Tom Wilson

the rumble is almost certainly low frequency pickup — either from your desk, HVAC, whatever. the PR-40 is a dynamic so it's not as sensitive to that as a condenser would be but it still picks stuff up if the gain is cranked. first thing id do is go into the 7300 TX equalizer and roll off everything below about 150-200 Hz, like a pretty steep cut. you dont need any of that on SSB anyway, the filters in the receiver on the other end are going to chop it off and all it does is eat up your headroom and make the audio sound muddy. on the compression thing, yeah 2-3 is pretty conservative but that's not necessarily wrong. the issue is the 7300's built in compressor isnt the greatest in the world. some guys run it a bit higher like 5-6 and then back off the mic gain slightly to compensate. the idea is you want the peaks controlled without squashing everything flat. honestly the best thing you can do is get on with a buddy on a nearby frequency and have them give you real time feedback while you tweak. way faster than guessing.

WAS is probably the most natural starting point honestly, especially since you're in the US — 50 states is very achievable even with a modest setup and you'll get a feel for how the whole QSL and credit thing works without it costing a fortune. LoTW makes it way easier these days, most stateside ops are on there. once you get comfortable with that then DXCC starts to make sense to chase because you'll have already worked a bunch of entities just by accident while hunting states anyway. WAZ is fun but 40 zones takes a bit more patience and some of them are genuinely hard to get from certain parts of the country. dont stress too much about the order though — just work what you hear and the awards kind of fill in on their own over time. i didnt really plan any of it and ended up with WAS confirmed in about my first year without even really trying that hard.

so i passed my technician like 6 months ago and ive been thinking about getting into CW for a while now. i know its not required anymore but something about it just seems cool and i want to learn it properly. the problem is i have no idea where to even begin. i downloaded a couple apps but i dont really know if im doing it right or if im just wasting time. do you just memorize the dots and dashes like on a chart or is there a better way? ive heard people mention something called the koch method but i dont really understand how that works either. any tips would be helpful, im pretty lost honestly

late october solar is rough depending where you are geographically. i tried to run solar-only on a field day type thing in early november once and it was kind of a disaster, like 4 hours of usable light and the panels were at like 60% because of the angle. ended up just running the car alternator more than i wanted to which isnt great long term. my vote is just bring the generator and dont overthink it. the eu2200i is solid and for 3-4 days of serious comms work youre not gonna regret having reliable power. lifepo4 stays as your buffer and overnight supply, genny handles the heavy daytime load or recharging. thats kind of the standard setup for anything serious i've seen at regional emcomm exercises anyway

yeah that rubbing your head thing is exactly what it feels like at first, you nailed it. took me probably 3 or 4 contests before it started feeling even slightly natural and honestly I still botch it when band conditions are chaotic and everyone's calling at once. the thing that helped me most was being really strict about only using the second radio for S&P, never trying to run on both simultaneously until you're really comfortable. so your flow becomes: run on radio 1, hear a dupe or a lull, flip to radio 2, log a quick S&P contact, flip back. you're not really listening to both at the same time so much as switching attention fast. the interleaving gets tighter as you do it more. also if you're not already using N1MM with proper SO2R keying setup, that helps a lot because the software handles a lot of the footswitch logic and you're not manually managing which radio is transmitting. that alone reduced a lot of my errors.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (tech) and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is for low power stuff and dx contacts and whatever else, and i guess i got curious enough to actually try learning it. problem is i have no idea how to even approach it. like do i just start memorizing dits and dahs? i tried writing out the alphabet chart and staring at it for a while and that felt completely useless. i also downloaded like three different apps and they all seem to do something different and i dont know which approach is actually good vs which ones are gonna teach me bad habits or whatever. someone at my club mentioned the koch method but didnt really explain what that was. is that what most people use? and how long does this realistically take before i can actually copy something on the air, even slow stuff

I run an IC-9700 with the satellite mode which handles the doppler split automatically and honestly even with that it still catches me off guard sometimes when the pass is coming up fast. one contact on your first real attempt with manual tuning is not bad at all, most people i know just heard nothing the first few times and gave up. the Ohio guy was probably just as lost as you lol

alright so i finally pulled the trigger on a Yaesu FTM-300DR after going back and forth on it for probably two months. been doing a lot of reading about mobile installs and i think i have a general idea but wanted to run it by some folks who've actually done this before i start making holes in my truck. the truck is a 2019 F-150 and im planning to mount the head unit down near the center console area and run the control cable back to the main body which i was going to stick under the rear seat or maybe in that little storage compartment thing. the antenna is where im really not sure - i was looking at a NMO mount on the roof but the idea of drilling through the roof of a truck i just paid off makes me a little nervous. someone suggested a lip mount on the edge of the cab but ive heard those can have grounding issues? also the power - do i really need to run it all the way back to the battery? i read some posts saying you absolutely have to for a 50W radio and others saying a fused connection to the fuse box is fine. the battery is way up front on this truck so its kind of a long run either way. just want to do this right the first time if possible.

