Amanda Williams49

honestly same boat as you like 8 months ago lol. what helped me was just listening to the net for a few weeks without even trying to check in, just to get a feel for how the NC runs it. every net is a little different. some are pretty loose and some NCs run a tight ship where they really do want you to wait your turn exactly. the thing about breaking into a regular qso - i was told to just say my call once during the pause and see what happens. works pretty well most of the time. worst that happens is they dont hear you and you try again later

so i just passed my technician exam last week (finally) and ive been lurking here for a while trying to figure out what to buy first. everyone seems to have an opinion on HTs and i honestly dont know where to start. my main plan is to hit the local repeaters, maybe do some APRS stuff eventually, and just generally get comfortable talking on the radio before i invest in anything bigger. i keep seeing people mention the Baofeng UV-5R as the obvious budget choice but then other people say stay away from it and get a Yaesu or Kenwood even if it costs more. i looked at the FT-65R and the TH-D74A and the price difference is kind of shocking. is the more expensive stuff actually worth it or is that just people being snobby about cheap radios. also does anyone actually use the APRS built into those fancier handhelds or is that more of a niche thing i live in a pretty hilly area so i was thinking maybe a better antenna would help more than spending extra on the radio itself? not sure if thats right. anyway any thoughts appreciated im just trying to not make a dumb first purchase

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and mostly been doing 2m and some 70cm stuff, got my HT and a cheap mobile rig. but honestly i keep hearing people on the local repeater talking about working dx and contacts all over the place on HF and im starting to feel like im missing out on a lot. been looking at the general class exam and it seems like a lot of the questions are pretty different from the tech exam, like theres actual math involved with like impedance and stuff? im not great at math, got through it in high school but that was a while ago. is it realistic to just use the hamstudy.org thing and grind through the pool or do i actually need to understand all the theory to pass. also what HF privileges do i actually get as a general, someone mentioned i still cant use certain parts of 20m or something like that? just trying to figure out if its worth the effort before i commit to studying

honest opinion — if your rate is already limited by operating skill or antenna rather than the SO2R advantage, fixing those things will probably get you more points per dollar than the filtering setup. i know guys running high single-digit hours in CQWW on a single radio with a modest beam who outscore casual SO2R ops just because their CW is clean and fast and they dont waste time on bad band decisions. that said once you hit a ceiling with single radio the SO2R mult hunting during run lulls is huge, especially for the multiplier bonus on something like SS or CQWW. the bleedover thing is real though, dont underestimate it. also worth lookin into the YCCC SO2R box or similar switching controllers if you go that route, makes the keying and audio routing way less of a rats nest.

im in almost the exact same boat lol, been at CW for about 4 months now. one thing that helped me a ton was switching from trying to think about dots and dashes to just hearing the sound as a whole letter. like dont think dit-dah, just hear the sound of A and your brain starts to recognize it without translating. its a game changer once it clicks but it took me probably 6 weeks before it started feeling natural at all so dont get discouraged if its slow going

CQ WW is actually a great one to start with even as a newcomer, dont let the size of it scare you. the exchange is super simple — signal report and CQ zone, thats it. you dont have to worry about complicated multiplier categories or anything like that at first. just point your radio at a frequency, call CQ or answer someone, log the contact, move on. N1MM+ is what most people use for logging and it handles everything automatically once you set up your profile, but honestly for a casual first effort paper is totally fine, youre not trying to win anything youre just getting a feel for it. SOTA is kind of its own world, great fun but yeah its not really a traditional contest, more like a program where you activate summits and get points. some people combine it with contests though, doing a portable activation during a contest weekend which is kind of a blast if you like that sort of thing. Field Day next june — mark your calendar now. its the most beginner friendly operating event in ham radio i think, lots of clubs run group operations and you can just show up and sit down with an elmer and learn as you go. did my first one about twelve years ago and still do it every year with my club.

yeah this stuff can feel overwhelming at first but honestly you do just pick most of it up pretty quick once you start operating. the Q codes go way back to maritime radio, way before ham radio was even a thing, so theres a lot of them and not all of them get used regularly. the ones youll hear constantly are QSL which means confirmed or i acknowledge, QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural static like lightning crashes, QSB is fading which is super common on HF, QTH is your location, QRZ means whos calling me, and QRO or QRP are high power and low power respectively. the ARRL handbook has a full list in the back and so does the ARRL website if you just search for it. as for 73 thats just best regards, comes from old telegraph days. 88 means love and kisses and you mostly hear that between people who know each other. ES just means and in CW shorthand. once you get your general and start actually making contacts it really clicks fast, dont stress too much about memorizing it all upfront.

