Ashley Brown21

so ive been thinking about learning CW for a while now and i finally decided to just go for it but i honestly have no idea where to start. ive seen people mention the koch method and also just the old fashioned way of learning dits and dahs for each letter but thats apparently not the right approach anymore? i dont know. i tried one of those youtube videos where they just play the sounds over and over and i could sort of pick up the letters but then when i tried to actually copy anything real i was completely lost. not sure if im doing something wrong or if its just supposed to be that hard at first. also does anyone use a straight key to start or should i jump straight to a paddle, i have a cheapo straight key that came with some kit i built but ive heard paddles are easier. mostly want to use it on HF eventually, probably 40m to start. any advice appreciated, been licensed for about 2 years but never touched CW.

so i passed my technician about 8 months ago and ive been mostly doing 2m/70cm stuff on a couple handhelds and a mobile rig. its been fun but honestly i feel like im hitting a wall, everyone keeps talking about HF and making contacts on 40m and 20m and i want in on that my question is basically how hard is the general exam compared to tech. i remember tech being not too bad once i just drilled the question pool for a couple weeks but ive heard general has more math and electrical theory stuff which im not great at. is it worth buying a study guide or just do the online question pools again also like what can i actually do once i get it, i know i get HF privileges but i dont really understand what portions of the bands i get vs extra class. is it a big difference or does it matter

oh man i was in the exact same spot like two years ago, the whole award ecosystem is kind of overwhelming at first. what clicked for me was just picking one and focusing on it — i went for WAS first because honestly getting all 50 states felt more achievable when i was starting out and the contacts are just more frequent so you get more practice with the whole logging and confirming workflow before you're deep in the DXCC rabbit hole one thing nobody told me early on — make sure your LoTW account is set up with the right call sign and dates because if you ever get a QSL uploaded that doesnt match your license period it wont count and that's just annoying to sort out later. also the ARRL has a pretty decent page explaining the DXCC rules, worth reading even if some of it is a bit dense

so the Tri-County hamfest is saturday and im debating whether its worth the drive, last year the swap meet tables were kinda thin but i did snag a decent MFJ tuner for like 15 bucks so who knows. anybody else planning on showing up? curious if the club is doing the fox hunt again this year, that was actually pretty fun even tho i came in dead last lol

so ive been pulling my hair out over this for a couple weeks now. got a comet gp-3 up on the roof about 35 feet of RG-8X running down to my FT-7900 and my signals into the local repeater are just... okay. not great. other guys hit it way cleaner than me and i know at least two of them are running less power. the run goes straight down the side of the house through a hole i drilled near the window, no sharp bends or anything, feedline looks fine visually. SWR on the rig meter reads under 1.5 which i guess isnt terrible but something feels off. im wondering if 35 feet of RG-8X is just eating too much at 146mhz or if maybe my ground plane situation on the roof mount isnt ideal. the antenna is on a j-pipe mount off the chimney, probably 18 inches away from the brick. would upgrading to LMR-400 actually make a noticeable difference for a 35ft run or am i overthinking this and the problem is somewhere else

yeah i was confused about this too when i started. what i do now is i just use phonetics whenever im on HF or if the band sounds sketchy, otherwise on the local stuff i dont bother unless someone asks me to repeat my call. honestly just listen to how the regulars on your repeater do it and match that, every repeater kind of has its own vibe

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (technician, working toward general eventually) and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is for weak signal stuff and dx and whatnot. i got curious enough that i want to actually try learning it but i genuinely have no idea where to begin. like do people still use those paper charts with the dots and dashes or is there an app or something. i tried googling it but there's so much conflicting stuff out there, some people say learn it one way some say that way is wrong. a guy at my club mentioned something called koch method? is that the thing everyone uses now or is there something better. i dont really have a goal like passing a test or anything, code isnt required anymore obviously, i just want to be able to actually use it on the air someday. any advice from people who actually went through this would be helpful

so i finally got around to trying satellite work after talking about it forever. did a couple SO-50 passes this week with my FT-65 and a homemade eggbeater-ish antenna i threw together from some old coax and pvc. actually heard myself come back through the bird which felt pretty cool even if the audio was rough. anyway now i want to try the linear transponder satellites, like FO-29 or AO-73. and this is where i get lost. with SO-50 its just a repeater basically, you tx on one freq and it comes out on another, same mode. but with a linear transponder i keep reading that the passband is inverted and you have to do the doppler correction differently for both uplink and downlink independently and honestly my brain is melting a little. like if im running SSB, which side do i use on which end. ive been reading the amsat pages but some of it assumes you already know stuff i dont know yet. also im using gpredict for tracking which seems to work fine for SO-50 but im not sure how to set it up properly for the dual doppler thing on a linear sat. does it handle that automatically or do i have to manually tune two separate rigs. right now i just have the one radio and would have to split the job somehow i think.

yeah that mushy sound is almost always one of two things in my experience — either the paddle gap is too tight so you're getting contact bounce, or the iambic mode is doing something weird when you're not expecting it. the 7300 defaults to mode B iambic i think and a lot of people find that confusing when they're starting out, especially if you learned on a straight key or just started with paddles. try bumping the gap on both paddles a little wider than you think you need and slow back down to like 12 wpm even if it feels too slow. clean sending at slow speed will do more for you than sloppy sending at 15. also record yourself every few days and compare, you'll be surprised how fast it improves once you sort out the mechanical stuff.

