Ham Fan

nice work dude. mint tin builds have a charm to them, dont let anyone give you grief about it. i built a similar thing a couple years ago and ran it for months before i moved on to a more serious project. the 602 is a great little chip for this kind of thing. one thing i noticed with mine was that i was getting a lot of breakthrough from a strong AM station nearby, ended up having to add another stage of filtering on the front end. depends on your location i guess, if youre near any AM broadcast towers it can be a real headache with a direct conversion design. just something to keep in mind if you start hearing weird stuff on frequencies you wouldnt expect

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about confirming contacts and i honestly dont fully understand the whole system. like i get that QSL cards are the physical paper cards you send in the mail but then there's LoTW which is the ARRL thing and also eQSL which seems like a different website entirely and im just not sure which ones i should be bothering with. i made maybe 60 or 70 contacts so far mostly on 40m SSB and a few FT8 contacts and i havent confirmed a single one because i dont know where to start. someone at my local club said LoTW is the only one that counts for DXCC but another guy said eQSL is fine for other awards. and then there's people who still mail paper cards through the bureau which seems like it takes forever? do i need to do all three or can i just pick one. also how hard is it to set up LoTW because i heard something about needing a certificate and it looked kind of complicated when i glanced at the website

Looking to upgrade from RTL dongles for serious weak signal VHF/UHF monitoring. The Airspy, SDRplay RSP and HackRF are all in the $150-$300 range and I'm torn between the RSP1A and HackRF One. The RSP1A has 14-bit sampling below 6Msps and appears more sensitive than the Airspy, while the HackRF can both transmit and receive. For my use case (aircraft, EmComm monitoring, some experimentation), which would provide better weak signal performance? Current setup is a decent discone at 40ft with LMR-400. An Airspy or SDRPlay will give much better weak signal performance, especially with stronger local signals present. Budget allows for either but not both.

so this has been my thing lately, just spinning the dial on 40m after dinner and seeing whats out there. not even transmitting half the time just listening to random ragchews. heard some guys talking about their garden last week for like 45 minutes, had no idea who they were but it was weirdly nice to just have that going in the background while i was doing dishes idk theres something about 40m at night that just feels different than any other band. skip is usually good enough to hear stuff from all over but not so far that it sounds completely alien. anyway not really a question just curious if anyone else does this kind of aimless listening thing or if thats weird

so im finally making the trip out to dayton this year after years of saying i was gonna go. been to a couple local hamfests but nothing on this scale. mostly interested in the flea market area tbh, heard you can find some crazy deals if you get there early enough. anybody done the swap meet before and have tips? like how early do people actually show up, is it worth camping nearby or just driving in each day

Just got my general upgrade and I'm starting to work some DX! Already have about 85 countries in my log after a few months of chasing spots. DXCC requires confirming on-air contacts with 100 countries, so I'm getting close to applying for my first DXCC. My question is about confirmations - should I use LotW (Logbook of the World) exclusively or still bother with paper QSLs? I've been uploading everything to LotW but only getting about 30% confirmations. Some of the DX stations I really need don't seem active on LotW at all. What's your experience with electronic vs paper for DXCC credits?

so ive been meaning to get into LEO sat work for a while and last weekend i finally just did it. grabbed my FT-818 and the arrow antenna and went out in the backyard to catch an AO-73 pass. had gpredict running on the laptop with doppler correction feeding into the rig through hamlib which honestly took longer to set up than the actual operating did. the thing that surprised me is how narrow the linear transponder actually feels in practice. i know on paper its like 40khz wide or whatever but when you factor in everyone piling on during a decent pass, finding a clear spot and actually holding your downlink frequency while manually adjusting the uplink for doppler is... a lot. my first pass i basically just listened and barely got a word out. second pass i managed one contact with a guy in germany which felt pretty great honestly. biggest issue i ran into is that i keep drifting off my own downlink. like i find myself on the waterfall, start talking, and by the time i check again im wandering. is this a technique thing or is my setup just not compensating well enough? the hamlib doppler correction seemed to be working but maybe not perfectly. curious if others had this problem early on.

yeah CQ WW will do that to you haha, first time I actually tried to operate it seriously instead of just tuning around I was hooked. 47 countries with an attic dipole is genuinely solid, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. one thing that helped me early on was just logging everything even the dupes and then reviewing afterward to see where i was making mistakes with the exchange. N1MM logger has a built in check that'll yell at you if you already worked someone so that saves some embarrassment in the pileup

yeah ive done almost exactly this, took me a few iterations to get it not terrible. the sweep approach is fine for initial tune but what you really want is a hill climbing algorithm — basically just nudge the cap or inductor in whichever direction improves SWR and keep going until it gets worse then back off. way faster than a full sweep and the arduino handles it fine, you dont need a pi for the control loop at all. for SSB the trick is to sample SWR during a pause or use the carrier at the start of a transmission to lock onto a solution, then hold position. if you let it hunt during actual audio it will absolutely chase its tail like you said. i added a simple lockout so once SWR is below like 1.5 it just stops adjusting and waits for the next key-up/key-down transition to re-evaluate. works pretty well, not perfect but way better than retuning by hand every band change the bridge at 100w is fine just make sure your toroids are rated for it, ive smoked a couple using the cheap ferrite mix stuff at anything over 50w

