Steve Martinez

so ive been at this for about 8 months now and im stuck. not like completely stuck but it feels like ive been sitting at around 12-13wpm for the last two months and just not moving. i started with the Koch method back when i got licensed and that got me to about 10wpm pretty smoothly but now its like hitting a wall. my current routine is maybe 20-30 minutes a day with lcwo.net and some of the W1AW practice sessions when i remember to tune in. the W1AW stuff is nice because its actual on-air copy which feels different than the computer stuff. anyway i keep reading that you're supposed to receive at speeds faster than you can send but honestly when i crank it up past 15wpm i just fall apart completely and start missing everything and then get frustrated and turn it back down. did anyone else go through this plateau thing? what actually helped you break through it? i really want to get to 20wpm, partly for the personal satisfaction and partly because i want to do some serious CW contesting someday. any advice from people who've actually done it would be great

yeah nice work getting out there. i did my first one like two years ago and spent way too long overthinking the antenna situation. your KX2 setup sounds totally fine honestly. one thing i'd add is that getting spotted by other hunters is huge, like if someone hears you and spots you the pile can get pretty big fast. i usually self spot when i set up and then again if things go quiet after 15-20 minutes. also 40m during the day can be hit or miss depending on where you are, might be worth trying 20m if you havent, i find i get spotted easier there during daytime activations

I went RSP1C about two years ago and dont regret it, but I'll say the antenna matters way more than people want to hear. I had an RSPdx for a while before going back to the RSP1C because I dont actually need the extra low-band stuff and the price difference wasnt doing much for my specific situation. One thing worth mentioning — SDR# with the right plugins actually works fine with SDRplay, you dont have to stick with SDRuno if you prefer the interface. There's an ExtIO driver that handles it. Just pointing that out since you said you tried SDR# already.

the router thing might actually be your culprit, more than you think. wifi routers especially the newer dual band ones can throw out a pretty nasty noise floor even at HF. worth doing a quick test — kill the router completely and see if your decode count jumps back up. i did something similar when i added a NAS drive to my network and it wiped out like 15dB of dynamic range on 40m before i tracked it down. also check your waterfall for any regular banding or striping patterns, that usually indicates switching supply interference. the 7300 is a good rig but it doesnt have the greatest front end when there's local noise competing. might be worth looking at a common mode choke on the USB cable too if you havent already, those can couple noise straight into the audio path and its not always obvious. solar conditions havent been helping either but id rule out the local stuff first since thats actually fixable

yeah almost certainly your grounding. the radio chassis needs its own short ground strap directly to the vehicle chassis — not just relying on the power cable ground. i mean a short as possible, like a few inches if you can manage it. braid strap works better than regular wire for this. the mag mount is also a potential issue, those things depend on the vehicle body for their ground plane and sometimes the paint or whatever interferes with a good connection, though if its on bare metal up top you should be okay. also check if your alternator whine follows engine RPM or just when you hit the gas — if it goes up and down with RPM thats a classic sign of alternator noise getting in. a lot of guys swear by an astatic rd104 noise filter on the power leads for exactly this situation. i had something similar in my old tacoma and it turned out the ground wire was just barely touching a bracket and making intermittent contact. drove me crazy for a month.

Try Pepyscope software - it's designed for direct sampling RTL-SDRs and gives clean waterfall displays. Much lighter on CPU than HDSDR for basic panadapter work.

so i finally got my technician license a few weeks ago and ive been just listening to the local 2m repeater trying to get comfortable. there's a net that runs every tuesday night and i really want to check in but honestly im kind of terrified i'll say something wrong or forget the right procedure or just freeze up completely. like i know the basics — you wait for the net control to ask for check-ins and then you give your callsign — but is there more to it than that? do i need to say anything specific about my location or that im a new ham or anything like that? some of the guys on there sound super confident and experienced and i dont want to embarrass myself. also someone mentioned theres a special event station operating this weekend for some anniversary thing and they said i could log a contact with it during the net but i have no idea how that works either. any advice would be really appreciated, been lurking here for a while and everyone seems really helpful

yeah that waiting around thing is completely normal and honestly one of the more frustrating parts of emcomm that nobody warns you about. ive been doing ARES stuff for going on 12 years and the served agency relationship is almost always the weak link, not the ham operators. most EOC staff have a vague idea that ham radio exists and might be useful but they've never actually had to use it in a real emergency so they dont know how to plug you in. the better ARES groups i've seen do joint exercises with the served agencies specifically so both sides learn to work together, things like simulated message traffic, practicing how to hand off info, that kind of thing. some groups have a liaison role where one person basically acts as the translator between the EOC people and the radio operators. if your EC isnt already doing something like that it might be worth bringing up. not in a critical way just like hey i noticed this gap what do you think. the fact that you were paying attention and noticed it after your first activation is a good sign honestly. a lot of newer folks just feel relieved it was over and dont think much about it

