Linda Thompson

i tried SO2R for the first time last ARRL DX and i have to say the setup took me longer than i expected and i definitely wasnt fully ready when the contest started. my big mistake was not having the audio routing sorted out ahead of time — i was trying to manage two sets of audio in my headphones and it just became chaos. ended up basically ignoring radio 2 for most of the first night which defeated the whole point lol. one thing that actually helped me even before i got SO2R working properly was just focusing more on rate optimization on single radio first. like really drilling down on your CQ timing, keeping your exchange snappy, not over-calling people who clearly have your call, having your function keys set up so you never have to touch the keyboard mid-qso for common things. i picked up maybe 15-20% more QSOs per hour just from cleaning up my operating habits before i ever touched the second radio. so maybe start there if you havent already gone through that exercise

yeah i was in the same spot like eight months ago, ended up just grinding hamstudy for like ten days straight and passed first try. the math freaked me out too but theres like maybe 5 questions on the actual exam that involve any calculation and even then its pretty basic stuff. 60% on your first practice test with zero studying is actually not bad at all, gives you a baseline. just keep hammering the practice tests until youre consistently hitting 80+ and youll be fine. the real test is 35 questions and you need a 26 to pass so theres a little wiggle room

yeah the park reference thing tripped me up too on my first couple activations, i kept just saying my callsign and forgetting the K-number entirely. now i write it in big letters on a piece of tape stuck to my radio, simple but it works. also spotting yourself on the POTA app before you even start calling makes a huge difference, the hunters find you way faster and you dont have to call CQ into dead air for 10 minutes wondering if anyones listening.

so ive been wanting to get my tech license for like a year now and i finally decided to just do it but honestly the amount of stuff out there is kind of overwhelming. a friend told me to just memorize the question pool but another guy at the local club meeting said thats not the right way to go about it and you should actually understand the material. im not sure who to listen to honestly i picked up a couple study guides at the library, one is the ARRL handbook which feels like it was written for engineers, and theres another one that looks simpler but i dont know if its current. the question pool gets updated periodically right? so i need to make sure im not studying old questions. anyway does anyone have a method that actually worked for them, not looking for the most thorough way just something realistic for someone with a basic electronics background and maybe 2-3 weeks to study

had the exact same thing happen to me last winter. turned out the windows firewall on the remote machine was the culprit, not the router at all. something about how it handles persistent connections after the machine had been idle for a while. added a specific inbound rule for the RCForb server ports and it basically stopped happening. still drops occasionally but like once every few hours not every 20 minutes.

yeah the D710 can be a little finicky with the audio path on the internal TNC sometimes. first thing id check is whether an igate is actually hearing you vs just a digi. a digi alone wont get you on aprs.fi, you need an igate in the path to push it to the internet. try pulling up aprs.fi and zooming into your area and look at the little antenna icons, those are igates. if the nearest one is like 20 miles away on the other side of a hill thats probably your answer. also worth checking if your path is actually being gated or just repeated by a digi that has no igate downstream. another thing, and this sounds dumb but check that your symbol and position data is actually being included in the packet. ive seen setups where the beacon goes out but its just a status packet with no lat/lon in it so aprs.fi has nothing to plot.

im kind of in the same boat actually, sitting around 12wpm right now and trying to get to 20 before the end of the year. one thing that helped me recently was using the Morse Code Ninja videos on youtube, he has these word lists organized by frequency so you're drilling the most common words over and over until they just become sounds you recognize without thinking. dit dah dah dit is just P now, i dont count it out anymore ya know. also dont underestimate just having a straight key or a paddle and sending too, not just receiving. something about having to produce the code at a faster speed kind of forces your ear to keep up when you go back to copying

I had a 7900 in my Tacoma for years and did the console mount with a RAM mount setup, worked great once i got the angle right. The reaching sideways thing is real but you kind of get used to it and honestly for just checking repeaters or adjusting squelch while moving its fine. The main thing i'd say is dont skimp on the coax routing — i ran mine up through the firewall grommet and it took me an afternoon but its clean and i havent had any RFI issues. On the power question, yeah run it direct to the battery. At 50 watts you probably wont notice much difference either way but if you're ever pushing it on a long transmission you dont want voltage drop from a shared circuit messing with your audio. Two fuses, one right at the battery and one near the radio, standard stuff. The 7900 is a solid radio for mobile, you'll be happy with it once its in.

