James Davis67

yeah i was totally lost on this stuff when i started too. the ones i hear most on the air are QSL, QTH, QRZ (which means who is calling me, you'll hear this a lot when someone is calling CQ and trying to pull out a callsign through the noise), and QRM/QRN. once you know those five or six you can follow most casual conversations on SSB. CW operators tend to use way more of them since youre already sending abbreviated code anyway so why not abbreviate further lol

yeah hamstudy.org is exactly what you want, thats the one pretty much everyone uses now. and yes you do have to go in order, Tech first then General then Extra, cant skip ahead. the Technician pool isnt too bad honestly, its 35 questions out of a pool of like 400 or so and you need 26 right to pass. most people spend a couple weeks just drilling questions on hamstudy and they're fine. the site will tell you when you're consistently scoring high enough, just keep at it until you're hitting like 85% or better and you'll probably be ok on test day. for finding an actual exam session look up your zip on the ARRL website, they have a list of upcoming VE sessions. some clubs do them pretty regularly. also some places do online testing now through groups like ARRL VEC or Laurel VEC if thats easier for you. Laurel ones are free which is nice. good luck, its really not that scary once you just commit to taking the test

I had similar issues with my 7300 setup. Adding ferrite snap-ons to all cables in the shack helped, but the real fix was a 1:1 current balun at the antenna feedpoint. The G5RV can be notorious for common mode radiation.

so ive been listening on HF for a few weeks now and I keep hearing people throw out stuff like QSL and QTH and QRM and honestly i dont know half of them. I know QSL means like confirmed or something and QTH is your location but beyond that I'm pretty lost. Is there like a standard list I should just memorize or do most operators only really use a handful of them in practice? Also heard someone say 73 and 88 the other day which I guess aren't Q codes but still had no idea what those meant either. Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the shorthand honestly.

So we're gearing up for field day again and same story every year - my friend keeps wanting to bring his massive 15kw generator that sounds like a freight train. Thing weighs like 300lbs and you need a trailer just to move it around. I keep trying to tell him we could do just fine with some smaller setups maybe some battery packs or those little 2kw inverter jobs but he says "you gotta have the power for the amps" and all that. Thing is we ran class 2a last year with just 100w rigs and did pretty decent. Made like 800 contacts over the weekend. But every year its the same argument about needing the "big iron" even though half our operators are running QRP anyway. I mean i get it if youre doing a serious contest operation but field day is supposed to be about emergency preparedness right? Anyone else deal with this kinda thing in their club? How do you convince the old timers that you dont need to haul a small power plant to every outdoor event?

im in the same boat as you actually, just started trying to learn a few weeks ago. im using an app called Morse Mania on my phone and its pretty decent for just starting out, you can do it while youre waiting for coffee or whatever. the LCWO site the other guy mentioned is good too but i find it a little dry tbh. one thing that helped me was just listening to actual QSOs on websdr even though i cant copy anything yet, just kind of getting used to what it sounds like on the air vs the clean tones in the apps

oh man i went through exactly this about four years ago and yeah it can feel like a lot. honestly the best advice i ever got was to start with the mission not the gear. like what are you actually going to be doing with this kit? if your county ARES does mostly shelter support and local repeater stuff then yeah, VHF/UHF first makes total sense, you dont need to drag an HF setup to a community center. if you want to do more serious emergency traffic or backup communication for something like RACES or winlink then HF starts to matter. for the physical kit i started with a rolling duffle and honestly still use it. pelican cases look great but they're heavy even before you put anything in them. i'd say get one decent portable radio sorted first, get a 20-30 ah lithium battery like a bioenno or similar, and a small solar panel you can actually test before you need it. then just practice — like actually set the thing up in your backyard and run it for a few hours. you'll figure out real fast what you forgot to pack.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general class) and i keep hearing people talk about checking into nets but i honestly havent done it much. did one ARRL phone net a while back and kinda fumbled through it but the net control was really patient with me so that was nice. anyway im looking to make it more of a regular thing. how do you guys find nets that are worth checking into? i know theres stuff on arrl.org but its a little overwhelming trying to sort through all of it. also do most local clubs run their own weekly nets? mine does a monday night 2m net on the local repeater but beyond that i feel like im missing a ton. also kind of a dumb question but whats the deal with special event stations — like i hear people mention them but i never really know when theyre happening or how to find out ahead of time. are those separate from nets entirely or sometimes combined?

