Ashley Brown21

so ive been running a Diamond X50 on the roof for about two years now and it works fine for hitting the local 2m repeater which is maybe 18 miles out. no issues there. but theres another repeater i really want to get into, its like 55 miles and on a good day ill barely make it, lot of QSB and sometimes it just drops mid-over. been thinking about swapping to a yagi pointed roughly in that direction but the problem is the local repeater is almost 90 degrees off from that bearing so id basically be choosing one or the other unless i put up two antennas or get a rotor which feels like massive overkill for just repeater work. someone at the club mentioned a higher gain collinear might be enough to close the link without having to aim anything. like a X510 or maybe one of the Comet verticals with more elements. does that actually make sense or is the gain difference between a 5.5dbd collinear and a decent 5el yagi just too much to ignore at that distance. im not doing EME or anything crazy, just want reliable FM into a repeater 55 miles out on 2m. terrain is mostly flat with some tree coverage.

yeah that symptom pattern — power dropping more as frequency goes up — is pretty classic for a bias problem or one of the driver stages going soft. on the 857 the pre-driver and driver amps are separate from the finals so it could be upstream of the RD70s entirely. before you pull the finals i'd check the bias voltage on the PA board with the radio keyed into a dummy load. if the bias is off you'll see it there and its a much cheaper fix than new transistors. also worth checking the low pass filter switching — there's relays that switch in different LPF sections per band and if one of those is flaky you can get exactly this kind of frequency-dependent power loss. i had an IC-706 do something similar once and it was a corroded relay contact, not the PA at all. cleaned it with deoxit and it was back to full power. might save you from going down the wrong rabbit hole.

yeah RF into GPIO is a real thing and bypass caps alone probably wont cut it if youre running any kind of power. i had almost the exact same problem with an arduino mega i was using for a band decoder a couple years back - the thing would just go crazy when i hit the key on 40m. ended up putting optocouplers on every single control line between the arduino and the relays and that fixed it completely. the PC817 is cheap and works fine for this, you can get a bag of 50 for almost nothing. also make sure your relay board has its own separate power supply and that the grounds are only connected at one point or you can get ground loops that make everything worse. ferrite beads on the data lines going to the shift register helped me too, just snapped a few on the wires and it cleaned things up noticeably.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general) and i keep hearing people talk about checking into nets but i honestly dont fully understand how it all works. like i get the basic idea, you check in, net control calls you back, but what happens after that? do you just say your call and then hang around? or is there actually stuff to do? i tried checking into the local 2m net a couple weeks ago and net control acknowledged me and then just... moved on to the next person and i kind of sat there not sure what i was supposed to do. nobody sent me any traffic or anything. i didnt have any to pass either. felt a little anticlimactic honestly but i know thats probably just because i dont understand what im doing yet also i noticed there are some HF nets listed on the ARRL site, are those harder to participate in? my antenna situation isnt great right now (dipole in the attic) but i can hit 40m decently most evenings. just curious if its worth trying or if ill just be stepping on people

i ran into the exact same question last summer and ended up just bringing both. sounds like overkill but its really not — the collinear stays on the pole for general use and the yagi comes out when someone is being difficult. takes maybe 2 minutes to swap. the yagi i use is a homemade 5el for 2m, nothing fancy, built off one of the free online calculators and it works great. the diminishing returns thing on omnis is real though. going from a rubber duck to a half wave is huge. going from a half wave to a 5/8 is noticeable. going from a 5/8 to a longer collinear is... ehh. you get a bit but youre also starting to compress the radiation pattern vertically which can bite you on uneven terrain

the HT is a really good call, i wouldnt skip it. during our last ARES activation we had guys who could only reach the repeater and that was honestly fine for half the nets we were running. something like a BF-F8HP or even just your everyday VX-6 is small enough to toss in without adding much weight and it gives you flexibility if the HF setup isnt cooperating. ground rod is worth having, especially if you end up operating near a lot of RF noise at a site you dont know. i keep a 4 foot copper rod and a small rubber mallet in mine. takes 30 seconds to pound in and it actually does make a difference sometimes. also i would add a small notepad with your most common frequencies already written out, simplex calling freqs, your local ARES net freq, maybe a few NVIS frequencies depending on your region. sounds dumb but when its 2am and youre tired you dont want to be digging through memory channels trying to remember if its 3.915 or 3.925 antenna analyzer is nice but i wouldnt call it essential for a go-kit, honestly. if your dipole is cut right and youre deploying it the same way each time you probably already know where its gonna land. a cheap SWR meter is smaller and covers most field situations fine.