yeah both people have to upload to LoTW for the confirmation to show up, thats the part that trips everyone up at first. so you might have 500 QSOs in your log but only see like 200 confirmed on LoTW because the other station hasnt uploaded yet or maybe never will. its kind of a waiting game sometimes. for awards like DXCC through the ARRL, LoTW is really the gold standard and eQSL credits dont count toward that one. but eQSL has its own awards and some people really like it, and honestly the interface is a lot friendlier when you're starting out. i use both personally, just upload to both and you cover more bases. physical cards are totally worth doing in my opinion even if they're not strictly necessary. you can design one pretty cheaply through places like UX5UO print service or some of the club bureau options. you dont need a manager unless you're running a rare DX entity or something — for a regular US ham you just exchange cards directly or through the ARRL bureau which is really cheap. the bureau is slow though, like months sometimes, so dont expect quick turnaround. honestly just start with LoTW since you already have it set up, keep logging everything, and add the others when you feel like it. you wont regret having the paper cards eventually, theres something nice about a physical confirmation sitting on your desk

i was in the same boat like six months ago. the Q codes made sense pretty quick once i just looked them up but what really tripped me up was all the non-Q stuff like the 73 thing you mentioned, and also people saying OM which means old man but its not rude its just like how they say dude basically, and YL for young lady, XYL for wife. and then contest stuff is a whole other thing with 5NN and all that. just takes some listening time

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, got my general, and i keep seeing people doing CW on the bands and honestly it sounds really cool but i have no idea where to even begin. like i dont even know my alphabet yet. i tried a few youtube videos but they just show you the dots and dashes visually and that doesnt seem right, i feel like youre supposed to learn it by sound? anyway i downloaded like 3 different apps and none of them really clicked for me. is there a specific method people actually swear by or is it just grind until it sticks. also how long did it take you, realistically, because i see people saying stuff like oh i learned it in 6 weeks and that seems either impossible or they already had some background. just want to know if theres a reasonable path here or if its one of those things that just takes forever

honestly the intermod thing you mentioned is probably 80% of your problem. if the radios are bleeding into each other you're fighting a losing battle before you even start thinking about operating technique. proper bandpass filters, a good 2-radio controller like the MicroHAM or the homebrew stuff using the shift registers, and seriously separated antennas make a huge difference. i was running into the same thing until i got a dedicated rx antenna on the second radio just for S&P and it changed everything. as for the skill curve, yeah it takes a while. i'd say it took me maybe 4 or 5 serious contests before i stopped actively making things worse with the second radio. the trick that finally clicked for me was treating SO2R less like multitasking and more like a rhythm thing. you're not really running both simultaneously, you're just filling dead air on radio 1 with radio 2 activity. once you stop thinking of it as two radios and more like one radio with an opportunistic side channel it gets easier. the plateau question depends a lot on conditions but yeah above like 150-160 qph in a major contest single radio starts to hit a ceiling pretty hard especially during the slower periods.

dont overlook the power supply decoupling, i built something real similar last winter and had all kinds of audio garbage until i added a bigger filter cap right at the LM386 supply pin, like 100uF right at the chip. also make sure you have a cap on pin 7 of the 602, the datasheet recommends something there and i forgot it the first time around and got all kinds of weirdness. small thing but easy to miss when youre just winging it on perfboard.

ok so ive been licensed about 4 months now, got my general back in august and ive mostly just been on 2m locally but i finally want to try some HF. my elmer told me to start on 40 meters but when i look up the frequency allocations online i keep finding like 3 different answers depending on what site im on. some say phone starts at 7.175, some say 7.200, and then theres the ARRL band plan thing which seems different from the actual FCC allocation? also whats the deal with band edges, someone in my local club said i should never operate right at the edge but didnt really explain why. is there like a buffer zone or something i should know about? i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere im not supposed to

oh man i went through the exact same thing when i first got my ticket, spent like two weeks wondering why nobody could hear me on the local machine. turns out the repeater here uses 100.0 Hz and i had nothing programmed. felt like an idiot when i figured it out but whatever, we all start somewhere. one thing i'd add — some repeaters around here are actually linked into systems like IRLP or AllStar and that can get a little different in terms of etiquette cause your signal might be going out to a bunch of other repeaters across the country or whatever. usually theres a bit more of a pause before people respond because of the audio delay through the internet linking. just something to keep in mind if you notice the conversations feel a little slower paced than you'd expect.

yeah the bidirectional igate thing trips a lot of people up. most igates you see listed are rx only, they just pull packets off the air and push them to the APRS-IS. for a message to get back to you over RF the igate has to be configured to gate traffic back down, and a lot of operators either dont have it set up that way or their TNC/software is misconfigured. you can actually check on aprs.fi by clicking on the igate station and looking at what it reports about itself — if it shows as IGate with a two-way icon or mentions TX in the comments thats a decent sign, but honestly the only real test is to send a message to a station you know is on RF and see if the ack comes back. also worth checking if your radio is set to monitor for the ack properly after transmitting. the D710 should handle that automatically but ive seen weird behavior when the symbol or SSID gets set up wrong and the radio doesnt recognize the incoming ack as being addressed to it.

