Rebecca Davis

yeah the Farnsworth thing the other guy mentioned is legit, that was big for me too. one thing i'll add that nobody told me until way later -- try actually getting on the air sooner than you think you're ready. i waited forever because i didnt want to embarass myself and when i finally did my first CW QSO at like 8wpm the other guy was super patient and it was way less scary than i built it up to be. the CW community is generally pretty good about slow operators especially if you send QRS at the start. also just sending with a straight key or paddle yourself even if youre just practicing helps more than only copying i think, something about having to produce the code makes you internalize it differently

So ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and mostly its been working fine, running a Mobilinkd TNC3 into my Baofeng UV-5R which i know isnt ideal but it gets the job done. The problem started maybe two weeks ago where my position on aprs.fi is showing me like 40 miles northwest of where i actually am. The packets are definitely getting out because i can see them being digipeated and hitting the igate, but the coordinates in the packet are just wrong. I checked the GPS lock on my phone (im using APRSDroid on Android) and it shows my correct position fine in other apps. Thought maybe it was a datum issue or something but honestly i dont know enough about that to even troubleshoot it properly. Tried power cycling everything, re-pairing the Mobilinkd, nothing changed. Anyone run into this before? Is there some setting in APRSDroid that controls how the GPS data gets formatted into the packet?

yeah the K index spiking will kill 15 and 10 fast, especially if you're trying to work into the pacific. what i usually do is check space weather dot com in the morning and look at both the flux and the estimated planetary A index for the day. if the A index is above like 20 i dont even bother with the high bands much, just drop down to 17 or 20 and call it a day. dxmaps is fine, i use it too, but pskreporter is actually really useful if youre doing digital modes because you can see real time where signals are actually being decoded and get a feel for which paths are open. even if youre doing phone or cw you can kind of infer whats happening from the digital spots. the flux being at 145 is pretty solid for this part of the cycle honestly, you should be seeing some good openings on 10 even, just gotta catch it when the K settles down

ok so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and i figure ill just ask because im not getting anywhere reading specs sheets. my situation is a suburban lot, maybe 60x120 feet, typical neighborhood with houses on both sides. i currently have an inverted V dipole fed with coax up about 30 feet at the apex, resonant on 40m, been using it for about two years now and its fine but im wondering if im missing something. a buddy of mine keeps telling me a quarter wave vertical with a good radial field would crush my dipole for DX because of the lower takeoff angle. and i get that in theory, but also my lot is basically all clay soil and i dont exactly have room to lay down 60 or 100 radials. so is a mediocre vertical going to actually beat a decent inverted V or am i going to regret ripping everything down to try something different. i mostly work DX casual, not contesting, and i do some rag chew on 40 too. anyone actually compared these side by side? not looking for simulation data, i mean real world use.

so i've had this 857D for probably 6 years now and always ran it stock because i was worried about screwing something up but last month i finally just did the extended TX mod and honestly it was way less scary than i built it up to be in my head. just a couple diodes on the main board, took maybe 20 minutes if you count the time i spent staring at the service manual convincing myself i had the right pads. while i had it apart i also went ahead and did the filter mod for the IF, swapped in a 500hz CW filter that i had sitting in a box forever. big difference on crowded bands, should have done that ages ago. the radio feels like a different rig now on 40m when things get busy. anyway i guess my question is — has anyone done the fan mod on these? mine runs pretty hot on digital modes and i've read about people replacing the fan with a quieter higher CFM unit but i cant find a consistent answer on whether the stock thermistor circuit handles a different fan okay or if you need to mess with that too. dont want to cook the finals just to get a quieter fan noise.

so ive been licensed for about three years now mostly doing HF and some local 2m stuff, but ive been watching videos of people working SO-50 and some of the linear transponder birds and i finally decided to try it out this weekend. got a decent dual band HT and a arrow antenna and figured id give AO-73 a shot since everyone says its beginner friendly. heres where im confused though — i understand the concept of the transponder being inverted, so USB on uplink becomes LSB on downlink or whatever, but when i actually try to tune while the bird is passing i just hear a mess. like i can hear signals but i cant figure out if im hearing myself or other stations. and the doppler correction thing is driving me crazy, do i need to be constantly retuning the whole time or is there some trick to it. im using gpredict on the laptop for tracking which seems fine but its a lot to manage between that and the radio and the antenna and trying not to fall over pointing at the sky any advice from people who have actually done this would be great, im clearly missing something fundamental here

so ive been a general for about two years now and honestly i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with Extra. like i use maybe 10% of what general gives me as it is, mostly just HF and some 2m stuff. but something about having the full ticket is just... i dunno, it bugs me that i dont have it. the thing thats holding me back is people keep telling me the theory section is really rough. like the impedance matching stuff and the transistor amplifier questions and whatever else is on there. i was never great at math, got through the general okay but that felt more like memorization honestly. is Extra actually hard or are people just being dramatic about it. and does the extra HF band access actually matter in practice or is it mostly just bragging rights at this point

for the exam honestly just hammer the question pool. HamStudy.org or whatever app you prefer, just do practice tests over and over until you're consistently hitting 85%+ and you'll be fine. the gordon west book is decent background but the actual exam questions are finite and you can just learn them. the math questions tend to intimidate people but theres only a handful of them and if you know the formulas you can usually back-calculate the answer even if you dont fully understand why it works that way the reactance stuff is worth understanding at least a little because it actually matters when you start messing with antennas on HF, but for passing the test you dont need to go super deep, just know the basic relationships as for the apartment situation, look into magnetic loop antennas or even just a random wire run inside if you have high ceilings. ive talked to guys running indoor loops from apartments that were actually making contacts, not great DX but it works. also 40m in the evening is genuinely where i'd start if you want to actually hear people talking, the band is usually pretty alive around 7.200 and nearby depending on conditions

