Gary Mitchell

I did the MARS mod on mine about a year ago, no issues. One thing I'll throw out there — if you ever feel like going deeper, there's a handful of guys on one of the SDR forums who've done work on the RF board to squeeze a bit more clean output on certain bands but honestly that starts getting into territory where you can really mess something up if you're not careful with a soldering iron. I bricked a perfectly good HT once doing something way simpler than that so I tend to respect my limits these days. The menu-level stuff and the jumper mods are pretty low risk though, sounds like you did it right.

i just export as ADIF from HAMRS and upload that directly to the wwff logger, works fine for me. sometimes the field names dont map perfectly and you have to double check that the reference number got embedded correctly in the ADIF but once you get that sorted its pretty painless. i usually add the KFF number manually in HAMRS under the comment or SIG fields before i export, theres probably a better way but that works

haha yeah the multi-tab chaos is pretty much a rite of passage. what i ended up doing was switching to DX Spider via telnet through Log4OM which pulls spots right into the logbook so i can see if i need a country without flipping to QRZ every 30 seconds. Log4OM has a built in lookup that ties to QRZ if you have a subscription so it saves a ton of time. DXwatch is great for a quick visual overview but youre right that the delay can be annoying especially when somethings pileup worthy and every second counts. the AR-Cluster network is still alive and well actually, a lot of serious DXers still connect directly because you get spots slightly faster than the web aggregators and you can filter by your own skimmer preferences. worth messing with if you havent tried it. just telnet into a local node and poke around.

so ive been a tech for about 2 years now and i finally decided to just go for it and upgrade to general. bought the gordon west book and been going through it but honestly some of this stuff is... a lot. the electrical theory stuff i kind of remember from school but propagation and all the band plan stuff is new to me and i feel like there's just so much to memorize my actual question is like, what should i actually focus on vs what can i kind of skim. i know some people say just do the question pool over and over and youll be fine but that feels like cheating somehow? also is there stuff on the exam that trips people up that isnt obvious from just reading the book. i've heard the math questions for impedance and stuff can be rough if youre not expecting them also side question -- once i actually get the general ticket what HF stuff can i realistically do without spending a ton on gear right away, i have a basic HF rig already (borrowed from a club friend) so i'm not starting totally from scratch

yeah that VHF module on the 857 is basically its own little world in there, should be totally isolated from what you did with the HF finals. but i'd definitely scope the drive signal going into it first before you assume the module is bad. there's a little coax jumper that connects the VHF driver board to that module and i've seen those get dislodged or even cracked at the connector when people are working nearby. easy to miss visually. also worth checking is whether you bumped the VHF ALC line during the job. theres a multi-pin connector somewhere in that area and if one of the ALC pins is floating youll get exactly what you're describing — the radio thinks its outputting but nothing actually comes out. the service manual has the test points laid out pretty well, page 63 or somewhere around there if i remember right. dont just assume the module is dead until you confirm drive is actually reaching it.

haha that first key-up nervousness is so real, i remeber sitting there with my finger on the PTT for like 20 minutes before i finally just said my callsign. Gary sounds like a good elmer. welcome to the hobby man, it just gets easier from here, before long youll be the one answering the nervous new guys on the repeater

you'll be fine, honestly. 40m is almost never dead during the day and if your alert is on SOTAwatch the chasers WILL find you. like there's a whole community of people just sitting at home waiting for alerts to pop up, they call themselves chasers for a reason haha. just pick a frequency that sounds clear, listen for a bit, then call CQ SOTA and give your summit reference clearly. W4T/SU-017 is easy to say so thats good. some guys mumble the reference and the chasers have to ask three times. oh and dont stress about the 4 contacts minimum, most activations i've done i had 10+ in the log before i even started to worry. the hard ones are the obscure summits with low point values that nobody cares about, yours should have decent activity. take a notepad for paper logging as backup in case your phone dies, trust me on that one. good luck and post how it went

for that kind of runtime and load honestly just bring the generator. i know it seems like overkill but ive done the math on lithium packs for all-day ops more times than i can count and you almost always end up scrambling by hour 6. 60ah sounds like a lot until the duty cycle creeps up during a busy net or someone decides to run more gear than planned. the EU2200i is a great choice too, those things are dead quiet and the THD is low enough that the 7300 doesnt care at all — no weird noise issues like you sometimes get with cheaper inverter gens. for the antenna i'd go EFHW if you have a decent 9:1 or 49:1 unun and a way to get the far end up in those trees. easier to deploy solo than a dipole usually, especially if you're also trying to set up the rest of the station. 40m half wave is around 66 feet so you've got options for angles depending on what trees are available. just watch your feedline routing near the generator if you go that route, keep some separation.

