CW Operator

yeah compression is one of those things where everyone has a really strong opinion and half the opinions contradict each other lol. my take after doing a lot of SSB contesting is that a little goes a long way and the people who say max compression is great are usually thinking about it from a signal strength standpoint not an audio quality standpoint. sure you average power goes up but you sound like a robot and good operators will have a harder time copying you when conditions get sketchy because everything is the same volume. one thing nobody ever mentions is the speech processor on vs off when youre just having a ragchew on a quiet band. i turn mine off completely in those situations because theres no point and it keeps the audio sounding more natural. save the compression for when you actually need to fight through QRM or marginal propagation. also room acoustics matter more than people realize, if your shack is super reflective and echoey that comes through on SSB a lot more than it does on FM

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now mostly doing HF with some 2m weak signal stuff on the side and EME has always seemed like this insane black magic thing that only guys with massive yagi arrays in their backyard could do. but ive been reading more about it lately especially with WSJT-X and the JT65 stuff and it seems like maybe the bar isnt quite as high as i thought? anyway my current 2m setup is a single 9 element yagi at about 30 feet, a sequencer, and a decent preamp — i think its a SSB Electronics unit, cant remember the model offhand. running about 100w from an IC-9700. i know thats pretty modest but i see people online claiming they've worked EME with similar setups using digital modes so im wondering if thats actually realistic or if theyre exaggerating. the bigger question for me is elevation — my yagi is on a fixed mount and i dont have a way to tilt it up. i know the moon isnt always near the horizon so im guessing i need an az/el setup to really do this properly? or is there a window where the moon is low enough that i could at least attempt a few contacts with what i have? just trying to figure out if i need to dump a bunch of money into this before i even try or if i can dip my toe in first.

you've actually got it right — the tone goes on transmit side, that's what opens the repeater's squelch so it will rebroadcast your signal. the receive tone (sometimes called DCS or CTCSS decode) is optional on your end and really just filters out other traffic you dont want to hear, most people leave it off or set it to carrier squelch like you did. so the tone setup sounds fine. could be a few things going on — baofengs can be a little quirky with their offset programming, worth double checking that the output frequency and the shift direction are both correct. also those HTs don't have great power or antenna gain so depending on how far you are from the repeater and what's in the way, 5 watts might not be making it. try going outside if you've been indoors. as for calling on a repeater, yeah just key up and say your callsign and say youre listening or monitoring, something like "W1XYZ monitoring" is totally fine. if you want to see if anyone will chat just say youre looking for a contact. most people on repeaters are pretty welcoming to new hams, dont sweat it too much.

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. yeah WWFF is its own separate program with its own database over at wwff.co and you do want to pre-spot yourself if you can, there's a self-spotting tool on the site. the cluster activity is a bit different from POTA — WWFF has its own spotting network but honestly a lot of the hunters also watch pota spots and dx clusters so you'll probably get picked up either way depending on band conditions. one thing worth knowing is that a lot of references are dual-listed between WWFF and whatever national program covers your country, so in the US that means KFF references. same park, two log uploads basically. its a little tedious but once you get the workflow down its not bad. for the log format they want an ADIF file just like POTA so your KX3 setup should be fine as long as youre logging callsigns and keeping track of the reference number. have a good activation, those WMAs can be really nice spots

oh man KFF-1847 -- i think i actually worked you, i logged a station there Saturday afternoon. small world. i'm fairly new to chasing WWFF references and have been trying to get confirmations from as many different ones as i can. i was really happy when you popped up on the spotting network because i didnt have that one yet. i cant help much with the log submission stuff since i'm on the chasing side not the activating side but i've been thinking about doing my first activation at a state park near me sometime this spring. posts like this help me figure out what to expect so thanks for writing it up

I just upgraded to General last spring after being Tech for almost two years and the exam was way less scary than I expected. Took me maybe three weeks of doing question pools on my lunch breaks. The electrical theory questions tripped me up a little but there arent that many of them and the formulas are pretty basic. The band privileges thing confused me too at first. The way I think about it now is that on most HF bands you get a big middle chunk for phone and data and CW, the Extra class guys get a little more on the edges but its not like youre locked out of anything significant. 20 meters is where I spend most of my time and I have never once felt limited by my General privs up there.

