Michael Wu

so i just passed my general last month and ive been using my sequential call which is fine but its kind of a mouthful and im looking at applying for a vanity call through the FCC ULS system. ive read a bunch of stuff online but im getting conflicting info about how the whole thing actually works now. from what i can tell it used to be this big complicated priority system where like Extra class guys got first dibs, then Advanced, then General etc. and there were application windows and all that. but now i keep reading that its just... first come first served? like whoever submits first gets it? also does it matter what call district the call is from? like if i live in the 4th district can i grab a 1x2 call from the 2nd district or does the FCC care about that. my elmer says it doesnt matter anymore but he got his license like 20 years ago so im not sure if the rules changed and one more thing — whats the realistic wait time looking like these days. ive heard anywhere from a couple weeks to like 2 months and i have no idea what to actually expect

Field Day is definitely the move for your first one, no question. the whole point of it is to be a club event and its totally normal to just sit down next to an experienced op and watch for a while before you take the mic. nobody is going to judge you and honestly most clubs are thrilled when newer hams show up because it keeps things going. plus you learn SO much just by watching how someone works a pileup or calls CQ repeatedly without losing their mind. CQ WW is great but it can be kind of brutal if you dont know what youre doing yet, the rates get really high and the logging gets stressful. SOTA is its own thing entirely and yeah its not really a contest in the traditional sense, more like an awards program for activating summits. but its addictive, fair warning. i know guys who got into SOTA and basically stopped doing traditional contesting altogether because they'd rather be on a mountain than in a shack. if you want something before Field Day there's usually some state QSO parties in the spring that are pretty low key and good practice. look up what state parties are coming up on the contest calendar at contestcalendar.com and just pick one, throw out some calls and see what happens. worst case you make a few contacts and learn how exchange works without the pressure of a huge international event.

the shoulder on the rising edge is almost certainly not gonna kill your receive performance on a direct conversion setup, especially if youre just using it for casual listening. the SA602 is pretty tolerant as long as your LO level is in the right ballpark — datasheet says around 200-300mV for decent conversion but ive run them a bit outside that and they still work fine. the classic thing people get hung up on with colpitts oscillators is the loading effect when you connect the next stage, so if you havent already stick a buffer between the oscillator and the mixer input, even just an emitter follower with a 2N3904 is enough. that can also clean up the waveform a bit because youre not letting the mixer pull on the tank circuit. the LM386 is fine for getting started but fair warning, it picks up every bit of RF that looks at it funny. keep your leads short from the mixer output and put a cap across the supply pin, the datasheet recommends 10uF and a 0.047 in parallel. ive had setups with the 386 that sounded awful until i sorted out the bypassing and then they were totally usable.

the biggest thing i can tell you is dont learn it visually, like dont sit there memorizing dit dah dah = W or whatever. your brain will try to do that and it just creates a bottleneck when you try to actually copy at speed. what you want is to hear the whole letter as a sound, like W sounds like a specific thing, not three separate elements you have to decode. for actually doing it, LCWO.net is pretty much the standard starting point. it uses the Koch method which basically throws you in at a fast character speed right away, like 20wpm characters but with long gaps between them, then as you get better it closes the gaps. sounds weird but it works better than starting slow because you never have to unlearn anything. i spent a few months on there years ago before i ever got on the air with CW and it made a huge difference. just do 15-20 minutes a day consistently, thats honestly better than hour long sessions twice a week. also the app Morse Mania is pretty decent for android if you want something on your phone for when youre waiting around. dont expect to be ragchewing in a month but you'll be surprised how fast the letters start to click if you stick with it

so ive been trying to get a proper remote station going for about three months now and im mostly there but this one thing is driving me absolutely crazy. using RemoteHams RCForb on the client side and the server software is running on a win10 box at the shack which is about 200 miles away. SDR side is an RTL-SDR V3 piped through into the setup but i also have the actual transceiver patched in for TX. problem is maybe every 20-30 minutes the connection just drops. not a full disconnect always, sometimes it just freezes the waterfall and the audio goes silent for like 15-20 seconds then comes back, sometimes its a full drop and i have to reconnect. the internet at the remote end is a 50/10 cable connection so its not exactly fiber but it shouldnt be this bad. ive checked the router and the port forwarding looks right, 7300 and the audio ports are all open. latency to that IP is usually around 35ms which seems fine. anyone seen this behavior before or know what to look at. im wondering if its the router at the remote end doing something weird with idle connections, maybe some kind of timeout thing, but i dont really know where to start poking around.

