DX Hunter

the band edge thing caught me out too when i first got my general. i was chatting away thinking i was fine and someone actually came on and told me my signal was splashing outside the band, was pretty embarrasing honestly. just keep a few kHz buffer and you'll be alright. also the ARRL band plan is worth bookmarking, its not law but most people follow it and it tells you where cw vs phone vs digital tends to cluster which helps avoid accidentally plopping down in the middle of a cw segment when youre looking for a sideband qso

After months of hearing about it, I finally got my setup working for FT8 last weekend. Downloaded WSJT-X, connected my IC-7300 to the computer, and made my first contact with a station in Germany! The waterfall display is mesmerizing - watching all those signals decode automatically feels like magic. I can see why people say it's addictive, though I'm still missing the personal touch of a good ragchew on SSB. Anyone else feel like they're watching their radio do all the work?

i built a double tuned set last winter and the selectivity improvement is real but honestly not dramatic unless the stations are pretty far apart in frequency. what made a bigger differnece for me was experimenting with different diodes, some of the old OA90 types i scored off ebay were noticeably better than the 1N34A for weak signal stuff. also if you havent tried a cats whisker with a chunk of galena crystal thats kind of a fun rabbit hole, gets into the real old school territory. anyway good first build though, getting it to work at all on the first try is more than a lot of people manage

honest answer is you kinda need LoTW if DXCC is your goal, thats just the reality. ARRL only accepts LoTW or physical cards sent through the bureau for DXCC credit, so eQSL on its own wont get you there. that said i still upload to eQSL too because some folks only check there and its nice to see the confirmations roll in regardless. paper cards i still send for anything rare or a contact that meant something to me. worked a guy in 3Y0 a few years back and we actually exchanged cards through the bureau, took like 8 months but it was worth it just to have it in hand. for everyday contacts though i just let WSJT-X auto upload to LoTW and call it done. set it up once and it basically runs itself after that. get your LoTW certificate sorted first, that takes a little while to arrive anyway, and then worry about the rest later.

haha yeah my first one i forgot the counterpoise entirely and spent like 20 minutes wondering why everything sounded terrible. ended up clipping a random wire to a tree root and it sorta helped. you learn fast when youre out there with no bench to work on congrats on the activation though, 10 contacts is solid especially if conditions werent great. 40m is usually pretty reliable for that kind of thing

Similar principles could apply to a RX only station with SDRs like the RTL-SDR/Airspy/SDRplay as the high-end setups. I found SDR# works better than HDSDR for the TS-2000 CAT emulation. Make sure your baud rates match between the virtual port and RemoteHams config.

Just got my first paddle last month (went with the TP3) and absolutely love it! When paired with the Senrog Bench Block, it becomes a stable tabletop key that won't move as you operate. Maybe overkill for a beginner, but I figured buy once, cry once. The build quality is incredible.

so ive been trying to figure out whats going on event wise around here the next couple months. our club usually does a swap meet in the spring but i havent heard anything from the guys running it this year, emails have been pretty quiet. anyone know if thats still happening or did it get cancelled again like last year also curious if anyone here is making the trip out toward the dayton area for hamvention or any of the smaller regional fests. i went a few years ago and it was worth the drive just for the flea market tables alone, picked up a barely used tuner for almost nothing. thinking about going again but its a long haul from where i am and id want to actually plan it out this time instead of just showing up like i did before

Have you considered the beamwidth differences - typical dual-band Yagis offer 48°/40° vertical and 53°/45° horizontal patterns? That's pretty narrow for base operations. I'd go collinear unless you're specifically chasing weak signal work or EME. Build your own - much cheaper than commercial versions.

Hi everyone! I'm a new Extra (got my license 6 months ago) and I'm getting confused by all the DX awards out there. DXCC requires contacts with 100 countries which seems like a lot for someone still learning about propagation. Should I start with something easier like WAS or WAC first? Also, what's the difference between LoTW and eQSL for confirmations? Any guidance for a newcomer would be greatly appreciated!

so ive been working on this thing for about 3 months now and i finally got it oscillating and putting out what seems like a reasonable signal. started from a design i found in an old ARRL handbook, the 1987 edition i think, and modified it a bit based on some stuff i read on eham. the VFO stage seems stable enough, drifts maybe a few hundred hz for the first 10 minutes then settles down which i can live with. the problem im running into is the PA stage — im using a 2SC1969 and at 12v im only getting about 3 watts into a dummy load. the design should theoretically do 8-10w and ive checked the bias point twice now. collector current at idle is sitting around 60ma which feels right but maybe isnt. the lowpass filter is 7-element chebyshev, wound my own toroids, and i checked the SWR going into the dummy load which is flat so i dont think its a matching issue. wondering if anyone has built with this transistor and had similar output issues. could it be a bad transistor, i ordered like 5 of them off ebay and they might be counterfeit. also the pi network tuning is kind of a mystery to me still, i calculated the values but not sure i got the component Q right.

Set the microphone gain to 70 and with the stock bandwidth of 2.4 kHz your SSB signal will be terrific. Compression: Adjust for ALC mid-scale on voice peaks. Start there and work from that baseline. Less is more with the 7300's processing.

Good for you joining up! The message handling is probably going to be radiogram format - its got specific fields like precedence, message number, all that stuff. Your EC should walk you through it but you might want to look up ARRL radiogram format online beforehand just so you're not completely lost. And yeah definitely bring paper and something to write on, you'll be copying a lot of text.

