Emily Davis22

congrats on passing the tech exam first of all. okay so to answer your main question -- yes you do need to wait until your license is actually in the ULS system and shows as active before you can apply for a vanity call. you cant apply for a vanity while youre still in limbo waiting for the initial grant. once that sequential call shows up and your license status is active, then you can go file a vanity application through the FCC's site. the sequential call you get assigned is totally valid and you can use it right away once the license is active, and then separately you apply for the vanity if you want one. the vanity process has its own waiting period, used to be like 18 days i think for technicians and generals, might be slightly different now so worth double checking the current rules. during that window other people can also apply for the same call so its not guaranteed even if you apply first. as for whether to bother -- totally up to you. some people put a lot of thought into getting a call that means something to them, like their initials or a call from their home state they like the sound of. plenty of folks just keep whatever they were assigned and it becomes their identity on the air after a while. neither way is wrong. just dont stress about it too much your first week, get on the air and have fun first

the fan mod is real, i did it on mine maybe two years ago. swapped to a higher cfm 60mm fan and wired it to come on a bit sooner, not a huge difference at QRP levels obviously but if you're running it near full power for any length of time on digital modes the heatsink temp is noticeably lower. i used a cheap IR thermometer to spot check it before and after and was seeing maybe 8-10 degrees C less at the heatsink after 10 minutes of FT8 at 50W. whether thats worth the hassle is up to you but i figure the finals will thank me eventually. on the mic gain thing — i just use an external preamp, specifically a little cheap Behringer unit i had lying around. honestly the audio reports got way better and i didnt have to touch anything inside the rig. the internal pot adjustment is fiddly and easy to overdo, i watched a guy on a zoom call with our club accidentally introduce a hum by messing with the grounding when he had the thing open for that. not saying dont do it just saying the external route is lower risk.

im pretty much in the same boat as you, only done two activations so far. the spotting thing stressed me out too before my first one but honestly the hunters are really patient and if you just keep calling someone usually picks you up and posts you to the network pretty quick. both times i had no real cell service and it worked out fine once i was actually transmitting. one thing that helped me was downloading the POTA app and putting in my planned activation ahead of time the night before. some hunters check that and will actually be listening for you which is kind of cool, felt like people were actually waiting which made me way less nervous about getting on the air.

yeah what he said. i was terrified my first net check-in too lol. honestly the NCS will help you out if you fumble it, they deal with new folks all the time. just go for it one thing i'll add — some nets have a specific time window for check-ins and then they close the net to new ones, so try to catch the start if you can. found that out the hard way when i tried checking into a traffic net like 20 minutes late and they were already wrapping up

WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is the recommended path for mobiles in North America and will give you two hops total. The WIDE1-1 allows low-level digipeaters to pick you up first, then WIDE2-1 gets you to the high-level sites. Much better for weak signal situations than straight WIDE2-2.

had something similar happen to a friends ft-991 after a storm, turned out to be one of those protection diodes shorted right to ground and killing receive entirely. they actually found it just by measuring across the antenna input with a DMM and seeing basically 0 ohms where there should have been a much higher resistance. ended up being a two dollar part but took like two hours to find it on the board because the schematic they had was a partial copy someone scanned badly. one thing id also check is whether the AGC circuit is doing something weird — ive seen cases where something in the AGC path fails and clamps the gain all the way down so it looks like dead receive but its actually just being crushed. probably not your issue if its truly zero noise but worth ruling out i guess

New General here (KE4XYZ) and I just got my vanity application dismissed by the FCC. I applied for W4ABC, which I checked was available on RadioQTH. The dismissal letter says "call sign not available for assignment" but gives no other details. I'm confused because I did my research beforehand. Is there something I'm missing about the availability checking process? I really want to understand what went wrong so I don't waste another $35. Any advice from those who've been through this would be greatly appreciated!

yeah im going, already got the hotel booked back in january. the flea market is definitely worth it if you get there early friday morning, like really early. ive seen guys lined up at 5am and that sounds crazy but thats where all the good deals go. last year i grabbed a barely used kenwood ts-590 for way under what theyre going for online so it pays off. the indoor stuff is cool too but honestly i spend most of my time wandering the outdoor tables. your club van idea sounds fun as long as nobody hogs the aux cord the whole way

so ive been doing more peaks lately and man every single time i get up there the coax is just a nightmare. like i thought i had it sorted nicely in my pack but then when i go to deploy the antenna its all twisted and knotted up. takes me like 10 minutes just to untangle before i can even start operating am i doing something wrong with how im packing it or is this just part of the deal with portable ops

