James Anderson

Absolutely! Been having a blast on 17m today - worked 6 new DXCC entities just this afternoon. 12m and 10m are also open for longer periods which is great to see. Perfect time to dust off those higher band antennas.

honest answer — SO2R done halfway is probably worse than single radio done well. the bleed-through you're describing between the k3 and 7300 is going to drive you insane and kill your ability to actually copy calls, so you'd spend more mental energy managing the interference than you'd gain from the second radio opportunity. i ran SO2R for a couple years before i had proper filtering sorted and my scores were actually lower than when i was focused single op, just because the cognitive load was brutal the real rate gains from SO2R come when you can seamlessly work a station on radio 1 while finding the next mult or a run frequency on radio 2 without even thinking about it. that takes clean audio on both receivers simultaneously. 4o3a or similar quality bandpass filters are expensive but they're kind of the price of admission. without them youre just doing manual band switching with extra steps and extra headaches if budget is the constraint id honestly say keep working on your single radio operating efficiency first. stuff like faster exchange speed, better use of N1MM or whatever logger you use, dialing in your run vs s&p timing, working the grey line better — all of that probably adds more rate than a broken SO2R implementation. the top scores in your section are probably also just working way more hours and having better antennas like you said

honestly if youre just trying to get a Winlink message through and prove the concept works, HF with VARA HF might actually be less hassle than you think. I know that sounds backwards but the RMS relay system on HF has way more nodes active at any given time and vara HF is pretty forgiving on a 7300. throw up your call on 40m, pick a gateway thats showing green on the propagation map and you'll probably get a session going pretty quick. 7.101 USB is where alot of winlink HF traffic hangs out tho check your regional band plan first. the 2m packet stuff is great for local emcomm nets but for just learning the message workflow the HF path removed one variable which is whether your local gateway is even staffed and maintained properly.

so ive been messing around with an arduino uno for the past couple weeks trying to build a simple antenna switch controller. the idea is pretty straightforward — i have 4 antennas and i want the arduino to read which band the radio is on via the band data output on the back of the IC-7300 and then automatically key the right relay to connect that antenna. in theory super simple right. the problem is im not sure if im overthinking the whole thing. right now ive got a relay board hooked up and it works fine when i manually send commands over serial but getting the band data lines decoded reliably is being a pain. the 7300 outputs like a 4 bit BCD signal i think and im reading it fine but theres occasional glitching where it'll briefly show the wrong band during a QSY and the relay fires for a half second before correcting. nothing is damaged but i could see that being an issue with an amp in line eventually. has anyone done something similar and figured out a decent debounce or delay approach that doesnt cause a noticeable lag when you actually switch bands? i tried just putting a 200ms delay before acting on a new band reading but that feels sloppy. also wondering if a pi would be better for this just because i could run some logging on the side too but seems like overkill for what is basically a relay controller

I've been using an EFHW for my POTA activations but considering a Wolf River Coil setup for better versatility. The EFHW works great but I'm limited to specific bands without my tuner. Anyone made this switch? Looking for real-world comparisons on setup time, performance, and pack weight. I mainly do park-to-park contacts on 20/40m.

I ran into the same thing for ages before somebody on a net finally just told me straight — too much low end and not enough high mid is what makes voice comms sound muddy. everything this other guy said about the bass cut is right. one thing id add is just get on the air with somebody you trust and have them give you honest reports while you tweak in real time, way faster than guessing in the shack. also ALC is something people forget about, if your ALC is pegging constantly youre introducing all kinds of distortion that no amount of EQ is gonna fix. watch that meter while youre speaking normally and if its slamming try backing off the mic gain first before touching anything else

HamAlert is the ham app I've been looking for since I got my license - syncs with clublog to identify your unconfirmed entities and notifies when they are spotted. Works perfectly and has already resulted in 2 additional ATNOs. The key is setting up specific triggers rather than trying to catch everything. I have mine set for needed DXCC on 20/40m only.

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out the 40 meter band. i know technicians are pretty limited but now i have more privileges and honestly the FCC part 97 stuff is kind of confusing to read through. like i understand there are certain segments for phone vs cw but what i dont get is how close to the band edge you can actually get. my buddy told me you should never transmit right at 7.300 because your signal bleeds over but then someone else said thats just a courtesy thing not a rule. also is the ARRL band plan the actual law or is that just a suggestion? because i keep seeing people operating in spots that dont match the chart i printed out. sorry if this is a dumb question just want to make sure im doing this right before i get on the air more

so i've been licensed for about 4 years now mostly doing SSB and some digital modes but i always told myself id learn morse code eventually and i think this winter is finally the time. bought a cheap set of paddles off ebay and borrowed a keyer from a friend at the club and ive been practicing with the Koch method app on my phone for a few weeks now. my question is really about the actual on-air stuff. like i can copy most letters at around 13 wpm in the app but when i actually tune around 40m i can barely pull anything out. is that just how it is at first? like does it take a while before real QSO code sounds the same as practice code? also not sure if my sending is any good either — when i listen back to recordings of myself it sounds kind of hesitant and the spacing is all weird. is there a trick to getting the timing more natural or is it just reps

Had the exact same problem with my first HT! Check that you have both TX tone AND the right tone frequency set. Some radios default to 88.5 Hz if you just enable "tone" without specifying 103.5. The repeater will respond with a kerchunk even if your tone is wrong, but other users won't hear you.

