James Brown

that ohio contact on 500mw is actually pretty solid, QRP can really surprise you especially on 40m when conditions are decent. the Pixie is a great little thing to learn on even if its not the most practical rig for actual operating. for your next build i'd seriously look at the uBITX or if that's a bit much to take on, maybe look at the 4state QRP group kits, they're reasonably priced and the documentation is genuinely good. the SW-40+ used to be a classic recommendation but i think they stopped making those. another option is just hunting around for a used Elecraft KX1 or K1, sometimes they come up for $150-200 which is over your budget but they're worth saving for if you get the QRP bug bad enough. and trust me, you will. also 559 at 200 miles on a pixie and a wire in a park is honestly a memory you'll tell people about for years. welcome to the dark side of this hobby

so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just done local stuff and some casual HF but lately ive been getting really into trying to work DX and someone at my club mentioned i should look into DXCC. i pulled up the ARRL page and honestly its a little overwhelming at first glance. like theres the basic DXCC, then theres mixed, phone, digital, band-specific ones... i didnt realize there were so many different ways to pursue it. i guess my main question is do most people just start by logging whatever they can work and then apply later, or is there some strategy to it? also i noticed something about needing actual paper QSL cards vs LoTW confirmations and im a little fuzzy on how that works now. does everyone use LoTW these days or do you still need to paper QSL for certain entities. my logging software is Log4OM if that matters. also while im asking — is WAS worth chasing alongside DXCC or is that kind of a separate rabbit hole. someone told me WAZ is harder than DXCC which surprised me honestly.

I've been on the air for about 6 months now and still struggle with phonetics. Sometimes other operators ask me to repeat my callsign multiple times, even when I think I'm being clear. Here are the issues I notice: I speak too fast when nervousSometimes I mix up NATO and other phonetics mid-callsignNot sure about proper pronunciation (is it "AL-fa" or "AL-pha"?)When to use phonetics vs just saying the letters normallyWhat are the most common beginner mistakes with phonetics, and how can I improve my on-air presence?

i was in the exact same spot like a year ago haha. what helped me was just having DXwatch open in one tab and not trying to act on every spot, just kind of watching it for a while and seeing which ones would repeat or get confirmed by other spotters. you start to get a feel for whats real pretty quick. oh also if you havent tried the DX alarm features some of these sites have, where you can set it to ping you for specific entities or bands, thats been super useful for me especially for rare ones that dont come around often. saved me from missing a couple good activations while i was doing other stuff

yeah the diode mod is dead simple, did mine years ago. on the fan thing though — i went a different route and just added an external heatsink to the bottom plate with some thermal adhesive pads on the finals. not as elegant as a fan swap but its been rock solid through two summers of JS8Call and Winlink sessions. the stock fan on these radios really wasnt designed with digital modes in mind, yaesu was thinking mostly voice and CW when they spec'd the thermal management. the noctua idea isnt crazy but you'd want to check what voltage the fan header is actually putting out under load. i measured mine at like 7.8v which is a bit low for most PC fans to run reliably at. some guys use a small voltage regulator inline but at that point its more work than its worth unless you're really committed to keeping it all internal.

yeah the relay board thing is almost certainly a ground issue. if your arduino and the relay board power supply dont share a common ground you get all kinds of phantom triggering. also those cheap 8-channel boards are notorious for needing the JD-VCC and VCC jumper dealt with properly — if its jumpered together youre powering the relay coils from the arduino 5v which can brown it out and cause exactly what youre describing. separate the jumper and power JD-VCC from your wall wart, leave VCC connected to arduino for the logic side. fixed that exact problem on a rotor controller i built last year. and yeah pi is overkill for 4 relays, stick with the arduino. unless you want to add logging or a web interface or something, then maybe, but even then an ESP32 would make more sense than a full pi.

