Linda Thompson

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

External tuners like the Unique Wire Tuner almost always have the lowest losses of the group. It uses an "L" network, which theoretically will be the lowest loss configuration. Built-in autotuners can have at least 3 dB of loss beyond that of the best tuner, meaning at full power, at least 50 watts is being dissipated in the tuner components. For serious operation, external is worth it.

so ive been a General for about three years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the Amateur Extra. i mostly do HF, some 40m and 20m SSB, a little bit of digital. the thing is i keep hearing people say the theory on the Extra exam is way harder than the General and honestly my math is pretty rusty at this point. im not an engineer or anything, just a hobbyist who got into this during the pandemic.
like what actually trips people up on it? i looked at a question pool a while back and some of the filter stuff and the oscillator theory questions looked pretty intimidating. is it mostly just memorization if you use something like HamStudy or do you actually need to understand the math behind it to pass? and is the extra HF spectrum access even worth the effort for a casual operator like me, or am i overthinking this

had almost the exact same thing on mine, turned out to be one of the driver transistors was intermittent. not fully dead just kinda... tired i guess. output was like 18-22w depending on band and temperature. the finals themselves tested okay when i pulled them. ended up replacing both driver transistors while i was in there since they were cheap enough and didnt want to do it twice. icom's service manual has the bias setup procedure, its not too bad if you have a power meter handy. good luck with it, these are nice radios when they're working right.

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into a local 2m net last tuesday and i think i maybe did it wrong? the net control acknowledged me and everything was fine but afterwards one of the guys pulled me aside on a different frequency and said i should have waited until net control asked for check-ins before i transmitted. but i swear i heard other people just jumping in and the net control was already running through callsigns so i figured it was okay to just throw my call in there.
i've been licensed about 4 months (general) and this was only my second time on a net. i don't really have a mentor or anything local so most of what i know i kind of pieced together from youtube and the arrl handbook. is there like a standard way nets are supposed to run or does every net do it differently? i dont want to be that guy who annoys everyone by doing stuff wrong.

Yeah I was wondering the same thing when I started. Got my tech last year and felt really self conscious about it at first but now i just do whatever feels right for the situation. One thing that helped was listening to how other ops handle it - some will give their call regular first then phonetic if needed. Also learned the hard way that saying "B as in boy" instead of "bravo" just confuses people lol

External tuners like the Unique Wire Tuner almost always have the lowest losses of the group. It uses an "L" network, which theoretically will be the lowest loss configuration. Built-in autotuners can have at least 3 dB of loss beyond that of the best tuner, meaning at full power, at least 50 watts is being dissipated in the tuner components. For serious operation, external is worth it.