Sarah Wilson13

had almost the exact same thing on my Tacoma with a 7300 i was running mobile for a while. ended up being a combination of a bad ground AND the power cable running too close to the factory wiring harness under the dash. once i rerouted the dc cable away from all that stuff and put a proper ground right to the firewall it was like night and day. took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out the cable routing part honestly

the handheld yagi thing is totally doable but your arms are gonna hate you by the end of a good pass lol. i did that for months before i built a simple az/el mount out of some rotor hardware i had lying around. even a crappy az/el setup with manual control is way better than trying to point freehand. also for AO-73 specifically the inverting transponder trips people up sometimes — USB on the downlink means LSB on the uplink or the other way, i always have to double check which one it is before the pass because i mix them up every single time

so ive been licensed about 4 months now and still a bit fuzzy on when youre supposed to use the NATO phonetics vs just saying the letter normally. like i get that on HF when conditions are rough you want to spell things out phonetically but what about on 2m repeaters when everyones coming in clear as a bell? i feel kinda silly saying "Kilo Foxtrot Seven Alpha Bravo Charlie" every single time i identify when nobody is having trouble understanding me. is there like an actual rule about this or is it just kind of a best practice thing that people do out of habit

yeah the CTCSS thing is almost certainly your issue. on the uv-5r you need to go into the menu and find the T-CTCS option — thats the transmit tone. set it to 100.0 and you should open the repeater just fine. the R-CTCS is for your radio to only receive signals that have that tone, which is useful sometimes but not what you need right now. as for jumping into a QSO already in progress, yeah you generally want to wait for a break between transmissions and then just say your callsign. most folks are pretty welcoming especially if they know youre new. some guys on nets will be a bit more formal about it but casual ragchews on a repeater are usually pretty relaxed. just key up during a pause and say your call and that you're listening, someone will usually acknowledge you.

oh man CQ WW was my first real contest too and yeah it's a little overwhelming at first but honestly just dive in. with your setup i'd stick to search and pounce for the first few hours just to get a feel for the exchange and how fast things move. the exchange for CQ WW is pretty simple — signal report and CQ zone — so thats at least one less thing to worry about. definitely get N1MM set up before the contest if you can. I know it looks complicated but there's good youtube walkthroughs and once it's running it makes everything so much easier, especially dupe checking. paper logging during a big contest is just gonna slow you down and you'll probably make mistakes when the pile gets crazy. 25ft dipole is totally fine for working the contest. you're not gonna be running a big rate but you'll get contacts especially on 40 and maybe 20 depending on conditions. just have fun with it, first contest is always a little chaotic but thats kind of the whole point

so ive been a General for about three years now and people keep telling me to just go ahead and get my Extra but honestly the theory sections have always kind of scared me off. like i passed the General fine but some of the stuff i see in Extra practice tests is just... a lot. the impedance matching stuff and the filter theory and all the oscillator questions. im not an engineer and never took anything beyond basic high school math so im wondering if anyone else kind of stumbled into passing it or if you really need to sit down and actually understand the material vs just memorizing the question pool also wondering if the full privileges are actually worth it in practice. i mostly do HF and some digital modes. is there anything on the Extra portions of the bands that feels noticeably different or is it mostly just the satisfaction of having it

I went through this exact same debate a few years back when I started. Honestly the straight key first argument has some merit but I dont think its as critical as people make it out to be. I jumped straight to a cheap single lever paddle I found used for like 25 bucks and it worked fine. The iambic thing is kind of its own skill to develop but it clicks pretty fast once your brain figures out the squeeze. For budget paddles the MFJ-564 gets a lot of grief online but for learning it honestly does the job. The tension and spacing adjustment is a little fiddly and the magnet feel isnt amazing but you can make it work. If you want to spend a bit more the Begali Simplex is incredible but thats like 200 bucks and probably overkill until you know you're really into this. A used Bencher BY-1 would be my actual recommendation, they show up on QRZ classifieds pretty regularly for 50-70 dollars and they're solid as a rock, mine has been going for probably 15 years with zero issues. Stick with the Koch method, it actually works. Most people quit too early or try to rush through characters before they're solid. 3 weeks in with 12 characters sounds about right honestly keep going.

dont forget something to write frequencies and net schedules down with, like a laminated card or something. I had all that stuff memorized and then one time during an actual activation my brain just went blank lol. also a small headlamp, sounds dumb but 2am in a parking lot its not dumb at all.