I've tested both extensively during Search and Rescue operations in Oregon. Digipeaters extend transmission range by retransmitting received packets, increasing coverage area. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 gives more predictable coverage patterns, especially important when you need reliable position reports for tactical operations.

timing is absolutely king, you nailed it. i've worked rare stuff from a compromised antenna situation more times than i can count just by listening to the operator's rhythm. every DXpedition op has a pattern — some go fast, some dwell, some will pull partials. once you hear maybe 10-15 QSOs you can start predicting when to call almost to the second. that tail-end technique is legit, some ops actually seem to prefer it cause it keeps the flow going. power helps at the margins but honestly past like 100w you're getting diminishing returns real fast in most pileups. the station that's 10dB louder than you might get through a little easier but if your timing is off it doesnt matter. ive seen guys running legal limit getting ignored while a 100w station with good timing cleans up. antenna is probably worth more than the amp anyway and even then operator skill beats both. the other thing i'd add — if the op is running split and everyone is calling on the same freq, try going a bit outside that cluster. not way outside but like just off the edge where you're not completely buried. some ops will actually swing out there when the middle of the spread is just noise to them.

New to EME and planning my first moonbounce setup with limited budget and space. Looking at either 2m or 70cm for initial band choice. Research suggests 70cm requires less power for equivalent performance due to better moon reflectivity - is this accurate? Available equipment options: 2m: 2 x 13 element Yagis + 400W SSPA + 0.8dB NF preamp70cm: Single 25 element Yagi + 200W SSPA + 0.6dB NF preampBoth setups fit my budget but wondering which offers better success rate for a newcomer. Most activity seems concentrated on 2m but 70cm appears more forgiving for smaller stations.

few things to check. first thing id do is listen to your own transmit — key up and watch if the TNC LED flashes when it actually sends a packet. sometimes the beacon interval is set but the PTT isnt actually keying the radio properly, especially if you have any VOX or weird audio level stuff going on. the D710 internal TNC is usually solid but ive seen people have the audio input level set too hot or too low and the digi just cant decode it even if it hears the signal. also check your MYCALL is set correctly in the TNC config, not just in the radio memory. they're separate settings on that radio and i know at least two people who had the same confusion. and yeah 5W through a window-mounted mag mount could definitely be the issue too, glass and metal framing kills a lot of signal. try keying it manually from outside even just as a test to see if a digi picks you up at all.

i had the same confusion when i upgraded lol. what finally made it click for me was someone explaining that the frequency on your display is just where the suppressed carrier would be, not where your voice is actually going. so on 40m LSB your voice audio kind of hangs below that number. took me an embarrasingly long time to really get that

i just passed mine like 6 weeks ago so this is pretty fresh for me lol. i used hamstudy.org almost exclusively and it was fine, took me maybe 3 weeks of casual studying. the one thing i'd say is dont skip the questions about operating procedures and like the regulatory stuff, i thought that would be easy common sense but some of those FCC rule questions tripped me up more than i expected the math questions look scarier than they are, theres really only a handful of formulas you need and they come up in pretty recognizable ways. ohms law stuff mostly

55 miles on 2m FM is doable but yeah its going to depend on what's in between you and the repeater site. do you know if theres any elevation advantage at the repeater end? that matters a lot more than people think. i spent like three weekends messing with antenna height and coax trying to hit a site that turned out to just have a ridgeline in the way and no amount of gain was going to fix it lol not trying to discourage you just saying maybe confirm the path isnt blocked before going all in on new hardware

For what it's worth, I find that I tune off to the end of the passband, give a quick test transmission while I talk myself on to the correct frequency, and that correction is good for the pass, and probably all the passes that day. SATPC32 and Ham Radio Deluxe both have ways to do this. The key is making that initial adjustment at the start of each operating session.

yeah the left ear right ear thing never worked for me either, i ended up getting a headset that lets me pan each radio independently in the mixing and just kind of nudge the S&P side down in volume so its there but not demanding attention. took a few tries to find the right balance. one thing nobody told me when i started SO2R was how much the antenna switching matters almost as much as the radio switching. if your second radio is stuck on a compromised antenna because you didnt plan the switching matrix properly you're going to miss half the mults anyway. just something to think about if you havent already sorted that side of it

