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

went from the same RTL dongle to an RSP1B about two years ago and honestly the difference on HF is pretty significant. the noise floor drops noticeably and you stop seeing all those phantom signals from images. the 10MHz bandwidth you can observe at once is also just genuinely useful, especially when youre trying to figure out whats going on across a whole band segment. SDRuno is fine, a bit clunky but it works, and it also runs in SDR# with the right plugin if you prefer that. the HackRF thing i get the appeal but the receive specs are pretty mediocre. like the noise figure is high and it shows on HF, youre not gonna be happy with it for serious listening. its a great tool for transmit experiments and protocol work but id say if receive quality is the goal the RSP1B is the smarter buy. you could always add a HackRF later for the TX side if you get into that stuff. they serve different purposes really.

so ive been doing single op contesting for a few years now mostly CW but started getting into phone last year and everyone keeps telling me SO2R is the way to go if you want to be competitive in the upper score tiers. i get the concept, running on one radio while S&P on the other, but every time i try to set it up in practice it just feels like im making more mistakes than i would just focusing on one radio. my setup right now is a K3 and an IC-7300 with a tribander and a 40m dipole. the antenna switching and the audio routing is where i keep getting tangled up. i did CQWW phone last year and my rate was decent i think, peaked around 180/hr on 20m during the good hours, but i felt like i left a lot of multipliers on the table because i wasnt monitoring 40 at the same time. is there a point where the complexity just isnt worth it and you'd be better off just optimizing your single radio operation instead? or is this one of those things where once you get the workflow down it becomes second nature and you cant imagine going back?

honestly the memorize the pool approach works fine for passing the test, not gonna lie. the tech pool is only 423 questions and you only get 35 on the actual exam so if you can consistently hit like 80-85% on practice tests you're pretty much there. HamStudy.org is probably the best free resource, it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills those specifically. that said i'd at least try to understand the basic electrical stuff — ohms law, what frequency bands you get with tech privileges, the safety stuff. not because itll be on the test differently but because youll actually be able to use the license once you have it. i've seen people pass and then have no idea what to do with their HT because they just memorized answers without any context. took me about 3 weeks of like 20-30 minutes a day before i felt solid.

honestly i just kept a little cheat sheet taped next to my radio for the first year. no shame in it. the ones that always tripped me up were the ones that sound similar, like Mike vs November or Sierra vs Victor in bad conditions. once i worked a station in japan and we spent like 10 minutes just on my suffix because i kept defaulting to just saying the letters and the noise floor was brutal. after that i just made myself use phonetics every single time regardless of conditions until it was automatic. now it feels weird NOT to use them

so i've been licensed about 8 months now and people keep telling me i should try a contest. CQ WW is coming up at the end of October and i figured maybe this is the year i actually do it instead of just reading about it. problem is i genuinely dont know where to start. like do i need special software, do i just pick a frequency and start calling CQ, or do i hunt around for people to work? i've done a little HF on 40m but nothing serious, mostly just ragchewing with the local guys. also saw some stuff about ARRL Field Day earlier this year and that looked fun but kind of overwhelming with all the club stuff going on. is CQ WW less chaotic for a solo operator or is it pretty much the same energy? i have a modest setup, IC-7300 and a wire dipole up about 25 feet, nothing fancy. just want to get my feet wet without embarrassing myself too badly.

so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and i keep going back and forth on this. my current setup is hamlib + flrig talking to my IC-7300 over a VPN tunnel and it mostly works but audio latency is annoying sometimes, like ill be mid-QSO and the other guy is already on to his next sentence before i even hear what he said. using mumble for audio which is actually pretty decent latency wise but getting all the pieces to talk to each other was a genuine pain. anyway someone at the club mentioned RemoteHams and the SDR remote stuff and i went down that rabbit hole last night. looks like they have a pretty polished client and the whole thing is more integrated than what ive cobbled together. but im reading mixed reviews about the SDR side — like the remote SDR client seems to be more aimed at just listening rather than full control of a transceiver? maybe im misreading the docs. also the internet linking angle — some guys in the linked system thread were talking about bridging remote SDR access with like an Allstar or IRLP node for local monitoring, which sounds neat but also sounds like a nightmare to actually implement. has anyone done something like that or am i just overcomplicating this in my head. curious what people have actually gotten working long term vs whats just cool in theory.

the index card for ICS-213 is a great idea honestly, i still have a little cheat sheet in my bag and ive been doing this for years. dont let anyone make you feel silly for having reference material, that is literally what professionals do one thing that catches people off guard at public service events is the noise. marathons especially, you get crowds and PA systems and generators near the med tents and suddenly you cant hear squat on your HT even with the volume maxed. if you have a speaker mic bring it, and position yourself so the speaker faces away from whatever is making noise. sounds obvious but in the moment you forget also the net discipline at something like that is usually pretty relaxed compared to a declared emergency activation, your EC will probably keep things moving but dont stress if someone breaks in out of turn or there's some crosstalk, it happens. just stay calm, speak clearly, and if you miss something dont be afraid to ask for a repeat. nobody is going to judge you for that you're going to do fine. the fact that you're thinking about this stuff ahead of time already puts you ahead of a lot of people who just show up and wing it

ok so ive been listening a lot lately and just got my technician last month and i keep hearing all this stuff like QSL and QRZ and QRM and i kind of get some of it from context but honestly its confusing and theres like a hundred of them apparently. also on FT8 everyone is using these other abbreviations i dont even know where to start. is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just kind of learn them over time by osmosis? and do i actually need to know all of them or just the common ones. someone on a local net used QNI last night and i had no idea what that meant

this is making me want to push our club to do something similar, we basically just talk about emcomm at meetings but ive never actually done a real drill. how did you coordinate getting everyone to show up and commit to a whole saturday? that seems like the hard part with volunteers

i have the 7300 and yeah its great but dont sleep on the fact that the 590 has dual watch which the 7300 doesnt, if you ever get into any kind of split operating or just want to monitor two freqs at once its really handy. probably doesnt matter for casual ops but worth knowing i guess