Moon Bounce

totally normal questions, dont feel bad at all. for the CTCSS stuff — yeah thats almost certainly your problem. every repeater that uses a tone requires you to transmit that specific tone or it just ignores you, which is exactly what youre describing. the place to look is repeaterbook.com, just search your area and itll show you the input/output frequencies and whatever tone is required. most radios have it labeled as CTCSS or sometimes just T-SQL in the menus depending on the brand. as for jumping into a conversation — the way it usually works is you just wait for a gap between transmissions, key up quickly and say your callsign, and then wait. most people on a repeater are happy to have someone new join in. the long pause youre hearing is usually just someone waiting to see if anyone else wants to get in before they respond. if youre not sure just wait a beat or two after the repeater tail drops and then give your call. worst case they dont hear you and you try again.

yeah 10m has been absolutely wild, i worked Japan twice last week on SSB from my back porch which i honestly did not expect at all. my antenna situation is pretty mediocre right now — just a vertcal with no radials to speak of — and it still pulled through. solar flux has been sitting up pretty high lately so hopefully this keeps going through the summer at least. on the Icom thing, i think what you saw might be related to the IC-7760 rumors that have been going around. somebody on one of the DX clusters was talking about it having a remote head design similar to the 705 but for full power HF operation. take that with a grain of salt though, ive been burned before by forum speculation turning into nothing. remember how long those FT-710 rumors dragged on before that thing actually shipped.

so i finally got activated for a real ARES deployment last weekend, county EOC asked for radio support during the flooding situation we had. ive been a member of our local ARES group for about 8 months but this was the first time it wasnt just a drill or a net check-in. honestly i wasnt sure what to actually DO when i got there. like during the ARRL emcomm training courses everything sounds really organized and clear but when youre standing in the EOC and the emergency manager is stressed out and people are running around... its different. i ended up mostly handling packet traffic between two shelters using my TNC setup but there were a few hours where i just kind of sat there not sure if i should ask for something to do or wait. one thing that surprised me was how much time is just... waiting. i expected it to be more like the tabletop exercises where stuff is constantly happening. anybody else feel kind of underprepared their first time even after doing all the training? not complaining, it was genuinely a good experience and i want to do more. just wondering if thats normal.

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for about two years now and honestly its been great for what it is, airband, weather sat, trunked scanning around here, the usual stuff. but lately ive been wanting to get into some lower HF stuff properly and also mess around with some of the weaker signal decoding like WSPR and FT8 on receive only, not transmitting or anything. my question is basically whether the SDRplay RSP1B is worth jumping to over just grabbing a HackRF. i know the HackRF can transmit which is cool but the receive specs on it always seemed kinda mediocre compared to dedicated receivers. the noise figure on the HackRF is rough from what ive read. SDRplay seems like it was actually designed to receive well. but the HackRF being open hardware and all the software support is tempting. currently using SDR# and a little bit of SDR++ which i actually prefer now. would probably stick with SDR++ and maybe GQRX if i go Linux for this. anyway anyone gone from RTL to one of these and have thoughts? not looking to spend RSP2 money right now

so ive been listening to the local wednesday night net for a few weeks now and i finally worked up the nerve to actually check in last week. it went fine but i felt kind of lost on the timing, like when exactly do you jump in and give your call? the net control was going pretty fast and i wasnt sure if i was supposed to wait for a specific pause or what. ended up just saying my call and it worked out but i was sweating the whole time lol also curious if anyone knows about any special event stations coming up, i saw something about a parks on the air activation nearby but cant find the details. my elmer mentioned that some nets do special operating events tied to holidays or anniversaries and that sounds like something id actually want to participate in. still pretty new to all this, only been licensed about four months

yeah i had the exact same problem when i started lol. the baofeng menu is genuinely terrible and i probably reprogrammed mine like four times before i got it right. i ended up just using CHIRP software to do it from a computer which is way easier, you can see all the settings laid out properly and it takes like five minutes once you get the cable sorted. one other thing — some repeaters have specific nets or activity times and outside of those its just dead air. might be worth checking if theres a local club associated with the repeater, sometimes they have a weekly net night and thats when most of the traffic happens. good luck

yeah the listening thing is huge and most people skip it entirely. ive watched guys jump into a pileup within like 30 seconds of tuning across the DX station and they wonder why they never get through. the good ops working the other end, especially on a dxpedition, they can hear a clean signal in a pileup way easier than people think — the problem is everyone's transmitting on top of each other constantly and there's almost never a gap. the other trick that works for me is timing your call to end just slightly before the DX stops transmitting so your call is sitting there in the clear for a half second before everyone else piles back in. takes some practice to get the feel for it but once you do it becomes kind of automatic. also second or third call in a row rarely works, if you don't get through in two or three tries move your vfo a bit and try a different spot in the split rather than just hammering away on the same freq.

