James Rodriguez

the tone thing can be confusing at first, dont sweat it. basically what you want is just the TRANSMIT tone set to 100.0 Hz, you usually dont need to set a receive tone (sometimes called DCS or CTCSS squelch) unless the repeater specifically requires it, which most dont. if your radio is opening its own squelch based on a tone coming back from the repeater thats probably causing the weirdness you're hearing. just leave the receive side on carrier squelch or whatever your radio calls it and only encode on transmit. as for etiquette, yeah just key up, say your callsign and something like "listening" or just that youre monitoring. some repeaters have a courtesy beep after someone finishes talking — wait for that before you reply so you dont step on anyone. honestly the best thing is just to listen for a few days before you transmit much, you'll get a feel for how that particular repeater crowd operates. every repeater has its own vibe a little bit.

honestly the hamstudy site alone got me through it, i barely touched the book. the way i did it was just grind through the flash card mode until i was consistently hitting 85% or above on the practice tests, then i went and took the exam. took me maybe 3 weeks of like 20 mins a day. the electrical theory stuff — dont stress too hard about fully understanding it for the test, a lot of it you can just pattern match. like for ohms law they always give you two values and you solve for the third, theres only so many ways they can ask it. the antenna and propagation stuff is actually pretty interesting once it clicks, and honestly those questions arent that bad once you see them a few times. the rules and regs questions are probably the ones worth paying the most attention to since theres a lot of them and they do come up. the ARRL book is good if you actually want to understand what youre doing but for just passing the test its probably more than you need right away

yeah what he said about search and pounce. i did my first CQ WW maybe two years after i got my ticket and i was nervous too but honestly once you make your first handful of contacts it just clicks. the pileups on the big DX stations can be frustrating but dont let that put you off, there are plenty of stations that are easy to work especially on 15 and 10 if the bands cooperate. one thing i wish someone told me earlier — get N1MM or even just use the ARRL contest logger, logging on paper during a fast contest is rough. also write your exchange on a sticky note and put it on your monitor so you dont blank on it when somone comes back to you fast. sounds dumb but trust me

i made exactly this switch a few years back, had a 4btv and replaced it with a dipole center fed at about 35 feet and honestly for local and regional stuff the dipole crushed it but yeah DX was about the same or sometimes worse. ended up putting the vertical back up and using both, feed them into an antenna switch. its not always convenient but having the option is nice when youre chasing something specific

so ive been a General for about 3 years now and honestly never really thought about upgrading but my buddy at the club keeps saying i should just go for it. the theory sections on the Extra exam look pretty intimidating though, like the stuff about impedance matching and filter design and some of the oscillator theory goes way over my head right now. i know the HF privileges open up the lower portions of the bands which would be nice for DX but im not sure if i actually need all that extra bandwidth or if its just nice to have on paper. did anyone else feel like the theory was way harder than it looked going in? im decent with antennas and basic circuits but some of this advanced RF theory stuff is pretty dense. also does anyone actually USE the knowledge from studying for it or is it mostly just memorize and forget like the lower exams?

so i've been meaning to get into LEO satellite work for a while now and last weekend i finally sat down and actually did it instead of just reading about it. been licensed for about 6 years but mostly hf so this was pretty new territory for me. managed to track AO-73 with gpredict and got my ft-991a set up for split operation, uplink on 70cm and downlink on 2m. the doppler correction was the thing that really got me — i knew intellectually that i'd need to compensate but actually doing it manually while trying to hold a qso is a whole other thing. i kept losing my own downlink signal because i was chasing it the wrong way for the first couple passes. got a few contacts in there though which was cool. my question is about the linear transponder behavior — i noticed that when the bird gets crowded with stations the signal levels all kind of drop together, is that the ALC behavior of the transponder compressing when total power goes up? ive read a few things about this and some sources say you should basically run as low power as you can get away with but im not totally sure how to judge what 'enough' is. running about 5w on uplink with a yagi and it seemed okayish but hard to tell. also gpredict is doing most of the doppler correction automatically for me but it feels like im still drifting a bit on the downlink. is that normal or am i missing something in the config?

hamstudy.org is honestly all you need, the book is fine but not necessary unless you really like having something physical to read through. the way hamstudy works is it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those more which is genuinely helpful. on the theory stuff -- you dont need to deeply understand ohms law to pass, you just need to know enough to answer the specific questions they ask. like if you know E=IR and practice applying it to the few question variations in the pool youll be fine. the pool is published and the actual test questions come directly from it, no surprises. just grind the practice tests until youre consistently hitting 80 or above and youre probably ready. the passing score is 74% so thats 26 out of 35 right. six weeks is way more than enough time if you put in even like 20-30 minutes a day. i studied for maybe 2 weeks total for mine.

