Jessica Wilson66

not dumb questions at all, this stuff genuinely takes a while to sort out. so the short version is yes they're tracked separately — DXCC is ARRL's award for working 100 DXCC entities (which is close to but not exactly the same as countries, some islands and territories count separately), WAS is Worked All States so all 50 US states, and WAZ is Worked All Zones which is the CQ magazine award for all 40 CQ zones worldwide. completely different organizations even, ARRL runs DXCC and WAS, CQ runs WAZ. for most people starting out WAS is actually the more achievable near term goal especially if youre in the US, you can knock that out in a few months of decent operating on 40m and 20m. DXCC takes longer but its very doable once you get the hang of band openings and start recognizing which prefixes are which entities. LoTW is really the way to go for getting credits confirmed, paper QSLs still work but they take forever and cost money. that Japan contact definitely counts for DXCC if you get it confirmed. i'd get yourself set up on LoTW sooner rather than later and just let the confirmations pile up — you might be closer than you think already

good to hear, ive been on the fence about this exact upgrade for like two years. my 570 is starting to act a little weird on transmit — nothing dramatic but the ALC behavior feels off sometimes and im not sure if its worth having it looked at or just calling it and moving to something newer. the 7300 keeps coming up whenever i ask around. does the scope slow you down at all or do you basically just ignore it after the novelty wears off

im still doing single radio contesting and reading threads like this makes me want to try SO2R but also kind of intimidates me honestly. sounds like theres a lot that can go wrong with the RF isolation side of things too, like dont you have to be really careful about the antennas not coupling and blowing up your front ends? whats the typical setup people use to keep the two radios from interfering with each other when youre on bands that are somewhat close together like 20 and 15?

oh man i remember feeling exactly this way when i first started checking into nets, honestly the timing thing just comes with practice and every net has a slightly different rhythm to it so dont be too hard on yourself. the short version is after net control calls for check-ins you just wait maybe a half second or so and then give your callsign phonetically, just your callsign nothing else until net control acknowledges you. the reason people step on each other is usually everyone waiting the exact same amount of time so some folks wait just a tiny beat longer and that helps. checking in without traffic or comments is completely normal and expected, thats actually the majority of check-ins on most nets. you're basically just saying hey i'm here and the frequency is working, which matters. the big thing that helped me was listening to the net a few times before checking in so i could get a feel for that specific net controllers pace. some of them talk fast and move quick, some leave longer pauses. after a few weeks it'll feel natural i promise.

yeah i was the same way when i started. i think the thing that helped me was realizing phonetics are just a tool for clarity, not like a rule you have to follow every single time. i still mess up sometimes and mix NATO phonetics with random words which you definitely arent supposed to do on formal nets lol. heard a guy say "K for kangaroo" once on a traffic net and the NCS had to ask him to say it again properly. so at least stick to the standard ones when you do use them

thats really cool, i keep telling myself ill build one of those kits but never quite get there. can i ask what antenna wire you used? i have some leftover wire from another project and wondering if its ok or if theres a specific type thats better for portable stuff. also did you need anything special to tune it or did it just work on 40m straight away

drilled NMO on my '18 Ram about two years ago and honestly yeah it does make a difference, not huge but measurable. SWR was flatter across the whole 2m band and the 70cm numbers cleaned up noticeably. mag mounts work but the ground plane contact is never as consistent, especially after the truck flexes a bit or the mount gets moved around. the roof thickness thing on F150s i cant speak to specifically but the general rule is just go slow with a step bit and dont be an idiot about it. seal it properly with self-amalgamating tape and some silicone around the base and you'll be fine. i ran the coax down through the A pillar and under the carpet, took maybe 3 hours total and i'm not particularly fast at this stuff. only thing i'd say is if you really do need to pull the antenna regularly for parking situations, maybe look at a quick-disconnect like the Larsen or Comet QD mounts so you can pop the whip off without losing your ground plane.

