Angela Turner

had something similar on my 746 pro years ago, turned out to be a cold solder joint on one of the band pass filter switching transistors, not even a relay. took forever to find because it was so intermittent. the way i finally nailed it down was with a heat gun on low just kind of waving it around different sections of the board while watching the S meter — obviously be careful doing that and dont let it get too hot anywhere. when i hit the right spot the signal would drop immediately and come back when it cooled. let me localize it enough to find the joint under magnification. might also just be worth checking if icom has any service bulletins for that radio, i think there were a couple issued for the 7300 in the first few production runs. cant remember what they covered though.

same boat here not too long ago — the LoTW integration is really what makes it manageable now. one thing i'll add is dont sleep on getting physical QSL cards for rare ones even if you have LoTW confirmation, some of the older DX entities or special operations dont always upload to LoTW reliably and you might need a card as backup for credit. also for WAZ, thats 40 zones worldwide which sounds simple but a few of those zones are genuinely hard to work, zone 2 and some of the pacific zones can take a while to fill in depending on the solar cycle.

yeah honestly at 25 feet a dipole on 40m is going to be pretty much a cloud warmer, good for regional stuff but anything over say 800 miles it starts to struggle. your 4btv with a decent radial field is actually probably doing better on DX than a low dipole would. the low angle radiation from the vertical is where it wins. if you could get the dipole up to like 50 feet or more then the conversation changes but at 25 feet i wouldnt bother pulling down the vertical. that said 16 radials is on the low end, i had a similar setup and going from 16 to 32 made a noticeable difference, not huge but real. if youre gonna keep the vertical id spend the weekend laying more wire before doing anything else

the hackrf is fun but its kind of a different tool honestly. i use mine mostly for replay stuff and poking at things in the 2.4GHz range, its not really what id reach for if i just wanted to sit and listen to HF. the bandwidth is impressive, like 20MHz at a time, but that 8-bit thing mentioned above is real and you feel it when there are big signals around. for P25 trunking specifically make sure whichever one you get plays nice with SDR++ or whatever youre planning to use for decoding. i run SDR++ with DSD+ and it works but getting the sample rates and the plugin chain right took me a frustrating weekend. just saying go in with patience

okay so i passed my general exam like 3 months ago and ive been mostly just listening on HF since then. im finally ready to actually transmit but im getting confused reading part 97 because the band charts everyone posts online all look slightly different and i dont know which one to trust. my main question is about 40 meters specifically — i see some charts that say general class gets like 7.175 to 7.300 for phone and others that say something different. also is there a rule about power limits that changes depending on the band or is 1500 watts just always the max across the board? i have a used IC-7300 and i dont want to accidentally operate somewhere i shouldnt be. sorry if this is a dumb question, i looked at the actual FCC part 97 document and it honestly made my eyes glaze over

i did my first EME contact about 2 years ago on 2m with a 4x9el array and around 400w, worked a big gun station in russia running like 8 yagis and a kw, wasnt exactly a fair fight lol but it still counted. the moment you actually decode something bounced off the moon its just a completely different feeling than a normal VHF contact. one thing that tripped me up early on — the moon moves fast enough that you have to account for doppler shift, not huge on 2m but enough that you need your frequency spot on and WSJT-X handles it automatically with the EME mode but you gotta have your grid set right and check the moon position stuff actually makes sense for your QTH. also az/el rotor is obviously needed, a lot of guys underestimate how annoying it is to track manually even for a short window. i built a cheap az/el setup with a couple of old prop pitch motors and it works fine but getting it calibrated took a weekend

this is actually really good to hear, im pretty new to HF and 10 meters was the first band i ever made a contact on because i only had a technician license at the time. just upgraded to general last month so now i have the whole band to play with but i havent really explored much yet. do you have a particular part of the band you hang around on for DX or is it kind of all over the place when its open like that? still trying to get a feel for where people actually are on these bands vs what the band plan says

350 miles is tough, honestly for that kind of distance most of the remote linking stuff is gonna feel a bit sluggish no matter the software. i use EchoLink for some linking stuff and even that gets weird when everyones nodes are hopping through multiple servers. different use case i know but same basic problem with internet timing. not super familiar with the RSPdx specifically but ive heard good things about it as a pan. does it play nice with the RCForb client or are you having to run it kind of parallel and switch windows? that context switching alone would annoy me during a pileup

honestly the power question is the one that trips everybody up at first. i went through three different setups before landing on something i was happy with. i use a 40ah lifepo4 from bioenno now and yeah they are pricey but i deployed twice last year and not having to worry about the battery going flat or hauling around something that weighs 60 pounds made a huge difference. lead acid is fine if budget is the main concern but once you lift a group 31 into the back of your car a few times you start doing the math on whether the bioenno is actually that expensive. for antennas i keep it simple. a buddistick and about 30 feet of wire for an end fed if i need to improvise. the buddistick covers me for most portable HF work and the wire is basically free so why not throw it in. the guys who show up with four different antenna systems and spend an hour setting up are not the guys you want at an activation honestly. biggest thing though — just get something put together even if its not perfect. a kit that exists beats a perfect kit you havent built yet. i had a checklist taped inside my pelican case for like two years before i actually trusted myself to just go down the list without reading every line.

