Jessica Davis21

that intermittent behavior with the ALC looking normal right up to the cutout is interesting. had something similar on an older 7200 and it ended up being one of the driver transistors getting flaky when it warmed up — thermal issue basically. the PA finals were fine but one of the drivers would just stop cooperating once it got to a certain temperature. you could actually predict when it was going to happen after about 20-30 minutes of operation because the case would be warm by then. worth checking if there's any correlation to heat on yours. let it sit powered on for a while with no TX, then start transmitting and see if the timing of the dropout matches up with thermal soak. if it cuts out faster on a warm day that's probably your answer. icom's service manual has the driver stage laid out pretty clearly and the transistors themselves arent expensive if you can solder SMD, which on a 7300 you need to be comfortable with anyway. also check all the coax connectors inside the chassis. i know you swapped external stuff but the internal PL-259 to board connection on these can develop a hairline crack that only shows up under RF load. i've been burned by that before.

yeah what he said about chirp, i had the exact same problem when i started. also worth mentioning — some repeaters around here are linked to other machines through like an IRLP node or Allstar or whatever so sometimes you'll hear a weird beep or a robotic voice announcement when somebody connects from another repeater. dont let that throw you off, its totally normal. i actually thought my radio was broken the first time i heard it lol. just means someone from across the state or wherever jumped on the link.

so i just passed my technician exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to get. ive been going down a rabbit hole reading reviews and watching youtube videos and now im more confused than when i started honestly. everyone seems to have a really strong opinion and half of them contradict each other the baofeng UV-5R keeps coming up and its like $25 which is obviously appealing but then people say the build quality is bad or that its not type accepted or whatever that means. then theres the yaesu FT-65 and the kenwood TH-D74 but that one is like $500 so probably not where i want to start i mostly want to hit a few local repeaters, maybe do some simplex with a friend who lives about 8 miles away, and eventually learn more about the hobby in general. not sure if i need dual band right away or if that even matters yet. any thoughts would be appreciated, im just trying to not make a dumb first purchase

the paddle adjustment is almost certainly part of it. with a Bencher BY-1 or similar the spring tension and the contact gap both matter a lot at higher speeds and most used paddles come way out of spec. what i usually do is set the gap to about the thickness of a business card on each side and then back the tension spring off until the paddle returns crisply but doesnt feel stiff. it takes some fiddling honestly. also worth checking which iambic mode your K3 is set to. mode A vs mode B behave differently when you release both paddles at the same time and a lot of people find one feels much more natural than the other. i switched from mode B to mode A years ago and it cleaned up a ton of my sloppy sending. the keyer speed adjustment should also have a weight setting — if dits are getting squished sometimes the weight is slightly off from the default. try bumping it up just a hair. but yeah some of it is also just muscle memory and it does come back, it just takes a few weeks of consistent time with the paddle every day even if only 10-15 minutes.

That SWR sounds about right for a trapped antenna, especially with two 6-BTVs. The total power loss is around 1.5 db on 10 meters, 2 db on 15 meters, 2.5 to 3 db on 20 meters compared to a non-trapped design. Try adjusting the trap positions slightly before moving the choke - sometimes just a quarter turn on the coils helps.

so ive been studying for like 3 months and passed my technician exam on the 14th and just got my callsign showing up in the FCC database a few days ago. set up my baofeng on the local repeater and just kind of listened for a while because honestly i was terrified to key up lol anyway yesterday morning i finally did it, some guy named Ron came back to me after i called my callsign and we talked for maybe 10 minutes about where i was located and what radio i was using. he was super patient with me fumbling around with the PTT and forgetting to say my callsign at the end a couple times. i know its not a big deal but it felt like a huge deal to me honestly anyone else remember their first QSO? did you mess it up as bad as i did

yeah what he said. i'll just add that 40m can get pretty crowded especially in the evenings and the "unofficial" band plans kind of exist because otherwise it would just be chaos with CW and phone all mixed together. so even if you technically can operate phone at 7.150 as a general, you probably dont want to because you'll be right in the middle of a CW pileup and everyone will hate you lol. the band edge thing burned me once when i was new, i was sitting on 7.298 thinking i was fine and someone pointed out my upper sideband audio was definitely poking past 7.300. just stay a few kHz inside and you wont have to think about it.

Consider the rig's age and availability of service support. For discontinued models where factory boards aren't available, component-level repair might be your only option. I've kept several "boat anchor" rigs alive this way when replacement parts dried up.

