Robert Kim

so ive been fighting this for a few days now and its starting to drive me crazy. my position beacon is showing up on aprs.fi maybe once every 45 minutes or so when it should be hitting every 10. running a TM-D710G with the built in TNC and ive got the SmartBeaconing settings configured the way i thought made sense — high speed threshold at 60mph, low speed at 3mph, and the corner pegging set to 25 degrees. been using this exact setup for like two years and it worked fine. what changed is i upgraded to a new mag mount antenna last week and had to redo some of the cabling. not sure if thats related. the radio itself shows the packets being transmitted, the TX light flashes when i'd expect it to, but they just arent showing up on the network consistently. wondering if maybe a digi near me went down or something but i checked and W5XYZ-1 looks like its still hitting aprs.fi fine based on other stations showing through it. anyone had something similar happen? is there a way to tell if my packets are actually making it to a digi or if theyre just dying in the air?

went through almost exactly this with my Tacoma a couple years back. ended up doing an NMO through the roof center of the cab and yeah i did lose sleep over drilling it but honestly best decision i made. seal it right with the proper weatherproofing gasket that comes with the mount, ive never had a leak and its been through two winters. the pattern is just so much better centered on the roof, youre not fighting compromised ground plane the way you would stuck way back on a bed corner. if you really cant bring yourself to drill, the next best thing ive seen actually work well is a good quality lip mount on the cab, not the bed, and make sure you run an actual ground strap to the body rather than relying on the clamp contact. mag mounts are fine for playing around but the NR770HB is going to be bouncing all over the place at highway speeds unless its really solidly mounted, ive seen those pop off before.

ok so i passed my tech exam like two months ago and im still a little fuzzy on some of the rules. i get that i have HF privileges on 10m and some other bands but my elmer was telling me something about phone vs cw privileges being different and i honestly got lost. like i understand the band plan generally but part 97 is kind of a wall of text and i dont know where to look for the specific stuff about what modes are allowed where. also is there somewhere that just explains this in plain english because the FCC document itself is... a lot. i tried reading it but i kept having to look up terms and then i forgot what i was originally looking for. does anyone have like a go-to resource for this or do you just kind of memorize it over time

honestly the memorization route works for passing but i'd say at least try to understand the resonant circuit stuff and the smith chart basics because once it clicks it actually makes the rest of radio make more sense. i studied for about 3 months using hamstudy.org and just kept grinding the questions until i was hitting 85% or better consistently then i went and took it. passed first try but there were definitely a few questions where i was just guessing. as for the privileges, depends on how you operate. if you're into CW or want to hang around 75 meters on the lower end of the phone portion it matters a lot. also some of the digital sub-bands. but if you're happy where you are with general its not like your radio breaks without the upgrade. i just wanted it because i felt like i'd hit a ceiling and wanted to feel like i actually earned the top ticket. took me long enough thats for sure

that feeling when the traffic actually matters is something else isnt it. i remember my first real activation back in like 2019, hurricane prep, and i kept second guessing myself on every transmission. but you did exactly right - accurate info, written down, passed correctly. that insulin relay is a perfect example of why we do this stuff. somebody's health literally depended on the message getting through clean. the nervousness never fully goes away in my experience, even after years of this. but it kind of sharpens you up. the nets and AUXCOMM exercises feel slow after you've done a real one. glad your EC had things organized, ive been to activations where that part was a mess and it makes everything harder. sounds like you did good.

had the exact same problem when i first got mine. turned out my bass response was way too boosted which made everything sound hollow on receive. the 7300 has that TX tone control in the menu — i think its under set > microphone or something like that — and i pulled the bass down a few notches and suddenly people were saying my audio sounded much cleaner. wasnt expecting that to matter that much but it really did. also for what its worth i switched to an SM-30 desk mic eventually and it made a noticeable difference just in terms of consistency since im not right on top of the mic or at an angle. hand mics are kind of all over the place depending on how you hold them.

congrats on the first contact, that feeling never really goes away honestly. the hum you're describing on the bitx40 is almost always the power supply, try a different one or add some filtering on the input, theres a whole thread on the bitx40 groups.io about it. people have had good luck with a simple ferrite bead on the supply leads. the ubitx is a solid next step if you're patient with it. mine needed some tweaking out of the box especially on the higher bands but the community support is really good. just go in knowing it'll probably take a weekend to get dialed in rather than a plug and play experience. for portable stuff ive been using mine with a lithium battery pack and a random wire antenna and its genuinely fun operating that way.

the free version of VaraFM should still work for connecting to RMS gateways, it just limits your throughput speed — so that probably isnt your issue. first thing id check is the audio drive levels going into Vara. the TX level in Signalink and the mic gain in Vara both need to be right, too hot and youre overdriving and your signal sounds like garbage on the other end. also worth checking: is the gateway actually manned or sysop-attended? some of them are on 24/7 and some arent. if you can decode the beacon that helps but doesnt always mean its actively accepting connections at that moment. try running the Winlink map and look at the last heard time for that station. one other thing — make sure youre not accidentally running the wrong mode. if the gateway is VaraFM and youre configured for something else in your session settings it wont connect obviously. sounds dumb but i spent a whole afternoon on that exact problem once.