so i've been putting off building one of these for probably two years now, kept telling myself i'd get to it. picked up a QCX mini kit over the winter and finally sat down with it last month. took me a couple evenings to get through the build, i'm not the fastest solderer in the world and my eyes aren't what they used to be so there was a lot of squinting involved. anyway it works. like actually works, which honestly surprised me a little because i've had kit builds go sideways before. got it calibrated, ran it into a 40m dipole i have in the backyard and worked a guy in ohio on 5 watts. just a casual QSO but still, felt pretty good. the efficiency on these little rigs is genuinely impressive, the thing barely gets warm even running continuous for a while. only complaint so far is the sidetone volume is kind of annoying to adjust and i keep bumping the tuning knob which is way too sensitive for my fat fingers. might try to print a bigger knob for it. anyone else run one of these or similar and have tips for portable use? thinking about throwing it in a bag with a small LiFePO4 battery and heading out to the park or something.

the 120hz hum is almost certainly your power supply ripple getting into the audio somewhere, classic LM386 problem actually. that chip is notorious for picking up supply noise especially if you're running it off anything less than a well-filtered bench supply. try putting a 10uf electrolytic and a 0.1uf ceramic right at pin 6 to ground and see if that cleans it up. also make sure your audio ground and your RF ground arent sharing a long trace or wire because that can couple all kinds of garbage in. on the toroid question — yeah T50-2 is fine for 40m but if your resonance is drifting when you connect an antenna it usually means your Q is lower than it should be, probably from loose or unevenly spaced windings. i wind mine as evenly as i can around the core and then use a dab of Q-dope to lock them. also double check your capacitor values in the filter, i once spent two hours debugging a BPF before i realized i had grabbed a 100pf cap from the wrong bin and it was actually 10pf. easy mistake.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend, went to a state forest about 45 minutes from my house that already had a reference number assigned (KFF-xxxx format, still getting used to the numbering system). set up my trusty FT-891 with a random wire thrown up in a tree, ran about 25 watts and honestly the pile was way bigger than i expected for a sunday morning ended up with 47 QSOs in about 2 hours which i think is decent for a first time? i know for POTA you only need 10 contacts to validate an activation but im not sure if WWFF has different requirements, i looked it up and i think it might be 44 contacts to actually log it as a valid activation which seems like a lot more work. can anyone confirm that? also do i need to upload the log somewhere specific, i found the wwff.us site but wasnt totally sure if thats the right place or if theres a separate spot for submitting overall though it was a really fun experience, way more relaxed than contest operating and i liked being out in the trees. definitely going to do more of these

the ARRL website has a band plan chart that lays it out pretty clearly, way easier than reading 97.301 directly. for 40m phone your General privileges start at 7.175 MHz, the guys you heard below that are probably Extra class or just not paying attention to where they're operating, which happens more than it should honestly. as for FCC enforcement, its mostly self-policed day to day but the FCC does issue NOVs and fines when things get bad enough. they have the Enforcement Bureau and they do monitor, especially if someone files a complaint. ive seen guys get actual warning letters for operating out of band so its not toothless, just slow. the ARRL also has a volunteer monitoring program that watches for this kind of thing. congrats on the General by the way, 40m is a great band to learn on

I went a slightly different direction on mine — ended up just modifying the thermistor threshold so the fan kicks in earlier rather than messing with the fan itself. It's a bit fiddly to get right because you're basically adjusting when the control circuit triggers, but the end result is the fan runs at normal speed just... sooner. Temps during WSPR beaconing sessions dropped noticeably. The stock fan is actually decent if it just ran more aggressively earlier in the thermal cycle. That said if the fan noise bothers you the resistor trick the other guy mentioned is probably the easier path. I've also seen people swap in a Noctua fan cut to fit but that seems like more work than its worth to me personally.

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into our local 2m net last night after having my ticket for like 4 months and just listening. the net control called around for check-ins and i keyed up and gave my callsign and... silence. then the net control came back and said something like "QSL, hold please" and i honestly wasnt sure if i did something wrong or if that was normal. ended up just listening for the rest of the net because i got too nervous to do anything else. nobody was rude or anything but i felt like everyone else just knew exactly what to do and i was the only one fumbling around. is there like a standard way you're supposed to check in? do you just give your callsign or do you say your name and location too? i've seen different things online and none of it really matches what i actually heard on the air. also is it weird to check in and then not really have anything to say when they come to you? like what do you even say if you dont have traffic or announcements or whatever

had something similar on my 7200 a while back, turned out to be a cracked solder joint on the PA board and not the LPF at all. wouldnt have found it without putting it under magnification. might be worth a look before assuming its the filter stage. just saying there can be more than one thing going on with a used radio

so i've been studying for like 3 months and passed my technician exam last thursday, got my callsign showing up in the FCC database yesterday morning and immediately went and found the local 2m repeater listed on repeaterbook. took me like an hour to figure out how to program the offset and tone into my baofeng (yes i know, everyone starts with a baofeng lol) but i finally got it and just keyed up and said my callsign and that i was a new ham looking to make a contact some guy came back immediately, we talked for like 20 minutes, he's been licensed since the 80s and was super patient with me when i forgot proper procedure a couple times. honestly did not expect it to be that easy to just... talk to someone. anyway just wanted to share cause im pretty pumped about it

