CW Operator

Consider QoS settings on your router to prioritize audio packets. Also look for a remote receiver to monitor your output. Plenty of HF SDRs are listed at: kiwifruit.com/public/ to check your signal quality during remote operation.

had almost the exact same thing happen on my 897 which shares a lot of the same guts. turned out to be a cold solder joint on one of the filter board connectors, totally intermittent which made it maddening to find. wasnt even a component failure, just a bad joint. i reflowed the whole area around the 40m LPF section and it came back to full power. worth checking before you start swapping transistors.

Consider antenna modeling with EZNEC or similar before switching. You could also try adjusting your current antenna's mounting position - sometimes moving it forward or backward on the roof changes the pattern enough to help with difficult repeater paths.

14 contacts and a valid activation on your first try is honestly a solid start, don't sweat it at all. A lot of people dont get their 10 the first time because they pick a dead band or forget to self-spot or just get rattled by the silence and pack up too early. The fact that you stuck it out says something. The self-spotting thing is huge and you already figured that out which puts you ahead of where i was on my first couple activations. Once the hunters see you on the map it changes completely. I'd say try to get on a second band next time if you can, even just 20m for a few contacts after you've worked the 40m crowd, helps pad your numbers and you might snag some DX too depending on conditions. The logging app freezing is a pain, i switched to a paper log as backup after losing contacts once and just upload after. old school but it works.

Congrats on the ticket. Honestly the Baofeng war is never going to end on the internet so I'll just tell you what I actually think — the UV-5R is fine to start with, full stop. You'll learn how to program an HT, you'll figure out what CTCSS tones are, you'll drop it in a parking lot and not feel terrible about it. The audio is a little rough and the receiver isn't great in busy RF environments but on a quiet 2m repeater in the suburbs you probably wont even notice. That said if you think you're going to stick with the hobby — and it sounds like you might — saving up for something like a Yaesu FT-65 or one of the smaller Kenwood TH series is not a bad call either. The build quality is just noticeably better and programming is way less of a headache. Depends what you want to spend really. Either way get on that repeater, introduce yourself, and the locals will probably have all kinds of opinions for you too.

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think im overcomplicating it honestly. the idea is pretty simple — i want the arduino to read azimuth from my yaesu g-800 rotator controller (tapping the voltage on the pot output like everyone does) and then compare it against a target bearing i set, then drive the rotator relay until it gets close enough. like within 3 or 4 degrees is fine for HF. i got the analog read part working no problem, voltage divider is set up and im getting sensible numbers out of it. the part thats killing me is the dead band logic. like when do i tell it to stop? i had it overshooting constantly last night and i couldnt figure out if it was the loop speed or just my relay debounce being garbage. tried adding a delay but that felt hacky. also wondering if i should just scrap the arduino and throw a raspberry pi at this instead. pi has more headroom for eventually adding like a web interface or whatever but feels like overkill for what is basically just a comparator with relays. anyone gone either route and have thoughts?

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, W4T/SU-001, been putting it off forever because i kept convincing myself i needed more gear or a better antenna or whatever. anyway packed up my KX2 and a 40m EFHW and hiked up saturday morning. wind was absolutely brutal up top, i mean i knew it would be exposed but not like THAT. spent like 20 minutes trying to get the wire up in a tree and the tree was basically horizontal from the wind lol. ended up just draping it over some rocks at a really terrible angle. managed to get 4 contacts on 20m SSB before my hands got too cold to key properly, so it counts as an activation right? barely but yeah. didnt even try CW which is probably what i should have done, fewer letters to mess up with frozen fingers. already planning the next one though, gonna bring gloves next time which seems obvious in hindsight

yeah it can be a lot at first but you honestly just pick most of it up by listening. the Q codes go way back to maritime and telegraph days, thats why they all start with Q. the most common ones youll hear are QSO which is just a contact or conversation, QTH is your location, QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural static like from thunderstorms, QSB is when your signal is fading, and QRT means youre shutting down or signing off. QSY means changing frequency. there are like a hundred of these officially but realistically on the air most guys only use maybe a dozen regularly. as for 73, that just means best regards, its been used since like the 1800s in morse telegraphy. OM literally does mean old man but its not really an insult, its just how hams refer to any other male operator, sort of like a friendly term. YL is young lady and XYL is ex-young lady which means wife. yeah ham radio has some old fashioned vocabulary lol. ARRL has a good reference page with the common ones if you just google ARRL Q codes, worth bookmarking.

