Robert Johnson

the eu2200i is actually pretty solid once you get used to it, i ran one for a 10 hour public service event last fall and it was fine, just keep it maybe 20-30 feet away from the operating position if you can and run a good extension cord. the noise issue is real but its manageable. fuel wise just bring an extra gallon jug, the tank on that thing is small for the battery route though, two 100ah lifepo4 in parallel should be more than enough for what youre describing. 30% duty cycle on a 7300 youre probably averaging maybe 8-10 amps realistically, laptop maybe 3-4 more, fan another amp or two. rough math puts you well inside 100ah for 6 hours even without solar. the second battery is good peace of mind though and they aint that heavy if youre just loading from a car on the antenna question, ive had decent luck with an endfed halfwave on a 31 foot fiberglass mast - the SOTAbeams ones are pretty packable. you can stake the mast with a camera tripod and some sand bags or just lean it against whatever structure is nearby and guy it with paracord. 40 works fine for me with a decent tuner, 80 is always a compromise on a short setup but what isnt

so ive been a General for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother studying for the Amateur Extra. like i already have HF privileges and i can work most of the bands i care about. the main thing holding me back is that the theory sections look pretty brutal - filter design, transmission line stuff, all the advanced math. i did okay on the General but that felt manageable. the Extra pool looks like a different animal. i guess my question is, is it actually worth grinding through all that just to get the extra slices of 40, 20, and 15 meters? i mostly do SSB and a little FT8. are those Extra-only segments even that active or is everyone crammed into the General portions anyway. someone at my club said it depends on what kind of operating you want to do but he wasnt very specific about it

yeah techs do get some HF. you get phone privileges on 10 meters around 28.300 to 28.500, and there's some CW access on a couple other bands too like 15 and 40 meters for CW only. the ARRL website actually has a frequency privilege chart that breaks it all down by license class, way easier to read than the actual Part 97 text. just search for ARRL frequency allocation chart and it should come up pretty quick. honestly dont stress too much about accidentally wandering into the wrong spot, just listen first and you'll get a feel for where things are. and yeah 10m can be a bit rough when conditions are good and the dx guys are piling up but techs on phone are pretty common there so no one should give you a hard time

congrats on that germany contact, 5 watts to europe is always a good feeling no matter how many times you do it. the KX2 is a great little rig too, solid receiver for its size which honestly matters more than people think when youre QRP because you need to be able to hear the weak ones coming back at you. for squeezing more out of your setup the biggest thing is antenna, which you probably already know. random wire is fine but if you can put any effort into making it a half wave on whatever band youre targeting and get it as high as you can manage youll notice a real difference. also if youre not already using a tuner to make sure youre getting actual power into the wire and not just heating up the feedline that'll help. and just be patient on the pile ups, wait for a lull and time your call — at QRP you kinda cant muscle your way in.

ah dont beat yourself up too much, genuinely happens to everyone at some point especially when you're new to HF. the band conditions play tricks on you and a net that's totally inaudible on your end might be booming in somewhere else — that's just propagation being weird. you did the right thing apologizing and QSYing, that's really all anyone can ask. the ARRL net directory is decent but yeah it's not exhaustive, and some of those listings are outdated too. honestly the best thing is just to listen a little longer before calling CQ, maybe a full minute or two, and also to ask if the frequency is in use before you start. just a quick "is this frequency in use?" before your CQ goes a long way. the old timers appreciate it and it gives anyone running low power a chance to say hey we're here. the guy was probably just caught off guard more than anything, i wouldnt take the tone personally.

so i was scrolling through the usual spots this morning and saw that Icom apparently dropped some info about a new rig, cant remember if it was at a hamfest or just an announcement but people on one of the facebook groups were going nuts about it. anyone have actual details? i didnt dig too deep into it yet. also completely separate thing but has anyone else noticed 10 meters has been absolutely bonkers the last few weeks? i worked like 6 or 7 new countries last weekend just sitting at the desk with my dipole, nothing fancy. solar flux has been up there and honestly i havent seen conditions like this since i got back into the hobby a few years ago. if you havent been on HF lately and you have any kind of antenna at all just get on there, you might be surprised. there was also something going around about a big ARRL rule change or policy thing but i honestly couldnt follow what the argument was even about, something with vanity calls or licensing maybe? anyone know what thats actually referring to