just passed mine last month so this is fresh. honestly the operating procedures section was easier than i expected, a lot of it is common sense stuff if you've spent any time listening on the bands. the part that got me was some of the antenna and feed line questions, like the ones about SWR and transmission line loss. i kept mixing stuff up. just drill the practice tests and when you get something wrong actually look up why, not just memorize the right answer. good luck, HF is way more fun than i expected coming from just doing handheld stuff

yeah what he said about the audio enhancements is spot on, windows is sneaky about that stuff and it'll ruin your day. one other thing i'd add - double check that your radio isnt doing any noise reduction or DSP filtering on transmit. the 7300 has some settings that can mess with digital modes if you're not in the right mode profile. i run mine in USB-D and turned off all the extra processing for digital work. the partial session thing is interesting though, if messages are actually queuing and partly going through then its probably not a fundamental config problem, might just be a marginal path to the gateway and you need better conditions or a closer station. have you checked the winlink maps to see whats actually reachable from your location on the bands you're using

the thing that got me my first real deployment was lighting. sounds so obvious but i had everything in a big pelican case and no way to see inside it at night without holding my phone in my teeth. now i keep a couple small USB LED strips and a headlamp right at the top of the kit, always accessible. also zip ties. i cannot stress this enough. you will always need more zip ties than you think and you will never regret having a hundred of them in a little bag. the laminated cards thing is actually worth doing even if you have a tablet. batteries die, screens crack, sometimes you just want to hand someone a card so they know what frequencies the net is on without having to unlock your device. takes like 20 minutes to make and its one of those things you forget until youre grateful you did it. your power setup sounds solid honestly. the one thing id add is some way to charge your phone independently from your radio power budget. people underestimate how much they lean on their phone during an activation even when the radio is doing the main work.

the iambic A vs B thing trips up a lot of people and honestly for where you're at right now it probably doesnt matter much. most guys i know just pick one and stick with it until it becomes muscle memory. mode A is a bit more forgiving if you're still working on squeeze timing, mode B can feel a little more predictable once you get used to it. i ran mode A for years before i ever even thought about switching. the tension thing though — that i'd pay attention to. too light and you'll accidentally key stuff all over the place especially if you're tense when sending. try cranking it up just a hair more than feels comfortable. sounds counterintuitive but it gives your fingers something to push against and actually slows down the accidental contacts. give yourself a few sessions with it and see if it smooths out. also just keep sending, even if it sounds terrible to you. send call signs, send random words, send whatever. the muscle memory has to come from somewhere

yeah the LO leakage thing is pretty much just the nature of a direct conversion design, especially if the detector isnt super well balanced. the ring detector should help versus a single diode setup but youre never going to get it to zero. a simple low pass or bandpass filter on the antenna input wont really stop it from leaking out because the problem is more about isolation between the detector and the antenna port — the LO is basically backdriving through the mixer. better shielding on the LO and making sure your si5351 output level isnt way hotter than it needs to be will probably do more good than a filter. what level are you driving the si5351 output at? those things can put out a lot more than you actually need for most detector configs and backing it off sometimes helps the LM386 thing — yeah that chip is notoriously noisy and has a pretty weird frequency response without some help. the classic fix is the 0.047uf cap between pins 1 and 8 to set the gain and a bypass on pin 7, theres a million variations of the decoupling network online. wont make it sound like a nice audio amp but itll clean up some of the mud

yeah what he said about showing up early is the big thing. i missed the check-in window on my first net like three times before i figured out the timing lol. also dont be afraid to just throw your call sign in during the check-in period even if you're not sure, worst case the net control asks you to repeat and thats not a big deal at all. everyone was new once. special event stations are honestly a lot of fun, i worked the one for the national parks on the air thing last summer and got a nice certificate mailed to me. QRZ.com also shows a lot of special event station listings if you look around on there

yeah just do it, worst case you fumble a little and laugh about it. i checked into my first net and completely forgot my own callsign for like two seconds which was mortifying at the time but net control just waited and it was fine. nobody said anything about it after. one thing i'd add is if the repeater has a courtesy tone, wait for that before you key up for anything, helps avoid doubling with someone else. but honestly just jump in, the tuesday night crowd on most club nets are really welcoming to new people.

