James Moore18

so i've been putting this off forever but i finally took my little KX2 out to a state park saturday and just spent a few hours calling CQ and making contacts on 20m. honestly wasnt sure what to expect since i'm used to running 100w at home with a decent antenna, figured QRP would be super frustrating. ended up making like 8 contacts in about 2 hours which doesnt sound like a lot but man the whole experience was just different. had a nice long ragchew with a guy in georgia who said my signal was solid, running 5 watts into a random wire i threw up in a tree. its hard to describe but there's something really satisfying about knowing you're doing more with less i guess. anyway i'm already thinking about building my own rig. i've been eyeing the various kits out there — the ubitx, some of the smaller cw kits. anyone have experience building from scratch vs buying a kit vs just getting something like the KX3 or whatever? i'm not afraid of soldering but i've never done an RF kit before, mostly just done audio stuff. wondering how big of a leap that is.

so ive been putting this off forever but finally got around to doing the MARS mod on my IC-7300 last weekend. pretty straightforward once you find the right jumper, took maybe 20 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself and looking at the service manual three times. expanded TX works fine, not that i actually need it day to day but its nice to have. while i had it open i also reflashed the firmware to the latest version which i somehow hadnt done in like two years. the waterfall does seem a little smoother? hard to say if thats placebo or real. the DSP filter changes in the newer firmware are supposed to be improved but honestly on SSB i cant tell a huge difference. FT8 is FT8, doesnt matter. what i really want to do next is look into the modifications people have done for the noise blanker — ive seen some threads on other sites about tweaking the NB aggressiveness but im not sure if thats a software thing or if theres actual hardware involved. anyone done anything along those lines on the 7300 specifically? my noise floor here is pretty brutal from a neighbors solar inverter and the stock NB only does so much.

the memorize vs understand debate is real and honestly both guys are kind of right. you CAN pass by just drilling the question pool, i know people who did it that way, but if youre the type who wants to actually know whats going on when you're adjusting an antenna tuner or trying to figure out why your feedline is doing something weird, taking the time to understand the theory pays off later. the ARRL Extra Class License Manual is pretty decent for working through it in order, it doesnt assume you remember a lot of math. for me the transmission line stuff clicked when i just drew out the smith chart stuff a few times by hand, sounds tedious but it helped. filters and oscillator theory took longer. give yourself 6-8 weeks of actual studying not just clicking through practice tests and you should be fine. the 60 question pool isnt that huge and the real exam pulls from it so patterns start showing up pretty quick

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

dont forget a way to charge your phone separately from your radio batteries. I made that mistake during a flood activation a few years back, ended up draining my main battery just trying to keep my phone alive for ICS messaging. got a dedicated small USB power bank now that stays in the kit and never gets borrowed for camping trips lol. also if you're doing net control specifically, a headset with a boom mic makes a huge difference over a long activation. your hand gets tired holding a mic and your voice fatigues less when you're not fighting background noise. I picked up a cheap one that works with my IC-7300 and honestly wish I'd done it sooner.

RAM mounts are solid, i have one on my jeep for my 5100 and no complaints. just make sure you get the right ball size for the weight of your radio head, i grabbed the wrong one initially and it kept slowly drooping down over bumps which was super annoying lol. also depending on where exactly you mount it check that it doesnt interfere with your airbag deployment zones, not trying to scare you just something i had to look up when i did mine

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.

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.

ok so i passed my general last month and im still trying to wrap my head around where i can actually operate. i know theres like segments for different license classes but honestly the band plan stuff confuses me more than the actual radio stuff did. like on 40 meters i see people talking all over the place but then i heard something about staying away from the band edges? my buddy told me to just stay above 7.200 for phone but then someone else said something about 7.125 and now im just lost. is there like a simple way to think about this or do i just need to memorize a chart

yeah almost certainly a CTCSS tone issue. most repeaters require you to transmit a specific subaudible tone along with your audio otherwise the repeater controller just ignores you completely, which is exactly what youre describing. the tone wont be in your audio, you wont hear it, but your radio needs to be programmed to send it. check repeaterbook again for that specific machine, theres usually a field that says "tone" or "CTCSS" and itll be something like 100.0 Hz or 127.3 Hz or similar. on the baofeng you need to set that under the menu somewhere, i think its called T-CTCS on those radios. once you dial that in youll hear the repeater tail when you unkey and then you know it worked. also just make sure your offset is set to negative for 146.940, sounds like you know that already but worth double checking. once you get the tone sorted, just call out your callsign and say youre a new ham testing and most regulars on a healthy repeater will come back to you pretty quick.

so ive been trying to get Winlink going for a few weeks now and i think im close but the RMS gateway part is tripping me up. i understand the basic concept, you connect to a gateway station, it passes your message to the internet side and the recipient gets it as a normal email. thats fine. but where im getting lost is the actual connection sequence in Winlink Express. im running a TM-V71A into a Signalink USB on 145.050 which is the closest RMS gateway to me according to the map on the Winlink site. when i try to initiate a session in packet mode it just sits there and never handshakes. ive checked the audio levels like four times and the Signalink is PTT-ing correctly because i can see the TX light on the radio come on. so the radio is transmitting, something is just not connecting. do i need to configure the gateway call in a specific place in Winlink Express or does it automatically try the closest one? i swear i read somewhere you can set a target station manually but i cant find where that setting is now. also wondering if maybe the gateway i picked is just down or something, is there a status page for individual RMS stations?