Kevin Turner

went through almost the exact same confusion last year lol. what helped me was just remembering that YOU are always the control operator and you never stop being responsible, so if your neighbor says something on the air that violates a rule thats kind of on you. once i thought about it that way the rest of the rules made more sense as like, a framework around that idea also worth knowing for your general exam — this stuff does come up so understanding it now isnt wasted effort

had both at the same time for a while actually. the 8-bit ADC on the HackRF is a real limitation once you start doing any serious HF work, especially if you're anywhere near a strong broadcast station or have local RFI. the RSP1A just handles adjacent strong signals so much better, less IMD products showing up all over the place. on VHF and UHF the gap is smaller but on HF it really does matter in practice not just on paper the other thing nobody really talks about is the HackRF's noise figure is pretty rough compared to the RSP1A, like 25dB NF or something which is fine for strong signal stuff but for weak signal work on HF youre fighting yourself. RSP1A is much cleaner. if you dont need TX just get the RSP1A, the HackRF's transmit is also pretty dirty without filtering anyway so its not like its a great standalone TX solution either

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.

yeah self spotting is totally normal dont worry about it. i felt the same way the first couple times but literally everybody does it. the hunters are watching the spots page constantly and thats how they find you. if you try to just call CQ without spotting yourself you might sit there for 20 minutes with nothing and then give up thinking no ones around when really theyre all just waiting for a spot to show up. i use the POTA app on android and it lets you spot yourself directly which is handy. also if you havent already, look up whether your park has any bonus multipliers or if its a rare one, some parks get way more hunters than others just because people are chasing certain references. sounds like you had a good time though which is really the whole point

so ive been running SO2R for a couple years now but sweepstakes always humbles me. i feel like my rate just falls apart compared to guys running single radio. maybe im overthinking the second radio or something. my setup is a K3 and a K3S, both into a 2x2 matrix switch, antennas are a tribander at 50ft and a 40m wire yagi — nothing fancy but it works most of the time. the problem is i feel like i spend so much mental energy babysitting radio 2 that i lose my rhythm on radio 1. like i'll have a good run going on 20 and then i chase some multiplier on 40 and suddenly my CQ cadence falls apart and callers give up. is this just a skill issue that goes away with reps or is there some strategy adjustment that actually helps also curious if anyone has strong opinions on when to break a run for a mult. ive been using a rough rule of anything over 5 kHz away and i wont chase it mid-run, but that feels like it might be too conservative. sweepstakes specific answers appreciated but general SO2R tips welcome too

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

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

The ground plane is one of the most overlooked parts of mobile antenna tuning. Your vehicle's roof, trunk, or fender acts as the ground reference, and poor grounding can increase SWR and reduce efficiency. Ensure that the antenna mount makes solid electrical contact with bare metal.

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

FT8 has become the most popular mode on HF and it's very forgiving for weak signal work. Try 14.074 on 20m FT8 - you'll be amazed at what you can work with that G5RV even in the attic. Download WSJT-X and you'll be logging contacts within minutes. Great confidence builder for a new General!

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

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.

Ok so I just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but nobody ever seems to hear me. I can hear other people talking just fine but when I key up nothing happens or sometimes the repeater just doesnt respond at all. Someone at my club meeting mentioned something about CTCSS tones and I think thats my problem but im honestly not totally sure what that even means. From what I can gather its like a sub-audible tone that you have to send along with your transmission so the repeater knows to open up and let you through? I programmed what I think is the right tone (100.0 Hz) based on the repeaterbook listing but still not sure if its actually working. My radio is a Baofeng UV-5R if that matters. Is there a way to test if the tone is actually transmitting or do I just have to trust the menu setting? Also someone mentioned something called a courtesy tone and I dont even know what that is yet. Sorry if this is a dumb question, trying to learn as much as I can before I embarrass myself on the air too badly lol

Time spent calling CQ can be used to locate stations on an auxiliary receiver. Even without full SO2R, I use an old receiver with simple headphone switching to find multipliers while running. SO2R benefits include more productive use of time, less boredom during slow times, and easier multiplier moving.

yeah the doppler thing on linear transponders trips everybody up at first. the key thing people dont realize is that gpredict's rig control will move both VFOs if you set it up right, but you have to configure the satellite entry correctly — make sure you have the uplink and downlink frequencies set as the inverting transponder type, not just two separate frequencies. if gpredict thinks its a non-inverting transponder it'll move your uplink the wrong direction and you'll spend the whole pass chasing nothing. also the echo you're hearing is almost certainly your own signal coming back down, which actually means you ARE in the passband, you're just not tuned to where another station is or you're hearing your downlink slightly off. on AO-73 the transponder is pretty narrow so even a few hundred hz puts you outside where you want to be. what i do is set everything up about 10 minutes before AOS, get gpredict locked and syncing, and just do a quick beacon check on the downlink first before i even try to work anyone. the beacon is at the lower edge of the passband and gives you a reference point. once you can hear that clearly you know your downlink is working and you can start worrying about the uplink. the phased harness thing could also be an issue. if the polarity is off you'll lose like 3dB or more depending on the pass geometry. how are you checking that?