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and ive been listening to a lot of the big contests on the bands but never actually jumped in. i tried a little bit of field day last summer with my club but i was mostly just watching other people operate and fetching coffee lol. this year i want to actually participate and maybe try CQ WW or one of the ARRL contests on my own. problem is i dont really know where to start. like do i need special logging software or can i just keep a paper log for something like CQ WW. and how do people even figure out what multipliers they need, i kind of understand the concept but in the heat of the moment it seems overwhelming. also i heard SOTA activations count toward some contests? not totally sure how that works. any advice would be great, im running a modest setup, just a vertical and 100 watts, nothing fancy. is that even enough to be competitive or am i just gonna be calling CQ into the void the whole time

this is actually what got me into ham radio in the first place and then i spent like two years obssesed with dxcc and forgot about it. maybe i should just go back to spinning the dial for a bit. been feeling burned out on the whole chasing thing tbh

yeah there is definitely a difference and it matters a lot. the FCC distinguishes between willful violations and honest mistakes, at least in practice. if you accidentally ID a couple seconds late or something minor like that nobody is coming after you. where people actually get in trouble is stuff like intentional interference, operating on frequencies your license class doesnt allow repeatedly, or broadcasting music which is a whole thing. the NAL your club member mentioned is real but its usually preceded by a warning or an official citation first unless its something egregious. most enforcement actions you see published on the FCC website are for things like pirates or people causing deliberate interference on repeaters, not some tech class guy who forgot to ID once.

Started with RemoteHams to learn remote operating, now run my own setup. wfview with IC-7300 is excellent - exposes hamlib interface that works with most logging software. The learning curve is steeper but you own the entire signal path.

I've been studying Part 97 and want to make sure I understand 97.119 correctly regarding station identification. Each amateur station must transmit its assigned call sign at the end of each communication and at least every 10 minutes during a communication, with no station allowed to transmit unidentified communications. Specific scenarios I'm unsure about: During a long ragchew that goes over 10 minutes - exactly when do I need to ID?If I'm operating remote or through a repeater, are there additional ID requirements?What about digital modes like FT8 or JS8 - do the normal ID rules apply?The call sign must be transmitted with an authorized emission, either by CW (max 20 WPM when automatic) or phone emission in English. Are there any exceptions or special cases I should know about?

Great question! The K-index is more immediate - The K index is a three hourly measurement of the variation of the Earth's magnetic field while A-index is derived from K over 24 hours. For your POTA activation with K=2 and A=7, you're golden! Those are excellent numbers for stable HF propagation. K below 3 means minimal geomagnetic disturbance.

honestly for 6 hours with a net control duty cycle you probably dont even need the generator. if youre doing maybe 20-30% transmit time on the 7300, which is pretty typical for net control, youre looking at maybe 8-10 average amps draw. so 100ah gets you comfortably through 6 hours with headroom to spare, especially if its a decent lithium pack and not an older AGM where you cant really pull below 50%. i did a 10 hour stint at a simulated emergency a couple years back with a 50ah battleborn and a 7300 and made it through fine running the radio at about 80 watts. kept the laptop on its own smaller battery though, that helped. the generator i brought sat in the truck the whole time honestly. the linked dipole plan sounds solid. 25 feet center height on a fiberglass mast at a fairgrounds should work decent for regional 40m, 80 might be a bit compromised at that height but for nets its fine. bring some extra tent stakes and guy rope if the forecast has any wind, those push-up masts can get squirrelly in gusty conditions especially in an open lot with no windbreak.

the GS232 thing is right, thats what you want. one thing i'll add — watch your pot coupling carefully, any slop in those gears and your position readback gets noisy and the software starts chasing its tail trying to hit a heading. i ended up averaging like 10 ADC samples and doing a small deadband, maybe 3 or 4 degrees, before the controller even tries to make a correction. made a huge difference in how it hunts.

so my neighbor has been into ham radio for years and finally talked me into trying to get my technician license. i downloaded a couple things but honestly im kind of overwhelmed. like there are study guides and apps and the actual question pool and i dont really know which one is the actual thing i should be using vs which ones are just extra. i guess my main question is do i need to memorize the whole question pool or is there like a smarter way to study. i heard somebody say the pool has like 400 questions but the test is only 35, does knowing the pool just mean i automatically pass or is it more complicated than that also do the questions change, because i saw something about a new pool but wasnt sure if that affects me right now

yeah Q and X trip everyone up at first, dont sweat it. Quebec and Xray are just weird ones to remember. I used to write them on a sticky note on my radio until they stuck in my head, took maybe a month of regular operating before it felt natural. as for when to use phonetics -- honestly on a clear local repeater with someone you talk to every week you probably dont need to spell out every letter, people will know who you are. but any time theres noise, when youre making a new contact, calling CQ, or especially if you ever get into HF where conditions can be rough, phonetics are just good practice. net control probably just wanted to make sure he logged your call correctly, not a big deal. better to get in the habit early anyway.