yeah it takes a little while but honestly you pick it up faster than you think once you're on the air regularly. QRM is interference from other stations, man-made stuff, QRN is natural interference like static from storms. QSB is when your signal is fading in and out, which happens a lot on HF especially. QRZ is basically "who's calling me" so if someone comes back with QRZ? they didnt quite catch who was calling going QRT just means shutting down, signing off, so "i'm going QRT" means they're done for the night. the 599 thing in digital and CW is a signal report, 5 by 9 by 9, strength and tone, though honestly in contest exchanges everyone sends 599 regardless of actual conditions, its kind of a running joke there's a full list on the ITU website and ARRL has one too but i'd just bookmark a simple cheat sheet page and honestly after a few weeks of operating you wont need it anymore. the ones you hear all the time just stick

yeah what the previous guy said, ae7q is basically the go-to for checking this stuff. i spent like two hours on there before i applied for mine lol. one thing i'll add — when you submit the vanity application there's a window period of a few days where other people can also apply for the same call, and then at the end of the window the FCC picks whoever has the highest priority. so if two people both want the same 2x1 and one of them is Extra class they'll win even if they applied after you. kinda annoying but thats how it works. i got my vanity on the first try which was lucky i think. just make sure you put in several choices ranked by preference in case your first pick gets snagged.

yeah what he said, also look up the echolink nets if your local repeaters have echolink enabled because theres a ton of activity there especially on weekends. i checked into my first net totally botched my callsign phonetics and nobody cared, the net control just asked me to repeat and that was it. you'll be fine

first thing id check is whether your callsign is entered correctly in the radio — not just displayed right but actually transmitted right. on the D710 theres the MYCALL setting in the packet menu and ive seen people have it set correctly on the main screen but somehow have an old or wrong entry buried in the TNC settings. connect it to a laptop with a terminal program and just watch what it actually spits out when it beacons, that'll tell you real fast if the packet structure is malformed or if the callsign is getting garbled. also worth checking — is your audio level set right for the internal TNC? the D710 has an internal TNC so its not like you have a separate device to tune but there's still a setting in the menus for the packet speed, make sure it's on 1200 baud since that's what APRS uses on 144.390. 9600 baud wont get digi'd properly by most infrastructure. that trips people up sometimes because the radio can switch modes and you don't always notice.

yeah honestly the 10 minute rule is kind of a background thing most of the time, like if youre having a long ragchew you just get in the habit of dropping your call every so often and it becomes second nature pretty quick. i was super anxious about it when i first got on the air too the phonetics thing cracks me up because there's this one older guy on our repeater who uses the most random stuff, like "Zanzibar" for Z and nobody bats an eye. but then i heard someone use non-standard ones on HF during some bad band conditions and it genuinely caused confusion so i think context really is everything there

so i finally passed my general last month and ive been using my sequential callsign which is fine but its pretty long and kind of awkward to say on the air. a buddy at my club mentioned i could apply for a vanity call and i guess i just assumed you could pick whatever you wanted as long as it was available but apparently thats not how it works at all? from what i can tell the FCC has some kind of system where you apply and then wait and theres a window period and honestly i got lost reading the ULS stuff. like do i just go to the FCC site and fill something out or is there a third party site that makes it easier. i saw something called the AE7Q site mentioned somewhere but i dont really know what to do with it once im on there also does it matter what license class you have for what callsigns you can get? someone told me extras get shorter calls but i want to make sure i understand the rules before i start the process. any help appreciated, dont want to screw this up

yeah the i2c noise thing is a real pain, especially if you have any length on those lines at all. i2c really doesnt like long cable runs, like even a meter or two can start causing issues depending on the capacitance. but if its specifically correlated with when the motor is running id look at the power supply first before anything else. are you powering the pi and the L298N from the same supply? because the motor switching transients can absolutely get back onto the power rail and from there into your ADC reference. try throwing a big electrolytic cap across the motor driver supply and a smaller ceramic right at the ADS1115 VCC pin and see if that helps at all. also make sure your grounds are all tied together at one point, star grounding basically, instead of daisy chained which causes all kinds of weird loops. the RF environment thing is worth thinking about too. i had a similar setup a while back and adding ferrite beads on the i2c lines and on the power leads to the pi made a noticeable difference. just small clip on ones, nothing fancy. also might want to add some pull up resistors on SDA and SCL if you havent already, the internal ones on the pi are a bit weak for anything beyond real short traces.

