Emily Wilson23

yeah what he said about LoTW — seriously just get that set up first before anything else. i waited way too long and had like a years worth of contacts that i had to go back and try to get confirmed through QRZ or eQSL which is hit or miss. the ARRL application process for LoTW is a little annoying with the certificate stuff but once its done its done and everything just kind of flows from there.
also 60 entities in 8 months on FT8 is not bad at all, you might actually be closer to DXCC than you think if you can get those confirmed. some of the entities are super easy to get but the last 10-15 to hit 100 confirmed can take a while depending on propagation and what DXpeditions are active. theres a site called DX Watch or you can use the DX cluster to see whos on and where

The ARRL handbook is definitely more of a reference book, not really a study guide for the exam. What you probably want is the ARRL General Class License Manual, thats the one thats actually written around the question pool. I used HamStudy too and honestly if you just grind through it until youre consistently hitting like 85% or better on the practice tests you'll be fine on the real thing.
The electrical theory stuff tripped me up too but a lot of it you can kind of learn to recognize the right answer without fully understanding the math behind it, which i know sounds bad but thats kind of how these exams work. The operating procedures and regs sections were way easier for me than i expected. Give yourself maybe 3-4 weeks of studying a little bit each day and you should be in good shape. The HF privileges alone are worth it, 40m at night is a completely different world than 2m.

so i dont even know where to start, been a busy few days in the hobby. First thing — Icom quietly dropped some info about additional accessories for the IC-905 which if you havent been following that radio is their microwave/UHF all-in-one thing. looks like theyre finally addressing the external unit mounting options which was a complaint i saw all over eham. Nothing revolutionary but good to see them actually listening i guess.
But honestly the bigger thing right now is 6 meters. I was just spinning the dial last night not expecting much and suddenly ran into a massive opening into the caribbean and parts of south america. Worked a few stations in Venezuela and one in colombia i think, signals were genuinely S9 on some of them which is wild for this time of year. If youre sitting on a 6m capable rig RIGHT NOW go turn it on. seriously. Been hearing the DX cluster is lit up all morning too.
Also saw somewhere that the ARRL is planning some changes to the field day rules for next year but i cant find the original source again, might have been a rumor. Anyone else hear anything about that?

check your ptt delay settings in vara. if the radio isnt fully keyed before vara starts sending data you get garbage at the beginning of each transmission and the gateway might just give up. i had something similar with my ic-7300 and had to bump the ptt delay up to like 150ms before it stopped doing weird stuff mid-session. also make sure windows power management isnt putting the usb port to sleep, that one got me bad on a laptop setup.

the band plan vs actual allocation thing tripped me up too when i got my general. what helped me was just remembering that the ARRL band plan is basically a suggestion that most people follow and the FCC part chart is the law. you only get in legal trouble for violating the FCC limits not for ignoring the gentlemens agreement stuff, though ignoring the conventions will definitely get you yelled at on the air lol
also worth knowing the 40m phone segment in the US is kind of squeezed compared to other parts of the world, ITU region 2 thing, so you'll hear a lot of foreign stations down around 7.100-7.175 where you cant transmit voice but can listen obviously

so ive been on FT8 for about a year now and i get it, its great for contacts and the waterfall is satisfying to watch but after a while it just feels like a robotic logging exercise. someone told me about JS8Call a while back and i finally sat down and tried it this weekend and honestly its kind of blowing my mind a little bit
the idea that you can actually type back and forth with someone on like -15dB SNR is kind of wild to me. i ran a QSO with a guy in finland from my attic dipole running 25 watts and we were actually talking about his antenna setup, not just exchanging grid squares and signal reports. felt more like actual radio to me
my question is whether people mostly use JS8Call on 40m or is 20m the more active band for it. i checked the usual dial frequencies and 40m seemed pretty dead when i was looking but maybe i had the wrong time of day. also curious if anyone uses it for emcomm stuff because from what i can tell the store-and-forward messaging thing would be pretty useful in a grid-down situation, but i dont fully understand how that part works yet

i started EME about two years ago with a single 4m long yagi on 2m, made maybe a dozen contacts total but they were real contacts and it was one of the coolest things ive done in ham radio honestly. the frustrating part is the moon windows are short and scheduling matters a lot, like you cant just point at the moon randomly and expect someone to be there. the EME2 logger and the online scheduling tools are kind of essential, people post their activity times and you can plan around mutual moon windows. patience is the other thing, ive sat for two hours on a scheduled sked and had nothing happen because of unexpected QSB or the other guys equipment issue or whatever. but when it works its just unreal to think about where that signal went