Take practice tests regularly - they show exactly where you need to improve. I used HamStudy.org's adaptive testing and passed easily. Focus extra study time on your weak areas rather than reviewing what you already know.

What antenna are you using? I found that on HF, the RSP1A can easily overload from strong broadcast stations if you don't have some front-end filtering. Weak signals may require a preamplifier and filters to reject interference from nearby broadcast stations, especially when dealing with multi-kilowatt mediumwave interference.

ok so i just got my ticket about 3 months ago and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly on 40m SSB and a little bit of FT8. someone in my local club told me i should sign up for LoTW and also eQSL but i honestly dont fully understand the difference or why you'd need both. like arent they both just digital ways to confirm a contact? i also got a big stack of paper QSL cards printed up because i thought that was just what you do, and ive sent out maybe a dozen so far through the bureau. but i havent gotten any back yet and its been like 6 weeks. is that normal? i was kind of expecting it to be faster than that. mostly i'm trying to figure out what the point of all of this is, like does it matter for anything practical or is it just a tradition thing. someone mentioned DXCC but i dont really understand how that works either. sorry if these are dumb questions, there's just a lot to take in when you're new

so ive been running a remote station for about two years now using a combination of RemoteHams RCForb client and a SDR as a panadapter on the back end and honestly its been... okay. not great. the latency on the audio path drives me nuts sometimes especially when trying to work weak signal stuff on 40m at night. like youll hear a station come up and by the time your PTT registers through the internet link the guy is already done with his transmission and moved on. i was talking to a guy at our club who basically rolled his own setup using a Pi, a couple of audio-over-IP bridges, and some custom scripting for the CAT control and he swears its lower latency than RemoteHams but i honestly dont know if its apples to apples because his station is only about 15 miles from his house and mine is like 350 miles away colocated at my brother in laws place in rural Oklahoma so the WAN hop alone is going to add jitter no matter what i do. anyone running RemoteHams with a proper SDR on the RF side? im using an SDRplay RSPdx right now as the pan but thinking about whether it makes more sense to just send raw IQ over the link instead of dealing with the audio codec. has anyone actually tried that over a decent broadband connection? curious what kind of bandwidth that actually chews through at like 1MHz sample rate or whatever.

ARRL website has a pretty decent list if you just search for it. i bookmarked it when i was studying for my tech. QRP is also one you hear a lot which means low power operation, some guys are really into running like 5 watts or less and they make a whole thing of it. QRO is the opposite, high power. QRM i still have trouble with sometimes because people also just say the word interference so it catches me off guard when they switch to the code mid sentence

i just passed mine like three months ago so i remember this exact feeling lol. i used hamstudy and also the hamradioprep website which has a paid course but honestly i think i couldve passed just using the free stuff. the thing that helped me most was just doing practice exams over and over until i was consistently getting like 90% or better, then i scheduled the test before i could chicken out. the electronics questions are the ones that tripped me up at first, like the ohms law stuff and calculating things, but once you see the same question a few times it kind of clicks. good luck, it feels really good once you pass

the cluster nodes do share spots with each other pretty well through the DX Spider and other interconnected networks so youre not really missing a ton by using one vs another, but some nodes have better uptime or less lag than others. the web tools like DXwatch and dxmaps.com are honestly fine for casual operating, i used them for years before bothering with a dedicated client. one thing that might help you is filtering by band on DXwatch so youre not chasing spots on 10m when the band isnt open or whatever. and if you see a spot thats more than 10-15 minutes old, good chance the pileup has moved on or the DX already went QRT. freshness of the spot matters a lot more than people realize when theyre starting out. your 40m dipole at 25 feet is totally workable for working DX when conditions cooperate, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. just takes patience and timing

I did my first CQ WW a couple years back in a pretty similar situation to you actually. Was nervous about it but ended up having a really good time. One thing I'd say is spend like 20 minutes before the contest starts just reading the rules on the CQ magazine website, specifically the exchange and the zone numbering, because if you dont know your CQ zone ahead of time youll be fumbling around looking it up mid-pileup which is embarrassing lol. You're zone 3, 4, or 5 depending on where in the US you are, worth just knowing it cold. Also the SOTA experience is going to help you more than you think - you've already learned to work with modest setups and pull out weak signals, that translates pretty directly. Enjoy it, its one of those things where even a "bad" score still means you talked to Japan or South Africa or wherever and thats just cool

