio is really clean. way more than you need starting out obviously but just throwing it out there incase you want something you wont outgrow the 8 mile simplex thing depends a lot on terrain btw, not just the radio. I have a friend who can barely hit a mile in his valley with a good radio and I can do 12 miles line of sight with a baofeng and a rubber duck. antenna and location matter more than most people expect.