John Taylor

okay so the thing that finally made it click for me after two failed attempts was the Koch method, specifically using a program called lcwo.net — its free and you basically start with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you only add a new character when you hit a certain accuracy threshold. sounds weird but it forces your brain to hear the sound as a whole letter instead of counting dots and dashes. the counting dots thing is the trap that kills everyone. if you learn it slow enough to count, you will count forever and it becomes a crutch. i know that sounds harsh but i wasted like three months doing it the wrong way before someone here actually told me that. also honestly just 10-15 minutes a day is way more effective than an hour once a week, your brain needs the repetition over time not all at once. give lcwo like a solid two weeks before you judge it

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, been putting it off for like 6 months because i kept thinking i wasnt ready or didn't have the right gear. ended up just throwing my KX2 in a bag with a random wire antenna and a 9:1 unun and just went for it. got there around 9am, found a picnic table kind of off by itself, set up in maybe 20 minutes which honestly surprised me. strung the wire up in an inverted L off a tree branch using a throw weight. conditions were pretty decent on 20m and i ended up with 23 QSOs in about an hour and a half which i know is well over the 10 minimum so the park is activated. logged everything on paper and then transferred to ADIF later for the upload. couple questions though — when you're self-spotting on the POTA app, do you need to do that before you start calling CQ or can you do it anytime? i spotted myself after like 15 minutes and the rate picked up a lot but not sure if thats normal. also does it matter what frequency you pick or is there kind of an understood range people stick to for POTA on 20m? i was just finding a clear spot and didn't know if i was doing it wrong.

so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and i think im finally getting somewhere but i wanted to ask if anyone else is running a RemoteHams SDR setup and also doing internet linking at the same time because im running into some latency weirdness that i cant quite pin down my setup is basically a SDRplay RSP1A feeding into the RemoteHams client on a remote machine about 40 miles from me, works fine for receive-only stuff and i can tune around and hear everything clearly but when i tried to tie in a linking node (running IRLP on a pi) on the same network as the remote station things get weird — like the audio path seems to develop this double-echo thing that comes and goes, worst when im also pushing PTT through the remote control software i dont know if its a buffering conflict or if the two systems are fighting over the audio interface or what. the remote machine is running win10, not a lot of resources but nothing that should be taxed by this. anybody dealt with something like this or am i just doing something fundamentally dumb here

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?

ok so ive had my general for about 3 months now and i still get confused about where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. like i know theres the tech portion and the general portion and then extra but when i look at the band plan on the arrl website it shows slightly different numbers than what my radio's memory channels have and also someone in my club told me to stay away from the band edges but didnt really explain why i was trying to call cq around 7.290 last weekend and someone came on and told me i was too close to the edge or something, i honestly couldnt tell if they were being helpful or just being that guy you know? my rig shows i was at 7.290.00 so i dont really understand what the problem was supposed to be. is there some unwritten rule about this or am i actually doing something wrong

yeah what you're seeing with the signal compression is exactly right — linear transponders have a fixed total power budget and all the stations using it are basically sharing that amplifier. so when the bird gets busy every signal gets a smaller slice, yours included. the usual rule of thumb i've heard is to find your own downlink and then back off your uplink power until you can just barely hear yourself, then add maybe a tiny bit back. if you're running so much power that you can hear yourself really loudly you're probably stomping on other people. 5w to a yagi sounds reasonable depending on your antenna gain and elevation angle honestly. high elevation passes give you more margin to work with. on the gpredict drift thing — are you using it to control the radio directly via hamlib or just reading the frequencies off the screen and tuning manually? if its manual correction youre going to be behind the curve especially near AOS and LOS when doppler rate of change is highest. getting hamlib set up to drive the rig makes a huge difference, took me a whole afternoon to sort out the config but worth it.

so i just passed my technician exam last week and im trying to figure out what handheld to get. everyone keeps telling me different things and honestly its just making it more confusing. my buddy at work has a baofeng uv-5r and says its fine to start out, but then i joined a local club and some of the older guys there were kind of making faces when i mentioned it. not sure if theyre being snobby or if theres actually a real reason to spend more money right out of the gate. i mostly want to hit the local repeaters, maybe eventually do some simplex stuff. i dont have a base station or anything yet, just trying to get started. budget is somewhere around 50-80 bucks but i could stretch to like 150 if theres a really good reason. anyone been through this same thing recently?

not a dumb question at all, everyone goes through this. the Q codes go way back to the telegraph and early maritime radio days, they were invented basically so operators who spoke different languages could still communicate, so like QTH means "what is your location" or "my location is" depending on context, QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural static like from lightning, QSB is when your signal is fading in and out. QSL specifically means acknowledgement or confirmation, so when someone says QSL it means they got your message or they're confirming something. a lot of people use it just to mean yes or understood now even in casual conversation on the air. the 73 thing is old telegraph code too, it basically meant best regards or best wishes, nobody really remembers exactly why 73 specifically but its been the ham farewell for over a hundred years so it just stuck. 88 means love and kisses which you still hear sometimes usually between people who know each other well. theres also stuff like OM which means old man, its not an insult its just an affectionate term for any male ham, and YL means young lady which just means any woman ham regardless of age. XYL is supposedly ex-young lady meaning wife. yeah the old timers had their thing going on. honestly just keep listening and it clicks after a while. arrl website has a decent reference list if you want to look them up all at once.

the tcxo upgrade is worth it yeah especially if your shack gets temperature swings. my old 7300 used to drift enough on 10m that id have to retune mid-qso when the room warmed up from the amp running. after the cr-338 that basically went away on the rf gain thing — i wouldnt mess with it honestly. the 7300s dynamic range is already pretty good for what it is and the dsp is doing a lot of the heavy lifting anyway. most of the guys ive seen try to hardware mod the front end either didnt notice a difference or made things worse. id put that energy into a better antenna or a decent bandpass filter before the radio if youre having front end overload issues on a busy band the speaker swap is a legit quality of life thing though. icom put a garbage little speaker in that thing. i went with a small external monitor speaker on mine rather than internal but same idea

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.

