Robert Johnson52

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, got my general, and everyone keeps telling me i should learn CW but i honestly have no idea where to start. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or is there a better way? ive seen people mention something called koch method but i dont really understand how thats different from just learning the alphabet also does anyone actually use morse code regularly or is it mostly just a thing people learn and then never touch again. genuinely asking because i dont want to spend months on something i wont use. my buddy at the club said once you get it you can hear a signal that would be unreadable on SSB and that got me interested but idk any advice on where to even begin would be great, im kind of lost on this one

i was in the same boat not too long ago honestly. what helped me was just keeping a little cheat sheet next to the radio for the first few months and you start picking them up naturally. the ARRL has a decent reference page for Q codes but dont try to memorize all of them at once, total waste of time since most of them you will literally never hear. the ones that tripped me up for a while were QRM vs QRN because i kept mixing them up, just remember M is for man made and N is for natural and it sticks. also QRP threw me off because people use it to mean low power operation like a whole operating style but the original meaning is more like a command to reduce power, but dont worry about that distinction too much everyeone just uses it to mean low power these days

so ive been trying to figure out if its worth making the drive this year, last time i went i picked up a decent antenna tuner for like 20 bucks from some old timer who clearly had no idea what he had lol. wondering if the swap meet is still as good as it used to be or if its gotten smaller. feels like every year theres less and less actual gear and more vendor tables selling the same chinese handhelds our club is also doing a table this year if anyone wants to come find us, we'll have some donated equipment from a silent key's estate which should be interesting. lot of vintage stuff apparently

so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and people are constantly using these weird three letter codes starting with Q and also a bunch of other shorthand stuff i cant figure out. like QSL and QTH and QRM and then also stuff like 73 and sometimes people say things like OM or YL and i have no idea what any of it means. is there like a master list somewhere or do people just kind of learn it over time? i feel like i should know this already but nobody really explained it when i was studying for my tech exam

also worth double checking which datum the GPS is outputting vs what aprs.fi expects. pretty sure aprs.fi uses WGS84 and most modern GPS receivers default to that anyway but ive seen some older setups cause a small offset if theres a datum mismatch. probably not your issue since youre using the built in GPS on the 710 but just something to rule out if fixing the manual/GPS toggle doesnt solve it. 3 miles off does sound more like the manual position thing tbh.

had almost the exact same thing happen to me last year. turned out the local digi was hearing me fine but the igate downstream was only running during certain hours because the guy who ran it had it on a timer or something. checked aprsdirect and could actually see my packets being digi'd but they just werent making it to the IS. worth checking if your packets show up on any of the direct RF monitoring sites vs aprs.fi specifically.

so i passed my technician exam about three weeks ago and have just been kind of lurking on local repeaters too scared to key up. but last night i just did it, called out on the 147.315 and some guy came back to me right away. we only talked for like 4 minutes but honestly it was the coolest thing. i was shaking a little which is embarrassing to admit but whatever. he gave me a 59 and said my audio sounded good which was a relief because ive been paranoid my cheap baofeng was gonna sound terrible. anyway just wanted to share because nobody in my house really gets why this is exciting

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into our local 2m net last night and i think i kind of made a mess of it. i checked in fine i think but then when the net control came back to me for a comment i just started talking without waiting and i guess i stepped on someone who was already mid-sentence. net control was really nice about it but i could tell i'd done something wrong and i just kind of fumbled through the rest of it. i've been licensed about 4 months now (general) and i mostly just listen, i don't do a ton of transmitting. i know the basic stuff but nets specifically feel like there's this whole unwritten rulebook that nobody told me about. like when do you actually key up, how long do you wait after someone stops talking, is there a specific way you're supposed to give your callsign. i looked online and got a bunch of contradictory stuff so figured id just ask here since people actually run nets.

