Jessica Miller

so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has been doing it for years and finally talked me into trying to get licensed. i went and looked up the FCC stuff and honestly it was kind of overwhelming, like i dont even know what pool of questions to study from or if there are practice tests online or what. do i need to buy a book or is there enough free stuff out there to get me through the technician exam? also how hard is the test really, i did okay in school but its been like 15 years since i thought about anything involving electricity or radio waves. just looking for a general idea of what im getting into before i commit to actually signing up for a session

the fan thing is pretty well documented actually, there's a thread on eham somewhere from years ago where a guy measured temps on the finals with the stock fan vs a better one and the difference was pretty significant under sustained load. you're not crazy. for digital modes especially PSK or JS8 where you're sitting at high duty cycle for a long time it genuinely matters. i did something similar on my 7100 though the internal layout is obviously different. the stock thermal management on a lot of these japanese rigs from that era is kind of "good enough for voice" and not really designed with WSPR or FT8 in mind, that stuff just wasnt as common when they were being designed. as for TX audio after the mod, i didnt notice anything on mine but i also run an external mic processor so i probably wouldnt. worth throwing a recording into audacity and comparing to something before if you saved anything.

rythm thing — yeah this. also nobody talks about the listening up trick enough. like if a dx op says 'listening 5 to 10' you still gotta figure out where in that range they're actually pulling calls from and kind of camp there. i had a guy tell me once to find where the DX is actually responding, not where you think sounds busy, and park 1kHz above or below that sweet spot. worked surprisingly well on a recent pacific DXpedition i was working on 20m. also your 7300 has some decent filtering, are you using it to narrow down and actually hear the DX clearly through all the qrm? some people crank their rx bandwidth way too wide and they cant even hear when they get called back.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and just got into chasing DX a little bit. someone in my local club mentioned cluster spotting and i finally sat down and figured out how to use DXwatch and the QRZ logbook thing together. or at least i think i figured it out. what im doing is i have dxwatch open on one screen filtered to like 20m and 17m because thats where i seem to have the best luck with my wire antenna, and then when i see something interesting i check qrz to see if ive already worked them or if theyre in my log. is that the normal workflow people use or am i overcomplicating it? feels a bit clunky to keep flipping between tabs. also is there an app that does this better on a phone? i saw something called DX Toolkit mentioned somewhere but couldnt find much about it. my shack PC is kind of old and slow so having something on my phone while im at the radio would actually be really helpful. just wondering what other people are using day to day.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF stuff, some weak signal VHF, and honestly EME has always seemed like this crazy black magic thing that only guys with massive yagi arrays in their backyard could do. but then i started reading more about JT65 and the EME2 protocol stuff and it sounds like maybe the barrier to entry isnt quite as insane as i thought? my current setup is pretty modest, ive got an IC-9700 and i was thinking about building or buying a decent yagi for 2m, maybe something in the 10-12 element range. i know guys are doing EME with smaller stations than i expected but im still not sure what the realistic minimums are. like what kind of preamp am i looking at, and do i actually need to worry about sequencing relays at the power levels most people run? i was reading something about MGF1302 based preamps being popular but i dont know if thats still current or if theres something better now also how does actually making a contact work, like do people just call CQ on a specific frequency and hope someone with a big dish is listening, or is there some kind of scheduling system i should know about

SOTA in the northeast is great before winter, some of the summits in the Catskills and Adirondacks are still really accessible through like mid November depending on the year. just watch the weather, i got caught on a summit last October with ice on the rocks coming down and that was not fun at all. bring microspikes just in case even if the forecast looks okay. for CQ WW yeah just jump in, worst case you make a handful of contacts and learn the flow. everyone starts somewhere

went through this exact process last year so i feel you. one thing i'll add is that some calls look available in the database but are actually in a post-cancellation hold period and you cant apply for them yet, AE7Q shows that info too if you dig into the individual call page. i picked a 1x3 that had been recently cancelled and had to wait like another 30 days before the hold cleared. little bit annoying but not a big deal. good luck, its kinda fun picking one out honestly