yeah the listening thing is huge and people really dont get it. ive worked a few small DXpeditions, nothing major like a top 10 entity or anything, but enough to understand what its like on the pile end. the signals you can actually pull out are not necessarily the strongest ones, its the ones that are slightly isolated spectrally. when theres a solid wall of carriers all within 200hz of each other its genuinely hard to pick any single call out of that. the guys who are sitting a little offset or who have cleaner audio just stand out more. the timing thing you mentioned is real too. we called it surfing the edge of the pile when i was helping out on one activation — waiting for the noise floor to drop slightly right after a QSO ends and then slipping your call in. the DX op on that trip commented on it specifically, said he could hear certain stations clearly because they werent overlapping with the initial pileup surge. one thing id add is working on your sent callsign clarity. some people send their call so fast or with such poor keying that even if the op hears them they cant decode it. i run around 20-22wpm in pileups, enough to get through quickly but not so fast the op has to ask twice. asking for repeats in a pileup is basically losing your spot and starting over.

so i passed my technician exam on tuesday and my callsign showed up in the ULS database like two days later which i wasnt expecting to happen that fast honestly. anyway i figured i'd just jump in and keyed up on the local repeater last night, said my callsign and that i was new and kind of just waited. guy came back to me within maybe 20 seconds, we talked for like 10 minutes about nothing really, his antenna setup, what radio i had, that kind of thing. i have a baofeng uv-5r which i know everyone has opinions about but it was $30 and it works. the whole thing felt weird and cool at the same time, like i kept second guessing whether i was doing the format right. he was really patient though. just wanted to share i guess, feels like a milestone even if it was just two people chatting on a repeater

yeah what he said. also just download the ARRL band plan pdf, it lays it all out visually and its way easier than reading the FCC rules. i spent like an hour confused the same way you are and then someone told me about that chart and it clicked pretty fast. the band edges thing burned me once early on, i was calling CQ on what i thought was a clear frequency and someone came back to tell me i was splashing into the extra portion. embarasing but thats how you learn i guess

yeah the arrl website actually has a really clean frequency allocation chart that breaks it down by license class, way easier than staring at the actual part 97 text. for tech on HF you basically get 80m, 40m, 15m, and 10m for CW only except 10m where you get a slice of phone too, 28.300 to 28.500 mhz for SSB. theres also some data and RTTY allocations mixed in there. the actual rule you want is section 97.301 for the frequency allocations and then 97.305 for emission privileges, those two together tell you pretty much everything. its not as bad once you know which sections to look at honestly just get your general already, the test isnt that hard and it opens up way more of the bands. youll want it eventually anyway

nice work getting it on the air. dc receivers are weird to listen to at first because you hear both sidebands at once, took me a while to not find that annoying. did you put any RF filtering ahead of the 602? i skipped that on my first one and could hear everything from broadcast band mixing around in there, was a mess

okay so the Q codes go back way before ham radio, they were originally used by maritime telegraph operators so everyone could communicate fast regardless of what language they spoke. QSL does double duty yeah — the card is named after the code, but on air when someone says QSL it just means acknowledged or i confirm. QRM is interference from other stations, like someone else transmitting nearby and mucking up your signal. QRN is natural static, like lightning crashes and atmospheric noise. so QRM is man made, QRN is nature doing it. easy way to remember it. 73 is not a Q code, its from an old telegraph brevity code called the Phillips Code or sometimes the 92 code depending on who you ask, and 73 just meant best regards. nobody really agrees on the exact history but it stuck around and now its basically universal in ham radio. and yeah QRP is specifically low power, the formal definition is 5 watts or less on HF, though people use it loosely sometimes to just mean running lower power than usual.

