Michael Miller90

so ive had this thing for about three weeks now coming from an old FT-450D that served me well for years but was starting to show its age. first thing i noticed was just how good the waterfall display is on the 7300, like i knew it had one obviously but seeing it in person is a whole different thing. spent probably two hours just watching signals scroll by before i even made a contact lol. the receiver feels noticeably cleaner to me, especially on 40m which is where i spend most of my time. the 450D always had this kind of mushy feeling when the band got busy but the 7300 handles it a lot better. roofing filter makes a real difference when theres a big signal two kHz away. one thing thats bugging me though is the menu system. i know everyone says you get used to it but its genuinely kind of a mess? like some settings are three layers deep and i cant figure out the logic of why certain things are grouped together. coming from yaesu the icom layout just feels backwards to me. anyway overall im happy with it. running it into a g5rv through an ldk tuner and its been working pretty well. just wanted to share in case anyone else is on the fence about making a similar jump.

so ive been chasing DX seriously for about three years now and the pileup thing still gets me sometimes. like i know the basics, listen to where the DX station is actually coming back, work split obviously, dont call on the DX's frequency (seen people do this on 40m last week and it was painful to listen to), all that stuff. but there are days where i just cannot crack a pileup no matter what i do and then other days i get through on the first or second call with the same setup. my current rig is an IC-7300 into a pretty decent 3-el yagi at about 40 feet, running 100w since i dont have an amp yet. i know barefoot 100w is going to hurt me in a serious pileup but i feel like technique should count for more than it seems to. the timing thing is what i cant fully figure out — like listening to the rythm of how the DX op is working the pile and then timing your call to land right when they say QRZ or finish a QSO. some guys seem to have this dialed in perfectly and i cant figure out how they develop that feel. also curious if anyone has thoughts on tail-ending, whether its actually effective or just annoying. i've had mixed results and honestly cant tell if the times it worked were just luck.

CQ WW is a blast but it can be pretty overwhelming your first time because the bands just get absolutely wall to wall with signals, especially on 20 and 40. honestly for a first contest with a modest station i might suggest starting with something like the state QSO parties — they're lower pressure, shorter, and you'll actually get responses without needing a big antenna. that said dont let me talk you out of CQ WW either, even working a handful of stations is satisfying. your attic dipole will work, maybe not great for the rare DX but you'll make contacts for sure. just be patient and search and pounce instead of running a frequency — with 100w and an attic antenna you probably wont hold a run frequency for long in a big pileup situation. SOTA is definitely its own thing, not really a contest per se, more of an award program where people hike up summits and activate them. some folks chase SOTA contacts during contest weekends though and it gets a little complicated with log cross-referencing but thats getting ahead of yourself

Welcome to WWFF, its a great program and honestly the nature reserve aspect makes it feel more meaningful than just chasing points if you ask me. To answer your logging question -- ADIF is ADIF pretty much, so whatever you export from HAMRS should be uploadable to the wwff.world logbook. Just double check you have the reference number in there, i think the field is SIG and SIG_INFO if youre doing it manually but HAMRS might handle it automatically if you tag it right in the app. Worth checking before you head out rather than trying to fix 44 entries after the fact. As for hunters, you dont need to announce anything special, just spot yourself on the WWFF spotter or POTA if the reference is also a park (some are dual listed) and people will find you. Most WWFF hunters are also POTA folks so theres a lot of overlap. 40m SSB on a weekend morning is usually your best bet, start around 7.270 or so and work up from there depending on whats clear. You'll be fine, 44 is very doable in a couple hours if propagation cooperates.

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly just scanning trunked systems locally and poking around the HF bands with the direct sampling mode. it works, dont get me wrong, but the HF performance is pretty underwhelming and i keep reading that the direct sampling hack is kind of a bandaid compared to a real HF-capable receiver. been looking at the SDRplay RSP1B which is like $110 or so and supposedly has way better dynamic range and proper HF coverage without needing an upconverter. has anyone actually done a side by side? im wondering if the difference is noticeable enough to justify it or if i should just grab a SpyVerter and call it a day. also running SDR# on windows 10 and the RSP1 apparently needs SDRuno which ive heard mixed things about. does it play nice with SDR# or HDSDR or is it locked into their software

yeah what he said. also just a practical thing -- make sure your go-bag is actually ready a few days before, not the morning of. i showed up to my second drill (learned from the first one) with fresh batteries, my ICS forms printed out, extra pens, and a copy of our local ARES plan and it just made everything so much less stressful. the radio stuff you can figure out on the fly but scrambling for a pen when someone's trying to hand you a message form is not fun lol

omg yes i saw the same thing tuesday, i'm up in michigan and had stations popping up from texas and louisiana that i've never seen before on 6m. i'm still pretty new to all this, only got my general like 8 months ago, so this was honestly my first real Es opening on HF/low VHF and i had no idea what i was doing at first. just kept clicking and clicking and somehow logged like 6 contacts before the band dropped. super cool experience even if i have no idea what half the grid squares mean yet lol