ok so i just upgraded from tech to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i looked at the FCC part 97 chart and also the ARRL band plan and they dont quite match up and now im more confused than before. like the FCC says generals get phone starting at 7.175 but then i see people talking about staying away from the band edges and i dont really understand what that means practically. if the allocation goes to 7.300 does that mean i can transmit with my carrier right at 7.300 or does the signal have to be fully within the band or what. also is the ARRL band plan like a law or just a suggestion because some guys at my club act like its the bible and others say ignore it

so ive been using WSJT-X for FT8 stuff for a while now and it logs fine into its own file but i always end up having to manually import things or mess around with ADIF exports and it gets old fast. been thinking about actually setting up a proper logging solution and i keep going back and forth between just committing to N1MM or trying Log4OM. the thing is i do some contesting, nothing serious, maybe the state QSO party and occasionally i'll jump into a CQWW for a few hours just for fun. N1MM seems like the obvious pick for that but its a little intimidating and honestly the interface looks like it hasnt changed since like 2003. Log4OM looks nicer and apparently has decent WSJT-X integration but ive heard mixed things about how it handles contest exchanges and dupe checking under pressure. does anyone actually run both or is that just asking for a mess with duplicate logs and stuff. or is there some other way to set this up where WSJT-X feeds into one master log and N1MM pulls from that during contests. i feel like im overcomplicating this but also dont want to end up with 4 separate log files that never agree with each other

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im still trying to figure out the whole frequency thing. i know generals get more privelges than tech but im not totally clear on where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. like i know there are phone and cw portions but where do i stay away from the band edges and why does everyone seem to freak out about operating too close to the edge? is there an official document i should be looking at or is it more of a gentlemans agreement type thing? sorry if this is a dumb question

yeah i caught the tail end of that opening, got home from work around 5pm and there were still a few south american stations booming in. worked a PY station on my vertical with like 50 watts and he came back first call, which never happens for me lol. 10m is really something when its actually open, its a completely different band than what most people experience when conditions are down. re: the Yaesu thing, i think you might be talking about something they showed at Dayton or one of the regional fests, i vaguely remember seeing a post on one of the Facebook groups about a new SDR based portable rig but dont quote me on that. could have been a different manufacturer honestly, i was half asleep when i read it.

ok so i just upgraded from tech to general last month and im trying to figure out 40 meters but honestly the band plan stuff is really confusing me. like i know theres a chart somewhere but when i look at it theres the FCC allocation and then theres what the ARRL recommends and they dont always line up? or maybe i'm reading it wrong. my question is basically -- as a general class can i operate anywhere on 40m or are there parts i cant touch. and also whats the deal with staying away from band edges, someone at my club mentioned it but didnt really explain why. i have a ft-891 if that matters

so ive been monitoring 20m and 17m pretty closely the last few weeks and something weird is going on. some days i get into europe no problem from the midwest, next day i cant raise anyone beyond a few hundred miles. solar flux has been bouncing around quite a bit and i know that plays into it but i cant always predict when its gonna be good vs garbage. had a random opening last tuesday around 1800z on 15m that lasted maybe 90 minutes and i worked like 8 or 9 stations in japan and a couple in south korea, which for me is pretty unusual. then the next morning 15m was dead as a doornail. been trying to track the sfi and kp index more carefully but honestly its still kind of a black box to me. does anyone have a good way to predict when these openings are gonna happen or is it just a matter of being in the right place at the right time and having the radio on?

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, W4C/EM-023 up near asheville, and man i had no idea what i was getting into. brought my KX2 and a end fed halfwave i built, figured id be up there making contacts in like 20 minutes. took me almost an hour to find a decent spot with any kind of line of sight, the trees were insane. then i spent another 20 minutes trying to get my antenna up in a tree and the paracord just kept getting tangled. by the time i was actually on the air i had like 45 minutes before i needed to head back down and my hands were kind of shaking from the cold which i was not prepared for at all. did get 6 contacts though so i guess it counts. already planning the next one, gonna bring warmer gloves and a proper throw bag for the antenna

oh man i had the exact same problem when i first got my ticket lol. spent like two days thinking my radio was broken and it was just the tone the whole time. one thing i'll add is that some repeaters also have a timeout timer, so if you key up for too long without releasing it'll cut you off and you might get a different beep or tone from the machine that sounds kind of angry haha. just something to be aware of while youre figuring things out, keep transmissions to maybe 30 seconds or so until you get a feel for the machine.