oh man welcome to the addiction lol. seriously QRP portable is one of those things that once it clicks for you its hard to go back to sitting in the shack with a big radio. i built an SW-40 back in the day and had basically the same experience, that first contact on something you built with your own hands is just different. for 20m if you go that route i'd look at some of the designs on EMRFD or even just grab a 4state QRP kit, they're reasonable and you learn a lot from building them. the efficiency thing you mentioned is real by the way - running low power with a good antenna is almost always more effective than people think. most of the signal is in the antenna anyway. a half wave dipole in a tree beats a rubber duck on a 100w radio any day. SOTA is absolutely worth it with QRP. just make sure you log your activations properly and get the antenna as high as you can, the elevation does a lot of the work for you up on a summit. good luck and 73

the Koch method is what most people recommend and honestly its what finally worked for me after i tried a few other things. basically you start with just two characters at full speed like 20wpm and you dont move on until you can copy them at 90% accuracy or whatever. the idea is your brain learns the sound as a whole thing instead of counting dits and dahs which is a trap a lot of beginners fall into. LCWO.net is free and does the Koch method, ive sent a lot of people there as for getting on the air, dont wait until youre fast. seriously. there are slow speed nets specifically for people learning, like the slow net on 40 meters. when i was learning i found that actual QSOs pushed my progress way faster than just solo practice. theres something about the pressure of a real contact that makes your brain lock it in. just look up some QRS frequencies and hang around, people are generally pretty patient with beginners sending at 5wpm

congrats on passing the tech, welcome to the mess haha. ok so here's my honest take — the baofeng hate is partly justified and partly just old-timers being snobby. the UV-5R works fine for hitting a repeater and doing local simplex, i used one for my first year and it did everything i needed. the receiver isnt great so you get a lot of interference in busy RF environments but if youre in a rural or suburban area you probably wont even notice. that said if you can stretch to the yaesu ft-65 i do think its worth it. feels more solid, the receiver is noticeably cleaner, and yaesu has actual customer support which baofeng basically doesnt. for APRS youre probably gonna want to look at something like the ft-65r paired with an app like APRSdroid through bluetooth, or eventually step up to a dedicated APRS ht like the vx-8dr but thats a whole other price range. start simple, get on the repeater, make some contacts, then decide what features you actually care about.

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into the tuesday night 2m net our club runs and i think i did it completely wrong. the net control called for check-ins and i just said my callsign without waiting for them to acknowledge me first and then someone else was talking at the same time and it was just a mess. i dont really know the proper order of things when you check in to a net. like do you wait for a pause and just say your call once? do you need to give your name and location every time or just the first check-in? and what do you do if net control asks if you have traffic — i just said no and then kind of trailed off awkwardly. i have my technician and im working on my general but nobody really covered this stuff in the license material. just the rules and regs stuff mostly. anyway not trying to make a big deal out of it but id like to not sound like a complete goober next week if i can help it

what jfet are you using? i built something similar a while back with a 2N3819 and had the same snap-through issue, switched to a MPF102 and it was noticeably smoother for some reason. might be totally different in your circuit but worth trying if you have one kicking around in your junk box

Had the same issue with my Diamond antenna on my JK! Turned out the NMO mount wasn't making good contact. I had to sand the paint around the mount area to get bare metal contact. Why does my SWR change after raising the antenna? Nearby objects and ground effects change electrical length and impedance. Also try moving the Jeep to a different location for testing - sometimes nearby metal objects can throw off the readings.

ok so i've been interested in ham radio for like a year now and i keep telling myself i'm gonna do it but honestly i dont even know where to begin. like do i need to take a class or can i just study on my own? i looked up the technician exam and it seems like there's a question pool but im not sure if i actually need to memorize all of it or if there's some smarter way to study. also does it matter which testing session i go to or are they all the same. sorry if these are dumb questions i just dont really know anyone who does this

im also pretty new to building stuff and this is encouraging to read honestly. i have a bitx40 kit sitting half assembled on my bench and i keep stalling out. maybe i should just commit and finish it this weekend. what kind of antenna feedline were you using, just curious if you went with coax or ladder line to the dipole?

ran RCForb for about a year before i went back to a custom setup. the client itself is fine, pretty stable, audio quality was decent once i got the codec settings dialed in. the latency was manageable for SSB, maybe 200-300ms depending on my connection, but CW was rough unless you're already a skilled op who can adapt. i found myself making way more errors just from the feedback delay messing with my timing. the SDR remote side is a different animal though — if you're doing receive-only or just want to monitor bands that's actually pretty solid. the panadapter updates nicely and you can share access which is handy if you have a club or want to let a buddy check propagation. the ecosystem lock-in thing is real but honestly its not that bad. my bigger gripe was that when their servers had issues you kind of just had to wait it out, vs my own setup where i could at least dig into what broke. tradeoffs everywhere i guess.

