Ashley Wilson27

so i heard the Tri-County hamfest is back this year, last time i went was like 2019 before everything got cancelled and i remember they had a decent swap meet section out back. wondering if its worth the drive this time, its about 2 hours for me. anybody know if the tailgate area is still free to set up or did they start charging for that?

welcome to the hobby, congrats on the ticket. dont sweat the phonetics thing, honestly even guys who've been licensed for 20 years still stumble sometimes when they're nervous. the morning net guys are usually real good about new hams checking in, they love it actually. once you get comfortable on the repeater you might want to look at getting your general so you can get on HF, thats where things really open up. but take your time and enjoy where you are for now

that plateau around 8-10wpm is super common, almost everyone hits it. what happens is below that speed your brain is still decoding letter by letter and it works okay, but to get faster you have to start hearing whole words as sounds instead of individual dits and dahs strung together. its a mental shift more than a physical one and it takes time to happen. the thing that helped me most was the Farnsworth method — basically you set your character speed high (like 20wpm) but with extra spacing between characters so you have time to think. LCWO does this, just crank the character speed up to 20 and drop the effective speed down to whatever you can handle. forces your brain to learn the sounds at actual speed even if the overall pace is slow. i went from about 8wpm to comfortable 15wpm in maybe 4-5 months doing 20-25 min a day, then 20wpm took another 6 months or so but i wasnt being super consistent. also get a paddle. seriously. not that a straight key is wrong but a decent iambic paddle with your keyer set up right will make sending a lot more pleasant and youll actually want to practice sending more. i use a cheap Bencher clone i found at a hamfest and its been fine for years.

so this is embarrassing but i knocked my 857 off the desk a few weeks ago, it fell maybe 2 feet onto carpet but apparently that was enough to mess something up. at first it seemed fine, powered on okay, received alright, but then i noticed transmit was way off — power output was reading like 8-10 watts on all bands when i had it set to 50, and the ALC was just pegged the whole time i was keyed up. SWR looked fine on a dummy load so it's not the antenna side causing feedback or anything like that. then last week it started doing this thing where on 40m specifically the display flickers when i transmit, which is just... a new one for me. never seen that before on any rig. receive still seems fine across all bands which is making me think the PA or driver stage took a hit from the drop rather than something in the frontend. ive got a decent soldering station and a scope so im not completely helpless but i havent done serious rig surgery before, mostly just connector work and stuff like that. was wondering if anyone had seen similar symptoms or had a gut feeling about what component i should be looking at first before i go pulling boards out. dont want to make it worse obviously.

yeah i went through this exact same thing last year, honestly just drilled the hole and put in a proper NMO mount and never looked back. the mag mount was always sliding around a tiny bit when i took corners and i was paranoid about it flying off on the highway. with the drilled mount i know its solid and the coax comes down through the headliner which looks clean. one thing i will say is that on 70cm the antenna placement matters more than people think because at those frequencies even small changes in height or ground plane shape can shift things. if you have a dual band antenna make sure its actually resonant on both bands, some of the cheap combos are kinda mediocre on 440.

so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and i cant make up my mind. currently running an old FT-450D which has been solid but i want to step up and these two keep coming up every time i do any research. the 7300 obviously has that waterfall display which looks really nice and i know the SDR architecture gets talked up a lot but ive heard some people say the receiver gets stomped on in contest conditions with a lot of signals nearby. the 590SG on the other hand seems to have a reputation for being a really clean receiver, roofing filters and all that, but the interface feels kind of dated and there's no panadapter built in unless you mess around with adding one externally. my main operating is going to be general HF, maybe some CW down the road, a fair bit of SSB ragchewing and probably some WSPR/FT8 stuff on the side. not really a hardcore contester so i dont know if the receiver performance difference would even matter to me in normal use. shack is in my basement, antenna situation is a trapped vertical in the backyard right now but planning to put up a dipole or fan dipole sometime this spring. anyone actually used both? or have a strong opinion either way

