Christine Lee

yeah RF into the arduino is a real thing to watch out for, especially if your feedlines run anywhere near the control wiring. i built something pretty similar about two years ago — was using a nano at first but ended up going mega because i ran out of pins faster than expected. the relay boards you can get on amazon or aliexpress are fine for this, just make sure you get the optocoupler isolated ones, that isolation between the control side and the switched side is what saves you from a lot of headaches. i also put ferrite beads on all the signal lines going to the relay board and that cleaned things up a lot. for the CAT control idea — totally doable. if your radio puts out band data on the ACC port or serial you can read that pretty easily. i actually went the flrig + pi route myself and its honestly not that complicated once you get flrig talking to the radio. you can write a small python script on the pi that polls flrig for the current VFO and then sends a serial command to the arduino telling it which relay to throw. latency is not an issue for antenna switching obviously. one thing i would do differently if i started over is put proper bypass caps and maybe a small snubber circuit across the relay contacts because i had one relay chattering on me for a while and couldnt figure out why until i scoped the power rail and saw all this noise on it. just small stuff but worth doing right from the start.

so ive been a tech for like 3 years and just upgraded to general last month and i told myself i was gonna learn CW even though its not required anymore. just feels like the right thing to do i guess. anyway ive been using just the software stuff to practice receiving and im getting better slowly but i want to start actually sending too and i have no idea where to start with hardware. theres so many paddles out there and the prices range from like 30 bucks to several hundred dollars and i genuinely cant tell what the difference is beyond looks. do i need a fancy keyer built in or can i just use an external one. ive heard people say the MFJ keyers are fine to start and ive also heard people say theirs broke immediately so im confused. whats a reasonable first setup without spending a fortune. im practicing with the Koch method on LCWO right now if that matters.

so ive been chasing DX for about a year now and i keep hearing people talk about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly i wasnt totally sure how they all fit together until recently. i think i finally understand the basics but the QSL card thing is still tripping me up a little. like for DXCC specifically, do you have to have a physical QSL card for every entity you want credit for, or can you use LoTW confirmations for all of them? i've been logging to LoTW since day one which i thought was the smart move but now someone at my local club said some entities dont upload to LoTW and you basically have to get a paper card. is that true for most of the rare ones? also is there any overlap between chasing DXCC and working toward WAZ - like if i work a station in zone 14 that also happens to be a new entity for me, does that count toward both awards simultaneously or do i have to do something special to make that happen. feels like it should just work but i dont want to assume. been using TQSL for uploads and everything seems to be going through fine, just trying to figure out the bigger picture of how to actually apply when the time comes. any help appreciated, this stuff is more complicated than i expected when i first got my ticket

yeah the tech HF privileges are kind of a weird patchwork honestly. so basically as a tech you get CW privileges on a bunch of HF bands — 80m, 40m, 15m, and 10m i think — but the 10m situation is the one people always ask about because yeah you do get a small phone/SSB segment on 10m as a tech, its 28.300 to 28.500 MHz. thats the only HF band where you can actually do voice as a tech. everything else on HF for you is CW only until you upgrade. the ARRL website has a band plan chart that actually shows this pretty clearly, way better than trying to read the actual part 97 text which is kind of brutal to parse if you're not used to legal language. definitely worth bookmarking. and yeah your club guy is right that the phone segment thing is different by license class, the FCC splits up the band allocations that way specifically