the MARS mod is basically a no-brainer on that radio if you do any EMCOMM, good call. i did mine the day i got it out of the box honestly. as far as going deeper — the one thing i actually found useful was tweaking the filter settings in the menu rather than hardware stuff. the 7300 has a lot of DSP headroom that most people dont bother dialing in. the NB on that radio is decent but its really sensitive to the threshold setting and most people just leave it on default which isnt always optimal depending on your noise floor. spend an hour playing with NB threshold and NR depth on a noisy band and you'll probably get more out of it than any hardware mod would give you. the firmware stuff i've seen floating around is mostly sketchy third party things and i wouldnt touch it personally. icom pushes legit firmware updates and those are worth doing obviously, but the underground firmware mods seem like a good way to brick a radio you paid real money for.

im pretty new too so take this with a grain of salt but i started using an app called DX Alert on my phone and it lets you set up notifications for specific callsign prefixes you want so like if youre chasing a certain entity it'll buzz you when something gets spotted. that was a game changer for me because i dont have to stare at the screen all day. not sure if its on android though, i have an iphone

okay so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get onto the local 2m repeater. i programmed my baofeng with the offset and what i thought was the right tone but nobody seems to hear me, or at least nobody responds. the repeater does open up when i key up because i can hear the tail, so i know im hitting it. someone at the club mentioned maybe i have the tone set wrong or maybe its set to transmit tone when it should be encode only or something like that. honestly i got a little lost in that conversation. is there a difference between the tone you transmit and the tone the repeater is listening for? i thought it was just one number you punch in and thats it. also is there any kind of etiquette thing i should know before calling out? i dont want to step on anyone or do something embarrassing my first time on the air for real.

yeah the si5351 route is what i did when i built a similar thing last year, cleans everything right up. only thing i'll add is watch your audio stage gain distribution, if the noise is really bad it might be where you're placing the gain in the chain not just which opamp you used. too much gain early before any filtering and you just amplify all the crud. anyway nice work getting it on the air, manhattan style on copper clad is underrated for RF stuff

the adapter cable thing is real, i have like 40 of them and can never find the one i need lol. what finally helped me was just making a dedicated small ziplock bag labeled "RF adapters" and putting ONLY the ones that actually go with equipment in my kit. cut down the chaos a lot. also 20Ah should be plenty for the 817 for quite a while at low power, just make sure you know your actual consumption at whatever wattage you run. i was surprised how long mine lasted when i actually measured it instead of just guessing.

so ive been watching the solar flux index creep up over the past few weeks and yesterday afternoon i finally started hearing stuff on 10m that wasnt just noise. worked a couple stations in South America and even had a brief opening into Europe around 1400 local which honestly surprised me because we havent seen much of that around here lately. been using pskreporter to watch the spots come in and its pretty clear somethings changing. the SFI was sitting around 180-something yesterday which i know isnt crazy high but compared to what weve had it feels like a different band. K index was low too which always helps. curious if anyone else has been taking advantage of this or if its just been good in my part of the country. im in the midwest for reference. also wondering if 12m is worth monitoring more — i kind of ignore it but maybe i shouldnt be.

welcome to the hobby, dont stress too much about the first check-in, honestly most nets are pretty forgiving especially with new hams. the basic flow is net control will open the net and then call for check-ins, sometimes they do it by region or by license class or sometimes just open it up to everyone. when they ask, you just wait for a slight pause and give your callsign clearly, something like "W1XYZ checking in" and thats really it. if two people key up at the same time net control will usually ask you both to try again one at a time. the mobile or portable thing is just so people know your situation, mobile means youre in a car, portable usually means handheld and not at a fixed station. some nets log that info, some dont care. either way just say it if its relevant otherwise dont worry about it. the baofeng is totally fine for checking into a local net, ive seen guys use them for years. just make sure your offset and CTCSS tone are set right for your repeater and youll be good.

so ive been putting off doing a proper mobile install for like two years now and finally bit the bullet last weekend. got the FT-857D mounted under the passenger seat on a RAM mount bracket thing, ran the power cables directly to the battery with an inline fuse, and put up a Tram 1185 on the roof with a mag mount for now until i can figure out the NMO situation on my tacoma. everything works great on HF mostly, but on 2m and 70cm im getting this weird buzzing/whining noise that changes pitch with the engine RPM. classic alternator whine i think? but i already used pretty heavy gauge wire direct to battery so i thought that would fix it. the noise isnt horrible but its definitely there and i know people on the other end can hear it too because my buddy told me my audio sounds rough when im driving. not sure if its a grounding issue or if i need one of those ferrite chokes on the mic cable or maybe a noise filter on the power line. anyone dealt with this before? im not totally new to radio but mobile installs are kind of new territory for me