Carlos Martinez

yeah 40 has been weird all week honestly. i had one good opening tuesday night down into florida and then nothing since. tried calling cq for like 20 minutes last night and got zero response which is demoralizing lol. 80m has been better for me lately at least after like 9pm local, lot of the usual guys are on around 3.905 area if you havent checked there yet

Oh man I just got my tech license like two months ago and didnt realize I could actually use 10m for voice. Just looked it up and yeah we get a slice of it. Gonna have to try this, I only have a little handheld right now but my elmer said he'd help me put up a simple dipole in the backyard. This is actually really exciting to hear about, gives me motivation to actually build something instead of just hitting the local repeater all the time.

oh man you'll do fine, everyone was new at some point. just have your script written down beforehand and dont worry about being perfect. the biggest thing is keeping track of whos checked in - i use a simple notepad but some folks have fancy computer logging. if its a slow night with only a few checkins thats totally normal, just keep things moving and maybe ask for any comments or questions. been doing net control for our sunday morning net for about 3 years now and still learn something new every time

so ive been running SO2R for a couple years now mostly on the bigger contests like SS and CQWW but lately i've been wondering if the setup overhead is actually worth it for the shorter sprints. like the NA Sprint specifically. the rate swings are so violent in that contest that by the time i've got the second radio tuned up and locked in on a run freq i feel like i already missed 3 or 4 QSOs on the first radio. my current setup is a K3 and an IC-7610 going into a DX Engineering NCC-2 and a bandpass filter stack from 4O3A. interlock is handled through a microHAM SO2R box. it all works fine, the interlock is solid, no RFI issues i can hear anyway. but the cognitive load during a sprint just feels different than a 48 hour contest where you have time to settle into a rhythm. anyone who actually runs SO2R in sprints have any tips or is this one of those situations where the juice isnt worth the squeeze and i should just focus on rate on radio 1 and use radio 2 for band checks only

Had the exact same problem with my first HT! The tone is definitely your issue - if you're not hitting a repeater when you think you should be, first check to see that you're transmitting the correct CTCSS tone. Don't feel dumb, we've all been there.

congrats on the first contact, that Pixie moment is something you dont forget. i remember mine, it was years ago and i was convinced the thing was broken because it seemed too simple to actually work. for portable ops my biggest advice is antenna, antenna, antenna. at QRP levels a bad antenna will kill you but a good one and suddenly 5 watts feels like a lot more. i use an end fed half wave with a small 9:1 unun and a lightweight tuner, fits in a sandwich bag basically. for camping a 40m EFHW strung up between trees with a bit of height gets you surprisingly far especially in the evenings when 40 opens up. also if you havent tried WSPR yet, throw your signal up on there before a camping trip to see whats actually getting out from your location. gives you a real picture of whats happening with just a few hundred milliwatts. its kind of addictive actually.

so we've got a county-level ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and i've been tasked with putting together the primary field communications station. ive done portable ops before but nothing this formal where people are actually counting on the gear to work reliably for like 8-10 hours straight. my current plan is running my IC-7300 off a Honda eu2200i with a 50ft run of extension cord to keep the generator noise away from the antenna area. been testing this at home and the RFI from the generator is manageable on HF as long as its at least 30ft away, though i still get some hash on 40m if the loading is light. anyone dealt with this — is it a grounding thing or just the nature of these inverter gennies? for antennas i'm thinking either my buddipole or just throwing up an EFHW with a 9:1 unun against a few radials. the site is a county park with decent tree cover so i should be able to get the wire up reasonably high. the buddipole is faster to deploy but the EFHW tends to just work better once its up, at least in my experience. also debating whether to bring the LiFePO4 battery as a backup or primary and run the generator as backup. battery is a 100ah bioenno and theoretically i could run the radio at 50-60% power for most of the day without touching the generator at all. but if something goes wrong with the battery mid-exercise that's a problem. what would you guys do for the power setup?

the mix thing you described is actually pretty common, people will say their call once quick and then if the other station comes back with a - or says say again they'll go through it phonetically. on CW its different obviously but on phone that workflow makes sense to me. saves time when conditions are good one thing i noticed is on some of the more formal nets they actually want you to always use phonetics, like every single time, even if the band is crystal clear. i did a traffic net for a while and they were pretty strict about it. but casual ragchewing on 40 at night nobody really cares that much