9 contacts is still solid for a first time out, honestly the first activation is mostly just figuring out what you forgot to bring lol. i did my first one and realized i left my logging sheet AND my pen at home so i was texting myself callsigns the whole time. get yourself a 9:1 unun and the random wire situation gets way more manageable, makes a big difference for multiband

yeah theres definitely a learning curve with all of it but honestly you just absorb most of it after a while on the air. the Q codes go way back to before voice radio, telegraph operators used them so you could communicate across language barriers since QRM means interference whether you speak english or spanish or whatever. anyway the ones you really run into constantly are QSL which just means acknowledgment or confirmed, QRM is man-made interference like someone elses signal bleeding in, QRN is natural static and noise, QSB is fading which is why you were confused, the signal was probably going up and down. QRZ is who is calling me, youll hear that at the start of a pileup when a DX station is trying to figure out whos calling. 73 is just best regards, goes back forever, and 88 is love and kisses which you mostly hear between people who know each other well. DE just means from, so when you hear W1ABC DE K5XYZ it means K5XYZ is calling W1ABC. theres a full ITU Q code list you can find easy enough but honestly just spend some time in the ARRL handbook or even just lurking on a busy 20m frequency for a few afternoons and it starts clicking pretty fast

so i've been running a handheld for like two years now and finally decided to do a proper mobile setup. picked up a used FT-857D and got it mounted under the passenger seat with the head unit on the dash. wiring went pretty smooth, ran the power direct to the battery with an inline fuse, 30 amp, seemed like the right call. the part im struggling with now is the antenna. i have a mag mount NMO that came with some random quarter wave whip for 2m and i slapped it on the roof for now. works okay but im getting a little RF back into the audio on 10m — like a buzz/hum when i transmit. figured it might be a grounding issue with the mag mount but not sure where to even start diagnosing that. also wondering if anyone has done a through-hole NMO mount on a pickup truck roof and how much of a pain that was. i do a fair amount of highway driving and the rig is mainly gonna be used for 2m/70cm repeaters and some HF when conditions are good. any thoughts appreciated

linked dipole in the trees should work great, whats your feedline run looking like? if youre going more than like 50 feet of coax down to the rig at that park you might want to think about where youre actually operating from vs where the antenna is, sometimes i end up with a weird coax run because of where i can actually get a tree and where i need to sit and it introduces more loss than people expect especially if someones donated you a roll of RG-58 or something. not a huge deal on 40m but worth checking. on the generator thing i pretty much always bring mine to anything over 8 hours. i know its a pain but ive been burned too many times by 'oh the solar will be fine' and then spending the last 4 hours babying the rig at low power trying to stretch the battery. EU2200i is a good choice at least, quiet enough that you can actually have a conversation next to it which matters a lot when you're doing voice ops.

1.8:1 on 2m isn't the end of the world but it's definitely worth tracking down before you leave it. honestly the first place i'd look is that PL-259 you soldered yourself — i've chased weird SWR issues for weeks on mobile installs only to find out it was a cold solder joint or a tiny bit of braid touching the center pin. if you have a second connector or even just some spare coax you can do a quick swap and see if the reading changes. also worth double checking that the NMO stud is actually making good contact with the body ground. sometimes the paint under the mount washer causes issues even if you think you scraped it clean. the Diamond 770 is a good antenna and should tune up pretty flat across 2m when everything's happy. what are you using to measure SWR, a dedicated meter or through the radio?