the balun question is one of those rabbit holes honestly. short answer is for a simple inverted-v at low power you're probably not going to notice a huge difference, but a 1:1 current balun at the feedpoint does help keep rf off the coax shield which can cause all kinds of weird stuff -- pattern distortion, rfi into your shack, swr readings that shift when you touch the coax, that kind of thing. i ran a dipole for years without one and it worked fine, then i added a cheap air-wound choke balun (just 8 turns of the coax through a couple of type 31 toroids) and my noise floor actually dropped a little. might have been placebo who knows. 1.8:1 on 40m ssb is workable, most tuners will handle that no problem and your finals wont care. if you want to bring it down you could try shortening the legs just a bit at a time, like half inch increments, and rescanning. sounds like the antenna is doing its job though if you're making EU contacts at 75w. redo the sketchy solder joint. seriously. cold solder joints fail eventually, usually at the worst possible time, and its a 10 minute job to do it right. flux, good heat, let the wire tin properly before you join it.

yeah there's no hard rule really, it's more of a feel thing. generally on a clear repeater with someone local you probably dont need to phonetic everything out, but when you're giving your callsign or spelling something where a mistake would matter — like a name or a grid square or whatever — that's when you reach for phonetics. the NATO alphabet is just the standard everyone's trained on so it's the safest bet. the reason you'll hear different ones is that before NATO standardized everything people were using all kinds of variations, Able Baker Charlie for instance was the old US military set, and some old timers still slip into that. there's also just... people who make stuff up when they blank on the real one lol, like i've heard guys say Lincoln instead of Lima and nobody really cares as long as it's clear. just use NATO when you can and you'll be fine

the metal roof probably doesnt matter much at 40m unless its really close to where the vertical would sit. but yeah i agree with the dipole rec just because its simpler. i built a fan dipole for 40 and 20 a while back and its been the workhorse antenna here ever since, super low drama. verticals are great but they really do need the radials or you're just loading up lossy ground and wondering why your signal reports are mediocre.

so this has been bugging me for about two weeks now. I can see my station showing up on aprs.fi just fine, beacon is going out every few minutes, position looks right, all that. but whenever I try to send an actual message to another station — like a proper APRS message, not just a beacon — it never seems to arrive. the other guy checks his TH-D74 and nothing. I check my end and it shows sent but no ACK ever comes back. im using a TNC-Pi hooked up to a 2m radio feeding into Xastir on a raspberry pi. path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. I thought maybe it was an RF issue but like I said the position beacons are clearly making it through because I show up on the map within like 30 seconds. messaging just seems completely broken. has anyone run into this or know what might be causing the disconnect between beacon working and messaging not working

14 contacts on your first activation is solid man, a lot of people struggle to even get the 4 minimum on their first try. wind is just part of the deal unfortunately, i started using those little tent stakes to anchor my antenna wire down and it helps a ton. what freq were you working, 20m? also the kx2 is such a good trail radio, i was debating between that and the 705 for a while and went kx2 and never looked back

yeah what he said on the path thing, i had the same issue when i first set mine up. but also check your beacon rate — the TM-D710 has that SmartBeaconing thing and if its configured for mobile operation it might be suppressing beacons when it thinks youre stationary. theres a setting in the menu somewhere that controls the stationary timeout, i forget which menu number it is but its in there. i spent like two weeks thinking my igate was broken when it was just the radio deciding i didnt need to beacon because i hadnt moved lol.

yeah i passed mine like three months ago and honestly hamstudy was all i used. just did it on my phone whenever i had a few minutes. took me maybe two weeks of casual studying. the test itself felt easier than the practice ones for some reason, maybe nerves made the practice feel harder i dunno. one thing nobody told me was that after you pass you have to wait for your callsign to show up in the FCC database before you can actually transmit, took about a week for mine. so dont freak out if you pass and then cant find yourself in the system right away

so ive been lurking on this forum for like 6 months while studying for my technician exam and i passed last tuesday, got my callsign thursday which was way faster than i expected honestly anyway i was just messing around on 2m with my baofeng plugged into a mag mount on the car and someone came back to me on the local repeater and we actually talked for like 10 minutes. the guy was in ohio which isnt far from me but still it felt kind of surreal that i was just talking to a random stranger through a radio i bought for 30 bucks idk i just wanted to share that somewhere because my family doesnt really get it. my wife was like "thats nice" and went back to her book lol. anybody remember their first contact? did it feel weird to you too at first

