Jessica Wilson66

the LPF relay idea is a good shout. i'll also say — did you verify the TX path enable voltage is actually making it to the PA board? on mine there was a cold solder joint on a tiny SMD transistor near the TX/RX switching that was intermittently dropping the bias voltage and it looked totally normal visually. had to actually probe it under power to catch it. the 817 is a nightmare to work on at that level cause everything's so crammed in there but its doable if you're patient.

yeah that sounds like classic hand capacitance getting into the VFO. its super common on homebrew stuff especially when the oscillator coil isnt shielded. the T50-2 is fine but an unshielded coil that close to the edge of the board is basically an antenna for your hand. before you build a full can, try wrapping the coil and the 3904 in some copper foil tape and grounding the foil, just as a quick test. if the effect reduces noticeably then you know shielding is your answer. also check if your bypass caps on the oscillator supply rail are actually doing anything — sometimes people use the right values on paper but the physical placement means theyre not really decoupling where it counts. layout on perfboard can work fine but you have to be really deliberate about keeping the RF return paths short.

honestly the memorization approach works fine for passing, thats basically what most people do and nobody is going to quiz you on the theory while youre operating. the pool isnt that big and if you spend a few weeks on hamstudy.org doing practice tests youll probably be ready. i think i got to like 85% on the practice tests before i took the real one and passed no problem the theory stuff does start making more sense once you actually get on HF and start dealing with antenna tuners and figuring out why your SWR is doing weird things, so dont stress about deeply understanding every formula right now. just get the ticket and get on the air, the learning happens naturally after that and yeah once you pass and your callsign updates in the FCC database which usually takes a day or two, you can operate on the General portions right away. no waiting period or anything. you wont have the full 40m or 20m privileges that Extra gets but honestly General gives you plenty to work with especially when youre just starting out on HF

so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and i cant make up my mind. currently running an old FT-450D which has been fine but the display is just terrible and i want to upgrade to something with a proper panadapter or at least a decent spectrum display built in. the 7300 seems like the obvious choice because everyone and their dog has one and the spectrum scope is genuinely good from what i can tell on youtube videos. but a few guys at the club keep telling me the 590SG just sounds better on receive, cleaner audio, better roofing filters out of the box. one of them ran both side by side at a hamfest a while back and said the kenwood just felt more solid somehow. i do mostly SSB on 40 and 20, some 15 when the band cooperates, occasional digital but nothing serious. not really a contester. just casual ragchewing and occasionally hunting a bit of DX when something interesting pops up on the cluster. budget is around $1100 used or new doesnt matter to me. what would you guys actually pick if you were buying today

Don't overthink it - the ham radio exams let you see the questions word-for-word before you take the test, and with only 35 total questions, applicants tend to overthink the exam. Every single question they can ask about bandplans and frequencies is in the question pool - it tells you exactly what you need to know.

so ive been going to this one for like 4 years now and its usually pretty decent, lot of the same vendors but you occasionally find something good in the flea market area. last year i grabbed an old HF transceiver for almost nothing just cause the guy wanted to get rid of it before loading up his car. wondering if anyone else from around here is planning to go, maybe we could meet up at the club table if our group has one this year

honestly the memorization approach works fine for passing the test, the pool isnt that huge and HamStudy does a good job of tracking what you're weak on. i did pretty much the same thing when i upgraded and passed no problem. that said some of the propagation stuff like understanding why 40m works better at night or why 10m goes dead for years at a time, that stuff actually helps you when you're sitting there spinning the dial wondering why nobody is coming back to your calls. so maybe dont go full zombie memorize mode on everything, the propagation and band plan stuff is worth actually getting. the electrical theory questions i mostly just memorized and i'll be honest i still cant tell you exactly how to calculate the impedance of a parallel LC circuit from scratch, but i can operate just fine. give yourself maybe 3-4 weeks of regular study sessions and you should be good

i had the same confusion when i first started trying to use these tools, there's just so many of them and nobody really explains how they relate to each other. the QRZ spot page is convenient if youre already on there looking up a callsign but i wouldnt rely on it as my primary for speed. honestly for just getting started i found DX Summit pretty straightforward and you can filter by band which helped me a lot when i was still figuring things out.

