Michelle Garcia

yeah i had the exact same problem when i first got my HT. turned out i had the tone set to 100.0 on receive but forgot to enable the encode side. felt pretty dumb when i figured it out but whatever, its an easy fix. just dig into the menu and make sure TX CTCSS or whatever your radio calls it is actually on and set correctly. the linked repeater thing is kinda cool once you get used to it — theres one near me that ties into a statewide system on sunday mornings and you can talk to people from like 200 miles away through it which is wild for a 5 watt HT sitting on my kitchen table

honestly cant go wrong with either one but if i had to pick id go with the 7300. the panadapter is really nice and icom generally has better resale value. the 991 isnt bad but that tiny screen for hf work gets old pretty quick. plus if you want vhf/uhf later you can always get a dedicated mobile rig that'll probably work better anyway

Are you running this on Linux? HackRF doesn't transmit in Windows, so that could be your issue if you switched OS. Also verify your USB connection isn't dropping power - HackRF TX draws more current than RX mode and can cause voltage drops on marginal USB ports.

i run a 40m inverted vee at about 30 feet apex and work plenty of dx with it, europe from the midwest isnt a problem most mornings when the band cooperates. so i wouldnt stress the takeoff angle thing too much unless you're really serious about competitive dx. for general operating it's a fine antenna and simple to build and tune. the neighbor situation you mentioned — honestly 8 feet off the ground near a fence line isnt ideal and depending on how nosy your neighbors are it might cause headaches even if its technically on your property. something to think about. my antenna ends at about 10 feet and nobody has said anything in 4 years but ymmv

so ive been sitting on this idea for a while now and finally starting to actually do something about it. basically i have four antennas out back — a dipole, a vertical, a small loop for 40m, and a two element yagi that i built last summer — and right now im just using a cheap manual coax switch to hop between them which means i have to walk over to the shelf every time i want to change. annoying when youre in the middle of a pile-up. my plan is to use an arduino mega with some relays to handle switching based on whatever band i select on my rig. the radio is an IC-7300 so i can pull band data off the ACC port, which should make it pretty straightforward to decode and feed into the arduino logic. i found a few sketches online but none of them are exactly what i need and my C++ is pretty rusty honestly. has anyone actually done something like this or something close? curious if the relay noise is an issue or if i need to go solid state for the RF switching part. the coax relays i was looking at are like the Tohtsu kind, they handle the RF and the arduino just drives the control voltage. seems doable but im probably missing something obvious

dont know what it is but ive been getting on 40m almost every evening this week just to ragchew and honestly its been great. nothing special, just talking to whoever is around, worked a guy in kentucky last night for like 45 minutes about his garden of all things. sometimes i forget why i got into this hobby and then a week like this reminds me. anyone else been having a good run lately or is it just me

yeah what he said. i checked into my first net about two months after getting my ticket and i was way overthinking it. just listen to a few check-ins before yours so you get the rhythm and then just jump in. the net control op on our tuesday net is super friendly anyway, he'd never make you feel bad for being new.

honestly i had almost the same setup question last year and just ended up putting both up and doing comparisons on the same qso's. what i found was the dipole killed it on anything inside about 400 miles and the vertical was noticeably better once you got past 1000 or so. for the in between range it was kind of a coin flip depending on conditions. if regional is your thing id just work on getting more height on the dipole before spending money on a vertical and a bunch of copper wire for radials

so ive been working on my CW for about 8 months now and honestly the first few months felt great, went from barely copying callsigns to getting whole QSOs at 5 then 8 then 10wpm without much trouble. but now im kind of stuck in this weird plateau around 12-13wpm and it feels like no matter how much i practice i cant seem to break through to the next level. im using the Koch method with the G4FON trainer and i do maybe 20-30 minutes a day most days, sometimes i miss a day here and there. the thing that gets me is individual characters i know cold, like i can copy most letters and numbers fine when theyre sent slowly, but when the speed goes up my brain just kind of locks up and i start missing things and then i panic and miss more and it kind of snowballs. someone at my club said i need to just listen to actual QSOs on the air instead of trainer software, is that true? or should i stick with the software until i get to at least 15? im not sure what the right approach is here and would love to hear from people who have been through this.

i was in basically the same spot about a year ago and ended up just buying the Baofeng to start with because honestly i wasnt sure how much id use it. its fine, i use it, no regrets. but i will say the menu system is genuinely terrible and i did need CHIRP to make it usable. recently picked up a used Kenwood TH-D74 for a crazy good price and the difference in feel and audio is pretty noticeable. so maybe there's something to the whole you-get-what-you-pay-for thing after all.

