Robert Moore

yeah what he said about Field Day. i was nervous showing up to my club's site the first year but everyone was so cool about it. they handed me a mic within like 20 minutes and just said go for it. made my first ever CW contact that weekend because one of the elmers sat with me and walked me through it. one thing i'd add — for CQ WW just spend the first hour or so listening before you jump in. tune around, hear how people are doing exchanges, figure out what the rhythm is. the exchange for CQ WW is signal report and your CQ zone which for most of us in the US is zone 3 or 4 or 5 depending on where you are. once you hear it a few times it clicks pretty fast. dont stress about rate or multipliers your first time, just have fun and work whoever you can.

so ive been on HF for about two years now mostly doing digital but lately ive been getting into phone more and every time i get a signal report the other station says my audio sounds kind of muddy or muffled. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 through the 8-pin mic connector and i feel like i did everything right but clearly something is off. ive played with the TX bandwidth settings in the menu and tried different compression levels but honestly the more i tweak the worse it seems to get. right now i have the low cut at like 100hz and high cut at 2800hz which seemed reasonable based on stuff i read but maybe thats wrong? i also have ALC bouncing around pretty good when i talk which i suspect might be part of the problem. anyone dealt with this on the 7300 specifically or just SSB audio in general, what should i actually be prioritizing here

congrats on the first one, that feeling after you get your qualifying contacts is pretty great. i remember mine, completely fumbled the exchange on the first call because i was nervous and out of breath from the hike lol. 20m has been pretty inconsistent for me too in the afternoons, i usually try to hit it in the morning now before like 1pm local and it seems way better. also if you dont already have it, the SOTA spotter app is huge for chasing your own activation, get someone to spot you before you even start calling CQ and the pile comes to you

dont forget to check if your particular unit has the MARS/CAP mod already done from a previous owner, some of the used ones floating around have it and some dont and its not always obvious unless you actually test outside the ham bands. found that out the hard way when i bought mine secondhand and assumed it was stock.

so ive been a General for about 3 years now and honestly I get by fine on the HF bands with what I have access to. but lately I keep running into situations where I want to operate on a frequency and I cant because of the privileges thing. happened again last weekend on 40m, wanted to join a net and the frequency was in the Extra portion and I just had to sit out. anyway I started looking at the Extra exam and honestly some of that theory stuff is way over my head. like the questions about filter design and impedance matching and whatever, I passed the General without really understanding half of it but the Extra seems like a whole other level. is it actually that hard or does it just look scary? and do most people actually understand the material or are they just memorizing the pool? also kind of wondering if the extra privileges are even that much of a difference in practice, like day to day would I actually notice

ok so the by sound not by sight thing is actually really important and took me a while to get. basically if you learn it by memorizing dots and dashes on a chart, youll always be mentally translating like dash dot dash = K in your head and that slows you way down. the idea is to learn it the same way you learned to read, where you just hear the sound and your brain knows the letter without thinking about it consciously. i used the Koch method when i started, theres a free program called LCWO.net that walks you through it. starts you with just two characters at a relatively fast speed and drills them until you know them, then adds more. sounds tedious but it works way better than trying to learn all 26 letters at once. i messed around with apps first and wasted probably a month before someone on here pointed me to that site. honestly just 10-15 minutes a day is enough, more than that and your brain kind of stops absorbing it. took me maybe 3 months to get comfortable enough to actually make a QSO on the air which felt pretty great ngl

so ive been using Log4OM for general logging for about two years now and honestly its pretty good for day to day stuff, QSL management, looking up DX entities, all that. but every time contest season rolls around i fire up N1MM and its like switching between a bicycle and a race car. the SO2R support alone in N1MM is just on another level and the band map integration with my radio is so much tighter. the thing thats been bugging me lately is the workflow when i want to log a mix of casual FT8 via WSJT-X and then jump into like a CW sprint or something. WSJT-X logs to its own ADIF file and then i have to import into Log4OM and sometimes the dupes dont get flagged right because the timestamps are slightly off or whatever. its not a disaster but its annoying enough that ive been wondering if just running everything through N1MM full time makes more sense. does N1MM handle WSJT-X UDP logging cleanly these days? last time i tried that was maybe 2021 and it was kinda flaky. not really looking to abandon Log4OM entirely because the award tracking stuff is genuinely better there IMO. just wondering how other people handle this split-personality logging situation

might be worth checking the bias on the finals too while youre in there, sometimes they drift and it shows up on certain bands more than others depending on how the drive is distributed. not saying thats definitely it but if youre already in there with a meter you might as well look. what firmware version is it on? i vaguely remember something about a power calibration issue on older firmware but im not sure if that was 40m specific or not, could be totally unrelated.

so i finally did my first park activation yesterday, been putting it off for months because i kept telling myself i needed more gear or more practice or whatever excuse i could come up with. went out to a state park about 45 minutes from home, nothing fancy, just my KX2 and a random wire up in a tree, maybe 20 feet high at the apex which honestly wasnt great but it worked. set up around 10am and started calling CQ POTA on 40m, wasnt expecting much but within maybe 3 minutes i had my first contact and then things just kind of snowballed from there. got my 10 contacts in about 25 minutes which i know isnt a huge pile but for a first time out i was pretty happy. stayed on for another hour and worked maybe another 20 stations, a lot of them hunters who clearly knew what they were doing way better than me. the weird part was i had one guy come back to me like four times on slightly different frequencies and i couldnt figure out if he was trying to tell me something or just had a weird radio situation going on. also wasnt sure about logging on the go, i was using HAMRS on my phone which seemed fine but i fumbled a few exchanges because i was trying to type and hold the mic at the same time. anyone else use a physical notepad first and then enter into the app later? feels like that might be cleaner for me personally. also do you always need to spot yourself or will hunters find you anyway?

i dont know man, been licensed for about 6 years now and lately ive just been sitting down at the radio and then just... not really doing anything. like ill turn it on, spin the dial a bit, maybe catch a few exchanges on 40m and then wander off to do something else. not sure if its burnout or what. had a really good run last winter doing some POTA stuff and even picked up a few new states on 17m which felt great at the time but now its just kind of flat. anybody else go through phases like this or is it just me

I've been experimenting with different EFHW transformers for portable QRP ops and noticed some interesting efficiency differences. Wise men say the more cores the better the transformer. I am not entirely convinced, but there is merit to the argument that if more copper is inside the core, the magnetic linkage is better. On that basis I chose to build my EFHW transformer using 2 stacked FT140-43 cores. I also built one with a single FT80-43 "wedding ring" core for ultralight POTA. Both work, but I'm curious about real-world efficiency comparisons. It's important to use a quality 100pf cap… those cheapies you got off of Amazon 250 for $10 will not cut it… TDK from Digi-key. If you really are qrp even a 500v silver mica would work. Anyone done actual measurements?

Consider the FT-891 if you want Yaesu reliability in that price range. I've worked 100+ countries on 100 watts with mine. The IC-7300's waterfall is nice but not essential for casual HF operation - either radio will serve you well for years.