so i dont know if everyone else has been glued to their radios this past week but 6 meters has been absolutely wild. i was just casually monitoring on 50.313 tuesday evening and all of a sudden my screen lit up with stations from the gulf coast, then some caribbean stuff started popping in, then i worked a couple of guys in florida and i'm sitting here in ohio going wait what is happening right now. ended up staying up way too late working a handful of new grids i needed. also saw some chatter on the local repeater about icom doing something with a new radio announcement? somebody mentioned it at the club meeting but i missed most of it because i got there late. cant find much about it online yet. anyone know what thats about or is it just rumor mill stuff at this point

so ive been chasing this for a few weeks now and i cant seem to get it together. im using SDR# to track the downlink on 145.960 and transmitting on the 435 uplink with my handheld through a Arrow antenna. the pass comes up, i can hear the beacon no problem, but when i try to work through the transponder i either cant hear my own downlink at all or i hear it way off where i dont expect it to be. i know about doppler and i thought i had it figured out with gpredict doing the tuning automatically but something isnt clicking. the satellite is AO-73 by the way. is it possible the linear transponder is inverting my signal and thats why my downlink is in a weird spot? i read something about that but wasnt sure if it applies here. also how much power do people typically run on these, im doing maybe 5 watts through the Arrow and not sure if thats even getting in

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new entities and all that but honestly after a while it starts to feel like youre just clicking a grid square not actually talking to anyone. heard about JS8Call a while back and finally got around to installing it last weekend. first impressions are interesting. the waterfall feels familiar since its built on the same WSJT-X engine more or less, but the 15 second TX cycles and the freeform text is a completely different vibe. managed to have an actual back and forth with a guy in Colorado for like 20 minutes which... i dont think ive done that on HF in months? usually its just 599 73 and move on. the downside that i can already see is activity levels are way lower. i was on 40m JS8 for like two hours yesterday afternoon and only decoded maybe 8 stations total. on FT8 at the same time the waterfall was absolutely packed. so the weak signal advantage is kind of pointless if nobodys there to work. curious if anyone here actually uses JS8Call regularly or if its one of those modes that sounds great on paper but the activity just never materialized. also wondering how it compares signal-wise to something like PSK31 since im told JS8 is supposed to be good down into like -24 dB SNR territory

I did the same mod about two years ago for MARS, no issues since. One thing I'll add — after you do that mod it's worth going back through the menu and double checking your power limits are set right for each band because mine defaulted to something weird on a couple of the lower freq ranges, can't remember exactly what but it was putting out more than i expected on one segment. minor thing but worth a look if you haven't already.

you gotta go in order, cant skip to general or extra without passing technician first. the good news is tech is pretty manageable, most people can pass it in a few weeks of casual studying. the question pool is public which is a huge deal — the actual test questions come straight from that pool so if you just grind through all of them on hamstudy.org you'll be fine. i used that site and was consistently hitting 85-90% after maybe a week of doing practice exams every night for like 20-30 minutes. and yeah morse code hasnt been required since 2007 so dont worry about that at all. once you get your tech license you'll have access to a ton of VHF and UHF stuff which is a good place to start anyway, lots of local repeaters to get on and talk to people. the elmers on those repeaters are usually pretty willing to help new folks out.

