Sarah Wilson93

had almost the exact same thing happen on a buddies 857 a couple years back, also 40m, also just quietly low power. turned out to be one of the driver transistors on the HF low band section — think it was a 2SC2078 or equivalent, dont remember exactly. the thing is they dont always fail hard, sometimes they just degrade and you get this kind of soft low output on certain bands because the drive to the finals is insufficient even though the finals themselves are fine. if you've got a scope you can probe the driver output and compare what you're seeing to the schematic levels. the service manual for the 857D is floating around online, definitely grab that if you dont have it. the block diagram in there makes it a lot clearer which stages are band-switched vs shared. also worth checking all the band-switching relay contacts while you're in there — a dirty or slightly oxidized relay contact on that band could cause this too and that'd be an easier fix than transistors. i wouldnt just throw parts at it before you scope it out a bit, but also these arent super exotic repairs if you're comfortable inside a rig. just be careful around the PA section, there's some caps that hold charge for a bit after power off.

oh man i went through this exact thing like 6 months ago, congrats on the General by the way. one thing i wish someone had told me is to check the AE7Q website before you do anything, it basically lets you look up any callsign and see if its available, when it becomes available, whether its in that 30 day hold period, all of it. saved me a ton of time versus trying to decode the FCC site which is honestly kind of a mess to navigate. my vanity app took like 18 days from submission to showing up in ULS. seemed fast to me but ive heard it can drag out longer sometimes, might depend on how busy they are or something.

totally understand the confusion, i went through the exact same thing when i first got on HF. here's what i actually do after years of messing around with this stuff — i upload everything to LoTW because thats the one that really matters for DXCC and most of the serious ARRL awards. the TQSL software is a bit clunky at first but once you get your certificate loaded it pretty much just runs in the background. eQSL i do upload to as well just because its easy and some DX stations only confirm there, its worth having just for that reason. the quality levels thing on eQSL (authenticated vs non-authenticated) confuses people but basically get yourself verified if you want the confirmations to actually count for their awards. physical cards through the bureau i only do when someone specifically requests one or when i work a really rare entity and want the card for the shack wall. direct cards i still send for special contacts, theres something genuinely nice about getting a physical card in the mailbox. but for everyday contacts? LoTW and maybe eQSL is plenty, dont stress about mailing cards for every QSO.

yeah what he said about radials is true but also — what feedline are you running to the vertical and have you checked for common mode current? i had a vertical that was acting weird and turns out i had RF coming back down the coax shield and the whole feedline was radiating. threw a few snap on ferrites on there and the noise floor dropped and the signal reports got better. probably not your main issue but worth checking before you do a ton of work on radials. for what its worth i have a fan dipole at about 38 feet for 40 and 20 and it works pretty well for domestic, never tried it back to back with a vertical so i cant really give you numbers, just anecdotal.

so i was just doing my usual morning routine, coffee in hand, figured id spin the dial on 10 meters mostly out of habit because honestly that band has been pretty hit or miss for me lately, and holy smokes it was just packed. like wall to wall signals from all over, worked a station in Brazil, then a couple in Europe, then some guy in Japan all within maybe 45 minutes. i havent heard 10m like that in years honestly. also saw some chatter online that the new Icom IC-905 is finally shipping to more dealers if anyone has been waiting on that. the microwave bands stuff looks really interesting but i havent had a chance to dig into the specs much yet. anyone actually have one in hand? curious what the actual receive performance is like on 5.7 gig compared to the older setups people were cobbling together. anyway if you havent checked 10m today maybe give it a shot, even with a mediocre antenna you might be surprised whats out there right now.

yeah that ALC being normal while power is low is the weird part. on most of the Icom stuff i've worked on, if a final transistor is partially failing you can sometimes still get relatively clean output just at reduced level, the ALC doesn't always misbehave until the device is really cooked. the 7300 uses a pair of RD70HVF1 finals if I remember right, might be worth pulling the board and doing a static check on them if you're comfortable with that. also check the bias trimmer — there's a VR on the PA board and if that's drifted it can definitely cause reduced output without throwing obvious symptoms. before you go that deep though, have you tried the internal ATU bypassed and confirmed it's not somehow introducing loss? long shot but worth ruling out.