I've done exactly this comparison with the same antenna! Roof mount gave me noticeably better performance, especially for simplex work and fringe repeaters. The roof is probably the easiest location to place VHF/UHF antennas, but make sure seam mountings and clip mountings are well grounded (bonded) to the frame.

so anyway this is kind of a tangent but when i was setting up my own gateway (im running one on 40m here in the midwest) i noticed a lot of failed inbounds that turned out to be people with exactly this problem. you can actually see it on the gateway side — the session starts, modem tries to negotiate, and if the client audio is clipping or the timing is off the RMS just moves on. it doesnt wait around. one thing i dont see you mention is whether youre using the radio's built in soundcard or a separate interface. the 7300 internal USB audio is fine but i know some guys have had better luck with a SignaLink or similar just to get cleaner audio path. probably not your main issue here but worth knowing. the ALC thing the other guy mentioned is definately the first thing to fix though.

One thing I notice is new hams sometimes forget to pause between transmissions. It is important to use your call sign regularly during conversations and to wait for a pause before transmitting to prevent overlapping transmissions. Give the repeater time to reset!

yeah the audio thing on mine bugged me too for a while and i eventually just started running it into a little outboard equalizer and that helped more than i expected. probably not what you want to hear if youre looking for an internal fix but its an option. someone on one of the other forums posted about tweaking the IF filter bandwidth settings in the menu and that did clean things up a bit for me on crowded band conditions — not really a mod just playing with whats already there but worth messing around with before you go opening it up again.

Congrats on getting your ticket! Most people need about 20-30 hours for Technician but 30-40 hours for General. The General exam digs deeper into RF theory, propagation, and circuit analysis. I'd recommend starting with HamStudy.org for free practice tests and the ARRL General manual.

yeah the part 97 table of allocations is kind of brutal to read at first. basically as a tech you get some limited HF stuff — 80m you can do cw only in a small segment around 3.525, 40m is similar just cw, 15m you get a little voice and image at the top end of the band like 21.200 to 21.225, and 10m is actually pretty open for techs, you can do phone and data across a decent chunk of it. the ARRL website has a band plan chart that makes this way more readable than the actual fcc document, id just look that up honestly. the main thing is dont transmit voice on 40m as a tech, thats a common mistake and yeah the fcc does care about that one.

so ive been going to hamvention for like 6 years now and i always end up spending most of my time in the flea market area anyway, never really bother with the indoor vendors much anymore. wondering if anyone else is planning to go and wants to maybe meet up saturday morning before it gets too crazy crowded out there. last year i picked up a barely used IC-7300 for way under market price from some guy who was clearing out his shack and i keep hoping lightning strikes twice lol. also our local club is doing a carpool from dayton area if anyone needs a ride, we usually leave around 5am which sounds brutal but honestly the early bird thing is real when it comes to the swap tables

the mode A vs mode B thing trips up a lot of people and honestly most folks just pick one and stick with it without really knowing why. the short version is that mode B will complete the last element you squeezed even after you let go, mode A won't. in practice if you're not doing fancy squeeze keying most of the time you probably won't notice a big difference. i run mode A and have for years just because that's what my first keyer defaulted to. the timing thing though - a lot of built in keyers are actually pretty decent but some radios let you tweak the weight (the dit to dah ratio). check your manual and see if there's a keyer weight adjustment, sometimes its buried in the menu. 3:1 is standard but some people like it a hair heavier on the dah side, like 3.1 or 3.2, feels more solid to some folks. and yeah try a straight key for slow practice, it wont mess up your paddle muscle memory i promise, if anything it helps you hear individual elements more clearly because you're forming them intentionally. i still bang on my old J-38 sometimes just to slow down and think about what i'm sending. nothing wrong with it.

APRS faces challenges with outdated infrastructure and congestion on 144.390 MHz, especially in urban areas. While WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is the recommended path, mobile stations in populated areas should consider using only WIDE1-1 since there are usually enough IGates nearby. Integration with mesh networks like AREDN could improve resilience and expand APRS applications beyond traditional tracking. What path strategies are others using to minimize network congestion while maintaining coverage?

so ive been trying to get into DXing more seriously over the last few months and someone in my local club mentioned using cluster spotting networks to find activity. i set up an account on QRZ a while back mostly just to look up callsigns but apparently theres a whole spotting thing built in there too? and then theres DXwatch which seems like a separate thing entirely. my question is basically are these pulling from the same spots or are they different networks feeding different data. sometimes i see a spot on DXwatch that doesnt show up on the QRZ cluster page and vice versa, which makes me think theyre not the same. or maybe im just looking at different bands filtered differently and not realizing it. i honestly cant tell. also is there a better app for this on android? ive been using the browser on my phone which is kind of a pain when im in the shack trying to also tune around. wouldnt mind something that just shows me spots in a cleaner way without having to mess with filters constantly every time i open a new tab

I've been comparing FT4 sensitivity specs showing it's 3.5 dB less sensitive than FT8 but offers twice the QSO rate with my actual on-air results. While FT4 has performance boosts, FT8's narrower bandwidth provides better decoding in extreme weak signal situations and longer duration helps average out fading issues. Anyone doing systematic A/B testing between the modes at various signal levels? I'm particularly interested in how FT4 performs with signals 10 dB weaker than required for RTTY versus FT8's advertised -21dB threshold.

Looking for some practical advice on improving my CW receiving for DX work. I'm comfortable copying contest exchanges at 25+ WPM, but when it comes to weak DX signals buried in noise, I really struggle. My ears just aren't picking out those faint CW signals that I know are there - I can see them on the waterfall but can't copy them aurally. Should I be using a 400 to 600 Hz bandwidth filter, centered on a comfortable pitch? Wider filters let you hear other stations and narrower filters may produce difficult-to-copy tone. Are there specific techniques for training your ear to pull weak signals out of the noise? Any recommended practice methods?