I had the exact same problem with my MK2R+ setup last year. The SO2R controller started randomly switching split headphones back to combined, then would not switch back until the transmitting radio stopped. Very frustrating when about to copy a serial number. In my case it turned out to be RFI from the AL-1500 getting into the control lines. Adding ferrite cores on all the audio cables between the controller and radios solved it completely.

same boat here, tiny lot in a suburb. what i ended up doing was just putting the dipole as high as i could get it and accepting the limitations. tried a vertical for a while and the local noise floor was way worse on it, all the switching supplies and junk in the neighborhood just killed me. dipoles are a bit more directional so you can at least null some of that stuff out depending on orientation. not saying the vertical wont work for you but worth factoring in if you're in a noisy neighborhood

im in basically the same boat as you lol, been at it for about 3 months now. i use an app called Morse Mania on my phone and its pretty decent for beginner stuff. what helped me click was watching some youtube videos by a guy who just talks about how to actually hear the rhythm of letters instead of counting the beeps. once i stopped trying to count i started getting it a little faster. still pretty slow though, maybe 8-10 wpm on a good day. the on-air practice stuff is way harder than the apps but theres some slow code nets out there if you search around

Had both at the same time for a few months and yeah the RSPdx wins pretty handily on HF, its not even close to be honest. The 8-bit ADC on the hackrf sounds fine in theory until you have a 50kw broadcast station two MHz away and suddenly your whole band is unusable. The RSPdx handles that a lot better, not perfectly but way better. The HDR mode below 2 MHz is actually useful too if you ever want to do NDB hunting or mediumwave DX. That said the HackRF is more fun to tinker with and if you want to do any transmit experiments later or play with stuff like portapack firmware it has a whole ecosystem. For pure receive on HF though the SDRplay is the better tool. SDRuno is a bit clunky but SDRplay also works fine with SDR# and HDSDR. If you're doing WSPR you'll probably end up in WSJT-X piping audio from whatever receiver software anyway so the frontend matters more than the software honestly.

totally normal to be confused by this, it took me a while to sort it all out too. so the short version is that LoTW is basically the gold standard if you're going for ARRL awards like DXCC — those confirmations have to be LoTW or a physical card, eQSL doesn't count for DXCC credit. that said eQSL is still used by a ton of people especially in Europe and it has its own award system that some folks really enjoy. for the bureau — yeah you'll want to check if your national society handles incoming QSLs. in the US the ARRL runs the incoming bureau for most calls and it's included with membership i think, outgoing you pay by the pound basically. it can take forever though, sometimes a year or more for cards to come through. i've got a stack sitting somewhere from 2021 i still haven't fully sorted through lol. honestly just keep doing what you're doing with LoTW and maybe sign up for eQSL too since it's free and some stations only use that. and when someone sends you a paper card just send one back the same way, you can order basic cards pretty cheap from a few printers, VistaPrint or one of the ham-specific ones like KB0TT's place or similar. don't stress too much about it

okay so i just passed my technician exam last week and everyone keeps telling me to get a baofeng to start out and then other people are like no dont waste your time get something decent. im just totally lost. i want to use it mainly for local repeaters and maybe some APRS stuff down the road but i dont even really know what i need to look for. like what does dual band actually get me that i cant do with a single band. and is the difference between a $30 radio and a $200 radio actually that noticeable or is it just brand loyalty stuff. i have about $150 to spend maybe a little more if its worth it. any advice from people who have actually used these things would be really appreciated, sorry if this is a dumb question

so i've had this 706mkiig for years and its been rock solid until lately. started acting up about a week ago. works fine on 2m but when i switch to hf ssb mode it keys up (can hear the fan change) but power meter shows nothing. fm on hf works fine though. already cranked the mic gain way up and that helps but seems like something else is going on. anyone else seen this before? really dont want to ship this thing off to get fixed if its something dumb im missing

honestly i just keep DXwatch open and dont bother with much else most of the time. the QRZ spot page is nice for a quick lookup but as a primary cluster tool its a bit slow for my taste. if your into DXCC chasing the HamAlert app is worth looking at too, you can set it up to only ping you when a specific entity gets spotted that you still need, which is way smarter than trying to monitor everything