honestly the General exam felt about the same difficulty as Tech to me, maybe slightly harder but not by much. the question pool is bigger but if you're already doing HamStudy every day for a few weeks you'll be fine. i wouldnt stress too much about understanding every single piece of theory, some of it like the exact formulas for calculating impedance or whatever you can kind of just memorize the pattern of the answer and move on. that said the propagation stuff is actually pretty interesting once it clicks and it'll help you actually use HF effectively so thats worth putting some effort into. as for bands, General opens up big chunks of 40m, 20m, 15m, 10m and some others, 20m is probably where you'll spend most of your time starting out if you want to work DX. you can absolutely just listen for a while first, thats actually a really good idea. get a feel for how contacts work before you jump in. you dont need to buy anything to pass the exam obviously, and if you already have a radio that does HF great, if not theres plenty of time to figure that out after you have the license in hand

so i just passed my technician exam last week (finally) and now im trying to figure out what handheld to get. everyone keeps saying baofeng and everyone else keeps saying dont get a baofeng and i honestly cant tell who to listen to anymore. ive been lurking on here for like two months trying to figure this out. my main thing is i want to hit the local repeater, maybe do some simplex with a buddy who lives about 4 miles away, and eventually get into APRS if thats not too complicated for a starter. budget is somewhere around $50-150 but i could stretch it a bit if theres a real reason to. i looked at the yaesu ft-65 and the wouxun kg-uv9d and honestly both seem fine but i dont really know what im comparing. does the extra money matter that much at this stage or should i just grab something cheap and see if this hobby even sticks for me

New to POTA and considering both of these. Question about the MPAS Lite - does the transformer introduce noticeable receive noise? My IC-7300's preamp seems sensitive to RF noise from nearby switching devices. Also, what's the minimum counterpoise length you've found workable?

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people on the air talking about their DXCC counts and WAZ zones and all that and im starting to get interested in chasing some of these awards but honestly i dont really understand the difference between them or which one is even realistic for a new person to go after like i get that DXCC is countries basically (entities i guess is the right word) and WAS is all 50 states which actually sounds doable but WAZ has something to do with CQ zones and i have no idea how that works geographically. do you need like a big antenna setup to realistically chase these or can you do it with a modest station, im running a G5RV up about 30 feet and a 100w radio so nothing crazy also im seeing stuff about LoTW and paper QSLs and which ones count for which awards and its all kind of overwhelming honestly. any advice on where to even start would be appreciated

yeah what he said about the LNA placement is critical, i cant stress that enough. i had mine about 3 meters down the coax for a while and when i finally moved it to the mast head my noise figure dropped by like 1.5 dB and it made a noticeable difference in decodes. also make sure whatever relay you're using in the sequencer is actually fast enough and isn't letting your TX bleed into the LNA because i fried one that way and it was an expensive lesson. on the dish question — you dont need one to start, but if you get serious about it you'll probably want to go that direction eventually. i went from 4 yagis to a 3m mesh dish and the difference was pretty significant. but honestly start with what you have, get a contact or two, then decide if you want to go deeper. a lot of people spend months building this massive array and then lose interest. better to validate that you actually enjoy the mode first.

the radial system honestly makes or breaks the vertical, thats the part people underestimate. ive seen guys put up a vertical and wonder why it underperforms and its almost always the ground system. 4 radials is not a ground system, its barely better than nothing. you really need to commit to it. 60+ radials and suddenly it starts behaving like the textbooks say. also worth noting — if your noise is local and broadside to the dipole youre gonna have a bad time switching to a vertical since those things have pretty omnidirectional pickup. not always ideal in a noisy suburban lot.

yeah i just did this a few months ago and was in the same boat. i ended up using the ARRL study guide book which was ok but tbh hamStudy and also the hamstudy app on my phone did most of the heavy lifting. the book is nice if you want to actually understand why the answers are what they are but if you just want to pass the test the question pool drilling works fine. one thing nobody told me was to just look up your local club because a lot of them do free exam sessions and some even have study nights. i found mine on the arrl website i think. good luck it really isnt as hard as it looks at first

im kind of in the same boat as you, just started putting mine together a few months ago. one thing someone told me at a club meeting that stuck with me is dont buy anything new just for the go-kit at first, just pull from what you already have and see if it actually works as a kit. figure out the gaps from there. i ended up with my HT, a small antenna adapter so i can run it off a mag mount on the car, some spare AA batteries in a ziploc, and a charger that works off 12v. nothing fancy but i could actually set it up and check into the local net within like 5 minutes if i needed to. thats the bar i set for myself. also threw in a cheap headlamp and some snacks because someone joked about it at a meeting but honestly its not a bad idea