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.

I used HamStudy.org exclusively and passed on my first try. Keep at it and you'll quickly see your scores improve as you remember the correct answers. Start taking practice tests when you're consistently scoring 85-90%.

yeah the antenna isolation thing is the real killer for most home stations, not the cost of a second radio. you can grab a used TS-590 or something for not that much but if your antennas are on the same tower or close together you're in for a world of hurt. i tried a ghetto SO2R setup a couple years back with two radios and just the MFJ bandpass filters and it was... not great. kept getting S9 noise on the second radio whenever the first one was transmitting on an adjacent band. ended up just using the second radio for multiplier spotting basically which is kind of cheating anyway depending on the contest category. if you want a real improvement without the SO2R rabbit hole, work on your exchange speed and cw proficiency if youre doing cw contests. thats where most casual contesters bleed time and dont even realize it.

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.

yeah honestly i think a lot of guys moved over to FT8 and never really came back to phone. which is fine i guess but it does make the old ragchew spots feel pretty empty sometimes. i still catch a few regulars around 7.250 on weekends but nothing like it used to be

yeah i had something similar on mine a while back, turned out to be a cold solder joint on one of the driver board connectors. the vibration from mobile use can work those loose over time. worth pulling the board and just going over all the connectors with a magnifying glass before you assume its the finals, saved me from an unnecessary parts order. not saying thats definitely it but worth 20 minutes before you spend money

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?

i did the fan mod but skipped the mars thing, didnt really have a use case for out of band tx. the fan writeup i followed was by someone on qrz forums i think, they measured temps before and after with a thermal probe and it was like 15 degrees C difference under load which is pretty significant for a rig thats already in a marginal thermal envelope. one thing to watch on the 857 is the connector on the fan wires is kinda fragile when you unplug it, go slow or you'll be buying a new JST connector from digikey and cursing for an afternoon. ask me how i know lol

so i was just messing around on 10m around 2pm local time yesterday and all of a sudden i started hearing stations from all over south america coming in super strong, like 59 across the board for about an hour and a half. i only made maybe 6 or 7 contacts because i was still half distracted with work stuff but man it was something else. havent heard 10m pop like that in a while honestly. also saw something on one of the facebook groups about the new icom ic-905 being available at some dealers now, anybody actually gotten their hands on one yet? been curious about the microwave bands for a while but thats a big investment. anyway just wanted to see if anyone else caught that opening yesterday or if i was just lucky with my antenna angle or whatever

Carefully read to understand what's being asked before considering answers, then eliminate clearly wrong options to narrow your choices. Group answer choices into families - this often narrows down the pool and immediately eliminates one or two choices.

nice work getting out there. i just did my 10th activation a couple weeks ago and i still get that adrenaline thing when the pile starts building. re: the logging thing, i actually switched to a bluetooth keyboard with my phone running hamrs and it made a huge difference, you can type calls a lot faster than tapping the screen. something to think about anyway.

so the short answer is the FCC part 97 is the actual legal document and the ARRL band plan is basically a gentlemens agreement on top of that. for 40m as a general you can do phone from 7.175 up to 7.300, the extra class guys get the chunk from 7.125 to 7.175 too. cw and data you have a bit more room down lower. the band edge thing is a real concern because your signal has sidebands and if youre running LSB at say 7.175 exactly your actual signal is spreading down below that into territory you're not supposed to be in. most people say stay at least 3 khz inside the edge to be safe, some say more depending on how clean your rig is. honestly just start somewhere in the middle of your phone allocation and you'll be fine, dont overthink it at first

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

so ive been on HF for about 6 years and VHF/UHF contesting for the last two and somewhere along the line i got the bug for EME. i blame a guy i worked on 2m during the september contest who mentioned he also does moonbounce and made it sound almost casual, which i now suspect was a lie. anyway ive been reading everything i can find and i feel like i have a rough picture but also a lot of the stuff online is pretty old and im not sure whats still relevant. like i keep seeing references to huge yagi arrays and then other stuff saying you can do it with a single yagi now because of JT65 and WSJT. so which is it? can a single long yagi actually get you contacts or is that just theoretical best case scenario where everything goes perfectly. my current 2m setup is a 9el yagi on an old TV rotor that i really should upgrade, running about 200w into it. i do have an masthead preamp. i know i need an az/el rotor situation to actually track the moon which is probably my biggest practical problem right now. just trying to get a realistic sense of what minimum viable EME looks like before i start spending money in directions that wont work.

yeah i saw that firmware notice pop up on the Icom America page but totally forgot about it, thanks for the reminder. been meaning to update mine for a while now. the ALC thing on mine hasnt been super noticeable but i've read enough threads on the reflector to know it's real for some people. that 6m opening sounds awesome. i completely missed it, i was out most of saturday running errands and by the time i got back to the shack it was all gone. story of my life with Es honestly. one of these days im gonna have a remote setup so i can at least monitor from my phone when im away from home. the DX cluster alerts only help if youre actually able to get to the radio in time you know