Rag Chewer

i went through exactly this last year and ended up doing a center-loaded design kind of by accident honestly — i had a specific piece of aluminum tubing that happened to put the coil right around the 40% height mark which is roughly where a lot of people say center loading should go. SWR came out fine, works reasonably well into europe from the midwest on 40m when conditions cooperate. no idea how it compares to a base loaded version because i never built one to compare. one thing nobody mentioned to me when i was building it — weatherproofing the coil connection points is way more important than i thought. i used some self-amalgamating tape and assumed that was enough. it wasnt. had intermittent contacts by the end of summer, took me forever to track down. use proper coax seal or something more aggressive if its going to be outside year round.

yeah alternator whine for sure, had the exact same thing in my truck with a 2m/70cm setup. ended up using one of those icom noise filters on the power lead and it cleaned up almost completely. they're like 15 bucks on amazon and they're super easy to inline, totally worth trying before you go nuts chasing grounds the NR770H is a solid antenna by the way, good choice for a dual bander. what repeaters you running on mostly? we've got a pretty active 70cm machine here that i'm on most evenings if you want to do some signal tests once you get the noise sorted

ok so i've been trying to get winlink going for a few weeks now and i think i finally understand the basics but the gateway stuff is still tripping me up. running vara HF on an IC-7300 into a laptop with winlink express and i can connect to some gateways no problem but others just time out. like ill see a gateway in the list that looks close to me and has decent reports but it just sits there trying to connect and eventually dies. i know there's RMS gateways and then there's like peer to peer which is different but im not 100% sure i understand when you'd use one vs the other. the emcomm group i just joined uses winlink and they mentioned something about setting up a local RMS gateway for our county but i have no idea what that actually involves hardware wise or whether we'd need to register it somewhere. is that a big undertaking or is it more like you just install the software and point it at a TNC? also the message handling side of things — when a message comes through a gateway does it just go straight to the winlink.org servers and then out to email? trying to wrap my head around the whole path the message takes.

oh man i remember my first one, it was a simulated hurricane exercise and i was so worried i was going to mess up a message or miss a callsign and the whole thing would fall apart. reality is way more low key than you're imagining, at least in my experience. your EC knows you're new and any decent served agency liaison knows these drills are partly FOR training newer people. the thing that helped me most was just listening for the first chunk of time before jumping on the radio. get a feel for how your specific group runs things because every ARES group has slightly different internal habits even if the overall ICS structure is the same. and dont stress about perfect ITU phonetics every single time, as long as youre clear and the message gets through accurately thats what matters. bring a notepad, write everything down, and ask your net control to repeat if you miss something. thats not weakness thats just good operating

honest answer? you can absolutely pass it with memorization just like the general. the question pool is public same as always and if you just grind through it on HamStudy or wherever you'll probably be fine. i did mine that way back in 2019 and passed first try. the theory is nice to understand but the exam doesnt really test if you truly understand it, it tests if you can pick the right answer. that said the privileges are genuinely useful even if you dont think they are right now. the extra class portions of 40 and 75 meters are way less crowded, and 60m has some stuff too. if you ever get into cw or weak signal stuff the extra segments on 15 and 17 are nice to have. i think once you have the ticket you start exploring more just because you can, at least thats what happened with me

so ive been at this for about 8 months now and im kind of stuck. started learning morse back in the spring, got to 5wpm pretty quick using the Koch method on the LCWO website, but now im somewhere around 10-12wpm and it feels like i hit a wall. i can copy okay if its slow and clean but anything faster and my brain just falls apart trying to sound out the letters instead of just hearing them as whole words. my practice routine right now is about 20 minutes a day with LCWO and sometimes i tune around 40 meters and just try to copy callsigns. i know i should probably just be doing more of that but honestly most of what i hear is way too fast and i get discouraged pretty quick. someone at our club said the plateau between 10 and 15wpm is the worst part and that i just have to push through it but didnt really explain how. any of you go through this? what actually helped you break through it?

