David Williams95

yeah same boat here i kept overthinking the antenna situation forever. ended up that a simple linked dipole just hanging from a trekking pole got me more contacts than i expected. whats your next summit gonna be?

so ive been meaning to put together a proper go-kit for like two years now and every time i sit down to do it i end up going down a rabbit hole and not actually doing anything. our local ARES group has been nudging me to get something ready and honestly after that ice storm last january where we lost power for 5 days i think its finally time to stop procrastinating. my situation is i have a Yaesu FT-891 for HF and a couple of handhelds, a TYT and an older VX-7R. i was thinking of centering the go-kit around the 891 since it can do HF and i can throw a wire antenna up pretty quick but im not sure if thats the right call or if i should just focus on VHF/UHF for local emcomm stuff. i have a deep cycle battery i use for portable ops but its heavy as heck and i dont always want to lug that around. also what do people actually put in these things beyond the radio? like documentation, spare parts, that kind of stuff. i feel like every list i find online is either way too minimal or so comprehensive its basically a go-bag for surviving the apocalypse. just looking for what you guys actually carry day to day for this stuff.

so ive been licensed since 2019 and always told myself id learn morse code eventually and here i am still on SSB doing nothing about it lol. anyway i finally ordered a cheap paddle off amazon (i know i know) and i borrowed a friends keyer to mess around with but honestly i have no idea what im doing. like i can hear the dit and dah but my timing is all over the place and i cant figure out if its the keyer settings or just me being bad at it. the keyer has a speed adjustment and a squeeze keyer mode which i turned on thinking it would help but now it feels even more chaotic. should i just slow everything way down and practice letters individually or is there a better approach people use. also does the type of paddle matter this much at the beginning or should i just get comfortable with any paddle before spending money on a nicer one

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah it works great for racking up contacts and chasing DX but honestly it feels a little hollow sometimes, like you exchange signal reports and grid squares and thats it, done, next contact. started looking into JS8Call because it supposedly lets you have real conversations in weak signal conditions and i was curious if anyone here actually uses it regularly or if its kind of a ghost town on the bands. my setup is pretty basic, IC-7300 into a wire dipole up about 30 feet, running WSJT-X for FT8 and FT4. i tried PSK31 a while back and liked that you could actually type back and forth but propagation has to be decent and my antenna situation isnt ideal. the appeal of JS8Call is obviously that it should work down in the noise floor like FT8 does but with actual text exchange. just wondering if the activity level is there or if im gonna fire it up and find three guys on at 2am. also curious if anyone still runs RTTY for anything other than contests, feels like that mode has kind of become contest-only at this point but maybe im wrong

i dont have a ton of DX experience but one thing my elmer told me that stuck was to never send your full callsign when the pile is huge, just the suffix, and only go full call once things thin out a bit or if the DX is clearly asking for more info. saves time and you stand out a little more when everyones sending their whole call over and over. not sure if that applies as much on phone but on CW it seems to matter

had almost the exact same issue last year, turned out my USB audio sample rate was mismatched between the Signalink driver and Windows. Winlink looked fine on the surface but Vara was basically getting garbage timing. went into sound settings and made sure both input and output for the Signalink were set to 48000 Hz and it made a huge difference. probably not your only problem but worth ruling out before you dig into the gateway stuff.

what transistor are you using in the final? i built something similar a while back and had harmonic problems that turned out to be because i was using a 2N2222 way outside its comfortable operating range for that frequency. switched to a proper RF transistor and things cleaned up noticeably even before i got the filter sorted out.

im kinda in the same boat honestly, been at it since spring and i stall out every few wpm. one thing that helped me a little was just listening to W1AW practice bulletins even when i cant copy everything — just having it on in the background while im doing something else around the shack. not sure if thats actually doing anything scientifically but it feels like my ear is getting more comfortable with the rhythm of real CW at least. good luck, its a slog but people say it clicks eventually

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and kept putting it off but after the storms we had last month that knocked out power for three days i figured i really need to stop procrastinating on this stuff here's roughly what i've got so far — a Yaesu FT-857D as my main rig, a 40ah lithium battery from bioenno, a small solar panel (30w i think), my random wire antenna and a roll of coax, logbook and pencils, a laminated copy of local ARES frequencies and the ICS forms i'd probably need, spare fuses and a few connectors, and a power strip with anderson powerpole adapters its all going into a pelican-style case i found at harbor freight which honestly seems pretty solid for the price. the whole thing fits in my truck which is kind of the point my main question is — is there stuff people always forget until they actually need it that i should be throwing in now? i feel like im missing something obvious but i cant figure out what. also curious if anyone has opinions on whether a dedicated HF rig for a go kit makes sense vs just using a handheld for local stuff and keeping it simple

nice, I did the same thing like 6 months ago. still mostly just doing 2m/70cm stuff but i picked up a cheap used IC-7300 and have been listening on 40m at night which is kind of addicting even if im not transmitting yet. welcome to the hobby or whatever theyre supposed to say

