John Peterson

hey welcome to the hobby, dont stress about the baofeng programming stuff — it trips up almost everyone at first. the 100.0 tone you see on repeaterbook is what you need to set as your TRANSMIT tone, sometimes called encode. basically your radio needs to send that subaudible tone along with your voice so the repeater knows to open up. the receive tone (decode) is optional on most setups, it just filters out noise on your end so you dont hear every blip the repeater picks up. for everyday use just set the transmit tone and leave receive alone until you understand it better. as for jumping into a conversation — what you did was exactly right honestly. saying your callsign in a pause is the correct thing to do. sometimes people just dont hear you or the repeater dropped your signal a bit. try it again next time, most folks on repeaters are pretty welcoming to new hams checking in. if the repeater has a net night or a regularly scheduled roundtable those are even better because people are specifically there to chat.

the fence thing would bug me personally. ive had chain link just completely mess up a low dipole before, like changed the pattern in ways i never fully figured out. moved the antenna and everything improved. might be worth ruling that out before you spend a lot of time trimming.

yeah the battery thing gets everyone at least once. i made the same mistake early on — tested my setup in the garage, everything perfect, then showed up to an actual deployment in july and my sealed lead acid was just not having it after a couple hours. switched to a LiFePO4 a while back and that helped a lot but even then you gotta actually run it under real conditions before you trust it. on the traffic handling piece, honestly the best thing i found was just getting back on a traffic net regularly even when theres no emergency. our section has a nightly net and i pop on maybe once or twice a week just to stay sharp. it feels kind of slow and old fashioned sometimes but when you actually need to pass a formal message under stress your hands just kind of know what to do. the tabletop idea your EC mentioned is really worth pushing for. we did one a couple years back before our SET and it made a huge difference — people figured out a lot of the coordination stuff on paper before anyone keyed up, which meant when we actually got on the air we werent reinventing things in real time.

just to add what the other guy said -- i was in the same boat when i upgraded and what finally clicked for me was remembering that on SSB your displayed frequency on the radio is the carrier, not where your actual audio is. so on USB if youre sitting on 7.299 your voice is going up to maybe 7.302 and youre now illegal. most people i know just sort of stay below 7.295 to give themselves some breathing room and not stress about it

i had the exact same thing happen when i got my first decent paddle. took me a while to realize i was gripping it way too tight, like a death grip. once i consciously relaxed my hand it got a lot better. also are you resting your wrist on the desk or floating? that changed everything for me personally, i float now and have way more control.

The 9700 works great once properly configured. Make sure you're not locking the VFOs during operation - it's very important that you not lock the VFOs during a QSO or expect the marriage of the two VFOs to compensate for any shift in frequency related to the Doppler effect. Let the software manage everything.

Check your MYCALL setting in the TNC config — sounds obvious but if there's a mismatch between what the radio is beaconing and what's actually set as the station identifier for message routing, messages just go nowhere. Also make sure message acknowledge is enabled, theres a setting burried in the APRS menu on the D710 specifically for that. I think its under APRS MSG or something like that, been a while since i had mine out. Also worth checking if your squelch is too tight and youre just missing the incoming packets. Messages need to actually be received on frequency to display, the radio doesnt pull them from aprs.fi or anything like that, it only sees what comes over RF. If your local digi is transmitting the messages back and your squelch is clipping the audio you'd see yourself fine on the internet but never receive anything locally.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and everyone keeps telling me i need to try CQ WW at least once before i can call myself a real ham, lol. i have a technician right now actually no wait i just upgraded to general last month so i have HF privileges now which is exciting but also kind of overwhelming. anyway the contest is coming up and i honestly dont even know where to begin. like do i need special logging software? i downloaded N1MM but it seems really complicated and i watched a couple youtube videos but theyre all assuming you already know stuff. also is it worth even jumping in with just a wire antenna in my backyard or is it going to be totally pointless because everyone else has these massive beam setups. also someone mentioned ARRL Field Day earlier in the year and i missed it which i guess was a mistake but hoping to catch the next one. and ive been looking at SOTA too but thats a whole different thing right? like actually going up mountains with radio gear. that looks amazing honestly but maybe too much for right now. any advice welcome, especially for someone who has no idea what theyre doing in a contest situation

