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

so ive had my TS-590SG sitting on the desk for going on 6 years now and it still works perfectly fine, no complaints really. but ive been eyeballing the IC-7300 for a while just because everyone seems to love the waterfall display and the DSP on it is supposedly really good. my 590 has decent filtering but honestly i think im just getting bored and looking for an excuse to spend money lol the thing is i mostly do SSB on 40 and 20, occasionally 15 when the band opens up, and some 10m during contests. i dont do digital at all. so im wondering if the 7300 even makes sense for my use case or if im just chasing a shiny new radio. anybody gone from a 590 to the 7300 or vice versa and actually noticed a real difference on receive? not talking about specs, talking about actual operating experience on a busy 40m evening

so ive been poking around the usual spots online and there's a lot of chatter about Icom supposedly having something new coming out later this year, some people are saying its going to be a mid-range HF rig to sit between the 7300 and the 7610 which honestly would be pretty interesting if true. I dont know how much of it is just forum speculation at this point but the rumors have been circulating for a few months now. Also totally unrelated but 10 meters has been absolutely nuts lately, worked a bunch of South American stations last weekend just running like 50 watts and a dipole in the attic, propagation has been really something else with the solar cycle where it is. If you havent been checking 28 MHz lately definitely worth a listen especially in the afternoons. Anyone else keeping up with whats going on in the hobby right now? feel like theres actually a lot happening for once

so ive been putting off building a wire antenna for probably two years now because i kept telling myself id just buy something decent eventually. anyway last weekend i finally just grabbed some 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had in the garage and cut two legs for 40 meters using the standard 468/f formula, came out to about 33.something feet per side. center connector is just a SO-239 i pulled off an old project, soldered the two legs on, threw it up in an inverted V config with the apex maybe 25 feet off the ground off my chimney bracket. problem is the SWR at the feed point is reading around 2.1 at 7.150 and i was kind of hoping for better than that. i know 2.1 isnt the end of the world but i was expecting closer to 1.5 or so. did i screw up the formula or is the inverted V configuration just naturally going to push the impedance around? i trimmed a tiny bit off one leg experimentally and it didnt seem to change much. running it into an IC-7300 with the built in tuner engaged it plays fine but still curious why the base SWR is where it is before the tuner. also the legs are not symmetric in terms of the angle, one side has more droop than the other because of where my anchor points ended up. could that be throwing things off or is it not that sensitive to that

the balun question comes up every time and honestly for casual SSB at lower power you might not notice a difference at all, but the reason people push for a choke is less about SWR and more about common mode current on the coax shield. without one the coax braid becomes part of your radiating system which can cause RF in the shack, weird SWR behavior if you touch the coax, that sort of thing. at 18-20 feet up on 40m you're also going to have a pretty high angle of radiation which limits you to regional stuff mostly, NVIS territory really, but for local nets and ragchewing thats not necessarily bad. if you want a quick choke wind 8-10 turns of your feedline coax through a type 31 mix toroid, costs a couple bucks and takes 15 minutes. your 1.4:1 SWR sounds totally reasonable for a dipole that hasnt been trimmed yet, id say leave it and just wind the balun before you do any serious operating. the stranded 14awg is fine by the way, ive been using similar wire for years.

okay so the ID thing — technically yes you're supposed to ID at least every 10 minutes and at the end of the transmission, that's straight from 97.119. but realistically nobody is sitting there with a stopwatch and the FCC has way bigger fish to fry than two hams going 13 minutes on a simplex freq. that said, get in the habit of doing it right because on a busy repeater people will notice and some guys will say something. the third party traffic thing is different and honestly a lot of newer hams get tripped up on this. third party just means someone who isnt a licensed amateur is communicating via your station. your wife saying hi is technically third party traffic. within the US that's generally fine as long as you're supervising and everything, Part 97.115 covers it. the agreement thing your repeater friend mentioned is for third party traffic to foreign countries — some countries have treaties with the US that allow it, some don't, and if the country you're talking to doesn't have an agreement with the US you cant pass third party traffic there at all. domestically you're probably fine, just make sure you stay in control of the station.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech) and just got my first HT, a Baofeng UV-5R which i know everyone has opinions about but its what i could afford. anyway theres a 2m repeater listed in the repeaterbook for my area and it shows a 100.0 Hz tone. i programmed the offset and everything but i cant get into it. like i key up and nobody ever hears me, or at least nobody responds. so my question is — do i need to program that 100.0 tone as a transmit tone, a receive tone, or both? i honestly dont fully understand what CTCSS even does. i read something about squelch but now im more confused than before. also is it considered rude to just call CQ on a repeater or is there some other way youre supposed to announce yourself? i dont want to be that guy who annoys everyone before i even figure out how to get the thing working lol

