David Williams50

Our local club has been running a nice 3-repeater RF linked system covering about 60 miles north-south for the past 5 years. When one repeater is keyed-up by receiving a signal, all the other repeaters in the network are also activated and will transmit the same signal. Works great for emergency nets and casual ragchewing. Now we're considering adding voice over IP (VoIP) techniques. VoIP links are a convenient way to connecting distant repeaters that would otherwise be unreachable by VHF/UHF radio propagation. The question is whether to go with AllStar, EchoLink, or IRLP. What's everyone's experience with these systems?

so ive had the 7300 for about three weeks now and figured id write up some thoughts since i spent forever reading posts like this before buying it. came from an old FT-450D which served me well but the waterfall on that thing is basically useless and i was getting jealous watching other people's screens on youtube. first thing i noticed is the receive is noticeably better, especially on 40m at night when its a wall of noise down here. the real-time spectrum scope is just genuinely useful, not a gimmick like i was half expecting. found a few stations i would have totally missed just scanning by ear. the touchscreen takes some getting used to and i keep accidentally changing things when im trying to adjust the mic gain but thats probably a me problem. one thing that bugged me out of the box was the TX audio, a few guys on 20m said i sounded a bit thin or processed. spent an hour going through the menu settings and found the TX bandwidth was set narrow for some reason, maybe a default thing. opened it up a bit and got much better reports after that. nobody told me to check that anywhere in the getting started stuff so just flagging it for anyone else. overall really happy with it. the only thing i genuinely miss is the dedicated buttons on the 450 for things i used constantly, you do end up menu diving more on the 7300 than id like. but not a dealbreaker by any stretch.

haha yeah the first time on a repeater is always a little rough, dont sweat it. i remember i gave my callsign in the wrong place like three times before i just gave up and let the other guy run the conversation. honestly after a few weeks it just becomes muscle memory. the pause thing — i usually wait a beat or two after the squelch tail before i key up, gives people a chance to break in if they need to. your local club probably has a net you can check into too, thats actually how i really got comfortable because everyone kinda knows its a structured thing and the net control keeps it moving so theres less dead air awkwardness

Honestly I tried to make Log4OM my everything app for about six months and I liked it but the contest module never clicked for me the way N1MM does. the rate display in N1MM during a serious contest run is just something else, you can see your hour rate and the multiplier status at a glance without thinking about it and after a while your brain just gets wired to that layout. The FT8 to N1MM pipe actually works pretty solid in my experience if you configure the WSJT-X settings correctly, make sure the secondary UDP server address is pointed right and N1MM is set to accept it. I run FT8 QSOs straight into N1MM during contests like FT8 roundup and it rarely misses anything. for regular digital work outside contests though I get why you wouldnt want N1MM open just to log a few JT contacts on a tuesday night

dont overlook the RF power control setting buried in the menus, i know it sounds dumb but ive seen guys chase hardware faults for days on these things and it was just set to like 20% from a previous owner. also the ACC socket — if somethings plugged in or even if the pins are slightly corroded it can pull the power down through the external ALC line. worth a look before cracking it open further.

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. seriously once you go QRP portable it gets kind of addictive. i started with a similar kit build a few years back and ended up with four different rigs now, which my wife finds unreasonable for the antenna question — honestly for SOTA and general portable stuff a lot of people swear by the end fed half wave with a little matchbox tuner. packs down to almost nothing and you can lean it against a tree or use a telescoping fishing rod as a mast for like 20 bucks. the endfed does better than a random wire in my experience, less RFI getting back into stuff and seems to tune easier on multiple bands if you get the right transformer ratio. 49:1 is the usual for multiband. you can wind your own in an afternoon, there are a million videos on it the other thing id say is dont get discouraged by slow days. QRP is just kind of feast or famine especially on 40 during the day. 20m and 17m have treated me way better for medium-haul stuff when conditions cooperate

