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.

honestly the 590SG is still a really capable radio and i dont think you'd notice a massive difference in receive on 40m SSB. the 7300 gets a lot of hype and the panadapter is genuinely nice to have but if you're not doing FT8 or anything like that the practical difference in day to day operating is pretty small. i made the switch about two years ago and sometimes i actually miss how the 590 felt to operate, the knobs and layout just made sense to me after years of use that said the spectrum display does change how you operate in ways you dont expect. you start seeing activity you would have just tuned past before. so its not nothing. but if your 590 is working fine id say save the money unless you really want the waterfall for a specific reason

that scratchy distortion on strong signals with a direct conversion design is almost always the mixer getting slammed. JFETs as mixers are great but they have a pretty limited dynamic range compared to a diode ring and if youre not putting any attenuation before the mixer it'll clip pretty badly on anything over maybe S7 or so on 40m which as you know is basically everything during the day. try sticking a 6dB pad right at the antenna input and see if the problem goes away or at least gets better. if it does then you know its upstream of your audio stage and you can start thinking about adding an RF attenuator or maybe a small preselctor with some gain control. the grounding rabbit hole is a classic time sink, i spent three weeks convinced a receiver problem was grounding once and it turned out to be a cracked ferrite bead i couldnt even see.

yeah the two-tab shuffle is pretty common when youre starting out but once you get used to it you kind of develop a feel for which spots are worth jumping on. the age of the spot matters a lot — anything under 5 minutes is usually still worth a listen, especially on 20 or 17 meters where propagation can hold for a while. over 15 minutes and youre usually chasing ghosts unless its a big pile and theyre still going strong. one thing that helped me a lot was switching to DX4WIN or even just using the built-in cluster in Log4OM or similar logging software because then the spots come into the same place as your log and you can filter by what you still need. that changed everything for me honestly. the website clusters are fine for browsing but they dont really integrate with what youre doing at the radio. if you want to stick with browser tools though, dx.qsl.net has some decent filtering and you can narrow down by band or region so youre not wading through spots for 160m when youre trying to work 17. the QRZ logbook integration thing — i tried it for a bit, wasnt really for me but some guys swear by it. depends how deep you are in the QRZ ecosystem i think

so i finally did my first summit activation last weekend, W4C/EM-001 if anyone knows it, and i was honestly pretty nervous about the whole thing. ive been a ham for like 3 years but mostly just sitting at the home station working digital modes so this was a totally different vibe. packed way too much stuff, my pack was probably 35 lbs which is embarrassing in hindsight, but i made 12 contacts on 20m SSB with just my end fed and a 817nd so im counting it as a win. the view up there was also just... yeah. anyway took me like an hour longer to get up than i planned and i almost didnt have enough time to make the 4 contacts needed for the activation points but squeaked it out. definitely going back but gonna cut the pack weight down a lot next time, probably leave the backup radio at home lol

the barrel sound is almost always too much bass. SSB just doesnt carry low frequencies well and they end up sounding woofy and unclear on the receiving end even if it sounds great to you locally. on the 7300 i'd pull the bass down quite a bit, like -5 or -6 and bump the treble up a couple notches. voice intelligibility on HF really lives in that 1kHz to 3kHz range, the low end is mostly just mud over a noisy band. also mic placement matters more than people think. if youre talking directly into the mic element you're gonna get a lot of plosives and proximity bass buildup. keep it a few inches off to the side of your mouth rather than right in front. and honestly the compression thing — i'd experiment with it rather than leaving it fully off. a little compression can actually help punch through QRM without sounding squashed, just dont go overboard with it.

so we have a county-wide ARES activation exercise coming up and i'm trying to get my portable setup dialed in before then. ive done a few of these before but this time i'm actually running the communications node for the EOC so the stakes feel a bit higher than just showing up with a HT and a mag mount. current plan is to run my IC-7300 off a honda eu2200i with a 40ah lifepo4 battery as a buffer — the generator feeds a battery charger and the radio draws off the battery directly so i dont get that nasty ignition noise bleeding into the audio. worked okay at home testing it but i haven't actually tried it on the air yet. antenna is where im less confident. thinking a linked dipole for 40/80 since those are the primary nets but the site is a parking lot next to a city building and i have no idea what the RF environment is going to look like or what i have to support the antenna with. was going to bring a couple of 20 ft painters poles and stake them out but that feels marginal for 80m. anyone run a setup like this in a parking lot situation and have thoughts on what actually works vs what sounds good at home? also genuinely not sure how long to plan on running the generator vs just sitting on battery alone. exercise is supposed to be 6 hours but you know how those go.

so ive been messing around with an arduino mega for the past few weeks trying to get it to auto-switch my antenna relays based on what band my radio is on. the radio puts out band data on a DB9 connector (its an icom 7300 so the CI-V bus is an option too but i went the simpler route first) and the idea is to just have the arduino read those lines and then key the right relay to connect whichever antenna is appropriate. its actually mostly working now but ive hit this weird issue where if i switch bands really fast on the rig the relay sometimes clicks to the wrong position for like half a second before correcting itself. not sure if thats a debounce thing in the code or if the band data lines are just noisy. i added a 50ms delay before acting on the band change and it seems better but feels hacky. anyone else done something like this and found a cleaner way to handle it? also thinking about eventually tying a raspberry pi into this so i could do logging and maybe run flrig or something, not totally sure what the architecture would look like yet. open to ideas.

this is actually really helpful to read because im pretty new and i didnt even know you were supposed to check solar stuff before getting on the air. i just kind of tune around and hope for the best lol. what exactly is the solar flux number and where do you check it? i have a general ticket and been trying to get into HF but honestly half the time i have no idea why the bands sound empty.

The aluminum approach is definitely more robust. I've seen too many wire beams fail mechanically. Your interlaced design should give excellent F/B ratios if you can get the element phasing right. Consider using EZNEC Pro for the optimization - much better than free alternatives for this complex geometry.

ive had mine about two years now and still finding little things i didnt know it could do. one thing worth looking at is the RF direct sampling front end can be sensitive to strong nearby signals if you dont have good filtering, some guys add a low pass or bandpass before the antenna input depending on their situation. probably wont matter for casual ssb but worth knowing if you ever notice weirdness. also the 7300 community online is huge so theres basically an answer to any question you run into already out there somewhere