Michael Williams

yeah the band plan stuff is genuinely confusing when you first look at it. the ARRL band plan chart is way more readable than the actual Part 97 text, just google "ARRL band plan" and print it out and stick it near your radio, seriously saves headaches for techs on HF, you get phone privileges on 10m from 28.300 to 28.500 MHz, and then CW on portions of 80, 40, 15, and 10. the 40m CW segment is 7.025 to 7.125 if i remember right. the 200w thing is real, techs are limited to 200w PEP on HF, vs the 1500w that extras can run as for accidentally going out of band, look the FCC isnt sitting there waiting to nail a new tech who drifts 2 kHz. that said, willful or repeated violations are a different story and they do issue NOVs and fines for that stuff. just use the band chart and youll be fine. most rigs let you set limits anyway

the MARS angle is what finally got me to do the same mod on my 817 years ago. club coordinator basically said either do it or bring a different radio and that was enough motivation. went fine, just double check your work before you key up on anything outside the ham bands obviously. i wouldnt overthink the collins filter unless youre genuinely chasing weak signals or contesting. for emcomm stuff the stock radio is fine.

im in basically the same boat as you lol, been trying to learn for like 3 months now. what actually helped me click a bit was finding those learn CW online videos where someone reads a callsign or a word and shows you the waveform at the same time. something about seeing it visually while hearing it made it make more sense to me. still super slow though, maybe 5wpm on a good day. the LCWO site the other person mentioned is pretty good i think its just really repetative which i guess is the point

yeah the PTT sense line is absolutely the right call, not overengineering at all. you do NOT want to switch relays under load even for a fraction of a second, the contacts will arc and youll be replacing the relay board way sooner than expected. i learned that the hard way on a similar project a few years back. i ran almost the exact same setup on a TS-590S actually, using an arduino uno and a 4 channel relay board from amazon. the way i handled it was just monitor CTS or RTS on the CAT connection, most kenwoods pull one of those lines when in transmit but you might have to check the manual or experiment. alternatively just wire a simple optocoupler off the PTT line directly, that gives you clean isolation and the arduino just reads it as a digital input. whole thing cost me maybe 12 bucks in parts. as for pi vs arduino for this specific task, honestly the arduino is fine. the pi boots slower, needs a proper shutdown procedure, and is overkill unless you want to run a web interface to control stuff remotely or log to a database or something like that. if you just want reliable switching, stick with the arduino, less to go wrong.

yeah actually i do this more than i probably should admit. sometimes i fire up the rig just to have it on in the background while im doing other stuff around the shack. 17m has been real nice for that lately, good propagation in the evenings and you get a mix of everything. dont even have the mic keyed up just vibing with the noise honestly

omg the gate story is sending me, im glad the ranger was cool about it. i did my first activation a few months ago and was so nervous i forgot to write down half my contacts properly and had to reconstruct them from memory later. ADIF logging apps are a lifesaver, i use hamrs now and it makes the upload way easier than my paper log disaster was.

i went the other direction and kept my 590 and just added a SDRplay for the panadapter functionality. works pretty well and i already knew the 590's quirks so felt easier than learning a whole new rig. but honestly every time i sit down at someone else's shack with a 7300 i do get a little jealous of that waterfall. maybe someday.

I just passed my Tech two weeks ago and was in the same boat! The question pool has 10 sub-pools, so I studied one section at a time until I mastered it, then moved to the next. After studying individual topics, I took practice exams to see my weak areas. The math questions seemed scary but you can actually pass without getting any of them right!

Don't overlook the Xiegu G90 - it's only around $400 and covers 160-10m with decent performance for a new General class op. The Ten-Tec Century 21 and Xiegu G90 were among other models mentioned. Saves you money for a better antenna system, which is honestly more important than the rig itself.

yeah the pattern thing is real and most people never bother to listen long enough to figure it out. i spent years just throwing my call in and wondering why i couldnt break pileups and then an old timer basically told me to shut up and listen for ten minutes before i ever keyed up. changed everything honestly. the other thing that made a huge difference for me was timing my call to END right as the DX finishes sending, not start when he finishes. a lot of guys key up the instant they hear the final dit and by the time your callsign is actually hitting his ears everyones already on top of each other. if you back time it so your call completes right around when he lifts the key you can sometimes punch through the leading edge of the pile before it gets dense. takes some practice to get the rhythm but its worth messing with partial calls are kind of a mixed bag in my experience. some DX operators love fishing with a partial, others get annoyed and just move on. you gotta watch how the operator works before you decide if thats a tool worth using. some guys will come back with just the suffix and work ya, others seem to ignore partials entirely. read the operator like you said.

