Michael Brown79

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

Gpredict user here with FT-991A. The CAT Doppler compensation works much better than SatPC32 in my experience, especially for linear birds. The interface takes getting used to but the tracking accuracy is noticeably tighter.

haha yeah mine was terrible too, i was on a 2m net and the net control asked for check-ins and i just... froze. said my call wrong the first time. these things happen man, nobody cares as much as you think they do. the guys on local repeaters are usually pretty patient with new hams. once you get a few more contacts under your belt it becomes second nature. also dont sweat the baofeng thing, we all started somewhere

Not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely is confusing when you're starting out. So WAS is Worked All States, that's 50 states confirmed, completely separate from DXCC which is about working 100 or more DXCC entities (countries basically, though not exactly countries — it's complicated). WAZ is Worked All Zones, 40 CQ zones worldwide. They're all independent awards run by different organizations and you can chase them all at once or focus on one, totally up to you.
The logging thing your club friend mentioned is real — you want to get on LoTW as soon as you can because a lot of stations upload there and your confirmations start stacking up automatically. For contacts you already made, if the other station is on LoTW and you upload your log, those will match retroactively. Doesn't matter when you made the contact as long as both sides upload. Start there honestly, get your log into LoTW and you might be surprised how many of your 40 states are already confirmed.

i went through this exact same thing lol. ended up with the 7300 about 8 months ago and zero regrets. the panadapter display is addictive, like i just sit there watching signals pop up on 20m. for digital stuff like FT8 it works really well too, setup with wsjt-x wasnt too bad once i figured out the audio routing.
only thing i'll say is budget for a decent antenna cause the radio wont matter much if youre on a compromised antenna. learned that the hard way.

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.

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.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been working on it for a few weeks. one thing that helped me was just assigning each letter a word or sound in my head instead of thinking about it as dots and dashes at all. like K sounds like a cowboy saying okay or whatever, theres whole lists of these online. not sure its the official way but its working for me so far
the not being musical thing shouldnt matter from what i can tell, its more about rhythm i think than actual music ability

I switched from an inverted V to a vertical about 18 months ago and yeah the DX improved but not as dramatically as the forums made me think it would. like I worked a few new countries but I was already working europe pretty regularly on the dipole so it wasnt a night and day thing
the thing nobody tells you is how much the vertical picks up local noise. I'm in a suburban lot and the thing hears every switching power supply within half a mile it feels like. ended up putting the dipole back up too and just switching between them depending on what im trying to do

im kind of in the same boat as you, been licensed about a year and just got my DXCC basic a couple months ago which felt amazing. the G5RV setup is fine for this stuff, i was running something similar when i got started. just work everything you hear and upload to LoTW religiously, some days youll be surprised what propagation brings in even on a modest antenna
the cluster helps a lot for spotting new ones when they pop up, i use DX summit mostly. one thing i wish someone had told me earlier is to just log everything and not worry too much about the award structure at first, after a few months you look at your log and realize youre closer than you thought

so ive been on HF for about two years now, mostly FT8 and some CW, but ive been trying to get into actual voice operation on 40 and 20m SSB and honestly the feedback i keep getting is that my audio sounds either too bassy or kind of muffled or just generally bad. i know my signal is getting out because people are hearing me, they just keep asking me to speak up or saying i sound like im in a tunnel or something
my setup is a TS-590SG and im using a Heil PR-40 through a preamp because i read that was supposed to be a great combo. processor is off, i havent messed with the TX equalizer in the menu much. i did read somewhere that you need to set the mic gain pretty carefully on these radios but i honestly dont know where to start. been running it around 50-60% which felt right but maybe thats the problem
also not sure if the speech processor is worth turning on or if that just makes things worse. anyone running a similar setup or have tips for dialing in SSB audio properly

oh man first activation is so fun, you're gonna love it. yes post an alert on SOTAwatch before you go, doesnt have to be exact to the minute but chasers check it and if you dont alert you might sit there calling CQ for a while wondering why nobody answers. the app is called SOTA Goat if you're on iPhone or there's Pocket RBN too which helps you see if your signal is getting out even when nobody's calling back.
the 4 contact minimum is real but honestly on a decent band like 40m you'll blow past that in the first 10 minutes once the pile up finds you. just make sure at least one of your contacts is a valid callsign, had a buddy once whose first activation almost didnt count because one of his four was a busted call he logged wrong. for logging in the field i just use a little waterproof notepad and transfer to the database that night, works fine. good luck and let us know how it goes

the slim jim comment is real, i keep one rolled up in my go bag now after a similar situation. rubber ducks are kind of a joke for anything serious.
one thing that caught me off guard in my first exercise was just... how slow everything felt? like in my head emergency comms was going to be fast paced and intense but actually passing written traffic correctly takes time and you cant rush it or you introduce errors. i think i came in with a TV drama idea of what it would be like lol. the discipline of slowing down and being precise, that was the adjustment for me.

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now and finally decided to just go for it and get my technician license. problem is i dont really know where to start with the studying. i looked up the question pool online and theres like 400+ questions and im kind of overwhelmed. do people actually memorize all of them or is there a better way to go about this? also i saw some people mention hamstudy.org but i wasnt sure if thats still up to date since the question pool apparently changes every few years or something. any advice would be appreciated, ive never really done anything like this before and im not sure how much time i need to set aside for it