David Williams95

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.

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

so ive been fighting this for about three days now and im starting to lose my mind a little. running a kenwood TM-D710G with the internal TNC, got it set up as a tracker on 144.390, the radio is definitely keying up when it should — i can hear the burst, sounds like good AX.25 audio — but i go to aprs.fi and nothing. not even a partial decode. my callsign just isnt there.
i checked the path and its set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area, theres a couple i-gates within like 20 miles. beacon rate is set to every 5 minutes. the symbol is the car icon. honestly i dont know what else to check. is there a way to decode my own packets locally to verify the audio is actually good before it hits the air? wondering if maybe the deviation is off on the 9600 baud port vs the packet port or something. or maybe my path is getting digi'd but not gated for some reason.
anyone dealt with this before

yeah the TCXO thing is real, not placebo. the stock oscillator on those radios is fine for most HF work but if you're doing any digital modes or trying to hold tight to a frequency for an extended period you'll notice the difference. I measured mine with a GPS-disciplined reference before and after and the drift on the stock unit over a couple hours was actually pretty surprising for a radio at that price point.
as far as other mods, the one thing i keep seeing people do is mess with the fan control so it spins up earlier and keeps the finals cooler during long digital sessions. the default thermal management is a bit conservative in terms of when it kicks on but the tradeoff is the fan noise during a QSO. some guys just wire in a manual pot to control it themselves. not hard to do if you're already comfortable with the internals, which sounds like you are at this point.

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

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 the CTCSS tone is basically a subaudible signal that goes out with your audio when you transmit — the repeater's receiver is set to only open up when it hears that specific tone, otherwise random noise or signals from other areas might accidentally key it up. Think of it less like a password and more like a filter. Some repeaters also send a tone back to you on the output side, which your radio can use to squelch out everything except that repeater's signal, but that's a separate thing called DCS or just receive tone and you don't always need to program that in.
As for jumping in — what you did was exactly right. Waiting for a gap and just throwing your callsign out there is the normal way to do it. If the guys are in a ragchew and they want to keep going they'll either acknowledge you and bring you in or they might not hear you and that's fine too. Just try again. Nobody owns the repeater and most folks are happy to have someone new jump in, especially once they know you're a newly licensed op. Don't stress it.

im fairly new to chasing DX seriously, only been licensed about 2 years, but one thing nobody told me early on was to check the DXpedition's cluster spots and see if they mention a specific operating style or split range in their announcements. some of the bigger DXpeditions post updates on their website or the dx world site saying stuff like "we are listening 5 to 10 up" or whatever and a lot of people just ignore that and call anywhere. also FT8 has been kind of a game changer for me on the rarer ones because the pileup dynamics are totally different and honestly more manageable when youre still figuring things out

yeah the chirp software might make programming that thing a lot easier if you havent tried it yet, baofengs have like 40 menu items and half of them are labelled in ways that make no sense. i wasted probably two weekends messing with mine before i just used chirp and it took 10 minutes. just make sure you download the right version for your specific model.
oh and dont feel bad about the conversation thing, ive been on some repeaters where the regulars are so deep in their own chat they kind of ignore break-ins for a while. not malicious just kinda oblivious sometimes. other repeaters are super welcoming. just depends on the crowd really.

okay so i passed my general exam back in march and ive been trying to figure out exactly what frequencies im allowed to use and honestly the FCC part 97 document is kind of a nightmare to read through. like i understand theres a privilege chart but every time i look at it i feel like im reading a different thing than what someone else told me.
my main question is about the 40 meter band specifically. someone at my club told me generals can use phone starting at 7.175 but then i looked at the arrl chart and it looks like its 7.175 to 7.300 for phone, which seems right but then someone else said something about a different segment for like digital modes and now im just completely turned around. also does any of this matter if im just doing like casual ragchews or is it more of a contest situation thing where people get strict about it
also separate question kind of, if i accidentally transmit outside my privileges do i need to report that or is it just like a dont do it again situation. asking for a friend lol

Start with the ARRL Extra Class Manual 13th edition - it's updated for the new pool and has excellent explanations. I would also strongly recommend that you strive to understand the broader theory and practical applications that lie behind the questions. This will make answering the exam questions easier in the short term but perhaps more importantly will enable you to get more from the hobby once you are on the air.

so i finally got activated for a real ARES deployment last weekend, been doing the training nets and ICS courses for about 8 months now so i figured i had a decent idea of what to expect. spoiler: i did not.
it was for a pretty big outdoor festival downtown, they had us set up a communications net to support EMS and the event coordinator because their commercial radios kept dropping in the crowd. nothing crazy, no actual emergency, but it still felt way more chaotic than any of the practice sessions. like on a training net everyone is calm and takes turns and does proper prowords and whatever, but when you're actually sitting next to a stressed out event coordinator who wants updates every 4 minutes it's a different vibe entirely.
the net control guy was fantastic though, really kept things organized. i mostly just passed traffic between two medical stations and logged it which honestly sounds boring but i was pretty focused the whole time. my HT was fine on simplex for most of it but we had one dead spot near the main stage that was annoying.
anyway just wanted to share because i feel like a lot of the ARES prep material makes it sound very clean and procedural and it is, kind of, but also there's just this background hum of actual real world messiness that the tabletop exercises dont fully capture. if you're thinking about joining your local ARES group i'd say just do it, the training is worth it even if you never get deployed.

honestly came here to say the same thing as the other reply. dipole is just less things to go wrong. i built a vertical for 40 last spring with like 20 radials and it works fine but getting it tuned was kind of a pain and i kept second guessing the ground connection.
one thing though — if you end up going dipole and the neighbor lets you use the oak, just be ready for it to move around in the wind and detune a little. mine shifts maybe 15-20 khz depending on how wet the leaves are which sounds dumb but its true. not a huge deal with an auto tuner but worth knowing.