Welcome to the hobby, dont stress too much about the baofeng thing, we all started somewhere. So the 100.0 in the directory is almost certainly the tone you need to transmit to access the repeater — that's called the encode tone. You program that on the transmit side so the repeater's controller knows your signal is intentional and not just noise. Most repeaters dont require you to set a decode tone on your radio (that would filter what you hear) so just set encode to 100.0 and you should be good. As for etiquette — the pause thing you noticed is people listening to make sure the repeater is clear before they start a full conversation. Good habit. When you first get on, just key up, give your callsign, and say something like "testing" or "is the repeater open" and wait a sec. If someone comes back to you, great. Also kerchunking the repeater (just keying up with no ID) is generally frowned upon even if youre just testing, so always id yourself. You'll get the hang of it fast.

honestly this depends so much on your ground and how high that dipole actually is. 25 feet on 40m is pretty low, which means you're getting kind of a compromise — not super low angle, not super high angle, kinda middle of the road. a vertical with a decent radial field, like 16-32 radials minimum, will almost certainly outperform it for DX just because of the radiation angle. but and this is a big but, verticals hear all the noise too. your dipole might actually have a better signal to noise ratio depending on your local rf environment. i switched from a dipole to a homebrew quarter wave vertical with 32 radials a few years back and dx improved noticeably but so did the noise. ended up adding a receive loop for listening which kind of defeats the simplicity of the whole thing. if you do go vertical dont skimp on radials, thats where most people mess up and then wonder why it doesnt work.

im in basically the same boat lol, been studying for general for like 6 weeks now. the math scared me too but honestly most of it is just ohms law and once you get the pattern it clicks. there are only a handful of actual calculation questions anyway so even if you mess those up youve got wiggle room. one thing that helped me was watching some of the ham radio crash course videos on youtube while i was doing dishes or whatever, just kind of background learning. i passed last month and i will say the actual exam felt easier than the hard practice tests which was a relief. good luck, the HF bands are worth it, i made my first 40m contact the week after i got my upgrade and it was way more satisfying than i expected

oh man the QCX mini is a completely different animal compared to the Rockmite, not knocking the Rockmite at all it's a classic but the QCX has a proper DSP-style audio filter and the selectivity is honestly impressive for what you pay. I run mine on a 3S lipo that i pulled out of an old RC car and get several hours of operating easy since the receiver draws almost nothing when youre just listening. the 700 mile QSO on 500mW — yeah it gets you doesnt it. thats the whole thing with QRP, every contact feels like you actually earned it. I've been doing SOTA activations with a QCX and an end fed for about two years now and i almost never bother bringing my bigger rig anymore. just not as fun somehow. one thing i'd say on the battery question — worth getting a small USB power meter inline so you know exactly what current draw youre pulling. some of those cheap lithium packs sag more than you'd expect under load and knowing your actual mAh consumption helps you plan activations a lot better. nothing worse than running out of juice on a summit.

Field Day is honestly the best starting point for someone in your situation, no question. its not really a contest in the competitive sense for most clubs — its more of a public event that happens to have scoring. find a local club doing a Field Day operation and just show up and help. youll get a feel for contest-style operating without any of the pressure of running your own station. most clubs are thrilled to have extra hands and they'll walk you right through the exchange. as for SOTA, yeah its totally different from contesting. its an awards program and the points come from activating summits and chasing other peoples activations. but theres a ton of community around it and the portable operating aspect is really satisfying once you get into it. i did my first activation last summer with just a 40m dipole strung between two hiking poles and a little KX2, worked about a dozen stations in 20 minutes. not hard at all once you do it once. for logging during actual contests i'd suggest N1MM+ if youre on windows. there's a learning curve but once you have it set up it handles the exchange automatically and keeps you from making the kind of mistakes you were worried about. dont be afraid to just jump in on CW WW next time — even if your log has a few dupes or messed up exchanges nobody is going to come after you, the big contesters honestly dont care

LM386 builds are like 80% dealing with that exact hum lol. I went through the same thing last year on a 20m receiver. ended up being my audio leads were too long and basically acting as an antenna inside the chassis. shortening them and twisting the pair together fixed most of it. also make sure you've got that 250uf cap on the output to speaker or whatever you're feeding into, sometimes people leave that out thinking it doesn't matter.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general class) and ive been doing a lot of HF lately, mostly on 40 and 20 meters. people keep talking about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly i kind of have a general idea what they are but not really sure which one makes sense to start working toward or if i should even worry about it yet. from what i understand DXCC is like 100 countries confirmed, WAS is all 50 states, and WAZ is zones? but i dont really get what zones means in this context. like geographic zones? and do you have to confirm everything with QSL cards or can you use that lotw thing everyone mentions. my elmer keeps saying get on lotw but i havent set it up yet which i know i know. anyway just curious what other people started with and if theres like a natural order to go after these or if it doesnt matter. i already have like 30-something countries in my log and maybe 35 states so maybe im closer than i think to something

nice, what radio did you end up using? ive been going back and forth on whether the KX2 is worth it over just bringing my FT-818 which i already own lol

oh man I was totally the same way when i first started checking into nets, felt kinda awkward just saying my callsign and signal report and then that was it lol. but yeah it grows on you. there's an HF net i stumbled into a few months ago on 40m that runs sunday mornings and its way more relaxed, people actually have conversations instead of just rapid fire check-ins. might be worth looking into once you get your general if you're not there already.

