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

so ive been using N1MM for a few years now mostly for contests, works fine for that, but outside of contests its kind of a pain to deal with for general logging. a buddy at the club keeps telling me to try Log4OM and honestly it looks a lot more polished from the screenshots but i dunno if its worth learning a whole new program. the thing that got me thinking about this is i also run WSJT-X pretty regularly for FT8 and the integration between WSJT-X and N1MM has always felt a little clunky to me. like it works but every time i update one of them something breaks and i spend 20 minutes figuring out the UDP settings again. Log4OM supposedly handles that better but i havent confirmed that myself. anyone actually use Log4OM for serious contesting? that's the part im most unsure about. i do maybe 4-5 contests a year, nothing crazy, mostly CQWW and some state QSO parties. N1MM is obviously king for that stuff but if Log4OM can handle it reasonably well id consider just consolidating everything into one logger instead of juggling two.

honestly the mumble path is fine for what it is but yeah the reboot sequencing thing is a real pain, i had the same issue and ended up writing a systemd unit file with proper dependencies that waits for rigctld to be alive before starting the audio daemon. helped a lot. not saying you should stick with your current setup necessarily but that one thing made mine way more stable. never actually tried RemoteHams myself so cant speak to that but ive heard the latency is somewhere around 150-300ms depending on your path which is enough to feel off but not unusable.

Welcome to SOTA, you're gonna love it. Alerts are definitely not required but they help a lot -- activators who alert usually get their 4 contacts way faster because chasers are already tuned in and watching for you. I'd post one a day or two ahead if you can, just go to sotawatch3.org and fill in the summit reference, your frequency and mode, and roughly what time you expect to be there. Even a loose time estimate helps. The FT-818 at 5w will be totally fine for a 2 point summit. I've activated bigger summits with 5w and had no trouble, especially if there are chasers active that day. The random wire should work, maybe try to get it as high as you can and give yourself a good counterpoise. As for the activation zone -- it's the top 25 meters of prominence, not just the exact peak. So if the whole ridgeline up there is within 25 meters of the high point you're good to go anywhere in that area. Dont stress too much about finding the exact GPS coordinate of the summit, just get up near the top and you'll be in the zone.

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, mostly because my neighbor does it and it seems pretty cool, but i honestly have no idea where to even begin with the license thing. i know theres different levels or classes or whatever but i dont really understand the difference between them or which one i should go for first. do i need to know morse code? someone told me you dont anymore but i wasnt sure if that was still true. also how hard is the test actually, like is it the kind of thing you can study for in a week or does it take months. any help would be appreciated i feel like im going in circles just googling stuff

this is really good to hear about, im still pretty new to ARES and just got my general last spring so i havent been to a drill yet but my EC keeps talking about running one later this year. the stuff about batteries is kind of making me rethink my go kit honestly, i built mine out of whatever i had laying around and i dont think ive ever actually tested how long it lasts under continuous use. probably should do that before i show up to something and embarass myself lol

yeah the weight control on the 7300 keyer is the ratio of mark to space within each element, so if you crank it up your dots get fatter and if you go too low they get thin and choppy. most people leave it right at 50 (sometimes labeled as 1:1) and that's the standard. if yours is set to something weird from the previous owner that would definitely cause the mushy sound you're describing. but honestly before messing with any of that i'd check the paddle gap first. Bencher paddles have two small screws on each side that set how far the paddle travels before making contact, and if the gaps are too tight the contacts will bounce or stick and you'll get extra dots you didn't intend. there's a sweet spot where it just barely closes with light pressure and you'll know it when you find it. takes some patience but once you get it dialed in it makes a huge difference. grab a business card and try to just barely fit it in the gap as a rough starting point, then go from there by feel. also make sure the iambic mode is set to mode A or B depending on your preference, some people find one feels more natural than the other. i personally use mode A and it feels more predictable to me but thats just habit from forever ago

the solder joint alone wont hold for long outdoors, learned that the hard way years ago. what i do is drill a small hole in the connector housing or use a zip tie anchor point and loop the wire back on itself before soldering, so the mechanical stress is on the wire loop not the joint itself. some guys use those little plastic dipole center insulators you can buy cheap, they have strain relief holes already built in and you just run your coax through the bottom. honestly for a first build that might be easier than fabricating something from scratch. on the balun question — for a simple 40m dipole fed with 50 ohm coax you can get away without one, lots of people do. but you might see some common mode current on the coax braid which can cause RF in the shack and pattern distortion. a simple 1:1 current balun makes a noticeable difference. easiest homebrew version is just wind 8 to 10 turns of the coax itself into a coil about 6 inches in diameter right at the feedpoint, tape it up good and call it a day. not perfect but way better than nothing.

Perform regular checks on your equipment to ensure everything is in working order. Charge batteries, test radios, and inspect cables and connectors for wear and tear. I know this is important but keep putting it off. What's everyone's go-kit maintenance schedule look like? Monthly? Quarterly? And what exactly do you check? Last month I discovered my coax had water intrusion from sitting in the truck - lesson learned the hard way!

Are you implementing Kenwood TS-480 emulation for the IC-718 CAT interface? That's usually the most compatible approach. The ESP32 Arduino core has some quirks with serial buffer handling compared to ATmega chips.

yeah 85 degrees in direct sun is gonna cook those little finals pretty quick, especially if the kit uses the typical IRF510 or similar. most of those budget kits dont have great thermal management to begin with so even modest temps can push them into protection mode or just cause weird behavior. i'd throw a small clip-on heatsink on the final transistor if you havent already, makes a big difference. also 1.8:1 isnt terrible but youre still losing a noticeable chunk of your already limited power to reflected, worth spending some time with an antenna analyzer if you have access to one. the spain contact at 4w is great though, 20m with good conditions can really surprise you.