Michelle Baker

so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to sit for the extra exam. i know the general was a step up from tech but honestly i kind of just memorized a lot of it without really understanding the theory behind some of it. the extra pool seems way more intense when i look at it, like there's stuff about filter design and transmission line theory and i see questions about vacuum tube amplifiers which i honestly didn't expect in 2024 my main question i guess is whether people actually understand all of it before they take the test or if most folks just use the question pool and pattern recognition to pass. i dont really care about the hf privileges since im already on 40 and 20 with my general, i think the main thing pulling me toward it is just wanting to know i actually understand the hobby at a deeper level. is that a naive reason to do it or does the studying actually teach you something real

the NR thing is super common, pretty much everyone who gets a 7300 cranks the NR down within the first week. icom ships it a bit hot from factory i think. also if you havent dug into the AGC settings yet thats worth an evening — the fast/mid/slow options make a bigger difference than you'd expect on SSB pile-ups. the mid setting is where i landed for most HF work. the RF gain thing took me a while too coming from older gear where you just kind of set it and forget it. once you get used to actually using it as a real control it becomes second nature. welcome to the dark side, the 7300 is genuinely a great rig for the price point.

had almost the exact same thing happen on my 897 which is basically the same guts. turned out to be one of those tiny relays on the LPF board had a dirty contact. i just reseated the board connectors first and it actually helped a little but didnt fix it fully. ended up hitting the relay contacts with some deoxit on a thin piece of card stock slid underneath and that sorted it. probably a temporary fix but its been two years now so ill take it lol

been licensed for about 6 months now and still feel awkward using alfa bravo charlie etc when giving my call. i hear some guys use it all the time and others hardly ever. when your on 2m repeaters do you really need to spell out your whole call every time? seems like overkill but maybe im missing something

APRS-IS to RF messaging worked yesterday but stopped after toggling telemetry settings. Using APRX 2.8.1 on Raspberry Pi with proper digipeater configuration. Logs show messages reaching APRX but getting discarded with "History entry for sending call from APRSIS is too new". RF-to-RF messaging via digipeater still functions, as does RF-to-IS direction. Has anyone seen this timing issue with message history filtering? The viscous-delay and filter settings appear correct but something in the dupe-checking logic seems broken.