Sarah Johnson

we ran into the exact same genny noise thing at a SET two years ago. turned out it was a cheap extension cord acting like an antenna and coupling into the feedline. swapped it for a properly shielded cord and added a ferrite choke right at the radio end and it got way better. sometimes its not the generator at all its just everything being too close together with no attention to RF layout.
i'd also say dont underestimate how much the laptop alone will trash your noise floor if it's sitting on the same table as the radio running off the same power strip. seen that bite people more than once

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep seeing people talk about LoTW and eQSL and also trading actual paper QSL cards through the bureau and i honestly have no idea what the actual difference is or if i need to be doing all of them. like is one better than the other or do most people just pick one and stick with it?
i set up a LoTW account a while back and i think i uploaded a couple logs but i dont really understand the whole TQSL certificate thing and whether my confirmations are actually going through. and i heard eQSL is kind of looked down on by some people but others seem to use it fine. and then theres the paper cards which look really cool honestly but seems like a lot of work and postage to send them internationally.
just trying to figure out what the normal workflow is for most hams. do you guys do all three or just focus on one? and does it matter for any awards or anything

yeah i do this all the time, its honestly my favorite part of the hobby. no pressure, no contest, just seeing whats out there. that buzzing you heard was probably some kind of power line interference or maybe a plasma tv nearby, i get something similar on 7.150 whenever my neighbor runs his hot tub pump. 40m is great for this kind of thing especially after 9 or 10pm local time when the skip settles down a bit.

okay so ive been licensed about 4 months now and i still feel weird about this. like i know the NATO phonetics, alpha bravo charlie etc, but im never sure when im supposed to use them vs just saying the letter. like if someones asking for my callsign on a net do i always spell it out phonetically or is it situational? i was on a local 2m repeater last week and said my call just normally and the net control asked me to say it again phonetically and i felt kinda dumb. but then i hear people on there sometimes just rattling off letters without phonetics and nobody says anything. is there an actual rule or is it just like... a feel thing you develop over time

i went RTL-SDR to HackRF and kind of skipped the SDRplay stuff entirely, different use case i know since the HackRF does TX too but just my experience — the jump from the dongle to something with proper front end filtering is real and noticeable, especially below 30 mhz where the cheap dongle is just sort of doing its best
if you're staying receive-only the RSP lineup is probaly the smarter call over HackRF anyway since the receive performance is actually better and you dont pay for transmit capability you wont use. gqrx on linux works fine with SDRplay stuff through the sdrplay driver plugin for gnu radio, took me a bit to get working but its solid once its set up

I've built a 20M vertical dipole using two Hustler 6-BTVs mounted back-to-back about 40 feet high on a wooden mast. The vertical dipole configuration was chosen because my house and back yard layout do not lend themselves to the installations of a good ground radial system. The antenna resonates perfectly at 14.200 MHz but I'm seeing 2.3:1 SWR across the phone portion. I have a 1:1 balun at the feedpoint and a 14 turn coil of RG-8 coaxial cable wrapped around a 7 inch diameter fiberglass form. Should I move the choke balun closer to the feedpoint, or is this just normal for a trapped vertical dipole?

so ive been using N1MM for probably 6 or 7 years now and honestly it does what i need for contests but outside of contest season i keep wishing it felt less like a war room and more like just... a normal logging program. heard a lot of people talking up Log4OM lately especially version 2 and the way it handles the QSO data and awards tracking is apparently pretty solid.
my main worry is i have like 15,000 QSOs in N1MM from various contests and regular logging and i dont want to mess up the ADIF export/import situation. has anyone actually moved a big log over to Log4OM and had it come through clean? also i run WSJT-X pretty heavily for FT8 and right now i just have it feeding into N1MM via the UDP port thing which mostly works except sometimes it just stops logging and i have to restart both programs which is annoying.
wondering if Log4OM handles the WSJT-X integration any better or if its basically the same UDP setup. not trying to abandon N1MM for contests, i know its the gold standard for that, but having two different programs for contest vs casual operating feels clunky. maybe theres a smarter way to set this up that im missing

I've built a 20M vertical dipole using two Hustler 6-BTVs mounted back-to-back about 40 feet high on a wooden mast. The vertical dipole configuration was chosen because my house and back yard layout do not lend themselves to the installations of a good ground radial system. The antenna resonates perfectly at 14.200 MHz but I'm seeing 2.3:1 SWR across the phone portion. I have a 1:1 balun at the feedpoint and a 14 turn coil of RG-8 coaxial cable wrapped around a 7 inch diameter fiberglass form. Should I move the choke balun closer to the feedpoint, or is this just normal for a trapped vertical dipole?