Just got my General and starting to work some DX. I keep hearing about different ways to confirm contacts - LoTW, eQSL, paper cards, bureau system. What's the difference and which should I use? I'm mainly interested in DXCC eventually but don't want to spend a fortune on postage. Also seeing mixed messages about which systems actually count for ARRL awards. Any advice for a newcomer would be appreciated!

so i've been putting this off for months but finally sat down last weekend and built a simple center-fed dipole for 40m. used some 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had laying around from an old extension cord project, grabbed a SO-239 chassis connector from the junk box and made a basic center insulator out of a piece of cutting board i cut up. yeah i know that sounds janky but it seems to work fine so far. cut each leg to about 33.5 feet based on the 468/f formula and got an SWR of around 1.8:1 at 7.150 which honestly surprised me, i was expecting worse. ran about 35 feet of RG-8X down to the shack. no balun right now which i know is probably not ideal but i wanted to get it up first and tune from there. my question is really about feedpoint impedance — im getting some RF on the outside of the coax (coax shield gets warm after a few minutes on SSB) and i know thats a balun issue but im wondering if anyone has just wound a choke balun right at the feedpoint vs using a ferrite bead balun or whatever. also the antenna is in kind of an inverted-V config, apex at about 30 feet, legs sloping down to about 8 feet at the ends. does that change the feedpoint Z much compared to a flat dipole? ive read all kinds of different things on this.

honestly the best advice I ever got was to actually deploy the kit before you need it. like set it up in the backyard on a saturday and run it for a few hours like it's real. you'll find out real fast what you forgot — I discovered my solar panel connector didn't match anything in my kit the first time I did that, which would've been a real problem if I found out during an actual event lol. the LiFePO4 choice is solid btw, good call on that over a regular AGM. 30ah should get you through a decent stretch depending on how hard you're running the rig.

so ive been putting together a go-kit for emcomm use and im kinda stuck on the power side of things. right now i have a 100ah lifepo4 battery that i built up last year and its been great for portable stuff but im not sure its gonna cut it for a multi-day deployment where were running HF and maybe a repeater link simultaneously. the antenna situation is mostly sorted - got a buddipole that works decent enough and ive been experimenting with a random wire with a 9:1 unun which honestly performs better than i expected on 40 and 80. but the generator question is where i keep going back and forth. a small honda eu2200 seems like the obvious answer for recharging but the weight and noise factor at something like a shelter or EOC setup is annoying to think about. anyone run a similar kind of dual setup where you lean on batteries for the radio and only fire the genny to top off? curious how that actually works in practice vs just running the genny all the time. also wondering if the inverter noise from even a quiet genny causes any issues on HF receive

yeah the audio loop thing is a real pain when you try to mix AllStar and RemoteHams on the same machine. i ran into the same thing, what ended up working for me was giving each application its own virtual audio device using something like VB-Cable or on linux just using separate ALSA loopback devices. the key is making sure RCForb isnt also trying to grab the default audio sink that ASL is already using. once i separated those two the latency stacking mostly went away, still adds maybe 200-300ms on top of the normal link delay but thats liveable. on the SDR side i actually run the RSP in a separate process and pipe it into the RemoteHams server with a virtual COM port for CAT control, works surprisingly well. the bandwidth thing you mentioned is real though, if you drop the FFT update to like 5fps on a marginal link it becomes almost usable on a hotspot connection which i thought was kind of impressive honestly.

oh man zone 2 — i spent like three months waiting to catch a VE8 or something from up there. finally got it during a decent opening on 17 meters just kind of by accident while i was messing around one afternoon. those weird mid-band openings sometimes pull in stuff you wouldnt expect. one thing i'd say is dont stress too much about chasing every zone or state in a hurry. i got burned out doing that and took a break for almost a year. the awards are fun but the actual operating is the point right. also check if your club does card checking, saved me a trip to the post office more than once.

oh man i remember feeling exactly the same way when i first got my ticket. okay so youre mostly right -- QSL does mean confirmed or acknowledged, like you got the message. QTH is your location yeah. QRM is interference from other stations, man-made stuff, and QRN is interference from natural sources like lightning static. QSB is when your signal is fading in and out. QRZ means whos calling me, youll hear that a lot when someone finishes a contact and wants to know if anyone else is calling. there are honestly like hundreds of Q codes going back to the old maritime and telegraph days but most hams only actually use maybe a dozen or so regularly. as for 73, thats just best regards, its from old telegraph shorthand codes, nobody really uses 72 much anymore but thats the one for QRP operators technically. honestly the best thing i ever did was just download the ARRL operating manual pdf and skim the chapter on operating conventions, it lays out all the common ones. you pick it up fast once you start making contacts yourself, just jump in and dont worry about looking dumb, everyone was new once and most hams love helping newcomers