John Johnson16

yeah the ranger thing is always a little nerve wracking the first time but most of them are genuinely curious. i carry a little laminated card explaining what POTA is and it's saved me a few awkward conversations. KX2 is a great first activation radio, that thing just works. once you do a few youll start figuring out the little tricks like which parks have good tree placement for the antenna and which ones are basically a parking lot with no good hang points lol

paper QSLs still work fine for DXCC, you just submit them directly to the ARRL for checking at a hamfest or mail them in. LoTW is way more convenient though because once both sides upload the credit just appears automatically. honestly if you can get the stations you worked to upload to LoTW that's going to be the path of least resistance for most of your contacts. on the multiple awards thing — yeah a contact can count for DXCC, WAS, and WAZ all at once as long as the mode and band count for each. so a 40m SSB contact with a station in say Texas could give you credit toward DXCC (if it's a separate entity from where you are), WAS for Texas, and WAZ for zone 4 or whatever. you dont have to do anything special, you just apply for each award separately and the same log entries get evaluated independently. i'd say go for all of them, the overlap makes it less work than you'd think

okay so i just passed my technician last week and im trying to figure out how the callsign thing works. the ULS system assigned me a sequential call which is fine i guess but a few guys at the club were talking about applying for a vanity call and now im second guessing everything. from what i understand the sequential ones just get assigned automatically based on your district and license class but the vanity process you actually pick what you want? or at least submit choices and hope? i looked at the FCC site and honestly it was kind of overwhelming, theres a lot of legalese in there about application windows and group eligibility and i wasnt sure if as a new tech i even qualify for certain call formats. also someone mentioned you should maybe just operate on your sequential call for a while before bothering with vanity because theres a waiting period or something? or maybe that was just their opinion. anyway just trying to understand the process before i dive in and accidentally mess something up with my license. any help appreciated

yeah ive done almost exactly this but with a Pi instead of an arduino, mostly because i already had one sitting around doing nothing. the CI-V thing is honestly pretty solid once you get the timing sorted. what i ended up doing was adding a small delay after i detect the band change before firing the relays — like 50ms — and then i also watch for the radio to stop being in transmit state before i allow any switching at all. the 7300 will tell you transmit state over CI-V too so you can poll that. its not the cleanest solution but its been working for about 8 months without a hiccup. the other thing worth checking is whether your relays are actually rated for what you need. i fried a ULN2003 driver chip once because i didnt account for the inductive kick from the relay coils. flyback diodes on every coil, dont skip that step.

im in basically the same boat as you, been licensed about a year. what finally got me to actually do LoTW was finding a youtube video that walked through the whole tqsl thing step by step, took me maybe 45 minutes total and then it just kind of works in the background with my logging software. i do all three honestly just because why not — LoTW uploads automatically when i close a log session, i have eQSL set up too and check it maybe once a week, and i've sent maybe a dozen physical cards to stations that either requested one or where it was a meaningful contact to me. got a few back in the mail and they're honestly really cool to have, especially the ones from far away. there's something about holding an actual card that just feels different you know

drilled my 2019 Tacoma about a year ago, put a Larsen NMO mount right in the center of the roof. yeah its a hole in a new truck but honestly once you seal it properly with the right mount hardware and a bit of self-amalgamating tape on the inside its just not something you think about again. the cable runs through the headliner really cleanly and i used one of those thin coax runs that tucks right under the door seal. difference from the mag mount was noticeable to me, not like night and day but the signal is more consistent especially when moving. the main thing i noticed is i stopped getting that intermittent dropout i'd get on the mag mount when hitting bumps on rough roads — that was almost certainly the ground contact moving around. for a daily driver that does a lot of repeater work i think its worth it, just do it right with a quality mount not a cheapo one

the balun debate is one of those things that will go on forever yeah. practically speaking for a backyard dipole at modest power you'll probably be fine without one, common mode current can cause some RFI issues or affect your pattern but honestly a lot of guys run coax fed dipoles without baluns their whole lives and never notice a problem. where it starts to matter more is if youre seeing RF in the shack or your swr is doing weird things when you touch the coax. for weatherproofing i just use self amalgamating tape over the feedpoint, wrap it good and it keeps water out for years. on the stranded vs solid question — stranded is actually fine outdoors, some people prefer it because it flexes better in wind without work hardening and eventually cracking the way solid can. solid holds its shape better if youre doing something like a fan dipole where the geometry matters. for a simple inverted V stranded is probably fine long term, just make sure whatever you use at the connection points is tinned well so it doesnt corrode and go high resistance on you.

