David Williams50

i went through basically the exact same thing a few months ago lol. took me like 4 or 5 passes before i actually completed a contact. one thing that helped me was just listening for my own signal in the downlink before the pass even starts - when the bird is still low on the horizon the doppler shift is changing fast so thats actually the hardest time to stay locked in. once its higher up things settle down a bit and you have more time to find yourself in the passband. also are you doing full duplex? because if youre not monitoring your downlink while you transmit you really cant tell if youre in the right spot. the 847 can do it but you have to make sure its configured for that, i think theres a setting in the menu for satellite mode that enables the split receive

so ive been at this for about 8 months now and honestly the first few months were great, went from barely copying anything to around 10-12wpm pretty smoothly. started with the Koch method on the lcwo website and it felt like things were clicking. but now im just... stuck. im sitting around 13wpm and every time i try to push to 15 it falls apart. i get a letter wrong and then my brain kind of freezes trying to figure out what i missed and then i miss the next three letters too and its just a cascade of failure lol my practice routine is pretty much just lcwo for 15-20 minutes in the morning before work, sometimes i listen to actual qso traffic on 40m in the evenings. someone at my club told me i should be doing longer sessions but honestly i dont have the time and also i read somewhere that short focused sessions are actually better? idk anyone been through this and gotten past it? what actually worked for you. im not in a huge rush but it would be nice to actually use cw on the air without feeling like im going to panic the moment someone sends faster than i expect

im in a similar spot, built a little pixie kit a while back as kind of a stepping stone before doing a full scratch build. havent done anything that ambitious yet but this is making me want to try. what design did you end up using from QST, was it one of the older ones or something more recent? i feel like there are so many options and i keep getting paralyzed trying to pick one to start with

not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely confuses a lot of new hams because there really isnt one unified system and they all kind of do slightly different things LoTW is run by the ARRL and its what you want for DXCC and most of the big awards. yes it works exactly like you said — you upload your log, the other station uploads theirs, and the system matches them up automatically. can take anywhere from a few minutes to months depending on when the other op gets around to uploading. some contesters batch upload everything right after an event, some DX stations take forever. just be patient eQSL is totally separate, they dont talk to each other at all. eQSL has its own awards and some people really like it because its fast and free and you can send a digital card with artwork right away. but for DXCC it doesnt count, you need LoTW or a physical card via the bureau or direct as for physical cards — yeah theres definitely a courtesy thing there. if someone sends you a card direct (meaning they paid postage), you really should send one back, ideally with a return envelope and a couple green stamps to cover return postage if theyre overseas. bureau cards are more informal but still nice to reciprocate. it doesnt have to be fancy, lots of people just use cheap printed cards from vista print or whatever

so ive been messing with an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now mostly just scanning the local repeaters and doing some airband listening and honestly its been fine for that stuff. but i keep reading about the SDRplay units and wondering if theres actually a noticeable difference or if its one of those things where the specs look better on paper but in practice you cant really tell my main use case is HF monitoring, im licensed general class and want to start actually receiving some shortwave stuff, maybe do some weak signal work eventually. i know the RTL-SDR does HF through direct sampling mode and ive tried it but it feels kind of deaf compared to what people describe. running SDR# on windows and tried GQRX on the laptop too. antenna is just a random wire out the window right now which i know is part of the problem anyway is the RSP1B actually worth like $130 or whatever it is now or should i just get a better antenna first and stick with the dongle for a while. not trying to receive CW contests or anything crazy just want better HF coverage

CQ WW is honestly one of the best ways to actually learn contesting because theres SO much activity you can just tune around and figure out the rhythm pretty quick. the exchange is simple — your signal report and your CQ zone, for most of north america thats zone 5 or 4 or 3 depending where you are, easy to look up. N1MM+ is what most people use for logging and it handles all that automatically once you set it up, worth taking an hour to get familiar before the contest weekend. Field Day is kind of its own thing, its more of a club/emergency preparedness event with a weird scoring system, not really a traditional contest even though it feels like one. November Sweepstakes is actually fantastic for new contesters, domestic only so the band conditions dont matter as much and the exchange has more info in it which helps you slow down and actually understand whats going on. dont skip it. your ic-7300 and a vertical will do fine, ive worked plenty of countries in CQ WW with worse.