so ive been using WSJT-X for a while now mostly for FT8 and it logs to its own thing but i want something that ties everything together better. right now my log is kind of a mess between the WSJT-X ADIF exports and whatever i manually enter when i do SSB or CW. been looking at N1MM Logger+ and Log4OM and honestly cant figure out which one makes more sense for my situation. i do a handful of contests a year, nothing serious, maybe sweepstakes and the occasional state QSO party. but i also just do regular ragchewing and some DX chasing so i need it to work for both. from what i can tell N1MM is really built around contesting and people use it for everyday logging too but its not exactly pretty. Log4OM looks a lot more polished but i dont know how it handles contest entry, like does it actually work for submitting Cabrillo or is that still kind of half baked. also does either one play nice with WSJT-X in real time, like the UDP broadcast thing, or do i have to keep doing the ADIF import dance every time.

omg same thing happened to me, i was just messing around and suddenly my S meter was going crazy on 10. i'm pretty new to HF so i honestly wasnt sure if something was wrong with my radio at first lol. worked my first ever European station which was a big deal for me. my elmers kept telling me 10m would come back and i kind of didnt believe them but here we are

drill the hole. seriously. i resisted for years and ran various mount solutions and nothing beats a proper NMO through the roof for a clean install. if you use a good rubber grommet and seal it right there wont be any rust issues and when you sell the truck you slap a plug in the hole and most buyers never even notice or care. lip mounts work but they always feel a little janky to me, especially at highway speeds if you run a longer antenna. i had one that would vibrate and i could hear it on the audio when i hit certain speeds. might have just been my install tbh but it was annoying enough that i finally just drilled.

so i just passed my technician exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to buy. ive been going back and forth on this for like two weeks now and every time i think ive made a decision i read something that changes my mind again. my local club mostly does 2m FM stuff and there's a couple repeaters nearby i want to hit. i dont really have a huge budget, maybe 50-80 dollars to start. ive been looking at the Baofeng UV-5R mostly because its cheap and everyone seems to have one, but then i read a bunch of posts about how the transmit is out of spec and blah blah blah and now im second guessing it. someone at the club said to just get a Yaesu or Kenwood and not bother with the cheap stuff but those are like $150-200+ which is more than i want to spend right now. is the baofeng actually that bad for just getting started and using local repeaters? or should i stretch the budget? i really just want something to learn on and talk on the local nets for now.

Good questions and dont worry, everyone's confused about this stuff at first. So the CTCSS thing - you've got it half right. The tone you transmit is what tells the repeater controller to open up, yeah. Whether you set your receive side to decode that same tone (sometimes called tone squelch or CTCSS squelch) is really just a personal preference thing. If you set receive tone squelch, your radio will stay quiet unless it hears that tone, which cuts down on hearing noise or other signals that bleed through. Some people like it, some dont bother. Either way the repeater doesn't care what your receive is set to, it only cares about your transmit tone. As for jumping in - totally fine and honestly encouraged. When there's a gap between transmissions, just key up and say something like your callsign and that you're monitoring or wanted to say hi. Most guys on repeaters are happy to have someone new join in. Just wait for a pause, dont step on someone mid-sentence, and you're good. The pause between overs is exactly when you do it.

so ive been putting this off for like a year and finally just did it last weekend. cut a basic 40m dipole from some 14awg stranded wire i had laying around in the garage, used a SO-239 chassis connector as the center insulator (yeah i know, not ideal but it works), and hung it inverted-V off a 25ft fiberglass push-up mast in the backyard. got it up and the swr on resonance came out around 1.4:1 which honestly surprised me, i expected worse for a first attempt. but heres my question — the feedpoint ends up being maybe 18-19ft off the ground at the apex and the ends are only like 8 feet up. ive read that the low angle radiation from an inverted-V suffers compared to a flat top dipole but does the height of the apex matter more than the ends or is it kind of both? also i used about 40ft of RG-8X as the feedline and didnt bother with a balun yet. running it to the shack through a window opening and when i key up on 40m i can kind of feel a tingle on the chassis of the radio sometimes. not every time but sometimes. guessing thats RF on the coax shield from no balun? anyway the thing actually works, made a handful of contacts last night including one down in Florida from Michigan which i was pretty happy with. just want to dial it in a bit before i call it done.

