David Johnson

so ive been putting off the extended TX mod on my FT-857D for like two years now because honestly the whole diode removal thing seemed scarier than it actually ended up being. finally sat down last weekend with a decent soldering iron and some magnification and just did it. took maybe 45 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself and re-reading the procedure three times.
the actual mod is pretty straightforward once you get the bottom cover off and locate D3007, just remove it and youre transmitting on the extended ranges. but here's the thing nobody really mentions — my power output on 60m dropped noticeably compared to what i was seeing on 40 and 17, and im not sure if thats expected behavior for this radio or if i maybe disturbed something nearby while poking around in there. anybody else notice that? also the fan seems to kick on a bit earlier than before but that might just be me being paranoid about it now that ive had the thing open.
either way im glad i finally did it. been wanting to work some of the oddball frequencies for MARS and just general experimentation. if anyone's been thinking about doing this mod and has a steady hand its really not that bad, the service manual is pretty clear once you track down the right version of it.

so ive been a General for about two years now and I keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the Amateur Extra. I mostly do HF, some SSB on 40 and 20, little bit of digital. I dont really have a specific reason I need the extra privileges right now, the General bands are honestly fine for what I do. But it kind of bugs me that there are portions of the bands I cant touch.
my main hesitation is the theory. I remember reading somewhere that the Extra exam gets into like transmission line theory, filter design, that kind of stuff. I passed my General without too much trouble but I never went to school for electronics or anything, just kind of self taught from handbooks and youtube. is the theory on the Extra actually difficult if you dont have an engineering background, or is it the kind of thing where if you just grind through the question pool it mostly makes sense? I dont want to spend months studying and then feel like I still dont understand what any of it means.

so ive been noticing 10m and 12m doing some really strange things this past week or so. like monday evening i worked a JA station on 10m with a dipole and maybe 50 watts, pretty solid copy, and then tuesday the same band was completely dead, couldn't even hear the beacon network. checked my antenna thinking something came loose but everything looked fine.
been watching the solar flux numbers on spaceweather.com and they were sitting around 180-something last week and now its dropped back down to like 145 or so. does that kind of drop actually happen that fast? i guess i always assumed solar flux kind of drifted slowly but maybe not. also there was some geomagnetic activity a few days ago, kp index got up to 5 or 6 which i know isnt great for HF but i thought that mostly messed with 40 and 80 more than 10.
anyway if anyone has been watching conditions lately and has thoughts id appreciate it. im relatively new to actually paying attention to this stuff, been licensed about 3 years but mostly done local stuff until recently getting the itch for DX.

yeah so techs do get some HF privileges, its not a ton but its there. on 10m you can do phone between 28.300 and 28.500 MHz which is actually pretty useful when the band is open. for 40m and 80m and 15m you can do CW only in small segments, i think 40m its around 7.025-7.125 but dont quote me on that exactly, look it up in the actual part 97.301 table because i always mix up the exact edges. the thing people forget is you still need to ID properly every 10 minutes and at the end of a contact, that trips up a lot of new folks. honestly just study the general exam pool even if youre not ready to test, it explains a lot of this stuff in plain english and youll understand your current privileges better too

had almost the exact same symptom on a friends 7300 last year. turned out to be one of the driver transistors running hot and going into thermal shutdown before the finals themselves got warm enough to trigger any protection. the ALC was also doing weird things on the scope when it happened - were you watching the ALC meter when it drops out? if the ALC slams to max and holds there right when you lose power that points pretty strongly at a driver stage issue rather than the finals themselves.
the tricky part is catching it in the act with probes on it because the board layout is pretty tight. what we ended up doing was running it with the lid off pointed at a small desk fan, which delayed the symptom by like 45 minutes, so we could at least rule out ambient airflow being the problem. didnt fix it obviously but helped narrow things down. icom actually has decent service docs for that rig if you can find them, the voltage rails at certain test points should tell you a lot.

$850 for a used 7300 in good shape is decent, ive seen them go higher lately. im still on a 718 which i know is a completely different class of radio but it works and i cant justify the upgrade when the antenna situation at my QTH is the actual limiting factor lol. one day maybe. enjoy the new rig

so i just passed my general exam last week (finally, after putting it off for like two years lol) and im trying to figure out how the callsign situation works. right now i got assigned a sequential callsign automatically through the FCC and its a 2x3 in my district which is fine i guess but ive been reading about vanity calls and now im wondering if i should just apply for one instead.
from what i understand the FCC has a system where they assign calls in a sequential order based on what pool is available in your district, but vanity lets you pick a specific call if its available? or is it more complicated than that. also does it cost money now — i heard something changed recently with fees.
i dont really have a specific call in mind, i just kind of want something shorter if possible. my assigned one is fine but a 1x3 or 2x2 would be easier to send in CW honestly. anyway if anyone has gone through this process recently id love to hear how it went

that's awesome, 559 on 500mw is no joke. im pretty new too and just got into qrp recently, been using a youkits hb1b which i didnt build myself but man its tiny and runs on a little lipo pack. took it camping and made a few contacts on 20m. my antenna situation is still kind of a mess though so i cant really give advice there haha

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i mostly do HF, some 40m and 20m. when i first got my ticket i kind of drilled the phonetic alphabet thinking it was like required by law or FCC rules or something. but then i got on the air and heard people saying all kinds of random stuff like "S for sugar" or "N for Nancy" and some guy the other day said "W for Whiskey... or Washington, take your pick" which made me laugh but also confused me a bit.
so whats the actual deal? is NATO phonetics required or is it just the standard that everyone kind of agrees to use? i dont want to be correcting people on the air or anything i just want to understand what im actually supposed to be doing when i give my callsign

nice work getting out there. i did my first one earlier this year and was also way overthinking it beforehand. the KX2 is such a good little radio for this stuff, i use mine with a similar setup.
one thing i'll add is if you havent already, download the POTA app and look at the alerts feature — hunters can set alerts for specific parks and they'll get notified when someone spots for that park. so if you're going back to the same park or doing a rarer reference you might get a little pile up which is fun. also keep an eye on whether your park has been activated before, if it's a fairly rare one you'll probably have an easier time getting hunters to find you.

so ive been trying to get Winlink working for a few weeks now and i think i finally understand most of it but the gateway stuff is still kind of confusing me. basically i set up Winlink Express on my laptop, got it talking to my IC-7300 through a SignaLink USB, and i can see the waterfall in Vara HF and it looks fine. the problem is when i try to actually connect to an RMS gateway it either times out or i get a partial session and then it drops.
i checked the gateway list and im targeting ones that show green or recently active, and im in the midwest so there should be decent propagation to at least a few of them. tried 20m and 40m at different times of day. sometimes the handshake starts and i can see VARA doing its thing but then it just falls apart maybe 30 seconds in. the message i was trying to send is pretty small, just a test message to my own callsign basically.
is this a common thing when youre first starting out or am i missing something in the configuration. also not totally sure if my RMS hybrid settings are set right, i kind of just left those at default. any ideas would be appreciated, been banging my head on this for a while now.