so ive been sitting on this for a while but last weekend i finally pulled the trigger and did the mars/cap mod on my FT-857D. honestly wasnt that scary once i got the thing open, just moving a couple diodes, but man it took me forever to find a decent set of photos that matched my specific board revision. half the guides online seem to be for older units and the jumper locations are slightly different. anyway now i have TX down into 136khz territory which i probably wont ever use but its nice to have i guess. the main reason i did it was to work some frequencies for a local ARES group that needed us to cover some commercial bands during drills. the radio seems fine, no issues so far, hadnt noticed any sensitivity changes on RX either which i was a little worried about. has anyone done the deviation tweak on these as well? im thinking about bumping the FM deviation slightly because it sounds a little narrow on local repeaters compared to my other rigs. or maybe thats just how this radio is idk

that first QSO feeling is real man, i remember mine like it was yesterday and that was 2003. dont let the nervousness go away too fast, its kind of what keeps you sharp on the mic. welcome to the hobby, youll be ragchewing for hours before you know it

been trying to work some dx the past few evenings and 20 seems pretty dead compared to a month ago. im in ohio with a dipole at about 25 feet so nothing fancy but usually can hear something going on. heard a few caribbean stations yesterday but they were really weak. solar cycle finally tanking or just seasonal thing?

The recent S21DX team tested their K9AY receive loop antenna on 80m and performed successful QSOs with a 1/4 wave vertical antenna. Good receive antennas matter as much as transmit power. I'd rather have excellent ears than just big amplifiers.

so ive been using Log4OM for general logging for a couple years now and honestly i really like it for everyday stuff, the interface isnt too bad once you get used to it and the cloudlog sync works fine for me. but every time a contest comes around i feel like im fighting it. ive tried setting up the contest modules a few times and it just never clicks the way i want it to. a buddy of mine keeps telling me to just use N1MM for contests and keep Log4OM for regular logging, which i guess makes sense since N1MM is basically built for nothing else. my question is whether anyone here is actually running that kind of dual setup and how much of a pain is it to keep the logs from getting fragmented across two programs. like do you just import the ADIF after the contest or is there some cleaner way to do it. also separately — anyone using WSJT-X alongside this whole mess. right now WSJT-X logs to Log4OM via UDP and that works fine but i have no idea how that would play with N1MM running at the same time if i ever wanted to do a mixed mode contest. probably a disaster waiting to happen

yeah the UDP thing with N1MM and WSJT-X is flaky sometimes, i had the same drop-out problem last year during the ARRL DX. what fixed it for me was making sure windows firewall wasnt quietly blocking the port, i had an exception set but it wasnt applying to the right network profile, public vs private thing. once i sorted that it stayed connected for the whole contest without dropping. still not as seamless as i'd like but its workable. as for Log4OM vs N1MM for contesting honestly just use N1MM, Log4OM is great software but it wasnt really built around contest workflow the same way. N1MM has been refined by contesters for like 20 years at this point and it shows. i keep Log4OM running on the side and just import the ADIF after the contest is done so my main log stays clean.

the doppler thing around TCA is pretty normal honestly, especially if youre doing it by hand. the rate of change is fastest right at closest approach so thats when you'd need to be cranking the dial the quickest. most people find it easier to just slow down a bit and accept you might lose yourself for 20-30 seconds in that window, its not the end of the world. gpredict crashing -- what OS are you running? ive had issues with it on certain ubuntu versions and the fix was just pulling a slightly older build. the rig control stuff through hamlib can be finicky too depending on how your serial port is set up. once you do get it working though its a total game changer for the linear birds, especially on something like AO-7 where the pass geometry is all over the place depending on the mode. the crossed yagi polarization flip is definitely adding to your workload. some guys just park it at 45 degrees and eat the loss rather than fuss with it during a fast pass. works fine for anything not too deep in the noise.

ok so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i still feel kinda awkward about when to use the NATO phonetics vs just saying the letter. like if someone asks me to confirm a callsign do i spell out every single letter with alpha bravo charlie etc or is that overkill sometimes? i was on a local 2m net last week and i just said my callsign normally and the net control asked me to say it again with phonetics and i felt a little embarrassed but also wasnt sure if that was just his preference or like an actual rule. also i keep blanking on X and Q for some reason, i know its xray and quebec but in the moment my brain just goes blank. does that happen to anyone else or is it just me being dumb about this