so ive been putting off learning CW for about two years now and i finally decided to just commit to it. been using lcwo.net for a few weeks and im slowly getting characters down but i want to start actually sending too, not just receiving in my head. right now i have a really cheap single lever paddle i picked up at a hamfest, think it was like $15. it works but it feels kinda mushy if that makes sense, the contact tension is all over the place and i keep accidentally sending extra dits when i dont mean to. is this a keyer problem or a paddle problem or just me being a terrible operator lol also my radio has a built in keyer — FT-891 — and i have it set to iambic mode B i think, should i be using something else? i read conflicting stuff online. any tips appreciated, still very much a beginner at this

so our ARES group did a full scale exercise Saturday, we were simulating a major flood event where the EOC needed to coordinate with three different shelter locations and a mobile command unit out near the river. I've done a few tabletops before but this was the first time we actually deployed people to physical locations and tried to pass real traffic through the net. honestly it went way better than I expected in some ways and way worse in others. The HF link to the county EOC was solid, like surprisingly solid, but the VHF simplex between the two shelters was a disaster because nobody had thought about the terrain between the community center and the high school. there's a ridge right in the middle and we basically had no comms for about 40 minutes while people figured out we needed a relay station up on Miller Road. the other thing that caught us off guard was message handling. we had trained on ICS-213 forms and people knew the format but when things got hectic some of the incoming operators were just reading traffic too fast and the shelter teams couldn't copy it all down. we ended up having to repeat a lot and the net got really congested for a while. curious if anyone else has done exercises like this and what tripped you up the most, because I feel like no matter how much you prep there's always something that bites you

this is really helpful to read, im about to do something similar in my jeep with a 2820 and ive been dreading the wiring part. did you have any trouble with the fuse holder right at the battery or did it just bolt on easy? also curious how hot the main body gets under the seat, i wasnt sure if that would be an issue with airflow

so ive been trying to learn CW for about three months now and just picked up a used set of Begali paddles off a guy at the club swap meet last weekend. really nice paddles honestly, way better than the cheap bencher clone i was using before. anyway i have them hooked into my ic-7300 and using the internal keyer set to iambic mode B. the problem is when im trying to send certain letter combinations like C or Y or anything with a dash-dot pattern i keep squeezing both paddles at the wrong moment and getting extra elements inserted. i know thats kind of the whole thing with iambic mode B is that it remembers your last squeeze but its driving me crazy because my sending sounds like garbage and i can hear it on the sidetone. been practicing with the keyer speed set around 15 wpm which might actually be too fast for where im at right now, not sure. do most people just eventually get the muscle memory or is there some kind of trick to timing your squeeze releases that im missing? or should i just switch to mode A and see if that feels more natural? any advice appreciated, getting a little frustrated but i dont want to give up on this

i had almost the exact same thing with my 706 years ago and it drove me crazy for months. turned out my power wires were running parallel to the coax for about 18 inches under the carpet and that was enough to cause problems. separating them fixed most of it. also ended up putting a cheap noise filter on the power line right at the radio, one of those astron or similar inline ones, and that got rid of the last of it. not the most elegant solution but it worked fine for years after that.

so ive been chasing a few entities on my most wanted list for a while now and honestly pileups used to completely destroy me. id call and call for like an hour and get nothing, or id get a partial call back and then lose it. real frustrating stuff especially when youre running maybe 100w and a modest antenna. anyway the one that finally clicked things for me was a recent dxpedition to one of the central african entities, i wont name it because this isnt really about that specifically. what changed was i stopped calling on top of everyone else and actually started listening to where the dx station was pulling calls from. like actually sitting on the dx tx frequency and just listening for a full 10-15 minutes before touching my key. you start to hear patterns — whether theyre working split and how wide, whether theyre favoring certain parts of the spread, whether theres a rhythm to how they come back. the other thing i started doing was calling slightly off the main pileup cluster. if everyone is hammering 14.025 to 14.027 i'd try 14.028 or even 14.029. sometimes the dx op is spinning the vfo looking for a clear signal and if youre sitting just outside the chaos you stand out. not always, but more than i expected. also just getting my timing right made a huge difference. waiting until the pile thins just slightly after the dx works someone — theres like a 2 second window where the chaos resets and if you're in there clean and quick with just your call, sometimes thats enough. anyone else have stuff thats worked for them?

not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely takes a while to click. the short version is yeah most of the cluster tools — DXwatch, DX Summit, what your logging program pulls — they're all tapping into the same underlying Telnet cluster network more or less, so the spots are basically the same data with maybe a few minutes difference depending on the node. log4om definitely has built in cluster support so you can have spots pop up right in your logging window which is actually pretty handy once you get it configured. for filtering, honestly the band filter is the right instinct. beyond that i usually also filter by my continent or sometimes specifically look for spots where the spotter is somewhere near me geographically, because a spot from a station in western Europe doesnt tell me much about whether i can actually hear the DX from here in the midwest. some of the tools let you filter by spotter location which helps a lot. the other thing i'd say is dont stress too much about catching every spot. just pick one or two targets for a session and focus on those rather than spinning all over the place chasing everything. took me a while to learn that one honestly.