"Lima" should not be confused with Lee-mah (incorrect) but pronounced as "Lee-ma" (correct). Make sure you pronounce the words slowly and clearly. Many letters in the phonetic alphabet can sound similar, like "Mike" (M) and "November" (N), or "Tango" (T) and "Sierra" (S).

ive had the same thing happen and honestly i just chalked it up to that particular guy having a bad radio or something lol. like maybe he genuinely cant hear the other station. but yeah net control should probably say something, even just a quick "please wait for acknowledgement" keeps things running smooth. some nets i check into are super organized and others feel like a free-for-all. just depends on whos running it i guess

the ink smearing on the forms got me, we did the exact same thing at our drill two years ago. now we use cardstock and keep everything in zip lock bags in the go kits, cheap fix but it works. honestly your debrief sounds like it went better than some ive seen where people get defensive and nothing ever gets written down so the same mistakes happen again next time.

i was in the same boat when i started lol. honestly i just kept a notepad next to my radio for the first few months and wrote down anything i didnt recognize and looked it up later. the ARRL website has a decent list and theres a few pocket reference cards you can print out. i still dont know all of them and ive been licensed like two years now, but the common ones you pick up pretty fast just from being on the air. QRZ.com also has a glossary i think if you want to look stuff up quick.

so i finally picked up a used FT-7900R to replace the old 2300H that died on me last spring. got it mounted under the dash on the passenger side which feels pretty solid, but im running into the same headache i always do with coax routing. right now i just ran it through the door jamb rubber seal which i know isnt ideal but it was getting dark and i wanted to get on the air. the antenna is a NMO mount on the roof center, so the coax has to come down the A pillar somewhere. has anyone run it inside the headliner on a full size truck? i have a 2018 F150 and im a little nervous about pulling that headliner down, seems like a lot of clips that like to break. or is the door jamb actually fine long term if i'm careful about it? the coax is LMR-240 so its not super stiff but not floppy either. also curious if anyone has had issues with the 7900 picking up noise from the alternator on these newer trucks. read some horror stories about the F150's electrical system being a nightmare for RF.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and finally feel like im getting comfortable enough on HF to actually try chasing some DX instead of just working the local nets. somebody at my club mentioned DXCC and i went down a rabbit hole on the ARRL website for like two hours and now im more confused than when i started lol basically my question is — does every QSO count toward DXCC or is it only certain ones? like i worked a station in the Canary Islands last week on 20m and i was pretty stoked about that, logged it and everything. does that count as an entity? and what about states, is WAS completely separate from DXCC or do they overlap somehow. also heard someone mention WAZ and i dont even know where to start with that one i know i probably sound like a total newbie (because i am) but any help is appreciated, the ARRL page kind of assumes you already know what youre talking about

There's no rule that says you have to use phonetics every time, it's really just a clarity thing. If the band is quiet and conditions are good, saying your callsign straight is totally fine. Where phonetics really matter is when there's QRM, weak signal, or you're working someone who might not have English as their first language — that's when NATO phonetics earn their keep because both parties already know the system. As for non-standard phonetics, yeah people do it, especially on local repeaters where everyone knows each other and it's more casual. But if you're doing any kind of formal traffic net or working DX, stick to NATO. The whole point is that the words were chosen because they're distinct even through heavy distortion. "America" and "Alpha" both start with A but Alpha is less likely to get confused with something else in a pile-up. Honestly just default to NATO and you'll never go wrong, and eventually it just comes out automatically without even thinking about it.

yeah the ALC behavior outside the ham bands is pretty normal on that radio, its not really calibrated for those freqs so it kind of does its best. as long as your power output looks reasonable on a wattmeter and youre not seeing reflected power go nuts i wouldnt stress it too much. i did the same mod on mine probably four years ago and still works fine for MARS nets. the 857D is a pretty solid little radio for modifications honestly, the community has been poking at them for years so theres good info out there if you dig around on eham or the yahoo groups archive before those got nuked.

yeah what he said. also dont forget JS8 takes up more bandwidth and the transmit cycles are longer so its not as efficient for contest type operation. but man when you can have a 20 minute conversation with someone running 5w to a random wire antenna its pretty amazing. try it out - you can run both programs just not at the same time obviously