Susan Davis

yeah im going, my buddy from the repeater club said theres supposed to be a couple guys bringing in some older HF gear this time. no idea if its true but worth checking out. i always end up buying junk i dont need anyway so might as well make the trip

so this is driving me nuts. picked up an 817 from a local silent key estate sale, guy's family had no idea what they were selling so i got it cheap but obviously theres a reason it was sitting on the shelf. fires up fine, all the menus work, i can key it up and the ALC meter moves, even the TX indicator lights, but zero RF out on any band. tried it on HF and VHF just to rule out a band-specific issue and same thing everywhere. already pulled the finals and they tested bad so i replaced them with the recommended 2SK2975s, resoldered everything, checked the driver stage too and that all looks okay with the signal tracer. still nothing coming out the antenna port. the SWR/power meter i'm using is a pretty decent Bird so its not a meter problem. just wondering if anyone's been down this rabbit hole before because i'm running out of obvious stuff to check and the service manual is only so helpful past a certain point.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and been using a whip on my HT which is fine for local stuff but i really want to get on HF. cant afford a commercial antenna right now and honestly i kind of want to learn by doing anyway so im going to try building a 40m dipole from wire i already have. i have some leftover 14 gauge stranded copper from an old project and i was going to use that. the formula is pretty simple, 468 divided by frequency in MHz, split in half for each leg. so for 7.150 thats roughly 65 feet total, each leg about 32.5 feet. thats what i got anyway. my question is whether the 14 gauge stranded is actually okay or if i need something different. i also dont have a balun — do i absolutely need one or can i just connect the coax center to one leg and shield to the other and call it good enough for now. planning to run it as an inverted V off my chimney, apex maybe 30 feet up. i know thats not ideal height but its what i have. running 100 watts from an ic-7300.

yeah the eu2200i is pretty clean as generators go but light loading is definitely when they get noisier — the inverter section seems to generate more garbage when its only pulling like 200-300w. running a small dummy load in parallel can help stabilize it, sounds dumb but it works. some guys use a cheap space heater on low just to keep the loading up. one thing i'd add is dont overlook your feedline routing relative to the generator. even 30ft separation doesnt help much if the coax is running parallel to the power cord for any length. try to cross them at 90 degrees or keep significant physical distance. picked that up the hard way at a field day a few years back, spent an hour chasing noise that turned out to be coupling between the coax and the generator extension cord that were bundled together for about 20ft.

congrats on the first activation, that feeling when the pile starts answering your CQ is pretty great isnt it. for frequency selection honestly the best thing i do is check the POTA spots page before i even leave the house so i know whats already in use, and then when i get set up i do a quick scan and just listen for 30 seconds before i plant myself anywhere. on 40m SSB i usually start around 7.250 or so and work down depending on QRM but it really varies by time of day and where you are. one thing that helped me a lot early on was self-spotting on the app as soon as i start calling, the hunters monitor that constantly and youll usually get a run going within a minute or two once your spot shows up. 23 QSOs for a first activation is solid, ive seen people stress out trying to get 10 and give up so you did fine.

congrats and welcome. the baofeng is totally fine to start on, dont let anyone give you grief about it. Walt sounds like a good elmer, hang onto that connection. the hardest part really is just keying up that first time, once you do it a couple times it gets way more natural. if your area has a local club worth checking out an in-person meeting sometime, that's honestly where i learned most of the practical stuff that wasnt on the exam

Your IC-9700 has built-in satellite operation modes which really helps. Most linear transponders today are inverting, meaning that as you tune the uplink higher, the downlink will decrease, and vice versa. It's important to note this is a setting in many satellite-ready radios that can be easily mis-configured. Make sure you understand inverting vs non-inverting transponders before your first attempt.

had something similar happen with mine about a year ago, turned out to be a menu setting that somehow got changed, specifically the TX bass and treble in the tone settings under the set menu. i think i bumped something during a firmware update or the update reset a few values, cant remember exactly. worth checking those first before assuming its hardware because the 7300 has a ton of audio shaping options and if one of them drifts or resets it can make the TX sound really weird. also check your microphone equalizer settings if you're using the built in one. i had mine set up pretty specifically and after one of icom's updates it went back to flat which didnt sound great with my sm-30. if you can factory reset just the audio profile without wiping everything else that might tell you whether its a settings issue or actual hardware.