so i finally got off my butt and did a summit activation after talking about it for like two years. drove up to a local summit, nothing crazy just a 6 point peak, and honestly it was way more fun than i expected but also a few things caught me off guard first off the wind. i knew it would be windy up there but my end fed just kept getting blown around and i had a hard time getting it up in the trees. ended up just kind of draping it over some brush which worked i guess but it looked terrible. also my KX2 battery died faster than i thought it would and i was running pretty low power too. made enough contacts to qualify but it was close anyway the actual operating part was great once i got set up. pileup on 40 was wild for about 10 minutes then it died down. spotted myself on sotawatch and that helped a lot. anyone else have tips for getting antennas up in open summit areas where theres no trees? thats probably my biggest problem to solve before next time

so i've been lurking on this forum for like 3 months while studying for the technician exam and i finally passed it last tuesday. got my callsign a few days later and just spent the last hour nervously keying up on the 147.315 repeater in my area. first transmission was pretty rough honestly, i forgot to wait for the courtesy tone and just started talking over someone finishing up a QSO. felt like an idiot but the guy i interrupted was super cool about it and we ended up chatting for about 20 minutes about his antenna setup. he's been licensed since the 80s and gave me a ton of advice. anyway just wanted to share because i feel like i've been building up to this moment for months and it finally happened. now i'm trying to figure out if i should bother with HF right away or just hang out on VHF for a while first. my radio is just a baofeng uv-5r for now which i know everyone has opinions about lol

honestly for the 7300 i wouldnt go hardware unless you really know what youre doing in there. the DSP TX processing on that radio is actually pretty capable and most of the improvement people hear after doing hardware mods is stuff they couldve gotten from just spending an hour properly setting up the TX equalizer and the bass/treble rolloff in the menus. i went through this exact thing about a year ago, spent like three evenings tweaking the EQ curves while a buddy on 40m gave me reports and i was genuinely surprised how much better it got without touching a single component the mic element swap can make a difference but its subtle, and if you go too flat you end up with too much low end getting through and it sounds boomy on the other end. the HM-219 isnt a great mic to begin with but most of what makes it sound meh is fixable in software on that radio

so i heard the Tri-County hamfest is back on after they skipped it last year, supposed to be at the fairgrounds again on the 14th. curious if anyone here is planning to go or if its worth the drive from my end, last time i went was like 4 years ago and it was decent, got a pretty good deal on some coax and a mic i still use. wondering if the swap tables have gotten better or worse lately, feels like every hamfest ive been to recently is just a bunch of guys selling old boat anchors nobody wants for way too much money lol

honestly just keep going, the plateau is normal. i went through the exact same thing around 13wpm and thought i was just one of those people who would never get faster. what eventually worked for me was doing the lcwo.net site — not sure if youve tried that one but it lets you set character speed and effective speed separately which is basically farnsworth spacing. also the daily practice streak thing on there kept me accountable in a way the phone app didnt. one thing i'll say though — dont move on from characters before you're really solid on them, the 90% threshold is there for a reason and i skipped ahead too fast early on and had to go back and fix some bad habits with certain letters. G and W tripped me up forever because i hadnt really locked them in

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and honestly embarrassed to say i dont have any kind of go-kit or emergency setup at all. been meaning to do it forever and then last month we had a pretty bad storm come through and i was completely useless — couldnt do anything because all my gear is just sort of scattered around the shack and none of it is ready to grab and go. so im finally taking it seriously. i have an ft-857d which i know is kind of the classic choice for portable ops, and a few handhelds (a baofeng and an older icom). my question is really more about the non-radio stuff — like how do you actually organize it? do you use a specific bag or case, and how do you handle power? i was thinking a small lithium battery pack but i have no idea what capacity i actually need for a real deployment that might last a few days. also do most people keep a full antenna kit in there or just a simple wire antenna? i looked at some youtube videos but they all seem like either way overkill (guy has a pelican case the size of a small car) or way too minimal to actually be useful. just looking for what real people actually use day to day for their emcomm stuff.

