David Parker

honestly the technician exam is pretty approachable once you just sit down and start going through the material. hamstudy.org is genuinely what most people use and its good, just grind the practice exams until youre consistently hitting like 85 percent or better and you should be fine on test day. the actual pool is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass so theres a little room for error. some of the electrical theory questions can be a little tricky if you have zero background in it but even then its mostly memorization for the tech exam, you dont have to deeply understand why an ohm is an ohm. the regulations and operating procedures stuff is usually easier to pick up because a lot of it is just common sense once you know the context. after you pass the FCC posts your license to their database usually within a few days, sometimes it shows up the next day, sometimes takes a week. once your callsign appears in the ULS database youre legal to operate even before the physical license shows up. your neighbor can probably walk you through finding a local club that does testing sessions, that parts honestly the most confusing bit for new people, just finding where to actually sit the exam.

Log4OM for contesting is fine for smaller stuff honestly, ive done some state qso parties and vhf contests with it and didnt have any problems. probably not where i'd want to be in cqww running 200 qsos an hour but for a casual effort it works. the udp bridge with wsjt-x is pretty seamless once you get the port set right, just make sure both programs agree on which port theyre talking to or youll sit there wondering why nothings logging for twenty minutes like i did

im in the same boat actually, been trying to learn for like two months now. what helped me besides the LCWO site was listening to the W1AW code practice transmissions, they broadcast on shortwave at different speeds and reading along with the published text. its old fashioned but something about hearing real radio signals instead of computer beeps makes it feel more real i guess, keeps me more motivated anyway

took me about a month of casual studying, maybe less. the Technician exam felt harder to me at the time because everything was new, General you already know some of the basics so it clicks faster than you think it will. the propagation questions tripped me up a little but after reading about how skywave and the ionosphere works it made more sense. just do practice tests until youre consistently passing and youre probably ready.

This happened to my club's TS-590SG. We found a loose connection in the fuse holder that only showed up under high current draw. Check for wire sizing using the ABYC 3% Table and look for corroded fittings - clean and replace as indicated, then retest. Fixed it completely after replacing the fuse holder with a proper marine-grade one.

honestly the General exam is not as bad as it looks when you first open the question pool. i went from Tech to General in maybe 3 weeks of casual studying, maybe 30-45 minutes a night with HamStudy.org. that site is pretty much all you need, it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those. the electrical theory stuff like the impedance questions and the resonance formulas look scary but theres really only so many ways they can ask it and once you see the pattern its fine. the band plan stuff does start to make more sense once you get even a basic feel for propagation, like why 40m is good at night and 10m can be dead for years and then suddenly open up and you're talking to australia on 5 watts. but for the exam honestly just memorize the phone and CW segments, the question pool repeats itself a lot on that. the propagation questions are actually kind of interesting once you get into it, stuff about the ionosphere and skip distance. i found myself actually wanting to learn that part rather than just cramming it.

Been reminiscing about the great special event stations from the 90s - remember W5FDR during FDR's centennial, or the amazing Marconi anniversary stations? What special events are you guys working these days? I see some commemorative callsigns pop up but nothing seems to generate the excitement like the old days. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places, but the ARRL special events page doesn't seem as active. Are the digital modes stealing thunder from traditional special events?Any upcoming anniversaries worth planning for?

the KX2 is such a nice little rig for portable ops, good choice. i take mine out for SOTA activations and its been rock solid. one thing i'll say about the whole building vs buying thing — i built a pixie kit just to say i did it and while the radio itself is kind of a toy it really did teach me a lot and cost almost nothing. now i kinda understand what's actually happening inside the box which makes the KX2 make more sense to me too if that makes sense.

so this has been driving me absolutely nuts for about three weeks now. my 7300 started doing this thing where it'll just drop to zero power output mid-over, like not gradually, just suddenly nothing. SWR meter on the radio still shows movement so it thinks its transmitting but the wattmeter on the coax side reads flat zero. happens on every band, doesn't matter if im doing 100w or dialing back to 25w. first thing i did was swap coax, swap antennas, tried into a dummy load. same thing. so its definitely the radio. pulled the covers and visually everything looks fine, no obviously burnt components, no smell. been poking around the PA board and the low pass filter section but honestly i dont see anything obviously wrong and i dont have a good enough scope to really dig into the RF path properly. before i send it off to icom i wanted to see if anyone's run into this specific symptom. the random part is what gets me — it can go 45 minutes without any issue then just die for a few seconds and come back. sometimes it stays dead until i cycle power. ALC looks normal right up until it cuts out. anyone seen this?

honestly it depends how you approach it. i did the pure memorization route back when i upgraded and passed fine but looking back i kind of wish id actually sat down with the theory because some of the stuff on impedance matching and transmission lines, once you actually get it, it clicks into everything else you do on HF. like understanding why your tuner is doing what its doing or why a certain feedline length matters at a given frequency. that stuff is genuinely useful day to day. the extra segments being less crowded is real btw, not just a myth. 80m especially below 3600 or so is noticeably different during a big contest weekend. whether thats worth the study time is up to you but if your already doing HF regularly youve probably got enough context that a lot of the questions wont come from nowhere. give yourself maybe 6-8 weeks if the math isnt your strongest thing, work through the ham radio prep site or whatever and actually read the explanations not just click through the answers.

