James Williams

yeah what he said about checking if the frequency is in use first - that part is important and a lot of people skip it. i made that mistake early on, just started calling CQ on what i thought was a clear freq and turns out there was a DX station in there i couldnt hear because of propagation. guy i was talking to later told me i'd been doubling with a ZL for like 10 minutes lol. so always listen for a bit and ask before transmitting

112 confirmed is solid for 3 years in, you're doing fine. Honestly the strategy question kind of answers itself once you think about band modes — a lot of the DX you need for DXCC you'll work incidentally while also filling in WAS and WAZ squares, especially on 20 and 17 meters. I wouldn't stress too much about chasing them separately. On the credits question — yes you can absolutely submit additional credits later. The way it works with LoTW is they keep a running tally and you just pay the incremental fee when you want to claim the next award level. So you might apply for the basic DXCC now and then later when you hit 150 or 200 confirmed you apply for the endorsement. Paper cards you'd send to an ARRL card checker, they log the credits and you're done, those get added to your account. You dont have to hold them and submit everything in a big batch, just do it whenever it makes sense. Some guys wait years before sending in a pile of cards though, which i get because the postage adds up.

yeah 10m has been doing exactly that, these burst openings that come and go real fast. what youre probably seeing is a mix of F2 propagation and maybe some sporadic-E thrown in, especially if the path to JA or VK seems unusually short on timing. F2 at this point in the solar cycle can be really good but it doesnt always mean a steady open band — it kind of moves around depending on where the solar zenith angle is and how the ionosphere is structured that day. the SFI being in the 170s is genuinely solid, we havent had consistent numbers like that in a while. i'd keep an eye on the geomagnetic stuff too though because even a moderate K index can knock out the higher bands fast. honestly just be ready to jump when you see a cluster of spots come through because like you said those windows can close quick

yeah i went through the same thing when i started, the jump from 12 to 15 felt like hitting a wall. what helped me was practicing with the Koch method using LCWO dot net, just doing receive drills at the speed i wanted to send at. weird as it sounds, getting your ear trained to the faster speed first made my sending loosen up. no idea why that worked but it did. also dont obsess too much over the keyer settings at first, get your hand comfortable and then tweak

eu2200 isnt that bad weight wise compared to older generators but i get what you mean, once you add the fuel can it adds up fast. we use them for SET exercises when we have a command post vehicle but for anything where your hiking in forget it honestly for the multi hour thing i just bring a second battery. boring answer but its reliable and theres no moving parts to break at the worst moment

honestly the memorization approach works fine for tech, a lot of people do it that way and pass no problem. the pool isnt that big and the questions repeat enough that if you grind ham study or qrz practice tests for like a week or two you'll probably be ready. that said the electrical stuff like ohms law is actually worth understanding because its dead simple once it clicks — voltage equals current times resistance, thats basically it, and like 4 or 5 questions on the test come from just knowing that. the harder part for most people is the rules and regulations stuff, frequencies you can use as a tech, what modes are allowed where, that kind of thing. i'd say if youre consistently hitting 80 percent or better on the practice exams youre probably good to go. find a local club doing a VE session, they're usually pretty relaxed and the volunteers genuinely want you to pass

matched diodes make a real difference in my experience. i built a similar ring mod a while back, just used whatever 1N4148s i grabbed from the bin and the suppression was mediocre at best. bought a bag, measured forward voltage on like 30 of them with a DMM in diode mode and sorted them into matched pairs and the improvement was noticeable. got up around 40dB pretty easily after that with just minor trimmer adjustment. its tedious but worth the hour you spend doing it.

at 30-35 feet on 40m youre both pretty much in the same boat pattern wise, neither of you is getting a low enough takeoff angle to really exploit any theoretical advantage. the EFHW with a good 49:1 unun is a fine antenna but its not magic, and a sloper is going to have a different pattern than a horizontal dipole anyway so comparing them directly is kind of apples and oranges. your ladder line fed dipole is probably more efficient overall just because youre not dealing with any matching network losses at the feedpoint. the 49:1 unun on cheap ferrite can get warm and lossy, especially on 40 where youre running more power. if you want to actually settle the argument put both antennas on the same band at the same time and have someone on the other end flip between them, anything else is too many variables

yeah i've done both and honestly they serve different purposes. RemoteHams is great if you want something that just works and you dont want to spend a weekend debugging port forwarding and firewall rules. The server dependency thing is real though, I think they had a pretty significant outage maybe 18 months ago and a bunch of people got burned. After that I set up a parallel path using hamlib over a VPN so I have a fallback if their broker goes down. The SDR panadapter in RemoteHams is actually pretty bandwidth efficient from what ive seen, I ran it on a connection that was maybe 10-12mbps down and it was fine, you can tune the FFT update rate and the span. Where you start running into trouble is if you're also pushing audio at the same time obviously but even then it's not as bad as youd think if you drop the audio codec quality a bit. The 7300's built in panadapter passthrough over the USB is what I use and that works fine as the remote SDR source.

