David Davis44

so ive been trying to work some DX on 17 and 20m this week and the conditions have just been completely unpredictable. like monday afternoon 20m was wide open, i was hearing stations from japan and australia like they were next door, logged a bunch of JA's without even trying that hard. then tuesday morning i go to check the band and its completely dead. like nothing. not even noise really. i've been watching the solar flux index on dxmaps and it was sitting around 145-150 which i thought was supposed to be pretty decent? but then the K index jumped up to 4 or 5 and i think that killed everything. i'm still learning how to read all this stuff so maybe im misunderstanding what the numbers actually mean in practice. does a high solar flux not matter as much when the K index spikes like that? feels like two steps forward one step back with this hobby sometimes

so ive been working on this double sideband transmitter for 40m on and off for like three months now, mostly following the W7ZOI designs from Experimental Methods but tweaking a few things based on what i had in the junk box. got it actually putting out a signal last weekend and made a couple contacts which was pretty wild honestly. my balanced modulator is a diode ring using 1N4148s, nothing fancy, and the carrier null is sitting around 40dB down which i think is decent for what it is. the final is a single IRF510 running class E, getting somewhere between 3 and 4 watts out depending on the supply voltage i feed it. my question is about the low pass filter after the final. i just threw in a 7-element chebyshev i calculated with one of those online tools and it seems to be working but ive never actually verified the harmonic suppression with anything better than my cheapo rtlsdr. does anyone have experience eyeballing whether a lpf design is trustworthy or do i really need to throw it on a real spectrum analyzer before i start using it on the air regularly. i dont want to be that guy lighting up harmonics all over the place

so ive been trying to learn CW for about 4 months now and i can copy at around 12-13 wpm when im relaxed and listening to W1AW or just random QSOs on 40m but my sending is just... embarrassing. i got a cheap Taiwanese iambic paddle off ebay and i think the tension is set way too light but i cant figure out if thats the problem or if its just me being inconsistent with squeezing. my keyer is set to iambic mode B and honestly i dont even fully understand the difference between mode A and mode B yet. like when i try to squeeze both paddles for the intersymbol stuff i just get a jumbled mess. been practicing with the keyer hooked up to a sidetone amp so i can hear myself without actually transmitting, which is good because nobody wants to hear what im putting out right now lol. should i just go back to a straight key for a while? some people online say that builds better habits but then other people say just stick with the paddle. getting conflicting advice everywhere i look.

yep thats alternator whine, classic. the RPM thing is the dead giveaway. first thing i'd try before anything else is running a dedicated ground wire all the way back to the battery negative instead of using the chassis. i know it sounds like overkill but newer trucks especially toyotas have all kinds of weird ground loops because of the electronics everywhere. the chassis ground on those is fine for a lot of things but for radio it can pick up noise from the ABS module, the ECU, all kinds of stuff. also double check where your power wire runs — if it's anywhere near the factory wiring harness for any significant length that can also introduce noise. i had a similar deal in my tundra a few years back and just rerouting the power cable solved about 80% of it, then a small choke on the audio line got the rest. mag mount probably isnt helping either since the ground plane isnt great but that shouldnt cause the whine specifically.

im pretty new too but i started listening to nets on my scanner before i even got my license just to figure out how they worked and that helped a lot. maybe find a recording of the net online if they archive it, some clubs do that. or just listen a few more times before checking in again so you get a feel for the rhythm of that specific net because they can vary quite a bit.

one thing i'll add is that 7.175 to 7.225 tends to get pretty congested with SSB, lot of rag chewing and some nets in there. if youre just starting out and want to make some contacts without stepping on stuff, somewhere in the middle of your allocation is usually fine. i had the same confusion when i upgraded and spent like a week just listening before i ever keyed up, that helped a lot more than reading about it tbh

yeah the mode A vs B thing confused me too when i started. im still pretty new to CW myself but one thing that really helped me was slowing way down on a straight key first just to get the rhythm of each character in my head before going back to the paddle. probably not what everyone says to do but it worked for me. also there are some youtube videos from guys doing slow CW demonstrations and just watching how relaxed their hand looks kind of showed me i was gripping the paddle way too hard

yeah 40m at night in the suburbs is just rough, nothing you did wrong. i live in a pretty dense area and my S-meter is basically pegged until like 2am sometimes. i use the bandscope mostly for contests when i need to find a run frequency fast, otherwise i kind of forget its there honestly

so ive been a licensed ham for about 8 months now (general class) and i joined my local ARES group back in the spring mostly because i wanted to do something useful with the hobby instead of just calling CQ into the void. did a couple of the training nets and the SET exercise back in october which was mostly just check-ins and passing some simulated health and welfare traffic, nothing crazy. anyway they just activated us for real to support the county emergency management office during the flooding that's been going on. nothing like a full disaster situation but the EOC wanted some extra comms support and our EC called us up. im set up for this in theory — i have my go-bag with a Yaesu FT-60 and a roll of coax and a mag mount, laptop with Winlink Express, all the stuff they told us to bring to the exercises. but actually doing it for real has me second guessing everything. like what if i forget something or mess up a message or dont understand a net control instruction. anybody else felt like this their first real activation? did it just kind of click once you were actually there or was it a rough learning curve?

