Robert Taylor83

check your DC power cable and connectors before you go digging into the radio itself. i know it sounds dumb but ive chased weird intermittent power drop issues for days and it turned out to be a dodgy anderson powerpole that was arcing just enough under load to cause voltage sag. the radio was fine, my wiring was the problem. worth ruling out the boring stuff first

i did my first activation on a POTA park actually not a summit but same idea basically. set up took way longer than i thought because i kept second guessing my antenna placement and by the time i was on the air i only had like an hour before i had to pack up. still got the 10 contacts for a valid activation but it was stressful. the kx2 is a great radio for this stuff btw, jealous you have one, im still running a older ft-817 which works fine but the battery situation is annoying

yeah im going, been going almost every year since like 2009 except for the covid years. the swap meet is honestly the main draw for me too, though get there early because the good stuff disappears fast. i mean really fast. saw a guy basically running through the rows at 7am with a cart. bring cash and know what stuff is worth before you go or youll overpay, some of the sellers know exactly what theyre doing.

The General exam is a step up for sure but honestly if you passed Tech you can definitely do it. The math questions tripped me up at first, the ones about impedance and reactance and stuff, but if you just memorize the formulas and do a bunch of practice tests on HamStudy or QRZ it starts to click. I probably did like 400-500 practice questions before I sat for the actual exam and felt pretty comfortable going in. On the HF access thing, once the VE session submits your results to the FCC it usually shows up in the ULS database within a day or two, sometimes faster. You dont have to wait for a new license in the mail or anything, once its in the database you can operate on your new privileges. Just check the FCC ULS lookup and when it shows General youre good to go. For a first HF radio a lot of people suggest something like an IC-7300 if budget isnt a concern, or if you want to spend less there are decent options like the Xiegu G90 that a lot of new HF folks seem to like. 40 meters is probably where id start, especially in the evenings, you can usually find plenty of activity and the propagation is pretty forgiving compared to some of the higher bands.

okay so i just passed my general a few months ago and got a sequential callsign, which is fine but its kind of long and awkward to say on the air. someone at my local club mentioned i could apply for a vanity call and get something shorter or more memorable. i looked at the FCC ULS website and honestly it made my head spin a little. from what i can tell you file the application, there's a 18 day waiting period, and then if multiple people applied for the same call it goes into some kind of drawing? or is it first come first served? i genuinely cant tell. also does it matter what license class you have for which calls you can apply for? i know 1x2 and 2x1 formats are for extras but what about 1x3 calls, can a general get one of those? sorry if this is a dumb question, just want to make sure i understand before i go filing something and wasting the application fee — wait is there even a fee now? i thought the FCC started charging but my buddy said vanity is still free? anyway any help appreciated

so ive been messing around with an arduino mega for the past few weeks trying to get it to control my 4-port antenna switch automatically based on what band my radio is on. the radio outputs band data on a DB9 connector (its an IC-7300) so in theory i should be able to read that and then just drive some relays accordingly. i got the relay board working fine, and i can read serial data no problem, but the band data format from icom is a little weird and im not 100% sure im decoding it right. the other thing i havent figured out yet is debouncing the relay switching so it doesnt just hammer the relays when the radio is doing its thing during a QSY. thinking maybe just a 500ms delay but that feels sloppy. anyone done something similar or have code laying around they wouldnt mind sharing? im not a great programmer but i can muddle through C++ well enough to modify stuff.

gpredict with CAT works great with the 818, just make sure you've got the hamlib stuff configured right and set the poll interval low enough that it's actually keeping up — i think i run mine at like 500ms or something. the doppler tracking on a 10 minute LEO pass is pretty aggressive especially near AOS and LOS so manual just doesnt cut it once you've tried full auto. for the inverting transponder thing yeah you basically pick a spot in the passband and try to stay there, the whole passband shifts together with doppler so if you're set up right your signal should stay in roughly the same place relative to other stations. the confusing part is that when you tune your uplink up, your downlink goes down because of the inversion, so it feels backwards until it clicks. just takes a few passes to get the muscle memory.

