Sarah Brown

the Mobilinkd with APRSdroid combo is actually pretty solid, i ran that same setup for a while before i got a dedicated tracker. one thing to double check is your audio levels going into the TNC, if the input is clipping your packets will decode like garbage at the other end even though they look fine on your screen. aprs.fi showing your position doesn't mean the packet was clean, just that it was decodable enough. also unrelated but if you ever want to step up from APRSdroid, Xastir on a laptop or even a raspberry pi running direwolf as a software TNC is a whole other level for seeing whats happening on the channel. you can see every packet, decode rates, all that stuff. kind of overkill for just tracking but its fun to poke around with

so i just got my technician license a couple months ago and ive been reading about HF and CW and honestly morse code seems kind of cool but also completely impossible to learn as an adult. like im not a kid who can just absorb stuff anymore lol i tried one of those youtube videos where someone just plays letters at you and i could not retain anything after like 20 minutes. is there a method that actually works or do people just suffer through it until it clicks? i dont even know if i want to use it for contesting or just general HF contacts, i just want to at least be able to copy my callsign and a signal report someday also how long did it take you, roughly, because some people say months and some people say years and i genuinely cant tell if theyre exaggerating

yeah man totally get that. i went through a phase where every session had to mean something, new band, new mode, whatever. burned me out a little tbh. now i just get on 75m in the evenings and shoot the breeze with the same 4 or 5 guys. one of em talks about fishing every single time and i still look forward to it. theres something about just having a regular thing with regular people even if you never meet them in person

the chasers really are patient i was surprised too when i did my first pota activation at a state park near me. i was fumbling around with my logging app and a guy just waited on frequency for me to get sorted, didnt even say anything just came back when i was ready. made me feel alot better about the whole thing. what logging app were you using for sota, im still trying to figure out if i should use goat log or just paper

lol i remember my first time keying up on a repeater my voice cracked like i was 13 again. took me like four tries to remember to say my callsign at the end. you'll get used to it fast, couple weeks and it'll feel totally normal

congrats on the ticket first of all. ok so here's my honest take — the UV-5R is not junk, it's just a basic radio that you have to set your expectations accordingly. i handed one to my daughter when she got licensed and she used it for two years without a single issue. at your budget it's really the only thing that makes sense unless you find a used radio somewhere. CHIRP works fine, just download it and watch one youtube video and you'll have your local repeaters programmed in like 20 minutes. the hardest part honestly is finding a good antenna for it because the stock rubber duck that comes with it is pretty mediocre. a nagoya NA-771 is like 12 bucks and makes a noticeable difference on receive at least. if you find yourself really getting into the hobby down the road you can always pick up a yaesu FT-60 or something used and keep the baofeng as a backup. thats what most people end up doing anyway.

had almost this exact same thing on a friends 7300 last year. turned out to be a cold solder joint on one of the inductors in the LPF board, not even the PA itself. the joint looked fine visually but when we hit it with a hot air station and resoldered it the problem went away completely. worth going over the whole LPF section with a magnifying glass, those boards can look okay until you flex them slightly and then you see the crack. also worth checking the driver board connections, there's a couple of ribbon connectors in there that can get loose especially if the radio was shipped or moved around a lot. i'd reseat everything you can reach before assuming it's a component failure.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been chasing DXCC this year and the LoTW thing took me a little while to wrap my head around but once you get your station certificate set up its pretty painless. the tricky part is some of those older contacts you have to make sure the dates line up with when the entity was valid, like if a country changed status or whatever. probably not an issue for stuff from 2018 but just something to be aware of. WAS i started at the same time and honestly its not that complicated to run both since youre just watching two different columns in your tracking software. i use TQSL for LoTW uploads and just keep a spreadsheet on the side. probably overkill but it keeps me sane

Watch the DX clusters and spots - many special events now use spotting pages to announce their operation and encourage re-spotting. I've worked several rare ones that way that I never would have found otherwise. QRZ also has a good special events calendar.

