John Anderson78

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech) and ive been trying to get into the local 2m repeater scene. theres a repeater listed in the directory about 8 miles from me and it shows a CTCSS tone of 100.0 Hz. so i programmed that into my baofeng as the transmit tone and i can hear people on it fine but when i key up nobody responds and i sometimes dont even hear my own signal come back through the repeater. i guess my question is - do i need to set a receive tone too or just the transmit tone? and also is there some kind of standard way you're supposed to ID yourself when you first get on a repeater? like do you just say your callsign and say you're listening or what. i dont want to be that guy who does everything wrong and annoys everyone

so i've been licensed about 3 years now and mostly just do local stuff and some casual SSB but last weekend there was a pretty rare one on 17m, think it was from somewhere in central africa, cant remember exactly which entity but it was a real pileup situation, like wall to wall signals the whole time i tried for almost two hours and got nowhere. i was running about 100w into a dipole up maybe 30 feet which i know isnt ideal but its what i've got. what i noticed was most guys were just screaming their callsign over and over on the same frequency as the DX station and it sounded like total chaos. i tried doing that for a while and nothing. then i started listening more carefully and realized he was working split, like 5 up or somewhere in there, and most people in the pileup werent even on his listening frequency they were just calling on his tx freq which i guess means they had zero chance. once i figured that out i tuned up and started listening for where he was actually pulling calls from i noticed he kept coming back to stations in a certain part of the frequency spread, seemed like maybe 3-4 khz up from where most people were piling. so i parked there and after maybe 20 minutes he came back to me. i couldnt believe it honestly my question is, is that actually a real technique or did i just get lucky? and how do you guys figure out where the DX op is listening when you cant hear both sides of the qso? also curious if there are any other tricks for breaking pileups with modest stations, i dont have a big antenna farm or an amp

yeah the Q codes can feel overwhelming at first but honestly once you hear them enough they just click. the ones you'll run into constantly are QSL which basically means "I confirm" or "do you confirm" depending on context, QRZ means "who is calling me" (you'll hear this at the start of a pile up a lot), QTH is your location, QRM is man-made interference like from another station or electrical noise, and QRN is natural static like from a thunderstorm. QSB is fading signal, QRP means low power operation which is kind of its own whole subculture. your instinct about them being used loosely on phone is totally right by the way. on CW they tend to be used more precisely because they save time in Morse. on SSB people kind of throw them around casually sometimes, like saying "lot of QRM tonight" when they just mean the band is noisy in general. dont stress about memorizing all 50+, the maybe 15 or so common ones will cover like 90% of what you hear. rest you can look up as you go.

so ive been a tech for about two years now and mostly just been doing 2m/70cm stuff with my local club and some satellite passes when the weather is decent. been thinking about upgrading for a while but kept putting it off because honestly the tech exam felt hard enough at the time lol anyway im starting to study for General now and i guess my main question is how much harder is the actual exam compared to tech? like the pool has more questions obviously but is the material itself way more complicated or is it more of the same kind of stuff just more of it. im going through the ARRL General manual but some of the HF propagation stuff and the electrical principles sections are kind of going over my head also once i pass, do i get HF privileges right away or is there some waiting period before the FCC updates things? and which bands should i even start on, i dont have an HF radio yet so i guess ill be shopping around too. any advice appreciated

11 contacts totally counts, anything over 10 is an activation. honestly your first one is always kind of a mess, mine i forgot to bring a chair and sat on a wet log for 3 hours. you learn what you actually need real fast when youre out there without your shack. the rocky ground antenna thing is a real problem, ive started carrying paracord and just tossing a line over branches for a dipole. way less fussing around with stakes

honestly the best advice i ever got was to start with what you have and build from there instead of trying to copy someone elses kit. the HT is fine as a starting point but yeah if you want to do any real served agency work or even just set up a net control position you're gonna want something with a bit more punch and the ability to hit multiple bands. my kit lives in a rolling pelican case but i didnt start there. first year i was just using a plastic tote from target, no joke. had my IC-7300 (which i know is not ideal for portable but it was what i owned), a 40Ah LiFePO4 battery, some coax, and my end-fed antenna all stuffed in there with foam padding i cut myself. not pretty but it worked at two activations. the thing that really helped me was doing a full deployment drill at home once a month. set a timer, grab the kit, set it up in the backyard, make a contact, log it, tear down. you find out real fast what you forgot to include. i was missing a pen for like three drills in a row which sounds dumb but when you're logging traffic by hand in an EOC it matters. also make a laminated checklist and zip tie it to the inside of the lid. future you will thank present you.