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i mostly do HF and some local 2m stuff and i keep going back and forth on this. like on the repeater everyone just says their call sign normally, like they dont spell it out phonetically or anything. but then i hopped on 40m the other night and the guy i was talking to spelled out his whole call sign every single exchange and it felt a little formal i guess. is there a rule about this or is it just a vibe thing depending on the band or mode. i dont want to be the guy who does it wrong either way

yeah the thermal management on the 857 is pretty mediocre for a radio that size, yaesu kind of crammed a lot in there. i did the fan mod on mine maybe three years ago, basically just put a small resistor in series with the fan power line so it runs slower all the time instead of the on/off thing. its quieter overall and keeps temps more stable. i think i used something like a 47 ohm resistor but honestly dont remember exactly, you'd want to measure your fan's current draw and dial it in properly. there's a thread on eham somewhere that goes into the specifics, might take some digging. the diode mod is solid btw, been running mine that way for ages, never had any issues from it.

had something similar on a 7300 about a year back, though mine did eventually throw the protection. before you go assuming finals check the ALC line first — theres a known thing where the ALC voltage can get pulled low by something upstream and the radio just quietly backs way off on power thinking its protecting itself. its not a super common fault but ive seen it trip people up because everything looks normal on the surface. also worth checking is whether the output drops equally across all bands or just 40. if its only one or two bands that changes the picture considerably. the finals on these are actually pretty robust and usually when they go they go in a more dramatic fashion, not this slow quiet fade you're describing. i'd lean toward bias or ALC before condemning the output stage. pull up the service manual and check the bias adjustment procedure, the trimpots can drift especially if a previous owner was poking around in there.

the asymmetric droop is probably contributing a little but honestly 2.1:1 on a homebrew inverted V with those mounting constraints is pretty normal. the inverted V configuration by itself lowers the feed point impedance compared to a flat dipole because of the angle the legs make -- closer they are to vertical the more it departs from that classic 72 ohm theoretical. at 25 feet apex and typical backyard droop angles you're often looking at something in the 50-60 ohm range which should actually match pretty well to 50 ohm coax, but ground proximity and the environment around the antenna shifts things around more than people expect. i'd try resonating it first by trimming for minimum SWR without worrying about the target frequency, just find where the dip actually is. if its resonant way below 7.150 then you cut too long, above means too short. also what length coax are you running and is there a choke balun at the feed point? no balun means common mode current on the coax shield which can really mess with your readings and also pull the resonant point around depending on how you routed the feed line.

so ive been slowly putting together a direct conversion receiver over the past few weeks, nothing fancy just a NE602 front end with an audio amp stage tacked on, wound my own toroid for the bandpass filter which honestly took longer than everything else combined because i kept losing count of the turns. anyway plugged it in tonight expecting the usual wall of hiss and static and i actually heard someone on 40m calling CQ, couldnt believe it. signal wasnt great and theres a weird hum i need to track down, probably my power supply since im just running it off a wall wart i found in a drawer. but still, it works. or at least it does something that resembles working. the audio is a little muddy and i think the BFO isnt quite right because SSB sounds like everyone is talking through a kazoo but CW comes through pretty clean actually. i breadboarded the whole thing which is probably why the hum is so bad, ground loops everywhere im sure. gonna try to get it into a real enclosure once i figure out what im doing wrong with the demodulation side. anyone else built around the NE602 and have tips for getting the audio stage cleaner? ive seen a bunch of designs use an LM386 but i read somewhere that chip is kind of notorious for oscillating if you sneeze near it

yeah the arduino as a front end for analog stuff and then serial to pi is a pretty common pattern for exactly this reason. i do it for my weather station setup. the pi is great for the network side and logging but the analog IO situation is kind of a pain. one thing though — if youre reading a pot thats tied to a mechanical rotator you might also want to look at whether the pot itself is worn. on older rotators those pots get scratchy and no amount of filtering will fix that, the wiper just has dead spots. might be worth checking if the noise happens at certain positions more than others

yeah this is something ive thought about a lot too. i think people underestimate how much the actual sending matters — like if your keying sounds sloppy or your signal has any kind of issue it's so much harder for the DX op to copy you even if your signal is strong. ran into a guy at our club who was frustrated about the same thing and it turned out his keyer sidetone timing was off from a software update and his dits were coming out slightly short. he'd been running that way for months without realizing it. one thing i havent seen mentioned much is the propagation angle. if you're on the same path as a hundred other stations you're all kind of competing at the same noise floor on their end. not much you can do about that honestly unless you're at an unusual geographic location relative to the DX, but it's worth remembering that the op might just not be able to pull anyone out of the mud at certain times regardless of technique. sometimes the honest answer is come back when the band is better.