welcome to the hobby, you're going to have a blast. so honestly for where you're at right now the UV-5R gets a lot of hate but it really is fine for getting started and learning the ropes. the programming with CHIRP isnt that bad once you do it once, took me maybe 20 minutes the first time and now i can do it in my sleep. the audio on the speaker isnt hi-fi but its perfectly workable on a repeater. that said if you can swing the FT-65 i do think its a noticeable step up in build quality and the menu system is less of a headache. i have an old UV-5R and an FT-65 and i pretty much always grab the yaesu now. for hiking i wouldnt stress too much about waterproofing unless you're doing long overnight trips in iffy weather, a cheap rain cover or just a ziplock bag gets you pretty far. dual band is nice because some areas have 70cm repeaters and you'll want access to them eventually, but its not make or break right away. whatever you get just get something and get on the air, thats the main thing. you can always add gear later and trust me you will lol

yeah i had basically the same thing happen with my first homebrew wire antenna, the resonance came out higher than expected. someone on here told me the 468/f formula already has some fudge factor built in but it still varies depending on wire gauge and how close to ground your ends are and all that. i ended up cutting mine long to start and trimming down which worked better than trying to add wire later. one thing i will say -- did you use any kind of choke or 1:1 balun at the feedpoint? running coax straight to a dipole without any kind of choke can let rf come back down the outside of the coax and that can do weird things to your swr readings and also just generally cause rfi problems in the shack. i made a simple air core choke just by coiling like 8 or 10 turns of the coax at the feedpoint and it made a noticeable difference on my setup. not saying its your problem but worth trying if you havent.

yeah this trips up a lot of newly upgraded generals, dont feel bad. the short version is your phone privelege on 40 starts at 7.175 MHz and goes up to 7.300 which is the band edge. the reason everyone says stay away from the band edge is that your signal has sidebands — if youre running SSB and you park right on 7.300 your upper sideband content is going to spill above the allocation and thats technically out of band. most people say stay at least 3 kHz inside the edge to be safe, so like 7.297 or lower to be comfortable. the lower part of 40 from 7.000 to 7.125 is CW only for US generals, and 7.100 to 7.125 you share with extra class on CW. digital modes like FT8 and JS8 tend to hang out around 7.074 which is within the CW segment but the FCC allows data/digital in there too so thats fine. the ARRL band plan is kind of a gentlemans agreement on top of what the FCC actually mandates, so if something is in the band plan but not in part 97 its more of a courtesy thing than a rule. but most people follow it anyway to keep things organized

I was in the exact same spot about a year ago and ended up going with a Yaesu FT-65 which nobody really talks about but its basically a stripped down simpler version of the FT-60 and I really liked it to start. Easier menus, sounds good, built solid. Eventually got a Kenwood TH-D74 which is a whole other thing but that was way later after I knew what I was doing haha.

yeah i run both, keep WSJT-X open on one radio and JS8Call on another when i can. FT8 is basically just a point scoring thing at this point, nothing wrong with that but you nailed it — its not a conversation. JS8Call has a totally different feel. slower yes, and you do need a reasonably clean signal path or the decodes get choppy, but when it works its genuinely satisfying. activity on 20m can be hit or miss depending on time of day. i find the 14.078 spot has decent traffic in the early evening UTC, and 40m overnight is usually pretty good in North America. the relay and aprs-like messaging stuff is where it gets interesting if you want to do something more than ragchew — ive seen people use it for lightweight emcomm stuff and it makes a lot of sense for that. not as fast as packet but way more robust on marginal paths. worth keeping in the rotation for sure, just dont expect it to replace FT8 for working new entities or anything like that