I got my Technician license about two years ago and then upgraded to General maybe eight months after that. The upgrade was one of those things where I studied for like three weeks straight, convinced myself I was going to fail, and then actually did fine on the test. Classic anxiety spiral for nothing. I've been slowly working toward Extra but honestly life keeps getting in the way and I'm not in a huge rush. Someday. So what do I actually do on the radio? Honestly it's kind of all over the place right now, which I think is pretty normal when you're still figuring out what part of the hobby you love most. For a long time I mostly just listened. Like, I'd sit at my little desk in the spare bedroom, headphones on, spinning the dial on my HF rig and just trying to understand what I was hearing. Who's calling who, what frequencies are being used for what, why some signals sound so much cleaner than others. There's honestly so much to learn just from listening. My setup right now is pretty modest. I have a mid-range HF transceiver — nothing fancy, one of the more popular beginner-to-intermediate rigs that gets recommended constantly on the forums — and for an antenna I'm running a random wire that goes out my window, up to the corner of the garage, and then kind of droops down at a sad angle toward the back fence. My husband helped me put it up and he was very patient about me explaining why we needed to drill another hole in the house. He doesn't get the hobby at all but he's supportive, which is all I really need. The antenna situation is definitely my biggest limitation right now. I've been reading a lot about dipoles and I think my next project is going to be building a simple 40 meter dipole and trying to get it up a bit higher. We have a couple of trees in the backyard that could work as anchor points. I priced out the wire and the center insulator and it's really not that expensive to do, so I don't have a good excuse to keep putting it off. Famous last words, right? One thing that surprised me about getting into ham radio is how much of the community experience happens in person. I joined my local club about a year ago and it's been genuinely one of the better decisions I've made in this hobby. The meetings are monthly and there's always some kind of presentation or show-and-tell. Last month someone brought in a vintage tube rig they'd been restoring and talked through the whole process. I understood maybe 40% of it but it was still really cool to see. The people in the club range from brand new hams like me to folks who've been licensed for 40+ years. Nobody's made me feel dumb for asking questions, which I was honestly a little worried about before I started showing up. On the air, I've been doing a bit of SSB on 40 meters in the evenings and some 2 meter stuff on the local repeater. The repeater has a pretty active net on Sunday mornings that I've checked into a few times. It's a low-pressure way to just get comfortable with talking on the radio, because check-ins are structured and you basically just say your callsign and maybe give a weather report or a quick personal update. Nothing scary. I was way more nervous for my first check-in than I needed to be — my voice was shaking a little and I kept second-guessing whether I was holding the mic button down correctly. Completely unnecessary nervousness in hindsight, but I think that's just how it goes. I've also been dabbling in FT8, which is this digital mode that's become really popular for HF contacts. You run it through your computer with some free software and it handles a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of encoding and decoding the signals. It's kind of a weird mix of completely automated and still requiring you to actually understand what's going on. Some people don't consider it real operating and I get where they're coming from, but for me it's been a great way to see that my station is actually working and making contacts even when band conditions are rough. I made my first contact into Europe on FT8 and literally said "yes!" out loud to an empty room. Small victories. Something I've been thinking about lately is getting more into emergency communications. The club has a group that works with the county on preparedness stuff and I went to one of their informational meetings a few months back. It seems like meaningful work — like the hobby actually connects to something practical and community-oriented. I haven't committed to joining yet because I want to feel a little more confident as an operator first, but it's definitely on my radar. I think what I want to use this blog for is just documenting the journey. Not in a "here are 10 tips for new hams" way because honestly I don't feel qualified to give tips yet. More like, here's what I tried this week, here's what confused me, here's the weird little moment that made me glad I got into this hobby. If someone reads it and relates to it, great. If it's mostly just me talking to myself, that's also okay. One last thing before I wrap up this very rambly first post — if you're reading this and you're also relatively new to ham radio, I just want to say it gets less overwhelming. Or maybe the right thing to say is you get more comfortable with the overwhelming feeling. There's always going to be another mode to try or another antenna design to read about or another piece of gear to consider buying (and then maybe actually buy, no regrets). But that's also kind of what makes it fun. There's no bottom to the rabbit hole and I've made peace with that. Alright. First post done. That wasn't so bad. I'll try to keep these coming more regularly. No promises though — anyone who's met me knows I'm better at starting things than maintaining consistent schedules. We'll see how this goes.

i went vertical because i had the same space problem and dont regret it but man the ground radials were a whole weekend project. ended up with 24 radials just sort of scattered around the yard under the grass, wife was not thrilled during the installation phase lol. does it work though yeah it does. worked JA twice last winter on 40 with 100w so cant complain too much

yeah the stock mics on pretty much every radio ive ever owned are kind of an afterthought, the FT-891 one isnt bad but the default eq curve is pretty middy and doesnt translate great on the air. first thing i always do is pull the mic gain back to maybe 50-60% and actually watch the ALC meter while youre talking at your normal voice level — you want the ALC just barely flickering, not pegged. if its bouncing hard the whole time youre already compressing too aggressively before the speech processor even gets a chance to do anything useful. on the bandwidth thing — 2.4kHz is actually pretty standard for SSB and fine for most conditions. some guys go wider like 2.8 or even 3.0 when the band is clean and they want more presence, but on 40m with QRM i usually stay at 2.4 or even drop to 1.8 if its crowded. the muffled sound though is almost certainly mic gain and maybe the treble rolloff in the radio's DSP, try bumping the high shelf a bit in the parametric EQ if your radio has that menu. Yaesu buries it in the menus but its in there.