the decode sensitivity thing is real — JS8Call isnt as optimized as FT8 because its doing more work essentially, the protocol has to handle free-form text instead of a fixed message structure so yeah you give up some dB of margin. i think ive seen numbers thrown around like 3-4dB worse than FT8 but dont quote me on that. for what its worth i run it on 40m mostly and theres a small but pretty consistent group of people on there, especially in the evenings. 7.078 is the usual spot. its not wall to wall signals like FT8 but the conversations are actually real which for me justifies the lower activity. i had a 20 minute back and forth with a guy in Finland last winter about antenna matching which would literally be impossible on FT8. for your decode issues try bumping the audio level down a bit if you havent already. overdriving the input even slightly seems to trash the decodes way more on JS8Call than WSJT-X in my experience. might not be your issue but worth checking before you dig deeper

the plateau around 12-13 is super common, almost everyone hits it, so dont get discouraged. what you're describing with the panic spiral is totally normal too — you miss one character, your brain tries to figure out what it was, and by then youve missed three more. the fix for that is honestly just learning to let characters go. seriously, if you miss one just move on. your brain will fill in a lot from context once you get used to doing that. the other thing I'd suggest is bump your training speed up higher than you want to copy, like set it to 18 or 20wpm even if you can only get maybe half of it. this is the Farnsworth trick but in reverse kind of — train your ear to hear the characters at high speed even if you cant copy full text yet. after a few weeks of that, 15wpm starts to feel slow. also yeah get on the air, even just to listen. W1AW sends code practice at multiple speeds and thats free, i used that a lot around where you are.

As someone who just upgraded to General, this is incredible timing. 20m has been my go-to band for learning, but now I'm starting to explore 15m and 12m. The digital modes are really helping me understand propagation patterns.

congrats on the first build man, that cold solder joint thing is basically a rite of passage. i think ive reflowed half my projects at least once before they started working right. the QCX mini is genuinely excellent for what it is. ive run mine on a 3s lipo with a small buck converter keeping it around 9v and the efficiency is pretty impressive, you can get a whole afternoon of POTA activations out of a reasonably small pack. the built in keyer and filtering is so much better than a pixie that its kind of not a fair comparison. for hiking its really hard to beat the size to capability ratio. only thing i'd say is the display can be a little hard to read in bright sunlight but thats minor. if you want to go even lighter look into the uBITX v6 once you're comfortable building more complex stuff, but for now i think the QCX mini would make you really happy and its not hard to put together at all.

so i finally got around to building a proper dipole instead of just using the end fed wire ive had strung up forever. cut it for 40m using the standard 468/f formula, legs came out to about 33.2 feet each, center insulator is just a piece of PVC i drilled and threaded with some stainless hardware, fed with RG-8X down to the shack. problem is the SWR at the calculated resonant freq is like 2.1:1 which i guess isnt terrible but i expected closer to 1.5 or so, and it gets worse the further up the band i go which i know is normal but the whole curve seems shifted up in frequency by like 30-40 kHz from where i expected it. trimmed a little off each leg thinking i was long, but that just made it worse. antenna is at about 25 feet at the center, slopes down on both ends to about 10 feet, not a flat-top. im wondering if the inverted-v configuration is throwing off my numbers since most of the calculators assume a flat dipole also the feedpoint impedance — is 2.1:1 just what you get with an inverted-v because the impedance drops below 50 ohms? i read somewhere the legs being angled down lowers the feedpoint Z but i cant find a consistent answer on how much

ok so i passed my technician exam like two months ago and ive been trying to figure out exactly what im allowed to do. i understand i have HF privileges on 10 meters and some other bands but every time i try to read Part 97 directly my eyes kind of glaze over because its written in such legal language. like i get the basic idea but the details trip me up. specifically im confused about things like third party traffic, what counts as broadcasting, and whether i can like talk to a friend who has a CB radio or a GMRS radio if im on a linked repeater or something. also somebody at a hamfest told me technicians cant use certain digital modes on HF but i cant find where exactly that says that. is there a plain english version of all this somewhere or does everyone just kind of learn the rules as they go

Colin, MM0OPX's video "Best Ferrite Core For a 100w End Fed Half Wave Antenna" covers this extensively. The efficiency difference is measurable - about 0.3dB less loss with the 2643251002. Worth the upgrade cost for serious portable ops.