so i just got my technician license a few months ago and ive been reading about CW and it seems like something i want to try eventually but honestly i have no idea how people learn it. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or what? i tried that for about a week and i can recognize maybe 5 letters now which doesnt feel like progress someone at the club meeting mentioned the koch method but didnt really explain it and then got pulled into a different conversation. i looked it up a little bit but im not sure if theres a specific app or program people use for it or if you just kind of figure it out yourself. also is 13wpm a realistic goal for someone starting completely from scratch or is that too ambitious to start with any advice appreciated, im not in a rush just want to actually learn it properly this time instead of giving up again

the power math is pretty straightforward if you work backwards from your duty cycle. at 50w out the 7300 is probably pulling around 10-11 amps at 13.8v but thats only when youre actually transmitting. for typical voice comms or even digital with some pauses youre probably averaging maybe 4-6 amps when you factor in receive current which is like 2 amps on that radio. over 8 hours thats maybe 35-50 amp hours depending on how active you are. a 100ah LiFePO4 will handle that without blinking, you wont even stress it to 50% discharge. id honestly leave the genny at home unless the exercise requires you to run higher power for extended periods or youre also running other gear off it like a laptop, radio, lighting, etc. on the antenna question the EFHW can be great but youre right that its site dependent. if you have decent height and can get the wire up reasonably straight it usually outperforms a compromised dipole. but if youre in a parking lot or somewhere without good supports sometimes the dipole is just easier to control. one thing that helps with RF in the shack situation is making sure your counterpoise on the EFHW is actually doing something — a lot of people just let it dangle or dont bother at all and then wonder why they have common mode issues. also check your coax length, there are resonant lengths that can make things worse on certain bands.

i have both sitting on my desk right now actually, use the rtl-sdr for quick scanning and ADS-B stuff and the RSPdx for serious HF listening. the bit depth thing does matter way more than i thought it would going in. on a crowded 40m evening the rtl just kind of starts to fall apart with intermod and the RSP stays clean. cpu wise SDR++ handles either one fine on my machine, HackRF is actually more demanding in my experience when youre doing wideband stuff.

yeah this is kind of the eternal question isn't it. i went through the same thing a couple years back. what i ended up doing was just accepting that N1MM is basically the contest logger and i use it only for that. my everyday logging is in Log4OM and i keep them separate on purpose, like i dont even try to merge them anymore. at the end of a contest i just export the Cabrillo for submission and then separately export an ADIF if i want those QSOs in my main log, but honestly half the time i dont even bother because contest QSOs are kind of their own thing anyway. the WSJT-X UDP issue you're describing, i had something similar and it turned out i had two programs trying to listen on the same port at the same time which was causing it to drop packets randomly. worth checking your port config if you havent already, make sure nothing else is binding to 2237.

honestly i just brute forced the question pool with ham study apps for about three weeks and passed. did i deeply understand every question about reactance and LC circuits? no. but some of it does stick with you and you find yourself actually caring about why your antenna tuner is doing what its doing once you have a bit more context from studying the extra band segments are worth it more than you think depending on where you like to operate. during a pileup or when 40m gets crowded in the evening that little sliver of extra-only spectrum can be surprisingly quiet. and yeah it opens up some of the digital modes sub-bands too which matters if you ever go down that rabbit hole just do it. the exam isnt as scary as the question pool makes it look once you realize a lot of the answers follow patterns

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think im about 70% of the way there but hitting a wall. basically i have an old Yaesu G-450A rotator and i want to drive it from a raspberry pi 4 instead of the controller box, or at least have the pi read the position and log it automatically during contests. the position pot in the rotator puts out 0-5v depending on where the antenna is pointing and i thought i could just read that with the pi's GPIO but of course the pi doesnt have an ADC so i ended up grabbing an MCP3008 off amazon and wiring that in. got the SPI talking to it okay and im reading values but theyre really noisy, like bouncing around by 20-30 counts even when the rotator isnt moving. not sure if its a grounding issue or if i need some filtering on the input. tried adding a 0.1uf cap to ground on the input pin and it helped a little but still not great. the actual motor drive side i havent touched yet, was thinking about using a relay board to trigger the CW and CCW lines but i keep reading about people using H-bridge motor controllers instead. the motor in the G-450A is just a basic AC motor though so i dont think a typical H-bridge is gonna work for that? or am i wrong about that anyway if anyone has done something similar or has ideas about the ADC noise problem id love to hear it. also open to just using an arduino for the analog side since it has a built in ADC and then talk to the pi over serial, maybe that would be cleaner

yeah what he said about the band edge is right. also just a heads up, 40m during evening hours especially around 7.200 and up gets pretty crowded and theres kind of unofficial watering holes that certain nets and dx stations hang around. nothing illegal about operating there but you might step on someone unintentionally. i'd spend a few nights just listening before you transmit and you'll get a feel for where things are. honestly the best way to learn the band is just lurking for a while