oh man i went through the exact same thing when i first got my tech, spent like two evenings convinced my radio was broken before someone at my local club told me about the tone thing. once i got it sorted it was like a whole new world opened up lol. one thing i'll add is that some repeaters around here are linked to other machines through something called IRLP or EchoLink so sometimes when you key up you might actually be going out to a whole network of repeaters in other states or countries. worth knowing just so you dont accidentally walk over someone mid-sentence on a linked system — the latency can be a bit weird and people get a little annoyed if you dont wait a full second or two after the courtesy tone before transmitting. found that one out the hard way

so ive been messing with an RTL-SDR v3 for about 6 months now and honestly its been great for learning but im starting to hit the walls on dynamic range, especially on 40m at night when the band is busy. the direct sampling mode works ok but its pretty noisy and i keep reading that an SDRplay RSP1A would be a noticeable step up. my main use is just general monitoring, some aircraft stuff with dump1090 which obviously the RTL handles fine, and id like to do more shortwave and eventually get into decoding some of the digital modes on HF. im running SDR# on windows mostly but ive played with SDR++ a bit which i actually think i like better now. question is whether the RSP1A is worth the price difference over just getting a better upconverter for the rtl dongle. ive seen the SpyVerter recommended a bunch but not sure if im just throwing money at a problem that a proper receiver would solve more cleanly. anybody made that jump and actually noticed a big difference day to day

yeah the message traffic backup thing is so real. we had almost the exact same issue during a county exercise a couple years back. what helped us was designating one person as basically just a traffic logger — not operating at all, just keeping a whiteboard of what was in queue, what was acknowledged, what was pending. sounds simple but it made a huge difference. that person also became the one who flagged when a message had been sitting too long without confirmation. the repeater failure scenario is a good stress test too. we actually started building our simplex channels into a laminated card that goes in every go-kit now. not fancy but people actually use it. the stuff that isnt written down and physically present just doesnt get used under pressure, thats been my experience anyway.

i did almost the exact same install about a year ago, different radio but same truck actually (also an F-150). the hiss drove me crazy for a while and it turned out to be the USB port i had plugged in for my phone charger of all things. unplugged that and most of it went away. might not be your issue but worth trying process of elimination with stuff like that before you start chasing ground loops. also the RAM mount setup for the head is the way to go imo, so much easier than trying to find a spot to permanently mount it and you can pull the whole thing off if you leave the truck somewhere sketchy.

yeah the diode mod on those Yaesus is pretty standard at this point, been doing it on 857s and 897s for years. you almost certainly didnt change the RX characteristics, the TX and RX paths are separate enough that moving those diodes shouldnt touch anything on the receive side. probably just confirmation bias after doing the mod, which is totally normal lol. on the Collins filter question -- it depends what youre doing with the radio. if youre running it mostly mobile or in noisy environments, the stock DSP filtering in the 857D is honestly decent enough and the collins filter wont blow your mind. but if you sit at a desk and do a lot of CW or work crowded SSB pileups, yeah you'll notice it. i put one in mine about three years ago and it made a real difference in CW selectivity, less so SSB but still noticeable. the mod itself is dead simple compared to the TX thing, its just dropping the filter into a socket. just make sure you get the right part number, theres a couple variants floating around and not all of them fit right.

cant speak to all the technical stuff as well as some guys but i started EME about 2 years ago from a pretty normal neighborhood and it works. my setup is probably comparable to yours. the thing that surprised me most was how the scheduling and the community around EME works — theres a whole network of guys who post skeds on the online EME sked pages and if you post that youre available a lot of the big stations will actively try to work you because they want the contact too. so you're not just randomly calling into the void. Q65 is where most of the activity is now on 2m at least from what i see. JT65B still used but Q65-60A seems like where the serious weak signal guys have landed. get WSJT-X set up and just spend a few sessions listening before you try to transmit, you'll learn a lot about the timing and the sequence just from watching.

honestly for tropo the yagi wins every time but you already knew that. the question is how much effort you want to put in. i used to haul a 6el yagi up hills and yeah it worked great but i spent half the time rotating it by hand and trying to figure out where the signal was coming from. these days i bring a 5el and a cheap az-el mount made from plumbing pipe and its actually not that bad once youre set up. the X50 is a solid antenna dont get me wrong but its not in the same league for working DX even on a good tropo day. collinears are great for if you just want to be loud in all directions at once, good for sporadic-E maybe, but pointed gain is pointed gain. if you care about working stations more than 150 miles out on 2m you probably want the yagi. one thing i will say — horizontal polarization matters if youre trying to work SSB weak signal guys. most of the serious 2m ops are horizontal and if youre running vertical you lose 20db crossing polarizations which is worse than not having the gain in the first place

congrats on the first one, it gets addictive fast. on the signal report question — yeah just use your best judgement, if you genuinely got a solid callsign and completed the exchange i'd count it. the rules are pretty relaxed compared to contesting. POTA is more honor system than anything. and yes 5nn is just contest shorthand that spilled over, everyone knows what it means, dont stress about it. for frequencies there isnt one magic spot but a lot of activators hang around 7.200 on LSB and 14.244 on 20m because hunters know to check there. that said if those are busy just find a clear frequency and self-spot yourself on the POTA app — thats honestly the biggest thing i wish someone had told me earlier. once you spot yourself the pile-up comes to you, you dont need to be on any particular frequency. just announce your park reference when you ID and youre good.