so ive been using N1MM for a while now mostly for contests and it does what it does really well, dont get me wrong, but outside of contest season i find myself fighting it a bit for everyday logging. the interface feels like its designed for someone who has 6 monitors and a paddle in each hand, which honestly maybe thats fine if thats your thing anyway a buddy at the club keeps pushing me toward Log4OM and i downloaded it last week and been poking around. the general day to day logging stuff feels a lot more comfortable, way easier to just log a random 40m QSO without it feeling like im setting up for a sprint. but now im wondering how well it plays with WSJT-X because i do a fair amount of FT8 especially in winter when the bands get weird and i dont want to lose that UDP integration or have it be a pain to set up has anyone run Log4OM as their main logger with WSJT-X feeding into it and then switched over to N1MM just for contest weekends? wondering if juggling two loggers is actually workable or if i should just bite the bullet and learn to live with N1MM full time. also curious if theres a way to keep the ADIFs in sync without it turning into a mess

that wall around 10wpm is super common, almost everybody hits it. whats happening is your brain is still sounding out individual letters instead of hearing whole words as a unit, and there's kind of a ceiling on how fast you can do that consciously. the jump to 20wpm really only happens when you stop thinking and start just... recognizing. like how you dont read individual letters when you read a book. what helped me more than anything was listening to fast code even when i couldnt copy it. like just having a 20wpm qso playing in the background while i was doing something else. sounds weird but after a few weeks my brain started picking out words here and there. also the farnsworth method where the letters themselves are sent at a higher speed but with longer gaps between them — that trains your ears to recognize the character sound without relying on the slower timing as a crutch. took me probably 8 months to feel comfortable at 20 but i wasnt super consistent about practice. if you do 20-30 min every single day you can probably do it faster than that. the consistency matters way more than doing long sessions occasionally.

not a dumb question at all, this confuses a lot of new hams. so yeah the sequential process is exactly what you described — the FCC works through a pool of unassigned callsigns in order and just gives you the next available one for your license class and call district. you'll usually see it show up in the ULS within a week or two of your exam session being submitted, sometimes faster. the vanity system lets you apply for a specific callsign as long as its available and matches your license class. technicians can only hold certain formats, same with general and extra — extras have access to shorter 1x2 and 2x1 format calls which is why a lot of people upgrade first before doing vanity. as for cost, the FCC started charging a $35 fee for new licenses and vanity applications a couple years ago, so yes there is a fee now unfortunately. my honest advice — just take the sequential call for now, get on the air, and then once you decide if you want to upgrade to general or extra, you can think about vanity then. a lot of people get attached to their first call anyway. i still use mine from 1987 and never bothered changing it.

so i've been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has like three antennas in his yard and it always looked interesting. i finally decided to just go for it and take the technician exam but honestly i dont even know where to start. there's so much stuff online and some of it looks really outdated? i found one site with questions but it said 2018 on it somewhere so i dont know if those are still valid. also does anyone actually memorize all the answers or do you study the concepts behind them. feels like there's a lot of electrical theory stuff i'm never gonna fully understand. been out of school for like 20 years so the math isnt exactly fresh in my mind. is there a good guide someone recommends or maybe an app or something

i was in the exact same spot about 8 months ago, zero background in any of this. i used the Gordon West technician book which i found at a hamfest for like two dollars, went through it pretty casually over maybe three weeks, then did practice tests on hamStudy for another week and passed first try. honestly the hardest part for me was the antenna and propagation questions, just because i had no frame of reference for any of it. but once you look up a few youtube videos explaining how radio waves actually work it clicks pretty fast. dont overthink it, the tech license is genuinely not that hard

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and ive been just kind of ignoring the whole QSL confirmation thing but i keep seeing people talk about it and i think i need to figure this out before i lose track of all my contacts in my log from what i can tell there's like three different ways to confirm contacts? there's LoTW which is the ARRL one, eQSL which is a different website, and then actual physical cards you mail to each other or through a bureau. but i dont really understand how they relate to each other or if one is better than the other or if i need all three i applied for my LoTW certificate thing a few weeks ago and got it set up in WSJT-X which apparently does it automatically for FT8 which is most of what im doing right now. so does that mean im already confirming contacts without doing anything else? and do i need to bother with the other methods too also what even is the bureau, people keep mentioning it and i have no idea what it means in this context. sorry if these are dumb questions just trying to wrap my head around it all

so ive been running a 40m dipole inverted-V style for about two years now, apex at around 35 feet which i know isnt ideal but its what i can do with the trees i have. it works fine for local and regional stuff, decent on 7.200 area but anything over about 1500 miles gets inconsistent. i get into the midwest from the southeast pretty reliably but the west coast is hit or miss and dx is mostly miss unless conditions are screaming. been thinking about putting up a vertical, probably something like a trap vertical or maybe just a dedicated 40m quarter wave with a decent radial field. read a bunch about how verticals have lower takeoff angles which should help with dx but then you hear just as many guys saying their dipole blows away their vertical and im going back and forth on this. part of the problem is i dont have a lot of room to lay down a good radial field either, maybe 20-25 radials at 16 feet each which i know isnt textbook. anybody actually done a real a/b comparison on 40m between these two? not looking for theoretical stuff, just what you actually heard on the band.