yeah honestly inconsistent reports on SSB are just kind of the nature of the beast sometimes, band conditions change, the other station's ears are different, their radio's AGC is doing weird things, whatever. but the barrel sound specifically usually means either too much compression or youre overdriving the mic input. whats your ALC doing? if its pegging constantly you're probably overprocessing. i went through the same thing when i first got serious about phone ops. ended up getting an Heil headset which helped a lot just from the mic element being voiced more toward the speech frequencies, but honestly getting the settings dialed in matters more than the mic hardware up to a point. stock mic on the 7300 isnt bad its just not optimized out of the box.

yeah the bureau confused me too when i first heard it. basically instead of mailing your QSL card directly to every station you worked, you send a big batch to your national bureau and they sort them and forward them on to the destination country's bureau, and then whoever you worked picks them up from their end. saves a ton on postage especially for rare DX. downside like the other guy said is it takes forever. i mostly just use LoTW now for everything and only send physical cards when someone specifically requests one or if its a really memorable contact i want a card for on the wall. some of the older ops really still love getting paper cards in the mail so i try to honor that when i can.

so ive been doing contests on and off for a few years now, nothing serious, usually just hop on for SS or the CQ WW and try to crack 500 QSOs before i get bored or my wife wants the shack back. lately ive been reading more about SO2R and watching some of the top ops talk about rate and i honestly cant tell if its something worth trying to set up or if its just for the guys who are already running 200/hr and want to squeeze out more. my current setup is a K3 and an IC-7300 sitting there doing nothing so technically i have two radios. the problem is i have no idea where to even start with the antenna switching and keeping the two from killing each other. ive seen the band pass filter setups but those arent cheap and my station isnt exactly optimized to begin with — single tower, a 3 element yagi on 20 and a dipole for 40/80. realistically is it even worth the effort at my rate or does SO2R only really shine once youre already a competent enough op that the second radio is finding mults while the first one is running a frequency also curious if anyone has tips just for general rate improvement that dont involve SO2R. like i feel like i leave a lot of points on the table just from slow exchanges and not knowing when to switch from running to SandP and back

so i've been messing with Winlink for about three weeks now and i think i have a decent handle on it but the RMS gateway stuff is still kind of fuzzy to me. like i get that the gateway is basically the relay between my radio and the Winlink servers but im not totally clear on when to use a dedicated RMS Express session versus just connecting through whatever gateway is closest on the frequency finder thing. my setup right now is an IC-7300 feeding into a SignaLink USB, running Vara HF. i managed to send a test message to myself through a gateway about 80 miles away on 40m and it went through fine, took maybe 45 seconds total which seemed pretty fast honestly. but then i tried again the next day on 20m and kept getting the handshake starting then just dropping. not sure if it was propagation or if i had the wrong mode selected in the session settings. also kind of confused about the message handling side — when i receive mail through Winlink does it just sit on their servers until i connect and pull it, or is there some way to get notified without having to manually poll? and what happens if my outgoing message doesnt get acknowledged, does Winlink retry automatically or do i have to manually resend. sorry if these are dumb questions ive been reading the Winlink documentation but it gets pretty dense

hamstudy.org is honestly what most people use these days and its pretty solid. the way it tracks which questions you're getting wrong and keeps drilling those specifically is way better than just reading through the pool top to bottom. i passed my tech probably ten years ago before that site existed and it was way more annoying back then. on the math thing, dont stress too much. the formulas you need are pretty basic, ohms law mostly, and even then the question pool only has so many variations so if you practice them a few times it clicks. there's a guy on youtube, i think his channel is ham radio crash course or something like that, who does walkthroughs of the trickier concepts and that helped a lot of people i know who were nervous about the technical side. give yourself like three or four weeks if you're doing it casually after work and you should be fine.

