Ashley Brown

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

so i had the shack open last night just kind of half paying attention while doing some stuff around the house and ended up just listening to a ragchew on 7.250 for like 45 minutes. two guys just going on about their gardens and the weather and one of them had just gotten a new tractor or something. didnt even matter what they were talking about honestly, just nice to have it on in the background. sometimes i forget why i got into this hobby and then something like that happens and i remember. anyway just felt like sharing that i guess

so ive been running a 40m inverted V for about three months now, apex at maybe 35 feet off a push up mast, legs going out at roughly 45 degrees and ending about 8 feet off the ground. resonant on 40, SWR is fine, radio is happy. but compared to my old hustler vertical with 4 radials that I used last year I feel like im losing signals left and right. guys who were 59 before are now like 55-56 and I feel like im running QRP when im not.
the inverted V should theoretically be better or at least comparable right? lower angle for DX maybe not but for domestic stuff it should do okay. im in a suburban lot so the vertical was always kind of squeezed in next to the fence anyway. ive checked connections at the feedpoint, coax looks good, balun is a homebrew 1:1 choke type wound on a FT240-43. not sure what else to check. maybe the angle of the legs? or is 35 feet just not high enough for a real low angle radiation pattern on 40.
anybody run both and have a feel for how they compare

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.

the D710 has a quirk where if your baud rate on the TNC side doesnt match what you've got configured in the radio menu it'll just silently fail to key up properly. Worth double checking that everything is set to 1200 baud consistently. Also make sure your TX delay isnt set too low — I had mine at like 20ms and kept having the same problem, bumped it to 50ms and it sorted itself out almost immediately.
The other thing I'd check is your audio levels going into the TNC from the radio's discriminator. If you're clipping or too low the packets will encode garbage and digis won't even bother repeating them. Direwolf has a nice tool for checking this if you can pipe audio into a laptop, just to verify what's actually coming out before you spend more time chasing gremlins in the path config.

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into a local net last night, been licensed for about 4 months now and have mostly just been listening. the net control called for check-ins and i just said my callsign and that i had no traffic. guy came back to me and acknowledged me but honestly i wasnt totally sure if i did it right or if there was some specific format i was supposed to follow.
like do you just give your callsign or do you give your name and location too? i've heard different nets do it differently and didnt want to ask on air because i was already nervous enough. also when net control was wrapping up and asked if there were any final comments i wasnt sure if i was supposed to say something or just listen. ended up just staying quiet.
anyway overall it went okay i think but would love to know what the actual expected format is, if there is one. dont want to be that guy who does everything wrong on his first time.

i built something similar last winter and went through basically the same thing. turned out my dummy load was also slightly off which was throwing my power measurements off from the start, worth double checking that too before you assume the rig is the problem. not saying thats whats happening but it bit me and i spent like two weekends chasing a problem that was partly my test setup.

so i've been studying for about 6 weeks and finally passed my technician exam yesterday morning, went home and borrowed my dad's baofeng to listen around on the local 2m repeater and ended up actually keying up and talking to a guy named Ron who was super patient with me while i fumbled through my callsign like three times lol. he walked me through the whole thing and gave me a signal report and everything. i know baofengs get a lot of grief on here but honestly it worked fine for a first contact, already looking at a proper radio though maybe the FT-65 or something in that range. anyway just wanted to say hi and that this hobby is already way more fun than i expected

ohio from tennessee on 4 watts is solid, nice work. i just started getting into qrp this spring and honestly the park activations are addictive. i havent built anything from scratch yet, just using a little commercial rig, but reading this makes me want to try a kit. which board did you end up going with if you dont mind me asking?

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

yeah the interference thing between the two radios is the part people underestimate. i tried running my 7600 and an old FT-1000MP on the same operating session during sweepstakes and even with the antennas being on different bands the IMD was making me crazy. ended up needing bandpass filters on both radios before it got manageable, the 4O3A or the Array Solutions ones are what most people end up with but thats another couple hundred bucks minimum
not trying to talk you out of it just saying budget the full system cost before you decide, its not just a second radio its the whole ecosystem around 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.

so i've been studying for about 6 weeks and finally passed my technician exam yesterday morning, went home and borrowed my dad's baofeng to listen around on the local 2m repeater and ended up actually keying up and talking to a guy named Ron who was super patient with me while i fumbled through my callsign like three times lol. he walked me through the whole thing and gave me a signal report and everything. i know baofengs get a lot of grief on here but honestly it worked fine for a first contact, already looking at a proper radio though maybe the FT-65 or something in that range. anyway just wanted to say hi and that this hobby is already way more fun than i expected

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

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

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.