Sarah Wilson93

SDR++ has been my go-to lately due to the lower resource usage and cleaner interface. The plugin architecture is really taking off - there are some excellent digital mode decoders available now. For contest monitoring across multiple bands simultaneously, it's superior to GQRX.

haha yeah the QSL ecosystem is kind of a mess honestly, you're not alone in being confused by it. short version: LoTW is the one that counts for ARRL awards like DXCC and WAS, eQSL has its own awards but most of the big ones dont accept it, and paper cards are kind of for the joy of it plus some awards like CQ WPX still like paper for certain things. for LoTW the reason stuff isnt showing as confirmed is that the other station also has to upload their log and the dates and frequencies have to match up pretty closely. a lot of people batch upload once in a while so it can take weeks or even months before a contact confirms. just be patient, it does eventually come through especially for the more active DX stations. as for the bureau cards, yeah if someone sends you one its polite to send one back. you dont have to go crazy with it but most people appreciate it. you can get cards printed pretty cheap through places like K4MAP or just design something simple. eQSL you can actually make a digital card which is kind of neat. anyway you dont need all three but a lot of us do use all three just because different operators prefer different methods and you never know who youll want a confirmation from down the road

yeah the pixie is a great starting point, i built one too. just a heads up if you plan on doing portable stuff the battery drain on those little rigs is so low you can run for hours on a small lipo pack. i use a 2200mah 3 cell pack with a small regulator and its way better than 9v batteries which sag pretty quick. also look into the KD1JV designs or the uBITX if you want something with a bit more flexibility down the road, still very buildable and way more capable. the rabbit hole goes deep haha

so i had been running an old TS-450S for like eight years, which honestly never gave me problems but i wanted to get into digital modes more seriously and the waterfall on the icom just seemed like it would help a lot with finding signals, especially on 40m where things get crowded fast. picked up a used 7300 from a guy locally about three weeks ago and overall yeah its pretty great but there were a couple things that caught me off guard. first the real signal scope is way more addictive than i thought itd be. i literally just sit there watching it sometimes instead of actually operating, which is kind of embarrassing to admit. second thing — and this surprised me — the receiver feels noticeably different from the 450S. not worse, just different. the 450S had this kind of... i dunno how to describe it, a certain character to how audio sounded on phone. the 7300 is cleaner i guess but took some adjustment. also spent about two hours messing with the digital modes setup through WSJT-X before i got the levels right. the documentation online is everywhere and some of it is outdated so just be aware of that if youre setting it up. once it clicked though FT8 contacts started rolling in pretty easy. anyone else come from an older kenwood and notice that kind of audio difference or is it just me getting used to new gear?

oh man this sounds exactly like what happened to me when i came back to cw a few years ago. the muscle memory is still kinda there but its like it gets scrambled when theres actual pressure to perform. what helped me was just slowing WAY down, like embarrassingly slow, 8 or 10 wpm even if you used to run 20+. your hands need to relearn the rhythm without the brain panicking. on the paddle itself, the gap adjustment on a Bencher is pretty forgiving, you want just barely a business card thickness between the contacts, some guys go tighter but i find that leads to exactly what you're describing, squeezing too hard and double-clicking dits all over the place. also check the icom keyer speed and make sure the weight setting isnt cranked up weird, sometimes those get bumped. the 7300 keyer is decent honestly, probably not the paddle or the radio its just rust, give it a few weeks of daily practice even if just 10 minutes

im pretty new too so take this for what its worth but i stumbled onto the WWV broadcasts on 5, 10, and 15 MHz that give propagation updates and that was kind of a lightbulb moment for me. they read out the solar flux and geomagnetic field conditions a few times a day. its old school but its kinda cool to actually hear it on the radio instead of just looking stuff up online haha also somebody in my club mentioned that 15m tends to follow the sun path so if youre trying to work europe from the US east coast the window is usually morning hours, not afternoon. i have no idea if thats totally accurate but it did seem to match up with what i was seeing

yeah and there's a ton more that you'll run into. QTH is your location, QSL means confirming a contact which is also why those confirmation cards are called QSL cards. one that confused me for the longest time was QRP which just means low power operation, like 5 watts or less. people who run QRP rigs are super into the challenge of making contacts with minimal power. oh and QRZ is when someone is asking whos calling, so if you hear someone say QRZ? theyre asking who just called them. its a lot to take in at first but honestly most of the common ones you'll just memorize from hearing them over and over

Clay soil definitely changes things - much better RF ground than sandy stuff. Your antenna is probably seeing a different ground reflection pattern which messes with the radiation resistance. I'd start by checking the SWR across the whole band, bet you'll find the resonant point shifted down in frequency. Might need to trim a few inches off each end or add some capacitive loading if you cant make it physically longer.