so i had basically the exact same problem when i started out like six months ago lol. for me it turned out my offset was going the wrong direction, i had it set to plus instead of minus and was just transmitting into empty air basically. once i fixed that it worked right away. also one thing i'd mention — some repeaters around here have a courtesy tone you hear after someone unkeys, kind of a beep or a short tone, and if you're not hearing that even when others are talking it might mean the audio path from the output to your radio is fine but there's like a delay or something quirky going on. probably just the offset thing though honestly

honestly same boat as you were like 6 months ago lol, i just passed my general last month. the exam has some stuff about operating procedures and band plans that i didnt expect, like knowing which portions of which bands you can use and all that. worth actually reading through the band plan for HF before the test. also there was more math than the tech exam but nothing you need a calculator for, just ratios and basic stuff. took me maybe 3 weeks of casual studying. one thing i wasnt expecting is after you pass you can start using HF privileges right away once the license shows up in the FCC database, you dont have to wait for a physical card or anything. so that was cool. now i just need to actually buy a radio haha

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and honestly it works great for what it is but ive been feeling like its basically just a fancy beacon exchange at this point. you get a signal report, you confirm the qso, done. there's no actual communication happening and that started to bother me after a while. started reading about JS8Call and it sounds like what i actually want — weak signal capability but you can type actual sentences back and forth. my question is whether the weak signal performance is anywhere close to FT8 or if youre giving up a lot to get that conversational capability. i know JS8Call has different speed modes, turbo normal slow etc, and i assume the slower ones dig deeper into the noise but i havent seen a good side by side comparison anywhere. also wondering if theres even enough activity to bother. i pulled up the JS8Call activity on pskreporter and it looked pretty sparse compared to FT8 which is absolutely packed. running a G5RV at about 35 feet and an IC-7300 so the station isnt the issue, more just trying to figure out if its worth spinning up another software instance and hunting for activity that might not be there. still mess around with PSK31 occasionally when i want to actually type words to someone, old habits i guess, but even that feels like it takes a lot more effort to find a qso these days than it used to.

so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly do HF but a buddy of mine got me interested in working the LEOs, specifically AO-73 and FO-29. i set up gpredict on my laptop and thats going okay, it tracks the passes and i can see the doppler shift displayed but here's where i get confused -- do i actually have to manually retune constantly while the satellite is overhead or is there some way to automate this? i have an IC-9700 which i think can do CAT control but ive never messed with that stuff before. also on FO-29 which has a linear transponder, i keep reading that you have to invert your tuning direction on SSB which makes zero sense to me. like if i tune up on my uplink i have to tune down on the downlink? i tried working a pass yesterday and just could not figure out what i was hearing, felt like i was chasing signals all over the place and never actually made a contact. the pass was like 7 minutes and it went by so fast i didnt even have time to think. any tips for someone starting out with this? i have a decent arrow antenna and a handheld for now but might upgrade later if i get into it more.

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and figured id just ask here because i keep going in circles reading old threads. basically i do a lot of portable ops from hilltops, sometimes SOTA sometimes just messing around on 2m and 70cm, and im trying to figure out if a dual band yagi is actually worth the hassle over just bringing a decent collinear like a diamond x50 or something in that range. the yagi obviously gives me way more gain in one direction which is great when im trying to hit a specific repeater or work someone a county or two over, but breaking it down and setting it up every time is kind of a pain, especially if im only up there for an hour or so. the collinear just screws on and works, omnidirectional obviously, which is nice when i dont know exactly where traffic is coming from. im running an FT-60 handheld most of the time, occasionally the IC-2730 if i bring the car up close. anyone switched from one approach to the other and regret it or found a setup that sorta splits the difference? also curious if the gain figures on the cheap yagis from the usual online sellers are anywhere close to real or if its all marketing fluff

yeah the MARS mod on those is dead simple, Yaesu basically made it trivial on purpose i think. glad it went well. on the ATU question -- ive seen a few people mount an LDG YT-100 basically velcro'd to the bottom of the 857 and use the CAT cable to get semi-auto tuning, its not truly internal but in the field it acts like one unit. not elegant but functional. the real internal solution would be swapping to an 897D which had the tuner option but obviously thats a whole different radio. there was a guy on one of the yahoo groups years ago who actually stuffed a miniature tuner board inside the 857 chassis but i never saw a complete writeup and i suspect it was more trouble than it was worth thermally. the fan mod is worth it just for sanity reasons alone, agree with you there. mine would kick on and scare me every time during a quiet net.

