Jessica Moore

check if the igate is running a range filter. some of them are set up to only igate packets from within a certain radius and if the operator set it tight you might just be getting dropped even though the digi heard you. you can test this by watching aprx's log carefully — if your packets are being heard by the digi and rebroadcast but nothing shows on aprs.fi after like 10 minutes then thats almost certainly a filter or the igate just isnt connected to the tier 2 servers properly. also double check your aprx.conf, specifically the mycall line. had a buddy who had a trailing space in there and it caused all kinds of weirdness with the passcode validation even though it looked right on screen.

also worth knowing that the NATO phonetics arent the only ones people use — you'll sometimes hear older ops use things like Baker instead of Bravo or Able instead of Alpha, thats the old ICAO/military alphabet from before they standardized everything in the 50s. doesnt really matter as long as the other person understands you but if your doing any digital voice stuff or working internationally stick to the standard ones

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i mostly just listen but im starting to actually key up and talk to people and everyone keeps throwing out all these abbreviations and codes and i can only catch like half of what theyre saying. like QSL i think means confirmed? and QTH is location? but then someone said QRN and QRM and i got totally lost. is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just kind of learn these over time. also whats the deal with 73 because i hear that constantly at the end of every contact and i just say it back but i dont actually know what it means lol also saw someone write QRP in a thread here and i know thats low power but is there a specific wattage that counts as QRP or is it just kind of a vibes thing

so i've been wanting to do satellite work for a while now and last weekend i finally had a decent pass of AO-7 over my QTH, mode B was active and i figured i'd just go for it with my FT-847 and a pair of yagis on an az-el mount i built from a kit last year. got the tracking going in Gpredict which was pointed at my rotor controller and that part actually worked pretty smoothly, better than i expected honestly. anyway i found the transponder passband and heard a couple QSOs in progress which was pretty exciting, managed to tune around and heard my own downlink which i know sounds dumb but that was kind of a revelation. the thing im struggling with is the doppler compensation. i understand the concept — uplink and downlink shift in opposite directions on a linear transponder — but my actual experience was kind of a mess. i was chasing my own signal around and i think i was overcompensating on one side and not enough on the other. Gpredict has the doppler tuning feature but i couldnt figure out if it was actually controlling both VFOs on the 847 independently or just doing one. does anyone have this actually set up and working? like what does your CAT setup look like for split doppler correction on a linear bird

had almost the exact same thing happen to mine about a year and a half ago. turned out to be one of the finals starting to go — i think it was one of the RD70HVF1 transistors but honestly i sent it to a shop so i cant say for certain which one was the culprit. the symptom was pretty much what you're describing, worse on higher bands, output kind of tapered off slowly over a few weeks before i noticed it properly. the shop said one transistor was leaky and the other was still okay but they replaced both as a pair which makes sense. cost me a bit but the radio has been solid since. if youre handy with RF work you could probably scope the drain voltages on the finals and see if something looks off, but if you're not set up for that it might just be worth sending it in. icom's service network isnt that bad depending on where you are.

honest answer is both options are a compromise at 25 feet on 40m, theres no getting around the physics. a dipole that low is going to have a high angle of radiation, good for regional stuff but not ideal for the long path DX you're after. that said a vertical with a decent radial field can do pretty well if you put the work in. the thing people dont always mention is the radials — you really need a lot of them, like 16 minimum on the ground to get the efficiency up, and even then a vertical is going to pick up more noise than the dipole just by nature of the design. if you can swing getting the dipole up to 40 or 50 feet even with a taller support you'd probably see a bigger improvement than switching to a vertical with a mediocre radial field. the inverted V isnt bad but the lower the angle of the legs the better for your purposes, some guys run them pretty flat if they have two supports far enough apart.