Steven Kumar

yeah the vanity process is actually not too bad once you understand how it works. basically you go into the FCC ULS, file a modification to your existing license, and request up to 25 specific callsigns in order of preference. the system then goes through a 18-day filing window — actually i think it used to be 30 days but they changed it — and at the end of that window if your top pick is available and nobody with a higher preference claim (like a close relative of a former holder or whatever) grabbed it, you get it. fee was eliminated a few years ago so thats one less thing to worry about. as for callsigns available to you, it depends on your license class. as a general you can hold a 2x3 format in most districts, or a 1x3. extras get access to the shorter ones like 1x2 and 2x1 formats. theres a site called AE7Q that a lot of people use to search available calls and see when callsigns are coming up — highly recommend poking around there before you apply so you go in with good options on your list

caps on the PA board is smart, those Yaesu rigs from that era used some pretty mediocre caps from what i recall reading. i redid the electrolytics on an older FT-897 and it honestly made the audio noticeably cleaner on receive which i wasnt even expecting. might be worth doing the whole board while you have it open rather than just the obviously bad ones, the others are the same age after all.

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep seeing people talk about QSL cards and LoTW and eQSL and honestly im not sure i understand the difference or if i need to be using all of them. like i made my first HF contact a few weeks ago on 40m and the guy said he'd send me a card and i said sure but i dont even have cards printed yet and i felt kind of bad about it. from what i can tell LoTW is run by the ARRL and its like the official digital log matching thing, and eQSL is a separate site thats kind of like an unofficial version? and then paper cards are just the old school way of doing it. but do contacts on LoTW count for DXCC and stuff? and does eQSL count for anything official? im also wondering if i even need to bother with paper cards or if digital is fine for most purposes. sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to figure out the whole confirmation system before i get too far behind on my logging

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about two years now and honestly its been fine for most stuff, ADS-B, weather satellites, poking around the bands, but i keep running into the dynamic range wall especially anywhere near the AM broadcast band or when i have a strong local pager system hammering the front end. been looking at upgrading and kinda torn between the SDRplay RSP1B and a HackRF One. i know they're kind of different tools. the HackRF is full duplex capable and goes up way higher in frequency but the noise figure is not great from what ive read, like 8-10dB across most of the range which is pretty rough for weak signal stuff. the RSP1B seems more focused on the receiver side and supposedly has much better dynamic range but you cant transmit obviously. mostly what i want to do is better HF reception, some decoding of digital modes (FT8 just to see if it works, some P25 monitoring for local public safety before they went encrypted, and maybe eventually some satcom stuff). not really planning to transmit with it. is the RSP1B actually worth the price jump over just getting a better filtered RTL setup or am i missing something. also does anyone actually use SDR Console vs SDRuno for the RSP hardware, ive heard mixed things

so ive been trying to learn CW for about 3 months now and i can copy maybe 10-12 wpm on a good day when someone is sending nice and clean. the problem is when i try to actually send, everything sounds terrible. im using a cheap set of paddles i picked up used and a keyer built into my radio (kenwood ts-590s) and i cant seem to get the weight and speed settings dialed in to where it sounds right. i keep getting what sounds like mushed together characters, like the dits and dahs are running into each other. ive messed with the weight setting a little but honestly im not even sure im doing it right. does anyone have like a starting point for weight settings or is this more of a technique problem than a settings problem? also my paddle tension feels really light, not sure if thats contributing or if i just need more practice with squeeze keying. any help appreciated, this has been bugging me for weeks

so i just passed my technician exam last week (finally) and now im trying to figure out what handheld to get. ive been reading threads and watching youtube for like 3 weeks and honestly it just made things more confusing. everyone seems to have a strong opinion and half the time they contradict each other. the main thing i want to do is hit the local repeaters and maybe do some simplex with a buddy of mine who lives like 8 miles away. nothing crazy. my budget is somewhere around $50-150 depending on whether i can justify spending more to my wife lol. ive seen a ton of people recommending the baofeng uv-5r just because its cheap but then other people act like youre committing a crime if you buy one. then theres the yaesu ft-65 which seems more respected but costs more. and i keep seeing the wouxun stuff mentioned but i dont really know anything about that brand. is there like a sensible middle ground here or am i overthinking this