so ive been at this for about 8 months now. started with the basic Koch method stuff at 5wpm and honestly the first few months went pretty smooth, picked up characters faster than i expected. got up to around 10-11wpm without too much pain and was feeling pretty good about it. but somewhere around 12-13wpm everything just kind of... stopped. i can copy fine when im relaxed and its a slow QSO but the moment i try to push the keyer speed up i just fall apart. letters start blurring together and i lose my place and then im just guessing. been stuck here for probably 3 months now and its starting to get frustrating honestly. im using the LCWO site and also just got the G4FON trainer which people seem to like. i try to practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes more on weekends. is there something specific i should be doing differently to get through this plateau? feels like 20wpm is a million miles away right now

honestly i felt the same way about FT8 after a while. the JS8Call activity isnt huge but the people who are on it tend to actually want to operate if that makes sense. i've had good luck on 20m during the day too not just 40m. the relay/store-forward stuff is kinda neat conceptually even if i haven't really used it in anger yet.

i was in the exact same spot like a year ago, had my tech and kept hearing people talk about 20 meters and DX contacts and finally just decided to go for it. the electrical theory wasnt as bad as i expected, i mean some of it is just like knowing what a capacitor does in a circuit or understanding SWR at a basic level, you dont have to be an engineer or anything. there are a few forumlas but they come up pretty predictably in the pool so you kinda just learn them. one thing i'd say is once you pass, dont wait forever to get on HF. i spent like two months after getting my general just reading about antennas and never actually transmitting and that was dumb lol. even a simple wire dipole in the backyard will get you on the air and youll learn way more from actually making contacts than from reading

yeah the submission process is a bit confusing the first time, i remember being totally lost with mine. once you do it a couple times it becomes second nature though. also dont forget you can use those contacts to count toward hunter awards for the people who worked you which is kind of a nice bonus feeling knowing your activation helped someone else tick off a reference too

i was in the exact same spot about eight months ago lol. ended up getting the UV-5R first because it was only like $25 and figured worst case i lose $25. it worked fine for hitting repeaters but i did eventually upgrade to an FT-70D and the difference in receive audio alone was pretty noticeable. so i guess what im saying is both paths work, just depends how patient you are

honestly the theory jump is real but its not as scary as the question pool makes it look at first glance. i spent about 6 weeks going through the hamstudy site and also picked up a copy of the arrl extra class manual which i actually found pretty readable. the stuff on impedance matching and transmission lines clicked for me once i stopped trying to memorize it and just worked through the math a couple times with actual numbers. the vacuum tube questions are kind of funny yeah, i think they're leftovers from older versions of the pool and probably will eventually get phased out but whatever. the filter theory and op-amp sections actually taught me stuff i use now when im looking at antenna designs or trying to understand why my feedline is doing something weird. so to answer your question no its not naive at all, i learned more from studying for extra than i did from any of the other two licenses combined. just dont try to cram it in a week

Consider adding a bias-T and DC blocking capacitor in-line if you're doing serious work. The RTL-SDR v4 is great for the price point but you'll hit these limitations compared to higher-end SDRs like the SDRplay or Airspy units.

yeah I was totally in the same boat when i got my general last year lol. the thing that finally clicked for me was remembering that SSB takes up bandwidth, so your suppressed carrier frequency (what the rig displays) isnt the only thing being transmitted. on upper sideband your signal goes UP from that number so if you're at 7.298 you might be poking past 7.300 depending on how wide your audio is running. some rigs are worse than others about this. honestly just download the ARRL frequency allocation chart and tape it near the radio for a while, that's what I did. after a few months you kind of just know where everything is

so ive been a tech for about 14 months now and honestly i feel like ive kind of hit the wall with what i can do on VHF/UHF locally. the repeaters are fine but i want to actually talk to people further away and everyone keeps telling me just get your general already. i know i know. anyway i ordered the gordon west book but its sitting on my shelf and i havent cracked it yet. i guess my main question is how hard is the jump from tech to general really? like the tech exam wasnt that bad once i sat down and just did the question pool a bunch of times. is general more of the same or is there actual stuff you really need to understand vs just memorizing? im kind of worried about the electrical theory parts because i never took physics or anything like that in school. also what HF stuff am i actually gonna be able to do once i pass, i know i dont get all the bands or all the mode privileges right away but im fuzzy on the specifics. somebody at the club said generals cant use certain parts of 20m? not sure if that was right

so ive been running SSB for a few years now mostly on 40m and 20m and I keep getting reports that my audio sounds kind of muffled or bassy, like people say it sounds like im talking into a tin can or that my voice is hard to cut through. im using an IC-7300 with the stock mic which i know isnt ideal but it shouldnt be this bad right ive messed with the TX EQ a bit but honestly the menu system on that radio is kind of overwhelming and i dont fully understand what im boosting or cutting. someone at my club told me to roll off the low end and boost around 2-3khz but i tried that and it still sounded off according to one guy on a net i check into regularly also been wondering about compression — i have it turned on but only at like 3-4 on the meter because ive heard over-compression sounds really bad. is that right or should i be pushing it more. and does mic gain interact with the compressor in a way that matters a lot basically just looking for whatever tips people have found actually make a difference on SSB audio quality, not looking for studio sound just want to be readable without people asking me to repeat myself constantly