Sarah Collins

honestly same boat as you a few months back lol. what helped me was just downloading the actual band chart from arrl.org and printing it out and keeping it near my radio. the part 97 document itself is rough reading, i dont think anyone actually reads it cover to cover unless they're studying for general or something

omg i didnt even have my radio on saturday, was doing yard work all afternoon and totally missed it. this is why i need to just leave the thing on in the background more often lol. i only got my tech last year and just upgraded to general a couple months ago so im still figuring out when to even bother checking the higher bands. is there a good way to know when an opening like that is starting without just stumbling onto it?

i cant make it this year but the club president posted on their facebook page that they got more vendor signups than usual so maybe its better this time around. worth checking their page before you commit to the drive

Ha yeah the first few times checking into a net feel exactly like that, you check in and then its like okay now what. Most of the time on a basic traffic net if you dont have any traffic to pass and nobody has traffic for you, youre basically just counted as a check-in and thats it. Which sounds boring but it actually matters for things like keeping the net active and demonstrating that the frequency is being used regularly. The more interesting stuff happens when someone actually has a formal radiogram they need passed down the line toward its destination. If you stick around long enough and learn the NTS format you can start handling traffic yourself and that makes it way more engaging. There are some good resources on the NTS (National Traffic System) if you want to dig into that side of things. For HF nets on 40m with an attic dipole, honestly just try it. Worst case you dont make it in or you get a partial. Most net controls are pretty patient with people. Evenings on 40m can be really good depending on where youre trying to reach.

went through the exact same thing when i first got started haha. the baofeng menu is kind of a nightmare to navigate honestly but once you find the tone settings it makes sense. one thing i'd add is double check the repeater offset too — most 2m repeaters are plus or minus 600 kHz and if thats off you might be transmitting on the wrong frequency entirely without realizing it. the repeater directory should list the input and output so you can verify. good luck, repeaters are a lot of fun once you get everything dialed in.

honestly i just leave mine stock, the 7300 is already pretty decent out of the box for what most people do with it. but i get it if youre doing the wspr and weak signal stuff. my buddy did a similar mod on his 705 and swears by it for portable ops where temperatures swing around. the one mod i actually have done is the simple fan mod where you swap in a quieter fan because the stock one drove me nuts in a quiet shack. not exactly performance but quality of life improvement for sure.

this is gonna sound dumb but did you check the TX/RX relay? on some of the older yaesu gear those relays get flaky and cause all kinds of weird intermittent stuff that doesnt obviously look like a relay problem. i chased a ghost on an FT-100 for weeks and it was the antenna relay contacts getting dirty. just a thought, probably not your issue but worth 5 minutes to clean the contacts if you can get to them.

i was in the exact same spot about a year ago and ended up just grabbing the baofeng to start. no regrets for what it is but i did eventually get a yaesu ft-70dr because i wanted to get into fusion and i wish i had maybe started there instead of spending money twice. just something to think about if you might want digital modes down the road. the dual watch on the ft-70 is also really nice for monitoring a couple repeaters at once which i use all the time now.

so ive been working on this 40m direct conversion receiver for about three weeks now, started from a design i found in an old QST from like 2003 or so. built the VFO around a hartley oscillator, nothing fancy, just whatever toroids i had in the junk box and a 2N3904 for the active part. the product detector is an NE602 which i know some people hate but it works fine for me usually. the problem is the audio out is super noisy, like not just band noise which i'd expect, but this kind of low hiss/buzz that doesnt change no matter what band conditions are. grounded the input, still there. tried a different audio amp stage (LM386 originally, swapped to a little op-amp config i pulled from somewhere) and the noise profile changed a tiny bit but its still there. power supply is a 12v wall wart which yeah i know could be the issue but ive got a cap on the supply rail right at the board. not sure if its oscillator leakage getting into the audio path or just RF getting in somewhere. layout is pretty much dead-bug on a piece of copper clad which probably doesnt help. anyone dealt with this before

i run both actually, keep the RTL dongle on a pi for ADS-B full time and use the RSP1B for actual listening. the difference on MW DX alone made it worth it for me, i was getting splatter from a 50kW station about 30 miles away that basically made the whole band unusable with the dongle and the RSP1B handles it way better. not perfect but way better

so ive been using Log4OM for about two years now and generally like it, does everything i need for day to day logging, the WSJT-X integration works fine most of the time but i keep running into this annoying thing where if i have both WSJT-X and Log4OM open and i try to switch to SSB mid session it just kind of... stops updating the log automatically and i have to restart something, not always sure which one is the culprit honestly anyway a buddy of mine who does a lot of contesting keeps telling me to just switch to N1MM and be done with it, says its the gold standard for contests which yeah i know, but i dont really do that many contests, maybe 3 or 4 a year, mostly CQWW and the occasional state QSO party. is it worth having two separate logging programs just for that or is there a way to make Log4OM work decently for contest operation too also side question does anyone know if Log4OM can export to Cabrillo properly because last time i tried to submit a CQWW log it was kind of a mess and i ended up manually editing the file which felt wrong