i just upgraded like two months ago so this is pretty fresh for me. the exam itself wasnt bad, i think i missed like 4 or 5 questions and still passed easy. the math looks scary but theres really only a handful of formulas they actually test you on and they come up enough in practice exams that you just kinda memorize them whether you want to or not lol the HF thing is a whole different world though i wont lie. my first time actually hearing a pile up on 20m i had no idea what was going on, everyone was talking over each other and i couldnt figure out who the dx station was even calling. takes some getting used to but thats half the fun i think

yeah i went through almost the exact same thing about two years ago. started with a pi running a combo of rigctld and some custom scripts to talk to my 7300, and honestly the audio path was the killer for me — i kept getting these weird dropouts that turned out to be a buffer size issue in the audio daemon but it took me forever to figure that out. eventually just punted and went with RemoteHams and the difference in just getting on and operating was pretty noticeable the SDR piece in RemoteHams is ok, its not like having a full SDRuno or SDRangel session but for monitoring and having a panadapter view while you operate its fine. i mostly use it to see whats happening around my freq before i transmit remotely cause the last thing you want is to key up into a QSO thats already going on and you cant hear it on the main rx the latency thing you mentioned — what codec are you using on the audio side? if youre doing anything uncompressed over the WAN thats gonna be your problem right there. RemoteHams uses OPUS i believe and that makes a big difference compared to just piping raw audio through something like darkice or whatever

honestly i just use N1MM for everything including FT8 via WSJT-X and it works ok once you get the UDP port configured right. the Log4OM integration stuff sounds like more headache to me but i get why people like it. N1MM's general logging is clunky like you said but i got used to it after a while. the contest features are just too good to give up and i didnt want to maintain two logs

went through this like 8 months ago so i can share what happened with me. i used ae7q just like everyone says to and found a 1x3 call i liked that was showing as available, submitted through ULS and honestly it wasnt that complicated once you actually get into the application. just make sure you list alternates because if your first choice gets snagged during that window youre kinda out of luck and out the fee. took about a week for mine to show up in the system after the window closed. the 18 day thing is real, so dont expect anything instant. good luck with it, shorter calls are definitely nicer on cw if you ever go down that road

so i finally got around to trying some actual linear transponder work on the LEO sats after years of just doing FM birds and honestly it was more frustrating than i expected. been doing AO-91 and SO-50 for a while no problem, always wanted to try the linear ones. got myself a copy of Gpredict set up properly, had my IC-9700 ready to go and was tracking AO-73 last thursday. the doppler correction was all over the place at first and i couldnt find my own signal in the passband at all. i knew i had to listen on the downlink while transmitting on the uplink and adjust for doppler but in practice its like... the whole thing is moving so fast and you have to tune both vfos differently because the uplink and downlink doppler shifts are in opposite directions on a linear transponder right. eventually i heard something that might have been my CW but honestly not sure. the pass was only like 8 minutes and by the time i felt like i had a handle on what i was doing it was already going LOS. anyone have a good workflow for getting your downlink signal found quickly? feels like i was wasting half the pass just searching.

