Gary Mitchell

did the same mod on mine about a year ago, had no issues and didnt notice any difference in normal ham band operation. the audio thing is almost certainly in your head — the jumper just gates the tx range, its not in the signal path at all. unless you bumped something else while you were in there which is always possible. if youre looking for other things to do while you have it open, some people swap the internal fan for a quieter one since the stock fan can be a little noisy during long sessions. not a performance thing really but quality of life improvement. also worth checking your electrolytic caps if the radio is a few years old, mine had one that looked a bit domed already and it wasnt even that old.

yeah the 10-12wpm plateau is super common, almost everyone hits it. what worked for me was honestly kinda counterintuitive — i actually bumped my practice speed UP to like 18-20wpm even though i couldnt copy it, and just let myself miss stuff. the idea is your brain starts to hear the characters as sounds instead of counting dits and dahs. if you slow it down too much you kinda slip back into counting mode without realizing it. also the word space thing matters a lot. on lcwo you can set the character speed high but the word spacing wide so the overall pace feels manageable. its called farnsworth spacing i think. anyway that helped me a ton. took maybe another couple months after that before i felt comfortable around 15wpm and now im sitting around 18-20 on a good day copying ragchews. just dont give up, that wall is real but its not permanent

welcome to the hobby, and yeah this stuff is genuinely confusing at first so don't feel bad about it. short answer is you probably want LoTW set up sooner rather than later even if awards seem far off right now. the reason is that the contacts you're making right now get logged in LoTW and confirmed by the other station — but only if both of you have uploaded. if you wait two years to set it up you'll have lost all those confirmations unless the other guy kept his logs too. getting the TQSL certificate sorted is a bit of a pain the first time but once it's done it's basically automatic. eQSL is way easier to set up and a lot of people do use it, but it's not accepted for DXCC or most of the ARRL awards so keep that in mind. it's good for some other awards and some people just like the digital card aspect of it. paper cards are still a thing and honestly there's something nice about getting one in the mail from some dx station. the bureau through ARRL is cheap but slow, direct mail is faster but you're paying postage plus the IRC thing gets complicated for international. if i had to prioritize i'd say get LoTW going first, then eQSL is easy enough to add, and start doing paper cards when you work somewhere interesting or someone specifically requests one.

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still feel weird about phonetics. like i know the NATO ones, alpha bravo charlie etc, but sometimes on the air people just say the actual letter and sometimes they spell stuff out with phonetics and i cant figure out when youre supposed to do which one. is there like a rule or do you just feel it out also i heard someone use "America" instead of "Alpha" for A the other day and that threw me off completely. is that a thing people do or was that guy just making stuff up

the timing thing caught me off guard too when i first started, i was using the windows clock synced to internet time and thought that was good enough but it really isnt, picked up a cheap GPS receiver and fed it into a timing program and suddenly things started decoding way better. that was like a year ago and still the best $30 i spent on this hobby probably. also dont overlook your feedline situation, all that gain from a 4x array doesnt mean much if youre losing 2-3dB in lossy coax between the array and the shack. most serious EME ops run the preamp right at the antenna, like a good low noise preamp mounted on the boom, and then either hardline or LMR600 or whatever down to the shack. the noise figure of that first stage really matters on receive.

RG-58 over a 12 foot run is honestly fine for VHF/UHF, you'll lose maybe half a dB compared to LMR-400 over that distance and you'd never notice it in real world use. don't tear it apart just for that. the SWR on 70cm is worth looking at though. the Tram 1185 is a decent antenna but ive seen some of them come a little off on 70cm out of the box. first thing id check is just making sure that NMO connector is threaded down all the way and there's no coax braid sneaking into the center pin area. those mobile NMO connections can be finicky when you first put them together. if the connection checks out and it's still 2.1 i honestly wouldnt lose too much sleep over it, 2.1 on UHF mobile still works fine for most local repeater work. your radio isnt gonna melt or anything.

so ive been working on DXCC for about 2 years now and my log shows i have contacts with 96 countries but when i look at my lotw credit report it only shows 89 credits. some of them i know i dont have qsl confirmations yet but there are at least 4 or 5 that show confirmed in my logging software but arent showing up in the dxcc credit matrix. is this normal? do i need to resubmit some of these or am i missing something obvious here. been trying to figure out if its a date issue or maybe some of the contacts dont meet the dxcc entity rules but honestly the whole thing is pretty confusing

honestly the General exam isnt that bad, i was dreading the electrical theory sections too but most of the questions on the actual pool are pretty repetitive once you drill them with HamStudy or something like that. i think i did maybe 3 weeks of studying, maybe 20 minutes a day on the app during lunch and i passed without too much trouble. the formulas are a little annoying but you dont have to understand them deeply to get the right answer on the test, just recognize the pattern. as for HF being worth it, i was exactly like you for two years just doing VHF and then i finally got on 40m and it completely changed the hobby for me. there is something really different about throwing a signal across the country or catching a station in europe on 20m during a good opening. you dont need a fancy station either, even a used Icom 7300 or a Yaesu FT-891 and a simple wire antenna and youre on the air. 40m is good for regional stuff especially at night, 20m is where you get the DX during the day. just get the ticket first and figure out the gear later

not exactly the same project but i built something on a pi 3 that watches band conditions and keys a little LED panel i have on my desk. used the DXcluster feed instead of wspr though. the relay floating input problem you're describing, i had that exact thing happen, drove me nuts for like two days before someone on here told me about the active-low thing. one thing i'd say is the pi zero W can get a little flaky with wifi under load if you're doing anything timing-sensitive, just something to watch out for. i ended up switching to a wired connection on mine but obviously the zero W doesnt have ethernet so thats a bit of a project in itself with a USB adapter. might just be easier to use a regular pi 3 or 4 if you have one sitting around

congrats on the first one, 12 contacts is a solid activation. yeah being spotted is kind of wild the first time it happens lol. i did my first POTA a few months ago and had almost the same feeling when the pile started. one thing i'd say is try 20m next time if conditions allow, i find i get more varied contacts and sometimes pull in some Europeans which is always cool from a summit

just took mine last month, was a tech for almost two years. i used the Gordon West book and also did the HamStudy flashcards. took me maybe 3 weeks of casual studying. the propogation questions got me a little confused at first but once you understand basically why HF works the way it does it clicks. passed with an 87 i think.

yeah what he said about the sensitivity is basically right. i messed around with JS8Call a bunch during a field day type outing last summer running it off a battery with maybe 10 watts and a vertical, got into some guys pretty reliably but nothing that made me think wow FT8 couldnt have done this too. the thing i actually liked was being able to relay messages through other stations, theres a store and forward thing baked in that could be genuinely useful for emcomm type stuff if anyone actually trained on it which they mostly dont lol PSK31 still has a soft spot in my heart btw, used to run that back when it felt like magic that you could type to someone across the country at like 5 watts. feels ancient now but its still out there

i built something similar last winter and had basically the same problem. for me it turned out to be the transformer balance more than the diodes -- i wound my own trifilar on a binocular core and i guess one of the windings was slightly off in terms of turns ratio which prevented a real deep null no matter what i did with the pot. rewound it being really careful about keeping the wire twist consistent and it got a lot better, ended up around 45dB suppression which i was happy with. might be worth checking that if you wound your own transformers.