30-35dB should be fine for casual ssb use honestly, thats not your problem. the 741 is almost definitely part of it though, those things have terrible slew rate for audio and will add their own distortion especially if youre pushing any kind of level through it. id swap that out first before you go touching the modulator. something like an NE5532 or even a TL072 would be a massive improvement and cost you like nothing. also the 'buzzy' reports could be RF getting back into your audio chain. does it get worse when you key up vs just audio testing on the bench? if so id look at bypassing on the mic input and maybe a few ferrite beads on the mic cable leads. ive chased that exact problem for way too long on a couple different builds before i figured out it wasnt the modulator at all.

yeah the three system thing trips everybody up at first, dont worry about it. basically LoTW is the gold standard for ARRL awards like DXCC and WAS, so if thats something you ever want to chase its worth keeping up with. eQSL is completely separate and some awards accept it but most of the big ones dont — its more casual and some DX stations use it because its free and easy. the two systems dont talk to each other at all so yes youll need to upload separately if you want credit on both. the low confirmation rate on LoTW is totally normal especially when youre working FT8 and making lots of contacts fast. lots of people upload in batches, some only once a year, and some never bother at all. just be patient and keep uploading your own logs and itll slowly tick up over time. as for paper cards, its considered good practice to reply but nobody is going to track you down if you dont. honestly id suggest getting a small batch printed at some point, there are services online that do like 100 cards for not much money. getting a nice card in the mailbox from some station halfway around the world never really gets old

im still pretty new to all this but ragchewing is literally why i upgraded to general. technician felt limiting for that kind of thing. havent had a real long qso yet but im working up to it lol, i always feel like im gonna say something dumb on the air

im in kind of the same boat actually, still on the rtl-sdr but been eyeballing the SDRplay stuff. one thing i'll throw out there is SDRuno, the software that comes with SDRplay, has a pretty steep learning curve compared to just running SDR# with the rtl. not a dealbreaker but took me a bit to figure out when i tried it at a friends shack. CubicSDR also works with the RSP stuff and i find it a bit more intuitive personally.

So I finally decided to stop just chasing summits from home and actually go out and do an activation. Been licensed about 18 months, general class, been watching other peoples activation videos on youtube for like forever and figured I'd give it a shot. Picked W6/NC-192 because it looked relatively accessible and I'd hiked up there once before without radio gear. So I packed up my KX2, a 40m EFHW wire antenna, some coax, my mast sections, feedline, spare batteries, logbook, and all the snacks you'd expect and hiked up. Got to the activation zone no problem, which was nice. Set up the antenna and immediately realized id only brought like 15 feet of coax when I needed probably 25 to get the feedline away from where I was sitting. So the antenna was basically right on top of me and I kept getting RF on the mic or at least I think thats what was happening - some stations kept saying my audio sounded weird. Still managed 4 QSOs on 40m SSB before my knee started complaining and I had to pack it up. Got the required 4 for a valid activation but only barely. Anyone else have a gear list they rely on or lessons from their first activations? I feel like I'm still figuring out what I actually need vs what I thought I'd need.

so i was just spinning the dial on 10 meters last night around 8pm local time and i kept hearing stations from Brazil, Argentina, a few from southern europe too. been a ham for about 6 years now and i dont think ive ever heard 10m this open in the evening like that, usually by the time dinner is over the band is dead as a doornail. checked the solar flux this morning and it was sitting around 210 which is pretty high, and the K index was nice and low like a 1 or 2. i know we're heading toward solar maximum but i keep forgetting how much difference it actually makes when the numbers line up like that. managed to work a PY station and a CE with just my 100w and a dipole, nothing fancy at all. anybody else been seeing good DX openings on 10 or 12m recently? curious if this is a consistent thing right now or if i just got lucky with the timing. also not sure if i should be watching any particular websites for predicting when conditions will be good, i've been using DXmaps but wondering if theres something better for planning ahead.

yeah totally, happens to me every winter. what usually gets me going again is just picking up the mic and calling CQ even if i dont expect anyone to answer. sometimes you get a surprise contact and the bug bites again. or find a contest weekend coming up, even if you only do an hour of it, that usually does it for me.

so ive been trying to work AO-73 for about three weeks now and i can hear the downlink fine on 145.935 but i cannot for the life of me find my own signal coming back down. running about 5 watts into a small yagi i built from a tape measure design, elevation is maybe 20-30 degrees on most passes i've been trying. full duplex capable with two HTs and a laptop running gpredict for doppler tracking. what i think is happening is im not compensating for doppler properly on the uplink side — im adjusting the downlink as i go but i set the uplink and kind of leave it. someone told me the linear transponder inverts the sideband so if i go up in frequency on uplink my signal actually comes down in frequency on the downlink? i think i have that backwards or maybe i have the whole thing backwards. also not sure if 5 watts is just too little for that bird. gpredict is showing good acquisition of signal times and the passes look decent overhead, northeast US if that matters. anyone worked this one recently and can tell me if there's something obvious im missing

yeah what he said about the honda noise thing is real, i learned that one the hard way. also for the antenna — the EFHW on a painter's pole is what i'd do too, way faster than messing with the buddipole in a parking lot situation where you might not have great options for element positioning. just make sure your counterpoise situation is sorted because in a paved lot with no ground to speak of the feed point behavior can get a little weird especially on 40m. i usually clip a 17ft wire to the shield side and just let it lay on the pavement, not ideal but it works. one thing worth thinking about is bringing a small solar panel even if you have battery capacity. like a 100w panel can at least trickle in enough to offset some of the draw during the day and it gives you a psychological buffer if the exercise runs long. i use a renogy 100w suitcase panel with a victron mppt and it folds up pretty small.