Angela Turner

yeah your buddy is right about the tone thing. for most repeaters you only need to set the transmit CTCSS — thats the tone your radio sends out so the repeater opens up for you. the receive tone (sometimes called DCS or just squelch tone on some radios) is optional and just means your radio will only unsquelch when IT hears that tone coming back from the repeater. most people leave that turned off or set it to carrier squelch so they can hear everything on the output. so basically just make sure youre putting the tone on the TX side and youre good. if repeaterbook shows 100.0 for a machine, set your transmit tone to 100.0 and leave receive tone off unless you really want it for noise reasons. and absolutely check into the net — thats literally what they're there for. most net controls love having new checkins, just wait for the net control to ask for checkins, listen to how others do it, and when its your turn just say your callsign phonetically and say youre a new ham if you want. nobody is going to bite you i promise. the tuesday night guys around here are pretty friendly from what ive seen on similar setups.

honestly the extra-only portions on 40 and 20 are pretty active, more than i expected. on 40 meters especially the phone portion gets crowded on weekends and having that extra slice of spectrum actually does help. that said yeah a chunk of the exam is stuff you memorize and then never think about again. the filter theory and some of the more advanced antenna stuff i had to just brute force with the question pool. hamstudy.org got me through it in about 6 weeks studying on my phone during lunch breaks. i wouldnt say its easy but its not as bad as it looks when you first open the whole pool and go oh no.

yeah the fan mod is totally worth doing, i did something similar on mine a while back. used a simple NPN transistor and a 10k thermistor zip tied to the heatsink, feeds into the base and gates the fan. keeps it quiet below about 45C and then it ramps up when things get warm. way less annoying on long digital modes sessions. the hardest part is finding a clean spot to grab 12v that's always on and not switching with PTT or anything weird. on the ALC thing, i ran into the same issue driving a Tokyo Hy-Power amp. what ended up working for me was just backing the drive way down and ignoring the internal ALC entirely, then let the amp do its own thing. not elegant but it worked. never found a clean external tap point that i was happy with on the 857 specifically.

one thing that tripped me up early on was propogation to the nearest gateway isn't always the best choice even if its geographically close. I'm in the midwest and sometimes I connect more reliably to a gateway three states away on 40m than I do to one 80 miles from me. The RMS list in Winlink Express shows the last heard time and you can sort by that, I usually just pick a few that have been active recently and try them rather than fixating on distance.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about chasing DX and all these different awards and honestly im a little overwhelmed trying to figure out what any of it means. like i understand DXCC is working 100 countries or entities or whatever theyre called, but then theres WAS which is the 50 states thing, and WAZ is zones? and people talk about mixed mode vs phone vs cw credits like theyre totally separate things? i got my general last spring and ive been logging contacts but i wasnt really paying attention to what counted for what. does LoTW automatically track all this or do i have to manually figure out which contacts apply to which award? and do i need to submit anything or does it just kind of build up in the background. ive got maybe 40 states confirmed on LoTW already just from ragchewing and some contests i jumped into and i didnt even realize i was close to WAS until someone mentioned it in another thread also is it worth going for all three or do most people just pick one to focus on. i dont want to spread myself too thin but i also dont want to miss contacts that would count

same thing happened to me like two weeks into my ticket lol. net control on ours actually took a minute after the net to call me directly and walk me through it which was really cool of him. most net controls ive met are super patient with newer folks. dont stress it too much, just keep checking in and it becomes second nature pretty quick. the waiting thing really is the main thing to get down.

so ive been doing single op for a few years now and consistently placing mid pack in my section for sweepstakes and cqww. i keep reading about guys doing SO2R and the rate improvements sound pretty dramatic but every time i look into it i get overwhelmed with the station engineering side of it — the filtering, the antenna isolation, all that. my antennas arent great to begin with (tribander at 35ft and a 40m dipole) so im wondering if the interference problems are gonna be worse than the benefit. also just practically speaking, how long did it take you guys to actually get comfortable enough with it that your rate went UP instead of down? i tried running a second radio during the last sprint just casually monitoring and i felt like i was making more mistakes on the run frequency than usual. felt like rubbing my belly and patting my head at the same time. is there a smart way to ease into this without rebuilding the whole station first

the antenna comment is real though lol. i upgraded my sdr before fixing my antenna situation and yeah. that said the RSP1A is genuinely better hardware, not just marginally. the multi-tuner thing where you can run two receivers simultaneously in SDRuno is actually useful sometimes for things like monitoring a repeater input and output at the same time or whatever. one thing worth mentioning is SDRplay has been pretty good about driver support and the RSP lineup works well with SDR++ which is what a lot of people use now instead of SDR# anyway. cleaner interface imo and actively developed. if youre on linux that matters a lot actually, the RTL drivers are rock solid but some of the others have been hit or miss depending on distro.