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and my elmer keeps telling me i should jump into CQ WW this fall. i finally have a decent HF setup — nothing fancy, just a 100w rig and a wire dipole up about 30 feet — and i figured why not try it. but honestly i dont even know where to start. like do i just sit there calling CQ contest or do i search and pounce or what. also how does the exchange work exactly because ive seen people log zone numbers and i dont fully understand the zone thing yet. i also want to try ARRL Field Day next summer since that seems more relaxed and social but CQ WW feels like the big leagues. anyone here done both and can tell me what to expect? im a little intimidated honestly. every time i tune across the bands during a big contest it sounds like absolute chaos and i have no idea how people are copying calls that fast. also random side question — does anyone do SOTA activations around contest weekends or is that kind of a different world entirely

congrats on the first activation, 44 QSOs on 5 watts with a random wire is a solid outing honestly. to answer your questions — yeah WWFF and POTA are completely separate programs, different logs, different submissions, different awards structures. if your forest doesnt have a POTA reference then you just submit to WWFF and youre done. the website has a log submission portal and they accept ADIF which makes life easier if your logging software exports that. for spotting, yes you can absolutely self-spot on the WWFF spotter, theres a link on the main wwff.club site. a lot of activators do it right when they get set up, just put your callsign, the KFF reference, frequency and mode and youll start getting callers pretty quick. some people also use the POTA spotting app even for WWFF just to get more eyeballs but the dedicated WWFF spotter works fine. the hunter award is for people chasing activations, they accumulate QSOs with different WWFF references and once they hit certain thresholds they can apply for awards. so that guy was probably excited because your reference was one he hadnt worked before, or maybe it pushed him over a threshold. its a nice part of the program honestly, you realize the contacts you make actually mean something to the other end too

11 contacts in 3 hours at 5w for your first time out is honestly pretty solid. i think i made like 4 my first portable trip and was thrilled with myself lol. what was your keying speed? i ask because i find when im running slow like 12-13 wpm i get a lot more responses than when i try to run faster and sound sloppy, people seem more patient with QRP ops for some reason or maybe they just appreciate that someone's making the effort.

im in the same boat as you actually, been licensed about a year. i printed some physical cards through one of those online services and honestly it was way easier than i expected and not that expensive. sent out maybe 40 cards so far and got a bunch back, its kind of addictive haha one thing i didnt realize for a while — you have to make sure your LoTW certificate matches your callsign and address exactly or the confirmations wont match up right. had that problem for a couple months before someone on here pointed it out to me

so ive been doing CW for about 8 months now and i can copy maybe 15-16 wpm on a good day but my sending still feels really choppy and uneven. im using an old Bencher BY-1 paddle i picked up at a hamfest and a Winkeyer USB for the keyer logic. the weight and ratio controls on the Winkeyer confuse me honestly, i've messed with them but cant tell if im making things better or worse. my elmer keeps telling me my dits are too short but when i slow down to fix it everything falls apart and i lose the rhythm entirely. does this get better just from practice or is there something specific i should be working on? also is the Bencher a decent paddle to learn on or should i look at something else eventually. i dont want to keep building bad habits

yeah field day is basically the perfect on ramp, i did my first one three years ago with a club and just logged contacts for like the first six hours before i got up the nerve to sit in the operators chair. nobody pressured me at all. then once i actually made a few qsos the whole thing clicked and now i look forward to it every june. one tip — download N1MM logger before field day and just mess around with it so the software isnt new to you on the day. that helped me a ton. also the ARRL has a pretty decent summary of how the exchange works on their site so its worth reading that the week before so you're not totally lost when someone throws a 3A Tennessee at you lol

so ive been running a mag mount dual band whip on the truck for about two years now, nothing fancy, one of those cheap diamond knockoffs i picked up at a hamfest. works fine for most of the repeaters in my area but theres one about 65 miles out that i can hit from the hilltop near my house when im walking around with the HT but cant seem to reach reliably from the truck even though id expect a 50w mobile to do better than 5w handheld. got me thinking about whether a small 3 or 4 element yagi mounted on the roof rack would be worth messing with for that specific path. the repeater is roughly to the northeast of me and i mostly drive that direction anyway for work so it wouldnt be like im always pointing the wrong way. but then again a yagi on a roof rack with no rotator is basically just a fixed direction antenna and id have to physically turn the truck which is kind of stupid. maybe a better collinear would close the gap instead? i know gain figures on those cheap whips are basically marketing nonsense. wondering what people who actually run decent mobile setups think about this.