If you seriously need a QSL, do it the old-fashioned way with paper - at least for the rare ones. I use LoTW for common countries but still send paper QSLs with green stamps for anything over 200 on the DXCC list. International QSL costs can run several dollars per card, but some stations still don't use LoTW.

went through this myself about six months ago. one thing i'd add is use ae7q.com to research calls before you apply — it shows you the availability status and when calls are coming out of the sequential pool vs. former holders being deceased or whatever. saved me a lot of guesswork. i ended up getting my call on the first try but i picked something that wasnt very contested so that helped

i totally missed it, was stuck doing yard work all day and by the time i got on sunday everything was quiet again. story of my life honestly. what part of the country are you in? im in the midwest and 10m has been hit or miss for me, sometimes i wonder if my antenna situation is hurting me more than i think.

Finally worked up the courage to check into my first local net tonight (K5ABC on the 146.52 repeater) but felt pretty awkward. Net Control asked for check-ins by prefix A-F and I just said my callsign - no name, location, or anything else. Should I have given more info? I heard some folks giving signal reports and mentioning their power levels. What's the proper way to check in without sounding like a complete newbie? The Net Control was super friendly and welcomed me but I want to do it right next time.

yeah been running a remote setup for a couple years, nothing fancy but it works. i never bothered with the SDR integration just because my internet at the remote site is satellite and the extra IQ data stream just tanks the whole connection. so i cant really help there but wanted to say the linking idea isnt as crazy as it sounds — there are guys doing mesh setups with multiple remote nodes, usually over VPN tunnels, and it can work if both ends have solid low latency connections. the vermont thing sounds like it depends entirely on what kind of pipe your buddy has up there. vermont rural internet can be pretty rough from what ive heard lol.

so ive been trying to get Winlink working for a couple weeks now and i think i finally understand the basics but the RMS gateway thing is still confusing me a bit. i set up Winlink Express on my laptop, got it connected to my IC-7300 via the USB audio interface, and i can see the waterfall and everything looks fine. my question is really about the difference between connecting to a public RMS gateway versus setting up your own. like is there any reason a regular person would want to run their own gateway or is that more of an emcomm/club thing? also when i connected to W4XXX-10 last night i got a session going and downloaded a couple test messages i sent to myself through the web interface. that part worked great. but i tried later and it kept saying no connection and i couldnt figure out if it was the gateway being offline or something i did wrong. is there a way to tell if a specific gateway is actually active before you try to connect? running vara HF on 40m if that matters, using the propagation map on the winlink website which honestly is pretty useful once you figure out it out

yeah the inverting transponder thing trips up a lot of people coming from FM birds. basically on a linear transponder the passband is inverted so LSB up means LSB down but the doppler correction goes in opposite directions for uplink vs downlink. gpredict handles this but you have to make sure you have the transponder configured correctly in the satellite database, specifically that the inversion flag is set. if its not set it'll shift both vfos the same direction which is wrong. the way i think about it is — the transponder passband is fixed relative to the satellite. so as the sat comes toward you, your downlink frequency appears higher (positive doppler) but because the passband is inverted, your uplink signal needs to go lower to stay in the same spot in the passband. gpredict should handle all of this automatically if the transponder data is right. check that you have the correct center frequencies loaded and that inversion is ticked. also make sure your CAT control is actually talking to both vfos and not just main. FO-29 has been a bit iffy lately with its schedule but AO-73 is pretty solid for practice passes

so i've been a ham for about 3 years now mostly just doing HF with my Icom 7300 and never really thought about QRP stuff because honestly i figured why would i want less power right. but my buddy kept talking about his little MTR trail friendly rig and i got curious and ended up ordering a QCX mini kit from QRP Labs a few months back and just finally sat down and built the thing last weekend. it took me probably 6 or 7 hours total and i had to reflow a couple solder joints that were giving me grief on the toroid winding section but got it going and took it out to the park yesterday with a random wire antenna up in a tree and worked a station in Ohio from Pennsylvania on 40m running 5 watts CW. i know thats not some huge DX accomplishment but something about it just felt different, like more satisfying than any contact ive had with the big rig. hard to explain really. anyway im kind of hooked now and wondering if anyone has suggestions for what to build or try next in the QRP world. im thinking maybe a 20m EFHW antenna to make the portable setup a bit easier. also curious if anyone runs QRP on digital modes like FT8, does the low power thing still feel rewarding on digital or is it kind of cheating since the software does all the heavy lifting