I'm ready to take the plunge into HF after getting my General license last month. Local elmers keep recommending either the Icom IC-7300 or the Yaesu FT-991A. The IC-7300 seems to be constantly recommended as an "entry level" transceiver in the $1,100 range that competes with $2,500 radios. However, the Yaesu FT-991A does 100 watts on HF and 50 watts on 2 Meters and 70 Centimeters, which could be a great option to build a shack around. The internal tuners in Icom radios will usually only match an SWR mismatch of 3:1, which has me a bit concerned about antenna limitations. What would you experienced operators recommend for someone just starting on HF?

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

Check your S-meter circuit if you have one - I found mine was loading the AGC line and causing that pumping. Also verify your IF gain isn't too high - sometimes less is more with AGC stability.

same boat as you like 6 months ago, went for it mostly because my elmer wouldnt stop bugging me lol. the exam was fine, HamStudy app just grind the practice tests until you're consistently passing and you'll be good. the theory is a little more involved than Tech but its not crazy. only thing i'll say is budget for at least a basic HF rig before you get too excited. i got my ticket and then had to wait like 3 months to actually get on the air because i wasnt ready gear-wise. kind of anticlimactic. but 40m late at night is genuinely fun once you get there, lots of ragchewing and its pretty forgiving for new HF ops

Check your IC-7300 keyer settings - sounds like you might need to adjust the weight or spacing parameters. Look for dit/dah ratio and element spacing adjustments in the CW menu. The Vibroplex paddles are excellent when properly set up.

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

yeah the Koch method is honestly the way to go, the idea is you start with just 2 characters at full speed — like 20wpm — instead of learning everything slow and then having to speed up later. your brain learns the sound as a whole thing instead of counting dits and dahs which is the trap most people fall into. i spent about 6 months counting and then had to basically unlearn all of it. LCWO dot net is free and walks you through Koch pretty well, just do like 10-15 minutes a day and dont skip ahead even when it feels slow. the jump from copy practice to actual QSOs is still rough but once you can do 10-15 words a minute solid you can at least chase the slower CW guys on 40m. patience is the main thing, theres no shortcut that actually works

So ive been running a Yaesu FT-7900R in my F-150 for about three months now and overall its great but im having a really hard time figuring out the best spot for the antenna. Right now i have a mag mount NMO on the roof kind of towards the rear and reception is decent but im getting some weird feedback or maybe its just road noise, hard to tell honestly. The radio itself is mounted under the dash which was a pain to do but looks pretty clean. My buddy told me to try a lip mount on the trunk but this is a truck so that doesnt really apply. Someone else said to drill and put a proper NMO mount on the roof which i know is the right way to do it but im a little nervous about drilling into my daily driver. Has anyone done a permanent roof mount on a newer truck? Does it affect resale or is it really as watertight as everyone says if you do it right? Also wondering if the antenna location relative to the cab is making a difference in the weird noise im hearing.

yeah what he said about a second antenna is probably the way to go. i tried to chase more gain with a longer collinear once and was kind of disappointed honestly. went from a x50 type antenna to a taller 6dB collinear and on a marginal path it didnt transform things the way i hoped. the yagi for a specific direction is just a fundamentally different tool also worth checking — is the 55 mile repeater on a good site? sometimes the issue is the repeater input antenna or the path itself and no amount of gain on your end is gonna fully solve it

so we have a county ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and im trying to figure out the best way to power everything without lugging a full generator out to the site. the site is a park pavilion with no shore power so were going to need to bring it all ourselves. our typical setup is an IC-7300 running at maybe 50-60w, a laptop for winlink, a small switch for the local net, and then a couple handhelds on the charger. been using a honda eu2200i for the past two years and it works great but its loud and the coordinator is already getting grief from the parks department about noise during events. ive been looking at lifepo4 options, something in the 100-200ah range, but i honestly dont know if thats enough to run through a full 12 hour activation without worrying about it the whole time. the 7300 at 50w is drawing what, maybe 10-12 amps on transmit? and the laptop is pulling another 3-4 maybe. if were doing a lot of traffic handling its not exactly a low duty cycle situation. also the antenna situation — right now we just throw up a resonant dipole for 40 and 80 and a vertical for vhf but getting the feedline run right at a pavilion is always a pain. anyone done something better for quick deploy field comms that doesnt take 45 minutes to set up?