Rag Chewer

I'm running 4x16el M2 antennas with similar power and getting good results. The 17th element gives maybe 0.3dB gain but adds wind loading. 144MHz moonbounce sits on a knife edge – it works, but only just. Focus on getting excellent coax and phasing harnesses first - that's where most people lose dB.

dont overlook the current sensing on that L298N, those boards can get surprisingly warm depending on your motor load and the onboard regulator is pretty weak. had one die on me mid contest which was annoying. nothing major just something to watch for. i ended up putting a little heatsink on mine and it's been fine since.

This was my first SET and I was nervous about making mistakes, but everyone was super supportive. Caution is good, but don't let it prevent you from participating and volunteering. Everyone makes mistakes on their first try, or first dozen tries, and everyone survives them. You will find that most other hams will be sympathetic and supportive of your efforts.

yeah im planning to be there, usually get there right when the gates open around 7 because the good deals are gone by 8:30 honestly. the tailgate guys sometimes show up even earlier to set up so if you walk the lot before the main hall opens thats where the real finds are. last year some guy had a pile of old Kenwood stuff he just wanted gone before he had to load it back in the truck lol the fox hunt thing is worth doing if youve never tried it, our club did one at the spring picnic and it took me embarassingly long to find the thing even with a tape measure yagi

the buzz on receive while moving is almost certainly alternator whine getting in somewhere, especially if it changes pitch with engine RPM. classic symptom. first thing i'd check is whether your coax shield is making good contact all the way through — sometimes when you tuck coax under door seals it gets pinched or the outer jacket gets compromised a little and you get all kinds of weirdness. also worth making sure your radio's ground is going directly to chassis, like a short run to a bolt on the firewall or floor, not just relying on the mounting bracket or the power wires. on the antenna placement thing, honestly for hitting repeaters and local simplex the difference between rear roof and center is going to be pretty marginal. you might get slightly better pattern centered but we're talking about situations where you're moving anyway so it kind of averages out. i wouldn't stress about moving the mount unless you enjoy doing the work for its own sake, which hey, some of us do.

What specific digital mode are you planning for the repeater? Some modes like DMR have tighter timing requirements that make the HackRF half-duplex limitation even more challenging to work around.

Ok so I've only had my technician license for about three months and I've been lurking on the local 2m net every Thursday night trying to get the hang of things. Last night I finally checked in and the net control asked me if I had any traffic and I just said 'negative' but then I accidentally keyed up again when two other stations were already in QSO and stepped all over them. I didnt even realize I'd done it until net control said 'please hold' and I just wanted to disappear. Nobody was mean about it but I've been overthinking it ever since. Is there like an unwritten rule I missed about waiting to hear the full exchange before transmitting again after you check in? I feel like I skipped some step that everyone else just knows. My elmer moved out of state before he could really walk me through net procedure stuff so I'm kind of figuring it out on my own.

im pretty new too so take this with a grain of salt but i spent like an entire weekend going through Part 97 when i was studying and the way it finally clicked for me was thinking of it as — you as the licensee are always responsible, period. whatever comes out of your radio is on you. so if your friend says something dumb or prohibited, thats your problem not theirs. that mental model made a lot of the rules make more sense to me anyway. the third party agreement stuff is real but honestly unless youre doing like formal message handling to certain countries you probably wont run into it for a while

the fan mod is worth it if you run any kind of digital modes for extended periods, honestly. i did mine after the finals got flaky during a long JS8Call session — couldn't prove it was heat related but after swapping in a better fan that kicks in earlier it's been solid. the stock fan threshold is set pretty conservatively high and by the time it actually spins up the PA has already been cooking for a while. what i did was just replace the fan with a higher CFM unit, same voltage, and added a small inline resistor to drop the speed a bit at idle so it's not screaming the whole time. there's a thread on eham somewhere from years back with the exact resistor value but i dont remember off the top of my head, probably worth digging up before you just slap anything in there. the 857 is a great little radio but yaesu really did cut some corners on the thermal management given how much they stuffed into that chassis.

Just upgraded to General last month and finally got my end-fed antenna up this weekend. Decided to tune around 20 meters this afternoon and heard a loud CQ from Chile. Heart was beating so fast but I took a breath and gave him a call with my KG5ABC. Got a solid 5-9 report and we chatted for 20 minutes about my new dipole setup. The DX bug has officially bitten me! Never thought I'd work South America with 100 watts and some wire. This hobby is absolutely incredible.

so ive been on SSB for about a year now and i keep getting reports that my audio is thin or tinny, sometimes people say its hard to copy me even when my signal is strong. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 which i thought would be pretty much solve all my audio problems but apparently not. i've messed with the mic gain and the compression settings a bunch but i feel like im just guessing at this point. the TX monitor sounds ok to me but i know that's not really a reliable way to judge it since your own voice always sounds weird to yourself. i did notice the default DSP settings on the 7300 are pretty aggressive with the TX bandwidth, like it seems to be cutting a lot of the low end. is that normal or is that something i should be adjusting. also not sure if the PR-40 needs phantom power because i think i have that turned off right now, someone told me it doesnt need it but now im second guessing that. anyway if anyone has dialed in their 7300 for good SSB audio id love to know what settings you're using, or just any general tips for not sounding like a robot

congrats on the first one, that feeling when the first chaser comes back to you on a summit is pretty great. to answer your questions, yes UTC times should be as accurate as you can make them, the database does cross reference with chaser logs and if times are way off it can cause issues getting the S2S points or confirming contacts. doesnt have to be second perfect but within a few minutes is good practice, i usually just have my phone set to UTC before i head out. the 1 watt thing is just personal challenge mostly, there is a QRP category on some of the leaderboards but it doesnt change whether an activation counts or not. some guys just enjoy the extra difficulty. i activated a 10 pointer last fall with 5 watts and a dipole and worked 20 stations so power really isnt the limiting factor most of the time, antenna and location matters way more. W4V has some great summits by the way, youre gonna have fun this spring.