ok so ive been listening on HF for about 3 weeks now and people are throwing around all these weird abbreviations constantly and i can only figure out some of them from context. like i know QSO is a contact and QTH is your location but then someone said QRM and i thought that was the same as QRN but apparently not? and then theres stuff like 73 and 88 which arent even Q codes i guess and people use them at the end of every conversation. is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just kind of learn these over time by listening. also someone on 40m last night kept saying QSB and i still dont know what that means. feels like theres a whole language i dont know yet

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the storms we had last month I finally got serious about it. got a pelican case, my FT-857D, a little 40Ah lithium battery pack, and a roll of RG-8X with some PL-259s already soldered on. threw in a j-pole I built last summer and figured that was probably a decent start. the thing is I keep reading these lists online and everyone seems to have wildly different opinions on what absolutely needs to be in a go-kit versus what's just nice to have. like do I really need a second radio? some guys on another group were saying you should always have a backup HT at minimum and honestly that makes sense but now im second guessing everything else too. also not sure how to handle power in a real emergency situation where I might be deployed somewhere for 24-48 hours. the 40Ah pack should theoretically last a while on low power but I havent actually tested it under real conditions yet. should I be looking at a solar panel setup too or is that overcomplicating things at this point? I just want something I can grab and be operational within like 20-30 minutes of arriving somewhere. anyway curious what you all have learned from actual deployments or drills, not just the theory stuff

oh man this is something i could talk about forever, been doing ARES activations for about 12 years now and my kit has gone through probably four or five complete overhauls. the biggest thing i learned early on is that your go-kit should match what you actually do, not what looks cool in someones youtube video. if your served agency needs you on VHF repeaters most of the time, you dont need to drag HF gear to every deployment. on the power question — yeah most people have moved to LiFePO4 at this point, the weight savings over SLA is just too good to ignore especially if youre carrying stuff any distance. i run a 50ah battleborn battery and it gets me through a long shift without stressing. that said SLA is still totally fine if you have it, dont let anyone tell you you need to spend a bunch of money before you even know what your role is gonna be. for organization i went with a medium sized rolling pelican case and used foam inserts for the radio and battery, then everything else — cables, anderson powerpole stuff, spare fuses, headset, notepad, pens — goes in a separate smaller bag that sits on top. the key thing is every time you pack it back up after a drill or activation, put it back exactly the same way. you want muscle memory so you can find stuff at 2am in the rain. also keep a laminated checklist taped inside the lid, saved me from forgetting things more than once

so ive been running a remote station at my parents place about 90 miles away for a couple years now, started with just a raspberry pi running fldigi and some VPN stuff that was honestly a huge pain to maintain every time the router rebooted or the pi decided to have a moment. works ok but latency on the audio has always been kinda rough and any time there's a network hiccup the whole thing falls apart and i have to call my dad to go push buttons which he finds hilarious but i dont anyway i was looking at RemoteHams and their SDR remote client — the RCForb software — and wondering if anyone's actually using it for serious operating or if its mostly just casual listening type stuff. i know it supports a bunch of radios through the server software but the SDR piece is what caught my eye because i was thinking about putting a RSP1A or maybe an Airspy up there as kind of a wideband monitor while also having the IC-7300 for actual TX. the internet linking side of things is what im not totally clear on, like does it handle the audio sync better than what i get with a raw VNC + audio stream approach? i've seen some youtube demos but those are always cherry picked ideal conditions obviously. curious what real world experience looks like, especially on a residential cable connection on the remote end