yeah i did almost exactly this a couple years back with a 7300 and a raspberry pi actually, not arduino, but same idea. the CI-V parsing isnt that bad once you understand that every message starts with 0xFE 0xFE and ends with 0xFD — you just watch for those delimiters and buffer everything in between. the baud rate on the 7300 i had set to auto and that caused me all kinds of headaches, just set it to a fixed rate in the radio menu and match it on the arduino side. 19200 should be fine. one thing that bit me was the CI-V address — the 7300 default is 0x94 i think, double check that yours matches what youre sending in your query command otherwise the radio just ignores you. also make sure youre actually in transceive mode or polling, the radio wont just spit out band data continuously unless you tell it to or have transceive enabled. i can dig up my old python code if you want a reference even if its not arduino it might help you understand the flow.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house. brought the ft-891 and a random wire i threw together the night before, figured id just wing it. well the feedline i packed had a bad connector i didnt know about and spent probably 20 minutes wondering why my swr was through the roof before i figured it out. once i sorted that out though i got my 10 contacts pretty easy on 40m, ended up staying an extra hour just because it was nice out and people kept calling me. kinda addicting honestly

The IC-7300 suffers from overload problems in the face of nearby strong signals like you might find at Field Day, and proper bandpass filters are the solution. For your amp issue, try adding a sequencer with adjustable timing delays between the radio and amplifier PTT lines.

Bring a cart or wagon if you have one! Cash is king at hamfests, lots of vendors don't take cards. Get there early for parking - the good stuff goes fast and so do the close spots.

oh man i didnt even know WWFF was a thing until like three weeks ago lol. i'm still working on getting enough POTA activations to feel comfortable but now you've got me looking up what references are near me. this hobby just keeps expanding

i was in literally the exact same spot six months ago lol. ended up getting a UV-5R just to have something cheap to learn on while i figured out what i actually wanted, and then picked up a FT-70DR a few months later. the FT-70 does fusion digital and analog both which is cool if any repeaters near you run Yaesu Fusion — worth checking before you buy actually since that might tip the decision one way or another. the baofeng gets a lot of grief but tbh for a new ham just listening to repeaters and doing simplex it does the job. my main gripe was the menu system is kinda confusing and CHIRP basically becomes required to program it without losing your mind. the yaesu menus are better but still not exactly intuitive haha

Your average power should only show about 30W while speaking with proper mic gain - if you're trying to see 100W on average reading, you're overdriving everything. Set high pass to 100Hz to avoid muddy bass that wastes power and makes you harder to understand.

Consider Win-Test if you have any contesters in your group - it's designed for multi-transmitter setups and handles networking beautifully. Don't forget to register your event on the ARRL special events calendar for maximum visibility!

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general) and i finally got a decent HT, a Baofeng UV-5R that my elmer helped me program. theres a couple of repeaters in my area that i can hear pretty well but when i try to transmit nobody responds and sometimes it doesnt even seem like the repeater opens up at all. i looked up the repeater info on repeaterbook and it shows a CTCSS tone of 100.0 for the input. i think i have it set but honestly the menu system on this radio is a pain and i might have set the wrong thing. like is there a difference between setting the tone for transmit vs receive? because i think i set it for both but maybe i shouldnt have done that. also one of the local guys told me i need to do a courtesy ID or something before just jumping in, is that a thing everywhere or just some repeaters? sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to figure out what im messing up here

so i finally got my general ticket back in march and ive been mostly just listening around on HF but i feel like im missing out on the social side of things. a buddy of mine mentioned that nets are a good way to actually meet people and practice your operating without the pressure of like cold calling random DX stations which honestly still makes me nervous. problem is i dont really know where to start. i looked up a few net directories online but some of the schedules seem out of date and i tuned into a couple frequencies at the listed times and just heard nothing. are there good resources for finding active nets? also curious if any of you have favorite nets you check into regularly — doesnt matter what kind, ragchew, traffic, whatever. just trying to get more active and actually use this radio i spent way too much money on.

