Ashley Brown

the inconsistency you're describing at that speed is almost definitely paddle tension and your grip, not the keyer itself. most cheap paddles come from the factory way too loose and people dont realize how much that affects feel. try tightening the tension screws just a tiny bit at a time until you feel a definite spring-back when you release a contact. if the paddle feels mushy at all thats your problem right there. also gap adjustment matters a lot more than people give it credit for. the contact gap should be just barely there, like a piece of paper thickness or so. too wide and youre working too hard to close the contact, which throws off your rhythm. as for the 7300 keyer vs external, honestly the built in one is totally fine for learning. MFJ keyers are okay but i wouldnt say they're a huge upgrade over whats already in the radio. save your money and spend the time on paddle technique instead. 12 wpm is a perfectly reasonable learning speed, just dont rush it and try to copy what you send in your head as you send it, that helps a lot with timing consistency.

few things to check — first thing id look at is your audio levels. even if the TNC looks like its keying up properly the audio going into the radio might be too hot or too quiet and the packets are just garbage on the air. digipeaters are picky about that. try finding a local igate frequency display or use a second radio to actually listen to what youre putting out. if it sounds like garbage or the deviation is way off no digipeater is gonna pick it up regardless of coverage. also double check that the PTT is actually releasing cleanly. ive seen issues with Mobilinkd where there's a slight tail on the PTT and it ends up clipping the beginning of the next packet or something, cant remember exactly but it was weird. the comment field change wouldnt cause this, that doesnt matter at all for routing.

yeah im going, me and a buddy from the club are driving up friday night to get there early saturday morning. the flea market is still pretty solid honestly, maybe not as massive as like 2018 or so but theres still tons of stuff to dig through. if your lookin for a carpool spot i think we got room but youd have to be cool with leaving real early, like 5am early

yeah i did pretty much exactly this a few years back. had an inverted V for 40 at about 40 feet and put up a quarter wave vertical in the corner of my yard with about 16 radials on the ground, not buried, just laying in the grass. the difference on transmit was pretty negligible honestly, within an S unit or so either way depending on the path. but receive was noticeably noisier on the vertical — my neighborhood has similar issues with all the crap electronics people run and the vertical picked up all of it. the inverted V was quieter for me and honestly more practical to maintain. that said i know guys who swear by their verticals for DX because of the low angle thing, and if you're trying to work Europe from the midwest on 40 late in the evening that low angle radiation probably does matter. for local and regional ragchewing though i dunno that you'd notice much difference. the dipole is probably fine for what you're doing.

you can definitely try with what you have first, especially if your yagis are decent quality. i started EME with about 150w and 4x12el and managed a few qsos on good moon passes. the key is really elevation angle and libration - wait for when moon is high and libration is favorable. for doppler i use map65 works fine, just make sure your computer clock is spot on. get some practice with the software first using terrestrial signals

honestly dont overthink it. i was in the same boat, Tech for like three years just sitting on 2m and 70cm and then finally buckled down for General. the question pool is like 450 questions or something and only 35 show up on the test. i used HamStudy.org basically every day for maybe three weeks, just drilling questions on my phone during lunch breaks. the electrical theory stuff looks scary at first but once you see the same questions a few times it clicks. i didnt really understand all of it deeply but i understood enough to pass and honestly the HF experience itself teaches you the rest way faster than studying ever could. as for whether its worth it — man 40 meters alone on a weekend evening is worth every bit of effort. you can be talking to guys in europe or south america just with a wire in a tree. its a completely different world from repeater stuff. just go do it, you wont regret it