the IC-7300 keyer is honestly pretty solid, you dont need a standalone keyer to start out at all. save that money for later if you really get into it and want things like memories or adjustable weight/ratio. for now just use what you have. on the iambic thing — yeah it takes a while to click. the basic idea is you squeeze both paddles at the same time and it alternates dits and dahs automatically. but honestly a lot of people (myself included after years of using iambic) eventually switch to single lever or just treat the iambic paddle like a single lever and never really use the squeeze feature much. dont stress too much about the technique early on, just get comfortable making clean characters first. the muscle memory stuff sorts itself out over time if you keep at it. 8 wpm after a few weeks is totally normal, keep going with lcwo. the wall usually hits around 15-18 wpm and thats where people quit. just push through it.

yeah the buddipole on a painters pole setup is pretty much what half the emcomm guys around here use, its not glamorous but it gets the job done. i switched to a end-fed halfwave on a 31 foot jackite pole and honestly for fixed-position field work its just less fiddly, no matching unit to mess with in the rain. the MPAS lite is nice but heavy for what it is imo. on the generator thing i cant really help much, our group just runs LiFePO4 battery banks for anything under 8 hours and only breaks out the genny for really extended deployments. 100ah lithium gets you through a lot more than you'd think if your running 50 watts and not transmitting 100% of the time.

honestly the best advice i ever got was from an old timer at the club who said to listen for the DX to finish a QSO and then send your callsign exactly once right as the pileup is restarting. his logic was there's like a half second where everyone is still listening to see if the QSO is actually done and if you jump in clean right there you stand out. i was skeptical but it's worked more often than i'd expect also power isn't everything. i've broken pileups running 100w that i couldn't crack with a kw when my antenna was wrong for the path. a dipole at the right height pointed the right direction beats a yagi pointed wrong every time

yeah what he said about the offset, that got me too when i first started. i spent like two days thinking my radio was broken lol. also some repeaters around here are linked into systems like EchoLink or IRLP so you might hear people from totally different states or countries which is pretty wild when youre not expecting it. if you key up and hear a bunch of beeps or a robotic voice announcing a node number thats probably whats going on. worth looking up if your local machine is part of one of those networks, sometimes theres etiquette specific to linked systems like pausing a bit longer between overs so the link can catch up

I was in the same boat when I started, the Q codes are honestly a bit overwhelming at first but you really do just absorb them over time. The ones you'll hear constantly on HF phone are QRM, QRN, QSB, QSL, QRZ, and QTH and once those click the rest kind of fall into place. I kept a little cheat sheet next to my radio for the first few months, no shame in that. The ARRL website has a decent list of them and so does the RSGB if you want something official to reference. 73 de whatever your callsign is is just how people sign off, you get used to it fast.

Got my first handheld (Baofeng BF-F8HP) and I'm struggling with programming it manually from the keypad. The menu system is... challenging. I've heard about CHIRP software but my programming cable hasn't arrived yet. I know FOT (Frequency, Offset and Tone) all need to be set properly for repeater access, but I keep messing something up. The programming sequence feels like Twister for your fingers! Any tips for front-panel programming while I wait for my cable? And what should I prioritize programming first - local repeaters, simplex frequencies, or emergency channels?

that feeling of being lost even after training is completely normal, i promise. i've been doing ARES stuff for going on 12 years now and i still remember my first real activation like it was last month. ours was a tornado warning that turned into an actual touch down and the net was chaotic for the first 20 minutes until everybody settled into their roles. the thing nobody tells you is that training is always cleaner than reality because in training everyone knows its training, you know? people on both ends kind of relax a little. the bit about net control — yeah that takes time. every EC runs their net a little differently and until you've worked with yours enough to almost predict their patterns it can feel like you're always half a step behind. don't sweat the audio correction either, good operators will tell you and better to know. keep showing up to the monthly nets and before long you'll be the one correcting someone else's mic technique.

Second floor installations can be tricky. Consider running additional grounding conductors - even #14 wire to water pipes helps establish a local RF ground plane. The lightning protection ground alone isn't always sufficient for RF.