yeah i did the mars mod on mine probably three years ago, same deal with the diodes being a little confusing to locate if you dont have the right revision of the manual. the thing i'd caution is just making sure you're documenting exactly what you clipped before reassembly because i had a buddy who did it on an 897 and couldn't remember afterward which ones he'd touched and had to trace the whole board again. on the noise floor question, i messed around with the IF filter mods for a while and honestly the biggest bang for my buck was just putting a decent external preamp on weak signal VHF rather than touching anything internal. the stock preamp in the 857 is fine for HF but for 2m SSB weak signal stuff it's just not great. collins filter swap on SSB is legit though if you do a lot of crowded contest operating, made a real difference in a pileup situation for me.

same thing happened to me lol, spent like an hour one evening wondering why i couldnt find my downlink and it turned out i was tuning the wrong direction the whole time because of the inversion. once that clicked it made way more sense. also make sure gpredict is actually connected and sending tuning commands to your radio, sometimes the CAT link drops and you dont notice and then youre manually tuning a moving target which is basically impossible

yeah the door jamb pinch is almost certainly your problem on UHF. coax is way more sensitive to that kind of thing at 440 than at 146, the wavelength is short enough that even a small kink or compression point can mess with the impedance. i did the same thing on my Tacoma years ago and had almost the exact same symptom, 2m was fine, 70cm was off. what i ended up doing was routing through the actual rubber grommet on the firewall instead and going under the truck instead of through the cab. took an extra hour but SWR on 440 dropped right down. the Tram 1185 is a decent antenna, shouldn't be the issue. if you really dont want to re-route, you could try to very carefully open that door jamb section back up and see if the coax looks pinched or has any weird bends. sometimes you can get away with repositioning it just slightly and the problem goes away.

yeah i had the same confusion when i started. one thing that helped me was just remembering that phonetics exist because letters get garbled, so if you wouldnt have any trouble understanding the letter just say the letter. its not like the phonetic police are gonna come after you. i mostly use full phonetics when im giving my call at the start of a contact or if someone asks me to repeat something. mid-conversation i just say the letters normally most of the time

mode A vs B honestly doesnt matter much when youre learning, dont get too hung up on it. most people find one that clicks with them eventually but at 8-10 wpm its not gonna make a real difference. just leave it on A for now and focus on getting comfortable with the paddle. the hand-brain disconnect thing you mentioned is totally normal and actually a sign youre doing it right — youre trying to send from memory rather than thinking about each dit and dah. that feeling goes away with time. i remember feeling the same way around that speed and then somewhere around 13-14 wpm something just kind of clicked. keep at lcwo, its a solid tool. also dont neglect actual on-air time, even just listening to slow CW nets. there are a few good ones on 40m in the evenings if you poke around.

so ive been running a pretty standard 40m dipole at about 25 feet for the past two years, fed with coax, nothing fancy. works okay for regional stuff but DX has always been kind of hit or miss. a buddy of mine keeps telling me i should put up a vertical instead and says the low angle radiation will make a big difference for working anything more than a few hundred miles out. thing is i dont really have a great spot for a vertical unless i put it near the fence which is probably not ideal and i'd have to lay a bunch of radials under there. not sure if a 4:1 unun and some random length wire would be just as good or if thats a completely different animal. anyone actually done a side by side comparison or switched from one to the other and noticed a real difference on 40? wondering if its worth the hassle of redoing everything.

so im finally doing my first activation tomorrow at a state park about 45 minutes from my house. ive been hunting for a few months now and figured it was time to actually get out there and do one myself. got my KX2 and a 40m end fed that i've been using at home, planning to set it up with a 20 foot painters pole in a tree or something. my main worry is honestly just making enough contacts. i know you need 10 to count as an activation but what if the band is dead or something? i picked a saturday so hopefully there are hunters out there. also do i need to spot myself or will someone spot me from the POTA hunters facebook group or whatever? ive read the rules like three times but still feel like im missing something obvious anyway any advice from people who have done these before would be great, even small stuff. kinda nervous but excited

same boat as you honestly, been at it about 6 months and just cracked 13wpm on a good day. one thing i started doing that helped was the Just Learn Morse Code software set to Farnsworth timing -- basically keeps the character speed high like 20wpm but puts longer gaps between characters so you have time to think without slowing the actual sound of the letters down. supposed to help your brain recognize the characters at full speed even before you can process whole words at that speed. i dont know the science behind it but it does seem to be doing something

honestly same boat here like a year ago. what helped me was just joining a couple of Facebook groups for ham radio in my state, which i know sounds weird but thats where people actually post about nets starting up or going QRT. more current than any website i've found. also if you have a local repeater trustee or know anyone who runs a repeater in your area just ask them directly because a lot of the 2m and 70cm nets are on local repeaters and they'll know every single one within 100 miles probably