the thing about memorizing the patterns on paper like dit dah dah for W and whatever is that it works until you try to actually copy anything at speed and then your brain is too slow trying to decode each letter from the chart in your head and you freeze up. the way most people recommend now is the Koch method or just learning with the Morse Toad or LCWO website where you start hearing each letter at like 20wpm but with extra space between them so your brain learns the sound not the visual pattern. took me probably 3 months of doing like 15 minutes a day before i could actually have a slow QSO without totally falling apart. the LCWO site is free and it tracks your progress which helped me a lot to see i was actually getting somewhere even when it felt like i wasnt

so ive been a tech for about two years now and mostly just do local repeaters and some APRS stuff but i really want to get on HF and talk to people farther out. started looking at the general class pool and honestly its kind of overwhelming. there's so much in there about propagation and operating procedures and then all the electrical stuff too. im using hamstudy.org which i used for my tech and it worked fine but im wondering if the general is just harder in general or if im overthinking it. some of the questions about like impedance matching and feedlines and stuff i feel like i kind of understand but then the question is worded weird and i get it wrong. is there like certain sections i should really nail down vs ones that are less likely to show up? or does it not really work that way also once i actually pass what do i need to do before i can actually transmit on HF? do i have to wait for my callsign to update or can i use my tech call with the upgrade or something, i genuinely dont know how that works

welcome to the hobby, congrats on passing the exam. honestly the baofeng question comes up constantly and my take after years of watching new hams go through this is — get the cheap one first, learn on it, and if you stick with the radio thing you'll know way better what you actually want in six months. the uv-5r gets a lot of grief and some of it is fair, out-of-the-box programming is a pain and yeah you should put chirp on your computer before you try to do anything with it manually. but as a first radio to mess around with and hit your local repeater? it does the job. the interference thing people worry about is mostly if you're transmitting on frequencies you shouldnt be, which as long as you're paying attention you wont do. the ft-65r is a noticeable step up if you want something that feels more like a real radio and the receive is better, but thats like $100 more and at this stage you probably wont notice the difference on a repeater qso. my honest pick for someone in your spot would be the baofeng to start, grab the programming cable with it, and just use it. you can always upgrade and it wont sting much if you decide the hobby isnt your thing after a few months

yeah i went through this exact thing like 8 months ago lol. i ended up just keeping my sequential for now because the vanity call i really wanted was already taken and my second choices felt kinda random. one thing i'll add is there are sites like ae7q.com that let you look up calls and see if theyre available or in a grace period or whatever, made the whole research part way less confusing than trying to parse the FCC database directly. good luck with the new license

so anyway i went through this same thing last year and honestly the LoTW setup almost made me give up on it lol. the certificate process is just weird if youre not used to it. but once i finally got tqsl configured right the confirmations started rolling in pretty fast especially after contests when everyone uploads their logs at once. i still send paper cards for anything that feels like a big deal to me, first contact with a new country or a really tough QRP contact or whatever. some older ops really appreciate getting a physical card and will send one back which is always a nice surprise in the mailbox. eQSL i use kind of as a backup, some guys only confirm there and not on LoTW so its worth having both set up. dont stress too much about picking one, they all serve a slightly different purpose

yeah the process can seem confusing at first but its actually not too bad once you do it once. you dont have to wait any set time after getting your sequential call, you can apply for vanity pretty much right away. the application window is 18 days and during that window anyone can throw in for the same call. if theres more than one applicant they do go by license class first — so an Extra would beat a General for the same call — and then if its still tied i believe it comes down to when they filed. after the window closes it usually processes within a day or two. the strategy most people use is to look for calls that have been recently released, like from silent keys or people who let their license lapse. there are sites that track available calls and show you when they become available. AE7Q dot com is probably the one most people use, its got a ton of useful lookup tools. 1x2 and 2x1 format calls in your district are usually the most sought after so expect competition for those. 2x3 calls in less popular districts are often available with zero competition if you just want something cleaner than what you have.