so ive been trying to check in to what i think was a regional morning net on 80 meters, i heard about it from a guy at our club meeting a few months back but i never wrote down the frequency or the time and now i cant find anything about it online. i think it was around 3.920 or somewhere close to that, weekday mornings maybe 7am local? not sure if thats right though. anyway i finally got my HF rig set up properly and the antenna is actually working now (long story involving a balun and my neighbor's tree) so i want to start actually getting on the air and doing something. nets seem like a good way to get comfortable on HF without just sitting there calling CQ and hearing nothing. is there a good place to look up net schedules? the ARRL net directory feels kind of outdated when i tried looking through it last week.

i was in the same boat when i first got my ticket, all these different websites and apps and i had no idea where to even start. what finally clicked for me was just picking one and sticking with it for a few weeks until i understood how it worked. i went with DXwatch because someone here recommended it and honestly its been fine, does what i need. one thing nobody told me at first is that the spots arent always accurate, like sometimes someone will post a spot with the wrong frequency or even wrong callsign so you kind of learn to take it with a grain of salt especially for rarer entities. but for just seeing general band activity its really useful

im also pretty new to this and just did my second activation last month so take this with a grain of salt but the wind absolutely wrecks your signal if the antenna is moving around a lot. i had the same issue on a ridge in W6 and my reports went from decent to terrible when the gusts picked up. some folks use a squid pole to get the dipole up more stable instead of relying on trees, might be worth trying if you're going back to that summit or somewhere with open terrain.

yeah the eQSL thing tripped me up too when i started. i spent like a month collecting eQSLs thinking they counted for DXCC and then found out they dont lol. they do count for the eQSL awards which are like their own thing but its not the same prestige i guess. one thing i'll add is some DX stations, especially the really rare ones on expeditions and stuff, they only do LoTW and dont respond to physical cards anymore just because of the volume of requests they get. so definitely worth getting LoTW sorted if you want to chase DX seriously. TQSL is the software you need to sign and upload your logs, its free, just takes a little patience to set up the certificate part

Just got WSJT-X set up for FT8 and noticed the PSK Reporter option in settings. On the reporting tab, there's a checkbox to enable PSK Reporter Spotting - WSJT-X will only report signals that are standard messages containing the sender's callsign and their locator, most often CQ messages or messages of the form 'Call_1 Call_2 grid'. From what I understand, the data includes PSK spots, JT65 and FT8 - with FT8 being the overwhelming majority at the moment. But I'm confused about how this differs from regular DX cluster spotting. PSK Reporter operates in the background as you're operating whatever digital mode you're using - your station is not dedicated to PSK Reporter and you can make QSOs to your heart's content while optionally providing useful feedback to other operators. Should new FT8 operators enable this? What are the benefits beyond helping others know their signal is getting out?

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general) and i finally got a decent HT, a Baofeng UV-5R i know i know everyone has opinions on those but its what i could afford right now. anyway i programmed the local 2m repeater that the club advertises on their website, 147.315 with a plus offset. i can hear people on it just fine but when i try to transmit nobody seems to hear me or at least nobody responds. i looked it up and apparently repeaters use something called CTCSS tones to open the squelch? or maybe its to identify who's transmitting? im honestly not 100% clear on what its actually doing. the club website lists a tone of 100.0 Hz but i wasnt sure if i need to set that as a transmit tone or a receive tone or both. right now i have it set as transmit only i think. is that right? also is there like a proper way to call on a repeater, like do i just say my callsign and say listening or something? i dont want to be that guy who does everything wrong on his first few transmissions

same boat as you were a few months ago honestly. what helped me was the Gordon West study materials, he kind of translates the regulatory stuff into normal sentences. also your club probably has someone who can just sit down and walk you through it, thats how i finally got it to click. dont stress too much about accidentally transmitting in the wrong spot right away, just double check before you key up and youll figure it out