I can say that I am an Extra and was an Advanced at one time (I never held a Technician class license, I jumped from Novice to General back in the day). I very rarely exercise my Extra class privileges. When I do, it's usually to get on 80 m phone, as it's a little quieter there. For casual operation, General gets you 95% of what you need.

so I just passed my technician exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to get. theres so many options and honestly I dont even know where to start. I keep seeing the Baofeng UV-5R everywhere and its like $25 which seems almost too good to be true, but then some people say to just save up and get a Yaesu or Kenwood. My main use would probably be local repeaters and maybe APRS eventually if I get into that. I dont have a huge budget, maybe $100-150 to spend. does the brand really matter that much for just starting out or am I overthinking this?

JS8Call activity really depends on your region and time of day honestly. 40m around 7.078 tends to have the most action, at least here in the midwest. 20m is spottier. the store-and-forward relay thing is genuinely cool and works better than youd expect when propagation is sketchy. i use it mostly for ARES stuff and the ability to leave a message for someone who isnt on frequency right now is actually useful in a way FT8 just isnt designed for. running two rigs simultaneously is totally doable, i do it all the time. the key is making sure each radio has its own dedicated USB audio interface — dont try to share one. i have a signalink on the 7300 and a cheap Behringer UMC22 on my backup rig and windows sees them as completely separate devices, no conflicts. just watch your RF around the shack because if youre getting any feedback into the audio chain itll corrupt the decodes fast. ferrite on the USB cables helped me a lot with that.

IC-9700 with SignaLink is a slightly weird combo honestly, that radio has built in USB audio so a lot of people just go straight USB without the SignaLink and have better results. not saying thats definitely your problem but worth knowing. ive run Vara FM on mine direct USB and it just works once you sort out the com ports. also just to double check - you do have the RMS gateway frequency dialed in exactly right yeah? some of those gateways run offset from what the winlink map shows or they updated and nobody changed the listing. i got burned by that once, was connecting to what i thought was one gateway and was actually hitting a dead node that still had the handshake running somehow. the Winlink RF network map is usually pretty good but not always current.

Diamond dual-banders like the X200/X500 use series-fed 5/8 sections for UHF with additional phasing coils to also work on 2m. For mobile, the vehicle body provides your ground reference - no need for the lightning protection section. Remember tuning can be accomplished with the toroids, and SWR will be lower once mounted in the air.

I've had similar issues with HRD on linear transponders. The tracking option in a radio cannot correctly compensate for Doppler, this is one reason why many QSO's drift gently across the linear transponder's available bandwidth. Only correct computer control will ensure that two or more stations stay on the same frequency while the satellite passes overhead. When using the linear transponder option Ham Radio Deluxe will correctly control your radio's frequencies so that are they are both compensated for Doppler shift. Try disabling your radio's internal satellite tracking and let HRD handle everything.

honestly man just do it, the General exam is not nearly as scary as people make it out to be. yeah theres some extra theory, like you'll see questions about impedance matching and some propagation stuff that wasnt on Tech, but if you grind through HamStudy.org for a few weeks you'll be fine. i think i studied maybe 3 weeks on and off and passed no problem. as for HF privileges, as a General you get decent chunks of 40m, 20m, 15m, 10m and a few others. 20m is probably where you'll spend most of your time starting out, there's almost always something going on there. 40m is great in the evenings for domestic stuff. the Extra class guys have slightly more of each band but honestly General gets you plenty to play with. and yeah the VE team submits everything to the FCC electronically now, you'll get an email when your license shows up in the ULS database, usually within a day or two. just dont transmit HF until you see it in there.