QRM and QRN are definitely different things even though they sound similar and i mixed them up for a long time too. QRM is interference from other stations or man made noise, like if someones signal is stomping on yours thats QRM. QRN is natural static, like lightning crashes or atmospheric noise. so if youre in a thunderstorm and the bands are full of crashes thats QRN, if your neighbor fires up some device that wipes out your reception thats QRM. QRP just means low power, like 5 watts or under typically. some people run QRP as a whole operating style and are pretty passionate about it, building tiny rigs and making contacts with almost nothing. its not about signal quality its about transmit power. 73 and 88 arent Q codes at all, theyre what they call prosigns or just traditional abbreviations. 73 means best regards basically, everyone uses it. 88 means love and kisses and is usually used between operators who know each other well or sometimes sent to a YL which is a female operator. old telegraph codes from way back, not ITU Q codes. there is a master list, the ITU publishes it and you can find it all over but honestly you just absorb most of them by listening. the common ones come pretty fast

i went RSP1C about 8 months ago coming from the same v3 direct sampling setup and yeah HF is just... cleaner. like not magic clean but noticeably less garbage. the MW broadcast stations dont splatter across everything the way they used to. one thing nobody mentioned to me before i bought it was to grab a good upconverter even with the RSP if you're serious about the lower HF bands, some people disagree on this but i found it helped with my specific noise situation. might be overkill for you though.

Yeah JS8Call is a bit of a different animal. I use it mostly for the relay and inbox stuff honestly — there's a small group of us that leave nodes running 24/7 on 40m and you can send messages that get stored and forwarded when propagation allows. for actual real-time conversation it can be frustrating like you said, you kind of have to be patient and accept that a short back and forth might take 10 minutes. once you accept that its not trying to be PSK31 it makes more sense. the weak signal performance is real though. ive decoded stations on JS8Call that were completely inaudible, like nothing on the waterfall that i could see, and they were getting through. that part is genuinely impressive. FT4 is worth looking at too if you want something faster than FT8 for contest-style stuff, the timing is tighter and the sequence is shorter, less time per exchange. PSK31 i have a soft spot for too but honestly 20m is so noisy here that anything without that kind of forward error correction just falls apart when conditions dip. RTTY still has a place in contests but for general weak signal work the WSJT modes just eat its lunch at this point

the listening part is so underrated. i used to just jump in and call and wonder why i never got through. took me embarrassingly long to figure out you have to decode the operators rhythm before you do anything. some of them have really distinct patterns too, like theyll work a run of EU stations then flip to NA for a few, and if you can catch that pattern youre golden. the 8-10 up trick is real by the way, especially on crowded bands where everyone is piled into the same 3khz window like they think the DX can only hear one slice. spreading out legitimately helps, the op has to move the RX VFO either way so might as well be where fewer guys are. the power thing i dunno about personally. on the DX expedition side ive been on two trips and honestly the signals that stand out are the ones that are clean and punchy, not necessarily the loudest. so maybe youre onto something with the cleaner 400w vs dirty 700w theory. reciprocal conditions matter too, if the band is marginal they need your signal to be readable not just loud.

im kinda in the same boat as you, been at it for like 6 weeks now using the Morse Mania app and also just listening to the W1AW code practice sessions they broadcast on shortwave, you can also get the text files from the ARRL site so you can check what you copied. the W1AW thing is cool because it feels like actual radio even if youre just listening, makes it feel more real than an app i guess. i wont lie some days it clicks and other days i sit there and my brain just goes blank on a letter i knew yesterday, pretty frustrating. but people keep telling me thats normal so i just keep going

yeah i went through the same thing with my first dipole, didnt bother with a balun and it worked fine but i had this weird thing where my swr would jump around depending on whether i was sitting close to the radio or not. turned out to be rf on the coax coming back in. wound a simple ugly balun with like 8 turns of the coax itself through a piece of type 31 ferrite and it totally fixed it. took maybe 20 minutes to make. anyway your setup sounds good for 40m, i'd try it on 15m too since a 40m dipole is a decent 15m antenna at odd angles which can be kinda fun for dx if you're into that