yeah POTA got me into portable ops too and now i basically cant sit still at home anymore haha. do you use a linked dipole or just the one wire? ive been going back and forth on antenna options for backpack stuff, the random wire works but sometimes tuning takes forever and i feel like im wasting battery on the tuner

so ive been using N1MM pretty much exclusively for the last few years mostly because thats what everyone at the club uses and it just works for contests. but outside of contest season i find it kind of clunky for just day to day logging, like if i work a bunch of DX on a sunday afternoon i dont really want to deal with all the contest-specific stuff cluttering up the screen. somebody mentioned Log4OM a while back and i downloaded it but never really got into it. does anyone actually run both? like N1MM for when youre doing a serious contest run and Log4OM for everything else? or is that just creating more problems keeping two logs in sync. also how does WSJT-X play into this — right now i have WSJT-X logging directly into N1MM via UDP and it mostly works but sometimes dupes get weird especially if ive been operating split between FT8 and SSB in the same session. not looking to reinvent my whole setup just wondering if theres a cleaner way to handle this without losing contest functionality

oh man ive had this exact thing on my crv, well mine is a 2017 but probably same deal. for me it turned out to be the ground, i thought i had a good chassis ground but apparently the spot i picked had some paint under there i didnt notice. once i sanded down to bare metal it got way quieter. still had a tiny bit of whine so i slapped a cheap inline filter on it and it went away completely. honestly these hondas seem to be a little noisy compared to some other cars ive installed in

been using n1mm for years mostly for cw contests but lately ive been doing more ft8 and mixed mode stuff. log4om looks pretty slick and seems to handle digital modes better but im wondering if its worth switching over. anyone made the jump from n1mm to log4om? how does it handle something like arrl dx where you might be doing phone and digital also does log4om play nice with wsjt-x because that integration seems hit or miss with different loggers

haha everyone blanks on their first qso dont even worry about it. i forgot to give my callsign like three times in my first week and the elmer who was monitoring the repeater just kind of gently reminded me every time. you'll get the rhythm of it real fast. welcome to the hobby, it only gets more addicting from here

congrats on passing the tech exam, welcome to the hobby. honestly the baofeng uv-5r advice isnt wrong for a first radio if budget is the main concern. yeah the build quality isnt amazing and programming it can be a little frustrating at first but chirp software makes it pretty manageable and you cant really beat it for learning the basics without worrying about breaking an expensive radio. plenty of people use them every day on local repeaters without any issues. that said if you can stretch to like 150-180 the yaesu ft-65 or the ft-4xr are really solid step ups. better receiver sensitivity, easier to program without a computer, and the build quality is noticeably better. i gave my old ft-65 to my nephew when he got licensed and hes been happy with it for two years now. for just hitting local repeaters and simplex you dont need a ton of features honestly, dual band vhf/uhf covers basically everything youll want to do as a tech. the channel count wont matter much until you start traveling or get really into it

yeah the timestamps will absolutely get you — spots can go stale in like 2-3 minutes on the higher bands especially when conditions are sketchy. what you're seeing is normal honestly. DXwatch, the QRZ spot tab, and most of the apps are all pulling from the same underlying cluster network (the DX Spider network basically) but there's propagation delay between nodes so sometimes you'll see a spot show up on one site 90 seconds before it appears on another. its annoying but thats just how the architecture works. for real time stuff i actually prefer to just connect directly to a telnet cluster node in my logging software — i use N1MM and point it at a nearby node and the spots come in pretty fast. DXwatch is fine for browsing but if you're actually trying to work something fresh you really want that direct telnet connection so you're not waiting on a webpage to refresh. the QRZ tab is decent for casual browsing but i wouldnt rely on it if you're trying to be first in the pileup. also on 17m specifically — if a spot is more than like 5 minutes old just forget it, the band can flip that fast. 40m spots tend to stay valid longer especially evenings.

i did my first check-in like 6 weeks ago and was super nervous lol but honestly nobody even noticed i was new. the net control just said "W5 whatever, thanks for checking in" and moved on. one thing i wasnt expecting is how fast it goes sometimes, so just be ready when they ask for check-ins and dont wait too long or the moment passes and then you feel weird also some nets have a second round where they ask if anyone missed the first call so if you freeze up theres usually a second chance which is nice

man this is inspiring me to actually finish the rock mite i started like 18 months ago and then shoved in a drawer. i keep telling myself i'll get back to it. what did you use for an enclosure? that's always where i get stuck, i can do the electronics fine but then i spend forever agonizing over how to box it up.

