James Moore18

not a dumb question at all on the USB/LSB thing — it's just convention that stuck around from the early days and nobody really changed it. below 10mhz is LSB, above is USB, 10mhz itself kind of gets used both ways depending who you ask. there's no deep technical reason you couldn't use USB on 40m, it would just confuse everyone and nobody would be where you're listening. on the audio thing, the stock HM-207 that comes with the 7300 is actually not terrible, the problem is usually mic gain set too high and the speech processor cranked up trying to compensate. classic combination that makes people sound harsh. i'd start by pulling the mic gain way back, like seriously lower than you think it should be, then bring the processor (the COMP setting) to maybe 5-8dB and see how the ALC is behaving. you want the ALC meter barely moving, not pegged. if it's slamming the ALC on voice peaks your audio is going to sound exactly like what that guy described. honestly the monitor function on the 7300 is your best friend here. record yourself, adjust, record again. it takes a while but you'll hear the difference when you get it dialed in.

yeah the cheap relay modules will absolutely do that, especially if youre running them directly off the arduino 5v pin. those boards can pull like 70-80mA per relay when they energize and if you have multiple firing at once the voltage sag is enough to cause all kinds of weirdness. what i ended up doing was running the relay coils off a separate 5v supply — just a little wall wart with a common ground to the arduino — and it fixed basically all my chatter issues immediately. also worth putting a small delay in your code between dropping one relay and raising the next, even like 50ms makes a difference. on the pi question, i do exactly what youre describing and it works great. pi runs flrig as a daemon and the arduino just handles the physical switching side. they talk over serial USB and its been rock solid for about a year now. just make sure your serial baud rates match and you add some handshaking logic or the pi will occasionally send commands before the arduino is fully booted.

so ive been running an old FT-450D for about four years and honestly it served me well but i kept eyeing the 7300 every time i was on eham or watching youtube videos. finally got one last month from a local ham who was upgrading to an IC-7610 and i have to say the difference is pretty substantial, at least coming from where i was. the real-time spectrum scope is the thing that gets me the most. i knew it was a feature obviously but actually using it during a pileup on 17m last weekend just clicked in a way i didnt expect. being able to see where activity is without spinning the dial is just... yeah. anyway the audio is noticeably cleaner too, my wife actually said something about it which was funny because she usually tunes out all the radio stuff completely. one thing i wasnt prepared for is how much time ive spent just in the menus trying to tweak things. the filter settings alone took me an afternoon. not complaining really just wasnt expecting to basically re-learn how to operate. anyone else spend a ton of time in the DSP settings when they first got one of these or did you mostly leave it stock?

yeah the web-based clusters do have a bit of lag compared to connecting directly via telnet, it's not huge but when you're chasing something rare even 30-60 seconds matters. most people who are serious about it run something like DX4WIN or just a straight telnet session to a nearby cluster node. AR-Cluster or CC Cluster nodes you can find a list on the web pretty easy. the QRZ spots are pulling from the same general DX cluster network as near as i can tell, they just display it in a nicer way. honestly for casual chasing the web tools are fine but if you keep missing stuff it might be worth setting up a telnet connection through your logging software, most of them support it. i use Log4OM and just have it connected all the time in the background, spots pop up right on the bandmap which is really the killer feature imo.

I just passed mine two months ago. The filter design stuff and the op-amp questions tripped me up at first but once it clicks its not that bad. The full privileges thing honestly mattered more to me than I thought it would — there are some nice quiet spots in the extra portions of 20m especially. Good luck if you go for it, the question pool is public so theres no excuse not to know whats coming at least roughly.

im kind of in the same boat, been at it about 8 months now and the sending catching up to copying took me way longer than i expected. one thing that actually helped me was slowing WAY back down, like uncomfortably slow, and just doing super clean sending for a while instead of always pushing speed. my elmer told me sloppy fast reps just wire in the bad habits and i think he was right because once i cleaned up at 15 i jumped to 22 pretty fast after that.

for the gateway scanning thing — in Vara HF you want to use the "Winlink Hybrid Network" session type in Express rather than locking to a specific channel/gateway. that way Express will actually query the network for active RMS stations near you based on your grid square and propagation guess. you can also set up a script channel list with multiple frequencies and it'll scan through them trying to connect. took me a while to figure that out too, the UI isnt exactly intuitive about it. on the RMS Relay question for VHF — yeah RMS Relay is still the right answer, the TNC-Pi should work fine for packet on 2m as long as your soundcard/TNC config is dialed in. the software hasnt changed dramatically, the 2018 docs are mostly still accurate from what i can tell. one thing to watch is making sure your gateway is registered properly on the winlink.org site under the sysop section, and that your forwarding intervals are set reasonably so messages dont just sit there for an hour before pushing to the network. we had that problem at our repeater site for months before someone noticed the default polling was way too slow for actual emcomm use.

no hard rule on repeaters honestly, its more of a courtesy thing. the idea is when conditions are rough or theres any chance the other person might mishear letters you break out phonetics. on a local repeater with full quieting signal you can usually just say your callsign plain and everyone hears it fine. where it really matters is hf when signals are marginal, contesting, or when youre working someone who might not speak english as a first language — nato phonetics are basically universal so November Uniform Lima Lima beats trying to figure out if someone said N-U or M-U. the "sugar" for S thing is old school. a lot of older hams grew up using what they called "able baker" phonetics or just made up their own words before nato got standardized. youll still hear it occasionally especially from guys who been licensed since the 60s and 70s. nothing wrong with it really but if youre working dx or in a net environment the nato set is just cleaner because everyone knows what to expect

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and worked a ton of HF stuff, some 6m sporadic-e, even dabbled in meteor scatter on JT65B but EME has always been this kind of mythical thing to me. figured id finally try to get serious about it but honestly the more i read the more overwhelmed i get. right now im thinking 2m EME as a starting point since thats where most of the activity seems to be and theres a lot more station density for initial contacts. i have a decent yagi situation i could build on — currently running a pair of M2 2M5WL for a terrestrial moonbounce setup and access to a legal limit amp (ACOM 1010) so the power side is probably okay. but from what i can tell the antenna gain is going to be my bottleneck, like way more so than power. path loss on 2m EME is what, around 252 dB? i keep seeing people say you really want at least 4 yagis to have a reasonable shot at working other stations without them needing a giant array on their end too. is that actually true or can i squeak by with 2 long yagis and good digital modes? im running WSJT-X with JT65B capability already so the software side isnt totally foreign to me. mainly just wondering what the realistic minimum viable setup looks like these days with Q65 in the picture