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.

yeah the missed check-in thing happened to me too when i first started. i was so nervous about stepping on someone i just sat there the whole time lol. now i know you can usually just wait for that end-of-net pass like the other reply says. some nets the NCS will even specifically say "any missed or late check-ins" so that's your cue. honestly the best thing i did was just listen to the net a few times before trying to check in, you kind of absorb how that specific group does things and they all have their own little quirks

yeah the room acoustics thing is no joke. i spent like two months tweaking equalizer settings and mic gain before someone finally told me my shack basically sounded like a bathroom and no amount of EQ fixes that. moved some stuff around and put a cheap foam panel behind me and suddenly everyone said i sounded way better without changing a single radio setting. also one thing — are you sure your ALC is behaving? if the ALC is pegging constantly your audio is gonna sound compressed and kinda strangled. there's a meter for it on the 7300, worth watching while you talk and making sure it's not just pinned the whole time. you want it barely touching on peaks not sitting there maxed out

i had the exact same problem when i first started seriously trying to work DX. the tab juggling is real. honestly what helped me most was just picking DXwatch as my main spot source and ignoring the others for a while, just to simplify things. you can filter by band and mode right on the site so you're not wading through HF spots when youre on 15m or whatever. the QRZ lookup thing — some logging software actually does that automatically when a callsign comes in, pulls up the entity and qsl info in a side panel. thats pretty handy. telnet setup really isnt as bad as it sounds once you just sit down and do it, theres a good walkthrough on the DXLab suite forums if you use that

yeah the listening to faster code thing does actually work, or at least it worked for me. i used to have LCWO running in the background while i was doing other stuff around the house, not even trying to copy it just letting it play. sounds weird but after a few weeks something kind of clicked and the characters started sounding more like sounds than patterns if that makes sense. dont know if thats scientific or whatever but it helped me also RufzXP if you havent tried it, its a little program for callsign copying and its kind of addictive. speeds up automatically when you get stuff right and slows down when you miss. got me moving faster without really noticing

honestly the memorization approach works better than most people expect, at least for passing the test. i wont pretend i fully understood every question about chebyshev filters or whatever when i took mine, but if you grind through the question pool enough times the patterns start sticking. that said i did find that understanding even a rough conceptual version of whats going on with things like skin effect or the smith chart made it way easier to remember the right answers, because its not just random anymore it actually makes a little sense. the extra segments are genuinely useful if you do any contesting or if you want to work DX stations that tend to hang around the edges of the bands where the pileups are a bit thinner. on 40m especially that extra sliver near the bottom is nice. whether its worth it for casual SSB use i mean thats kind of up to you but i dont regret it at all, the process of studying made me a better operator even if some of the theory went over my head.

Weight is everything on long hikes to summits. I switched from IC-705 to KX2 last year and saved about 8 ounces in my pack. VHF/UHF is a good match for SOTA (Height Above Average Terrain). However, for some remote summits, it can be a challenge to get enough radio contacts (4) to qualify. The KX2's CW capability really shines for weak signal work.

so ive been going to this one for like 4 or 5 years now and its usually pretty decent, good swap meet tables and the club always does a pretty solid antenna forum in the morning. last year i grabbed a barely used 706 for way less than i expected so im hoping to find something similar this time around. anybody else planning to show up? might try to carpool if someone is coming from the north side of town

so this has been driving me nuts for about two weeks now. my IC-7300 suddenly started putting out maybe 20-25 watts max when it should be doing 100. nothing changed as far as i know, was working fine one day and then the next time i sat down to operate it was just weak. ALC looks a little weird on the meter too, kinda jumpy when it shouldnt be on a steady carrier. ive already checked the obvious stuff — power supply voltage is solid at 13.8v under load, coax and connectors look fine, tried a dummy load and same issue so its not the antenna. SWR is reading normal when i do have a signal going out. the radio doesnt get unusually hot or anything and there are no error codes showing up on the display. im wondering if its a PA transistor starting to go or maybe something with the ALC circuit itself feeding back wrong. anybody dealt with this on the 7300 specifically? i dont really want to ship it to a service center if i can avoid it but im also not gonna dig into the finals without knowing what im looking at first.

so i decided to finally go for my technician license after years of just thinking about it. my neighbor has been a ham for like 30 years and he keeps telling me to just do it already. anyway i bought one of those study guides from amazon but honestly its kind of overwhelming, theres so much stuff in there about electronics and regulations and i dont even know what to focus on first. like does the actual exam pull questions directly from the question pool or are they paraphrased or something? i feel like if i could just memorize the pool id be fine but im not sure thats how it works. also is the gordon west book still the go-to thing or is there something better now

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general class) and everyone keeps telling me i need to try a contest to really get better at operating. my elmer keeps pushing me toward field day but honestly i dont even know what that involves beyond like... setting up outside? i looked up CQ WW and just got overwhelmed by all the exchange stuff and zones and whatever. is there like a progression to these things? like should i start with something smaller before jumping into CQ WW or ARRL sweepstakes? ive also been hearing about SOTA which sounds totally different from the logging contest stuff. anyway just looking for any advice from people who have actually done these, what was your first contest and did you feel completely lost at first or is it just me