so i've been running my FT-7900 kind of half-assed for a while now, just had it sitting on the seat with a mag mount slapped on the roof, worked okay but the SWR was a little sketchy and the cable was just flopped across the backseat which was driving me crazy every time i had a passenger anyway finally bit the bullet last weekend and did a proper install. ran the coax through the firewall with a grommet, mounted the head unit under the dash on a little RAM mount bracket thing i found on ebay, and switched to a NMO mount through the roof. what a difference honestly. SWR is sitting at like 1.1:1 across the whole 2m band now and the audio on receive is noticeably cleaner, less noise getting in i guess from not having that crappy mag mount cable only thing im not totally happy with is where i routed the power cable, i went straight to the battery with an inline fuse but the cable runs kind of close to some other stuff under the hood and i'm a little paranoid about it. anyone dealt with that, like is there a minimum clearance i should be keeping from other wiring harnesses or is that mostly just about heat sources

i just did an ID-4100 install in my Tacoma a few months ago and went with a lip mount on the rear hatch, works great and no drilling involved. not sure if the F-150 geometry works the same way but worth looking into. the D-STAR on the 4100 is really nice if your area has any D-STAR repeaters, just throwing that out there since you mentioned it as an option.

yeah this tripped me up for a while too when i first got into HF. the short version is SFI tells you about solar activity and how ionized the upper atmosphere is, higher numbers mean the F layer is more reflective and supports higher frequencies. for 10m to really open up for decent DX you generally want SFI somewhere above 120 or so, and honestly 150+ is when it starts getting really exciting. anything below 100 and 10m is basically FM repeater territory most of the time except maybe for sporadic-e which is a whole different thing. the K index is more about geomagnetic disturbances, so even if the SFI is great a high K index (like 4 or above) can completely wipe out propagation especially on the higher bands and at higher latitudes. basically you want high SFI and low K index at the same time, thats your sweet spot. those two things dont always cooperate. as for why you saw spots on pskreporter but got nothing yourself, could be timing, could be the path was just barely cracked open for digital modes which are way more sensitive than voice, FT8 will work through conditions that would leave SSB totally dead.

the RFI thing is real but people overcomplicate it sometimes. before you spend money on bandpass filters make sure your coax connectors are actually tight and your ground system is solid, ive seen setups where the second radio was killing the first one and it turned out to be a bad PL-259 letting RF into the shack. also the K3 and 590 are both pretty good receivers so you might be surprised how well they play together on different bands even without fancy filters, just dont try to run them on the same band or adjacent bands without isolation. honestly for SS specifically since its only 24 hours i might just try it one year without perfect filtering and see what happens. worst case you deal with some noise. best case it works fine and you learned something.

pretty much a judgment call in most cases. the FCC just says you have to ID every 10 minutes and at the end of a transmission, doesnt say anything about phonetics specifically. the NATO stuff is more of a best practice especially when conditions are rough or theres any chance of confusion. on a local repeater where everyone knows your call you could probably just say it straight and nobody cats. but if youre working HF, especially DX or in a contest, you really do want phonetics because the other station might only catch one or two letters and needs the context to fill in the rest. i worked a guy last winter in the middle of a pileup and his call had two letters that sound almost identical, took us three tries before i got it right even with phonetics. so yeah just use your judgment based on the situation

ok so ive been checking into the tuesday night local 2m net for a few weeks now and i still feel like im doing something wrong with my timing. the net control will say something like "any further check-ins" and i never know if i should just say my callsign right away or wait a beat or what. last week i jumped in at the same time as another guy and we both stepped on each other which was embarrassing. he was nice about it but still. also how do you handle it when net control asks for traffic and you have something to pass but its not really important, like i wanted to mention a club meeting but i wasnt sure if that counted as "traffic" or if that was only for like formal messages. i dont want to waste everyones time but i also dont want to not say something when i should. anyone been through this learning curve

the jackery as primary then gen as backup is actually a pretty solid approach, thats kind of how i run it too. one thing i'd watch though is the 7300 pulls something like 23 amps peak on transmit so if youre doing any extended SSB ragchewing or net control duty that 1000wh jackery is gonna drain faster than you think. figure maybe 4-5 hours of mixed rx/tx before you're sweating it. not a dealbreaker just know your numbers before you're three hours in and wondering why the voltage is dropping. on the generator noise thing, the eu2200 really is pretty clean, ive ran mine next to a 7610 and the noise floor barely moves. just run your dc line through a good common mode choke and keep the gen at least 20-30 feet from the antenna feedpoint if you can manage it. physically separating it does more than most people realize. fan dipole is fine, don't swap antennas on exercise day. you already know how it works, stick with what you tested.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, summit was only like a 2 mile hike but still took me forever to find a decent spot with enough clearance for my end fed. ended up just throwing the wire over a branch and it worked fine. ran 10w on 40m SSB and got my 4 contacts pretty quick, even had a guy in colorado come back to me which i was not expecting at all from ohio. only thing that sucked was my kx2 battery was lower than i thought and i was watching the voltage the whole time stressing out. made it through but barely. gonna start bringing a small lipo backup i think. anyone else just wing it the first time or did you actually plan yours out properly lol

yeah its been rough, i think we had a few bad CME's come through and it just kinda wrecked propagation for a bit. tried working some dx last weekend and 40 was just not cooperating at all. 20 was decent in the afternoon though if you havent tried that yet

so i was just sitting down last weekend to do some casual operating, wasnt really expecting much, had the rig tuned to 28.450 just kind of half listening while i was doing other stuff around the shack and all of a sudden i start hearing stations from everywhere. worked a couple guys in South America, then caught a station in Spain without even really trying that hard. this is on a pretty mediocre dipole too, nothing fancy. i know solar cycle 25 has been ramping up and people have been talking about it for a while but i dont think i fully appreciated how good 10m can get until this weekend. for context ive only been licensed about 18 months so ive never really seen a solar maximum before. is this what it was like back in the last cycle? because if so i completely understand why the old timers get so excited about it. i almost missed my kids soccer game because i couldnt stop spinning the dial. also heard someone mention there was a big DX expedition somewhere in the Pacific coming up soon, does anyone know more about that? i saw something on the DX bulletin but didnt catch all the details.

