John Taylor

yeah the 386 is a pain in the neck with hum, ive built probably a dozen little receivers and audio gadgets with that chip and layout really does matter a lot more than people think. a few things id check — first make sure your input ground and output ground arent sharing the same path back to the supply, that chip will couple output noise right back into the input if your ground plane isnt thought out. also the bypass on pin 6, 10uf is okay but i usually go higher, like 100uf, and put a small ceramic right next to it too. the datasheet circuit shows a 250uf which seems overkill but its not wrong. also and this is the thing people miss — if youre picking up hum even on battery there might be a ground loop from your antenna connection. if the coax shield is connected to anything else in your shack thats also connected to mains ground youre gonna get 60hz no matter what your supply is doing. worth lifting the antenna ground and seeing what happens.

honestly the question pool looks scarier than it is. when i did mine a couple years back i just used HamStudy.org every day for like 2-3 weeks, maybe 20-30 mins a day, and i passed pretty comfortably. the site tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and keeps drilling you on those. i wouldnt bother with the full handbook for exam prep, thats more of a reference thing. what helped me was actually understanding WHY certain answers are right instead of just memorizing, especially the electrical stuff like ohms law, because there are a few questions that are basically the same formula just with different numbers so if you get the concept you can work it out. the regulations questions are pretty straightforward once you read through them once. dont overthink the license structure stuff either it clicks pretty fast

the 9700 will work fine for EME honestly, the doppler correction is built in or you can let WSJT-X handle it, doesnt matter much on 2m since the shift isnt that dramatic compared to higher bands. your real bottleneck is going to be the antenna and the preamp, in that order. single yagi is definitely doable now with JT65B and Q65, guys are making contacts with a 9 element and 500w, it just means you're limited to working the big stations — the ones with arrays or dishes. which is still real EME, just not the same as being able to work other single yagi stations. preamp goes at the feedpoint, full stop. every foot of coax between the antenna and the LNA is killing you. i use a down east microwave unit, its been solid for years. NF around 0.3 dB which is about as good as it gets without going crazy. start with the WSJT-X group on groups.io and look for the EME logs, you can see what stations are working what and get a feel for whats realistic for your setup before you spend anything.

yeah the waterfall is what gets everyone, i remember the first time i sat down at one i just kind of stared at it for a while. you start to recognize signal shapes after a bit, PSK31 looks completely different from a badly overdriven SSB signal and you can just see it without even listening. the internal tuner thing is accurate, icom rates it for like 16.7 to 150 ohms or something in that range which sounds generous until you actually have an antenna that wanders. i ended up leaving my external tuner in line most of the time anyway just out of habit from the old setup. one thing i'll add — spend some time in the menu going through the scope settings, there's a ref level adjustment that makes a big difference depending on your noise floor. took me embarrassingly long to find it.

oh man the dog thing is real, my golden retriever got into my feedline twice before i wised up. i ended up running everything through cheap PVC conduit from the hardware store, the kind they sell for electrical, works fine and the dog completely ignores it now. bit of a pain to route through corners but honestly worth it. also keeps the wife happier because it looks cleaner than coax just laying on the floor lol

I just passed my extra like two months ago so this is fresh for me. The math sections were the part I was most worried about and yeah some of it is genuinely harder than general, like the questions on reactance calculations and the ones about op-amp circuits and filter cutoff frequencies. But I'll be real, a decent chunk of it you can still get through by just knowing what the formula looks like and plugging in numbers even if you dont fully understand why. What actually surprised me was the operating procedure and regulations stuff being kind of easier than i expected, the general exam felt like it covered most of that already. The extra regs questions are mostly about things like volunteer examiner rules and the finer points of band plans. I studied maybe 5 weeks on and off using the ARRL extra class book and the online question pools. Passed with room to spare. The extra HF privileges do feel nice though, went down to 3.570 on 80m for the first time last week and it was way less crowded, so theres that.

