Christine Lee

I was in the same boat maybe 8 months ago. I used hamstudy AND the ARRL technician book together and I think that combo helped because the book explained the why behind stuff, like why certain frequencies behave the way they do, which made the questions stick better instead of just memorizing. took me about 3 weeks studying maybe 20-30 minutes a night the ohms law stuff really isnt bad once you do a few practice problems, the exam questions basically give you two of the three values and ask for the third so if you can rearrange a simple equation youre fine. what helped me was just doing the hamstudy practice exams over and over until i was consistently hitting like 85 percent or better, then i went and took the real thing and passed with room to spare

so i've been lurking on this forum for probably two years now reading about QRP and always thinking 'yeah someday i'll try that' and last month i finally just did it. built a Michigan Mighty Mite from a kit i found, took me three evenings of fumbling around with the soldering iron but got it together and it actually works. first time i keyed it up i honestly expected nothing to happen because my solder joints looked pretty rough in a few spots but the thing fired right up, maybe 500mw or so on 40m. spent a few nights just listening and calling CQ and nothing, starting to think i'd made a mistake. then last thursday night around 8pm local i got a response from a guy in Tennessee, im in Ohio so not a huge distance but honestly it felt like i'd worked DX. we had a solid little QSO, signal reports were decent considering im running less than a watt into a dipole in my backyard. anyway i guess im just posting because i wanted to share it with people who would actually appreciate it, my wife was happy for me but i could tell she had no idea why i was so excited about talking to someone in Tennessee with a radio i built myself. anyone else remember their first QRP contact? does it get more addictive from here because im already looking at the 4state QRP group kits

im sort of in the same boat, been at CW for about 6 months now. one thing that helped me a lot was the G4FON trainer software, its free and you can set it to do Koch method which builds letters up gradually. way better than trying to learn the whole alphabet at once and then wondering why nothing sticks. also dont sleep on just copying callsigns off the DX clusters and trying to send them back on the keyer. sounds weird but practicing real callsigns is different than practicing random letters and it starts to feel more like actual operating

im in basically the same boat as you, started using DXwatch a few months ago. one app i found that helps is the DX Toolkit app on Android, it pulls cluster data and lets you filter by band and mode which is way easier on the eyes than staring at the raw stream. not sure if thats helpful if youre desktop only but just throwing it out there

so ive been using WSJT-X for FT8 stuff for about a year now and it logs to its own internal log fine but ive been wanting something that handles everything in one place, like when i do the occasional contest plus my regular HF work plus the digital modes. right now my setup is kind of a mess -- WSJT-X logs to its adif file, i manually import that into Log4OM every week or so when i remember, and then for contests i fire up N1MM because thats what our club uses and i kind of just live with having duplicate entries or missing stuff. anyway i was talking to a guy at the club meeting last thursday and he said just pick one and stick with it but that doesnt really help because N1MM is clearly better for contest ops but Log4OM has the nicer interface for everyday logging and LoTW sync and all that. does anyone have a workflow that actually works here or am i just overthinking this. also does Log4OM play nice with N1MM exports after a contest, ive had issues with duplicate QSOs when i try to merge the adif files

oh man the Echolink nets are actually underrated for this exact thing if you havent tried those yet. but if you want straight HF, the 75 meter morning nets can be a blast depending on your mood — fair warning though 75m gets... colorful sometimes haha. for something more structured and friendly id honestly point you toward the OMISS nets, they do 10-80m at various times and the net control operators are usually real patient with newer folks. you just wait for NCS to call for check-ins, give your callsign phonetically, and thats literally it. easy as it gets. also keep an eye on the ARRL website, they have a net directory that you can search by band and time. i used that thing constantly when i was first getting comfortable on HF. once you check into a few you realize its honestly not nerve-wracking at all, most net control guys are happy to hear a new callsign

the EU2200i is genuinely pretty clean in my experience, way better than the old style generators. i ran my 7300 off one for about 8 hours at a simulated emergency exercise last year and didnt really have noise problems, but i did run a good 50 feet of extension cord and kept the genny downwind. the bigger thing honestly is the grounding — i drove a short ground rod at my operating position and bonded everything together and that cleaned up a lot more than moving the generator did. for your antenna situation the EFHW is fine, honestly for a single-band exercise where you just need reliable 40m copy i wouldnt overthink it. the only time id say bring something more flexible is if the net control frequency changes or if you end up needing 80m for closer stations, which happens more than people expect in my area. maybe throw an 80m resonant wire in your bag just in case, costs you nothing in weight. one thing that bit me — make sure your battery and the generator arent both connected trying to charge and supply simultaneously unless you know your charging setup handles that cleanly. i had a weird voltage fluctuation issue that turned out to be exactly that.