oh man i remember being exactly where you are like two years ago. the one that really confused me for the longest time was QSY which just means change frequency. seemed so weird to use a three letter code for something that simple but i guess it goes back to the telegraphy days when brevity was everything. also you'll see stuff like OM which means old man and it's not actually rude it's just how hams refer to each other, and YL means young lady which some people find a bit dated but it's still used pretty widely. XYL is wife apparently. the lingo is a lot lol

yeah forget staring at the chart, thats probably the worst way to do it. you want to learn the sounds not the dots and dashes, like your brain needs to hear K and just know its K without going through some mental translation step first. the koch method is basically starting with just 2 characters sent at a normal speed (like 15-20 wpm) and you only move on when you can copy those accurately, then add one more character at a time. the idea is your brain learns the rhythm of each letter at real speed from the beginning instead of starting slow and having to relearn it later. that relearning thing is a real problem, i went through it myself. for apps, LC Morse on android is pretty solid and actually follows the koch method properly. LCWO.net is the website version and a lot of people swear by it. just pick one and stick with it for a few weeks before deciding it isnt working. consistency is honestly the whole game here, even 10-15 minutes a day beats doing an hour once a week. as for timeline, realistically copying simple qso stuff at 5-7 wpm took me maybe 2-3 months of daily practice but i wasnt super dedicated about it. some people are faster, some slower, dont stress it

So i've been putting this off for like two months but i finally got around to mounting a proper dual band antenna on my truck. Running a Yaesu FT-7900R which i picked up used a while back. The radio itself is working great, got it tucked under the dash on a RAM mount and its actually pretty clean looking if i say so myself. The antenna though... i went with a NMO mount through the roof which i know is the right call but i was nervous about drilling obviously. Ended up putting it pretty much dead center on the roof. SWR looks fine on 2m, maybe 1.3 or so, haven't checked 70cm properly yet. Question i keep going back and forth on — how much does antenna placement really matter on a vehicle for VHF/UHF? Like center of roof is supposed to be ideal for the ground plane but i've also seen people do lip mounts, hatch mounts, all kinds of stuff and they seem to get along fine. Is the center of roof thing overrated or is it actually worth the nerve-wracking hole in the roof? Also anyone have experience with the FT-7900 fan running constantly? Mine seems to kick on a lot even at low power, not sure if thats normal.

yeah that wall around 10-12wpm is completely real, almost everybody hits it. what you're describing with your brain locking up trying to process one letter while the next one comes in — thats exactly the problem, you're still hearing individual dits and dahs instead of just... hearing the letter as a sound. the jump from character recognition to word recognition is the hard part and honestly it just takes time and repetition. the advice about cranking the speed up is basically the Farnsworth method idea — you run the characters themselves at a higher speed, like 18-20wpm, but put longer spaces between them so you have time to process. lcwo lets you do this actually, theres a setting for effective speed vs character speed. that way your brain learns the rhythm of a fast E or a fast C from the start instead of building a slow version of it that you have to un-learn later. thats where the bad habits thing comes from, if you learn letters slow they feel different when they speed up. as for how long, honestly it was probably close to a year before i was comfortable ragchewing at 20wpm without breaking a sweat. but i wasnt practicing every day either. 4 months at 10wpm is completely fine, dont sweat it.

I used Gordon West's book combined with Ham Radio Prep's phone app and passed with flying colors. Having electronics flashcards on my phone worked great - I got 100% on my Extra exam. The key is consistent daily practice, even if just 15-20 minutes during lunch breaks.

Some people prepare for the Technician exam in less than 5 hours using video lessons and interactive games. I used HamStudy's adaptive system which focused my practice on weak areas - very efficient approach.

oh man i remember feeling exactly like this when i first started checking into nets, you're definitely not alone. i actually sat on the frequency for like three weeks before i worked up the nerve to check in lol. the thing that helped me was just accepting that everyone there was new once and most hams genuinely like helping newcomers figure it out. one small thing i picked up -- some nets specifically ask for new or visiting stations first, so if you hear the NCS say that, thats your moment to jump in early and maybe even mention youre new. a lot of net controls will give you a little extra time or acknowledge you specifically which is nice. worth paying attention to how your particular net runs because they all have slightly different formats.

