John Taylor

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.

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.

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.

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 40m qsos thing — yeah those guys are going way faster than you think, even the "slow" ones on the novice end of the band. dont beat yourself up over that. what actually helped me get from crawling to something useable was just doing 15 minutes a day consistently instead of hour long sessions twice a week. consistency was the whole thing for me. and honestly just get on the air even if you feel not ready, there's people who will slow way down for you if you put QRS in your call or whatever. some of the elmers on the cw nets are incredibly patient

honestly i just use FT8 for the contacts and accept it is what it is. tried JS8 a couple times didnt really get into it. if you want to ragchew just go find someone on SSB or do Winlink or something lol. ft4 is kinda fun if you want something faster paced than ft8 but still weak signal capable, i use it during some of the shorter contests now.

so ive been a ham for about three years now and kept telling myself id put together a proper go-kit for emergencies and i just never got around to it. well we had a pretty bad storm come through last month and our local ARES group got activated and i showed up basically with nothing useful — just my HT and no extra batteries, no backup power, nothing. felt pretty useless standing there while the guys with actual kits were doing all the work. so now im actually serious about it. ive got a Yaesu FT-891 that id like to build around since its pretty compact and already does HF and i figure thats more useful than just a VHF/UHF setup for longer distances. but i dont really know what order to tackle stuff in. do i start with the radio and work outward from there, or do i figure out power first? also whats a realistic budget for a decent but not crazy expensive kit, like something that actually works but im not spending two grand on a pelican case full of gear right before christmas any advice from people who have actually deployed these things would be really helpful, not just theoretical stuff

so its one of those nights where i dont really have anything going on, just spinning the dial on 40m listening to whatever comes up. caught a couple guys ragchewing out of ohio, some digital stuff i couldnt quite identify, and some weird buzzing noise around 7.180 that just kept going for like 20 minutes. propagation seems decent tonight actually, hearing some stuff from farther away than usual. anyway just curious if anyone else does this or if im the only one who just kind of... hangs out on the bands without any real purpose lol

so i've been running a little handheld clipped to my visor for like two years and finally broke down and got a proper mobile rig, picked up a used Yaesu FTM-400 and honestly kind of intimidated by all the options on this thing. got it mounted on a RAM mount between the seats for now which feels a little janky but it works. the antenna situation is what im actually unsure about. i drilled a NMO mount through the roof which was terrifying but it's done now, running a Tram 1185 dual band whip. seems to get out okay but i don't really have anything to compare it to. was on a local 2m net last night and a few people said i sounded a little noisy but nobody could really say why. also the radio is pulling power directly from the battery with an inline fuse on the positive lead, ground goes to a bolt under the back seat. did i do that right or should the ground be somewhere else? i feel like i read somewhere the ground point matters a lot more than i thought

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.

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.

oh man i love wwff activations! That buddipole should work great, i use mine for most of my portable stuff. One thing i learned the hard way - bring more coax than you think you need because you never know where you'll end up setting up once you get to the park. Also check if the park has any antenna restrictions, some places are picky about temporary installations even though we're exempt under part 97. The logging apps like hamrs or n1mm logger+ both have wwff support built in now which makes it super easy. Just remember to put the reference number in the comment field or wherever your logging software wants it. Good luck and 73!

honestly the technician test is not that bad, i was really worried about it but the way these tests work is the question pool is public so youre basically just memorizing answers. HamStudy.org is what i used and it tracks which questions youre getting wrong and keeps drilling you on those. took me maybe two weeks of studying like 20 minutes a night and i passed no problem. the electrical stuff does look scary at first but most of it is just ohms law and a few basic formulas, you dont need to actually understand electronics deeply to pass. as for whether to skip straight to general or extra, i wouldnt bother right away. get your tech, play around with it a little, and then if you want more HF privileges youll have a reason to sit down and learn the general material. some people do all three in one sitting which is impressive but theres no rush.

trunk lip mounts actually work pretty decent in my experience, had one on my old civic for about two years with a Larsen NMO and it was fine for local repeater work. the ground plane isnt ideal but honestly for just hitting repeaters in your area you probably wont even notice. just make sure you get a good quality mount and run the coax through the door seal or weather stripping carefully so it doesnt pinch. the through-glass options work too but i found the loss adds up if youre trying to hit anything more than maybe 30 miles out.

