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.

yeah hamstudy is what everyone recommends and for good reason. but if you want an actual book the ARRL Ham Radio License Manual is the one most people use, its pretty readable even if you have zero background. i will say though dont stress too much about understanding every single concept before your test date, you can always learn the deeper stuff after you get your ticket. the test really isnt that hard once youve gone through the pool a few times. some of the questions about frequencies and band privileges are worth actually learning though because youll need to know them when you actually start operating, otherwise youll just be confused out there

yeah i had the same debate and ended up just grabbing a Ham It Up upconverter for my RTL and ran that for probably a year before i sprung for a HackRF. totally different use case obviously since the HackRF is transmit capable but still. the direct sampling on the v4 works but you do get some birdies and the sensitivity isnt amazing. for $30-40 though its hard to complain. SDR++ is the right call btw, SDRuno felt like it was designed by someone who really wanted to make sure you knew it was complicated

oh man W4T summits are fun, ive done a few in that association. yeah the 25 vertical meters thing trips people up sometimes, just make sure you're actually near the high point and youre fine, nobody is out there with a surveying kit checking on you lol one thing i'd add is bring way more battery than you think you need. i thought my 3ah lipo would be plenty for a 2 hour activation and i was on my last few percent by the time i made my 4th contact because i was running higher power trying to break through a pileup. the KX2 is efficient but still, bigger battery or a spare is worth the weight

so ive been chasing 3Y0 for what feels like forever and last week there was a smallish dxpedition active on 17m and the pileup was just insane, like wall to wall signals for 20 minutes and i wasnt getting through at all doing my normal thing what finally worked — and im genuinely surprised — was listening to exactly where the op was pulling people from in the split. he was working about 3-4 up but kept drifting slightly higher every few QSOs. so i just started anticipating where he'd land next instead of calling where everyone else was camping. got through on like the third try after that. the other thing i noticed is timing matters so much more than raw power. i run an IC-7300 into a 3-element yagi at about 45 feet which isnt a huge station by any means, and ive seen guys with kilowatts and stacked beams just throwing carriers over each other not getting through while a more patient op slips in clean. the dxpedition op can only work one signal at a time and if your call comes in when there's a brief gap in the wall of noise you're golden anybody else have techniques that consistently work? im curious whether the zero beat approach ever actually helps or if that's just a myth for most modern digital-mode-style pile situations

which summit was that? ive been eyeing some of the WM peaks but havent pulled the trigger yet. how long was the hike in? i have a kx3 and was thinking about trying POTA first just to get the hang of field ops before going up a mountain

yeah the CTCSS thing confuses a lot of new hams, dont worry about it. so basically there are two sides to it — the tone your radio transmits (sometimes called encode) and the tone your radio uses to squelch what you receive (decode). the repeater itself has an encoder and decoder too. what you need to set is the encode side — that 100.0 Hz tone needs to go out with your signal so the repeater's controller knows to open up and pass your audio through. without it the repeater just ignores you, which is probably whats happening. on the UV-5R you want to go into the menu and look for something like T-CTCS (transmit CTCSS) and set that to 100.0. theres also R-CTCS which is receive side, you usually dont have to set that unless theres a lot of other interference you want to filter out. as for calling on the repeater, most people just say their callsign and say listening or just say the callsign once or twice. something like W1ABC listening or just W1ABC for a contact. some repeaters have nets on certain nights so it helps to check if theres a schedule. just listen for a while first and you'll pick up the rhythm pretty quick. also if there's a break between conversations thats usually when you'd jump in and say your call.

okay so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i get it, its great for working new countries and the SNR performance is honestly magic sometimes. pulled a ZL2 last week at like -21dB which i still cant quite believe. but theres something that bugs me about it — its not really a conversation right? its just exchanging callsigns and signal reports and then youre done. feels a little like a slot machine sometimes. so i started poking around JS8Call because i heard it was built on the same engine basically, like the JS8 waveform is derived from FT8 but with longer transmit windows and you can actually type messages back and forth. been messing with it for a couple weeks and the activity on 40m seems decent enough, especially in the evenings. the relay/store-and-forward thing is interesting too. my question is — for people who use both, is JS8Call worth putting real time into or is it kind of a niche thing that never really took off? and does anyone actually use it for emcomm type purposes or is that more theoretical at this point. my setup is pretty basic, IC-7300 into a fan dipole, running WSJT-X for FT8 and the JS8Call client for the other. audio interface is a SignaLink.

so i got my technician license back in november and got assigned one of those sequential calls, mine is like a 2x3 with a K prefix which is fine i guess but ive been looking at the vanity callsign application process on the FCC ULS site and honestly its kind of confusing me. like do i just apply and then wait in a queue or is there some kind of bidding thing that happens? i read somewhere that theres a window period and if multiple people apply for the same call during that window it goes to whoever has seniority or something? not sure if thats still how it works. also wondering if theres any calls that are just off limits entirely or if pretty much any unassigned 1x3 or 2x2 format call is fair game. i had a call in mind that was my grandfather's old call, he was a ham back in the 60s and 70s, not sure if that changes anything or if family connection doesnt matter at all to the FCC. sorry if this is a basic question, the FCC website is not exactly user friendly lol

went last year and honestly wasnt that impressed but my club president said they got more vendors signed up this time. might be worth it if your not driving more than like an hour or so

so ive been running my old IC-746 for probably 12 years now, great radio, never really had issues with it but the lack of a real panadapter and the whole having to bolt on an SDR just to see whats happening on the band was getting old. finally grabbed a used 7300 off a guy local to me, paid $850 which i think was fair given the condition. first thing i noticed is just how different the waterfall feels compared to running SDRuno alongside the old rig. its all integrated and snappy, scrolling through 40m at night and actually seeing where the activity is without tabbing between windows is kind of a game changer honestly. the touch screen took maybe a day to get used to, i kept instinctively reaching for knobs that werent where i expected them. RF performance wise i honestly cant tell a huge difference on RX compared to the 746 on most bands, maybe slightly better on 160 but im not doing rigorous testing here just operating. transmit audio reports have been good, running the stock mic which i never do but havent swapped it yet. the built in ATU handles my off-center fed pretty well up through 15m, starts complaining a bit on 10 when conditions are up and things get weird impedance wise. anyway just figured id share since i see people asking about the 746 to 7300 jump all the time. happy to answer stuff if anyone has questions about the comparison