i literally just did this like two months ago so maybe i can help a bit. i was in the same spot as you had no idea where to start. i ended up just using hamstudy.org on my phone during lunch breaks at work and honestly passed the tech exam after maybe three weeks of that. the questions arent as scary as they look at first, a lot of them you can figure out with common sense even if you dont fully understand the theory behind it. the one thing that tripped me up a bit was some of the electrical formulas like ohms law stuff but there are only a few of those and you can just memorize the approach. my test was at a local club and the VEs were super nice, way less stressful than i expected. definitely just go for it

the G90 and a wire antenna is totally fine, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. i worked like 40 countries in CQ WW with a compromised dipole strung up weird in my backyard. conditions matter more than gear in a lot of cases and honestly just participating and getting a feel for how it flows is the whole point when youre starting out. SOTA is great and its addictive in a different way. its less about speed and more about the whole experience of getting up somewhere with minimal gear and making it work. once you do your first activation you'll probably be hooked

yeah 20m has been doing that for me too, some nights its absolutely wide open and others its like a dummy load. i've been checking the DXmaps site and the solar flux index has been bouncing around quite a bit lately. honestly just part of cycle 25 doing its thing. 40m has been treating me better for domestic stuff in the evenings if you havent tried that yet.

honestly the math part gets overhyped. there's like maybe 4 or 5 questions that involve actual calculations and most of them are pretty simple ohms law stuff or just knowing a formula well enough to plug numbers in. if you use HamStudy consistently for 3 or 4 weeks you'll be fine, the question pool isnt that much bigger than Tech and the concepts build on each other once you start seeing them repeat. as for HF privileges with General, yeah you get access to most of the good stuff. 40m is great for regional and evening DX depending on conditions, and you get a solid chunk of 20m which is basically the workhorse band for international contacts. there are some portions of 20m and other bands that are Extra only but in practice i never felt like i was missing that much when i was a General. you can absolutely work DX and get on SSB and do contests and all that. i waited way too long to upgrade honestly, had my Tech for 4 years before i finally just sat down and studied. dont do what i did.

the eu2200i RFI issue is pretty well documented actually. the problem is usually the ground — or lack thereof. most people just plug in and go but those inverter gens have a floating neutral and depending on your coax run and antenna setup you can create a really effective noise antenna out of the whole thing. what worked for me was running a 6 foot ground rod right next to the generator and bonding the gen frame to it, then also bonding that to the radio ground. made a huge difference on 40 and 80. also wrapping the power cable through a mix31 toroid a few times right at the radio end helped knock down whatever was still getting through. ferrites alone without the actual ground bond didnt do much for me. the buddipole base thing is real too, that tripod is fine for calm days but any wind and youre fighting it. i switched to using a camera tripod sandbag on the base and it helped but the jackite poles with a simple inverted V dipole is honestly way more stable for real emcomm work. less to go wrong.

yeah ive done basically exactly this with an IC-7300, the band data voltage thing is straightforward once you look it up in the manual. on yaesu rigs i believe the ACC jack outputs different DC voltages for each band — like 0v for no band selected, then it steps up from there. youll want to use the analog inputs on the arduino and just set threshold values in your code to determine which band youre on. something like if voltage is between 0.8v and 1.2v thats 160m, etc etc. the buffering question is a good one. i put a simple voltage divider on mine just to be safe, the arduino analog pins are 5v tolerant but the band data output on some rigs can be a little higher than that depending on conditions. a 10k/10k divider brings it down to half and you just adjust your threshold values accordingly. hasnt given me any grief in about 2 years of running it. one thing i will say — debounce your relay switching in software. when you're tuning around and crossing band edges the thing will chatter like crazy without it. i added like a 500ms delay before actually switching so it only commits once you've been on the new band for half a second. made a huge difference.

so ive been wanting to build something from scratch for a while now and finally just jumped in. went with a simple direct conversion design for 40m, mostly following the Minima schematic but i kind of went off road a bit with the BFO section because i couldn't source the exact xtal values locally and figured id just use a VFO instead. got the thing mostly assembled on a piece of copper clad i had sitting around, point to point wiring, nothing fancy. it actually receives something which i was honestly surprised about for a first attempt. i can hear SSB signals but theres this really annoying carrier hum that im not sure how to track down. tried twisting the leads to the audio amp section and it helped a little but its still there. also the image rejection is obviously not great but i kind of expected that with a DC receiver. the VFO is drifting a fair bit too, probably 500hz or more over the first 20 minutes. i used whatever coil former i had in the junk box and the cap is just a crappy ceramic. thinking maybe i need to use an NP0 cap and maybe pot the coil in wax or something? anyone done that with good results. also wondering if a jfet buffer after the oscillator would help with frequency pulling when i change bands.