so ive been licensed about 3 years now and mostly just ragchewed and did some local stuff but lately ive been getting really into DX and somebody at the club mentioned DXCC and now i cant stop thinking about it lol i understand the basics - 100 confirmed entities and you get the basic award, and then there's endorsements and all that. what i dont fully get is how the credit submission actually works now. i know Logbook of the World is involved but do ALL my QSOs need to be in LoTW or just the ones i want to use for credits? and what about paper QSLs, can i still use those for DXCC or is it basically all LoTW now also someone mentioned WAS and WAZ and honestly im not even sure which one to chase first. feels like WAS (worked all states) would be more achievable starting out but maybe WAZ zones is more interesting? i dunno. any advice from people who have been doing this a while would be appreciated. im sitting at maybe 60-something entities confirmed in LoTW already just from normal operating so apparently i was closer than i thought

i dont run RemoteHams specifically but ive been doing remote ops with a physical rig (IC-7300) over the internet for a couple years and the latency stuff you're describing sounds pretty normal honestly. 80ms is workable for SSB, gets annoying for CW if youre used to the feel of a real key but you adapt never tried mixing in an SDR on the server side, thats an interesting idea for using it as a wideband monitor while the main rig does the actual work. let us know how the Allstar integration goes, im kinda curious if it actually hangs together reliably or if its one of those things that works great for a week then randomly dies

so i finally picked a summit for my first ever activation, going up W6/NS-177 this saturday. ive done a couple chases from home which honestly got me hooked on the whole thing but actually going up a hill myself feels like a different thing entirely. im bringing my KX2 with a 20m link dipole and a 5ah lipo, plan is to operate SSB mostly but maybe some CW if i can get comfortable enough. already spotted myself on SOTAwatch so hopefully ill get some chasers lining up. one thing im not sure about is whether i need to be at the absolute peak or just within the activation zone. i read the rules and it says 25 vertical meters below the summit but the trail kind of flattens out and im not 100% sure where that boundary is practically. also do most people announce a time or just spot when theyre ready? any advice appreciated, kind of nervous honestly

So ive been seeing some chatter on a couple other forums and on twitter about Yaesu possibly announcing a new HF transceiver sometime before Dayton this year. Nobody seems to have solid info yet but theres been some leaked photos floating around that look like a mid-range rig, maybe somewhere between the FT-891 and the FTDX10 price bracket if i had to guess. Take it with a grain of salt obviously. On a completely different note, 10 meters has been absolutely insane the last few days. I made contacts into eastern europe and japan yesterday afternoon just running 100 watts and a wire dipole. Cycle 25 is really delivering lately and if youre not spending some time on 10 and 12m right now you are genuinely missing out. Even 6m has been doing some weird stuff in the evenings, caught a couple sporadic E openings last week that came out of nowhere. Anyone heading to Hamvention this year? First time going and i dont really know what to expect in terms of the flea market — is it worth getting there super early or does stuff stick around for a while?

so i finally got my technician license last month and ive been mostly just listening on the local repeater. theres a weekly net that meets tuesday nights on the club repeater and ive been lurking on it for like three weeks now just trying to figure out how it works before i actually try to check in. the net control guy always says something like 'check-ins please give your callsign phonetically' and then people just rattled off their calls and he acknowledges them. seems simple enough but i dont know if theres like an etiquette thing i'm missing or a specific format i should follow. do i just say my callsign phonetically and wait? do i say my name and location too or is that too much? i dont wanna sound like a total idiot lol also is there like a good place to find other nets to try? the club has this one but i feel like there must be a ton of them out there on different frequencies and stuff

so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero w for the past few weeks trying to get it to control my old Yaesu G-450A rotator and honestly its been equal parts fun and maddening. the rotator itself is fine, its the interface side that keeps biting me. i wrote a little python script that reads the azimuth voltage from the rotator controller through an ADS1115 ADC over i2c and its mostly working but i keep getting these weird jitter spikes where the reading will just randomly jump like 20-30 degrees for a sample or two and then settle back down. ive got some filtering in the code but its not totally cleaning it up. the stepper driver side is actually working pretty solid, using an L298N module to drive the rotator motor direction and its responding to the az commands from hamlib rotctld which is running on the same pi. wsjtx on my main machine can talk to it over the network and it does actually point the antenna where i tell it to, most of the time. i think the jitter might be electrical noise getting into the ADC lines since the motor and the signal wires are kind of all bundled together in the cable run i did. gonna try some shielding or maybe just separate the runs. anyone dealt with this kind of noise pickup on i2c ADC stuff in a shack environment? the RF alone in there is probably not helping either.

nice work getting it up. i did basically the same thing last spring for 20m and had almost the exact same experience, dip was too low and i panicked thinking i messed something up. ended up trimming like 3 inches total off each leg and it came right up to where i wanted it. pvc center insulators work great btw, ive been using them for years, just make sure you seal the ends somehow if its gonna be outside, water gets in and does weird stuff over time. i just hit mine with some silicone.