one thing that helped me when i was figuring this out — just download the ARRL band plan PDF and keep it next to the radio for a while. after a few weeks you kind of just know where everything is without thinking about it. also if you have a rig with a spectrum display you start to see where the activity actually clusters and that gives you a feel for it pretty fast the band edge thing is real though, had a guy at our club who was running USB right at 7.300 and his audio was apparently going above the limit. nobody said anything to him on air but somebody did check with a SDR and yeah it wasnt pretty. just give yourself some room and youll be fine

been running a remoteHams setup for about two years, K3 out at a rural property about 40 miles from where i actually live. the latency thing on SSB is real but its manageable — i'd say anything under like 80ms round trip you can have a pretty normal QSO. above that it starts to feel weird, like youre talking to someone on a satellite phone. i had a period where my ISP at the remote end was doing something funky with traffic shaping and the audio would just fall apart, took me a while to figure out that was the issue and not the software. the SDR remote piece is actually pretty solid if your upload bandwidth at the remote end can handle it. i run mine at 192kHz wide and it chews through maybe 2-3 Mbps which is fine on a decent connection but would be painful on anything marginal. the control latency for tuning and mode changes is snappier than youd think. as for AllStar thats really a separate world — different protocols, different purpose. you could theoretically bridge them but that seems like a pain and id question why you'd want to. what are you actually trying to do with the linking piece

so i know not everyone keeps up with the propagation reports but its been a pretty exciting few weeks if you watch the clusters. we had some really solid Es openings on 6m last weekend, i was making contacts into the midwest from the mid-atlantic which i honestly wasn't expecting at all for this early in the season. caught a few guys on 2m meteor scatter too which was a nice bonus. also heard through the grapevine that Icom is supposedly doing something with their handheld lineup sometime this year, nothing confirmed just rumors floating around on a couple other forums and one of the usual youtube channels mentioned it. take that with a huge grain of salt obviously. the IC-705 is still the shiny object everyone seems to want but maybe something new is coming who knows. on the event side, the ARRL June VHF contest is coming up pretty quick if anyone is planning to operate, worth dusting off the yagi if you got one. and for you new guys, Field Day is obviously right around the corner too, if your local club isnt doing anything check nearby clubs because most of them welcome visitors and its a great way to actually get on the air with people watching your back. anything else happening that people have heard about? feel free to drop stuff in here, trying to keep a bit of a running thread for news and updates since i always end up finding out about things too late.

I've been running SimpleHRR for 8 months with my IC-7300. This is the simplest way to remote control your ham radio station there is no additional software to install like Remote Desktop, RealVNC, Mumble, Skype or Teamviewer, all you need is a web browser on your remote device to operate the station. Works great for FT8 with WSJT-X integration.

so ive been going to this thing for like 4 years now and last year it was honestly kind of a disappointment, vendor turnout was way down and the swap meet tables were half empty by 9am. but i just saw they added a fox hunt this year and apparently theres gonna be a bigger indoor section which would be nice because it was hot as hell last summer standing out in that parking lot digging through boxes of old coax and mystery connectors anyway just curious if anyone from around here is planning to show up, maybe we can meet up at the club table if our club even has one this year, i havent heard anything from the VE team either about whether theyre doing testing on site

yeah that plateau around 12-14 is super real, i hit it too and honestly almost gave up on CW entirely. what finally worked for me was two things. first i started using the Farnsworth method where the characters themselves are sent at like 20wpm but the spacing between them is stretched out, so your brain learns the sound of each letter at speed even when you have more time to process. LCWO lets you set this up pretty easily, character speed at 20 and effective speed at whatever feels manageable. second thing, and this is the one people dont talk about enough, i started just listening to actual QSOs on the air. not trying to copy everything, just having it on in the background while i was doing other stuff around the shack. after a few weeks my brain started picking out words without me even trying. common stuff like 599, QTH, UR, TNX just started jumping out automatically. its kind of a slow burn but it works. also head copy practice, even just 3 or 4 characters at a time without writing anything down. forces you to hold stuff in your head instead of relying on your pencil to think for you.

yeah the PL tone thing gets people every single time, you'd think after all these years groups would have a better system for pushing out repeater changes but it never seems to happen. our group had almost the exact same issue during a drill a few years back, except it was the input frequency on our backup simplex channel being wrong in like half the members' radios. the tabletop idea is solid. we started doing those before every full exercise and it really does help surface the dumb stuff early. doesnt have to be fancy, we just get 6-8 people around a table with a map and a scenario sheet and basically talk through what happens if X goes wrong. the questions that come up in those sessions always surprise me. someone always asks something like 'wait who actually has the key to the trailer' and suddenly you realize nobody has written that down anywhere. one thing we added to our drills that helped a lot was a dedicated 'inject coordinator' whose whole job during the exercise is to throw curveballs at the team. radio fails, operator has to leave, shelter site reports their count doubled unexpectedly. keeps people from getting too comfortable and actually tests whether your backup plans are real plans or just words on a document.