Emily Wilson37

for moving resonance down from 7.080 to 7.050 you're looking at maybe 2 to 3 inches per leg, not more than that. the formula is a starting point and real-world stuff like height above ground and wire insulation always shifts things a bit. i'd add 2 inches each side, remeasure, repeat. way easier to trim than to splice back in. on the angle question, yeah flatter is generally better for radiation angle but at 45 degrees you're not completely killing yourself either. you'll lose a little gain compared to a flat dipole but honestly for 40m it still works. the bigger thing is getting the apex as high as you can, which it sounds like you already thought about. 35 feet is decent for 40.

yeah i caught that opening too, was running the KX2 portable from my backyard and managed to snag a German station on like 5 watts which made my day. 10m when its actually open is just something else, nothing really compares to it for that kind of skip. i remember cycle 23 being nuts for it and it feels like were slowly getting back toward something decent again, fingers crossed. on the Icom thing, i saw a blurry photo on one of the Facebook groups but couldnt make out much. someone in the comments was saying it might have remote head capability built in which would be interesting for mobile use, but who knows how reliable that info is. ill wait for a proper announcement before getting too excited, ive been burned before by the rumor mill on this stuff.

yeah the gateway thing tripped me up too when i first started. basically those RMS gateways are just other hams running the RMS Relay software on their end — Winlink the organization provides the CMS servers on the internet side but the RF access points are all volunteer operated. so if a gateway shows in the list but doesnt respond it could easily just be offline or the op is having issues with their setup. the list doesnt always reflect real time status super accurately. for your connection problems on VARA HF — what mode are you using, VARA or Winmor? VARA is way better in my experience but you need to make sure your audio levels are dialed in or you'll just get garbage. the IC-7300 has that built in USB audio which is nice but you still need to tweak the input level in VARA's settings so youre not overdriving it. too hot and the modulation goes to hell and nobody can decode you. id check the VARA FM vs HF thing too make sure youre running the right one for HF. also some of those gateways are VHF/UHF packet only and wont respond to HF modes obviously. double check the mode column in the RMS list before assuming something is broken.

had something weirdly similar on my 7610 last year, ended up being the TX monitor was misleading me and the audio was actually fine on the air lol. not saying thats your problem but worth having someone do a real recording of your signal before you go too deep into diagnosing it. kinda embarrassing how long i chased my own tail on that one. anyway if it IS a real issue the filter setting thing the other guy mentioned is the first place i'd look too

so im just spinning the dial on 40m, nothing going on really, picked up a couple guys chatting about fishing near 7.250 and listened for like 20 minutes. dont know why but i find that more relaxing than actually making contacts sometimes. been licensed like 6 years and i still get this way where i just want to listen and not transmit. anyone else do this or am i just weird about it

welcome to the addiction haha. i remember my first contest, i think it was actually ARRL Sweepstakes not CQ WW but same idea. i was so nervous to even call CQ that i spent the first hour just searching and pouncing on other peoples CQs which is totally fine by the way, thats what most new contesters do. you dont have to run a frequency if it feels too intimidating at first. Field Day is actually maybe a better starting point if you havent done that yet, its more of a community event and usually your club sets up somewhere and you can just show up and get on the radio with people who know what theyre doing. CQ WW is more serious but still very approachable. just make sure your logging software is set up before the contest starts, N1MM is free and most people use it. dont try to paper log a major contest trust me on that one

so ive been noticing 20m has been doing some strange things the past couple weeks. some days its absolutely dead in the afternoon when it usually opens up nicely to europe from here in the midwest, then other days its just wall to wall signals and i'm working stations i normally cant touch. checked the solar flux and it was sitting around 145-150 which honestly isnt bad at all, but the K index keeps jumping around and i think thats messing things up more than anything. had a really nice opening to japan on 15m last tuesday out of nowhere, like i wasnt even expecting it and just happened to be tuned up and heard JA stations coming in strong, worked 4 of them in about 20 minutes then it just kind of faded. is this normal for where we are in the solar cycle? feels like conditions are getting better overall but really inconsistent. anyone else seeing this kind of thing or is something wrong with my setup that im not accounting for

I upgraded to Extra last spring and honestly the exam was easier than I expected after using HamStudy for a few weeks. the harder theory questions like the stuff on op-amp circuits and oscillator design I just made sure I understood the basic concept behind each one rather than brute forcing the answer. took me maybe 6 weeks of casual studying. the band privileges were the main reason I did it too. that little sliver on 75 meters where a lot of the nets I wanted to join were operating, I could hear them fine as a General but couldnt check in. kind of annoying. solved that problem immediately after passing so yeah worth it for that alone if nothing else