had almost the exact same thing happen when i built a transmitter a couple years ago, different tube but same kind of frustration. turned out my grid leak resistor value was wrong, i grabbed the wrong one from my junk box and it was biasing the tube too far into cutoff. worth double checking all your passives around the tube socket, its easy to grab the wrong resistor when youre in the middle of a build and not really paying attention.

been lurking on a few of the usual sites this week and noticed the FT-710 has come down a bit at some of the bigger dealers, not sure if thats a permanent thing or just one of those weekend sale situations but worth keeping an eye on if youve been on the fence about it. i almost pulled the trigger last month and now im kicking myself a little but also glad i waited maybe. also for anyone who missed it, 10 meters has been absolutely ridiculous lately. i mean i know the cycle 25 thing has been talked to death but actually sitting down and working it is something else entirely. got a few contacts into europe last tuesday afternoon with like 100 watts and a dipole in the attic, which i genuinely did not expect. my wife thought i was making things up when i told her. anybody else been following the new Icom releases? heard some rumblings about something in the mobile HF space but nothing concrete yet, probably just wishful thinking on the forums. also the ARRL announced some updates to the digital modes contest rules i think but i havent read through it fully yet. anyone know the details on that?

so ive been going back and forth on this for about two weeks now and i think im making it way more complicated than it needs to be. currently running a resonant dipole for 40m up about 30 feet which works fine, decent reports, no complaints really. but my neighbor two streets over has a vertical and he consistently gets better DX reports than me at least from what he says at our club meetings. my lot is small-ish, maybe 80x120 feet, and the dipole is strung between a tree and my garage roughly NE/SW which i know isnt ideal for everything. i keep looking at verticals thinking maybe the lower angle of radiation would help me work more DX but then i read all this stuff about ground radials and now im nervous about committing to a big ground radial system. been digging through the ARRL antenna book but honestly some of that math goes over my head after a while. anyone made this switch and actually noticed a real difference or is it one of those things where you spend a lot of money and effort and end up roughly where you started

so ive been building this direct conversion receiver for 40m on and off for like 3 months now, mostly following the NorCal 40A schematic but i made some changes because i couldnt get the right toroids locally and had to substitute. anyway got it all put together last weekend and it actually receives signals which honestly surprised me considering how messy the wiring looks inside the enclosure. the problem is the audio sounds kind of hollow and there's this low frequency rumble that comes and goes. like if i tune to a CW signal it sounds like the tone is inside a tin can. SSB is barely intelligible. i checked my LO and its sitting pretty stable on the scope, the NE602 seems to be getting the right supply voltage. audio stage is just an LM386 feeding a small 8 ohm speaker. im wondering if its an impedance mismatch between the mixer output and the audio amp input or maybe my bypass caps are insufficient somewhere but honestly im just guessing at this point anyone built something similar and had audio issues like this? would really appreciate some direction before i start randomly swapping components

FlDigi actually displays live IMD readings which gives instant feedback on signal cleanliness. For contests where every decode counts, I never exceed -25 dB IMD even if it means running lower power.

so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while and finally decided to just do it and get my ticket. signed up to take the tech exam in like 6 weeks which seemed like plenty of time but now im looking at all the material and honestly a little overwhelmed. there's so much stuff about frequencies and ohms law and i remember basically zero physics from high school. i found the hamstudy.org site which seems good but someone at a club meeting told me i should also get the ARRL study guide book? is that actually worth buying or is the free online stuff enough. also the question pool thing -- is it really just memorizing the exact questions that are on the test or do i actually need to understand the stuff. some of the electrical theory questions look really hard and i dont know if i should spend a ton of time on those or just try to get through the regulations sections first sorry if this is a super basic question, just dont know where to start

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about CW and how they wish they'd learned it earlier and whatever, and i kind of want to give it a shot but i genuinely have no idea where to start. like do you just listen to recordings over and over? buy some program? i downloaded one app but it felt really random and i wasnt sure if i was doing it right or just wasting my time also does it matter what speed you start at, i heard something about starting slow being bad? or maybe it was starting too fast being bad, i cant remember which. someone at my club mentioned the Koch method but didnt explain what that actually means. just looking for what actually worked for people i guess, not really interested in buying a whole course if i can avoid it

honest answer — the baofeng will work fine for hitting repeaters and learning the basics. the interface is a little clunky and programming it without chirp is kind of a nightmare, but once you get it set up its totally usable. i started on one and made plenty of contacts. the build quality is not great but for 25-30 bucks if you drop it in a parking lot you're not crying about it. that said if you think this hobby is gonna stick and you want something that just works without fussing around, the ft-60r really is noticeably better. the receiver is cleaner, the audio is louder, the buttons make sense. i've had mine for like 6 years and it still works exactly the same as day one. for 8 miles simplex you'll probably be fine either way depending on terrain but the yaesu will give you a little more confidence in the link. honestly just get the baofeng first, see if you even use it, and upgrade later if you want to. thats what most people end up doing anyway.