Jessica Williams

so ive had this 857 for about 4 years now, picked it up used and it's been solid until maybe a month ago. noticed my signal reports on 40m were garbage compared to what i usually get and finally got around to putting a wattmeter on it. im seeing like 8-12 watts on 40m no matter where i set power, but 20m, 15m, 10m all look fine, hitting full 100w or close to it. 2m and 70cm also fine. it's not the antenna situation, i swapped to a dummy load to confirm. the rig itself doesnt throw any error codes, SWR protection isnt kicking in, it just... quietly puts out almost nothing on that band. driver stage issue maybe? i've seen some stuff about the low band driver transistors on these going soft but im not sure how to actually verify that without just throwing parts at it. anyone actually dug into one of these for a band-specific power issue? i'm decent with a soldering iron and have a scope but not super experienced with RF troubleshooting specifically. not sure if i should just send it to a tech or try to work through it myself.

tape measure yagi is what i bring almost every time. weighs basically nothing and you can fold it up in the bag. yeah you gotta point it but thats half the fun honestly, you can really feel when youre on a good path. collinears are convenient but i feel like people overestimate how much gain they actually get in practice, a lot of those ratings are optimistic especially if youre not mounting them perfectly vertical.

So ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah it works great for racking up contacts and the DX is incredible but honestly after a while it just feels like watching a slot machine. You click, something happens, a grid square gets logged. Fine. Anyway someone at the club mentioned JS8Call and I set it up last weekend and its... different. I get that its based on FT8 underpinnings but you can actually type things to people? Had a 20 minute back and forth with a guy in Finland on 40m with signals that woulda been completely unreadable on voice. That part was genuinely cool. But heres the thing — the activity level seems really thin compared to FT8. Like I'll watch the waterfall on JS8Call for 20 minutes and see maybe 3 or 4 signals whereas FT8 on 20m is a zoo. Is this just a time of day thing or is JS8Call kind of a niche within a niche at this point. Also running it at the Normal speed setting, should I be on something different for HF. Not trying to start a modes war just genuinely trying to figure out if this is worth investing more time in or if its always gonna be a ghost town compared to FT8.

the hum that gets worse with engine rpm is almost certainly alternator whine, classic symptom. few things to check before you tear anything apart though. first, how long is your ground lead? if its more than like 12-18 inches you might want to run a dedicated ground all the way back to the battery negative instead of chassis grounding it. sounds counterintuitive but chassis grounds can be really inconsistent depending on the vehicle, especially newer ones with all the electronics in them also check where your coax runs relative to the power leads. if they're bundled together for any length of run that can cause all kinds of noise to get into the audio chain. try separating them and see if the hum changes at all, its a quick test that doesnt require pulling anything apart for the muffled audio, first thing id do is just check the mic gain setting in the menu, a lot of people dont realize the ftm-400 ships with it set pretty conservatively. also make sure the mic isnt partially blocked by the mounting position, ive seen people mount the head unit where the mic ends up pointing into the dash and it just sounds terrible

so ive been planning a 2m yagi install on the roof for a while now and the run from the shack to where i want to mount it is going to be around 60 feet, maybe a bit more depending on how i route it through the attic. i was going to use LMR-400 because thats what i have a spool of sitting around but someone at the club meeting last week said i should just go ahead and use hardline for anything over 50 feet and honestly i dont know if thats overkill or not. the antenna is a 7 element yagi im building from a design i found, should be around 10-11 dBd gain when its done. mostly using it for local weak signal work and maybe some tropo if conditions cooperate. not doing EME or anything serious like that. just wondering if the LMR-400 loss at 144 is going to be noticeable enough to actually matter or if the guy at the club was just being that guy, you know the type