so ive been listening on HF for a few weeks now and people throw around all this shorthand constantly and i can only figure out maybe half of it from context. like i get QSL means confirmed or acknowledged but then someone said QRM and QRN and i wasnt sure which was which, one is interference from other stations and one is natural static? and then theres QSY which i think means change frequency but i never know for sure if im right also on top of the Q codes theres all the other abbreviations like 73 and 88 and de and stuff like that. is there like a definitive list somewhere or do people just pick this up over time. i dont want to sound totally clueless when i finally get on air and transmit

same here. hit a guy in New Zealand last Tuesday on 15m of all places, totally random. then last night nothing. ham radio is weird and i love it

so ive been messing around with an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now and honestly its been great for just poking around, listening to ACARS, doing some ADS-B stuff with dump1090, that kind of thing. but im starting to feel the limits of it especially on HF where the direct sampling mod only gets you so far and the noise floor is just kinda rough compared to what people post about on the reddit. so now im trying to decide whether to step up to an SDRplay RSP1A or just go all in on a HackRF One. the price difference isnt huge, RSP1A is what, around $110 and HackRF is like $300-350 for a real one not a clone. but the HackRF does transmit which the RSP1A obviously doesnt. problem is i dont actually NEED to transmit right now, im mostly just trying to get a better receiver for the HF bands and maybe do some decoding with WSJT or JS8Call just to see how the band sounds through an SDR compared to my actual radio. anybody gone through this same decision? i feel like the RSP1A is probably the smarter buy for pure receive but the HackRF is more future proof if i ever want to do anything else. or am i totally off base here and should just look at an Airspy HF+ Discovery instead

honestly most people just memorize the pool and thats fine, theres no shame in it. the test is multiple choice and if you can pass it you pass it. that said if you actually want to understand the transmission line stuff the ARRL Handbook has a decent section on it, and there used to be a free PDF floating around called something like "Reflections" by W2DU that goes real deep on SWR and transmission lines if youre into that rabbit hole. the Smith chart stuff looks scary but once someone explains to you that its basically just a graphical way to do impedance calculations it becomes less intimidating. i watched a few YouTube videos on it before my Extra exam and that helped more than reading about it. i think W7BRS or somebody had a good one but i dont remember exactly. just search smith chart ham radio and youll find something. the filter questions and the op-amp stuff i mostly just memorized if im honest, some of it you'd need an actual EE course to really get into properly.

I ran RemoteHams for probably two years before I switched back to a custom setup. The client is nice but you're kind of locked into their ecosystem which started to bother me after a while. Latency wise it was fine for casual HF, I worked some DX through it without too much trouble, but contesting is rough regardless of what platform you use — the turnaround time on PTT keying alone will drive you crazy in a pileup. The SDR remote part is actually where it shines in my opinion, having a panadapter view at the remote end makes a huge difference for finding activity. Your hybrid idea with SDR on receive and a real rig on TX should work in theory but youll need to handle the timing yourself because the client isnt really designed for split-path audio like that. I messed around with something similar using a SDRplay on the receive side and an IC-7300 on TX, had to write some glue code to keep everything synced. wasnt pretty but it did work.

so our local ARES group finally got around to doing a simulated emergency exercise last saturday and i have to say it was a real eye opener. we've been talking about doing one for like two years and the EC kept pushing it back but we finally got a scenario set up with the county EOC and ran it for about four hours. the scenario was a major flooding event, multiple roads cut off, and we had to establish comms between the EOC, two shelter sites, and a staging area for emergency vehicles. sounded simple enough on paper. it was not simple. biggest thing i noticed right away was that people just assumed someone else had the frequencies and the net control plan sorted. nobody had actually printed out the ICS forms ahead of time. our NCS did a great job staying calm but there was probably a 20 minute period early on where traffic was just a mess, people talking over each other, not identifying properly, sending incomplete messages. one guy kept giving his street address instead of grid coordinates which honestly slowed everything down. we also found out pretty quick that two of our members had HTs that hadnt been charged since the last meeting. and one of the repeaters we were planning to use had some kind of issue that day so we had to scramble to a backup. which was good in a way because it forced us to actually use the backup, which nobody had really tested. anyway im curious if anyone else has run drills like this recently and what kinds of surprises came up for your group. feels like the more we practice the more we realize we dont know.

yeah what he said about knowing your gear is huge. i actually did a drill last year where i timed myself setting up and it was embarassing how long it took me to find stuff i thought i knew where it was. so now i do a kind of quarterly check where i actually pull everything out and make sure batteries are charged, nothing's corroded, and i can get on the air in under 10 minutes. its more of a ritual at this point but it caught a bad SMA connector once that wouldve been a real problem in an actual emergency. for budget options a lot of people have good luck with the Yaesu FT-65 or even a used FT-7900 for a mobile setup. power wise if youre just starting out even a decent AGM battery in a battery box with anderson powerpoles will get you through most local events. dont forget a few ways to charge it -- car adapter, solar panel if you can, whatever. redundancy matters more than fancy gear imo.