the HM-219 is honestly not great out of the box for flattering voice audio, a lot of guys swap it out pretty quick. but before you blame the mic, first thing id check is your TX bandwidth setting in the menus — on the 7300 you can set that under the set menu, SSB TX bandwidth. if yours got bumped down to narrow or something like 1.8khz that would absolutely explain the pillow effect. default should be around 2.4 or 3.0 depending on what mode preset is active. also check your mic gain, if its cranked up too high youll clip before the compressor even kicks in and that sounds terrible. try talking at a normal conversational distance, maybe 4-6 inches from the mic, mic gain around 50-60% and see what reports you get. the 7300 also has that speech processor built in and even at low settings it can add some presence. once you have the gain set right, a little compression around 3-4 on the meter actually helps intelligibility a lot, the no-compression advice isnt always right depending on your voice.

so ive been running a diamond x50 on my roof for a couple years now and it hits the local 2m and 70cm repeaters just fine, maybe 90% of the time. but theres this one machine about 34 miles out that i can only barely scratch on a good day and it drops out whenever theres any kind of weather moving through. been thinking about throwing up a yagi pointed that direction but then i lose the omnidirectional coverage and id have to manually rotate or put up two separate antennas which honestly sounds like a pain. the other option i was reading about is going to a longer collinear, something like the diamond x300 or maybe one of the comet GP-9 types, more gain in the horizontal plane, still omni. but ive also read that higher gain collinears can actually hurt you on closer stations because of the compressed pattern? like the radiation angle gets too flat and you lose stuff thats not perfectly on the horizon. my house is in a bit of a valley so i dunno if thats gonna be a real issue or just theoretical. anyone actually done a back to back comparison or switched from one to the other and noticed a real difference, not just on paper

yeah the linked dipole on a jackite is a solid choice for that kind of deployment, ive used almost the exact same setup and it just works. one thing i'd throw out there — if you're doing inverted V off a single 31ft pole and you're near any other operators also running wire antennas, watch your apex height vs their setup or you can end up with some weird coupling issues, had that happen at a simulated emergency test a few years back where two stations were maybe 40 feet apart both running inverted Vs and they were just walking all over each other even on different bands. not saying itll happen but worth thinking about spacing if other folks are bringing similar gear.

Make sure frequency and PTT are working correctly in N1MM+ before starting WSJT-X. For the IC-7300, ensure the Mode Control PSK setting is set to AFSK-R, not USB. This caught me during ARRL RTTY.

so ive been at this for a few weekends now and I cant figure out what im doing wrong. built a simple center-fed dipole for 40m, cut each leg to roughly 33.3 feet based on the 468/f formula, fed it with 50 ohm coax through a so-239 connector at the center insulator. its hanging inverted-v style off a 25 foot mast in the backyard with the ends maybe 8 feet off the ground. measured SWR with my antenna analyzer and its sitting around 2.8:1 at 7.150 which is where I want it, dips to about 2.1 somewhere around 7.3 which is weird. the resonant point seems way off from where I expected it. tried trimming a few inches off each leg but it barely moved. using RG-8X and the run is about 65 feet to the shack. wondering if its the coax or the angle of the legs or just the height above ground messing with things. I know SWR isnt everything and my tuner can probably handle it but id like to understand why its behaving this way before I just slap a tuner on it and call it done.

so ive been noticing something strange the past few weeks, maybe month or so. 20m used to be pretty reliable for me in the evenings for working europe and sometimes JA but lately its been hit or miss to the point where i cant even hold a QSO with someone in the next state sometimes. then out of nowhere yesterday afternoon the band just opened up like crazy and i was pulling in stations from all over the place, some really solid signals from south america and even a couple europeans late in the day. is this just the solar cycle doing its thing or is there something else going on? i've been checking pskreporter and watching the dxmaps but honestly i dont really understand what im supposed to be looking for beyond just seeing whether there are spots on the band. someone mentioned solar flux index to me at the club meeting last month and i nodded along like i knew what that meant but im not gonna lie i had no idea running an ic-7300 into a fan dipole at about 35 feet if that matters. licensed about two years ago so still learning all this stuff