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still get confused about this. like when im on 2m FM calling someone i just say my callsign normally but sometimes people come back with the full NATO phonetics thing and it makes me feel like im doing something wrong. is there like a rule about when you have to use them or is it more of a situation thing i know the alphabet, november golf kilo whatever, i just dont always know when its expected. on HF it seems like everyone uses them all the time but on the local repeater people usually just say their call letters. did i miss something in the manual or is this just one of those unwritten things

nice work getting it up. i did almost the exact same thing for my first antenna except i used some kind of mystery wire i bought at a hamfest and spent way too long trying to figure out why it kept changing resonance on me — turned out to be stranded steel inside, not copper. lesson learned. the coax seal stuff works but yeah its a pain when you need to get back in there. i use the self-amalgamating tape now too and honestly havent had any issues with it.

yeah i saw that on the club's facebook page, i think they are doing a technician licensing seminar in the morning before the tailgate opens which is kind of cool. last time i went was like 2019 and it was pretty decent sized. brought home a tuner i probably didnt need but hey thats what hamfests are for right

Have you considered vendor feedback from last year? Maybe survey them on pricing vs amenities. Our club found vendors cared more about good advertising and foot traffic than saving $5 on table fees.

the bed stake hole thing gets a bad rap but honestly for what you're describing — hitting local repeaters, doing simplex — it works fine. yeah the pattern isn't perfectly omnidirectional because the cab blocks some of the forward radiation but on VHF it's not like you're losing huge amounts, the signal bounces around enough in most areas that it doesn't matter much in practice. i ran a Tram 1185 in the driver's side stake hole on my old Silverado for two years and never had a real problem with it on 2m. that said if you can sell your wife on the NMO through the roof it really is the cleaner solution long term. you can get a good weatherproof mount and it'll look factory if you do it right. tell her a properly installed NMO is actually less likely to leak than a hastily done mag mount rattling around up there, which is true

yeah its all multiple choice and 35 questions, you need 26 right to pass. most VE sessions ive seen will give you scratch paper if you ask, sometimes they just have it out on the table already. you can definitely skip around and come back, at least every session ive been to worked that way, just let the VEs know if youre unsure about the process when you sit down. honestly the regulations stuff that trips people up is usually the band privileges and the part 97 rules around things like third party traffic and stuff. if you're using hamstudy and youre consistently hitting above 80% on the practice exams you're probably fine. the real test feels a lot like the practice ones. just read every question all the way through before picking, thats where most people mess up, they see a familiar phrase and jump at the first answer that sounds right without reading all the choices.

theres a project called "rotctld" that might be worth looking at for the software side, its part of the hamlib package and a lot of logging programs can talk to it natively including N1MM and Log4OM. if your arduino presents itself as a serial device and speaks the right protocol you can get computer control working without writing custom integration code for every program. just something to keep in mind before you go too deep designing a proprietary serial interface

yeah honestly when i was starting out i just memorized the NATO alphabet and used it every time no matter what, felt safer that way. some of the older hams on the local repeater nets are really particular about it and some dont care at all. i think on simplex or HF you really do want to use them because even a tiny bit of qsb can make a letter disappear. i still sometimes blank on a letter and say something dumb like november oscar tango alpha for no reason on a crystal clear local contact lol but whatever

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly HF on 40 and 20 meters. i signed up for LoTW a while back and got my certificate sorted after like three weeks of waiting on the postcard from ARRL which was a whole thing in itself. anyway i've been uploading logs and getting confirmations trickling in which is great. but then someone on the air mentioned eQSL and said a lot of people prefer that and its faster. and then another guy sent me an actual physical QSL card in the mail through the bureau which honestly was really cool to receive, it felt more real somehow. now im wondering if i need to be doing all three of these to be a good operator or if most people just pick one. also does eQSL actually count for any awards or is it kind of a secondary thing? i dont want to set up accounts everywhere if it doesnt matter but i also dont want to miss confirmations from people who only use one system. also side question — is the QSL bureau through your regional club or is it all through ARRL? i'm still fuzzy on how the outgoing bureau actually works for sending cards internationally.