yeah the tin can thing is almost always too much bass or the bandwidth set too narrow. I had the exact same issue and it turned out I had the low cut set way up from when I was experimenting and forgot about it. easy thing to miss in the menus. also something nobody talks about much — the room you're operating in affects it too. if you're in a small room with hard surfaces you get weird reflections and it shows up in the audio. not huge but ive noticed it. anyway get your ALC sorted first like the other guy said thats really the foundation of everything else

so ive been licensed for about two years now and just recently started actually paying attention to what entities ive worked rather than just ragchewing and calling it a day. a buddy of mine at the club keeps talking about DXCC and how he's at like 280 something confirmed and it honestly sounds like a really cool long term goal to work toward. my question is kind of embarrassing but how does the credit system actually work? like i understand you need 100 confirmed entities for the basic award but do QSL cards still matter or is it all LoTW now? and what happens if someone works me but never uploads to LoTW and wont send a paper card either? that contact just doesnt count i guess? also is WAS a separate thing completely or does it tie into DXCC somehow? i keep seeing people mention WAZ too and im not sure if thats an ARRL thing or a CQ thing. sorry if this is super basic, just trying to figure out where to start without wasting a lot of effort going in the wrong direction

honestly the hamstudy.org website is probably the best thing out there for this right now, it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those specifically. i did the same thing you're describing where i tried to read through everything first and just got overwhelmed. what finally clicked for me was just doing practice questions from day one and looking up the why behind the ones i missed. the ARRL technician manual is good if you want actual explanations but you dont have to read the whole thing cover to cover, just the sections that confuse you after you do some practice tests. the electrical theory stuff especially ohms law just takes a few repetitions and then it sticks. give yourself like 3 weeks and you'll be fine, the pool is only 35 questions on the actual exam out of the full question pool so the odds are in your favor once you know most of them

yeah that feeling is 100% real and it doesnt really go away. ive been doing QRP for probably fifteen years now and still get a little kick out of a dx contact on 5 watts. theres something about the constraints that makes you actually think about what youre doing — antenna placement, time of day, band conditions — stuff you can just brute force with a kilowatt but cant with QRP. on the heat thing, little bit of warmth is pretty normal especially if youre running close to rated output for a while. id check your low pass filter first, if the output matching isnt right the transistor is working harder than it needs to. also double check your SWR on that wire, a random wire without a decent ground or counterpoise can look pretty ugly and the final stage takes the hit. some guys use a small 9:1 unun and a few radials just laying on the grass and it makes a real difference. dont stress too much though, those kits are usually pretty robust and a warm final after 20 minutes of operating is not the same as a hot one.

Pre-spotting is totally a thing and honestly its probably your best bet given the no cell situation. You can post a planned activation on SOTAwatch ahead of time, put down an approximate time and the bands you plan to work, and chasers will be watching for you. Lots of activators do this the night before or morning of. Just try to stick reasonably close to your planned time because chasers will literally sit there waiting and if you show up 90 minutes late some of them have moved on. The RBN will absolutely pick you up if youre running any kind of power and calling CQ on a clear frequency, and there are automated systems that push RBN spots over to SOTAwatch so youll likely get spotted that way too even without a phone. The pre-spot just gives people a heads up to be listening. And yeah 4 QSOs is all you need to qualify the summit, theres no time minimum. Most activators stay longer because its fun and you want to work as many chasers as you can, but technically once youve got your 4 contacts in the log youve done it. Have a great activation, W4T summits are usually pretty solid for radio from what i recall.

