Amanda Williams49

omg yes i was on 10m yesterday too this was literally the first real DX opening ive experienced since i got my general last spring. worked a PY station and the guy was just booming in, i honestly thought it was someone local at first. totally forgot about the IC-905 thing gonna have to look that up, microwave stuff seems really advanced but i guess thats kind of the point right, always something new to learn

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

For emergency communications, having access to most HF bands is almost a necessity for traffic handling, since amateur HF communications get through without failure during disasters. Winlink HF email system works nearly anywhere in the world with General privileges.

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

haha yeah the zone thing trips everybody up at first. WAZ uses CQ zones, not ITU zones — there are 40 CQ zones that cover the whole world and you need to work a station in each one. ITU zones are a totally different animal and used for some other awards, HF Century Club being one of them i think. definitely not interchangeable.
as for tracking, seriously just get yourself a copy of Log4OM or even just use LOTW and let it do the heavy lifting. if you upload your existing ADI file from WSJT-X to Logbook of the World, it'll start matching your confirmed contacts against DXCC entities automatically. same goes for Club Log — upload your log there and it'll show you a map of what you've worked and what's confirmed. you'd be surprised how much progress you might already have without knowing it.
FT8 is totally valid for all the major awards by the way, no worries there. i worked most of my first 100 DXCC entities on FT8 with a pretty modest setup. the dipole might limit you on some of the rarer ones but for getting started it's absolutely fine. just keep logging everything, upload to LOTW regularly, and sort it out later — that's pretty much what everyone does.

yeah the gateway status thing is actually something a lot of people run into. if you go to winlink.org and click on RMS stations you can filter by frequency band and mode and it'll show you the last time each gateway checked in with the CMS. anything that hasnt checked in within like an hour or two during normal operating hours is probably down or the sysop is doing maintenance. thats the first thing i check now before wasting time trying to connect
on the VARA FM vs packet question — VARA is way faster if the gateway supports it and your path is clean, like sometimes dramatically faster for anything more than a tiny message. but a lot of the older gateways around me are still just running Direwolf on a TNC-Pi or whatever and those are AX.25 only. check the gateway listing, it'll tell you what modes each one supports. if you see a gateway listed as VARA FM capable and it checked in recently, try that one first. just make sure your VARA FM is actually registered or youre gonna hit the speed cap which is annoying but it'll still work
also double check your squelch isnt killing the tail end of packets, that bit me for a while

yeah i did almost exactly this about two years ago, except i used a nano instead of a mega and was only switching between two antennas so it was pretty simple. the CI-V parsing is actually not that bad once you get the framing figured out — the tricky part is that the 7300 doesnt always spit out band data unsolicited, you might have to poll it. there's a library on github called IC7300-CI-V or something similar, cant remember the exact name but a search will find it.
on the relay board question — most of those cheap amazon boards already have optoisolation built in, look for the EL817 or PC817 chips near the input headers. if you see those youre probably fine. i'd still put a snubber diode across any inductive load you're switching just to be safe but for a basic antenna switch the relay contacts are doing all the work anyway so RF isolation from the arduino side is less of a concern than you might think.
the pi doing higher level logic and the arduino doing the actual I/O is a solid approach, thats kind of the standard way to split it and it means you can update the logic without reflashing the microcontroller every time. just make sure your serial comms have some kind of handshaking or at least a watchdog on the arduino side so if the pi crashes the relays dont do something weird.

omg yes i was on 10m yesterday too this was literally the first real DX opening ive experienced since i got my general last spring. worked a PY station and the guy was just booming in, i honestly thought it was someone local at first. totally forgot about the IC-905 thing gonna have to look that up, microwave stuff seems really advanced but i guess thats kind of the point right, always something new to learn