so after about two years of running an old TS-480SAT that i got off a silent key estate sale, i finally picked up an IC-7300 last month. been meaning to post about this for a while but life gets in the way. anyway the short version is i love it but there were a couple things that kind of caught me off guard coming from older gear. the waterfall is obviously the thing everyone talks about and yeah its genuinely useful for finding activity, not just a gimmick like i kind of assumed before i had one. but the thing that actually surprised me more was how much i had to mess with the ALC settings before it stopped looking ugly on my neighbors SDR monitor. i was running a little hot without realizing it for like the first week. nobody told me, which, whatever, i eventually figured it out by checking my own signal with a websdr. also the built in ATU is fine but its not going to save a really bad antenna situation. i have a pretty compromised attic dipole for 40m and it does what it can but dont expect miracles. the radio itself though, receive is noticeably better than the 480 was especially on 17m for some reason, thats been my favorite band to just sit and listen lately. anyone else come from older icom or kenwood stuff and have thoughts on the learning curve? feels like theres menus inside of menus inside of menus sometimes.

I went through exactly this about a year ago. What helped me more than anything was using an app called Morse Mania to get the characters into my head first, then moving to the paddle. Trying to learn the characters AND the paddle feel at the same time was too much for my brain to handle at once. once i had the code pretty solid from listening and typing on a keyboard, the paddle started making a lot more sense because i wasnt also trying to remember what dah-dit-dah-dit even was lol

I just did this like three months ago so it's pretty fresh. Honestly the thing that helped me most was just doing the practice exams over and over on hamstudy until I understood WHY the answers were right not just memorizing them, especially for the electrical stuff because that comes up in weird ways. The band plan questions I just flat out memorized, there's no shortcut there. 70% passing rate on practice tests is a little low id want to be closer to 85-90 before I went to a session just so I wasn't stressed out. give it another week or two. and yeah once you pass you can start operating immediately, you dont have to wait for a new license to show up in the FCC database or anything, just show up on 20m SSB and have fun with it

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend out at a state forest near me, been meaning to do one for ages and just never got around to it. figured id share how it went since i had a few questions going in and couldnt find great answers in one place. setup was pretty basic — ft-891 running off a 20ah lifepo4 battery, end fed halfwave up in the trees maybe 25 feet or so. took me longer than i expected to get the antenna sorted because the trees were spaced weird and i kept messing up my paracord throws. anyway once i was on the air things picked up pretty fast, got spotted on POTA spots which i know also feeds into the WWFF network somehow and before long i had a decent pileup going on 40m. ended up with like 67 QSOs over about 2.5 hours which felt pretty good for a first time. activated KFF-whatever number my state forest is. one thing i wasnt totally clear on before going — you need 44 QSOs to count as a valid activation for WWFF, not sure why 44 specifically but thats the number. also learned the hard way that you need to actually register on the wwff.world site and get your reference confirmed before you go out, otherwise the logging gets complicated after the fact. honestly the whole experience was just... really nice? being out in the woods with the radio, people calling in from all over, had a guy from Slovenia work me on 40m which was unexpected. definitely doing more of these.

im pretty new to all this so take this with a grain of salt but i actually just started checking into a local echolink net because i dont have HF yet and it's been really great for just getting comfortable with net procedure and everything. the net control on ours is super patient when people mess up their callsigns or forget to say over or whatever. maybe look for something like that while you're getting back into the swing of it, low pressure way to get back in the habit i think

congrats on the 7300, its a genuinely solid radio for the money. i ran one for about two years before i moved up to a 7610 and honestly i still kinda miss the simplicity of it. for twin PBT on 40m phone i was usually running the inner passband shifted just slightly low and the outer maybe 200hz or so toward the high end — hard to give exact numbers because it really depends on where the QRM is sitting. what i found more useful honestly was just dropping the FIL1 bandwidth down to like 1.8k or even 1.6k when it gets messy, you lose a bit of the audio quality but the adjacent channel rejection gets much better. the DSP NR on that radio is pretty decent too, NR1 mode usually works better for voice than NR2 in my experience. the fan thing is just the 7300 being the 7300, you kind of get used to it. some guys mod the fan with a quieter aftermarket one but i never bothered.

yeah the flea market aint what it was, thats just the reality. everyone knows what their old drake is worth now becuase they checked ebay before they loaded the car. but i still go every year, mainly to see club guys from all over. our local club usually does a dinner saturday night and that alone is worth the trip honestly. if youre driving more than like 5 hours probably think hard about it, if youre within a reasonable range i wouldnt skip it

ive been lurking on this forum for a while and just got my general last spring so take this for what its worth but our EC has us do something he calls a traffic relay ladder every couple months where each person in the chain only hears the message once and has to pass it on accurately. its kind of like telephone but with actual radiogram format. even as a newer ham it made me realize how much you can lose if someones not writing things down carefully or asks for fills at the wrong time. might be worth trying if you want something that feels more like a game than a drill