I had the same experience a couple weeks ago, worked a ZL on 10m SSB with my vertical and maybe 50 watts and he was 59 both ways. I actually thought my radio was malfunctioning because the signal was so strong lol. I've only been licensed about 2 years so I've never really experienced a proper solar maximum before and it kind of blew my mind honestly. I've been checking DX maps obsessively ever since trying to catch more openings.

ok so for DXCC you really do need LoTW or physical cards submitted to the ARRL, QRZ confirmations wont cut it unfortunately. the LoTW setup is a pain the first time but once you get through it its pretty much automatic after that. you apply for a certificate through the ARRL, they mail you a thing, you use TQSL to sign your logs and upload them. took me maybe an hour to figure out the first time but now it just runs in the background. eQSL is kind of its own thing — some awards accept it, some dont, and honestly a lot of DX stations dont use it at all. i mostly use it because its free and some people only confirm there. but for serious award chasing LoTW is the one you want. as for paper cards, yeah people still send them and some folks really love them. i send cards for anything rare or a new entity for me, or if someone sends me one first. otherwise i dont bother printing and mailing for every FT8 contact, thats just not practical at that volume

oh man i went through exactly this when i was around the same point in my CW journey. what helped me weirdly was just recording myself with an audio recorder and listening back. you hear things you dont notice while youre sending because your brain fills in what you meant to send not what actually came out. pretty humbling but useful also dont underestimate just being relaxed physically - i used to grip the paddle way too hard and it was making my timing all choppy. took me forever to figure out that was the problem. light touch, let the spring do the work basically

yeah the LPF relays on those are absolutely worth suspecting, ive seen that exact symptom on an 897 which is basically the same guts. the relay contacts can look fine but have high resistance that only shows up under RF load. what i did was unsolder each relay and measure contact resistance with a decent meter, anything over like half an ohm and youre probably in trouble. also worth cold spraying the relay bodies while keyed up and watching the power meter, sometimes thermal helps you nail down which one is the problem child. the ALC thing you mentioned is interesting too though. if somethings pulling the ALC line down it can absolutely kill your output without any obvious cause. do you have a scope? poking around the ALC feedback loop while transmitting into a dummy load has saved me a lot of time on yaesu stuff.

ok so i finally got my technician license last month and ive been trying to get on the local FM repeaters but im having a hard time figuring out the tone thing. i programmed my baofeng with the frequency and offset that the repeater directory listed but when i key up nobody seems to hear me, or at least nobody responds. a guy at the club meeting mentioned i probably need to set the CTCSS encode tone but i wasnt sure if i needed decode too or just encode. also i noticed there are two repeaters listed nearby, one says 100.0 hz tone and the other doesnt list a tone at all. does that mean the second one is open and i dont need any tone? i tried keying up on that one and i could hear it open the squelch a little but then nothing. not sure if thats normal or if im just missing something obvious. any help appreciated, been at this for a few days now and its a little frustrating

so ive been trying to get my 2m/70cm mobile setup working decent for weeks now and the swr is all over the place depending on where i park. got a diamond nr770hb on the roof of my accord and sometimes its great, sometimes its terrible. checked all the connections twice and the coax looks fine. is this normal or am i missing something obvious? the radio is an ft8900r if that matters

so ive been chasing ZL9 for like three weeks now and kept getting nowhere, just throwing my call into the void with everyone else and getting stepped on constantly. last night something finally clicked and i actually got through so i figured id write up what worked while its fresh. the big thing was stopping trying to call on top of the pileup. sounds obvious but its hard to resist when you hear everyone else going. what i started doing was listening to where the DXpedition was actually coming back — they were working split and pulling out of a pretty narrow slice, maybe 2-3 kHz above their TX. once i mapped out roughly where they were digging i started placing my call about 500 Hz above where the last guy got picked up. not on top of him, just slightly off. also tightened up my exchange, just my suffix at first, full call only when they came back partial. i think a lot of guys waste time sending their whole call over and over when the DX op already has half of it and just needs confirmation. running about 400w into a 4-el yagi at 45ft and the band was 15m which was behaving reasonably. propagation into the south pacific was marginal for me in the midwest but not impossible. timing helped too — i waited until the pileup thinned a bit, like 20 minutes into a run when some guys had already worked them and dropped off. anyway it finally went into the log after three weeks. curious what techniques others use because i know theres probably smarter ways to do this

yeah just do the LMR-400 run now, future you will be annoyed if you dont. also check your connectors because i had a situation where i was blaming coax loss for ages and it turned out one of my PL-259s had a cold solder joint that was adding like another db of garbage on top of everything else. drove me crazy for weeks