Kevin Turner

so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im stuck somewhere around 10-11wpm and it feels like a wall. when i first started it felt like progress was happening pretty fast, went from basically nothing to copying around 5wpm in maybe 3 weeks which felt great. but now its like... i can hear individual letters fine but the moment a word comes at me faster than 12wpm my brain just locks up and i miss the next two letters trying to process the first one. im using the Koch method mostly, been doing about 20-30 minutes a day with lcwo.net. someone told me i should just crank the speed up to like 20wpm and suffer through it and eventually my brain rewires itself. is that actually true or is it one of those things that sounds good in theory. i dont want to build bad habits if thats even a thing with cw. also curious how long it actually took people here to get comfortable at 20wpm. not looking for a magic answer just want to know if 4 months in at 10wpm is totally normal or if im doing something wrong

yeah the real activations are a whole different animal, you nailed it. i remember my first one was a winter storm back in 2019 and i was completely unprepared mentally even though i thought i wasnt. the ICS stuff is so important and honestly most new ARES members underestimate it. some people join thinking its all about the radio stuff but half the job is just knowing how to fit into an incident command structure without being in the way. glad it went well for you. and seriously the go bag thing - i tell everyone in our local group to pack like you're going to be there 12 hours minimum with zero support. snacks, a phone charger, maybe a small folding chair if you're doing a fixed post, layers of clothing. sounds like overkill until its not.

so ive been messing with my audio chain for the past few weeks trying to get cleaner SSB transmit and honestly some of this stuff online is wildly contradictory so figured id ask here where people actually know what theyre doing my setup is an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 through a small outboard preamp i built, running into the rear mic jack. on receive people tell me i sound fine but occasionally someone will say im a bit boomy or that theres some low end rumble, which i suspect is either the preamp gain staging or maybe the mic placement since the PR-40 is pretty sensitive to proximity effect if youre close to it the 7300 has the built in EQ and i've been playing with the tx monitor to try and dial things in but honestly monitoring yourself through the rig is kind of a pain because of the slight delay messing with your cadence when you talk. ive tried backing off the bass on the parametric EQ a bit and rolling off below maybe 150hz or so which seems to help but im not confident im doing it right without a proper way to see what im actually transmitting anybody have a workflow for this that actually works? like do you just have a buddy on the other end give you reports or is there a better way to actually see your tx audio. i know some guys use a second receiver to monitor their own signal but that seems like a lot of setup just to get decent audio

i just passed mine like two months ago so this is fresh. i used hamstudy and just drilled the pool but i did look up the actual explanations for stuff i kept getting wrong instead of just memorizing the answer. the filter shape factor questions and the op-amp stuff i had to actually read about because i could not get them to stick otherwise the privileges are nice but tbh i went for it mostly because i wanted to be done with licensing forever lol. full privileges feels good even if i dont use all of it

dont stress about the math, the technician exam is really not that bad. i was in the same boat a couple years ago, zero electronics background, just studied using the HamStudy website for like two or three weeks and passed first try. the question pool is public so youre basically just memorizing answers to a fixed set of questions, which sounds like cheating but thats just how it works. there are 35 questions on the actual test and you need 26 right to pass. some of the radio wave propagation and band stuff felt random at first but it clicks after a bit of reading. gordon west makes a study book thats pretty popular too if you like having an actual physical thing to read through. once you pass tech you can get on most of the fun stuff, vhf uhf repeaters, talk to people locally, some satellite stuff even. general opens up the hf bands which is where you start working other countries and stuff but thats a whole other conversation

haha the shaky hands thing is real, happened to me too. welcome to the hobby

so ive been thinking about this for a while and finally started messing around with it last weekend. basically i have a 4-port antenna switch out in the shack and im tired of walking over to flip it manually every time i change bands. figured an arduino could handle reading the band data output from my radio and switching the relays automatically. the radio puts out BCD band data on a DB9 connector, ive already confirmed the voltage levels are TTL compatible so that parts straightforward. my plan is to use a Mega since i have one sitting around, read the BCD lines, decode the band, and fire the appropriate relay through a ULN2803 driver board i pulled off an old project. the relays are 12v so thats fine, just need to level shift the 5v logic side if im driving anything directly. what im not sure about is whether anyone has done something similar and run into weird timing issues with the band data. my radio apparently has a brief glitch on the BCD lines during band changes and i dont want the arduino catching it mid-transition and switching to the wrong antenna for half a second. thinking i need to debounce in software but honestly havent thought it through completely yet. anyone dealt with this or have a sketch i could look at as a starting point?

yeah this trips a lot of people up when they first upgrade. so the actual FCC allocations are what you legally have to follow — the ARRL band plan is more of a suggested gentlemens agreement thing to avoid interference between different modes. for 40m as a general, you have phone privileges from 7.175 up to 7.300 MHz, and then theres also a chunk down lower for CW and digital. the 7.125 to 7.175 part is actually extra class only for phone so thats the bit you want to stay above for SSB unless you have your extra. the band edge thing is a real concern too — your transmitted signal isnt just a single frequency, it has sidebands, so if you tune right to 7.300 and youre running USB your actual signal is spreading above that which is outside the allocation. most people say stay at least 3 or 4 kHz inside the edge to be safe depending on how wide your audio is. some rigs will actually let you transmit outside the band if youre not careful so worth double checking.

so we have this county-level exercise coming up and im trying to figure out the best way to power everything without relying on shore power. the EOC wants us to demo a fully independent setup for at least 6 hours of sustained ops, maybe longer if they extend the scenario. right now my plan is to run my IC-7300 and a small laptop for logging off a 100ah lithium battery with a 30a power supply fed from a Honda eu2200i. the generator is quiet enough that it wont drive people crazy inside but im second guessing whether i even need it if the battery can carry the load by itself. on the antenna side im thinking a linked dipole up maybe 25 feet on a fiberglass mast, probably targeting 40 and 80 for local nets and 20 if we need any regional traffic. the site is a fairgrounds parking lot so no trees to work with which is why im going the mast route. my real question is — is it worth lugging the honda just to keep the battery topped off, or can i run purely off battery and just swap in a second pack if needed. the 7300 draws around 20a on transmit but were mostly going to be net control so a lot of receive time. anybody done extended field ops like this and have a feel for realistic battery consumption with that kind of duty cycle.

yeah i was in the same boat when i upgraded. what helped me was just downloading the ARRL band plan pdf and keeping it next to the radio for a while. after a few weeks of actually operating you kinda just absorb where things are without having to look it up constantly. one thing nobody told me that i wish they had -- on 40 meters especially, a lot of the activity shifts depending on the time of day and what propagation is doing, so the spots where people are hanging out change pretty dramatically from afternoon to evening. took me a while to realize i was tuning around at the wrong times and wondering why the band sounded dead

so ive been noticing 10m and 15m doing some really strange things the past couple weeks. like some days i can hear europe just fine in the morning, decent signals, worked a few italians and a german station without much trouble. then other days its completely dead, like the band doesnt even exist. im running about 100w into a dipole up maybe 30 feet so nothing fancy. checked the solar flux index a few times and it was bouncing around between like 140 and 180 which i thought was pretty good for this part of the cycle? but then i look at the K index and its been all over the place. is that whats causing the inconsistency or am i missing something. ive only been licensed about 8 months so still trying to wrap my head around how all this actually works in practice vs what i read in the books