hamstudy.org is honestly all you need for the technician. i spent maybe two weeks doing practice questions on there every evening, like 20-30 minutes, and passed with a pretty comfortable margin. the question pool is finite and the actual exam questions come directly from it so theres no surprises. that said the ARRL book isnt bad if you actually want to understand why things work the way they do, which i think pays off later when youre messing with antennas and wondering why your SWR is weird or whatever. but strictly for passing the test, just drill the questions. find a local club too if you can, they usually hold exam sessions pretty regularly and some of them do free study nights which helped me a lot just to have someone to ask dumb questions to without feeling judged

yeah I went down almost exactly this same path about two years ago, except I tried to do everything on the Pi and regretted it pretty quickly. the real time stuff just doesnt play nice on a linux system without a lot of pain, latency was all over the place and the motor would overshoot constantly. splitting it up like you did with the Arduino handling the low level control is definitely the right call. one thing I added that helped a lot was a second pot geared down further for coarse position and using the original for fine — kind of like a vernier deal. overkill probably but it got my pointing accuracy down to about 2 degrees which is good enough for my 2m yagi. also if you havent looked at it already there's a guy on github who did a pretty clean rotctld daemon implementation that talks to Arduino directly over serial, saved me writing a bunch of glue code.

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals, the confusion is real. so the short version is the FCC part 97 is what actually matters legally, and for general class on 40m you get phone privileges from 7.175 to 7.300 MHz. the ARRL band plan is just a gentlemens agreement, nobody is going to fine you for being at 7.201 instead of 7.200 but people generally follow it out of courtesy. the band edge thing your elmer mentioned is important though. if youre running SSB your signal has sidebands, so if youre on lower sideband and you set your dial to 7.175 your actual transmitted signal is going down below that. most rigs display the suppressed carrier frequency not the actual edge of your signal. so operating right on the lower edge of your allocation means part of your signal might be outside where you're allowed. general rule of thumb most guys use is stay at least 3 kHz inside the edge to be safe, some say more if your audio is wide. its not a hard rule written anywhere its just practical.

peaking IF transformers for noise is actually a pretty standard old-school method when you dont have a sig gen, so you probably did that right. what you do is connect the antenna, put your ear to it metaphorically, and slowly rock those slugs until the background hiss peaks up. means the passband is aligned at least roughly. its not perfect alignment but it works well enough to get you on the air and you can always tweak later once youre actually hearing signals. for the BFO, honestly the easiest way ive found without a generator is to tune in WWV on 10 MHz if your set reaches there, or find a strong AM broadcast and use it as a carrier reference. tune until the carrier gives you a nice low audio tone, maybe 500-800 Hz or whatever pitch sounds natural for SSB, and thats close enough. if youre getting a high-pitched squeal instead of a clean zero-beat you're probably on the wrong sideband, just flip the BFO trimmer past zero beat to the other side. takes some fiddling but honestly your ears are decent test equipment for this. good luck, these scratch builds are worth it when they finally sing.

i had something similar on mine but it turned out to be that little relay on the VHF TX path, not the module itself. can't remember the part number off the top of my head but if you pull up the schematic it's pretty obvious. mine was switching but not making solid contact — looked fine on a DMM but under RF load it was basically open. swapped it and VHF came right back. probably unrelated to your finals work but worth ruling out before you go pulling the whole module.

so ive been slowly building a direct conversion receiver for 40m over the past few months, nothing fancy, just a NE602 front end and a simple audio stage, mostly following a circuit ive seen in a few places with some mods i added myself. works okay for SSB but the selectivity is pretty terrible and every loud station on the band just bleeds into whatever im trying to listen to. someone in my club mentioned i should build a crystal ladder filter and put it before the product detector, which makes sense in theory, but ive never done one and from what i can tell you really need matched crystals for it to work right. i have a bunch of 7.2 MHz surplus crystals from an old box i bought years ago but no idea if theyre even close enough in frequency to be useful. i have a frequency counter but not a proper crystal measuring jig. is it worth building a jig just to measure and sort these, or should i just order a set of matched crystals from one of the usual places and be done with it. part of me wants to do it the hard way because thats kinda the point of building your own stuff but i also dont want to spend three weekends on something that might not even work that well