So ive been messing with this install for about three weeks now and its mostly working but something is still off. Running a Yaesu FTM-400 in my F150 and the antenna is a Tram 1185 on a mag mount right now, center of the roof. SWR on 2m reads around 1.3-1.4 which i know isnt terrible but on 70cm it jumps up to almost 2.1 near the top of the band and i cant figure out why. The coax run is about 12 feet of RG-58 going through the door jamb rubber seal, which i know isnt ideal but i dont want to drill. The radio itself is mounted under the dash on a RAM mount and everything looks clean to me. Power is going straight to the battery through an inline fuse. I tried adjusting the antenna tip but it barely changed anything. Anyone dealt with this with that antenna specifically or with mag mounts in general? Part of me is wondering if its the coax routing through the door seal thats pinching something but i cant really see any damage. Really just want to get this dialed in before the club's simplex net on Saturday.

yeah N1MM and WSJT-X can talk to each other through UDP same basic concept, you point WSJT-X at N1MM's port and the QSOs flow over automatically. the setup isnt too bad once you find the right section in N1MM's config, i think its under Tools > UDP then you just make sure the port numbers match on both ends. i did a full weekend ARRL contest last fall running FT8 on one screen with WSJT-X and N1MM logging everything and it was pretty solid, only issue i had was the timing on the dupe checking felt slightly off but honestly that might have been my machine. that said i totally get keeping Log4OM for regular logging and just firing up N1MM for contests. thats basically what a lot of guys do. the two logs dont automatically sync obviously so you end up importing an ADIF after the contest which is a little annoying but not the end of the world. Log4OM's general logbook stuff is genuinely nicer for casual use in my opinion, N1MM is kind of brutally focused on contest efficiency and not much else.

the UDP logging dropping contacts is almost always a firewall or windows defender thing in my experience, had the exact same issue and it turned out windows was occasionally blocking the UDP packets from WSJT-X to N1MM for no obvious reason. adding both apps as exceptions fixed it mostly but it still happened once in a blue moon so i just have WSJT-X write its own log and i do a periodic import anyway as a backup.

yeah the warmth is totally normal, icom runs them pretty hard thermally. mine sits on a metal rack shelf and i can feel the heat coming off after a long FT8 session but it's never been a problem in like two years of use. 2 inches on top is probably fine but if you're doing long digital sessions maybe give it a bit more room just to be safe, heat rises and all that. the ALC thing on digital caught me too when i first set it up. theres a specific output level you want to run for FT8, i think most people land around 50 watts and set the audio drive so the ALC is barely moving or not moving at all. if the ALC is pumping up and down youre probably overdriving it and it messes with the signal quality. JS8Call is even more sensitive to that in my experience. coming from a 480 the waterfall must feel like a revelation, that radio had no real panadapter to speak of. enjoy it, the 7300 is a genuinely great radio and i dont think youll regret it.

so ive been a general for about 3 years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra class exam. like i get that you get the full privileges and the extra portions of the HF bands which honestly would be nice on 20m when its crowded, but the theory on that exam looks brutal. been flipping through the question pool and some of that stuff about filter design and antenna theory at that level, i mean i took basic electronics back in the day but that was a long time ago. is it actually useful stuff to know or is it just like... memorize it pass the test and forget it. im not planning to become an engineer or anything i just like ragchewing and some occasional contesting. anyone here actually use the theory they learned for extra in their day to day operating

so ive been running a diamond x50 on the roof for a couple years now and its been fine for local stuff but im finally trying to put up a proper yagi for 2m weak signal work, maybe eventually EME but lets not get ahead of ourselves. the run from the shack to the roof is probably 60 feet, maybe a bit more, i havent actually measured it properly. right now theres a run of RG-8X up there which i just used because i had it lying around when i put the collinear up. my question is basically how bad is 60ft of RG-8X at 144mhz and is it worth replacing before i bother putting up the yagi or should i just try it first and see what the numbers look like. i have a buddy who keeps telling me LMR-400 is the only thing worth running but that stuff isnt cheap and id have to rerout the whole run probably. the current cable goes through a vent which is kind of a hack job anyway so maybe this is the time to do it right also wondering if anyone has opinions on the M2 2M5WL vs the longer 9 element yagis you see from various makers. trying to stay reasonable on boom length since i have a small roof and my wife already has opinions about the x50 up there

so ive been glued to my radio the past few days because 10 meters has been absolutely wild. worked a bunch of south american stations last tuesday afternoon with barely any effort, like S57 over with a dipole. havent seen conditions like this in a while honestly and its got me thinking we're really climbing toward the solar max now. also saw that Icom apparently teased something new at a trade show, some people on reddit are saying its a new handheld but nobody really knows yet. the usual speculation is flying around. if anyone has actual info id be curious. and for the new folks here — if you havent tried 10m recently now is a really good time to just spin the dial around 28.400 and see what you hear. its a great band when its open because even a modest setup can reach really far. i remember when 10 was basically dead for like three years so this is a nice change.

I've made the trip maybe 8 or 9 times over the years. Honestly the flea market has shrunk, that part's true, but I still think it's worth it just to wander around and talk to people. You run into folks you only ever see once a year and that alone kinda makes it. If you do go check if your local club is doing any kind of meetup dinner the night before, ours usually does and thats always a good time

ok so i passed my technician exam like three weeks ago and ive been trying to figure out exactly what frequencies im allowed to use and what modes and stuff. i read through part 97 but honestly a lot of it goes over my head. like i understand i get HF privileges on 10 meters but only certain parts of it? and then there's something about phone vs CW and i'm not totally clear on where the line is. also someone at the club told me i can operate on 15 meters with a control operator who has a general or higher but i cant find where that actually says that in the rules. just trying to make sure i dont accidentally do something wrong before i've barely even started