Check your baud rate settings and add some delay between CI-V message processing. The watchdog timer can help if you're missing input data - set it to about 10 seconds to reset relays if CI-V goes quiet.

so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and honestly i feel like ive hit a wall a little bit. i mean theres still stuff to do on VHF and i do some satellite stuff occasionally but everyone keeps telling me to just go get my General so i can actually get on HF. i tried listening to 40m on my friends rig last weekend and it just kind of blew my mind how much activity there is down there. anyway i guess my question is how hard is the General exam compared to Tech. i remember the Tech exam being not too bad, studied with HamStudy for like 3 weeks and passed first try. is General more of the same or is there actually harder stuff in there. i heard theres more math involved? i really dont want to fail in front of people at the testing session lol also wondering if there are specific topics i should focus on or if its just grind the question pool like i did before. any advice appreciated, trying to maybe take the test sometime in the next month or two

Working on setting up a new HF station with 100W and beam antenna. Need to understand the RF exposure requirements under Part 97.13. Questions: When is a routine environmental evaluation required?What documentation do I need to keep?How do I handle household vs. general population limits?Any good tools for calculations?

oh man i remember that feeling so well, dont sweat it at all. most nets are super forgiving with new folks and honestly the best way to learn is exactly what you did — just jump in. the basic flow for most directed nets is you wait for net control to ask for check-ins, you give your callsign once (phonetics if it's a noisy net), and then you just stand by until NCS calls you. if you have traffic to pass or a comment you usually say so right after your call — something like your callsign and then "with one comment" or "no traffic." the NCS will work through everyone in order. every net does things a little differently though so it helps to just listen for a few sessions before checking in, that way you kind of absorb the rhythm of that particular group. sounds like you did fine honestly.

oh man this brought back memories, i was exactly where you are probably 3 years ago. the panic spiral when you miss a letter is so real and honestly that's the thing you have to work on more than the speed itself what helped me more than anything was just letting go of trying to copy every single character. like seriously, just accept that youre going to miss some and keep moving forward. your brain will actually start to fill in gaps from context if you let it relax a bit. trying to catch every missed character is what causes you to miss the next five also i'd say dont increase your character speed at all for now, keep it at whatever feels slightly uncomfortable, maybe 15 or 18wpm character speed, but drop the word spacing way down so you get more time between letters. that farnsworth method thing is actually pretty solid. i went from fumbling at 5wpm to being comfortable around 18-20 over maybe 8 or 9 months of pretty casual practice, maybe 15-20 mins a day. just gotta be consistent more than anything, one long session a week doesnt do much

yeah i was on! caught the tail end of it around 4pm local time, conditions were already starting to fade but i still worked a couple stations in south america which i'll take. my old FT-857 was doing the heavy lifting and honestly it held up fine, sometimes i forget how capable that radio still is even after all these years. on the 905 thing, a buddy of mine in the local club just got one delivered last week and brought it to the meeting. we were all crowded around it like it was christmas morning haha. first impressions are that the build quality is really nice and the spectrum display is way better than i expected for a microwave rig. he hasnt had time to do a real test from a hilltop yet but thats coming. if you're serious about 1.2 and up it looks like a legit option, just brace yourself for the price tag.

I did almost the exact same install on a Ram 1500 last spring. Ended up going with a mag mount temporarily just to figure out where I actually wanted the antenna before committing to anything permanent. Ran it for like 3 months that way and it worked fine for everyday use. eventually bit the bullet and did the NMO through the roof and yeah its noticeably better but honestly for getting on the local repeater the mag mount was totally fine in the meantime. just something to consider if you want to get on the air sooner while you figure out the permanent solution.

oh man i remember feeling exactly the same way before my first net check-in, just breathe and go for it honestly. when net control opens it up for check-ins you just wait for a pause, key up, and say your callsign clearly — phonetics help if the band is noisy. some nets just want callsign and location, some want signal report requests too but net control will usually tell you the format at the start so just listen to the first couple people check in and copy what they do. you will fumble it a little your first time, everyone does, but net control has heard it all and they will work with you. the main thing is just doing it. after the first time it feels totally normal. for special event stations, the ARRL has a listing on their website and there's also a site called QRZ that usually has info posted when operators set them up. W1AW does special operating events too if you havent looked into that. some of the bigger special events will post on social media too which sounds weird but its actually pretty common now.