yeah the band chart is honestly the clearest way to look at this, the ARRL publishes one and it lays out exactly what a tech can do. so for HF you do get a small slice of 10 meters, specifically 28.000 to 28.500 MHz, but only CW below 28.300 and then SSB phone up to 28.500. there used to be some 15m and 40m CW privileges for techs too but those got grandfathered out for newer licensees if i remember right, so basically if you got your ticket after like 1987 you dont have those. for digital modes you dont need any special authorization, part 97 covers it under the emission types allowed in each band segment, just make sure youre using an authorized emission type for that part of the band. the rules around image and data emissions can get a little specific but for most normal digital stuff like FT8 on 10m you're fine as long as youre in the right portion. seriously though just grab the ARRL band plan PDF, way easier than trying to parse 97.301 and 97.305 yourself

so ive been down a rabbit hole the last few days reading through some of the usual spots and there's a lot of chatter about Icom possibly announcing something new at the tokyo hamfair this year. nobody knows for sure obviously but the speculation is pretty wild, some people think its a mid-tier HF rig to slot between the 7300 and the 7610, others think its something totally different. take it all with a grain of salt but its fun to speculate i guess. also separate from that — 10 meters has been absolutely nuts this week. i worked a bunch of south american stations yesterday afternoon with like 50 watts into a dipole, signal reports were solid both ways. solar flux has been climbing and it shows. if you havent fired up 10m in a while now might be a good time to dust it off and see whats happening up there. anyone else been following the hamfair rumors or have info i dont? and has anyone else noticed the 10m conditions lately or is it just my area doing well

I upgraded last spring after being a tech for like 4 years and I honestly wish I had done it sooner. The electrical theory stuff tripped me up too but what helped me was just watching some youtube videos on the basic formulas, there's a few guys who explain Ohm's law and the LC circuit stuff in a way that actually makes sense for non-engineers. Once you get the concept even loosely the questions stop feeling so random. One thing nobody told me before I upgraded was that after you pass you can actually start operating on HF immediately once your license is in the ULS database, you dont have to wait for a paper license or anything. I was on 40m the same evening I passed the exam which was pretty surreal honestly, made my first contact with a guy in Missouri while sitting in my car in the parking lot of the VEC session location using a buddistick on the roof of my car. not exactly ideal but i was too excited to wait.

the short answer is yes, small station EME on 2m with Q65 or JT65 is genuinely doable now, its not just people hyping it up. ive seen stations with a single long yagi and 100 watts make contacts. your 45 watts is a bit thin but if you can squeeze more power out with an amp even a small one like 300-400 watts it changes the picture considerably. the link budget math on 2m EME is tight but it works out if you know what youre doing. the elevation thing though, yeah you kind of need it. you can catch the moon rising or setting when its low on the horizon and your fixed horizontal beam is pointing roughly right but youre really limiting your operating windows to maybe a short time each day and some days not at all depending on geometry. i ran fixed elevation for a few weeks when i was starting out and made a handful of contacts but it was frustrating. az-el control opens it up enormously. yaesu G-5500 is the go-to combo that most people use, its not super expensive and works fine for a yagi setup. worth just doing it right from the start honestly. also get on the EME chat page on the web, thats where people coordinate skeds. cold calling on 2m EME random is possible but scheduling is way more efficient especially when youre new and figuring out if your setup is even working right.

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and everything seemed fine when i was just receiving, aprsfi was showing all the local digis and igate traffic no problem. but now that i set up my TM-D710 to actually beacon my position i can see my own packets on the radio display but they're not showing up on aprs.fi or even being picked up by the igate about 8 miles away that i can clearly hear doing its thing. im using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 for my path which i thought was the standard thing everyone uses. 144.390 obviously. the radio is showing TX and the little packet icon lights up so its definitely transmitting something. been at this for like 3 evenings and im just going around in circles at this point. running the radio through a SignaLink into APRSIS32 on my laptop for the igate side but the mobile beacon is coming from the radio direct, no TNC needed since its built in. anybody have a guess what im missing here, i feel like its something dumb

yeah 2m is the right band to start on, theres way more activity there than any other EME band for most people. i run 4x10 element yagis and about 800w and i get a reasonable number of contacts, not setting any records but its not like pulling teeth either. the key thing nobody really tells you upfront is that your azimuth and elevation rotor setup has to be solid, you'd be surprised how much time you lose chasing the moon when your rotors are flakey or your heading is off a few degrees. also check the EME2 reflector and the online skeds database, a lot of EME is still semi-coordinated especially for smaller stations wanting to work each other. random on JT65A does happen but having a sked with someone means both stations know when to look and you're not competing with a pile. N0UK has a good writeup somewhere on getting started that i thought was pretty realistic about what to expect with a modest setup.