totally normal where you're at, dont worry about it too much. the thing that helped me most was slowing way down and really focusing on relaxing my grip. like almost let the paddle do the work, you shouldnt be muscling it. a lot of new CW ops squeeze the thing like theyre trying to strangle it and then the timing goes all over the place. as for the paddle quality question -- honestly it does matter eventually but probably not yet. the main thing cheaper paddles have issues with is the gap adjustment slipping or the contacts being inconsistent, so check if yours has a way to lock down the adjustments. if the gaps are changing on you mid-session that'll absolutely wreck your timing. mine came loose twice before i figured out what was happening. also try dropping your speed a bit and just doing one letter at a time perfectly. like obsessively perfect. then string two together, then three. its boring but it actually works faster than just hammering away at full speed and hoping it gets better.

the NB on the 7300 is mostly DSP-driven so there isnt a ton you can do on the hardware side without getting into territory that would probably make things worse. what i did find that actually helped was playing with the NB depth and width settings in the menu — most people leave them at default and they're honestly not optimized for inverter-type noise which tends to be more periodic than impulse noise the blanker is really tuned for. if you havent already, try setting NB width to around 3 and depth somewhere in the 8-10 range and see if that does anything. also the notch filter in auto mode can sometimes catch inverter harmonics better than the blanker depending on the frequency. i spent a while messing with this when my neighbor put in a solar setup and that combo helped more than i expected. still not perfect but workable on 40m which was the worst band for me.

yeah JS8Call is definitely more freeform, thats kind of the whole point of it. its based on FT8 encoding but the way it handles messaging is asynchronous so you dont have to be on at the same time as the other station which is a cool concept. the sensitivity is decent but not quite FT8 levels, i want to say its something like -24dB for FT8 vs maybe -18 or so for JS8Call depending on speed setting. theres actually three speed modes, normal, fast, and turbo i think, and the slower ones get you better weak signal performance but its a tradeoff. 14.078 is the right freq but honestly activity is pretty sparse compared to the FT8 watering holes. i tend to have better luck on 40m in the evenings, 7.078 i think is the standard spot. stick with it though because when you do get a contact its a lot more satisfying than the usual 73 and done you get on FT8

yeah just saying "no traffic" or "no traffic, just a check-in" is totally fine, thats what most people say. net control has heard it a thousand times and nobody thinks twice about it. some nets you can also just say "nothing further" after your callsign if the format is real brief. the tuesday night ones around here are pretty casual, sounds like yours probably is too. and honestly dont worry about slowing things down. you're doing exactly what you're supposed to do. every single person on that net checked in for the first time at some point. i still remember my first check-in, i said my callsign twice because i panicked. net control just laughed and moved on.

so ive been putting off building my own antenna forever and finally just decided to do it last weekend. going for a simple half wave dipole for 40m, nothing fancy. i got some 14 gauge stranded copper wire from the hardware store and some SO-239 connectors but i'm not sure what to use for the center insulator piece. seen people use PVC, egg insulators, that kind of thing. also wondering if the wire gauge even matters that much for a dipole or if i'm overthinking it. i calculated the length at roughly 66 feet total (using the 468/f formula) for around 7.150 mhz. cut it, soldered on the connector, and just kind of taped the whole center together for now while i figure out what to actually do. SWR came out around 1.4:1 which honestly surprised me, thought it'd be worse. anyway the question is more about the mechanical side of things - what are you guys actually using for the center piece when you build your own? dont want it to fall apart in the rain

yeah what he said basically. i'll just add that i was in almost exactly the same spot as you maybe two years ago and the moment i started actually *trying* to work new entities and states it became kind of addictive in a good way. like you start looking at the band with totally different eyes. one thing worth knowing — for DXCC specifically you can apply for credit online through ARRL if your QSL confirmations are in LOTW, which makes it pretty painless. i think i applied for my first DXCC certificate with like 112 entities confirmed and it was maybe a 10 minute process. the fee wasnt bad either, i want to say it was around 15 bucks for members but dont quote me on that, check the ARRL site for current pricing. also dont sleep on WAZ, it doesnt get talked about as much but its a really satisfying one to chase because some of those zones are genuinely hard to catch on the air. zone 1 up in the arctic took me forever