yeah FO-29 transponder has been flaky for a while now. i actually gave up on it and moved over to SO-50 for FM just to get some satellite contacts in the log while i sort out my linear transponder technique. not the same thing i know but at least i know something is coming back at me when i transmit. the inverting transponder thing tripped me up too when i started. the way i think about it is if you tune up on the uplink your signal moves down in the downlink passband, so when youre hunting for yourself you gotta tune the opposite direction than feels natural. took me an embarrassingly long time to internalize that

so we've got a county-wide ARES exercise coming up in about 5 weeks and i'm trying to figure out the best way to handle power for our main HF station at the EOC staging area. we're basically going to be running an IC-7300 plus a laptop for logging and maybe a second VHF/UHF radio for local tactical stuff. probably 8-10 hours of operation, not continuous TX obviously but we do get into some pretty sustained nets during these things. my question is really about whether to bring a generator or just go heavy on battery. i've got a 30ah lithium pack and i can borrow another one that's similar so maybe 60ah total. at 100w output on HF the 7300 pulls like 20-22 amps transmitting and maybe 2-3 amps on receive so if we're doing a typical 20-25% duty cycle over the day it might work out. but then the laptop adds another couple amps and honestly these exercises always run longer than planned. the other option is our club has a Honda EU2200i that's whisper quiet and would handle everything no problem. but dragging a generator to an EOC parking lot feels a little overkill and we'd need fuel, exhaust considerations, all that. i know some guys just run inverter gens for exactly this reason but i dunno. also separately — anyone have thoughts on portable HF antennas for this kind of setup? we'll probably have a few hours to get set up before the exercise starts. i was thinking either a simple EFHW for 40/80 or maybe just throwing up a dipole. space isn't super constrained, it's a big parking area with some trees around the perimeter.

Consider DX Data as a free alternative - it aggregates spots from DXSpider, RBN, and PSK Reporter with advanced filtering. Sometimes redundancy helps when one service has issues. I run multiple cluster connections during major contests just to be safe.

im in pretty much the same boat, got my general in the spring and just started messing with CW a few weeks ago. what helped me a lot was just running the keyer into a practice oscillator and not even worrying about getting on the air yet. theres a free program called Just Learn Morse Code or you can use the LCWO website, i use that one almost every day now even just for like 10 minutes. the sending will come with time i think but my receiving is honestly worse than my sending lol so maybe focus on that too

hearing your own downlink for the first time is genuinely one of the cooler moments in this hobby imo. thats how it grabs you. i still get a little kick out of it even after doing this for a few years one thing i'd add on top of what the other guy said — when you're starting out dont chase perfect doppler correction every second, the passband on AO-7 mode B is maybe 40khz wide and the doppler rate mid-pass isn't so fast that you'll lose yourself immediately. let Gpredict handle the coarse tuning and just do small manual corrections on your downlink rx. once you've got a few passes under your belt the muscle memory develops and you stop thinking about it so much. the first few times are always a bit chaotic

Looking for some real-world feedback on elevated vs ground-level radial systems for a 33-foot vertical on 40m. I've been running this setup for 6 months with four quarter-wave radials buried 6 inches down, and while it plays well on 40m and upper bands via loading coils, I'm curious about performance improvements with elevated radials. The theory suggests that a generous radial system can perform as well as a dipole, especially for DX work with low radiation angles. The radials represent half of the antenna's performance, essentially acting as the other half of a dipole turned 90 degrees. Anyone made the switch from ground to elevated radials and noticed significant changes in signal reports or noise floor?

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and mostly do HF stuff, some 2m SSB when the band opens up, but ive always been kind of obsessed with the idea of moonbounce. like bouncing a signal off the actual moon is just insane to me and i want to try it before i get too old to build all the hardware lol the problem is every time i start reading about it i get completely overwhelmed. some guys say you need a massive array and a kilowatt minimum, other guys are talking about doing JT65 contacts with a single yagi and like 100 watts. i dont know who to believe. i have a decent 2m setup already — ic-9700, a pair of M2 2M5WL yagis stacked, and a good preamp at the feedline. az/el rotor is already on the list because i know i need that mainly wondering if anyone here has actually done EME with modest gear and what kind of results you got. is it worth building toward or is it one of those things where you really do need the big guns to work anyone meaningful

dont bother with the cap mod imo, the 7300 audio is already pretty good out of the box and you can do a lot with software processing before you ever need to crack it open. the TCXO is a different story tho, legit improvement if you do any digital modes at all. just be careful with the ribbon cables when you open it up, theres one near the front panel that people snag and thats a bad day

im in basically the same boat, upgraded to general like 6 months ago. what i did was find this one chart on the fcc website that color codes everything by license class and it made way more sense than the actual text of part 97. just search like fcc amateur radio band chart and it should come up. the pdf version is cleaner than trying to read the actual regulation text imo