so i just upgraded to general a few months ago and honestly the band plan stuff is still kind of confusing to me. i know there are certain frequency ranges i can use now that i couldnt as a tech but im not always sure if im in the right spot or if im accidentally stepping on an extra class only segment or whatever. like i was operating around 14.200 and someone told me to check my privileges which was kind of embarrassing. is there a simple way to understand this or do i just have to memorize the whole part 97 chart also separate question but does the no-encryption rule apply to like everything or are there exceptions i should know about. i saw something about auxiliary links and got confused

so ive been trying to get on 20m most evenings this week and its just been all over the place. like one night ill work a station in Japan no problem and then the next night i cant even hear anything past maybe 500 miles. i know propagation does its thing but this feels different somehow, maybe the solar flux stuff? i dunno i havent really kept up with the solar cycle news as much as i should. anyway just curious if anyone else is noticing it or if its just my antenna situation being garbage as usual lol

i was in the exact same spot like six months ago lol. the propagation questions were the ones that got me too. what finally helped me was just watching some youtube videos about how the ionosphere actually works, once i had the visual in my head the questions made way more sense than just trying to read about it. there are a few hams on youtube who do really good explainers for this stuff. and yeah the privileges chart is annoying but after a few dozen practice tests you just kind of know it without really knowing how you know it if that makes sense. good luck on the exam, its not as bad as it looks

im in basically the same boat as you, took mine like two months ago. what helped me was the gordon west technician book, its kind of old school but it goes through the question pool and actually explains the answers instead of just listing them. the arrl one is fine too but felt a little dry to me personally. either way do the practice tests on hamstudy or ham exam dot org before you go in, when you start hitting like 85-90% consistently you're probably ready. the real test felt easier than the practice ones tbh

same thing happening to me on 10m, had it wide open to south america for like 45 minutes tuesday and worked a bunch of stations then nothing. checked pskreporter and it looked like a huge opening came through and then just shut. i think thats just how 10 and 15 are at this point in the cycle, kind of feast or famine but the feasts are getting better. i set up a little alert on my phone for when the DX clusters show a lot of spots on 15 so i dont miss it sitting open while im at work lol

yeah the two sites pull from overlapping but not always identical cluster networks so you will see some differences, totally normal. dxwatch aggregates from a bunch of telnet nodes and tends to be pretty current. qrz's spot feed is decent but i've noticed it can lag a few minutes sometimes depending on where the spot originated. for the app question — honestly clublog has a pretty solid spot alert thing and so does the hrdlog app. but what really changed things for me was just setting up a proper telnet connection in my logging software directly to a cluster node. if you're on windows and using something like log4om or even just the built in stuff in hamradio deluxe you can get spots piped right into your bandmap in near real time. way better than refreshing a webpage. the ft-991a should work fine with any of that once you get the rig control sorted.

yeah this is pretty much exactly what happened during our Skywarn exercise a couple years back. the ICS forms thing is huge, people underestimate how much that stuff matters when things are actually moving fast. we ended up making laminated quick reference cards for our go-kits after that and it helped a lot, at least the most common form numbers and what goes in each field. the uncharged HTs thing though... that drove me crazy at our drill too. i think some folks just dont treat it seriously until theyve actually been in a situation where comms failed for real. we had a guy who showed up to a real activation after a tornado outbreak with a dead battery and no spare. never again after that one. now our EC sends out a reminder two days before any drill to charge everything and do a quick radio check at home first. the repeater issue is actually kind of a blessing in disguise like you said. nothing teaches you to respect your backup plan like having to actually use it under pressure. we make a point now of running at least part of every exercise on simplex even if the repeater is working fine, just to keep everyone comfortable with it.

yeah i had the exact same whine on my Yaesu in my Tacoma, drove me nuts for weeks. turned out my ground wire from the radio to the chassis was going to kind of a crappy spot under the dash. moved it to a bolt that actually went to bare metal on the firewall and most of the whine just went away. worth checking before you buy a bunch of filters and stuff.

I had the same issue with my IC-7300 and tube amplifier. There is 2dB power overshoot for less than 5mS. In theory, you need to de-rate an external linear amplifier to 63% of its peak rated power. Setting my amp's timing delay to 25ms helped considerably.

congrats on getting out there and doing it, that's the best part of QRP honestly — just the simplicity of the whole thing. a picnic table and a wire in a tree and you're on the air, hard to beat that. the drift thing is pretty classic with those designs. a couple things that helped me a lot — first, try to thermally isolate the oscillator section as much as you can, even just a little cardboard shield between it and any components that put out heat can make a difference. second, and this took me forever to figure out, make sure your supply voltage to the oscillator is well regulated, even small ripple or sag can show up as drift especially early on. some guys use a little 78L05 just for the osc stage even if the rest of the rig runs off 12v or whatever. the NPO caps are the right idea but yeah placement really matters, they need to be in there where the temperature coefficient actually counteracts the drift direction, sometimes you have to experiment a bit and it feels like black magic.