so ive been messing with remote station control for about 6 months now and i finally got a setup i'm mostly happy with but the internet linking side of things is still driving me nuts. running RemoteHams RCForb on a windows box at the remote site, which is at my buddy's place about 40 miles out in a much quieter RF environment than my house. the rig out there is an IC-7300 and it works great when the connection behaves itself. the issue is latency spikes — like the audio will be fine for 20 minutes then suddenly go choppy and i lose the CAT control sync for a few seconds. i bumped the jitter buffer up but that just makes the audio delay worse and then i feel like i'm operating through molasses. his ISP is one of those rural fixed wireless things which probably doesnt help, im on a normal cable connection on my end. also started playing with the SDR side — he's got an RTL-SDR dongle plugged in as a panadapter feed and i pull that through separately over the same link. i dont know if running both streams simultaneously is making the bandwidth problem worse or if it's just the fixed wireless being flaky. anyone been through this and figured out a good buffer/codec tradeoff? i tried dropping the audio to 8kHz mono and that helped a little but still not great on SSB.

im in the same boat sort of, i took my general last month after being a tech for like a year. the electrical theory stuff threw me off a little bit, ohms law and stuff i vaguely remembered from high school but some of the impedance and reactance questions were weird. i didnt fail or anything but those were the ones i was least confident on. just grind the practice exams same as tech, youll be fine

yeah 30 degree max passes are rough, i wouldnt even bother with those personally and wait for something higher. also are you correcting doppler on both uplink and downlink simultaneously? because if youre only chasing it on one side the math gets weird with an inverting transponder. gpredict can drive the rig directly if youre using something with CAT control and that helps a lot once you get it set up, manually tuning is kind of a nightmare especially on short passes

the WIDE2-2 thing is a whole rabbit hole but for suburban/urban you're actually better off with WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 or even just WIDE2-1 depending on how dense the digipeater coverage is near you. WIDE2-2 isnt wrong exactly but you end up with a lot of redundant hops and it annoys some of the igates in high density areas. thats probably not your position problem though. for the position being off — check if your radio is set to use the internal GPS or if theres a manual lat/lon still in there from when you first set it up. the D710 can be a little weird about which source it's actually using for the beacon payload. go into the APRS menu and look at the GPS unit setting, make sure its not just defaulting to whatever you typed in during initial config. also worth watching the raw packets on aprs.fi for your callsign to see exactly what coordinates are being transmitted, might make it obvious whats going on.

antenna feedline adapters — I always forget those and then show up somewhere and the connector situation is a mess. like a little ziplock bag with a few pl-259 to SO-239, maybe a BNC adapter or two. also if your buddy pole needs specific tools to assemble make sure those are actually in the kit and not sitting on your workbench at home lol oh and snacks. seriously. I know that sounds off topic but I went on a 6 hour deployment once and didn't eat anything and by hour four I was pretty useless

yeah PL and CTCSS are the same thing, PL is just the old Motorola trademark name for it but everyone uses both interchangeably. so no worries there. for the Baofeng you want to make sure the tone is set on the transmit side — a lot of people accidentally set it on receive which does basically nothing useful for getting into a repeater. in the menus you're looking for T-CTCS not R-CTCS. if you have R-CTCS set you'll just be filtering what you hear, not sending the tone to open the repeater up. as for breaking in, yeah just toss your callsign out during a pause between transmissions, that's pretty standard on most machines. most folks are friendly and will acknowledge you, especially if you mention you're new. some repeaters have a specific format they like but usually the locals will just let you know if anything's off.

same honestly, 40 is my go-to when im just messing around in the evenings. last night i actually had a pretty decent qso with a guy in ohio, we talked for like an hour about antenna setups which was cool. he was running a dipole in his attic which i thought was kinda impressive given the noise floor he was dealing with. 20m has been hit or miss for me too lately, sometimes wide open sometimes nothing

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i keep hearing people throw around all these abbreviations and Q codes and half the time i have no idea what they're saying. like i know QTH is location and QSL is like confirming a contact but then someone said QRM to me the other day and i just kind of said yeah thanks and moved on because i didnt want to seem like i had no idea what was happening is there like a good way to learn these or do you just kind of pick them up over time. also whats the difference between QRM and QRN because i see both of those a lot. and what does 73 mean, someone explained it once but i forgot. sorry if this is a dumb question im still figuring everything out