so ive been putting this off for like two years but i finally cracked open the 857d last weekend to do the mars/cap mod so i can tx outside the ham bands for some emcomm stuff our group does. pretty straightforward once you find the right jumper, theres like three different versions of this mod floating around online and two of them are wrong so heads up on that. i ended up using the one from the eham thread that was posted back in 2019, worked first try. while i had it apart i also replaced the stock electrolytic caps on the PA board because mine is an older unit and a couple of them were looking a little puffy. not catastrophically bad but enough that i didnt want to leave them in there. grabbed some nichicon fine gold series replacements, probably overkill but whatever they were cheap enough. havent done a full power output comparison yet but it definitely runs cooler which either means the caps were causing some inefficiency or im imagining things. also re-seated the main display ribbon cable while i was at it because i had that occasional flicker thing that seems to plague these radios. that alone might have been worth opening it up. display has been rock solid for the past week of daily use. anyone else done the AF filter mod on these? ive seen some stuff about tweaking the DSP filter rolloff but im not sure if its worth the hassle. my rx isnt bad as-is but always curious what people have actually gotten from it versus what people claim on youtube.

So ive been trying to get a proper remote station going for about three months now and im at the point where im not sure if the problem is my setup or just the nature of doing this over the internet. Running RCForb client connecting to my home station, got a SDRplay RSP1A on the remote end feeding into the SDR side of things so i can monitor the band while operating, and the whole thing works... kind of. The audio latency on the control side is somewhere around 400-500ms which makes SSB conversations feel really weird, like im always stepping on people or leaving dead air. I read somewhere that RemoteHams can get this down to like 150ms if you tweak the codec settings but i cant figure out where that actually is in the software. Anybody using this regularly for like actual rag chews or is everyone just doing CW and digital where latency doesnt matter as much Also the SDR part -- is there a way to have the panadapter update faster? Right now it feels like its updating maybe once a second which isnt terrible but id like to see propagation changes a bit quicker. my upload at home is only about 15Mbps so maybe thats the bottleneck idk

APRS messaging is honestly pretty flaky in general, you're not doing anything wrong necessarily. the way it works is the message has to get acked back to you and if any hop in that chain drops a packet the sender just keeps retrying until it times out. being parked next to each other is almost worse in some situations because you can end up hearing each other direct but the ack might not make it back through the path you're expecting. one thing to check is whether the FT3D guy has his station set to respond to messages at all — some of those Yaesu portables have APRS messaging kind of buried in the menu and it might not be enabled or might be in a weird mode. also worth checking what path he's using, if hes running WIDE2-2 and you're close to a busy digi you might be getting a lot of collisions. aprsdroid through APRS-IS should honestly work better than RF in that case since its going internet to internet, so if thats also failing i'd look at whether his callsign-SSID is configured exactly right on both ends

honestly the question pool looks scarier than it is. when i did mine a few years back i just used HamStudy dot org every day for like two weeks, maybe 20-30 minutes a session, and passed no problem. the site tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and keeps drilling those so it kinda does the work for you. i wouldnt stress about understanding every single concept right away, some of the electrical theory stuff like ohms law and the decibel questions just takes a little repetition before it clicks. the RF safety section tripped me up at first but theres really only like 4 or 5 questions in that pool that show up and once you see the pattern its fine. if you want the book the ARRL Tech manual is decent but i found it a bit slow for how i learn. the question pool method is honestly enough to pass, you can dig deeper into the theory stuff after you get your callsign

I'm kind of in the same boat honestly, around 14wpm right now so watching this thread. One thing my Elmer told me was to try listening to actual QSOs on the air instead of practice recordings because real operators send a little differently than the computer generated stuff and it forces your brain to adapt. Haven't tried it consistently enough to say if it works but thought i'd mention it.

so ive been on HF for about two years now mostly doing digital modes but lately ive been getting into SSB phone and honestly my audio sounds pretty rough compared to what i hear from other stations. im running an IC-7300 with the stock mic and i havent really touched any of the TX settings because i figured the defaults would be reasonable enough out of the box. a guy i worked last week on 20m said my audio sounded thin and a little harsh, which i guess makes sense because when i listen back on recordings it does kind of cut through in an unpleasant way. ive been reading about TX bandwidth settings and the bass rolloff and all that but its hard to know where to start without just making things worse. anyone have a starting point for dialing in better SSB audio on the 7300 specifically? or just general tips that apply across the board? i know mic technique matters a lot too but im not sure how much i can fix in software vs just learning to talk into the mic better.