so ive been messing with this for like three days now and im losing my mind a little. i've got a TM-D710G set up in the truck with a mag mount on the roof, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 and i can hear the beacon transmitting, the TX light flashes every two minutes like its supposed to. but when i go to aprs.fi and search my callsign theres just nothing there. tried with and without the SSID and still nothing. the radio is on 144.390 which is correct for north america, and i have the internal TNC enabled. not using a separate TNC or anything. i wonder if the path is wrong or maybe the symbol isnt set right, but i feel like that wouldnt stop it from showing up at all? like even a misformatted packet usually shows up as something weird rather than not at all. anyone run into this before, is there something obvious im missing

WSJT-X documentation recommends Q65-60B at 432 MHz for EME, but I see many stations still using JT65B. Running 4x17el array with 1kW and want to optimize for weak signal work. Technical question: What's the actual sensitivity difference between these modes? Q65 uses 1/3 the bandwidth of JT65B and numerical signal reports, but does this translate to real-world performance gains on 70cm EME?

Your readings actually aren't that far off spec for the X510HDM - Diamond rates it at <1.5:1 but real-world installations often see slightly higher SWR due to ground interactions and mounting variables. Try temporarily raising it another 5-10 feet to see if ground coupling is the culprit.

I just did my Tacoma last month and ended up going through the door jamb anyway because i couldnt find a good grommet spot lol. it actually looks pretty clean if you use split loom and route it tight against the weatherstripping. not perfect but the radio works great so cant complain too much. the FTM-400 is a solid choice btw, display is really nice to read while driving

As a newer operator, I started with JS8Call because I was already familiar with WSJT-X from FT8. The messaging layer lets you chat off-grid during emergencies - very appealing for EMCOMM applications.

congrats on the build, that's always a great feeling when it just works the first time. and yeah you're 100% right about the antenna — at 5 watts you really can't afford a mediocre antenna situation. the end fed half wave is honestly one of the best choices you can make for portable work, especially if you're throwing it in a tree. i've been running a similar setup for a few years now, sometimes i use a linked dipole so i can cover multiple bands without needing a tuner, just disconnects at the center and changes the length. takes maybe 30 seconds. the ontario contact at qrp is nothing to sneeze at either, 40m can be magic in the evenings depending on conditions. you'll have days where you work europe on 5 watts and days where you can't get anyone to hear you from the next state over, that's just part of the fun i guess. keep an eye on the pota activators map, lots of folks doing exactly what you're doing and it's a good way to get contacts when cq feels slow.

yeah same thing happened to me when i first got on the air, felt weird being corrected but it wasnt really a correction just a practical thing. i use phonetics basically any time im not 100% sure the other person can hear me perfectly. on simplex especially because theres no repeater helping boost the signal. HF i pretty much always use them because even a strong signal can have weird propagation doing stuff to it one thing that tripped me up early on was mixing up ICAO and NATO phonetics not realizing they're basically the same thing lol, someone said ICAO on a net and i had no idea what they meant for a second

congrats on passing the test. so yeah you can apply for a vanity callsign pretty much anytime after your license shows up in the system, theres no mandatory waiting period after getting your initial sequential call. the $35 fee applies to all license applications now including vanity, the FCC started that a couple years back. used to be free which was nice but what can you do. the way vanity works is you submit an application through the FCC's ULS system and list up to 25 callsigns you want, in order of preference. then theres a 30 day filing window and if nobody with a higher preference claim puts in for the same call (like a close relative of a former holder), and nobody else applied for it before you, you get it. 1x2 and 2x1 format calls are harder to snag obviously since everyone wants those short ones, but 1x3 or 2x2 calls in less popular districts can be pretty easy to get. worth poking around on ae7q.com, thats the go-to site for looking up whats available before you apply

went through exactly this same debate last year lol. ended up doing the dipole first and honestly dont regret it at all. mine is up about 28 feet as an inverted-v and i work stations all over north america on 40m no problem, even got a few europeans in the evenings when conditions are decent. the vertical can wait, radials are a pain especially if you have a nice lawn your wife/husband cares about