that cold/heat cycle symptom is almost always a solder joint or a component that's drifting way out of spec when it warms up. the cold spray method you mentioned is the right instinct but you kinda have to be systematic about it — section by section, give it a minute to see if receive comes back before moving on. on the receive side of a 7300 i'd be looking hard at the front end stuff, the preamp transistors and anything around the roofing filter area. there's also been some talk on the icom groups io about a specific cap near the RF board that causes thermal drift issues on some units but i don't remember the exact reference designator off the top of my head. honestly if you're not super comfortable poking around in there while it's running (and you shouldn't be with mains connected to the PA section) it might be worth the icom service depot fee just for peace of mind. they're not cheap but they'll at least give you a proper diagnosis. that said a lot of guys have fixed exactly this kind of symptom themselves with a good magnifying glass and a rework station.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, been chasing for about 8 months and kept telling myself i'd get out there eventually. picked a 1-pointer near me, W4T/SU-something, i'd have to look up the exact reference but it was listed as an easy hike which it was, maybe 45 mins up. anyway i brought my KX2 and a linked dipole i built over the winter, set up near the summit, called CQ SOTA on 40m and... nothing. sat there for probably 20 minutes, spotted myself on SOTAwatch and then got a little pile up which was great except my logging app kept crashing so i was just writing calls in the dirt with a stick basically. got my 4 contacts so the activation counts but man i was not prepared for how fast things move when people know you're up there. my question i guess is do most activators pre-announce on the reflector or just self-spot when they get up there? and is there a good android logging app that people actually like for portable ops, i tried one but cant remember what it was called and it kept freezing on me

yeah the bed rail is definitely not ideal, the ground plane on a truck roof is about as good as it gets for mobile work and moving to the rail cuts that down significantly. the plastic liner underneath probably isnt helping either even if the mount is touching bare metal — theres still a discontinuity there that the RF sees. that said 2.1 isnt going to kill you, youre not going to damage anything and on VHF the difference in real world performance between 1.5 and 2.1 is pretty marginal. but if you want to fix it properly the usual trick is to add a few radials or a ground strap running from the NMO mount back to the truck chassis. some guys use copper braid. it wont be perfect but it gets you closer to what you had on the roof. also worth checking the coax for kinks, 14ft of 240 is fine but if you put a sharp bend in it anywhere during the reroute that can mess with things too.

i tried SO2R once during sweepstakes and it was a disaster lol. had the second rig bleeding into the first one something awful, took like 45 minutes to figure out it was a grounding issue not the filters. by then i was so flustered my rate had tanked and i just went back to single radio and had a fine time anyway. not saying dont do it, just that maybe pick a smaller contest to experiment with first rather than sweepstakes where every qso kind of matters for the multiplier chase. something like a state qso party where the pressure is lower would let you mess around with the setup without feeling like you're throwing away a real effort. thats what i'd do if i were starting over with it

so ive been chasing rare DX for about 6 years now and pileups have always been my weak spot. i'd just throw my call in with everyone else and wonder why i never got through. this past week the 3Y0 bouvet expedition was on and i was absolutely determined to work them on at least a couple bands. what finally clicked for me was really paying attention to where the DX op was actually listening, not where everyone was transmitting. i know that sounds obvious but i mean really listening — like sitting on the frequency for 15-20 minutes before even keying up. I noticed the op was consistently coming back to stations around 3-5 up from his TX freq, and occasionally going way up to maybe 10 kHz when the pile thinned a bit. once i figured that rhythm out i just parked just above where he'd been picking people and waited for the right moment. also stopped sending my full callsign every single time. just sent the suffix twice when the pileup was dense, then switched to full call when things thinned. not sure if that's technically right but it seemed to work. got through on 17m CW and then again on 40m SSB the next morning. 40 was harder cause the pile was massive and there were so many lids just tuning up on the freq which is a whole other rant. curious what other techniques people use — especially for SSB pileups cause those feel way more chaotic than CW to me

