Emily Thomas17

oh man yeah i remember mine, i was so nervous i forgot to give my callsign at the end and the other op had to ask me twice. been licensed since 2019 and i still think about that first contact sometimes. the guy was super nice about it too which made all the difference honestly. congrats and welcome to the hobby, it only gets easier from here trust me.

so the short version is the FCC allocations are the actual legal limits and the arrl band plan is more of a gentlemans agreement on top of that. you HAVE to follow the fcc rules, the band plan is just so everyone plays nice and doesnt cram phone ops into the cw portion etc. for 40m as a general your phone priveliges start at 7.175 MHz, not 7.125 — that lower chunk down to 7.125 is for advanced and extra class. so yeah stay above 7.175 for ssb or youre actually operating outside your license. the arrl plan also suggests keeping the lower end of your allowed range open for certain modes but thats not a legal thing. band edges are a courtesy and also a practical thing. if youre right on the edge like 7.300 and your radio drifts even a tiny bit or your sidebands spread out, you can end up technically transmitting outside the band. most people stay a few khz inside just to be safe. nothing in the rules says exactly how far but 3-5 kHz inside is pretty standard advice

im in basically the same boat as you, been general for like 18 months and been going back and forth on whether to bother. someone at my local club told me the extra question pool has some stuff about vacuum tubes and old technology that nobody uses anymore which seems kind of silly to memorize but whatever. i did start studying a little and the electrical theory sections are intimidating but its not like calculus or anything, mostly just ohms law variations and knowing what happens in LC circuits. havent taken it yet so cant say if i passed lol but i feel like its doable

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and people keep telling me i should try a contest but honestly the whole thing is a bit overwhelming to figure out where to even start. like i get the basic idea, you make contacts and log points, but which one do you actually start with as a newer guy? i was looking at CQ WW which sounds huge and exciting but then someone at the club mentioned Field Day might be more beginner friendly since its more of a group thing and you can just sit next to someone who knows what theyre doing. i also heard about SOTA which isnt really a contest but kind of has a points system? someone was telling me about activating summits and i honestly had no idea that was a thing but it sounds really cool if you like hiking. anyway im just trying to figure out what makes sense. i have a basic HF setup at home, nothing fancy, and i can probably get on for most of a weekend if the timing works out. are there any other contests coming up that would be good for a first timer or should i just wait for Field Day in june and do that with the club first before trying anything solo

nice one, i did my first activation maybe 6 months ago and had the same confusion about where to submit stuff. the wwff.cc site is kind of a maze tbh but once you find the upload page it makes sense. one thing i didnt realize at first is that you need at least 44 QSOs in one activation for it to count as a full activation for the reference, so you just barely made it which is actually great timing haha. i usually post to the WWFF Activators group on facebook the day before and that helps a lot, i went from like 20 contacts on my first one to over 80 on my second just because people knew i was going out

so ive been a general for about 2 years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra. i know a lot of people just grind the question pool and pass it that way but honestly some of the stuff in there looks actually interesting? like the impedance matching stuff and the filter theory and whatever. my question is i guess... is it worth actually trying to understand the advanced theory or do most people just memorize and move on. i feel like if i dont understand it ill just forget it all the week after the test anyway. but the pool is also like 700+ questions so thats a lot of memorizing too. also does getting the extra actually change what you do day to day on the air or is it mostly just for the sub-bands

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general class) and i keep hearing people talk about nets but i honestly have no idea how to find out when and where they are. like i know there are local repeater nets and then there's HF nets too but i dont really know how to track them down. i tried googling a couple times and got some outdated looking pages from like 2015. also someone at my club mentioned a special event station that was happening on a weekend but i missed it because i didnt know how to look those up either. is there a central place people go to find all this stuff or is it more word of mouth? i have a decent HF setup now and a mobile rig for the repeaters so i should be able to actually participate once i figure out where everything is

800mA at roughly 11-12v lipo voltage means youre putting in somewhere around 9-10 watts and getting 4 out, so your efficiency is running maybe 40-45%. thats actually pretty typical for a class AB final, not gonna lie. class E or class D switching amps can get you up in the 80-90% range but theyre a lot more fussy to build and tune, especially on 40m. for a first build id say youre doing fine. the transistor getting warm is normal as long as youre not cooking it, whats the part number? some of the old favorites like the IRF510 really want a heatsink even at low power or they get grumpy over a long CW session. Ohio from Mass on 4 watts is a solid contact. once you get comfortable with the rig try some of the QRP nets, sparc or the 40m QRP watering hole around 7030, lots of patient operators there who are happy to dig out a weak signal.

i did my first activation like 3 months ago and had almost the same experience haha. the spotting thing the other person mentioned is huge, i didnt know about it my first time and just called CQ into the void for like 20 minutes before anyone came back. once i started putting myself on SOTAwatch the pile was actually kind of fun to manage even with 5 watts. the 818 is what i use too, its not the lightest but its tough and i trust it. some guys in my club swear by the KX2 if you want to spend the money but i'm not there yet.