40m phone for general is 7.175-7.300 MHz in region 2 (thats us). Stay away from 7.300 since thats the band edge. Most people hang out around 7.200-7.250 for casual ragchewing. Your radio should have band edges programmed in but double check the manual

ok so i passed my tech exam about 3 weeks ago and got my callsign last week, super excited to get on the air but im honestly really confused about what im actually allowed to do. like i know i have HF privileges on 10m but only part of it? and then theres something about phone vs cw vs data and different parts of the band have different modes allowed and i just cant wrap my head around it all. i looked at part 97 online and it was just... a lot. i dont really understand the way its written. is there like a simpler breakdown somewhere or can someone just explain the main things i need to worry about as a new tech? mostly interested in VHF/UHF for now but want to understand the HF stuff too eventually. dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere i shouldnt be.

ok so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i check into the local 2m net pretty regularly but theres a whole bunch of stuff i still feel like im doing wrong or at least not doing the way everyone else does it. like when the net control asks for check-ins and i give my call, sometimes i hear other people say their call AND their name AND their location all at once and other times people just say their call sign and thats it. i never know which one to do so i usually just say my call and then feel awkward. also whats the deal with traffic nets vs just a regular ragchew net — are the procedures pretty different? the club guys at the meeting said i should try to get on one but i didnt want to ask too many questions and look dumb in front of everyone lol. also is there a wrong time to just break in with a comment or should i always wait to be called on by net control? i feel like i broke in at a weird moment last week and nobody said anything but it felt off.

so ive been wanting to build something from scratch for a while now and figured a crystal set would be the easiest entry point, which it mostly was. grabbed a random coil form from the junk box, wound about 70 turns of 26AWG enameled wire, threw a 365pF variable cap on there and wired up a 1N34A germanium diode i found in a bag of old parts my dad left me. slapped some alligator clips on a piece of cardboard for terminals and hooked it to a long wire out the window. thing actually worked which honestly surprised me more than i expected it to. got a couple AM stations coming through pretty clearly with some decent earphones, though im in a semi-rural area so not sure how it would do in a city with more stations fighting each other. the selectivity is pretty rough obviously, two of the stronger stations bleed into each other if im tuned anywhere in the middle of the band. my question is whether adding a second tuned circuit would actually help that much or if im just hitting a fundamental limit with this approach. ive seen some double tuned designs but the coupling between the two coils seems fiddly and i dont want to spend a week tweaking it if the improvement is marginal. anyone built one of these that can give me a realistic expectation of how much better selectivity gets with a second LC stage?

i went through exactly this last spring. ended up doing the inverted V and dont regret it at all. my apex is only like 18 feet which everyone told me was too low but i regularly get 59 reports on 40 out to about 1200 miles which is all i really care about. the vertcal i had before (commercial trapped one) was just a noise magnet in my neighborhood. only thing id add is dont cheap out on the center insulator/balun situation, i used a cheap 1:1 choke balun i wound myself and it made a noticeable difference in the noise floor compared to just running coax straight to the feedpoint.

I've had good luck with custom Python automation scripts for repeater control and DTMF functions on Pi hardware. For your antenna switching, make sure you're using proper isolation between the Pi GPIO and relay drivers - that's usually where the timing glitches come from, not the Pi itself.

the mic gain thing is definitely where to start. on the 590 you really want to watch the ALC meter while you're talking — you want it barely kissing the bottom of the ALC range on voice peaks, not slamming it. if the ALC is working hard the whole time youre talking that usually means mic gain is too high and you're compressing the heck out of everything before it even gets to the processor stage, which gives you that squashed muffled sound people complain about the PR-40 is a large diaphragm condenser-style mic (well dynamic but same idea in terms of proximity) so you really dont want to be right on top of it either. work it from like 6-8 inches and slightly off axis if you have a resonant voice. the low end buildup from close-miking that thing can absolutely bury your highs and make you sound like youre underwater on the receiving end as for the speech processor — personally i leave mine off for casual rag chewing and only turn it on if conditions are rough or im trying to bust through a pileup. when its on keep the level conservative, like barely noticeable. guys who crank the processor sound terrible and dont realize it because they cant hear themselves.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new entities and all that but every time i try to actually talk to someone its just the standard exchange and done. i get it thats kind of the point. but lately ive been reading about JS8Call and it seems like the idea is you can have a real QSO using the same weak signal tech underneath it. tried it last weekend on 40m and the waterfall looked completely dead compared to what FT8 looks like. maybe 3 or 4 signals visible the whole session. so my question is — is JS8Call just not popular enough to be usable or am i looking at the wrong times, wrong bands? i was on around 7.078 which i think is the standard dial freq but honestly not sure if thats even right anymore. also still have WSJT-X running on the side and i noticed my FT8 decode rate dropped a bit, guessing thats a cpu thing. running on a pretty old laptop. anyway the main thing is i want to know if JS8Call is worth sticking with or if its kind of a dead end activity wise