Yeah ive noticed this too with a couple recent ones. The good dx ops usually have some kind of system - they'll work their way up the band systematically or at least give you hints about where theyre going next. When they just jump around randomly it becomes pure luck instead of skill The really experienced guys will even announce stuff like "working up from 14.025 now" so you know roughly where to position yourself. Makes a huge difference in the rate they can work stations too

i just passed mine like two months ago so this is fresh for me lol. i used hamstudy and also watched some youtube videos from a channel called ham radio prep or something like that, they go through the material in a pretty chill way and it helped me understand the why behind some answers instead of just memorizing. the test is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass so theres actually a decent amount of wiggle room which helped calm my nerves going in

so i was just doing some casual monitoring on 50.313 yesterday afternoon, wasnt really expecting much, and all of a sudden i started hearing stations coming in from what looked like the gulf coast and then some florida stations just absolutely booming in. ran outside to check my antenna wasnt broken or something because i genuinely couldnt believe the signal strength. ended up working like 14 new grids in about two hours which for me is unreal, i usually struggle to work anything past 300 miles on 6. also saw some chatter on the reflector about the new Icom IC-905 actually shipping to a few dealers now? not sure if thats confirmed or just rumor at this point but if anyone has seen one in the wild id love to hear about it. been on the fence about whether to upgrade my VHF/UHF setup for a while now and that radio keeps coming up in conversations. anyway just wanted to share because it was one of those evenings that reminds you why you bother putting up antennas in the first place

yeah the 7760 caught my eye too. i watched the announcement video like three times trying to figure out if the remote head actually adds anything over just running the radio on a network with something like RS-BA1 but it seems like the latency would be way better doing it hardwired i guess. still feels like a lot of money though. my 7300 isnt going anywhere anytime soon. on the 10m thing — totally agree, i worked a handful of europeans last weekend from the midwest which almost never happens for me this time of year. my neighbor who just got his tech thought his radio was broken at first because he wasnt used to seeing anything on 28mhz lol. had to explain propagation to him for about 20 minutes. good problem to have

I just went through this exact thing a few months ago when I got my technician. ended up putting a mag mount on the roof just to try it out before committing to drilling and honestly the difference going from the trunk area to the roof was noticeable on a couple of the repeaters I was marginal on. not huge but real. I know mag mounts arent ideal long term but its let me experiment before I make a permanent decision which has been nice

i set up js8call maybe 6 months ago and honestly use it more than ft8 now just because it feels like ham radio again. yeah you wont work 200 countries in a weekend but you can actually ask someone how their antenna is holding up in the wind or whatever. theres a small but pretty active group on 40m around 7078 i think, late evenings eastern time theres usually a handful of stations around. one thing nobody told me when i started — the store and forward messaging thing is really neat for emcomm type stuff, messages can kind of hop through stations that are running unattended. not sure how reliable it is in practice but the concept is cool. anyway if you already have wsjt-x dialed in the audio setup for js8call is basically the same deal so it wont take long to get running.

yeah what he said about Field Day, my first year i just sat with a club member and watched for most of it and by Sunday morning i was running my own contacts. the 7300 is a great radio for any of this by the way, you're well set up. only thing id say is maybe get comfortable logging software before CQ WW rolls around — N1MM is free and most contesters use it, there's a bit of a learning curve but plenty of youtube walkthroughs out there.

congrats on the first activation, that feeling when the pile starts coming in is pretty great isnt it. for the logging thing have you looked at HAMRS? its a free app, works on phone or tablet, built specifically for POTA and generates the adif automatically, i switched to it after fumbling with paper and spreadsheets for my first few and never looked back. you can also do it in the field and it handles the spot integration too if youre on a device with data. some people swear by paper still and thats totally fine but having the adif ready to just upload when you get home is nice. also 15 watts and an endfed between trees is basically the ideal POTA setup honestly, dont let anyone tell you that you need a fancy rig to do this

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and got my beacon working pretty solid, showing up on aprs.fi with good position reports every few minutes which is great. but the messaging part is just completely broken for me and i cant figure out if its my setup or something with the network. im running a TM-D710G with a Raspberry Pi running direwolf as a secondary igate at home, and i also have the radio itself set up with its built in TNC. when i try to send messages to other stations i can see the packets going out in direwolf's output, they get acked sometimes, but the people im trying to reach say they never got anything. i tried messaging WB4APR just to see if the message robot thing would bounce back and nothing came back either. is there some setting im missing with the message path or something? i have the path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine i think. been googling this for days and half the stuff i find is like 10 years old and i dont know if its still relevant.