so this has been driving me nuts for about three weeks now. my IC-7300 will just randomly lose a ton of receive sensitivity on 40m, sometimes 80m too but mostly 40. it'll be fine for an hour, then the noise floor just drops way down and signals that were S7 are barely tickling the meter. if i go to 20m or 15m it seems totally fine which makes me think its not a preamp issue but what do i know. first thing i did was swap coax thinking maybe a connector was arcing or something, no change. checked the antenna switch, reseated all the cables inside the shack, even ran a temporary feedline directly to the radio bypassing my usual setup. still happens. the weird part is it usually comes back on its own after maybe 20-30 minutes, sometimes just cycling the band and coming back fixes it for a while. i did a factory reset last week hoping it was some weird software thing, no help. the radio is about 4 years old and has maybe 400 hours on it, not a ton. has anyone seen this behavior before or have any idea where i should even start looking? i dont really want to ship it to icom unless i have to.

oh nice, which state forest was it if you dont mind me asking? im always looking for new KFF references in the northeast that havent been activated much. some of those smaller state forests barely ever show up in the logs and hunters go nuts for a rare one

i had the exact same question like a month ago and someone pointed me to the DX Maps website and also the Reverse Beacon Network, those two together with pskreporter give you a much better real time picture of whats actually open vs whats just noise. the other thing i learned is that 10m openings can be super patchy and short, like literally a 20 minute window where europe is workable and then its gone. so sometimes you just miss it by bad timing even if the conditions are technically there.

so ive been running APRS for a few months now with a TM-D710G and at first it seemed fine but lately im getting almost nothing on aprs.fi when i check my station. i can hear packets coming in all day long, the radio is decoding them, but my own beacons just seem to disappear into the void. i'm in a semi-rural area, not like deep mountains or anything, probably 15-20 miles from the nearest igate i think. my path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was the standard thing to do. beacon rate is every 2 minutes which seems reasonable. the TNC built into the 710 is doing all the encoding. i dont have a separate TNC or anything. i did mess around with the beacon text a couple weeks ago adding my grid square but i cant imagine that broke anything. anyone run into this before? is there something obvious im missing or should i just accept that coverage is spotty out here

the panic thing when you miss a character -- yeah that never fully goes away but it does get way better. honestly the biggest thing that helped me was just forcing myself to let go of missed letters. like mentally just put a dot or a question mark in your head and keep moving. the word usually makes sense from context anyway and thats kind of the whole point of head copying, your brain fills in gaps way better than you'd think once you trust it. as for the farnsworth thing, i'd say bump it up. i kept my character speed at 20 the whole time and just slowly raised the effective speed from like 8 up. took me probably 8 or 9 months total to feel genuinely comfortable ragchewing around 18-20wpm but i wasnt doing it every single day either. some guys get there faster. the ones who do usually just throw themselves on the air early, like way before they feel ready, and get beat up a little and it works. W1AW practice broadcasts are good too if you havent tried those, real on air signals just hit different than any app

Paper QSL direct method has the highest success rate at 63% but costs more. The QSL bureau provides a very cost effective way of sending cards though it takes longer. For DXCC I'd recommend LoTW for the electronic confirmations and paper direct for the special ones you really want.

Yeah part 97 is rough to read if you're not used to legal writing. The ARRL publishes a kind of plain-english breakdown of the rules and it's way more readable, might be worth grabbing that or just reading through the operating manual they put out. For general class on 40m you're looking at 7.175 to 7.300 for phone which includes SSB, and yeah there is a 200 watt PEP limit on some segments of 40 and 75/80 meters depending on where you are — that one's actually in the rules, not just convention. I forget the exact section off the top of my head but it has to do with interference concerns with stations in other parts of the world using those same frequencies. The band plan on the ARRL website lays it out pretty clearly and matches up with what part 97 actually says, so using both together helps a lot when youre trying to figure out what goes where.

okay so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately since i just got my general and honestly i feel like people are speaking a completely different language half the time. i know QSL means like... confirm? and QTH is location i think but then theres all these other ones i keep hearing and i have no idea. someone said QRM to me the other day and i just said yeah thanks lol. also what about the number things like 73 and 88, my elmer mentioned those but didnt really explain them. is there a good way to just learn all this or do people just pick it up over time

CWops CW Academy combines live instruction with recommended practice tools for a well-rounded experience. Long Island CW Club conducts video conference classes at various skill levels - students can usually QSO within 3 months. Nothing beats human mentoring for motivation and course correction when you hit plateaus.

The Koch method with Farnsworth timing is the gold standard for good reason. Using 13 WPM characters with 5 WPM spacing helps train your ear to proper sound cadences while keeping overall pace manageable for beginners. Most successful training programs combine both methods.