so ive been a member of my local ARES group for about 8 months now, went through all the ICS training, got my FEMA certs done (100, 200, 700, 800 the whole deal), been showing up to the monthly nets pretty regularly. they just told me last week there's a county-wide emergency exercise coming up next month and i'm on the volunteer list for it. honestly a little nervous, not gonna lie. its a simulated shelter activation, so we'll be providing comms between the EOC and a couple of the red cross shelter sites. i know the basics of message handling and i've done some traffic on the weekly net but this is different. anyone been through one of these drills and have advice on what to actually bring, what to expect in terms of how organized or disorganized it usually is, stuff like that. my EC said to just bring my go-kit but i feel like i should know more before showing up

passed my general like two months ago after being a tech for almost two years, same situation as you basically. the exam itself wasnt too bad but the electrical theory questions are where people usually get caught out, theres more math than on the tech exam. nothing crazy but like ohms law applied in different ways, some impedance stuff. if math isnt your thing just make sure you know the formulas and practice plugging numbers in the HF privileges open up a lot, honestly the first time i made a contact on 20m SSB from my living room to someone in Spain i was pretty floored. its a totally different world from 2m repeaters

i just use N1MM for everything including FT8 contests like FT8RN and stuff, it handles WSJT-X integration fine once you get the network message setup right. never really got into Log4OM tbh, tried it once and felt like it was doing too much if that makes sense. for regular dx logging outside of contests i just use the N1MM log and call it a day, less moving parts.

yeah what he said. also just download the arrl band plan pdf and tape it to your wall or whatever, thats what i did when i was starting out. took me a while to really internalize it but eventually you just kinda know where to go without thinking about it. one thing that always confused me early on was that the band plan and the part 97 rules are two completely different things and people mix them up constantly even guys who've been licensed forever. the rules are what you legally have to follow, the band plan is more like etiquette. both matter but for different reasons

so i finally have a free saturday and the tri-county fest is like 20 minutes from me, havent been to one in probably two years. wondering if its worth dragging myself out of bed at 6am for. last time i went the flea market tables were kind of picked over by the time i got there around 8 but the inside vendors were decent. anybody been to this one before or planning on showing up?

okay so ive been licensed for about three months now and i finally got my baofeng set up to hit the local 2m repeater, at least i think i do. sometimes i can hear other people talking on it just fine but when i key up nobody responds and i dont hear the courtesy tone or anything. someone at my club mentioned i might have the CTCSS tone wrong but i thought i set it to 100hz like the repeater directory said. what i dont get is why i can HEAR the repeater but not get into it. like if im on the right frequency shouldnt it just work? do i need to program the tone on both transmit and receive or just transmit? ive been reading about DCS codes too and now im even more confused. any help would be great, trying not to bother people on the repeater itself with dumb questions haha

yeah the 7300 mods scene is pretty active. one thing i havent seen you mention is the rf connector mod, some guys replace the stock SO-239 with a higher quality N connector or at least a better grade UHF connector. marginal difference at HF frequencies honestly but if youre doing any 6m or upper HF it does matter more. mostly its just a peace of mind thing for me. also if you havent looked into the TCXO upgrade thats worth considering depending on what youre doing. the stock oscillator drift isnt terrible but for FT8 or any narrow digital work the improved frequency stability is nice. i think Icom actually sells an official TCXO option for some of their radios but im not 100% sure on the 7300 specifically, might need to check the service manual.