The evaluation is often as easy as using tables to determine that your antenna is far enough away from people - the bulletin outlines several ways hams can evaluate their stations. Start with the distance tables in OET Bulletin 65 Supplement B - if your antenna meets the minimum distances, you're done. No measurements or paperwork to the FCC required!

the farnsworth method helped me a ton, what the other guy said. also just — have you tried actually getting on the air yet? even just listening to qso's on 40m or 20m? i know it sounds scary but honestly just tuning around and trying to copy real signals even if you only get like half of it does something different for your brain than software practice. theres some QRS nets too specifically for slower speed practice, i forget the frequencies off the top of my head but theyre out there. sometimes practicing with software forever can only get you so far

yeah the ADIF import into Log4OM is actually pretty decent, i moved about 22k QSOs over last year and only had maybe a handful of records that came in weird and those were old ones with funky formatting anyway. the duplicate checking during import is solid so you wont end up with a mess. the WSJT-X integration is done through the same UDP broadcast but Log4OM has a dedicated WSJT-X integration panel that shows decodes and stuff in real time, i find it a bit more stable than my old N1MM setup was. that said i still fire up N1MM the second contest season kicks in, theres just nothing that touches it for that. the two-program workflow is annoying i agree but i kind of just accepted it. run Log4OM as my main logger, when a contest starts i export whats relevant and move to N1MM, after the contest i import the contest log back. bit of a pain but not terrible once you have the workflow down.

also worth double checking your baud rate is actually 1200 and not something weird — ive seen direwolf default configs cause issues with some setups. and the baofeng thing, just make sure your TX delay is set high enough, those radios have a slower PTT response than dedicated APRS radios and if the TNC starts sending before the radio is fully keyed up you lose the beginning of the packet and digis wont decode it cleanly.

i had the exact same issue with a receiver i built last year, drove me crazy for like two weekends. turned out the problem for me was i had the input and output wiring of the 386 running parallel to each other for a few inches and it was just oscillating at a low frequency and presenting as hum. rerouted the wires and it cleaned right up. might not be your problem but worth looking at the physical layout before you go changing component values.

so ive been wanting to get into LEO satellite work for a while now and last weekend i finally just went for it. borrowed a pair of cross-yagis from a club buddy and set up in the backyard with my FT-818 and an old laptop running gpredict. the pass looked decent on paper, maybe 6-7 minutes, elevation peaked around 52 degrees which i figured would be plenty of time. the problem is i completely underestimated how fast you have to tune on the linear transponder. AO-73 has that inverting transponder so when youre doppler correcting on the uplink it goes the opposite direction from the downlink and my brain just could not keep up in real time. i kept hearing my own signal wandering all over the place. got one contact, barely, some guy in Ohio who i think was also struggling because his audio was all over the place too. i know people do this with just a single dual band radio and manual tuning and i honestly dont know how. is there some trick to it or do you basically just have to run SDR on the downlink and have a separate radio for the uplink so you can at least hear yourself? or does it just take a bunch of passes before your hands know what to do automatically

you're not overthinking it, it's genuinely a bit of a mess when you first start. the short version is that most of these tools are pulling from the same underlying cluster network (the DX Spider nodes and similar) but they filter and display things differently. DXwatch tends to have pretty good filtering options and the interface is clean once you get used to it. QRZ spots are fine too but i've noticed they sometimes lag a bit behind or have slightly different propagation data depending on which nodes they're connected to. honestly for casual DX chasing i just use DXwatch and have been happy with it for years. if you want to go deeper, look into setting up a direct telnet connection to a cluster node in your logging software — that way you're getting spots as raw as they come and can filter however you want. WSJT-X has its own spot integration too if you're doing FT8 which is worth knowing about. but for now yeah just pick one and learn it, you can always add more tools later.

yeah the callsign thing tripped me up too when i started. i think the general vibe is phonetics whenever theres any doubt the other person will hear it clearly, which on HF is honestly most of the time. ive heard guys on 20m just rattling off their call like its nothing and half the time the other station asks for a repeat anyway so whats the point lol

haha this is exactly me like 3 months ago. i kept telling myself i needed to practice more before transmitting but honestly you just gotta do it. Larry sounds like good people, the regulars on most local repeaters are usually pretty welcoming to new calls

honestly i think people overthink the split thing sometimes. i mean yes you should be in the right spot but half the time when i finally break through its just... the band opened up a little more or the pileup thinned out for a second. i dont know if theres as much skill involved as people say, some of it is just timing and luck. that said the one-call thing is real. i did a small dxpedition a couple years ago to a fairly rare island, nothing vp8 level but still wanted by a lot of people, and from the operating position the pileup sounded like pure white noise when everyone was calling at once. when someone sent their call once clearly it actually stood out way better than the people who were just hammering away. you can hear a clean callsign in there if it isnt buried under other people calling at the same time