Emily Davis22

yeah the bureau thing confuses everyone at first. basically the ARRL has an incoming and outgoing bureau system, and your affiliated club usually handles the incoming cards for your call district — you drop off a batch of outgoing cards sorted by country prefix and they handle the postage internationally. saves a ton of money vs sending cards direct to every DX station, especially for chasing rare ones where the other op might not reply for a year anyway for awards purposes though LoTW really is the way to go if you're serious about DXCC. most serious DX operators upload to it and the confirmations just accumulate over time without you having to do anything. eQSL is fine and some people like it but a lot of award programs dont accept it or treat it differently so i wouldnt stress about it too much starting out. just get your logs into LoTW via TQSL — once you do the first batch it gets easier, the tricky part is just making sure your station location is set right before you sign the log paper cards are still fun to get in the mail honestly, i still send them for any interesting contact or when someone sends me one first

gpredict with doppler correction through CAT is honestly the way to go eventually but i get it if you're not there yet. i spent about three passes doing exactly what you described, chasing my own tail on the tuning. one thing that helped me before i got CAT sorted was just printing out the expected doppler curve for a typical pass and keeping it next to me so i had a rough sense of where i should be at each point in the pass. sounds dumb but it actually helped me stay ahead of it instead of reacting. also for what its worth RS-44 has a wider passband than AO-73 and seems a bit more forgiving for newer operators, might be worth trying if you havent

the ARRL thing i think is about the petition to the FCC regarding technician HF privileges, thats been floating around forever and keeps coming back up. theres a camp that wants techs to get more access on like 40 and 15 meters and another group that thinks the current structure is fine. honestly as a fairly new tech myself i would love more HF access but i get why some people push back on it, its been debated for years from what i understand. havent had a chance to get on 10m yet because ive been dealing with some RFI issues at my place but now im really motivated to sort that out before the conditions change

nice, i remember my first one i was so stressed about the contacts i forgot to spot myself on SOTAwatch until i already had 3 in the log lol. holding the feedpoint manually is very on-brand for SOTA honestly, we've all been there in some form

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (got my technician in february) and i finally got a decent HT, a Baofeng UV-5R that my buddy passed along to me. i can hear people on the local 2m repeater just fine but when i key up nobody responds and i dont think im getting into it. looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it shows a PL tone of 100.0 Hz so i programmed that in but still nothing. heres what i dont understand though — i see in the menu there are options for encode only, decode only, or both. right now i have it set to encode AND decode which i thought was right but maybe thats the problem? like if im decoding too then am i filtering out my own transmissions somehow? i honestly cant tell if im even hitting the machine. is there a way to check without bothering everyone on the repeater? and also is it rude to just key up and say something like a radio check when theres no conversation happening? dont want to step on anyone or come across as annoying right out of the gate.

yeah what he said about the offset, that got me too when i first started. i was so focused on the tone i totally forgot to check which direction the offset was going lol. spent like two days wondering why i could hear everyone but couldnt get a response. embarrassing in hindsight but whatever, we all start somewhere i guess.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still feel kind of weird about phonetics. like i know the NATO ones, alpha bravo charlie etc, but i see people on the repeater just saying letters sometimes and other times going full phonetic and i cant figure out when youre supposed to do which one. is there like an actual rule or is it just whatever feels right also i was on HF the other day trying to work someone and i blanked on what X was. i know its Xray but in the moment i just said the letter and the other guy came back with Xray like he was correcting me lol. wasnt sure if i did something wrong or if he was just being helpful

the K3 pairs really well with another radio if you handle the audio routing right. a lot of guys use the microHAM stuff for the switching but you can do it cheaper with some careful wiring and the bandpass filters matter a lot if your antennas are anywhere near each other. the 20m yagi and 40m dipole should give you decent enough isolation to experiment without blowing anything up at least. i'll be honest though i operate SO2R and i still have contests where i wonder if i wouldve done better just focusing on one radio and running cleaner. its not a magic fix, its just another tool. rate optimization in a contest is like 70% knowing when to S&P vs run and when to switch bands, the second radio just gives you more options for doing that. if your rate is already decent you might get 10-15% improvement once you're comfortable with it. if your rate is low because of other reasons SO2R wont fix that

yeah totally get that. i call it the sunday afternoon drift, just tuning around with coffee and not really trying to do anything. sometimes i'll throw out a cq on 17m just to see who bites but half the time im fine if nobody comes back. its a good hobby for that kind of mood i think