yeah that 13-15wpm wall is super common, almost everyone hits it. what's happening is you're still sounding out some letters in your head instead of just hearing the whole word as a chunk. the jump from 13 to 20 is less about raw speed and more about switching from letter-by-letter to word recognition, which is a completely different mental process and honestly kind of has to be relearned from scratch. what helped me was setting my character speed way higher than my overall speed, like 20wpm characters but with extra spacing between them so the overall pace is slow enough to copy. Farnsworth spacing its called. you train your ear to hear the characters at full speed but you give yourself time to write it down. then you gradually close that gap. took me maybe 4 or 5 months of pretty consistent daily practice, maybe 20 minutes a day. also just listening to W1AW bulletin code practice on shortwave even if you cant copy it all, just having it on in the background while you do other stuff around the shack seems to help your brain absorb the rhythm without you even trying

yeah what he said about the audio levels. i spent like a weekend on this exact problem last year. one thing that finally got me sorted was using the VARA FM calibration tool, oh wait you're on HF not FM. but VARA HF has a similar thing, there's an audio calibration in the VARA HF settings somewhere that lets you check input and output levels before you try to connect anything. run that first before anything else honestly. also just a thought - have you tried connecting to a Telnet session first just to confirm your account is actually working and your messages are set up right? sometimes the issue is account side not RF side and it saves a lot of headache to rule that out. if telnet works fine then you know its definitely something with the RF path or the modem config

so ive been fighting this for about two weeks now and im pretty sure im close but something is still off. running a TM-D710G in the shack connected to a dedicated 2m antenna on the roof, about 25ft of LMR-400 so loss should be minimal. i can see my beacon going out on the radio display and the rig is definitely transmitting — i can hear the packet burst on a nearby scanner. the local digi is only about 8 miles away line of sight, maybe a little less, and i can see OTHER stations getting gated to aprs.fi just fine but mine never shows up there. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which from what i read should be pretty standard. SSID is -9 because im mostly using it mobile but right now parked at home. my symbol is set to a car which is maybe confusing but whatever. one thing i noticed is i can occasionally see the digi ACKing stuff but not sure if thats related to messaging or just normal digi behavior. is there some setting in the TM-D710 that would cause it to tx but not actually format the packet right? i feel like i went through the menu a hundred times but maybe i missed something with the callsign entry or the SSID setup. any ideas appreciated

so i passed my technician exam last saturday and my license finally showed up in the FCC database yesterday which is awesome, but the callsign i got is kind of a mouthful. its a 2x3 format which i guess is normal for new techs but i was reading somewhere about vanity callsigns and now im wondering if i should just apply for one right away or if theres some waiting period or something. like do i have to wait until i upgrade to general or extra before i can even apply for a vanity call? and does the sequential process just mean they assign you whatever is next in line in your district? i tried reading the FCC ULS instructions but honestly it reads like stereo instructions from 1987 and i got lost pretty quick. any help appreciated, im in the 4th district if that matters

so ive been building this 40m direct conversion receiver on and off for like 3 months now, based loosely on the NorCal 40 design but with a few changes because i couldnt source some of the original parts. anyway got it actually receiving signals last night which was pretty exciting, SSB sounds decent and CW is nice and crisp, but theres this low frequency hum underneath everything that doesnt go away no matter what i do with the volume or the RF gain. ive already tried a different power supply thinking it was ripple from my bench supply but same hum on a fresh 9v battery so its not that. the LO is a simple colpitts running around 7 mhz and im wondering if its maybe audio pickup from something or maybe my layout is causing issues. ground plane is just a piece of copper clad i etched myself, connections look solid. the hum sounds like its maybe 60hz or close to it, hard to say exactly without a scope probe on the audio stage. anyone dealt with something like this on a homebrew DC receiver before? im guessing its either my detector stage picking up mains somehow or maybe a ground loop between the audio amp and the detector but im not sure where to even start poking around.