ALC barely moving when you're speaking is actually a big clue yeah. on the 857 if the ALC is low it usually means the driver isn't being told to push hard enough, or the driver itself is struggling. first thing i'd do is check your DC supply voltage under load — key up on 40m into the dummy load and watch what the supply voltage does. if its sagging below like 13.5 you might just be starving it and everything else is fine. these rigs are surprisingly sensitive to voltage drop especially if you're running off a switcher that's getting old. if voltage holds up fine then yeah you're probably looking at driver transistors. the Q1011 area on the PA board is where i'd start looking but honestly without a scope you're kind of guessing. there's a service manual floating around online that has the test point voltages, worth pulling that up before you touch anything inside.

so I've been interested in ham radio for a while now mostly because my neighbor does it and it seems pretty cool. I finally decided to just go for it and get my technician license but honestly the whole thing is kind of overwhelming. I looked up the question pool online and there's like 400 something questions and I dont even know what half the words mean. is there a good way to study for this or do I just memorize everything? someone at work said theres apps for it but I dont know which ones are actually worth using. also how hard is the actual exam, like should I be worried about it

yeah what he said about the acks is spot on. also just double check your MYCALL is set correctly on the radio and not still on the default or something goofy, ive seen that trip people up before. and WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine for mobile, some people actually trim it back to just WIDE1-1 in denser areas to reduce congestion but that shouldnt be why messages fail entirely. if youre near a fill-in digi it should still get out.

On my 2017 F-150 I went through the firewall on the driver's side, there's a factory grommet that already has some wires going through it but there's usually enough room to poke an RG-8X or LMR-240 through if you use a smooth piece of wire to guide it. I used a coat hanger to fish it through and it wasn't too bad, maybe 20 minutes of fiddling around. The tricky part is finding it from the engine bay side — it's kind of up and to the left near where the brake booster is, hard to describe but once you see it it's obvious. Also if you're going permanent eventually I'd ditch the mag mount and look at a lip mount for the roof or drilling for a NMO. The mag mount will slide around on the highway and scratch up your paint over time. But you probably already know that, just saying for when you're ready.

the antenna situation always bites people. you pack the radio, you pack the coax, and then you show up somewhere and realize your only antenna is a mag mount that needs a metal roof and youre in a parking lot or a field somewhere. i keep a cheap roll-up jpole and a telescoping whip in mine just for that reason, takes up almost no space. also and this sounds dumb but bring snacks and a water bottle. ive been at activations where we sat there for 6 hours with nothing because everyone assumed someone else handled food. not exactly radio gear but its part of being operational. oh and a phone charger, external battery bank, that kind of thing. your radio might be all set but your phone dies and now you cant look anything up or coordinate with the served agency folks.

not done it myself but a guy in our club built something like this with a raspberry pi instead of arduino, mainly because he wanted a web interface so he could switch antennas from his phone while sitting in the shack. overkill maybe but it was pretty slick. he used GPIO pins through a relay board from amazon, the whole thing cost him like 20 bucks in parts. i think the pi approach makes more sense if you want logging or any kind of network integration, arduino if you just want something dumb and reliable that turns on when power comes up and does its thing. both are fine really depends what you want out of it

nice work getting out there. i did my first one earlier this year and had similar issues with the spotting thing, felt like i was just calling CQ into the void for a while before someone spotted me and then suddenly it was busy. the tablet issue in cold weather is real too, i now bring a little paper log as backup every single time just out of habit. better safe than having to dispute your own activation lol

honestly i bounce between all of them depending on what im trying to do. FT8 when i just want to work something and log it, JS8Call when i actually feel like talking to a human being, and i still fire up RTTY occasionally during contests because thats just fun in a masochistic kind of way. PSK31 isnt totally dead either, there's still some activity on 20m around 14.070 most afternoons if the band cooperates. its just much thinner than it used to be. i miss the early 2000s PSK31 scene honestly, felt like everyone and their dog was running it for a while there.

WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine for most situations, dont overthink the path. if your packets are being digipeated locally then the RF side is working, almost certainly the igate. i had the exact same thing happen to me last spring — my local igate guy upgraded his router and forgot to port forward again, took like three weeks for anyone to notice lol. the pi igate idea is good. i'd say go tx-capable if your location is as good as you say, could be useful for messaging during events or whatever. just make sure you're compliant with the passcode stuff for transmit igates, its not hard just gotta register.

the 602 is notorious for its poor dynamic range, like its only got something like 15dB of IP3 which is just not great when youre sitting near strong BC stations. adding a preamp would definitely make things worse in that situation. what you probably want is actually an attenuator in front of the thing, not more gain — counterintuitive but it helps with the overload. for the filter, if your core count and winding are off by even a turn or two you can shift the passband enough that the BC stations arent getting attenuated as much as they should be. worth measuring with whatever you have, even a basic antenna analyzer across the filter input/output can tell you where the center actually landed. also check if your filter is properly terminated — those doubly-tuned designs need to see the right source and load impedance or they fall apart. the VFO birdie is almost certainly a shielding issue. copper tape works but the seams need to be soldered, just sticking it wont do much for RF. i had the same problem on a similar build and wrapping the VFO in its own little tin can made a huge difference.

so our ARES group has a county-wide exercise coming up and im the one who got volunteered to handle the comms station setup this year. last time we just ran off a deep cycle battery and it died about 4 hours in which was embarassing. we were running an IC-7300 plus a couple HTs on charge and a laptop, so yeah that adds up fast. anyway im trying to figure out whether to just get a proper inverter generator this time or go with a bigger battery bank. a guy in our group has a honda eu2200i he said we can borrow and that would obviously solve the runtime problem but then you've got noise, fuel, the whole thing. i've been looking at some of the larger lifepo4 options, something in the 100ah range, and wondering if that's enough headroom for a full 8 hour deployment. also on the antenna side we've been using a homebrew NVIS dipole cut for 40m which works okay locally but the county wanted us to demonstrate some 80m capability this time too. thinking about just making it a fan dipole or maybe an OCF. anybody run an OCF portable, like actually portable not just in a fixed location? curious how the feedline situation works when you're in a field.

ok so I just got my general and I'm trying to figure out 40 meters but honestly the band plan stuff is really confusing me. like I understand there's a difference between what the FCC says I can do and what the band plan says but I dont really get which one I have to follow vs which one is just a suggestion? my elmer told me to stay away from the band edges but didnt really explain why other than saying 'trust me on this one' also I keep hearing people say things like 7.125 to 7.175 is phone for general class but then I tune around and hear people way outside of that, are they doing something wrong or am I reading the chart wrong? I've been just sitting there listening and not transmitting because im scared of stepping on someone or being out of band. any help appreciated

ha i remember doing the exact same thing with the sticky note. mine fell off the desk right when i keyed up for the first time and i completely blanked. net control just waited for me, didnt make a big deal of it. you'll get it. welcome to the hobby

congrats on the first one, 65 QSOs is a solid activation especially on your first go. for the logging you'll want to submit your ADIF directly to the WWFF logbook, theres a portal on the main wwff.net site or you can use Fast Log Entry if you like that workflow. it doesnt pull from SOTA or anything like that, completely separate. just make sure your ADIF has the wwff-ref field populated for each QSO otherwise the system will complain. on the announcing the reference thing, yeah the convention is to say it pretty regularly, like every few QSOs or whenever you ID. something like "this is W1XYZ portable KFF-1234" and hunters really appreciate it because some of them are chasing a lot of references and need to confirm they got the right one. you'll get a feel for the rhythm of it after a few activations. sounds like you did great for a first time though, those wildlife refuges are usually good references to activate if theyre not already done a bunch of times.

General Class licensees can operate digital modes and SSB phone on HF bands below 28 MHz, including 20 meters which is excellent for DX work. Generals can operate all digital modes on HF, including FT8 - huge difference from Tech privileges!

so i passed my general last month and ive been using my sequential call which is fine but its kind of a mouthful and honestly a little embarrassing to send in CW haha. a friend told me i can apply for a vanity call through the FCC but i looked at the ULS system and im honestly lost. like is there an actual window you wait for or do you just apply and hope for the best? i tried reading through the ARRL page on it but it kept referencing stuff about the old filing windows which i think dont exist anymore? or do they. i cant tell if the info is outdated. from what i can piece together it seems like you just submit an application and if nobody else applied for the same call during some period then you get it, but if multiple people apply for the same one then theres a tiebreaker based on some preference order — like a widow/widower of a former holder gets priority, then immediate family, then the previous licensee themselves if they let it lapse, and then general applicants are kind of at the bottom of the pile. is that right? and how do you even find out which calls are available? i found some third party sites that track this stuff but i dunno how current they are. any of you been through this recently

haha that first contact feeling never really goes away, at least not completely. i remember mine was on 2m too, back in like 2011, and i was so nervous i basically read off a script i had written out beforehand. the other guy definitely knew but he was cool about it. welcome to the hobby man, it gets way easier after the first few times you key up