so ive been at this CW thing for about 8 months now and im stuck. like really stuck. i started learning with the Koch method back in the spring and got up to copying about 5wpm pretty comfortably but every time i try to push past that it just falls apart on me. i can hear the letters individually but when someone sends at 12 or 15wpm it just becomes noise and i miss everything and then i panic and miss more. ive been using the LCWO website and some of the practice files from the ARRL. i practice probably 20-30 minutes a day most days. my goal is to get to 20wpm eventually because i really want to work some DX on 40 meters and honestly i just love the mode, there's something about it that got under my skin. just wondering what actually moved the needle for people who went through this same wall. did you just grind through it or was there some specific thing that clicked?

oh man i had no idea, im still pretty new to all this (just got my general a few months ago) so i dont really know the difference between all the Icom models but i did just buy a used 7300 and now im second guessing myself haha. not really though, everyone says the 7300 is great and i can definitely confirm 10 meters has been really active because even i managed to work some DX last week which felt pretty cool for someone who barely knows what theyre doing yet

yeah ground layout kills more homebrew projects than anything else, i learned that the hard way on a regen i built years ago. glad you got that sorted. for the audio filtering the TL072 is totally fine for this, i used one in a Sallen-Key lowpass configuration in my DC receiver build and it worked great. two poles gives you enough rolloff to clean things up without adding a ton of phase issues. if youre mainly doing SSB you probably want cutoff somewhere around 2.5 to 3kHz, maybe a bit lower if you find yourself doing more CW. the component math isnt too bad and there are calculators online that do the work for you. just keep the op amp supply clean, another bypass cap close to the pins, that kind of thing. the NE602 can put out some garbage on the supply rail so dont let the audio stage share a filter with it if you can avoid it.

i just passed my tech exam like two months ago so this is still pretty fresh for me. honestly i was way overthinking it. i used hamstudy.org pretty much exclusively and just did practice tests every night for like 2 weeks for maybe 20-30 minutes at a time. once i was consistently hitting 80% or above on the practice tests i felt ready and i passed no problem. the math stuff theres only a handful of questions and the formulas are pretty simple, ohms law type stuff, but even if you blank on those you can still pass easily. the harder part for me was the regulations questions just because there was a lot to memorize about frequencies and what you can and cant do on each band but again the practice tests help a ton with that. just keep doing them until the answers start feeling familiar

so ive been messing around with an RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now and honestly its been great for learning but im starting to feel the limits, mostly on HF where the direct sampling mode is okay but not really great for anything serious. been looking at either grabbing a HackRF One or stepping up to an SDRplay RSP1A and i cant really decide if the price jump from the HackRF to the RSP1A is worth it for what i want to do mostly i want to do better HF monitoring, maybe some airband, and eventually i want to play with decoding some of the utility stuff like weatherfax and maybe WSPR reception just to see how my antenna is doing. i dont do transmitting so the HackRF's TX capability is kinda wasted on me but the frequency range is appealing. the RSP1A has way better dynamic range from what ive read and the 14-bit ADC vs the HackRF's 8-bit is apparently a big deal on crowded bands anyone actually run both or switched from one to the other? SDR# and SDRuno both seem fine from what ive seen on youtube but i spend most of my time in SDR++ now anyway so software isnt really the issue. just trying to figure out if the RSP1A is actually noticeably better in practice or if its one of those things where the specs look great on paper but in real use its not that different

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for chasing DX and all that but honestly it feels like a slot machine sometimes, you decode, you call, you maybe get a 73 and thats it. no actual exchange of anything meaningful. started looking at JS8Call because it seems like you can actually like... talk to someone? but the SNR performance is supposedly worse than FT8 and i cant figure out if thats a dealbreaker or not for my setup. running an IC-7300 into a 40m doublet at about 30 feet, mostly operating in the evenings on 40 and sometimes 20. propagation here has been decent lately but im not exactly on a hilltop. anyone gone from FT8 over to JS8Call and actually stuck with it? does the relay stuff work in practice or is it mostly theoretical on a low-traffic mode? also mildly curious if PSK31 is just completely dead at this point or if theres still activity somewhere on 20m during the day. used to see it occasionally when i was just listening around but havent checked in a while