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, mostly because my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it looks really cool, and also i got into it a bit during the last big storm when cell service was out and he was able to communicate fine. anyway i finally decided i want to actually get licensed but i honestly dont know where to start. like do i need to memorize the whole question pool or is there a smarter way to study? and how hard is the technician exam actually, im not great at the electrical theory stuff. also not sure if i should just walk into one of those testing sessions or if i need to sign up somewhere ahead of time. any advice would be appreciated, sorry if this is a dumb question

Building a field communications kit around my IC-7300 at 50W output for emergency preparedness. Current power budget:
IC-7300: 20A max transmit, 2.5A receive Laptop (digital modes): 4A@12V LED lighting: 1A Planning on 100Ah LiFePO4 with 100W solar panel and backup Honda EU2200i. Anyone running similar setup? How long can you sustain 50% duty cycle operation? Looking at real-world runtime data, not just theoretical calculations.

congrats on the activation, 47 Qs on your first one is really solid especially if conditions werent great. and yes 44 is the magic number for a valid activation so you're good.
for the logging stuff — HAMRS export should work fine, just make sure the ADIF has the POTA_REF field populated with the reference number, the WWFF system is pretty forgiving but ive seen people have issues when that field is blank or formatted wrong. when you submit to wwffdxhf.adif or wherever you're uploading just follow the instructions on the main wwff page and it usually goes through within a day or two for validation.
as for spotting, you really want to self-spot if you can, either through the WWFF spotting page or just post to POTA spots since a lot of hunters monitor both. if you dont spot yourself you're basically hoping someone stumbles across you or that another ham spots you which does happen but its hit or miss. i usually spot about 10 min after i get set up and start calling CQ, gives people time to see it and tune in.

so i finally stopped putting it off and just built a 40m dipole from scratch. used some 14 gauge stranded wire i had lying around from an old extension cord project, center insulator was a piece of PVC i drilled out and ran the coax through. honestly it came together pretty fast once i stopped overthinking it.
my question is about the feedpoint impedance situation. im running it as an inverted V with the apex at maybe 28 feet, legs going down at roughly 45 degrees. i know the impedance drops when you do the inverted V thing versus a flat top, closer to 50 ohms which is actually kind of convenient. but when i did a sweep with my nanoVNA the SWR at resonance is sitting around 1.4:1 which i thought was fine but then i started reading about it and now im second guessing myself. is that normal for this kind of config or did i mess something up at the feedpoint. the solder joints look ok to me but i didnt do anything fancy with the coax shield braid, just soldered it straight to one leg.
also the resonant frequency came out a little high, around 7.15 instead of where i cut it for which was more like 7.1. does wire stretch or settle over time or do i just need to add a few inches to each leg.

so ive been noticing some really strange stuff on 10 and 12 meters the past few weeks. one afternoon it'll be completely dead, like i cant even hear any noise floor activity from europe, and then two days later ill be working stations in japan like theyre next door. checked the solar flux index and its been bouncing around between like 140 and 190 which i guess is pretty high? im still fairly new to understanding how all that translates to actual band conditions on the ground.
had a buddy tell me to watch the K-index too for geomagnetic stuff but honestly i dont fully understand how a geomagnetic storm wrecks 20 meters while maybe helping 160 or something. feels backwards to me. anyway been having a blast when 10m opens up but i never know when to even bother checking it. is there some pattern people go by or do you just kind of check it constantly and hope for the best

Just wanted to share some success with FT8 during these moderate solar flux days. The mode offers operators the ability to communicate despite unfavorable conditions with signal-to-noise ratio as low as −20 dB. In my first week of operating I worked 180 countries using just a simple dipole at 30 feet and 50W. It's widely used by amateur radio operators who want reliable contacts with minimal power, limited antennas, or difficult propagation conditions, especially popular among DXers and stations operating from restricted locations. Anyone else finding FT8 opens up DX that would be impossible on SSB or CW?