I'm running similar on Pi 4 with great results. For multiple bands, check out the RTL-SDR-Blog's multiplexer - lets you feed one antenna to multiple dongles with proper isolation. Your PostgreSQL approach is smart for long-term trending.

had both at different points. the 7300 receiver just feels cleaner to me on a crowded band, the roofing filter situation on the 991A is a bit of a weak point if you're doing any serious contesting — you'll notice it when the band is wall to wall signals. firmware on both has matured a lot so that's not really a deciding factor anymore. that said if you're doing satellite the 991A makes way more sense because full duplex on SO-50 or whatever with one box is just easier to manage. if it's mostly HF contesting and RTTY i'd go 7300 without much hesitation, the waterfall alone is worth it for finding activity and the audio DSP handles RTTY decoding software really well in terms of clean audio output to the PC.

dont overthink it honestly, just get on and make some noise. i did my first CQ WW with a wire antenna in my attic and a borrowed radio and still managed like 200 contacts over the weekend. it was messy and i probably did half of it wrong but i learned more in those two days than in the previous six months combined. the logging software does most of the heavy lifting if you set it up right — N1MM is free and what most people use, takes a little bit to figure out but there are youtube videos that walk you through it

so i just passed my technician exam last month and ive been trying to figure out exactly what im allowed to do. i know i have privileges on VHF and UHF and some limited HF but every time i try to read part 97 directly it just kind of makes my eyes glaze over. like the actual document is so dense. my main question is about the HF stuff — i keep hearing people say techs can use certain portions of 10 meters and maybe 40 meters for phone but im not totally sure whats phone vs what isnt and whether there are power limits i need to worry about. also someone at the club mentioned something about a third party traffic rule and i have no idea what that is or if it applies to me yet. is there like a plain english version of the rules somewhere or do i just have to suffer through the actual CFR document

yeah the RMS gateways are stations that hams are running, they arent always on. some are pretty reliable and run 24/7 but others go up and down depending on whether the operator has their station running. the list in Winlink Express shows gateways that have checked in recently but recently could mean like the last hour or so, so they might not be active right this second. the bigger issue is probably propagation tbh. on HF you need to actually be able to reach the gateway and a lot of beginners pick a gateway thats geographically close but the band conditions dont support that path at that moment. try sorting by different bands and look for gateways on 40m in the evening or 20m during the day and see if that helps. also make sure your VARA modem settings match - the dial frequency and the audio routing through the 7300 USB interface needs to be set up correctly or youll transmit on the wrong spot. if you connected via telnet fine then yeah your account is definitely good, its gotta be the RF side.

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and im still a little fuzzy on this. like i know the NATO phonetics, alpha bravo charlie etc, but when im on a repeater just having a normal conversation do i have to say my whole callsign in phonetics every single time? or is that just for when conditions are bad or the other person asks you to repeat? i feel like i hear some guys do it every time and some guys just rattle off the letters and numbers normally. is there like an actual rule about this or is it just preference. i dont want to sound like im overdoing it but also dont want to be doing it wrong

I studied HamStudy.org flashcards and practice tests for just 6 days and passed the Tech test, missing only 1 question. Focus on taking lots of practice exams rather than just reading - you can pass by taking enough practice tests without ever studying material directly.

yeah the sliding is the thing that finally made me do it too. woke up one morning and my mag mount had blown completely off on the interstate, antenna and coax just gone. luckily didnt cause an accident but man that was a wake up call. drilled the hole that weekend. if youre keeping the truck more than another year or two just do it, resale value hit is basically nothing

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. i looked into it and apparently you need a license first which makes sense but i dont really know where to start. like is there a book i should get or a website or what. also how hard is the test actually, im not great at math and someone told me theres some antenna calculations and stuff on it which is kind of intimidating. any advice would be appreciated, i just want to get to the point where i can actually transmit and talk to people

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, tech class, and ive been reading about CW and it honestly sounds really appealing to me for some reason. i know its not required anymore but theres something about it that just seems cool and i want to learn it. problem is i have no idea where to even begin. like do i just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or is that the wrong approach? ive seen some people mention something called the koch method and something else about not learning it visually at all, just by sound? i dont really understand what that means practically. i just want to get to a point where i can have a basic QSO eventually, nothing crazy. any advice on how to actually start would be appreciated, or just what worked for you personally