i was stuck at almost exactly the same spot lol. what finally got me moving again was doing the farnsworth timing thing differently -- i had my character speed at like 15 but word speed at 8 which meant i had too much time between characters to second-guess myself. bumping the word speed up even when it felt too fast actually helped more than i expected. also just be patient with yourself, 13 to 20 took me way longer than 5 to 13 did, thats just kind of how it goes from what i can tell

the generator question is pretty much always gonna come down to runtime vs noise floor and logistics. i've run the EU2200i at a couple EOC activations and it's solid but man the fuel logistics for a 14+ hour op get annoying if you dont pre-position gas cans. that said i'd still take it over babysitting a battery bank any day during an actual exercise where i'm already thinking about a hundred other things. for what its worth we did a hybrid setup last fall — ran the Honda most of the time but had a 100Ah Dakota Lithium as a buffer so if the genny needed to shut down for refueling or whatever the stations stayed up. worked really well actually. the battery also cleaned up some of the noise that was getting into the 7300 when we were running close to the generator. on the antenna side if you're doing NVIS on 60m seriously just throw up the EFHW at low height and call it done. the Buddipole is great gear but it takes longer to tweak and on a 60m setup you're already fighting the band plan restrictions, last thing you want is to be fussing with element lengths when the net control is waiting on you.

did basically the same thing on mine about a year ago, went fine. one thing i did after the TX mod was also swap out the stock electrolytic caps on the audio board while i had it open — there are a few that are known to drift on older units and it made a noticeable difference in receive audio quality, kind of tighter and less mushy sounding. probably not worth opening it back up just for that but if you ever go in again for something else its cheap insurance. total cost was maybe 4 dollars in caps from mouser.

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and finally got my Kenwood TM-D710 beaconing pretty consistently but the position that shows up on aprs.fi is like 3 miles from where i actually am. im using the internal GPS on the radio and the GPS lock looks solid, shows like 8 satellites. the symbol shows up in the right general area but its definitely not my house, its showing me in the middle of a field somewhere. i double checked the NMEA settings and everything looks right to me, baud rate is 4800 which i think is correct. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which is what everyone seems to recommend. not sure if maybe there's some offset in how the radio is interpreting the GPS data or what. anyone seen this before?

so i just passed my general last month and ive been using my sequential call which is fine i guess but its kind of long and not super memorable. a buddy at the club mentioned i could apply for a vanity call and pick something shorter or maybe get a 1x2 or 2x1 format depending on what district im in. i went to the FCC ULS website and honestly its kind of confusing. like i can see there are calls available but i dont fully understand the sequential process vs the vanity process and whether i even qualify for certain call formats yet. do i have to wait a certain amount of time before i can apply or can i just do it now? and is there a fee involved now because i thought i heard they started charging for that. also someone told me there are third party sites that help you find available calls and file the application which sounds easier but i dont know if those are legit or just trying to take your money. any help appreciated, been lurking here for a while and you guys always seem to know this stuff

so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and yeah its great for working new entities and all that but honestly the 15 second exchange thing gets old when you just want to talk to someone. like theres no actual communication happening, just signal reports and grid squares. started poking around JS8Call last month and the concept is interesting — its built on the same WSJT-X encoding basically but stretched out so you can type actual messages back and forth at like -24dB or whatever. latency is obviously rough since each transmission takes longer but at least you feel like youre having a QSO and not just logging a contact. wondering if anyone here actually uses JS8Call regularly or if its kind of a ghost town on the bands. i tried 40m around 7.078 a few nights ago and heard maybe 3 or 4 stations but nobody responded to my CQ. could be my timing or the propagation was just weird that night. also not sure if im supposed to be running it in turbo mode or normal, the documentation is kind of all over the place. not looking to abandon FT8 entirely, just want something where i can actually exchange more than a grid square with someone

im new so i dont really have anything to compare it to lol but 40m is still my go-to just because my antenna works best there. maybe ill try later at night, someone told me it opens up more after 10pm local