Michael Brown79

9 contacts on your first activation is solid man, i think i only got like 6 on mine and i was super relieved just to qualify. the battery thing is real though, i switched to a bigger capacity pack after my second time out and it made a huge difference. also 20m was probably working in your favor, have you tried any CW? even slow CW pileups on a summit are something else

so i've been working on this install for like three weekends now and i finally got everything buttoned up yesterday. FTM-500DR in my 2019 tacoma, remote head mounted on the dash, main body under the seat. ran the power directly to the battery with an inline fuse, grounded to a bolt on the chassis near the seat rail. everything works great except there's this weird buzzing/whining noise that kind of changes with the engine RPM. its not super loud but its definitely there, especially on VHF. UHF seems a little cleaner for some reason. antenna is a NMO mag mount on the roof for now until i get around to drilling, dual band 5/8 wave thing i had sitting around. i know this is probably some kind of alternator whine but i wanted to ask before i start throwing ferrite chokes at it and making a mess. anybody dealt with this on a newer toyota? i've read some stuff about the ground being the usual culprit but i thought i grounded it pretty well. maybe the chassis ground near the seat isnt ideal?

yeah what he said, and i'll just add — i spent way too long worrying about this when i was new and honestly just pick one system and learn it before adding more. i started with LoTW and didn't even touch eQSL for my first year and it was fine the bureau thing confused me too for a while. basically your club (if they're an ARRL affiliated club) can receive incoming bureau cards on your behalf and you pick them up periodically. sending outgoing cards through the bureau is super cheap but slow, like months sometimes. for anything rare i just go direct and include a self addressed envelope and a couple dollars or a green stamp for return postage honestly the physical card part is just fun though, i dont think of it as obligatory. getting a nice card in the mail from some station in Kazakhstan or whatever never gets old

i just passed mine like 6 weeks ago and im definitely not an engineer type. the math scared me too but most of the actual calculation questions you can get by if you just know the formulas and kind of practice plugging numbers in, you dont have to deeply understand why it works. the harder parts for me were the operating procedures stuff and some of the obscure part 97 rules honestly, way more than the theory. just use hamstudy or the ARRL extra book and give yourself like 2 months. its not as bad as it looks from the outside i promise

dont overthink it. the pool is like 700 questions and you get 50 on the test so just hammer the practice exams on hamstudy or whatever and you'll pass. i studied for maybe 3 weeks and got a 44 out of 50. the filter theory stuff is mostly just recognizing the circuit topologies at that point. that said if you actually want to understand it thats cool too but its not required to pass lol

so ive been running SSB on 40m mostly and ive had a few guys tell me my audio sounds like im talking through a blanket or something. im using an IC-7300 with the stock mic and i honestly havent touched any of the audio settings since i got it. the TX EQ is all flat, compression is on but i think its at like 4 or 5, and i usually run about 60-70% power. not sure if thats relevant. i did some reading and people say to roll off the low end below like 300hz and boost a bit in the mids but i dont really know where to start with the parametric EQ on this radio. also someone in my local club said to watch my ALC and not let it slam too hard but i wasnt totally sure what he meant by that. anyone have actual settings they use or a starting point they can share? getting a little frustrated because ive heard other guys on the same radio sound crisp and punchy and mine just sounds like garbage comparatively

honestly both approaches work and neither one is wrong. i did a mix when i took mine a few years back, there were some sections where i actually sat down with the ARRL handbook and tried to work through the theory properly like the filter stuff and the transmission line sections because i was genuinely curious, and then for other parts like the regulatory questions i just straight up memorized because there's no deeper truth to learn there, its just rules. the subbands thing is real though, having 40m extra sub-band access alone was worth it to me because thats where a lot of the dx action is during contests. and the 80m and 160m windows matter too if you do any serious cw. day to day casual ragchewing probably not a huge difference but if you ever start doing dx or contesting you'll feel it pretty quickly. the theory stuff does stick better if you learn it properly, i still remember most of the reactance and Q factor concepts because i actually worked through them instead of just pattern matching the answers

had almost the exact same issue last year and it turned out to be my transmit audio was slightly too hot even though it looked fine on the waterfall. the waterfall isnt really the right tool for setting TX levels for VARA, you want to use the VARA soundcard setup tool and watch the ALC on the radio itself — you want basically zero ALC movement. like none. even a tiny bit of ALC action will cause the kind of dropout youre describing especially mid-session when the protocol is doing its thing. also worth checking: is your computer going into any kind of power saving mode that might be throttling the USB port? signalink runs over USB and ive seen weird timing issues crop up when windows decides to be clever about power management. go into device manager and turn off the power saving option for USB root hubs. sounds dumb but fixed my dropouts immediately.

