James Anderson

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

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

went last year, honestly it was smaller than i remembered but still fun. the outdoor tables are still there and i found some decent coax and a few connectors, nothing crazy. indoor stuff is mostly club tables and a couple commercial vendors. worth the trip if you're nearby but maybe not a 90 min drive unless you just like the atmosphere, which i do personally

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

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

so ive been getting reports that my audio is pretty bad on 20m ssb, sounds distorted and overdriven according to a couple guys. im running an ic-7300 with the standard hand mic and i thought the audio processing would handle everything automatically. gain is set to about 50% on the radio. anyone know what im doing wrong here? really dont want to be one of those guys with crappy audio that everyone avoids