okay so field day is kind of both — it counts as a contest in that you exchange information and accumulate points, but the ARRL set it up primarily as a public outreach and emergency preparedness exercise. that said plenty of clubs go absolutely full bore competitive on it and it gets intense. for a newer ham its honestly one of the best ones to start with because most clubs are super welcoming and youll learn a ton just sitting next to somebody experienced and watching how they operate. cq ww is a different beast. its one of the biggest contests on the calendar, probably the biggest in terms of worldwide participation. ssb weekend is usually end of october, cw in november. with an ic-7300 and even an attic dipole you can absolutely make contacts, the bands are wall to wall signals during that weekend. dont worry about being competitive just focus on working as many new entities as you can and practicing your exchange. the exchange is dead simple — signal report and cq zone number, thats it. SOTA is not really a contest at all, its more of an awards program. activators go up summits and chasers work them from home. theres no head to head competition, just points toward awards. totally different vibe from a traditional contest but a lot of people love mixing both hobbies. sounds like your activation went well honestly 12 contacts from a hilltop with an 818 is pretty solid depending on conditions.

yeah the youtube thing is a trap, dont start there. what worked for me and honestly what most people i know swear by is the Koch method — basically you start with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm or whatever, and you dont move on until you can copy those two at like 90% accuracy, then you add one more. the key is your brain learns the sound as a whole thing instead of counting dots and dashes which will absolutely kill you later on. LCWO.net is free and does exactly this, i used it for a few months and it genuinely works if you stick with it even just 10-15 minutes a day. the other thing people dont tell you is it takes a while before anything clicks and then one day it just kind of does. dont give up in week two when it feels impossible

so the baofeng menu situation is genuinely confusing, you're not alone there. what you want is to make sure you're setting the T-CTCS (transmit CTCSS) to 100.0 Hz, not the R-CTCS which is just for receive squelch. a lot of people accidentally set the receive one thinking thats all they need. if you set the T-CTCS correctly the radio will encode that tone on your transmissions and the repeater should open up for you. as for the courtesy tone — thats a little beep or chirp the repeater makes after someone stops transmitting, basically tells you the repeater is done with that transmission and you're clear to key up. its good practice to wait for it before you respond otherwise you might step on the tail end of what the other person was saying. some repeaters have a pretty quick timeout on it, others take a moment. just listen for a second or two after the other person unkeys and you'll hear it. once you get into the repeater try a short call like your callsign and say you're testing, usually someone monitoring will come back and let you know they can hear you.

hey welcome to the hobby, dont stress about it. the tone you see listed is almost always the one you need to transmit — that's what the repeater uses to open its squelch and let your signal through. so encode only is usually the right setting for most situations. the decode side is just for your radio to filter out other signals on your end, a lot of people dont bother with it. as for nobody responding, honestly thats pretty normal on a lot of repeaters these days. a lot of them just sit quiet for hours. best thing to do is just say your callsign and something like 'listening' or 'monitoring' after you key up. just that simple. if someone's around they'll come back to you. some repeaters also have a courtesy tone — a little beep after someone transmits — so listen for that after you key up, it usually means the repeater at least heard you.

So i just got my general a few months back and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly HF on 40 and 20m. Someone in my local club mentioned i should be uploading to LoTW but then another guy said eQSL is better for certain awards and now im just confused about what the difference even is between all of these and whether i actually need to bother with paper cards at all. Like i understand the basic concept, you log the contact and the other person logs it and if they match up you get a confirmation. But i dont really get why there are so many different systems. Do most people use all of them? And is there any reason to still bother mailing physical cards through the bureau or direct? Seems like a lot of effort when you could just click a button. Also somebody mentioned ARRL and DXCC and i think LoTW is related to that somehow but im not sure how it all fits together. Sorry if this is a really basic question, just trying to figure out what i should actually be doing with my log.