ok so i just got my ticket a few months ago and ive been making contacts and logging everything in WSJT-X and then importing to HAMRS which then goes to... somewhere i think. anyway i'm trying to figure out this whole QSL confirmation thing because apparently there's like three different ways to do it and nobody seems to agree on which one matters. from what i can tell LoTW is the one that counts for DXCC and awards but you have to get a certificate from the ARRL which takes forever and involves a notary or something? and then eQSL is easier to set up but some people act like it doesn't count for anything real. and then there's actual physical cards which i think you send through the bureau or just directly to someone's address which you look up on QRZ? i've already got like 200 FT8 contacts logged and honestly i have no idea if any of them are confirmed anywhere. do most people just do all three or is there like one that's actually worth the effort for a new ham trying to work toward some basic awards

so this has been driving me nuts for about two weeks now. we had a pretty bad storm roll through and i had everything unplugged except apparently i forgot the coax on my 7300 was still connected to the antenna switch. lightning hit somewhere nearby, not a direct strike but close enough that my neighbor's router got fried. anyway ever since then the rig receives totally fine, audio sounds normal, SWR meter moves when i key up but power output reads zero or like 0.2 watts max on 20m. tried other bands same story. the ALC looks like its doing something when i transmit which is a little weird, almost like it's trying to fold back before the PA even gets going. finals maybe? or something upstream in the driver stage? i pulled the top cover off and looked around for obvious scorching or anything that smells burnt, didnt find anything obvious. all the voltages on the main board look okay at a glance but i dont have schematics for this thing and icom's service manual situation is... not great let's say. anybody dealt with this kind of partial damage before? wondering if its worth sending to icom or if someone local can dig into it. im in the mid-atlantic region if anyone knows a good shop.

yeah the mic swap suggestion above is dead on, do that first. i had a similar thing happen with an older 746 pro (different radio i know) and i spent like two hours inside the thing before realizing the coiled cord on the hand mic had a broken wire right at the strain relief. drove me crazy. also worth checking your menu settings havent somehow gotten scrambled — i know it sounds dumb but a hard knock can occasionally do weird things and if the tx bandwidth or mic gain got changed it might explain the underwater thing. probably not it but takes 30 seconds to check so why not

yeah part 97 is written in government-speak so its kind of brutal to just sit down and read cover to cover. for your question about 10m, as a tech you get phone privileges from 28.300 to 28.500 MHz so yes SSB is fine in that range. below that on 10m you have CW access down to 28.000 i believe. the 1500 watt thing is a bit of a red herring for most people because thats the absolute max for general and extra class on most bands, but as a tech on HF youre actually limited to 200 watts PEP on the 10m phone segment if i remember right. honestly just look up the ARRL band plan alongside part 97, the ARRL version is way more readable and lays it out visually so you can actually see whats what at a glance. and dont stress too much about accidentally keying up somewhere wrong when youre first starting out, just double check before you transmit and youll be fine.

hamstudy.org is honestly all you need if you just want to pass the exam. i used it exclusively, spent maybe two weeks doing practice tests every evening for like 20-30 minutes and passed with only a couple wrong. the way it tracks which questions you're getting wrong and keeps drilling you on those is really well done. the math stuff looks scarier than it is. ohms law is basically the only thing you really need to get comfortable with and theres a pattern to it once you see it a few times. the frequency and wavelength stuff is just memorizing one formula and plugging in numbers. dont let it psych you out. the real trick with the question pool is that a bunch of the answers are just common sense once you read them -- like the safety and operating rules questions mostly follow logic if you think about it from a practical standpoint. i did pick up a used gordon west study guide at a hamfest for like two bucks and flipped through it but honestly the website did 90 percent of the work for me

i was in the same boat not that long ago. what helped me was the QRZ DX spotting page actually, mainly because its tied to your logbook so it'll flag stuff you havent worked yet. makes it way easier to know if a spot is even worth chasing. i think theres a setting somewhere to filter by needed entities but i fumbled around for like an hour before i found it lol. also someone in my club pointed me toward the clublog tools which are pretty neat once you get your log uploaded there.

we did almost the exact same thing at our last SET. ran two 100ah battleborn batteries and a 7300 for about 6 hours with a signalink and had maybe 30-35% left at the end so your plan is workable. we were probably lighter on the laptop draw though, had a pi running fldigi instead of a full laptop which helped. one thing i'd add — if you're going the battery route get a clamp meter on there early so you actually know what you're pulling. we estimated going in and were pretty close but it was nice to confirm. also make sure your connectors and wiring can handle the load, we had a powerpole connection get warm on us which was a little exciting.