John Anderson78

yeah what he said about ALC is the big one. i spent like three weeks convinced my audio was trash before someone finally told me i was overdriving the mic input and the ALC was going crazy trying to compensate. once i got that sorted the difference was pretty immediate. the TX equalizer on that radio is actually pretty decent once you learn it, i boosted a little around 2-3k for presence and rolled off some of the low end because my voice is kind of muddy and it helped a lot with reports on 40m especially.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for contacts and all that but honestly it feels like a slot machine more than radio sometimes. you click a callsign, exchange grid squares, 73, done. i started poking around JS8Call a few weeks ago because i actually wanted to, you know, talk to people.
the sensitivity on JS8Call is impressive — its built on the same WSJT-X engine so you get that weak signal performance but you can actually type back and forth. its slower obviously, maybe 25 wpm equivalent at the normal speed setting, but ive been having legit conversations on 40m with guys id never reach on SSB from here. my antenna situation is not great (end-fed in the attic, dont ask) so weak signal modes are basically my only option for reliable HF.
the thing i cant figure out is whether theres enough activity to make it worth learning the software quirks. the heartbeat/relay stuff is kind of confusing and the UI takes some getting used to. anyone running JS8Call regularly on a specific freq or net? is 40m the sweet spot or do people mostly hang on 20?

congrats on the first one, 23 contacts at QRP on your first time out is honestly a solid start. the spotting thing trips everyone up at first. yeah you should respot when you move frequencies, the hunters are watching that spot and if you move without updating it youll have people calling on the old freq wondering where you went. some guys respot every 20-30 minutes even if they havent moved just to stay near the top of the list and get a fresh wave of callers.
for the pileup etiquette, most activators just work through them one at a time and say QRZ or just their callsign after each QSO. if its a big pileup some people call by region or last letter but for a normal activation just keep it moving and people will wait their turn. the hunters are used to it. the ones who call mid-QSO are kind of breaking the unwritten rules anyway, dont stress about it.
20m can be weird depending on the time of day, i find it really opens up midday but early morning and late afternoon 40m is usually better for regional stuff. good luck on the next one

so ive been working on this direct conversion receiver for 40m, mostly following the EMRFD design but with a few changes because i didnt have all the parts on hand. got it breadboarded last weekend and fired it up and honestly it works better than i expected in some ways and worse in others.
the problem is the thing is pulling in broadcast stations like crazy, there's this massive AM station somewhere nearby i think around 1.2 MHz and it's just bleeding into everything. audio is loud and distorted and it basically covers the whole band when conditions are right. i've got a low pass filter on the front end but clearly it's not doing enough. the filter is a 5 element chebyshev thing i wound on T50-2 cores, calculated for 40m but i wonder if my winding is off or the core material is wrong for this.
also getting a lot of hum, like 60hz hum that varies with the signal strength weirdly enough. not sure if that's the power supply or if i'm picking up the AM demodulation products or what. running it off a wall wart right now, probably should put a proper filtered supply on it but i wanted to see if it worked first.
anyone dealt with this kind of broadcast breakthrough before? feels like a shielding issue too because moving my hand near the board changes things noticeably.

yeah 10m has been wild lately, i caught some of that too. worked a station in japan on a whim Tuesday evening which i was not expecting at all. the solar flux has been sitting pretty high and we had a couple of X-class flares go by without totally wrecking everything which is kind of unusual. if you havent already set up some alerts on DX maps or even just check the cluster in the morning you'll start seeing the patterns more. its a good time to be on HF honestly, bands like this dont last forever so might as well take advantage

i used the gordon west book when i did mine last year and it was pretty good for explaining things in plain english but tbh i think i spent more time on it than i needed to. the question pool approach is totally legit for passing. one thing nobody told me is you should pay attention to the electrical safety and RF exposure questions because those trip people up and there's more of them than you'd expect. good luck, the exam itself isnt scary at all once you sit down for it

honestly same boat here not long ago. what helped me was just doing a few passes where I wasnt even trying to make contacts, just listening to the downlink and watching the waterfall in SDR# or whatever to see how the doppler actually looked visually. once you see the curve on a waterfall it kind of makes sense in a way that reading about it doesnt. after that the manual tuning felt way less chaotic.
also AO-73 has pretty decent passband strength when the bird is high elevation so if youre really struggling to hear anything on a good pass it might be your yagi pointing, those handheld ones are way more directional than people expect and you lose signal fast if youre even a little off especially near the horizon.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, been chasing for about 6 months and figured it was time to actually get up on a summit myself. picked W4T/SU-072 because its only like a 2 mile hike and the trail is pretty well marked. brought my KX2 and a 20m EFHW that i've used in the backyard a bunch of times, figured no problem.
well. the antenna situation was a disaster. i forgot the actual wire was still sitting on my workbench at home, only had the feedline and the 9:1 unun in my pack. so im standing up there thinking ok what do i do now. ended up just throwing a random length of speaker wire i had in the bottom of my bag over a branch and tuning across like 40 and 20. somehow got 4 contacts including a guy in germany which i still cant believe. logged them in the SOTA spotter app and the alerts went out and people were actually calling me it was kind of wild.
my question is does it count even though my setup was basically garbage? i submitted the log and it seems like it went through but i feel like i cheated somehow lol. also the summit reference i used, is SU the right designator for that region or did i mess that up too

so ive had my tech for about 4 months now and been doing some local repeater stuff but honestly its getting a little quiet on the ones near me. a buddy at the club mentioned there are like scheduled nets i could check into but i cant really figure out how to find them or know whats a good fit for a newer operator. i dont want to jump into something thats way over my head or where i'd feel out of place.
also i saw something on qrz about a special event station happening next month for some historical thing, is that different from a regular net? like do you just call them or is there a specific way to work those. i feel like i'm missing something obvious here but nobody at the club has really walked me through the net thing step by step

What ceramic filter bandwidth are you using? I found 6kHz filters work better than 2.4kHz for SSB work with the MC1350. The narrower filters seemed to make the AGC more sensitive to phase variations.