John Taylor

this is super helpful actually, im about to do almost the exact same thing in my car and was also going back and forth on the mount situation. one question though — did you have any trouble with the NMO mount leaking water through the hole? thats the one thing thats been making me hesitate, i live somewhere where it rains a lot and i dont want to deal with rust or water getting in

the radial situation is almost certainly your problem before anything else. four radials on a vertical is not enough to really evaluate it fairly — you want at least 16 if you can manage it, ideally more, even if they're short. i ran a trap vertical for years thinking it was mediocre and then laid down 24 radials and it was like a completely different antenna. the improvement on 40m specifically was pretty dramatic. so before you pull it down and start stringing wire between trees id try fixing the ground system first, its way less work than building a new antenna. that said if your lot is 60 feet and you can get a dipole up at 35-40 feet its genuinely not bad for the domestic stuff you're describing. the radiation angle wont be ideal but at those distances it doesnt really matter, youre not fighting for low angle dx you're just trying to hit a net in the next state. either antenna will do that fine once the vertical has a real ground plane under it.

so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero w for a few months now and i finally got hamlib talking to my 7300 over usb which honestly took way longer than it should have but thats a whole other story. right now it just logs frequency and mode to a little sqlite database every few seconds which is kinda fun to look back at but im trying to figure out what else to do with it. the thing that got me thinking was i saw someone on reddit who had their pi monitoring swr and temp inside the shack and would text them if something went wrong. that seems really useful especially since i leave things running unattended sometimes when im doing digital modes overnight. i have a few DS18B20 sensors sitting in a drawer from an old project and a basic SWR bridge i built years ago that has an analog output i never did anything with. has anyone tied an Arduino into something like this too? im thinking the pi handles the logic and network stuff and the arduino does the analog reading since the pi doesnt have an adc. or is there a better way to do it — i know you can get i2c adc chips pretty cheap. just not sure what the cleanest approach is for something that needs to be reliable and not crash every week.

the WSJT modes really did change everything for smaller stations, that part is true. i ran my first EME contact on 2m with a single 9el yogi and about 200w, took forever to find a station that would hear me but it happened. the 100 foot coax run is a real problem though — at 144 mhz youre going to lose a significant chunk of your signal before it even gets to the antenna. people usually deal with this by putting a mast mounted preamp up at the feedpoint for receive, that alone makes a huge difference. on transmit you either shorten the run, use LMR-600 or hardline, or honestly put the amp up at the mast too which is what the serious guys do contact rate on single yagi is going to be slow. you'll be mostly running with stations that have big arrays, they can hear you even if you can barely hear them. weekends when there are organized EME contests or activity periods are your best bet. look up the ARRL EME contest and the various club-sponsored events, those are when the activity is high enough that a small station can actually work stuff. patience is the main thing, its not like working DX on 20m

yeah this resonates a lot. we did something similar about 18 months ago and the message handling thing was exactly our weak point too. its one of those skills that sounds easy until you're actually doing it under simulated pressure with someone waiting on the other end. one thing that helped us a lot was doing smaller tabletop drills in between the big exercises — just like four or five people sitting around practicing ICS-213 traffic passing on a simplex frequency. low stakes, no one watching, just getting the muscle memory down. made a huge difference by the time we did our next full exercise. the net control logging issue is real and honestly i think every group underestimates it. we ended up designating a dedicated logger who wasnt allowed to transmit at all, just focus on keeping the log clean. sounds simple but it took us two exercises to figure that out.

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, been putting it off for like two years because i kept convincing myself i didnt have the right gear or wasnt ready or whatever. ended up just throwing my elecraft kx2 in a pack with a 20m end fed halfwave and a small lipo, hiked up a local summit thats only like a 2 mile approach, nothing crazy. set up the antenna with a 31 foot wire just kind of draped over some bushes and got 4 contacts in maybe 15 minutes which is all you need for a valid activation. the signal reports were actually decent, one guy said i was 57 which i was not expecting running 10 watts. anyway im hooked now, already looking at harder summits for next month

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly just poking around on aircraft, some weather sat stuff with WXtoImg, and occasionally listening to P25 trunking in my area. its been fine honestly but i keep hitting the ceiling on it — the dynamic range is pretty rough when theres a strong pager transmitter nearby and the noise floor just bugs me more and more the better i understand what im looking at. anyway been looking hard at either the HackRF One or the RSPdx from SDRplay and i cant quite figure out which way to make sense for me. the HackRF is attractive because yeah it can transmit which opens up some stuff i might want to do later, fox hunting practice setups, maybe some basic signal replay experiments in a controlled way. but from everything i read the receive performance is actually worse than the RTL in some ways? like the noise figure is pretty bad and the ADC resolution is only 8 bit which shows up when youre trying to pull weak stuff out of the noise. the RSPdx on the other hand seems to get really good reviews for actual receive quality, the 14 bit ADC makes a noticeable difference from what people say, and the HF coverage without any upconverter is a big deal for me since i want to get into more shortwave and 160/80m monitoring. but its RX only so if i ever want to do any transmit experiments id need something else. not sure what the right call is here. budget isnt unlimited but im not trying to cheap out either. anybody been down this road?