the doppler thing messed me up for way longer than it should have. i was manually tuning which is fine but i kept overcorrecting and chasing my own signal around. eventually set up a rig control loop with gpredict and that helped a lot even though my radio's CAT implementation is a little janky. what rotators did you end up with on that pipe mount if you dont mind me asking, im trying to build something similar on the cheap

so im trying to get my technician license and ive been looking around online and theres like a million different study guides and practice test sites and i honestly dont know which ones are actually worth using vs which ones are just garbage. a guy at the local club told me to just memorize the question pool but that seems like it might not actually help me understand whats going on, you know? like i want to actually understand at least some of the basics not just pass the test and have no idea what any of it means anyway is there a specific study guide people actually recommend or is the question pool memorization thing really the way to go for the tech exam? i think the test is like 35 questions? not totally sure. any advice would be appreciated ive been putting this off for like two months already

dont stress too much about CQ WW being your first real contest, i did it about two years into the hobby and just treated it like a big operating weekend. yeah its loud and fast and sometimes guys dont even say their callsign clearly but you pick it up. one thing that helped me was just searching and pouncing at first instead of trying to hold a frequency and call CQ — way less pressure and you can work at your own pace. also FT8 experience wont totally translate but at least you already know that propagation is everything, so watching the bands in the days before and seeing whats opening up toward europe or japan will give you an idea of what to expect. 15m has been pretty good lately with the solar cycle doing its thing so hopefully that holds into october.

yeah those old QSOs absolutely can count, thats the beauty of LoTW — when you upload your logs the system matches them against whatever the other station uploaded and boom, confirmed credit. ive had contacts from years back suddenly show up as confirmed when a station finally got around to uploading their log. so definitely upload everything you have going back as far as you can. as for strategy, honestly with 40-50 entities already in the log on a modest setup youre doing fine. the first 100 come pretty quick if youre paying attention to the bands. 15 and 17 meters have been really good lately with the solar cycle picking up, id spend time there. the strategy part really kicks in when youre chasing the harder ones — the rare pacific islands, some of the african entities, stuff like that where you might only get one or two expeditions a year. for those you kinda have to plan around them. but for now just work everything you can hear and youll hit 100 before you know it

yeah this is pretty much the classic problem and honestly there isnt a perfect answer. I run N1MM for any serious contesting, no real substitute for it when youre trying to keep a rate going and need the dupe checking to be instant. But for day to day stuff and FT8 i keep WSJT-X feeding into Log4OM. The ADIF merge headache you described is real though. What i started doing is just accepting that N1MM is its own silo during a contest and then after the contest is over i do the ADIF export carefully — make sure youre exporting with the full cabrillo fields included and then use the ADIF master import in Log4OM rather than the quick import. Theres a field mapping screen that comes up if you go through the right menu path and you can manually tell it where to put the exchange data. Takes maybe 20 minutes after a contest but then everything ends up in one place. The RST issue is usually because N1MM stores sent and received differently than Log4OM expects, you might need to remap RST_SENT and RST_RCVD manually on that screen. Not glamorous but it works.

so ive been doing contests for a few years now, mostly single op single radio, and i keep reading about SO2R and how the top scores are basically all using it. finally set up a second radio this past weekend for SS phone and honestly i dont know if i helped myself or hurt myself lol the interference between the two radios was way worse than i expected even with the bandpass filters. running 100w on 40 and trying to S&P on 20 at the same time and it was just a mess. i know guys swear by the interlocking so the second radio cant transmit while the first is in QSO but getting that set up with my logging software was a whole afternoon of pain anyway my rate actually went UP in the second half when i figured out what i was doing, went from like 60/hr to pushing 85-90 for a couple stretches on 40m during the evening. so maybe there's something to it. but i feel like i spent more mental energy managing the two radios than actually working stations. is that just a learning curve thing or is SO2R genuinely one of those things where you need a full season of practice before it clicks