so ive been messing with RemoteHams for about 3 months now and overall its pretty solid but theres this one thing thats been driving me nuts. whenever i pass control of the remote station to another client the audio just drops out for like 8-10 seconds. sometimes it comes back, sometimes i have to restart the RCForb client entirely to get it back. the station end is running an IC-7300 through the RemoteHams server software on a little fanless mini PC. internet at the station end is comcast business so its not like its a flaky connection. my end is just a normal home cable connection. both sides are showing decent latency, like 45ms or so which shouldnt be causing this. i wonder if its a codec negotiation thing happening during the handoff or if theres some buffer somewhere thats not getting flushed properly. anyone dealt with this before? the forum over on the RemoteHams site has some stuff but its kind of sparse. figured id ask here since a few of you guys run remote setups.

yeah js8call has a bit of a learning curve with all the message types but once it clicks its pretty satisfying. i run it on 20m mostly and theres usually somethign happening mid afternoon on weekdays of all times, not sure why. also the @ALLCALL and @HB stuff confused me for a while but its basically just how the network propagates mesages around without direct connects. one thing tho — if your waterfall is busy with FT8 traffic make sure youre not accidentally parking on an FT8 frequency, js8call will just get stomped. 14.078 is the usual spot but check the js8call.group site for current activity maps

so the short version is LoTW is what you want for DXCC and most of the serious award chasing — it's run by ARRL and the confirmations are cryptographically signed so they carry more weight for awards. the certificate setup is annoying yeah, but once you get through it it's pretty painless. if you havent already, reach out to your local club because a lot of elmers will just sit down with you and walk through the whole tqsl process in like 20 minutes, saved me a ton of headache when i was starting out. eQSL is a bit more casual, some people use it some dont, and it's generally not accepted for official ARRL awards but there are some other awards that take it. i use both personally just to cover my bases. paper cards — yes people absolutely still send them, especially DX stations. if someone sends you a card it's generally good form to send one back. you can mail direct to the address on the card or look them up on QRZ. the bureau system exists for when you have a pile of cards going to the same country and dont want to pay a ton of postage, your national society handles routing. for just a few cards though, mailing direct is fine and honestly the DX stations seem to appreciate it more than going through the bureau which can take like a year or more to arrive.

I just got my technician like two months ago and everyone kept telling me HF was complicated and expensive and I'd need a big antenna setup but my neighbor let me try his radio on 10 meters last weekend and I made a contact in Brazil on my first try which was kind of unbelievable to me. Definitely making me want to upgrade to general now. Is this level of propagation normal or is this like a special thing happening right now?

so anyway i finally got the dual band mobile working the way i want it after like three weeks of messing around and figured id share what tripped me up in case it helps anyone else going through the same thing i went with a Yaesu FTM-400 and mounted it in a RAM mount setup under the dash. the head unit is on a little arm where i can see it without looking away from the road too much. first problem i ran into was the coax routing — i tried running it under the door sill trim and picked up a ton of ignition noise from somewhere, clicking in time with the RPMs. drove me nuts for a week. eventually i rereouted the coax along the center tunnel instead and grounded the radio directly to the chassis with a short heavy strap and that pretty much killed the noise floor issue completely. the antenna is a Diamond NR770HB on a lip mount on the trunk. not the most ideal location but i rent so i didnt want to drill. SWR came out around 1.4 on 2m and about 1.6 on 70cm which im okay with for now. hitting the local repeaters on 2m without any trouble and even worked a few stations simplex on the highway which was fun. if anyone is still fighting ignition noise i really cant stress enough how much a proper chassis ground helps, like it made a night and day difference for me. the factory ground points are usually garbage for rf purposes

that feeling never really goes away, first contact on a homebrew rig is just different from anything else in this hobby. i built a rockmite years ago and still remember exactly who i worked and what the band conditions were like that evening. congrats on getting the solder joints right too, those small kits can be fussy especially around the toroids if you haven't wound a lot of them before. the 20m kit is a good choice for your next one, propagation on 20 can be really rewarding for QRP because you get a much bigger potential contact range especially in the afternoon. just make sure your antenna situation is solid on that band, a lot of the time with QRP the antenna is doing more work than the rig itself. if you're ever thinking about portable operation look into a simple linked dipole, it's not complicated to build and gives you a lot of flexibility.