so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been doing VHF/UHF stuff on my baofeng and a couple local repeaters. its been fun but honestly i keep hearing people talk about HF and working other countries and stuff and now im kind of obsessed with the idea of actually doing that. my question is basically how hard is the General exam compared to Tech? i remember the Tech exam felt pretty manageable, i studied with HamStudy for like 2 weeks and passed no problem. but i've heard the General has a lot more math and electrical theory and honestly math is not really my strong suit. is there stuff about like resistors and ohms law and whatever that i need to actually understand or can i just memorize the answers from the question pool? and also what HF privileges do i actually get on General vs having to wait for Extra? im trying to figure out if General is enough to actually do the DX stuff people talk about or if i need to go all the way to Extra right away

i was in the same boat when i got my tech a couple years ago. honestly just get the ARRL band plan and tape it to your wall, thats what i did. the actual part 97 text is more useful once you have a general idea of whats going on and you're looking up something specific. also dont stress too much about memorizing every little exception right away, you'll pick it up as you actually get on the air and run into situations

12 contacts absolutely counts, yes. the 10 QSO minimum is the threshold and you're over it so that park is activated, upload your log to the POTA website and youll see it show up in a day or two. congrats on the first one. the chaos of calling CQ and then getting piled on is real and it catches almost everyone off guard the first time. you'll get a rhythm going after a couple more activations. one thing that helped me early on was keeping the exchange super tight — just their callsign, 59, your park reference, and done. some hunters just want the contact logged and will move on quick if you keep it moving. also dont be afraid to say QRZ after each contact to signal youre ready for the next one, it helps manage the pileup a bit. the random wire over branches setup honestly works great for portable ops. ive done probably 40 activations now with basically the same kind of antenna and rarely have trouble making contacts. sometimes the simple stuff just works.

so ive been working on this 40m direct conversion receiver for the past few months, finally got it to the point where it actually receives something but theres this persistent 60hz hum underneath everything that just wont go away no matter what i do. ive tried re-routing the audio wiring, added more filter caps on the power supply rail, even tried running it off a battery to rule out the wall wart and the hum is still there, maybe slightly less but still very much present. the design is pretty basic, NE602 mixer fed by a colpitts VFO i wound myself on a toroid, then into an LM386 for audio. nothing fancy. ive shielded the vfo section in its own little tin enclosure i made from some PCB material and grounded it to the main board at one point only. my suspicion at this point is the LM386 is just picking up RF from somewhere and rectifying it or something, or maybe my ground plane isnt great, i built it on perf board not a proper PCB. anyone dealt with this kind of thing before? its driving me nuts because the actual reception when there is a signal is really quite good, the selectivity isnt great obviously but for a DC receiver im pretty happy with it.

yeah dont memorize the chart, that is pretty much the one thing everyone agrees on. what you want is to learn each character by its sound not by counting dots and dashes, theres a difference and it matters a lot once you start trying to copy at any real speed the method most people swear by is the Koch method, basically you start with just two characters at a fast speed, like 20 wpm, and you only add a new character once you can copy the ones you know at like 90% accuracy. sounds weird to learn at fast speed when youre a beginner but it trains your ear the right way from the start. LCWO dot net is the website i used, its free and its exactly that method. i did maybe 15-20 minutes a day and was making slow QSOs within a few months, not fast ones but enough to feel real also just listening to actual cw on the air helps even when you cant copy it yet, your brain starts picking up the rhythm without you realizing it

so ive been messing around with my audio chain on SSB for a few months now and wanted to get some actual opinions from people who run SSB regularly. im running an IC-7300 and for a while i was just using the stock mic (the one that came with it, the HM-219 or whatever it is) and honestly it was fine but i kept getting reports that i sounded a little muddy or sometimes a bit hollow depending on conditions. tried rolling off some of the bass in the TX equalizer and that helped a lot actually, like bumping the low end down a couple dB around 100-200hz made a noticeable difference in reports. but then i also started playing with the TX bandwidth setting and kept it around 2.4kHz which seems to be the sweet spot for me without killing too much presence. my question is basically — how much of the audio improvement stuff people talk about online is actually meaningful vs just tweaking for the sake of tweaking. like does mic choice really matter THAT much on HF where the bandwidth is already limited, or am i overthinking it. also curious if anyone has strong opinions on whether speech processing actually helps or just makes you sound compressed and harsh. i run it pretty light right now, maybe 10% on the IC.