so ive been working on a simple AM transmitter for 40m, nothing fancy just a crystal controlled thing based on a design i found in an old ARRL handbook from the 80s. got the carrier looking pretty clean on the scope but when i modulate it the audio sounds really boxy and distorted, like talking into a tin can. checked my modulation transformer and the impedance should be in the ballpark, im using a 600 ohm primary into the final. the modulator stage is just a single 6L6 running class A which i thought would be fine for this power level, maybe 5 watts carrier. tried adjusting the grid bias on the modulator and it helped a tiny bit but still sounds rough. not sure if its the transformer itself or if im overdriving the modulator or what. anybody built something similar and ran into this? i have a second 6L6 i could throw in there for push-pull if thats what it needs but wanted to ask before i start rewiring things.

congrats on the ticket. dont stress too much about the courtesy tone thing, everyone does something like that when they first get on air. the old timers on most repeaters are pretty forgiving as long as you're not being obnoxious about it. as for HF vs staying on VHF, thats really up to you but id say get comfortable with repeater etiquette first just so you have the basics down. HF is a whole different animal and theres a bit of a learning curve with propagation and everything. that said nothing wrong with jumping in early either, just get yourself a general upgrade when you feel ready and go from there. the baofeng will do fine for local stuff in the meantime

so ive been doing single op contests for a few years now, usually finish somewhere in the middle of the pack for my category, and ive been reading a lot about SO2R and how the serious contesters swear by it for rate. but every time I try to wrap my head around actually setting it up and operating it it just seems like an enormous amount of complexity for... what exactly? like my brain already feels like mush after hour 20 of a 48 hour contest, adding a second radio and all the switching logic seems like a recipe for me making more mistakes not fewer. for context I'm running a K3 right now and have a spare TS-590 sitting around that I could theoretically use as the second radio. the antenna situation is manageable i think, i have a 2el yagi on 20 and a dipole on 40 so there's some separation there. what I'm really asking is at what point does the rate gain from SO2R actually become noticeable vs the overhead of managing two radios. is there like a contacts/hour threshold where it starts to make sense

ARRL website has a decent reference page for Q codes if you search around for it, thats where i started. also just grab any old copy of the ARRL handbook and theres a table in the appendix. i still look stuff up occasionally and ive been licensed like eight years, theres some obscure ones i've genuinely never heard on the air. QRV is another common one, means are you ready or im ready to operate. you'll pick it up fast once you start actually making contacts instead of just listening

I did mine last spring and went the drill-a-new-hole route, used one of those weatherproof bulkhead grommets from the hardware store and it turned out fine. Not saying that's better just that it worked for me. The NMO roof mount is the right call btw, way better than a mag mount long term and your signal will thank you for it.

i went through exactly this last year. ended up putting up a trap vertical for 40/20/15 and spent a weekend laying out 24 radials. worked europe on 40 the first night which i had never done with my old dipole setup so that felt pretty good. but i also cant tell you if it was the vertical or just better band conditions that week, hard to do a real comparison. the radial laying is tedious but not actually that hard, just time consuming.

congrats man, apartments are tough for HF but people make it work. ive seen guys do pretty well with a magnetic loop or even just throwing a wire out a window at weird angles. the compromises are real but its not impossible. anyway good luck and hope to hear you on the air sometime

tried it once, couldnt figure out the interface fast enough and went back to WSJT-X. maybe ill give it another shot. does it work okay on a compromised antenna? im running an attic dipole so weak signal stuff is kind of my whole life at this point

so the short version is the FCC part 97 rules are what you legally have to follow, and the ARRL band plan is more of a gentlemen's agreement kind of thing — nobody's going to fine you for operating SSB at 7.100 but you might get some grumpy CW operators on your case for general class on 40m your SSB prvilege starts at 7.175 and runs up to 7.300, so thats where you want to be for phone. below 7.175 is CW territory for generals. now the band edge thing — a lot of people say stay a few kHz inside the edge because if your signal is wide or your rig drifts you dont want to be bleeding outside the allocation, which is actually an FCC violation. so like dont try to operate right at 7.300.0, just stay below 7.295 or so to be safe. the gentleman's agreement stuff on 40m mostly refers to stuff like keeping 7.200 clear for maritime mobile and not parking on known dx frequencies, its not a legal thing just courtesy