yeah 2.5 on 70 is annoying but honestly your radio will probably survive it for now while you track it down. i had a Diamond NMO antenna a while back that was just slightly loose at the base plate and that was enough to throw things off. the LMR-240 with hand soldered connectors is usually fine but 70cm doesnt forgive sloppy connectors the way 2m does. if you have access to a cheap antenna analyzer even a NanoVNA you can sweep it and see exactly where its resonant which makes finding the problem way faster than just poking around. good luck with it, clean installs like that are worth getting right

so ive been trying to get more into DX chasing lately and everybody keeps telling me to use the cluster spotting networks but honestly its kind of overwhelming when you first look at it. i set up an account on QRZ and i can see the logbook stuff fine but then someone mentioned DXwatch is better for real time spots and now im running both open in different tabs and i feel like im seeing duplicate spots everywhere or maybe theyre pulling from different sources i genuinely cant tell. my main question i guess is do these pull from the same underlying cluster network or are they actually different feeds? and is there like a standard way people filter out the noise because right now im seeing spots for like 12m when my antenna is basically useless on 12m so its just cluttering things up. been using HRD on the side too but the built in bandmap seems to lag behind what im seeing on the web tools by a few minutes sometimes. im only about 8 months into the hobby so maybe this is all obvious and i just havent figured it out yet, sorry if thats the case

I'm pretty new to this too but I went through a similar thing a few months ago and one thing that really helped me was actually doing a timed drill — like, pretend you just got an activation call and see how fast you can be ready to go. you find out real quick whats missing or annoying about your setup when theres a fake clock running lol. I discovered I had no way to mount my antenna without borrowing someone elses stuff, which was embarrassing. also just make sure your battery is actually charged. sounds dumb but I showed up to a training exercise with like 40% because I hadnt checked it in two months. people were nice about it but yeah.

the ALC bouncing hard is almost definitely your problem — that usually means youre overdriving the mic preamp and the radio is trying to compensate. with the PR-40 on the 7300 i actually run the mic gain a lot lower than you'd think, like around 30-35% and let the speech processor do some of the work if needed. the PR-40 is a hot mic to begin with so you dont need to push the gain much. also on the bass thing — that mic has a proximity effect that is pretty significant, so if youre talking close to it youre gonna get a ton of low end buildup. try pulling back a few inches and then cut some of the bass in the radio's EQ, like below 200Hz or so. on SSB all that low frequency stuff is just mud anyway, it doesnt help readability at all and just eats up your power on frequencies nobody can really hear clearly over a radio link. the sweet spot for SSB intelligibility is more like 400Hz to maybe 2.8kHz. once i made those adjustments my audio reports went from mediocre to pretty consistently good.

yeah what he said about the 40m segment is right. i was in the same boat when i upgraded, spent like an hour convinced i was reading the band chart wrong lol. one thing i'll add -- dont stress too much about accidentally violating stuff as long as you're actually trying to follow the rules. the FCC isn't out there monitoring every QSO waiting to bust a newly licensed general. just keep your ID habits solid and stay in your segment and you'll be fine. the third party traffic rules tripped me up once too if you ever get into that, basically just be careful relaying messages for non-hams to foreign countries because some countries have restrictions on that

i did this exact thing but used a pi zero w instead because i wanted to control it from my phone when im not in the shack. flask server, couple of gpio pins, done. works fine but honestly the boot time is kinda annoying if power goes out and comes back, takes like 40 seconds before its responsive again. probably shouldve just used an arduino for the actual switching logic and kept the pi just for the network piece if i did it over.

This is actually documented behavior - the passband temperature coefficient is quite pronounced on the FUNcube series. I use the FUNcube Dashboard's AFC feature rather than manual tuning, and it tracks the drift automatically during the pass.