yeah the ISP router is almost certainly your problem, those things have terrible QoS defaults and usually dont even let you configure anything useful. if you can get him to either put it in bridge mode and use a real router, or at least get into the admin page and try to prioritize UDP traffic, that alone might make a noticeable difference. the RemoteHams audio stream is UDP based and it tends to get deprioritized by cheap routers whenever anything else on the network kicks up traffic. on the sync thing between the SDR feed and the control channel — ive seen that too and i honestly think its just a timing artifact when the connection hiccups. it usually self-corrects after a few seconds. if it persists it might be worth checking if youre running the SDR remote and the rig control on the same TCP session or separate ones, cant remember off the top of my head how RemoteHams handles that by default. the VPN tunnel idea is worth trying but in my experience it adds a little overhead of its own, maybe not worth it unless the routing between you two is genuinely bad. you could run a traceroute and see how many hops youre going through via the RemoteHams relay vs direct.

i did almost exactly this project last winter, also 40m, also based loosely on the Sudden. mine ended up working but i had a really frustrating issue with images for a while that turned out to be just RF getting in through the power lead — completely obvious in hindsight but i spent like a week thinking my mixer was blown or something. ferrite bead on the supply line fixed it immediately. one thing i'll say is dont underestimate how much work the enclosure does for stability. i breadboarded mine and it drifted like crazy and then i moved it into a little aluminum project box and it calmed way down just from the thermal mass. nothing fancy, just one of those hammond boxes from the usual suppliers.

yeah honestly the bandwidth thing is huge and most people dont mess with it. i had the same problem on my older 746 pro years ago. also worth asking — what are you using for a boom arm and how close is the mic to your mouth? the PR-40 is cardioid and pretty sensitive to positioning, like an inch or two off axis will change how you sound quite a bit. ive heard some guys running that mic almost touching their lips which sounds terrible on SSB, you get a lot of low end boom and the highs get buried.

did basically the same project last year except i used a pi pico instead of an uno because i had one spare and the pico's ADC is actually a bit worse than the uno in some ways lol so that was fun. ended up just going with a dedicated ADC chip over SPI, think it was an MCP3208, 12 bit and the noise was way more manageable. adds a little complexity but not much. the hamlib + serial thing works fine once you get it going. i wrote a tiny arduino sketch that just accepts single-letter commands over serial like G for get position and S,270 for set target, kept it dead simple. the pi side was a python script with pyserial. honestly didnt even bother with hamlib in the end, just wrote my own little rotctld-ish thing, took maybe an afternoon. might be overkill for you depending on what software you wanna drive it from but if youre using gpredict for sat tracking it expects rotctld protocol so maybe worth doing it properly.

yeah 10m was really cooking yesterday, i worked maybe a dozen south american stations in like 45 minutes which is pretty unusual for this time of year. the flux being up helps a lot but honestly the best trick ive found is just keeping an eye on the DX cluster and when you start seeing spots on 10m from stations near you geographically, thats your cue to jump on. waiting for the cluster to light up is way more reliable than trying to predict it ahead of time in my experience. the other thing worth looking at is the K index, if that stays low while the flux is high you get really clean propagation without all the geomagnetic noise. yesterday the K was sitting around 1 or 2 which is about as good as it gets. there's a guy on youtube who does daily propagation forecasts, W7WW i think? or something close to that, i watch it most mornings just to get a rough idea. anyway glad you caught some of that opening, we're definitely climbing up the solar cycle which means more of this

i built the same kit last winter, mine did NOT fire up first try lol. spent a weekend chasing a solder bridge i couldnt see without a magnifying glass. but yeah once it worked it was totally worth it. 5 watts feels like nothing on paper but in practice its suprising what propagation will do for you.

okay so i just got my technician license a few weeks ago and ive been listening on the local repeater and also tuning around HF a bit and people are throwing around all these weird codes and shortened words and i have no idea what half of it means. like i hear QSL, QRM, QSY, 73, 88, and then on CW its even worse obviously. is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just kind of pick this stuff up over time? i wrote down a few things i heard and looked them up but im not sure im getting the right meanings because some of them seem to have like an official ITU meaning and then a slightly different way people actually use them on air which is confusing

yeah HamStudy is what most people recommend these days. there's also the ARRL Technician manual if you want an actual book to read through, I liked having something physical to go through but plenty of people just do the online practice exams and pass fine. one thing I'd say is pay attention to the questions about operating privileges and frequencies because there's a bunch of those and they can trip you up if you're not careful. also the safety stuff like RF exposure and tower grounding shows up more than you'd think. find a local club too if you can, a lot of them do licensing sessions and sometimes they'll even hold a study session before the exam which helps a lot

honest answer — SO2R at 8-10 hours casual is probably more trouble than its worth unless you already have the station built for it. the payoff really starts showing up when you can run a frequency AND scan for mults at the same time without losing your run QSO rhythm, but that takes a lot of practice to not sound like a complete mess on air. i tried it for the first time at SS a couple years back with two radios that werent even properly filtered and i was bleeding into myself on 20 and 40 when they were close in frequency, cost me probably an hour of frustration. that said if you already have the 991A sitting there, it doesnt hurt to at least use it for passive monitoring while youre running on the 7300. just listen on it, dont transmit, find your next mult before you need it. thats kind of SO2R training wheels and it does help rate without any of the RF engineering headaches. the full transmit SO2R with interlocks and all that is a whole project, not something you bolt on afternoon of the contest.