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a local state park that has a KFFW reference and honestly i had a blast but i also made a bunch of rookie mistakes that i wanted to post about in case anyone else is in the same boat. the biggest thing that tripped me up was the logging. i was using my normal paper log and just writing down callsigns and bands like i always do for portable ops, but when i got home and tried to upload to the WWFF logger i realized i hadnt recorded the time in UTC consistently and a couple of my entries were missing the signal reports entirely. the WWFF logger is pretty strict about the format and i had to go back and piece together what i could from memory which was not ideal. also i only made 22 QSOs and i know the minimum for a valid activation is 44 so i technically didnt qualify the reference which is a bummer. the band conditions were rough and i only had about 3 hours before a thunderstorm rolled in. im going to go back and try again but just wondering if anyone has tips for working faster or attracting more callers. i self-spotted on POTA spots app but i dont think there's an equivalent for WWFF specifically? or is there and im just missing it

did you check the LPF board? the 7300 has individual low pass filter relays per band and the 40m relay contacts can get worn or oxidized. i had an older icom years back that did something similar and it turned out the relay wasnt making solid contact so you'd get partial signal loss rather than a complete failure. a relay on its way out can do weird stuff to ALC too because the reflected/forward sensing isnt seeing a clean path. might be a cheaper fix than dealing with the PA if that turns out to be it.

had a 7300 for about four years before i moved to a 7610 and honestly that radio punches way above what you'd expect at that price point. the waterfall alone changed how i operate — i used to just tune around blind and now i can actually see where the pileups are forming or where a clear spot is on 40 at night. its hard to go back to a radio without one after you get used to it. noise floor on mine was noticeably cleaner than my old 857D which admittedly isnt a fair comparison. the preamp and attenuator controls are really easy to get to which helps when conditions change. for attic dipole stuff you might still fight noise but thats your feedline and environment more than the radio — the 7300 will at least let you hear whats actually there instead of masking it. $850 is pretty reasonable right now if the screen has no burn-in and the TX audio checks out. id ask to meet him somewhere you can hook it up to a dummy load and just key it up on a few bands, shouldnt take more than 10 minutes to verify the basic stuff. the finals on these are generally pretty robust unless someone ran it way outside spec for a long time.

congrats on the General, welcome to the club. so the vanity process — there used to be a waiting period after getting your initial license but the FCC got rid of that a while back, so you can apply pretty much right away now. the application goes through the ULS just like anything else, theres a form 605 involved. as for call formats, yeah the license class matters quite a bit. 1x2 and 2x1 calls are reserved for Extras only, so if you want something like W4AB or AB4W youll need to upgrade first. 1x3 calls like W4ABC can be held by any class i believe, and 2x3 is just the default sequential stuff most people get. the vanity system basically lets you pick from whatever is available in your call district, or sometimes other districts depending on circumstances — like if you have a club affiliated there or if a close relative held the call. club calls and memorial calls have their own whole thing too which gets complicated fast. honestly the AE7Q website is the best tool for figuring out whats available and tracking applications, way better than trying to dig through the FCC site directly. worth bookmarking.

N1MM is honestly kind of ugly and the learning curve is a bit steep at first but once you get it set up for a specific contest it's hard to beat for actual contesting. the real-time scoring, the telnet cluster integration, bandmap, all that stuff is just dialed in for contest use. Log4OM is nice but its more of a general logbook that can do contests rather than a contest logger that can do general logging if you see what i mean. for the WSJT-X thing yeah you can run them together, N1MM has a WSJT-X integration where it listens on a UDP port and pulls in the QSOs automatically as you make them. you set WSJT-X to send logged QSOs to N1MM and it just works, ive been doing it for a couple years with no issues. just make sure you set the UDP server address in WSJT-X settings to 127.0.0.1 and match the port N1MM is listening on, default is 2237 i think. IC-7300 with N1MM over USB serial is pretty standard stuff too so that shouldnt give you any trouble.

so ive been a tech for about two years now and mostly just been doing local repeater stuff and some APRS. i keep hearing people talk about HF and honestly it sounds really cool but i dont really know where to start with the whole upgrading thing. like how different is the General exam from the Tech exam? i remember the Tech exam being not that bad but people keep saying General has a lot more electrical theory and i was never great at math in school so thats kind of what's been holding me back from even trying. also i guess my other question is even if i pass, what do i actually need to get on HF? i dont have any HF radio obviously. is it super expensive to get started or are there cheaper ways to get your feet wet first. sorry if this is a vague question i just dont even know what i dont know at this point

yeah same thing happened to me on my second activation lol, posted a spot too early and showed up late and spent forever calling into the void. the self spotting from the summit is a game changer once you figure it out. also 40m was probably fine depending on time of day but a lot of chasers are listening on 20m too so if you have it linked in try both. S2S (summit to summit) contacts are worth extra points if you ever catch another activator while you're up there, those are always fun to snag.

12 contacts counts same as 100 contacts lol. i did one last spring where i set up in a parking lot instead of the actual park boundary by accident and had to pack everything up and move. check the unit boundaries before you go, some of those parks the actual qualifying land is weirdly specific on the map.