Emily Wilson37

so anyway ive been building this direct conversion receiver for 40 meters over the past couple months, been using the ugliest ugly construction youve ever seen, just manhattan pads thrown on a piece of copper clad and soldered together wherever things line up. the VFO is a colpitts running around 7 mhz and it locks up pretty decent, drift isnt terrible after warmup maybe 100-200 hz over 20 minutes which i can live with for SSB.
the problem is the audio coming out of the LM386 stage is kind of buzzy and distorted especially on stronger signals. ive got a bypass cap on pin 7 and the usual stuff on pins 1 and 8 to set gain, but something isnt right. also picking up a fair amount of 60hz hum even running off a 9v battery which is weird. the RF frontend is just a simple bandpass filter and a diode ring mixer which i breadboarded first and it worked great but now that its soldered up the audio is just rough.
anyone dealt with LM386 audio issues in homebrew receivers? wondering if its oscillating or if my layout is just causing problems. i can post some pictures of the board if that would help diagnose

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

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.

so ive been at this for about 3 months now and i feel like im completely stuck. started with the Koch method using the LCWO website and got up to maybe 5-6 wpm copying but every time i try to push it a little faster my brain just kind of freezes up and i lose the whole word. its frustrating because i can sit there and do 5wpm all day long without any real mistakes but the second i bump it to 7 or 8 i fall apart.
i practice probably 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes more on weekends. been listening to the W1AW code practice sessions too which i heard is good. is there something specific im doing wrong or is this just one of those things where you have to grind through it and it eventually clicks? i really want to get to 20wpm someday, feels like a million miles away right now

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and im still confused about when youre supposed to use the NATO phonetics vs just saying the letter normally. like if someone asks me to confirm a letter in my callsign do i always have to say Whiskey or whatever or is it fine to just say the letter W. i hear some people on the air just say letters and other people go full phonetic every single time and i cant figure out if theres a rule or if its just preference. also sometimes i hear people use non-standard ones like some guy said "Washington" instead of "Whiskey" the other day and i wasnt sure if that was wrong or just an old habit. is there an actual requirement or is it more of a courtesy thing