CQ WW is wild if youve never experienced it, like genuinely the band just sounds completely different that weekend. i did my first one two years ago with almost the exact same setup you have and managed like 80 contacts which felt amazing at the time lol. just use n1mm or even the free version of logger32 and set up a simple log before the weekend so youre not fumbling with paper. one thing nobody told me — work dupes early on, dont stress about whether youve worked that station before, just log it and sort it out later. most logging software flags it anyway.

so ive been thinking about getting my general and eventually extra and i keep reading that people say learning cw is worth it even though its not required anymore. i kind of want to try but i have no idea where to start. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or is there some other way people do it. i tried looking at a chart online and it just seemed impossible to remember all of it. is there software or apps people use or do you need like a physical key to practice. sorry if this is a dumb question i really dont know anything about this

so ive been at this for about 3 months now and im kind of stuck around 10-12wpm and honestly its getting a little frustrating. i started with the Koch method using the G4FON trainer and got to 5wpm pretty quick but now the progress has really slowed down. i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day when i can, sometimes less if work gets crazy. my question is really just how long did it take other people to get from that beginner stage up to actually being able to hold a conversation on the air at like 20wpm. i feel like i keep reading these posts where people say they got there in 6 months but then i also hear stories of people practicing for years. trying to figure out if im doing something wrong or if i just need to be more patient. also wondering if switching to a different trainer or method would help or if thats just me looking for shortcuts

the certificate thing for LoTW tripped me up too when i first started. you request it on the ARRL site and they actually mail you a postcard with a code on it to verify your address, takes like a week or two. then you download the tqsl software and import it. once thats done uploading logs is pretty easy, tqsl can import from a lot of logging programs directly. for what its worth i barely bother with eQSL anymore since most of the people i care about confirming with are on LoTW anyway. paper cards i still send for any really special contacts, like if i work a new country or someone sends me a card first i always send one back. the guy in Florida probably just wanted a LoTW confirmation honestly, most stateside guys do. just ask him next time you catch him on the air.

yeah the listening before calling thing took me way too long to learn. i used to just jump in immediately and wonder why i never got through. 500w and a 3 element at 45 feet is a solid station though, that's not your problem. one thing i'll throw out there that maybe sounds weird — i've had better luck on the low end of a pileup spread sometimes. not the very bottom where everyone avoids on principle, but like just slightly below the main crowd. worked a VK9 a while back that way, op was clearly fishing down there and hit me on the second call. total luck but it made me think about it differently. also dont underestimate 30m for this kind of thing, pileups are smaller and propagation can be magic at the right time.

the thing everyone forgets is documentation. like printed documentation. frequencies, repeater info for your area, your nets, ARES contact numbers, ICS forms if you do any served agency stuff. your phone dies or gets lost and suddenly you cant remember what the local 2m simplex calling freq is and youre useless. i laminated mine and stuck them in a folder inside the lid of the case. also adapters. BNC to PL-259, a few different power connectors, anderson powerpoles if you dont already have everything wired up with those. i cant tell you how many times ive shown up somewhere and the power situation was not what i expected. oh and a headlamp. sounds dumb but seriously just put one in there now and forget about it.

so ive been running a TNC-Pi on my pi3 with Direwolf for a few weeks now and everything locally seems fine — i can see my own beacon showing up in Xastir and other stations are hitting my digipeater no problem. but none of it seems to be making it to aprs.fi. like at all. my station just doesnt show up there and when i check the raw packets nothing is coming through from my callsign-10. im running the WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path on my beacons, RF is going out fine, i can hear other traffic on 144.390. the igate part of direwolf is configured with my passcode and everything, i double checked that like three times. server is set to rotate.aprs.net port 14580. filter is set for a 200km radius around my grid square. is there something dumb im missing in the direwolf config? i feel like ive been staring at this for so long i cant see the obvious thing anymore

yeah i went through this same thing last year, the AE7Q website that guy mentioned is genuinely the best resource, way easier than trying to figure out the FCC site. i spent like an hour on the FCC ULS and then found AE7Q and had my answer in 5 minutes lol one thing i'd add is think carefully about what callsign you actually want before you apply. i kind of rushed mine and got something fine but i wish i'd thought more about how it sounds phonetically on the air and for CW if you ever go down that path. like some calls just roll off the tongue nicer than others. take your time with the list of 25, its worth spending an afternoon on it

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.