the cable labeling thing is so real, i went through the exact same frustration. what i ended up doing was using those little brady label maker labels on both ends of every cable so you always know what connects to what without tracing the whole thing. color coded velcro straps too, red for power cables, black for coax, just something visual you can grab fast when youre stressed. one thing i'd add to your kit if you dont already have it is a laminated quick-start card. like literally just a single page you made yourself that says step 1, step 2, in the order you actually set it up. sounds dumb but when you're at a real deployment at 2am or in the middle of something stressful your brain doesn't always work the same as when you're relaxed on the bench. i've watched very experienced ops fumble around because they just forgot their own setup order under pressure. your kit sounds solid honestly. the linked dipole is a good call, way more flexible than a lot of people give it credit for. only thing i might suggest is thinking about a small headlamp in there and maybe a short extension cord or power strip, you'd be surprised how often there's one outlet in a weird spot at an EOC.

yeah dont bother memorizing the dots and dashes visually, thats gonna slow you down bad later on. what you want is to hear each character as a sound, like the letter K should just sound like K to your brain without you counting anything. thats the whole idea behind Koch -- you start with just two characters at a relatively high speed, like 20wpm, and you dont move on until you can copy those two at 90% accuracy or whatever. then you add one more character. it sounds slow but it builds the right habits from the start. for resources, lcwo.net is free and its basically the go-to for Koch method online. also look up the Just Learn Morse Code software if youre on windows, thats what i used. and honestly just listen to actual CW on the bands even before you can copy it, tune around 7.025 or so in the evening and just let it wash over you. your brain starts picking things up even passively. took me maybe 4 or 5 months of pretty consistent daily practice before i felt okay enough to actually call CQ on CW, but im glad i did it the way i did

yeah the HackRF thing is a common misconception — its a great device but the ADC resolution is only 8 bit and the noise figure is pretty mediocre so for pure receive the SDRplay blows it out of the water. HackRF makes sense if you actually want to transmit or do RF testing stuff, not really if HF listening is your main goal. the RSPdx specifically has that notch filter for MW and the broadcast FM band which makes a huge difference on HF if you're anywhere near a strong station. i went from an rtl-sdr with an upconverter to the RSPdx about two years ago and honestly yeah the jump was noticeable, better sensitivity and the software (SDRuno) has come a long way although i know some people still prefer SDR# with the SDRplay plugin. antenna matters too obviously but at a certain point the dongle really is the limiting factor on HF

im in basically the same boat as you except i havent pulled the trigger yet either lol. did you ever look at the actual question pool numbers, like the pass rate for extra vs general is not that different apparently. a guy in my local group said he passed it mostly through hamstudy practice without fully understanding all of it and then went back and learned the why later. not saying thats the right approach but it worked for him

i did something similar a while back, not exactly the same but close enough. one thing that bit me was ground loops between the coupler circuit and the arduino — had a separate supply for the RF detector side and forgot to tie the grounds together properly and the readings were all over the place. probably not your issue but worth checking. the Pi Zero idea isnt bad but honestly for a control loop that needs to be fairly snappy the latency from linux scheduling can get annoying. had a Pi 3 running a rotor controller once and it would just hiccup randomly. arduino is dumb and simple and thats kind of the point for this stuff

RTTY is still my go-to for contesting honestly, CQWW RTTY fills up the bands every year and the rates you can get are surprisingly good even compared to FT8 in a contest context. but for weak signal ragchewing JS8Call is pretty underrated. the -24dB floor isnt quite as low as FT8 but its close enough and at least you can tell someone your antenna situation without having to encode it in a macro one thing that helped me find activity was just leaving JS8Call running overnight on 40m with the beacon on. by morning i usually had a few messages sitting there from guys on the other side of the country or occasionally europe. its more of an async thing than real time i think, kind of like a very slow text message system which is either cool or annoying depending on your mood

S2S contacts are honestly one of the best parts of SOTA once you get into it, there's something really satisfying about two people both hauling gear up different mountains and managing to work each other. I've done maybe 30 activations at this point and S2S is always the highlight of a log when it happens. one thing i'd add, if you weren't already using 14.285 or 7.033 or the usual SOTA watering holes, try to stick around those general areas when you self spot because that's where chasers will go looking even before they see your exact frequency. sometimes the spot takes a minute to propagate and people are already scanning before they see it.