so ive been plugging away at morse code for about 3 months now and im stuck somewhere around 7-8 wpm and it feels like the wall is real. i started with the Koch method using the G4FON trainer and got through all the characters pretty quick but now actually copying at speed is just... not happening the way i expected. im doing maybe 20-30 minutes a day which i know probably isnt enough but thats what i got. mostly using the trainer and sometimes listening to W1AW code practice on 40m. my sending is actually not bad i think but copying is where i fall apart, especially when its a word i dont recognize right away and then i miss the next two characters while my brain is still stuck on the first one. anyway i guess im asking — for people who actually got to 20wpm or beyond, how long did it realistically take from being a total beginner, and is there anything that actually worked for you other than just grinding hours. i keep reading about word recognition vs individual characters and honestly im not sure i fully understand the difference in practice.

Looking for guidance on phonetic alphabet usage for HF DX work. I understand the standard phonetic alphabet for amateur radio comes from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the ARRL and many other national entities recommend the NATO phonetics for Amateur Radio use as most Hams around the world recognize them. However, I keep hearing experienced DXers use alternatives like "Germany" for G and "Sugar" for S. When should I stick to NATO phonetics versus using DX alternatives? Are there specific situations where one works better than the other? I routinely hear experienced HF operators using "germany" for G, "japan" for J, and "sugar" for S but want to make sure I'm following best practices.

yeah so theres actually two seperate things going on with tones — theres the tone YOUR radio transmits (so the repeater will open up and let you through) and then theres a tone the repeater might send back to you, which some people call the courtesy tone or sometimes its a different CTCSS for linked systems. for basic access you really only need the encode side set correctly, which means your radio sends the right tone when you key up. the baofeng menu can be a little confusing because it has options for like T-CTCS, R-CTCS, and sometimes both. T-CTCS is what you want — thats your transmit tone. R-CTCS would make your radio only unsquelch when it hears a specific tone coming back, which most people dont bother with unless theyre on a linked system with a lot of noise. as for etiquette, honestly just listen for a bit before you jump in. if the repeater sounds quiet just give your callsign and say youre monitoring, or say something like "(your call) listening" and see if anyone comes back. most regulars on a healthy repeater are pretty welcoming to new folks, especially if you just say hey im new. dont worry too much about messing up, everyone does it.

yeah the band edge thing trips up a lot of new generals. so the FCC allocation is the legal part — you genuinely cannot transmit outside those limits or you're violating part 97. the ARRL band plan on top of that is more of a gentlemans agreement, nobody is going to fine you for ignoring it but people will get annoyed if you set up a ragchew in the middle of the digital portion for example. for 40m phone as a general you've got 7.175 to 7.300 MHz, at least thats where most people operate to avoid bumping into the extra class guys lower down. the reason people say avoid the band edge is that your signal has sidebands — on SSB you're running lower sideband on 40 so your actual transmitted signal extends a few kHz below your dial frequency. if you tune to exactly 7.125 and you're running LSB your signal is actually going below that and technically outside your allocation. so most people just stay a few kHz inside to be safe. honestly just stay above 7.180 or so for casual phone and you'll be fine for starters.

the 7300 keyer is fine dont worry about that. i actually compared it to my Winkeyer USB a while back and for casual operating and practice there wasnt much difference i could notice. save your money on a standalone keyer for now. one thing nobody told me when i was learning — check that your paddle contact gap is set consistently on both sides. if the dit contact is closer than the dah contact or vice versa you'll fight yourself constantly. bencher paddles are nice but they do need a little tweaking out of the box sometimes. theres a good video on youtube from W7ATC i think that shows how to set up a bencher properly, might be worth a look.