went through basically the exact same thing when i got my UV-5R lol. the menu labeling is really confusing. what worked for me was just using CHIRP to program it from the computer, way easier than fighting through the menus manually. you can download the repeater info straight from repeaterbook and set the tones correctly there. saved me a ton of headaches honestly. once i got it sorted out i was hitting three or four repeaters in my area no problem

i had almost the exact same situation with a repeater over a ridge from me and went the fixed yagi route. used a cheap arrow antenna 2m 5 element, just strapped it to a piece of 1 inch conduit zip tied to my existing mast and aimed it roughly toward the repeater. took like 20 minutes. works way better than my old vertical ever did on that path. honestly the x50a is a solid antenna i wouldnt get rid of it for general use. just run both if you can.

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals honestly. so the FCC allocation for general on 40m phone starts at 7.225 MHz going up to 7.300, and for CW/digital you get 7.025 to 7.125. everything below 7.025 on CW is extra class only. the thing about band edges is you really dont want your signal to actually be AT 7.000 because even a tiny bit of carrier or sideband energy can spill outside the allocation and thats a rules violation. most people leave at least a couple kHz of cushion. so like 7.003 at the absolute closest for CW if youre an extra, but realistically most operators stay well inside. on phone the upper edge 7.300 is the same deal, your whole signal needs to fit within the band so on USB your carrier would actually need to be a bit below 7.300 to keep the sidebands inside. its one of those things that makes more sense once you think about it from a signal bandwidth perspective rather than just a single frequency

25 feet on 40m isnt ideal but honestly its not as bad as people make it sound. a dipole at that height is gonna have a higher radiation angle than you want for DX but itll still work, and the big thing you already figured out yourself is the noise. verticals really do pick up more local garbage in a lot of suburban setups. ive run both and the dipole at modest height usually wins for me just because im not fighting the noise floor the whole time. on the radials question — 16 to 20 on the ground will get you most of the way there. theres some NEC modeling work that shows the improvement from 16 to 60 radials is maybe 1-2 dB at best, so unless youre a contester obsessing over every tenth of a dB its not really worth the extra wire and work. get them down, make them at least a quarter wave long, and youre fine. id still probably try the dipole first just because its cheaper and you can always add the vertical later.

so i know solar cycle 25 has been ramping up for a while now but the last few weeks on 10 meters have just been something else. im seeing dx from south america, europe, even some pacific stations on FT8 pretty much all day long. been a while since the band felt this alive honestly. grabbed a few new entities i'd been waiting on for years. also heard that Icom is supposedly dropping something new at the Hamvention this year, some kind of mid range HF rig, nothing confirmed yet but there's been chatter on a couple other forums. anyone got more details on that or is it just rumor mill stuff at this point. every year there's like 5 rumors and maybe one of them pans out lol. either way if you havent been on 10m lately you're really missing out. even running 50 watts into my old vertical ive been working stuff i normally wouldnt touch with a kilo.

ok so ive been checking into a few local nets lately and im still a little fuzzy on the ID thing. like i know you have to identify every 10 minutes and at the end of a transmission but on a net when the NCS is running things pretty fast, do you ID every single time you come back to answer someone or is just saying your callsign when you check in good enough for a while? last week i was on the Tuesday night 2m net and someone came back to me after i passed traffic and they were like "please ID" and i felt kinda bad but i honestly wasnt sure if i was doing it wrong or if they were being overly strict about it. the NCS didnt say anything so i dont know who was right. been licensed about 8 months so still figuring out the unwritten stuff too not just the rules in part 97

yeah the ALC thing tripped me up for the longest time too. I had mine way too hot for probably the first six months and didnt even know it. what finally helped me was getting a friend on a nearby repeater to give me honest reports while I adjusted in real time, way better than trying to figure it out from the TX monitor alone because the monitor has a slight delay and you can't really trust your own ear on your own voice anyway. one other thing I'll throw out there — if you're operating in the shack with any kind of fan noise or PC noise near the mic that can also contribute to sounding muddy or distant to people. I had a desk fan running and didnt realize how much it was bleeding in until someone finally pointed it out. switched to a boom mic with a cardioid pattern and most of that went away.

rubbermaid tote guy here lol, dont let anyone tell you it has to be fancy. mine is a big blue tote from walmart and it works fine. i did put some foam in the bottom for the radio and taped a little pouch inside the lid for adapters and fuses and stuff. the one thing i'd really say is whatever you build, actually deploy it in your backyard or driveway a few times before you need it for real. i thought my kit was solid until i set it up one afternoon just to practice and realized my power cable was too short to reach the battery with everything positioned the way i wanted, and i had the wrong connector for my antenna anyway. took like an hour to sort out all the little dumb stuff that seemed obvious when i was packing it at home.