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, went up to a local W4 summit, nothing crazy, maybe a 2 mile hike in. brought my ft-818 and a linked dipole i made from a kit, ran it off a 3ah lipo and honestly it went smoother than i expected. made 4 contacts on 20m SSB which i know is the minimum for a valid activation so i was pretty relieved. couple things i wanted to ask though. first, i uploaded to sotadata the same night but i dont see my activator points yet, is there usually a delay or did i mess something up? second, i noticed some of the chasers who called me were already in the log before i even announced on the SOTAwatch cluster, is that normal? like do people just scan around for portable stations calling CQ SOTA or something? also one of the guys gave me a 59 and then asked for my summit reference twice, which made me feel like maybe my audio wasnt great. running the mic pretty close to my face out of habit from handheld use, wondering if thats an issue with the 818 internal mic. anyway overall stoked and already looking at my next one, theres a W4T summit about 45 min from me that looks doable

yeah the noise thing is real and its probably the biggest practical difference nobody talks about. verticals pick up a ton of local QRN because theyre omnidirectional and close to the ground, your dipole in inverted-V is actually rejecting some of that noise off the sides and ends. so even if the vertical is technically hearing a slightly stronger signal from a DX station the SNR might be worse and thats what actually matters for copying. that said 8 radials on an MFJ trap vertical is leaving a lot on the table. ive read the ARRL studies and basically you get most of the benefit from going to like 16-32 radials and then it starts to taper off. with 8 youre probably losing a dB or two in efficiency versus a well-built radial field. and trap verticals have their own losses baked in from the traps themselves so its already starting behind a resonant wire antenna. for pure casual DX on 40m late at night i actually think a fan dipole up at decent height beats a mediocre vertical more often than people expect. now if you could put up a full quarter wave vertical on 40 with 60+ radials on the ground thats a different conversation

so i was just spinning the dial on 10m last tuesday afternoon, wasnt really expecting much honestly because conditions around here have been pretty mediocre lately, and all of a sudden im hearing stations from south america, europe, japan all piling in at once. like wall to wall signals. i managed to work a ZL and a few EA stations which i havent done on 10m in probably two years at least. logged like 14 new entities in about 90 minutes which is more than i usually get in a whole month of casual operating. also saw some chatter that the Icom IC-7760 is getting closer to actually shipping to US dealers, somebody posted a hands-on video from a japanese ham and it looks pretty impressive though the price is gonna be... yeah. and apparently there was some kind of digital mode sprint last weekend that i completely missed because i forgot to check the calendar. anyone else been taking advantage of these conditions or am i just lucky with my timing

dayton is worth every bit of the drive man. i go almost every year and even when i dont buy anything i end up spending way too much time at the flea market just digging through boxes. found a barely used LDG tuner last year still in the box for 40 bucks. get there early though like before the gates even open if you can, the good stuff disappears fast

check the speaker first like the other guy said but also -- did you try the NR and APF settings? sometimes those get bumped and make things sound really weird, especially NR set high can cause that kind of mushy distortion artifacting on voice. probably not your issue but worth ruling out before cracking the case open lol

not sure if this helps but ive been using a nano instead of a pi for rotator stuff and just letting it handle the low level ADC reading and motor control, then it talks to the pi over serial for the hamlib side. kinda separates the concerns and the nano is way more tolerant of electrical noise in my experience, the atmega ADC isnt perfect but its less fussy about the i2c stuff. might be overcomplicating things for your setup though depends how much you want to tinker with it lol. the wsjtx integration part sounds like it's working better than mine ever did honestly

yeah the RFI thing got me too when i first installed mine. turned out one of my ground connections was just not great, like i had it on a bolt that looked grounded but wasnt making solid contact. redid it to bare metal and most of the noise just went away. might be worth checking before buying a bunch of filters

the 991A as a second radio is probably not helping you — the receive audio on that thing has a bit of lag in the DSP chain compared to the 7300 and when you're trying to do fast S&P on radio 2 that slight sluggishness adds up. not saying it wont work but if you ever get a chance to try something like an older Icom or a dedicated second contest radio youll notice the difference. anyway thats kind of a tangent. for the mental load thing i found it helps a lot to be really strict early on about WHEN you even look at radio 2. like dont touch it mid-exchange, only use it during your own CQ transmission window. sounds obvious but i kept breaking my own rule because i could hear a juicy mult on the second radio and id try to work it at the wrong moment and then miss my own callsign coming back. just takes discipline and eventually it becomes automatic

I was in the exact same spot last year lol. Ended up going with the Yaesu and haven't regretted it. The one thing I'd say is make sure whatever you get can do both VHF and UHF because some of the cheaper ones are VHF only and our local club uses a 70cm repeater for nets so that woud have been annoying to find out later.