Sarah Collins

Field Day threw me off too my first time, the exchange has your class and section in it and nobody really explains that upfront. like you have to know that 1A means one transmitter club station and 1D means home station etc, took me a bit to sort that out. just print the exchange sheet from the ARRL website and tape it next to your radio, seriously helps. for CQ WW just get on and call CQ or answer stations, if you mess up the exchange most ops will just ask you to repeat, its not a big deal. people are generally patient with newer stations. the rate can get pretty crazy on the first night though so maybe start by search and pouncing rather than running a frequency right away

so i've been trying to convince a couple guys from my local club to make the trip up to Dayton this year and nobody seems that interested which is kind of a bummer. ive gone maybe 4 or 5 times over the years and yeah its a lot of walking and the parking situation is always a mess but honestly its still worth it just for the swap meet tables alone. found a barely used FT-857D for like 200 bucks a few years back and that thing is still in my truck to this day. anybody else planning to go? and if anyone knows if the ARRL forum sessions are worth sitting through this year id be curious, last time i went to one it was pretty dry honestly

honestly i tried SO2R last CQWW and kind of gave up on it midway through sunday because i was spending so much mental energy managing the second radio that my CW on the run radio got sloppy and i started making dupe contacts. might just be a practice thing but i dunno, felt like i was losing more than i was gaining at that point. one thing that did help when i was using it properly was having N1MM set up with the SO2R audio switching so it automatically puts the active transmit radio in your primary ear. once that was working right it was way less chaotic. but yeah antenna wise you really do need some separation, even just having the second antenna on a different polarization helps a bit with isolation even if its not perfect

the LM386 is not garbage but it is incredibly sensitive to layout and power supply noise, almost to a frustrating degree. the motorboating almost certainly points at your power supply — wall warts are notoriously dirty and a DC receiver is going to pick up every little ripple on the supply rail. what i'd try first is throw a 100uF electrolytic right across the supply pins close to the chip, and then add a small RC filter on the input to the LM386, something like a 10 ohm resistor in series and another 100uF to ground. that kills a lot of the feedback loop that causes motorboating. also check pin 7 on the LM386, thats the bypass pin — it wants a 10uF cap to ground right there. if thats missing or the cap is too small youll get oscillation and generally nasty behavior. the NE602 also has pretty low output drive so make sure your audio interstage impedance matching isnt killing your level before it even gets to the amp. half the DC receiver builds i've seen have this issue and its almost always the power supply or a missing bypass cap somewhere.

so ive been a tech for about 2 years now and mostly just done VHF/UHF stuff, some APRS, talked on a couple local repeaters. decided i want to get onto HF finally and started going through the general question pool but honestly its a lot and im not sure what actually matters vs what i can kind of skim. like the electrical stuff i get mostly, and propagation makes sense to me after playing with PSK31 a bit. but some of the operating procedures and the band plan questions are tripping me up because i dont actually know any of it from experience yet. is there a part of the pool that tends to catch people off guard on the actual test? i dont want to just memorize and forget, i want to actually understand it but also i have a test date coming up in like 3 weeks so also wondering if once i pass, is there a waiting period before i can actually use the HF privileges or does it kick in pretty fast now

Extra privileges give you additional frequencies in the lower segments of 80/40/20/15 meters - often considered choice territory for DXpeditions and contesting. During contests or big DX openings, that extra spectrum is golden. You'll find less QRM and better propagation characteristics in those segments, especially for CW and digital modes.