I just upgraded like two months ago so this is pretty fresh for me. Took me honestly about three weeks of studying maybe 20-30 minutes a day. The propagation stuff clicked for me once I just started listening on HF before I even had privileges, like just tuning around on a receiver or an SDR and you start to hear what people mean about band conditions and skip and all that the exam itself felt easier than the practice tests somehow, maybe because i was nervous and overstudied but either way i passed first try with a few to spare. just keep grinding hamStudy and you'll get there

so ive been messing around with remote station control for a while now, got a basic setup running at home where i can hit my IC-7300 over the LAN but i want to take it further and actually use RemoteHams to expose it to the internet properly. the SDR side is what im fuzzy on. i have an RTL-SDR dongle sitting on the same machine as my RRC-1258 and im not totally sure how to get that panadapter data streaming out alongside the audio without it turning into a total mess. the RemoteHams client software supposedly handles all this but every time i try to configure the SDR server piece it either cant find the device or it just hangs on connect. tried reinstalling twice. running windows 10, the dongle shows up fine in SDR# and in SDR Console so its not a driver thing. has anyone actually got the full chain working where you have the rig control, audio and the SDR panadapter all going over a single internet connection? curious how much bandwidth that actually chews through too because im on a 25 up at the shack end.

so i finally stopped being lazy and just built a simple 40m dipole out of some 14 gauge stranded wire i had sitting in the garage. cut each leg to about 33.5 feet, fed it with some RG-8X i had leftover from a previous project. center insulator is literally just a piece of PVC pipe with holes drilled through it, nothing fancy at all. anyway got it up in an inverted V config, apex is maybe 30 feet up on a pushup mast in the backyard. SWR is sitting around 1.8:1 at 7.150 which honestly isnt terrible but i was expecting to get closer to 1.3 or so before i started trimming. the thing is im not sure if its the feedpoint connections causing issues or if i just need to keep shortening the legs. i soldered the coax braid and center conductor directly to the wire ends at the PVC insulator, no balun or anything like that. should i be worried about the lack of balun here or just keep trimming first and see what happens? i can get SWR down to about 1.5 at 7.200 if that helps narrow anything down. havent tried to really tx much yet, mostly just listening and checking the SWR across the band.

No hard rule that says you must use phonetics every single time — it's really just about whether the other station can copy you clearly. On a local repeater with good signals and no QRM you can just say your call and everyone hears it fine. But on HF especially when the band is noisy or you're working DX, phonetics are just how you make sure the other op actually gets your call right. Nothing worse than getting into a log wrong because someone heard B instead of D or whatever. As for mixing in non-standard words, yeah some old timers do it and it's not the end of the world, but honestly stick with NATO when you can. The whole point is that those specific words were chosen to be distinct from each other even through static and accents. "Sugar" and "Sierra" both start with S so it's fine, but some substitutions can actually cause more confusion than they solve. Just learn the standard ones, after a while you say them without even thinking about it.

Have you considered using the existing sixteen 10-footers but adding sixteen more at different lengths? Mix of 1/4 wave on different bands can broaden the effective ground plane bandwidth. I use 8, 10, 12, and 16-foot radials on my multiband vertical.

haha yeah my first activation i drove an hour to the park and realized my paddle wasnt plugged in all the way and kept getting double dits on every press. spent like 20 minutes thinking my KX3 was broken before i figured it out. its always something. the counterpoise thing is real though, i literally zip tie mine to the feedline now so i cant forget it. once you do a few of these the setup gets way faster, now i can be on air in under 10 minutes if the trees cooperate

yeah what he said about LoTW being the one that counts for DXCC. i chased that award for years and basically every serious DXpedition uploads to LoTW pretty quickly after they get home. some of the rarer ones take a while but they get there. one thing i'd add — setting up LoTW the first time is kind of a pain because of the certificate process, you have to request a certificate from ARRL and they mail a postcard to your address on file with the FCC to verify you. just takes a few days but people get tripped up if their FCC address is out of date. just something to be aware of before you start.