JS8Call is genuinely worth messing with if you want actual QSOs instead of just signal report exchanges. the sensitivity isnt quite FT8 but its still really good, like way better than PSK31 or even RTTY. the big thing is the timing is more relaxed so theres room for actual text to go back and forth. i use it on 40m in the evenings sometimes and you do get real conversations going, especially with the store and forward stuff where messages can relay through other stations even when theyre not actively watching. that said the user base is way smaller than FT8 so you gotta be patient. some nights the waterfall is pretty quiet. i think of it as a different tool for a different mood, not a replacement. when i want to just rack up contacts or chase a new entity FT8 is obvious choice. when i actually want to talk to someone in a way thats more than a macro exchange, JS8Call. PSK31 still has its fans and honestly on a good band it can be fun but yeah the noise floor performance is just nowhere close to the WSJT stuff.

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and every time there's a storm or something comes up locally I realize I am completely unprepared compared to some of the other guys in my club. last month during the ice storm my shack power went out and I basically had nothing ready to go. I have a Yaesu FT-891 that I love but it just sits on my desk and I've never really thought seriously about making it portable for emergency stuff. I started throwing things in a pelican case last weekend and now I'm second guessing everything. I have the radio, a power pole distribution block, about 40 feet of coax, my programming cable, and a little notebook with frequencies written down. I feel like I'm forgetting obvious stuff that everyone else already knows about. my wife keeps asking me why I need another box of cables and honestly I cant even fully explain the go-kit concept to her in a way that makes sense. what do I actually need in there that I'm probably overlooking? especially for local emcomm kind of stuff, not like ARES deployment across the country or anything. just want to be useful if something happens in my county.

oh man don't feel bad about that at all, literally everyone does this when they first start checking into nets. i stepped on our club's net control like three times my first few months and she was very gracious about it but i still think about it sometimes lol. the timing thing is just something you develop a feel for over time, there's no magic number of seconds. what i do now is wait until i hear the tail of their transmission drop, then count to maybe two beats in my head before keying. some repeaters have a courtesy beep that tells you the squelch closed, so listen for that if yours has one. that beep is basically the system saying ok someone else can talk now. also don't worry too much about the callsign order thing, net control hears all kinds of stuff and it really isnt a big deal to them. just keep checking in, it gets natural really fast.

so ive been trying to get winlink working for about three weeks now and im losing my mind a little. background: im running a signalink usb into my ic-7300, pat as the client on linux (yeah i know, i know), and im trying to hit a local RMS gateway about 40 miles out on 40m. the gateway shows up in the winlink map and the RMS list, frequency is listed as 7102.0 USB, i set pat to dial up that freq and initiate a vara HF session but it just... sits there. no response from the gateway side. ive confirmed the audio levels look reasonable in alsamixer, the ic-7300 is definitely keying up because i can see the TX light and the ALC is moving. what i cant figure out is whether the problem is on my end, the gateway is just offline even though the map shows it active, or if im doing something dumb with the pat config. the RMS list shows the last heard timestamp as like 6 hours ago which makes me think its probably still up. do gateways go offline randomly without updating their status? also do i need to be within a certain distance for this to work or is 40m supposed to reach 40 miles no problem during the day. im in the midwest so terrain isnt a huge issue. any help appreciated, been at this too long

yeah the PSK31 thing caught me off guard too when i first got back into the hobby a couple years ago. figured everything had moved to FT8 but theres a whole crowd that never left the older modes and honestly i respect it one thing worth mentioning if you havent done it yet — make sure your audio levels going into WSJT-X or JS8Call are set right. i spent like two weeks wondering why my FT8 decodes were garbage compared to what other people were reporting and it turned out my mic gain was way too hot and i was clipping the ADC on the interface. dropped it way down and suddenly i was decoding twice as many signals. seems obvious in hindsight but nobody told me when i started

oh man that feeling of missing a good opening is the worst. happens to me all the time, drives me crazy. for what its worth the K index is actually pretty important, probably more immediately useful than SFI for knowing if conditions are going to be rough. like a high solar flux means the ionosphere is charged up and potentially great for DX, but if the K index spikes above 3 or 4 you can basically expect 10 and 12m to get noisy and unreliable because of geomagnetic disturbance. so you kinda need both — high SFI and low K is the sweet spot. when i see SFI above 150 and K at 1 or 2 i start watching 10m and 12m pretty closely. for tracking this stuff i just have a widget on my phone from HamAlert and i also check spaceweather.com in the morning with my coffee. its become a habit. after a while you get a feel for it, honestly. the bands also behave differently depending on the time of year and where the gray line is, that's a whole other rabbit hole but worth reading up on if you haven't already.