yeah gpredict with hamlib can be a bit finicky to set up honestly. the doppler correction does work once you have the right device string and baud rate configured but its not always obvious if its actually talking to the radio or just silently failing. what i usually do is watch the VFO on the 9700 screen during AOS and if the frequency isnt creeping you know somethings broken in the connection. for the inverting transponder thing — that trips everyone up the first few times. just remember if you hear yourself going up in pitch you need to tune your uplink down, not up. after a few passes it becomes muscle memory but yeah in real time its counterintuitive. AO-73 is a good one to practice on, the transponder isnt super crowded compared to SO-50 or whatever. give yourself a few more passes before expecting to actually make a QSO, just finding your own downlink first is the real skill

I made a similar move but went from a Kenwood TS-590SG to the 7300 and honestly I go back and forth on whether it was the right call. The receiver on the 590 was genuinely excellent and I sometimes feel like people sleep on it because it doesn't have a waterfall. For casual ragchewing the 7300 is great but I've read some stuff about the 7300's front end being a little more susceptible to overload on a really active band compared to some of the older dedicated receiver designs. Haven't confirmed that myself but something to keep an eye on if you're near a strong local station. Either way it's a solid radio and you'll get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

made basically the same move about 18 months ago and honestly for casual SSB and a handful of contests a year the 7300 probably wouldve been fine. the 7610 is a better radio no question, the roofing filters really do make a difference on a crowded 40m during a contest, but whether that difference is worth 900 bucks to you is really a personal thing the dual watch is nice but i use it less than i thought i would. where i actually notice the upgrade is just sitting on a busy band during a pileup, stuff that would have caused me some AGC grief on the 7300 just kind of disappears. if you do upgrade just make sure you're running a decent antenna because the radio will outperform the vertical pretty quick and you might end up chasing that rabbit hole instead

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for contacts and my DXCC count has gone up a ton but honestly it feels like operating a slot machine more than amateur radio, you just watch the screen and click stuff and occasionally something happens. started reading about JS8Call and it seems like you can actually type to people which is more like what i got into ham radio for in the first place my question is does anyone actually use it regularly or is it one of those modes where the band is technically open but nobody is ever on? i checked pskreporter a few times and theres activity but not sure if its all beacon stuff or real qsos. also how much weaker is it compared to FT8 really, like if FT8 is getting through will JS8 also get through or is the gap bigger than people say running an ic-7300 into a 40m dipole up about 30 feet, mostly interested in regional stuff but wouldnt mind trying some dx if the mode can handle it

get the generator, seriously. i know everyone wants to go all battery and solar these days and thats fine for low power stuff but if youre running a full 100w HF station for 8 hours straight at an exercise where reliability actually matters, just get a Honda EU2200i or similar and be done with it. fuel it up, bring an extra gallon, done. no anxiety about state of charge, no voltage sag, no explaining to your EC why you went QRT because your battery died during a simulated disaster. the quiet inverter generators are genuinely not that bad for RF either. i ran one about 15 feet from my station at Field Day and yeah i picked up a little noise on 40 but it wasnt terrible and moving it another 10 feet fixed most of it. run your power cable away from the antenna feedline and youre fine.

haha yeah the cluster can be overwhelming at first, totally get it. what i do is use the filter on DXwatch to just show the bands im actually on — if youre mostly on 20m then just filter to that and suddenly it gets way more manageable. same thing on QRZ cluster, theres a band filter dropdown thats easy to miss. as for how fast you need to move, it depends. sometimes a spot is valid for 20-30 minutes, sometimes the station is gone in 3 minutes flat if theyre running a pileup. you kind of develop a feel for it. rare ones go fast, more common DX you can take your time. i usually keep a browser tab open and just glance at it while im already at the radio rather than sitting there waiting. for apps, i really like DX Toolkit on android, gives you push notifications when something shows up that matches your filters which is way better than refreshing. havent used DX Sherpa personally but ive heard good things.

For right about $1,000 you get 100 watts of HF output power in a direct sampling HF radio with an internal tuner that matches antennas well. The 7300's waterfall display is a game-changer for finding weak signals and understanding band conditions. Skip the 891 if you can swing the extra $400 - you'll appreciate the difference.