hamstudy is honestly where its at for drilling but the guy who said read something first wasnt wrong either. i used the arrl ham radio license manual when i studied and it actually explains the why behind stuff instead of just throwing questions at you. helped me a lot with the electrical theory because once you understand what voltage and current are actually doing the formulas make way more sense and you stop blanking on them. the ohms law stuff does show up on the exam and its usually a few questions, not a ton, but enough that you want to be comfortable with it. the antenna length calculations too, those come up. honestly the formula E=IR and the basic resonant antenna stuff are worth spending an extra hour on just so theyre solid. regulations and operating procedures are a big chunk of the pool too so dont neglect that either. 3 weeks is plenty of time if you put in like 30 minutes a day. do some reading, then drill on hamstudy, and pay attention to which categories youre weak in and focus there toward the end. you got this

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the storms we had last month that knocked out power for three days I figured its time to stop procrastinating and actually put something together. I got a Pelican 1510 case from a buddy and I'm starting to load it up but I keep feeling like I'm missing something obvious. Right now I've got my Yaesu FT-857D, a SignaLink for digital, a 20ah LiFePO4 battery, and I've been running it all off a little power distribution block from West Mountain Radio. threw in some coax adapters and a basic dipole kit. Also tossed in a notebook and pencil because yeah sometimes the simple stuff matters. I feel like the antenna situation is where I always get fuzzy. Like for actual field deployment for ARES stuff, what are you all running? I keep going back and forth between just a random wire with a tuner or something more purpose-built. Also wondering about documentation — like do you keep laminated freq lists or just trust your memory? I definitely don't trust my memory lol anyway if you've got a go-kit that's actually been used in a real activation please share what you wish you'd thought of earlier

congrats on the first contact, thats always a special feeling no matter the distance. dont sell yourself short either, 2 watts into a compromised antenna over any path is something to be proud of. for efficiency on qrp rigs the biggest gains usually come from the driver stage and how well matched your final is to the antenna system. a lot of homebrew designs run the final transistor a bit conservatively for reliability which eats into efficiency. if your using something like a 2n2222 or similar in the final you might try tweaking the bias point slightly, but go slow and watch your current draw. also worth double checking your low pass filter, a poorly tuned lpf can rob you of power too. 65% isnt bad for a first build honestly, some commercial rigs dont do much better. whats your PA transistor?

hey welcome, you'll be fine honestly. for most local 2m nets you just wait for net control to say something like "net control is now accepting check-ins" and then you key up and give your callsign, usually just once in phonetics unless the band is noisy or net control asks you to repeat. something like "Whiskey four november bravo" and thats pretty much it. net control will acknowledge you and log you in and then you just listen unless you have traffic or a comment for the net topic if its that kind of net. some nets are just for practice or welfare checks and others have a topic or agenda, so it kinda depends on what type of net it is. the main thing is just listen to a full session first like you already did, you picked up on more than you think. as for the special event station thats a totally separate thing. someone gets a 1x1 callsign like W4S or whatever and they operate specifically for people to contact them and get a certificate or log the contact for an award. you just call them like any other station. it can be on HF or VHF depending on the event. check the special event station listings on the ARRL website, theres usually info on what bands and modes theyre using and sometimes a QSL card if you contact them.

so ive been messing around with an arduino mega for the past few weeks trying to get it to handle my antenna switching automatically based on what band i QSY to. the idea is it reads the band data output from my IC-7300 (the BCD lines on the ACC port) and then fires relays to switch between my dipole, vertical, and a 6m beam i just put up. got the relay board wired up and the arduino is reading the band data fine, but im running into this weird issue where the relays are chattering when i first key up. like theres a brief moment where two relays are both partially energized before one fully drops out. not sure if its a timing issue in my sketch or maybe the relay board itself is pulling too much current and browning out the arduino 5v line. using one of those cheap 8 channel relay modules from amazon so that could definitely be the problem. also been thinking about adding a raspberry pi to the mix to handle logging and maybe do some CAT control stuff through fldigi but not sure if thats overcomplicating things. curious if anyone else has gone down this road and what you ended up doing.

ok so i passed my tech exam about 3 weeks ago and ive been reading through part 97 trying to figure out what i can actually do. i keep seeing conflicting stuff online about whether techs can operate on certain HF bands. like i thought i read somewhere that techs get some HF privileges but then someone at my club meeting said that was only for certain modes and i got confused. also is there like a summary version of part 97 somewhere because reading the actual FCC document is kind of a lot and i feel like im missing things. just want to make sure im not accidentally doing something i shouldnt be

so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im kind of stuck around 13-14wpm. started with the Koch method using the G4FON trainer and got to 5wpm pretty fast, maybe 3 weeks, but now every time i try to push past 13 it just falls apart on me. like i can copy for a minute and then suddenly i miss one character and then im trying to figure out what i missed and i fall behind and then it just snowballs into a mess. i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day which i know isnt a ton but its what i have time for. my question is really just how long did it take people to get comfortable at 20wpm and is there anything that actually helped besides just grinding more time. ive heard about the Farnsworth method but im not sure i fully understand how that helps or if i should switch to it now or if i should have been using it from the start also not sure if it matters but im mostly practicing copy, i dont really do much sending yet