oh man 60+ confirmed already without even trying, you're going to blast through DXCC no problem once you start paying attention to what you need. the LoTW thing - you dont need every QSO in there, only the ones you're actually submitting for credit. but honestly you'll want to get in the habit of uploading everything because you never know when that random contact with some rare entity pays off six months later when they finally upload too. paper QSLs still work for DXCC, you'd just have to send them in to the ARRL with an application and there's a fee involved. most people do it all through LoTW now because its just way easier and cheaper over time. the only time paper really matters anymore is for entities where the operator never uploads to LoTW, which unfortunately still happens with some DXpeditions especially from certain parts of the world. as for WAS vs WAZ - i'd say do WAS first just because its more approachable and you can work a lot of states on a random Tuesday afternoon. WAZ gets tricky because some of the zones are genuinely rare and you might wait a long time for zone 2 or some of the Pacific zones. get WAS under your belt and it'll give you the confidence to go after the others

so i've been doing contests for probably 8 or 9 years now and always heard the big guns talk about SO2R like it was some magic thing that doubled your rate. tried setting it up a few times and it always felt like i was fighting the radios more than working stations. QRM from my own second radio bleeding into the first one, timing felt off, all that stuff. anyway this past CQWW phone i finally just sat down and thought about it differently. stopped trying to run on both radios at once and just used radio 2 purely for S&P during the gaps when radio 1 was waiting for a pileup to settle or whatever. rate went up noticeably, probably 20-30% more Qs in the same time. not doing anything fancy, no SO2R automation software, just manual switching with a footswitch. curious if anyone else went through this kind of learning curve or if theres a smarter way to use the second radio that im still not seeing. feels like im still leaving contacts on the table somehow

yeah what he said about the 10 contacts thing. also just want to add — spot yourself early even if you're not quite ready, like as soon as you know your frequency is clear. hunters are watching the spots constantly and they'll start calling you almost immediately once you show up. my first activation i waited too long to spot myself and ended up calling CQ for like 10 minutes before anyone found me, felt like forever lol. end fed on 40 should work great, i use almost the exact same setup. have fun with it

so ive been a technician for about a year and a half and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is and i kind of want to learn it but i have no idea where to start. i tried one of those apps a while back and just got frustrated and gave up after like two weeks. i dont know if i was doing it wrong or just impatient or what. is there like a method that actually works for beginners or is it just one of those things where you grind forever until it clicks. i can type pretty fast so i feel like my brain should be able to handle it but copying what im hearing is a completely different skill i guess. anyway just curious what worked for people who actually made it to where they can use it on the air

So i finally did my first ever parks on the air activation last weekend at a state park about 40 minutes from home. Ive been licensed for almost two years but just kept putting it off because honestly the whole thing seemed complicated to set up and i wasnt sure id even make 10 contacts which is the minimum you need to count the activation. Ended up using my KX2 with a random wire antenna i threw up between two trees, ran it on battery the whole time. Took me maybe 20 minutes to get everything up and running which was longer than i wanted but whatever. I spotted myself on the POTA app once i was ready and within like 5 minutes i had a small pileup going which was kind of overwhelming honestly. Made 23 contacts in about an hour and a half on 40m, tried 20m for a bit but conditions werent great that afternoon. Biggest thing i learned is that you really do need to upload your log the same day or at least pretty quickly — i forgot to mention the park reference number in my log notes at first and had to go back and fix things. Also learned that hunters really appreciate when you ID frequently and give signal reports, some of them are trying to get park credits and they want to make sure the contact counts. Anyone else do their first activation recently? Curious what parks people are targeting around the midwest if anyone wants to share.

ok so i passed my general a few weeks ago and ive been trying to figure out the 40m band but honestly the band plan stuff is confusing me more than i expected. like i know theres a chart somewhere but when i look at it i dont understand if those are hard limits or just recommendations or what. my elmer told me generals can operate phone starting at 7.175 but then i saw people talking on like 7.230 and someone in another thread said the band edge is somewhere around 7.300. so is everything between 7.175 and 7.300 fair game for me or are there spots i should avoid? also heard something about the ARRL band plan being different from the actual FCC allocations and now im really lost. just want to know where i can actually talk without stepping on someone or doing something wrong