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i mostly do HF on 40m, some 2m local stuff. my question is kind of dumb but when are you actually supposed to use phonetics vs just saying the letter. like i know NATO phonetics, alpha bravo charlie etc, but sometimes on the local repeater people just say letters normally and other times they spell everything out phonetically and i cant figure out if theres a rule or if its just whatever you feel like also is it weird to use phonetics on FM when the signal is totally clear? feels like overkill sometimes but then i get nervous and do it anyway especially for my callsign

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and im starting to get more into chasing DX but honestly the whole cluster spotting thing is kind of overwhelming. like i knew about QRZ obviously because everyone uses it for callsign lookups but i didnt realize it had a built in bandmap and spots too. then someone in our club mentioned DXwatch and there seem to be like 5 other sites that do similar things and i genuinely dont know which one to actually pay attention to. right now when i want to see whos active i just kind of refresh QRZ's DX spots page and hope for the best but half the time im not sure if what im seeing is even current or relevant to my region. do spots on these networks get filtered by location or is it just a firehose of everything happening globally. also someone mentioned connecting directly to a telnet cluster node through logging software but that sounds complicated and i wasnt sure if thats even worth it vs just using a website. just looking for a sanity check i guess on how people actually use these tools day to day

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

so we've got a county ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before i commit to hauling everything out. we're looking at running two HF stations simultaneously, probably an IC-7300 and a 7100, plus a VHF/UHF station for local coordination, and someone wants to bring a laptop for winlink so that's another draw on top of everything. my gut says bring the Honda EU2200i and call it a day but a couple guys in the group are pushing hard for the battery-only approach with a big LiFePO4 bank. the thing is we're talking about a 14-hour deployment potentially going longer if things run over, and i honestly dont know if a 100Ah or even a 200Ah battery setup is gonna cut it without being really disciplined about duty cycle. the generator just runs, you know? you dont have to think about it. the other part of this is antennas. we've been going back and forth on whether to bring the club's Buddipole setup or just throw up a couple of end-fed half-waves. the EFHW goes up faster but the Buddipole can be optimized better on specific bands and we might be doing some NVIS work on 60m if the exercise scenario calls for it. anybody done extended field deployments where you actually compared these things in a real stressed situation?

yeah the Telnet thing trips a lot of people up at first, youre right that its basically just using the internet dressed up to look like radio. good for testing your message templates and getting familiar with the interface but yeah useless when the grid goes down for RF on VHF you have two real options - traditional packet (AX.25 at 1200 baud) or VARA FM. the old packet stuff works fine and theres tons of TNCs that support it, but VARA FM is dramatically faster if the gateway supports it. most newer gateways do. the thing with Signalink is it doesnt do hardware packet, its a soundcard interface, so youre doing soundcard-based packet or VARA FM through software. VARA FM is free to use in the basic mode but the registered version is way faster. i'd honestly just start with VARA FM if the gateway near you supports it, check the winlink.org map and look at the gateway details it'll show supported modes as for message handling - you open a session, it syncs both directions automatically, then the session closes. you dont have to babysit it. the client queues outbound messages and grabs any inbound ones waiting on the CMS. not really a way to check the queue without the client open that im aware of, at least not easily

okay so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater that my club runs. i programmed in the frequency and offset no problem but every time i key up nobody hears me and i dont hear anything back from the repeater. i looked it up and i think it has something to do with CTCSS tones? my radio is a baofeng uv-5r and honestly the manual is kind of a mess to follow. also while im asking — when i do eventually get on there, is there like a protocol or something for how to join a conversation? i dont want to step on someone or do something embarrassing. a guy at my club meeting mentioned something about kerchunking being rude but i wasnt totally sure what he meant by that.

I was in the same spot like a year ago. took me maybe 3 weeks of casual studying to feel ready, prob an hour a day maybe less some days. the math questions freaked me out but honestly most of them you can just learn the pattern for, like ohms law stuff you probably already know and the rest is just plug and chug. one thing that helped me was watching some youtube videos on the topics i kept getting wrong instead of just re-reading the book. sometimes seeing someone explain impedance or whatever on a whiteboard made it stick better than reading the same paragraph six times

You can request authorization before your hardware is complete, but you should at least have a solid plan and the basic equipment identified. RMS Packet is simple to install and run, and requires a minimum of computer and radio equipment... The program listens for both AX.25 packet and VARA FM using single or multiple radios, TNCs, soundcard programs or 'soft modems'. For dual-mode, I'd recommend at least 4GB RAM and a decent dual-core processor - the bottleneck is usually the sound card interfaces, not CPU.