Emily Miller

yeah dont sweat it at all, nets are supposed to be welcoming especially for newer folks. i checked into my first net without even knowing what a traffic net was vs a casual ragchew net and ended up confused why everyone was being so formal lol. different nets have pretty different vibes so if you stick with it youll get a feel for each one pretty quick.

yeah what the other person said about hamstudy is right but i'll add one thing -- dont skip the regulations questions even if they seem boring because there's a LOT of them on the test and they're actually pretty easy points if you just memorize them. stuff like what frequencies technicians can use on HF, power limits, when you have to ID, that kind of thing. it's all just rote memorization but it adds up fast. the electrical theory tripped me up a little when i was studying, i kept confusing myself on the parallel vs series circuit stuff. what helped me was watching a couple youtube videos on it rather than just reading. ham radio prep channel has some decent free videos that go through the whole question pool section by section if you learn better that way. anyway good luck, the test really isnt that bad once you've done a week or two of practice tests

so this has been driving me nuts for about two weeks now. picked up an FT-857D off a local swap, guy said it was working fine but honestly i think he just hadnt noticed the problem. receive on all HF bands is basically dead, like S0 noise floor and nothing coming through even on 40m which should be wall to wall signals here. VHF and UHF receive works perfectly fine which is what makes this weird. TX appears to work, hooked it up to a dummy load and the power meter shows normal output on all bands, SWR looks good. so its not a finals issue or at least doesnt seem like one. i swapped the antenna just to rule out the obvious and same result. also tried a second antenna feed line, nothing changed. my gut says its somewhere in the RX frontend on the HF side, maybe the bandpass filter switching or the preamp section but i dont have a schematic in front of me right now. anyone dealt with this on an 857? the shared TX/RX architecture on these always makes tracing stuff a bit annoying.

so ive been using WSJT-X for FT8 for about a year now and it logs to its own file which is fine but i keep meaning to get a proper logging program set up and i cant decide between N1MM and Log4OM and honestly every thread i find is either ancient or written by someone who clearly works for one of the developers or something my situation is i do maybe 3 or 4 contests a year, nothing serious, mostly ARRL CW stuff and occasionally a VHF contest when the band is doing something interesting. rest of the time its just ragchew and some digital. i want something that plays nice with WSJT-X so the FT8 contacts dont live in a totally separate universe from everything else from what i can tell N1MM is basically the gold standard if you live and breathe contests but its kind of overkill and the interface looks like it was designed in 2003 which it basically was. Log4OM looks nicer but ive seen people say the contest support is kind of an afterthought. anyone actually use both and have a real opinion that isnt just repeating what the websites say

I built the SM0VPO design - operational within one hour and gives very nice results. You get about 6dB with 8 half-wave sections, 9dB with 16 sections. The trade-off is worth it for general VHF work where you want gain without constantly rotating.