Our local ARES group does quarterly go-kit exercises where we all meet at a park and set up from scratch. Really helps identify weak points in your setup and keeps the muscle memory fresh. Maybe suggest something similar to your EC?

yeah the battery thing gets everyone the first time, no shame in it. i've been doing emcomm stuff for probably 15 years now and i still see experienced guys show up to activations with power setups that look great on paper and then reality happens. cold weather especially will just destroy your capacity estimates if you did your math at room temp. the net control discipline issue you mentioned is real and honestly its mostly a training problem not a people problem. most hams just dont practice formal net procedures in their day to day operating so when a drill rolls around the muscle memory isnt there. our group started doing a quick 30 minute tabletop before every actual exercise just to walk through the protocols verbally and it helped a lot. even just reading through the net script out loud as a group before keying up made a noticeable difference. the ICS form thing is a whole other rabbit hole but if you're interfacing with served agencies it really is worth the pain of learning it. they dont care about our radio stuff, they care about the information being in a format they can plug into their own systems. took me a while to accept that but its true.

so ive been running a Yaesu FT-7900R in my F-150 for about three weeks now and overall im pretty happy with it but the antenna situation is killing me. i started with a mag mount on the roof which worked fine i guess but it kept sliding around when i went through the car wash and i was worried about scratching the paint. so then i tried mounting a NMO on the cab but my wife was not thrilled about drilling into the truck. right now ive got a lip mount on the rain gutter but the SWR on 70cm is kinda mediocre, like 1.8 to 1 which im told is fine but i feel like i should be doing better. the antenna is a Diamond NR770HB which a guy at the club recommended. does anyone else run a lip mount and did you have this same issue or is it just my placement on the passenger rear corner

I just got my general a few months ago and honestly the weekly net was one of the first things i started doing regularly. its kind of how i got comfortable actually transmitting because it feels low stakes compared to just calling CQ on HF. so for what its worth the newer hams probably appreciate it more than you know even if they dont say anything. i dont have ideas for getting old timers back but maybe posting the net times on like QRZ or the club website if its not already there? i had no idea our local net even existed for like the first two months until someone mentioned it at a hamfest

so this has been driving me nuts for about two weeks now. buddy of mine handed me his 7300 to look at, says it just stopped putting out power one day. no smoke, no obvious trauma, just keyed up and noticed the watt meter wasnt moving. receives perfectly fine, all bands, sounds great on rx. but hit the PTT and you get nothing. ALC meter doesnt even twitch. ive already checked the obvious stuff — antenna port is fine, tried a dummy load, RF output setting is maxed, speech processor is off. internal ATU is bypassed. firmware is current. swapped mics. still nothing. i cracked it open and visually everything looks okay, no scorched components that i can see around the PA section. havent done any actual probing yet because i wanted to see if anyone else has run into this before i start poking around. is there a known weak point on these for TX failure or am i looking at a full PA board swap?

honestly for 8 hours i'd just run the generator and stop overthinking it. yes there's some RFI but a common mode choke at the feedpoint handles most of it and a laptop doesn't care about generator noise at all. the battery math you're doing is right and a bank big enough to run 35A for 8 hours even at 50% duty cycle is gonna weigh more than the eu2200i anyway, and cost way more up front. the one thing i will say is dont skimp on the extension cord situation — ran into a guy at a field day type event who was getting all kinds of weird voltage drop issues because he had like 50 feet of 16 gauge going from the genny to his station. use at least 12 gauge if you're going any distance, or just park the generator close and deal with the exhaust fumes.