For emergency communications, we regularly deal with control operator responsibilities when coordinating multiple stations. Remember that 97.113 prohibits broadcasting, and there's zero exemption for information bulletins. Document everything during incidents - it protects you if questions arise later.

meteor scatter decoding with an RTL dongle and SDR# actually works surprisingly well if you havent tried yet, just throwing that out there. got my first MS decode last summer off a sporadic-E opening using nothing fancier than a V3 dongle and a yagi I had laying around pointed roughly northeast anyway yeah the RSP1A is the move for receive, HackRF if you wanna do weird stuff. thats basically the whole answer lol

yeah what he said about mic gain, thats the first thing i check whenever audio sounds off. i spent like three weeks thinking my radio had a problem and it was just mic gain set way too high from the factory reset i had done. one other thing — are you on USB or LSB? obvious question but ive seen people accidentally be on the wrong sideband for the band they're on and not realize it because it kind of still sounds like speech just weird. 40m and below is LSB, 20m and up is USB, just making sure since you said youre new to phone.

yeah 40 is my go-to for that. sometimes i fall asleep to it lol. better than the tv

Yeah the pool thing throws a lot of people off. The actual exam is 35 questions pulled from that pool so technically if you know all ~400 questions you're guaranteed to pass, but like the previous person said hamstudy does a good job of making that feel less tedious than just reading a PDF. One thing I'd add is dont completely ignore the why behind some of the answers, especially the safety stuff like RF exposure and electrical safety, that knowledge actually matters when you start putting up antennas and messing with equipment. The pure memorization approach works for passing the test but you'll feel a bit lost your first few times on the radio if nothing clicked conceptually. That said the test itself is pretty doable, i passed first try with maybe 10 days of casual studying, dont let the list of topics intimidate you.

Welcome to the hobby, congrats on the ticket. Okay so the baofeng thing - honestly a UV-5R or one of the UV-82 variants will absolutely work for what you're describing and plenty of people run them for years without issues. The complaints are usually about transmit audio quality, spurious emissions on some units, and the programming software being a pain. For just getting on a local repeater and chatting with your buddy, it'll do the job and you can get one for like 25 bucks. That said if you can stretch toward your upper budget, a Yaesu FT-65 or a Radioddity or even a used Yaesu FT-60 would give you noticeably better receive and the audio is a lot clearer both ways. The FT-60 is kind of legendary for being basically indestructible. I dropped mine off a ladder once and it just kept going. On the dual band question - yeah get dual band, pretty much all the entry level stuff is dual band anyway and 70cm repeaters are super common depending on where you live so you'd be cutting yourself off for no reason. Most of my local activity is 2m but theres a few really active 440 machines too so im glad i have both.

yeah the log upload thing got me too on my first activation, i was checking the site for like two days wondering why nothing was showing up lol. you have to do it manually. i use HAMRS app in the field which is pretty solid for POTA, exports ADIF no problem and has a spot for the park reference built right in so it ends up in every log entry automatically. also 18 contacts on your first solo activation is really solid, i only got 11 on mine and i was running 50w more than you, so good job getting out there and doing it

so ive been thinking about trying to learn cw for a while now, just never actually started. i have my general and i see people talking about working stations with cw and it sounds cool but i have no idea where to even begin. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or what? i tried that once and it felt completely useless when i actually heard it. is there a specific method most people use or does it just take forever no matter what. also not sure if it matters but i mostly want to be able to ragchew eventually not just send contest exchanges or whatever

QRV sounds great but full QRZ data requires an XML and/or API subscription. As a new ham still building my station, every subscription adds up. Are there good free alternatives that work well for basic DX spotting?

so we've got a countywide exercise coming up and I've been tasked with setting up a portable station at one of the EOC alternate sites, basically a community center parking lot with no shore power available. been doing this a few years now but this one is a bit more involved than usual because we need to sustain ops for roughly 8 hours and potentially run two rigs simultaneously. my current thinking is to bring the Honda EU2200i and just run everything off that, but a few guys in the club are pushing hard for the LiFePO4 battery route and solar top-off. my concern with the battery-only approach is that it's gonna be late October, we're in the midwest, sun angle is gonna be terrible and if it's overcast we're basically just draining the pack with no meaningful replenishment. the generator feels more reliable for a known duration exercise but then you've got the noise, the fuel, exhaust placement headaches, all that. on the antenna side I'm planning the Buddipole on the 20/40 switchable config plus maybe a linked dipole for the HF work, and we've got a couple VHF/UHF verticals for local net traffic. mast is the Jackite 31 footer which has been solid. anyone done something similar and have thoughts on the power side especially? the dual-rig simultaneous thing is what's making me second guess the battery approach.