okay so i've been licensed about four months now and ive been lurking on the local 2m net pretty much every week just listening and getting comfortable with how it flows. last tuesday i finally checked in and the net control was super friendly about it so that felt good. but here's what i'm not sure about — the net had already been going for like 15 minutes when i finally got my radio sorted out and found the repeater. is it rude to check in late? i wasnt sure if i should just wait til next week or go ahead and key up during the check-in calls. i ended up waiting and just listened the whole time. also kind of a related thing, when net control asks if there's any traffic or announcements and you dont have anything, do you just say your call and say nothing further or do you actually say no traffic? i've heard people do it both ways and i dont want to sound like i dont know what im doing even though i guess i dont yet lol

so ive been thinking about making the drive out to Dayton this year, never been and a few guys at my local club keep saying its worth it at least once. problem is its like 6 hours from me and i dont really know if theres enough to see to justify the trip. last hamfest i went to was the one they do over in Millbrook and honestly the swap meet there was kind of thin, not a ton of vendors. is Dayton actually that different or is it just hype at this point

yeah this is basically the whole game with big pileups and most guys never figure it out. the DX op gets bored working the same slice of frequency over and over and drifts around, or they intentionally move to clear QRM. if you watch closely with a decent panadapter you can actually see where they're tuning between QSOs — there's usually a little jump in activity that follows them up or down the band. the other thing that's helped me a ton is keeping calls short. like absurdly short. a lot of guys send their whole callsign two or three times plus a signal report nobody asked for. i just send my suffix once when i think the timing is right and a lot of the time that's enough for the DX to at least get a partial and come back. then you complete it from there. works way better on CW obviously but even on SSB just saying your call once clearly at the right moment beats yelling it repeatedly. congrats on the contact btw, FT5XO was a nightmare pileup from what i heard

yeah the terrain thing gets people every single time. we did a similar drill about two years ago and had the exact same problem, spent months planning the net and nobody actually drove the routes to check simplex coverage. after that our EC made it a requirement that we do a coverage survey of any new deployment area before we finalize the communications plan. sounds obvious in hindsight but when youre sitting in a meeting room with a map it all looks fine. the message handling piece is a real skill gap in a lot of groups I think. reading traffic on the air is different from practicing it in a room, people get nervous or rushed and start dropping words. we now do standalone message passing drills separate from the big exercises just to build that muscle memory. even just getting on a local net once a week and passing a couple formal messages helps a ton. the winlink crowd sometimes gets grief for not doing voice but honestly having a written record that doesn't depend on someone copying fast is worth thinking about for certain types of traffic.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i keep getting confused about the 40 meter band. i know generals have phone privileges but i keep seeing different numbers thrown around and im honestly not sure where i can legally operate vs where i just shouldnt go because of conventions or whatever. like is there a difference between what the FCC says and what the band plan says? someone at the club meeting mentioned something about staying away from the band edges and i dont really understand why. is it just courtesy or is there actually a rule about it also someone told me DX stations are usually down around 7.100 or so and if i transmit there ill cause problems but i couldnt get a clear answer on why exactly

honestly i skipped the RSP1A and went straight to a HackRF and kind of regret it for receive-only work. the HackRF is 8-bit ADC and the RSP1A is 14-bit i think, so for weak signal monitoring the SDRplay stuff is going to walk all over it. HackRF is great if you need to transmit or do wideband stuff but for just listening on HF its not the best tool. i still use mine for certain things but if your use case is just monitoring and decoding i wouldnt necessarily go that direction

honestly i just use phonetics whenever the band sounds rough or if im not sure the other station copied me. on a clear repeater i usually just say the letters but if theres any doubt i'll go full phonetic. the thing that tripped me up early on was people using non-standard ones, heard a guy say London once instead of Lima and i had no idea what letter he meant for a second lol. stick to NATO and youll be fine, most people will know what you mean

yeah what he said about hamstudy, thats what i used about 8 months ago when i got mine. i was in the same boat as you, full time job, no time for a class. i just did like 20-30 minutes of practice questions on my lunch break for maybe 3 weeks. the electrical stuff isnt as bad as it sounds, mostly just ohms law which is V=IR and you can google a quick explainer and it clicks pretty fast. one thing i will say is dont wait too long once you feel ready because i kept second guessing myself and delayed another month for no reason. just go take it, worst case you dont pass and you can take it again same day at some sessions for another fee. but you'll probably pass

so i've been monitoring 10 and 12 meters pretty much every morning for the past few weeks and mostly just hearing noise, maybe a beacon or two if im lucky. yesterday afternoon though i tuned across 28.4 and it just opened up out of nowhere, worked a couple stations in Brazil and one in Argentina before it all died back down maybe 40 minutes later. wasnt even expecting it. ive been checking the solar flux numbers on the spaceweather sites and the SFI has been hovering around 160-170 which i thought was supposed to be pretty decent? but then some days the bands are totally dead and other days like yesterday you get these short windows. is there something else i should be watching besides the SFI to know when to actually sit down and try to work DX? i feel like im missing a lot of openings just because i dont know the right time to look