altoids tin is definitely not helping lol. i built a similar rx a few years back and had so many weird grounding issues until i moved it to a proper aluminum chassis. the stray capacitance from the lid alone can do weird things. that said ive seen people make altoids builds work so its not impossible, just harder to debug. cant really comment on the specific hum without knowing more about your audio amp schematic but the touching the case thing sounds classic ground loop to me. does it go away at all if you disconnect the antenna?

yeah that's pretty much how most people start out honestly, just watching the scroll and reacting. nothing wrong with it. what most of the more serious DX chasers do eventually is filter the cluster by band and mode so youre not watching a firehose of spots for stuff you cant even work. dxwatch lets you do that in the filter settings, took me forever to find it but its there. the qrz vs dxwatch thing — they pull from a lot of the same underlying cluster network (DX Spider nodes mostly) so youre not really missing spots by using one over the other. qrz has the advantage that it ties right into your logbook so you can see instantly if you already have a particular entity confirmed, which is actually really useful once your log gets bigger. dxwatch is a bit more barebones but loads faster and the filtering is solid. for logging software integration, if you use something like Log4OM or DXKeeper you can actually pipe the cluster feed directly in and it'll alert you when something new shows up on your needed list. that changed everything for me, way better than staring at a browser tab. took a weekend to set up but worth it

Congrats on the first activation, that's a great feeling isn't it. To answer your question — no you absolutely do not need to be spotted for the activation to count. The 4 QSO minimum is all that matters for the points, and those contacts just need to be logged correctly on the database. Self-spotting helps a ton because chasers can find you, but plenty of activators especially when starting out just work whoever they can find calling CQ or answer general calls and it all counts the same. For the reference thing, just double check it against the SOTA database at sotadata.org.uk — search your summit name and make sure the reference matches exactly what you entered in the log. If you typo'd it the activation might not show up under the right summit but usually the database managers are pretty helpful about correcting honest mistakes if you email them. Dont stress too much about your first one, everyone fumbles through the logging stuff at the start.

dont start with a chart, seriously that will make it way harder than it needs to be. look up the Koch method, thats what most people recommend now and its what worked for me after i tried the chart thing and got nowhere. basically you learn two characters at a time at a higher speed like 20wpm but with long gaps between them, and you add new ones only when you can copy the ones you already know at like 90% accuracy. LCWO dot net is a free website that does exactly this, ive been using it for a few months and its way better than i expected. for a key, a straight key is totally fine to start with, honestly might be better while youre still getting the hang of timing. dont go buy an expensive paddle right away. a cheap straight key off amazon or a used one from a hamfest is all you need to just get started making sounds and getting a feel for it.

honestly the General exam isnt as scary as people make it sound. yeah theres more math than tech but most of it you can just memorize the formulas and plug in numbers, you dont really need to understand the theory deeply to pass. the question pool is bigger but hamstudy is fine, thats basically what i used and i passed first try. just grind the practice tests until youre consistently hitting 85% or above and youll be good. the main thing General opens up for you is the HF privileges obviously but also you get more operating flexibility in general, like some of the good parts of 40m and 20m that are restricted to tech are night and day difference in how busy and interesting they are. 40m at night is kind of addictive once you start hearing stations from all over. with that 718 youre gonna have a blast, solid radio. just get an antenna up and go for it.

yeah counterfeit parts from ebay are a real gamble especially for RF transistors, been there. but also double check your toroid winding — if you miscounted turns even by one or two on the output transformer that can kill your efficiency pretty bad. the pi network Q thing is worth spending time on, a lot of homebrew designs assume a Q of around 10-12 and if youre way off that the output just kinda... doesnt happen. what core material did you use for the toroids?

What's your current driven element length and diameter? The 2.8:1 SWR suggests you're close but may need element tuning first. Element positioning has to be precisely maintained for proper impedance - even small movements affect feedpoint impedance. I'd verify all dimensions against the original W6QHS specs before adding matching networks.

The kit's contents were well organized as were the accompanying instruction. Parts are sorted into one of 10 bags and the assembly follows the bag's numerical sequence. Perfect beginner kit - I built the 20m version and it's been rock solid. The manual is excellent and they keep it updated online.