so ive been doing sweepstakes CW for a few years now and keep going back and forth on whether to finally set up SO2R properly. right now im running one radio (K3) into a 2el yagi at 45ft and doing okay, usually end up somewhere in the 800-900 QSO range which honestly im pretty happy with for a single weekend. but i keep watching the top scores and the guys beating me by 30-40% are almost all running two radios. the thing is my shack is a mess and adding a second rig means dealing with RFI between them which i've heard is a whole project in itself. i've got an old TS-590 sitting on the shelf that i could press into service but the bandpass filtering situation is what's holding me back. was looking at the 2x2 bandpass filters from 4O3A and they're not cheap. is there a cheaper way to do this that actually works or am i gonna spend a bunch of money and still have the two radios stomping on each other also separately — anyone have good advice on rate optimization just as SO1R? like i feel like my CQing strategy could use work. i tend to jump around a lot instead of planting on a frequency and running, not sure if thats hurting me

just passed mine like six weeks ago so pretty fresh. hamstudy was the main thing i used, did maybe 30-45 mins a day for a couple weeks. some of the electrical theory questions are a bit annoying if youre not an engineer type but you dont really need to understand it deeply just recognize the answers after enough repetition tbh the HF thing is real though, got on 40m the first weekend after my license came up in the ULS database and made like 8 contacts including one in germany which i was not expecting at all. just had a cheap used ic-7300 and a random wire out the window

not dumb questions at all, this stuff is genuinely confusing at first because there are so many overlapping awards and tracking systems. so yeah DXCC is entities not countries, which trips everyone up early on because some entities are tiny islands or territories that count separately from the mainland. the ARRL has the official entity list on their site. for submitting, basically everything goes through LoTW now and honestly that makes it a lot easier once you get your account set up. you upload your logs, your contacts get matched with other hams who also use LoTW, and confirmed QSOs just kind of accumulate. you can still use paper QSLs and submit a batch to an ARRL card checker but most people lean on LoTW for the bulk of it. for DXCC you need 100 confirmed entities to get the basic award, and yeah mixed is typically how people start because youre counting contacts on any mode. WAS and WAZ are completely separate chases. WAS is working all 50 states which sounds easier than DX but some states like Delaware and Rhode Island can be surprisingly hard to catch on certain bands. WAZ is working all 40 CQ zones worldwide, thats a different kind of hunt. most logging software like Log4OM or HAMRS can track all of these simultaneously so you dont have to think too hard about sorting them out manually.

so ive been running an inverted V for 40m for about two years now, center point is maybe 35 feet up on a fiberglass pole and the legs slope down to about 8 feet at each end. works ok, gets me in the log, but ive always wondered if i was leaving something on the table by not getting it up as a flat top. problem is my yard isnt great for supports — i'd have to get creative with the fence posts on one side and there's a tree on the other end that might work but its kind of an awkward height, maybe 28 feet? so the antenna wouldnt even be truly flat, it'd be more like a slight droop in the middle or id have to run it at an angle across the yard which puts it near the house. is the difference actually noticeable in real world use or is this one of those things thats like 1-2 db on paper and basically nothing in practice? i mostly work domestic, some casual dx when conditions cooperate, not contesting seriously or anything.

I had this exact problem last month! The issue was Windows Defender blocking the UDP broadcast. Add both N1MM+ and WSJT-X to your firewall exceptions, and make sure no antivirus is interfering. Don't check Enable in Secondary UDP Server when WSJT-X runs from inside N1MM+.

Remember that Section 97.113 also requires manual control for retransmissions - automatic retransmission of other amateur signals is prohibited. The business rule is about keeping amateur radio noncommercial. When in doubt, use a different communication method for anything work-related to avoid potential violations.

went through the exact same thing with my first radio lol. one thing that got me was that chirp sometimes doesnt save properly if you dont hit enter after changing a value in the cell — i kept wondering why nothing was sticking. worth double checking the actual radio menu after you write to it just to confirm the tone is really in there. also the courtesy beep thing — some repeaters have a slight delay before it sounds, so if youre letting go of PTT and listening right away you might be missing it. try holding a hair longer after you finish talking before you release.

Question about the business communications rule in Part 97.113: Section 97.113 prohibits transmissions for hire or material compensation, as amateur service is defined as being for personal aims without pecuniary interest. However, there are four specific exceptions where compensation is allowed, including teaching positions during classroom instruction and control operators of club stations transmitting telegraphy practice. Can I use amateur radio for coordinating volunteer emergency services where I might receive meal vouchers?What about discussing work projects with colleagues over a repeater during commute? Where exactly is the line drawn between prohibited business use and allowed communications?