which park was it? im always looking for new ones to activate in that region. also what band were you on, 40m? i find 40 during the day can be hit or miss depending on conditions but 20 usually saves me when nothing else is working

so this might be slightly off topic but the waterfall thing you mentioned is huge and i feel like people dont talk about it enough. im running an IC-7610 and just being able to see exactly where calls are landing on the panadapter changed everything for me. i used to just tune around the split range and guess but now i can literally see where the dx is pulling from and see the cluster of signals and find the slightly less packed spot. doesnt always work but it helps a lot. one thing ive never quite figured out though — when do you give up on a pileup and just try again later vs sticking it out. ive wasted entire evenings on one station before and then not gotten through. is there a point where you just decide the conditions arent gonna cooperate and move on

one thing i'd add is that the drift issue is real and worth paying attention to. some rigs especially older ones or anything that hasnt warmed up can be off by a khz or more. i got dinged at a club meeting once (not by the FCC just an old timer) for parking too close to 7.300 on a cold morning. wasnt over the edge but it was close enough that he could tell my rig hadnt stabalised yet. just let it warm up 10-15 min before you get on and you'll probably be fine. also honestly 40m is so busy that hanging out near the band edges is annoying anyway, theres usually pileups and weird stuff happening there.

honestly 2.4k transmit bandwidth is fine for most contacts but ive found bumping it to 2.8 or even 3.0 on 20m when conditions are decent makes a real difference in how natural you sound. the 2.4 setting cuts some of the upper mids that carry intelligibility. just something to experiment with, not a fix for the hum obviously but the audio quality thing is real. mic placement matters more than people think too. the PR-40 is meant to be talked across not straight into, a lot of guys dont realize that and eat the mic which causes all kinds of plosives and proximity bass buildup. keep it maybe 4-6 inches out and slightly off axis and see if that cleans things up. your reports will probably get more consistent just from that alone.

went through this exact thing about a year ago when i upgraded to extra. i will say the 18 day window thing caught me off guard, i thought i had to like sit there and submit the second a call dropped. ended up being way less stressful than i expected once i realized how it actually worked. just submit your application through the FCC ULS portal during the window and wait. the fee is like $35 i think, or maybe it changed, worth double checking that before you start. one thing nobody told me — make sure your current license info is completely up to date in ULS before you apply for a vanity. had a friend who had an old address on file and it caused some kind of delay with his application, nothing catastrophic but annoying. good luck with it, getting a call you actually like makes a surprisingly big difference

honestly just jump in, thats the best advice i can give. CQ WW is huge and yeah it can feel overwhelming when you tune around and everyone sounds like theyre going 100mph but you dont have to operate like that. just find a station calling CQ, give your call, log the contact. thats literally it. the 7300 is a great radio for this and a dipole at 25 feet will work fine especially on 40 and 80. you wont win anything your first time but thats not really the point anyway. and SOTA is kind of its own universe — it's more about portable/summit operating than contesting per se, though there are SOTA activations that happen during contests sometimes. worth looking into separately once you get the contest bug sorted out. there's a SOTA reflector and the website sotawatch.org has upcoming activations listed if youre curious.

oh man i had the same problem when i first started chasing DX, was constantly refreshing DXwatch on my laptop like a crazy person lol. someone at a hamfest pointed me toward the telnet clusters and i didnt even realize you could just connect directly with a terminal if you wanted to, like telnet to a node and see the raw spots fly by which is kind of fun in a nerdy way but not practical when youre actually trying to work someone. for android i think there was one called Ham DX Cluster or something like that, i dont remember the exact name but if you just search cluster in the play store a few pop up. the trick is finding one that lets you filter because otherwise its just a firehose of spots and you cant keep up