so i finally sat down and did a proper contest run this past CQ WW SSB and wow i had no idea what i was missing. ive been licensed about 18 months and mostly just done ragchews and a little SOTA but something about the pileups and the rhythm of contest operating just clicked for me. ran about 6 hours on 20m and managed just over 200 QSOs which i know isnt anything impressive but for me it felt incredible. the part i wasnt expecting was how much it helped my operating skills. like i had to really learn to listen through QRM and my exchange got tighter just from repetition. also realized my antenna situation needs work badly - kept losing contacts to stations running beams while im sitting here with a dipole strung between two trees. anyway i got the bug now. already looking at ARRL Sweepstakes next month and trying to figure out if i should try CW Sweepstakes even though my code is still pretty rough. also been poking around the SOTA summits list thinking about doing an activation during a contest weekend to stack both at once. anyone done that? does it actually work out or is it more chaos than its worth? also genuinely curious what upcoming events people are looking forward to. feels like contest season is just ramping up and i want to plan better this time instead of just stumbling into CQ WW the night before

so ive been working on this 40m crystal controlled TX for the past few months, mostly following the EMRFD designs with a few modifications because i couldnt source the exact parts listed. got it to fire up finally last week and it puts out somewhere around 3-4 watts into a dummy load which honestly is better than i expected. the problem is there's this weird chirp on keying, like the frequency drifts for maybe half a second when i first hit the key and then settles. i thought it was a VFO stability thing but its crystal controlled so that shouldnt really be happening. also the sidetone is a bit off, sounds slightly different pitch than what im actually transmitting which is annoying but whatever, livable. anyone dealt with the chirp thing before? im wondering if its a keying voltage issue affecting the oscillator stage somehow, or maybe my buffer amp isnt isolating well enough. the crystal is a surplus 7.030 i pulled out of an old piece of gear so maybe that has something to do with it too.

basically the rule of thumb most people use is if theres any chance the other station might mishear or misread something, go phonetic. callsigns especially on HF where the band might be marginal, always phonetic. on a clear local repeater with someone you talk to every day, honestly nobody cares if you just say your call normally. the thing about mixing in wrong phonetics or non-standard ones -- its really not a big deal at all on amateur radio. youll hear people use all kinds of weird stuff. i knew a guy who used his own made up phonetics for years, like instead of Whiskey he always said Washington. drove some people nuts but it was perfectly understandable. the whole point is just clarity so the other person can write down what you said. if it works it works. once you do it enough the standard NATO ones just become automatic, especially the weird ones like November and Uniform. just takes reps.

so ive been messing around with QRP stuff for about a year now and finally built up a kit that actually works well enough to take out to the field without wanting to throw it into a lake. figured id share since i know theres a few others here that have been asking about portable low power setups. started with a Xiegu G90 which isnt technically QRP but i keep it at 5 watts when im out portable, then moved to building an actual QRP rig from a kit — ended up going with a 40m monoband thing i got from QRP Labs, the QCX+ if anyone knows it. the build took me a weekend and a half mostly because i kept second guessing my solder joints and reflowing stuff that was probably fine. anyway the thing that surprised me most is how far you can actually get with 5 watts if you have a halfway decent antenna. i was running a linked dipole up about 25 feet in some trees at a state forest and worked a station in germany on 20m which still kind of blows my mind honestly. conditions were good that day but still. battery situation took me a while to figure out. i tried a little lipo pack first and it worked but the voltage sag was annoying, switched to a 3ah lifepo4 and it's been way more consistent. i can usually get a solid 4-5 hours of operating before i need to think about charging. anyone else doing a lot of portable QRP? curious what antennas people are using out in the field, still feel like thats my weakest link

yeah 4 contacts is 4 contacts, activation counts. honestly my first one was worse, i forgot to log two of them properly and had to go back through my memory to submit. the wind thing is real, i use one of those cheap foam windscreens now and it helps a lot. linked dipole is worth it if you want to hit multiple bands without retuning, i bring mine on almost every trip now.

so ive been sitting on doing the mars/cap mod on my FT-857D for probably two years now, always felt a bit nervous about opening it up even though i know its literally just moving a diode. finally got around to it last weekend and honestly it went fine, took maybe 20 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself and reading the service manual three times. the main reason i wanted it was just for some EMCOMM stuff where we occasionally need to go slightly outside the normal ham bands, nothing crazy. but while i had the thing open i also noticed the fan mod people talk about where you jumper the fan to run at lower speed constantly instead of kicking on hard when it gets hot. did that too. the fan noise on these radios always bugged me during rag chews, the sudden blast of air is pretty distracting. anyway my question is whether anyone has done the internal ATU mod or added an aftermarket one to these, i know the 857 doesnt come with a built in tuner and ive been running an LDG externally forever but its kind of a pain in the field. wondering if theres a cleaner solution that others have figured out.