oh man i had the exact same issue when i first started, spent like two weeks thinking my radio was broken lol. turned out i had the tone set but also had tone squelch enabled on receive so i was basically filtering out the repeater's output. once i turned off the receive tone squelch it all clicked. baofengs can be a little finicky with how they label that stuff in the menu too so just make sure youre editing the right channel settings.

so ive been running single op for about four years now and my rates have kind of plateaued. i do okay in the bigger contests, usually manage somewhere around 800-1000 QSOs in a 48 hour phone contest but i feel like im leaving a lot of points on the table especially during the slow periods when the run frequency is just dead and im sitting there hitting F1 every 30 seconds waiting for someone to call. been reading a lot about SO2R and it seems like the obvious answer for filling in those dead spots but honestly every time i look into it i get intimidated by the station complexity. the antenna switching, the bandpass filters, making sure your second radio isnt splattering all over your run frequency... it feels like a whole project just to set up correctly and then you still have to actually learn how to operate it without your brain melting. anyone who made the jump from single radio to SO2R — was it worth it for your claimed scores or did the station headaches eat up too much time and focus? and do you need to have the filter situation completely dialed in before you even try it or can you kind of limp along with some separation and work on it over time?

800 QSOs in CQWW SSB is pretty solid for single radio honestly, dont sell yourself short. i dabbled with SO2R a couple years ago and went back to single radio because i felt like i was doing both badly instead of one thing well. maybe thats just me though, some guys take to it really fast. what i did find helped my rate more than anything was just being more aggressive about when to switch between running and S&P. like a lot of guys run until they dry up completely and then go hunt, but ive had better luck setting a threshold — if i get less than like 60 an hour for more than 10 minutes i start S&P and look for fresh multipliers, then come back and try a new run freq. keeps the log moving even when propagation gets weird

so i passed my technician exam last saturday and im pretty excited about it, been wanting to do this for like 3 years now. anyway the VE team was great and they uploaded everything to the FCC that same day i guess, and i got my CACS notice pretty fast which was cool. but now im trying to understand how the whole callsign thing actually works. like does the FCC just assign you whatever the next available sequential call is in your district, or is there some way to have any input on it? a guy at the club mentioned something about vanity calls but said i had to wait a while before i could apply for one. is that true? also does where you live actually affect the number in your callsign or is that kind of outdated now sorry if this is a dumb question, i tried searching the FCC website and honestly it just made me more confused

I remember my first activation vividly, it was a flooding situation and I drove 45 minutes to the shelter with all my gear and then basically sat in a corner for three hours because nobody had told me there was a sign in sheet or that I needed to check in with the shelter manager not just the ARES folks. little stuff like that can trip you up. the ICS 100 and 700 courses online are free and they actually do help you understand how you fit into the bigger response structure, not just the radio part of it. sounds like you did fine though, HF traffic handling during an actual event is not nothing.

the offset thing tripped me up too when i first started, felt dumb when i finally understood it lol. one thing i'll add — some repeaters around here are linked into bigger systems like IRLP or AllStar so occasionally when you key up you might be talking to people in completely different states or even other countries without realizing it. not a big deal just something cool to know. i heard a guy in florida answer a local check-in once and everybody was confused for a second

so ive been wanting to get into CW for a while now, got my general last year and just never bothered with code since its not required anymore but everyone says its worth learning and i keep seeing people on 40m having these long QSOs and i just hear noise basically anyway i downloaded a couple apps and tried doing the whole alphabet chart thing where you look at dots and dashes and try to memorize them but that seems really wrong somehow, like im just staring at dit dah dah and trying to convert it in my head and by the time i figure out one letter the next three are gone is there like a method that actually works or do people just grind it out for months, also how long did it realistically take you to get to where you could actually have a real QSO, not contesting or anything just a basic contact