so ive been messing around with the idea of setting up a proper remote station for a while now, mostly because my HOA situation is getting worse and i have a buddy with some land about 40 miles out who said i could put up antennas there. the question is whether to go with RemoteHams RRC-1258 boxes or just cobble something together with a raspberry pi and some VoIP setup i already kind of understand. also been looking at the SDR remote side of things through RemoteHams because i already run an SDRplay at home and honestly the idea of having that sitting out at a rural site with no local RF noise is pretty appealing. anyone actually used the RemoteHams SDR remote client for anything serious like actual contesting or just casual DX listening? i cant find many real-world opinions that arent from like 2016. the internet linking piece is what im less sure about. my buddy only has a basic cable connection out there, nothing fancy, and im wondering if thats going to be a bottleneck for control latency on SSB. CW would probably be fine but SSB audio with any kind of jitter gets annoying fast. anyone run a remote over a mediocre residential connection with decent results or is this a lost cause without fiber or a dedicated link

I went two years ago and it was pretty decent honestly, they had a license exam session in the morning which was cool to watch. Not sure about this year tho. If you go check if anyones selling a used antenna analyzer, been looking for one on the cheap for months now

Classic common mode problem. Get a Mix 31 ferrite choke right at the radio - 10-15 turns of RG-213 through a big toroid. Also check your USB cable shielding to the computer. Sounds like your station grounding is adequate.

honestly the math looks scarier than it is. theres only a handful of actual calculation questions and you can kind of learn to recognize the pattern without fully understanding the theory behind it. hamstudy.org is where i'd point you first, just grind the question pool until you're consistently hitting 85% or better on the practice exams and you'll be fine. the electrical theory stuff like reactance and impedance, you dont need to be an engineer to get through the exam. just know enough to pick the right answer. i spent maybe 3 weeks studying on and off in the evenings and passed with room to spare. the privileges you get on HF are absolutely worth the effort, 40m especially is great once you have your General ticket.

yeah the wikipedia list is overwhelming, most of those codes havent been used since morse code was how everyone communicated and a lot of them are pretty obscure maritime stuff that crossed over into ham radio back in the day. in practice you really only need maybe a dozen or so to get by day to day. the ones you mentioned -- QRM is interference from other stations, like someone transmitting on or near your frequency. QRN is natural static, so like lightning crashes and atmospheric noise. QTH is your location, people will ask QTH? meaning wheres your location. QSL means acknowledged or confirmed, and its also used for those cards people mail each other to confirm contacts. 73 is just best regards or good wishes, its been around since early telegraph days and stuck around. you'll also hear QRZ which means whos calling me, and QSO which is just a contact or conversation. those honestly cover like 90% of what you'll hear in casual HF operation. the other abbreviations you'll run into -- stuff like OM (old man, just means any male ham), YL (young lady, any female ham regardless of age lol), and ES which is just shorthand for and -- those come from CW culture and people still use them even in voice sometimes. just listen for a while and context usually makes it obvious what people mean.

so ive been wanting to get into satellite work for a while now and finally just decided to jump in with SO-50 since everyone says its a good starting point. got my ft-817 and a arrow antenna and went out in the backyard last night for a pass that was supposed to be like 47 degrees max elevation, figured that was decent enough to try. problem is im totally lost on the doppler correction thing. i understand the concept, frequency shifts as the bird approaches and then moves away, fine. but in practice when im out there holding the arrow and trying to manually tune the radio at the same time its just chaos. i was on 145.850 for the uplink and 436.795 for the downlink and i could hear what i think was the transponder or maybe just noise honestly, but i couldnt get a contact. do most people just memorize the doppler curve ahead of time and manually tune by feel, or is there some way to automate this on the 817? ive seen people mention gpredict but i havent figured out how to get that talking to the radio yet. also not sure if my antenna polarization was right, i had it horizontal the whole time

i went HackRF mostly because i wanted to do some spectrum painting and mess around with replay attacks on my own garage door opener just to see how it worked, so the TX capability mattered to me. but honestly for pure receive work the RSP1A wins and costs less. thats kind of the whole story there. one thing nobody talks about enough is the software side mattering as much as the hardware. i was getting mediocre results with everything until i started using proper decimation settings in SDRangel and actually paid attention to the gain staging. sdr++ is also worth trying, its lighter weight than SDRangel and the UI actually makes sense right away. runs great on a pi 4 too if thats relevant to your setup