75-80% on practice tests you should be fine honestly, i was hovering around there and passed no problem. dont overthink the LC stuff, just memorize the formulas and remember that higher capacitance or inductance means lower resonant frequency, that pattern shows up like four times in different forms. one thing nobody told me was that after you upgrade you kinda want to have at least a basic HF antenna ready because otherwise passing the exam feels anticlimactic lol. i spent two weeks with general privileges and no antenna that would actually work below 10m so just... plan ahead if you havent already

yeah Japan only counts once for the basic DXCC — its one entity regardless of how many bands or modes you work them on. the 100 entities is just 100 different countries/entities confirmed, doesnt matter how many times you've worked each one. where bands start to matter is for the band-specific endorsements, like 5BDXCC where you need 100 entities confirmed on each of five bands separately. that gets expensive in terms of time and postage if youre still doing paper QSLs lol. as for doing DXCC, WAS and WAZ at the same time — honestly most people just kind of naturally work toward all of them simultaneously without really thinking about it too hard. if youre on 20m calling CQ or working pileups youre gonna rack up states, zones and entities all at once. WAS is probably the easiest of the three to finish if youre in the lower 48, most guys knock that out without even trying that hard. WAZ takes more deliberate effort especially for some of the rarer zones. id say just work everything you can hear and sort it out later, LoTW makes tracking pretty painless these days compared to the old card binder days.

Finally received my SDRplay RSP1B and have been comparing it against my trusty RTL-SDR V4 over the past week. Both running on same laptop with identical antenna setup - Diamond X-50A at 25 feet. The RSP1B's 14-bit ADC vs the RTL-SDR's 8-bit makes a significant difference on weak HF signals, particularly PSK31 around 14.070 MHz. However, I'm getting some strange artifacts on 2M FM that I can't seem to tune out. Anyone else experiencing similar issues with the RSP1B on VHF/UHF?

one thing nobody told me when i started was to also look at WAS and WAZ at the same time, like you might as well be chasing all three simultaneously since a lot of your contacts will count toward multiple awards. WAS is all 50 states confirmed, WAZ is the 40 CQ zones. i actually finished WAS before DXCC because working US stations is obviously a lot easier but it was still satisfying to get that certificate. just something to think about so your logging and confirming effort does double or triple duty

so ive been on SSB for about three years now, mostly on 40 and 20m, and lately something has been bugging me about my transmitted audio. guys on the other end keep saying it sounds like im in a barrel or there's a low rumble underneath everything. my mic gain hasnt changed, speech processor is on like it always has been, but something shifted. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 through the boom arm. the mic element itself is probably fine but who knows. i did move the shack around a couple months ago and now the desk fan is closer to the mic. could be that but it seems like too obvious of a fix. anyway i started reading about proper SSB audio and realized i actually dont know that much about optimizing it beyond just plugging in and talking. like i know you want to keep ALC from hammering too hard and you should be somewhere around 50-75% of rated power but thats kind of the extent of my knowledge. anyone have a sort of rundown on what really makes SSB audio sound good vs bad? and also curious if anyone has had the barrel effect before and figured out what it was

The monthly product releases have been impressive. Those Nifty Accessories Mini-Manual guides are brilliant - same info as the owner's manual but in concise, plain language with clear illustrations. Perfect for field reference when you can't remember all the menu settings on complex rigs.

yeah i just did this like three months ago, it really wasnt that bad. i used hamstudy and just did like 20 minutes a day for two weeks and passed no problem. the hardest part for me was the electrical formulas, ohms law and stuff, but theres only a few of them and once you do enough practice questions you kind of just recognize what they're asking. dont stress too much about it honestly. the test is 35 questions and you need 26 right so theres some room for error

yeah i had the same plateau problem for a while. one thing that helped me more than any gear change was just logging analysis after the contest. like actually pulling up my cabrillo and looking at where my rate died and what i was doing at those times. turns out i was spending way too long calling CQ on a dead frequency out of some weird reluctance to give it up. the data doesnt lie. SO2R is great but its also kind of a mental load thing. ive seen guys with full SO2R setups put up worse scores than simpler stations because they were spending half their brain managing the second radio instead of just operating. if youre not already comfortable enough with the first radio that its basically automatic, adding a second one might actually hurt you. just something to think about before you go buying more gear