i had similar problems with my civic and that same antenna. ended up switching to a lip mount on the trunk and it made a huge difference. the roof mount looked cleaner but never worked right. also what kind of mount are you using? some of the cheaper mag mounts dont have great connection

so i got my technician a few months ago and ive been reading that learning CW is worth it even if its not required anymore. i tried a few youtube videos and some website thing but honestly i cant tell if im doing it right or just memorizing shapes in my head. like when i hear dit dah i think A but then when im actually listening to a real QSO i just hear noise and cant make out anything. is there a specific order i should learn the letters or does it matter. also someone mentioned koch method to me at the club meeting but i dont really understand how it works differently from just drilling the alphabet over and over. any advice appreciated, im not in a hurry just want to actually get somewhere with this eventually

so ive been chasing DX seriously for maybe 3 years now and for the longest time i just could not break pileups to save my life. i mean i was doing everything wrong apparently. calling on top of everyone else, giving my full callsign every single time, not listening enough before jumping in. the usual newbie garbage. what finally clicked for me was during the VP6R dxpedition last year — i spent like the first two days just listening to how they were working the pile. they were running split obviously, like 5 up to 10 or so, and i noticed they were bouncing around a lot in that range. not just sitting on one frequency. so instead of parking on whatever the loudest station was calling on i started trying to predict where the DX was going to go next based on who they were coming back to and the pattern they seemed to be running. also started only sending my callsign once, maybe twice max. not three or four times like i used to. if the DX op cant hear you after two calls adding two more isnt gonna help, the QRM is already too deep. and timing — actually waiting for the DX to fully finish before transmitting. sounds obvious but i was jumping the gun constantly before. ended up working VP6R on 20 and 17. nothing crazy but felt like i finally understood what was happening. anyone else have that kind of lightbulb moment with pileups? curious what techniques people actually swear by because there seems to be a lot of mythology around this stuff

Listen before you transmit to avoid interrupting ongoing conversations, and keep transmissions reasonably short with pauses for others to join. Instead of just asking for a radio check, try "KD8XYZ monitoring" - that's more common on repeaters than calling CQ.

yeah the engine noise on certain rpms is almost always the coax routing, i had the exact same thing with a door jamb setup on my old chevy. once i rerouted it properly and used a ferrite bead near the radio end it was basically gone. that said i still havent drilled my current car so im not one to talk lol

the hum thing is almost certainly a ground loop somewhere, especially if it responds to touching the case. what are you using for an enclosure, metal or plastic? if its plastic thats probably your issue right there, no chassis ground reference for anything. even just running a wire from your circuit common to a metal panel screw can make a huge difference on these sensitive audio stages. on the 386 oscillation, the bypass on pin 7 is good but you also want a snubber on the output, like a 10 ohm resistor in series with a 0.1uf cap from output to ground. that tames the high frequency instability on almost every LM386 circuit ive ever built. also check your layout around pins 1 and 8 if youve got any gain-setting resistor in there, those traces pick up everything if theyre too long.

Yeah I've been there too. Sometimes you gotta restart both programs in the right order - WSJT-X first, then N1MM. Also double check that "accept UDP requests" is enabled in N1MM under the digital interface tab. Pain in the rear when it stops working randomly but usually its something simple

Your not alone, 10m has been pretty much dead here too for the last several days. Solar flux dropped to around 95 yesterday and the A index has been elevated. Should start picking up again once we get some solar activity but who knows when that will be. Try listening around 28.300 for the beacons, if you can hear those your antenna is probably fine

so ive been trying to get winlink working for a while now and i think i finally understand most of it but the RMS gateway part is still kind of fuzzy to me. like i get that you need a gateway station nearby to relay your messages out to the internet but im not totally clear on whether i should be trying to connect to an RMS express relay vs a telnet session vs whatever else is in that dropdown. ive been running vara HF on my IC-7300 and i can see a few gateways in my area when i do the channel selector thing but half the time it just times out or gives me a weird error about the connection also not sure if this matters but im running through a SignaLink USB and i had to mess with the audio levels for a while before vara would even decode anything. got it mostly dialed in now i think. the bigger question is whether my messages are actually sitting in a queue somewhere waiting to go out or if they just disappear when a session fails. had a message to my wife i was testing with and it never showed up in her inbox, dunno if it got lost or if it just hasnt gone through yet any help appreciated, been lurking here for a while and you guys seem to know this stuff way better than the youtube videos do

been using RemoteHams for almost a year, came from the hamradiodeluxe remote thing which was a disaster for me. the latency on fixed wireless should be totally fine, ive operated through a Starlink connection at a friend's place and even the jitter wasnt that bad once you set the audio buffer a bit higher than default. there's a slider in the client for it, dont leave it on auto if your link isnt rock solid. honestly my only gripe is when they have server issues the whole thing just dies and theres not always great communication about it. had a contest weekend where i lost the connection for like three hours and couldnt do anything. with a DIY setup at least you can reboot stuff remotely or figure out whats wrong. so there's a tradeoff. but for casual operating and not wanting to babysit the setup all the time its pretty solid.

so im finally gonna make it to a hamvention this year, been saying i would for like 4 years and never went. trying to figure out if its worth driving all the way from ohio to xenia just for the flea market portion or if you really gotta do the whole thing. last hamfest i went to was a local club swap meet and honestly i scored a pretty clean kenwood ts-430s for like 60 bucks so my expectations are maybe unrealistic now lol. anyone been recently and have tips, like is it worth getting there friday or can you skip to saturday and still find decent stuff in the flea market before its all picked over