James Wilson48

yeah man that's basically my whole hobby at this point lol. i gave up chasing awards a few years back and just kind of do whatever sounds fun that night. some nights its wspr just to see where my signal is going, other nights i park on a frequency and wait to see whos around. 40m ragchews are underrated honestly, you hear some wild stories from old timers

so the short version is you dont really NEED all three but a lot of folks use at least two. LoTW is the gold standard for award chasing — DXCC, WAS, all the ARRL awards run through it so if thats something you care about down the road you definitely want LoTW working correctly. the certificate thing is annoying to set up the first time but once its done you kind of forget about it. eQSL is totally separate and some people swear by it, some ignore it completely. it has its own awards and some operators only confirm there, so its worth having an account even if you dont check it constantly. the thing is LoTW and eQSL dont talk to each other at all so a confirmation on one doesnt count on the other. paper cards — honestly still very much alive, especially for DX. when a rare station sends you a card its something you keep. i have a whole wall of them. but yeah you dont have to send one to everyone, most people just send back when they receive one, or some folks do bureau cards which is cheaper if you're sending a lot internationally. dont stress about it too much, you'll figure out your own system as you go

honestly i just keep DXwatch open in a browser tab and it does the job for me. the QRZ cluster is fine but i find DXwatch refreshes a bit quicker and the filtering options are better if you want to narrow down by band or region. that said they're both pulling from the same underlying cluster network more or less so you're not going to miss something huge by only using one. the android apps i've tried have been hit or miss. DX Toolkit is decent but i found myself going back to the browser version just because it's easier to see more spots at once on a bigger screen. if youre portable or operating from somewhere without a laptop then yeah the app makes sense but at the desk i dont bother.

ok so ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now and figured id just ask because i keep reading conflicting stuff online. currently running a simple 40m dipole at about 25 feet, fed with RG-8X into an MFJ-949 tuner. works ok, gets me on the air, but my neighbor has a vertical (i think its a Hustler 6BTV or something similar) and he consistently seems to punch through pileups better than i do on 40 and 80. now i know 25 feet isnt exactly ideal for a 40m dipole — youre supposed to be at like a half wavelength up for it to really sing, which would put me at 66 feet and thats just not happening with my HOA situation. so im wondering if a vertical with a decent radial field would actually outperform my low dipole for DX, or if im just seeing confirmation bias because my neighbor runs more power. he has an IC-7300 and im on a 100w Kenwood so that shouldnt be a huge difference. has anyone actually done a side by side on this or is it just too situationally dependent to make a general call

check your port numbers - i had the same issue after a windows update messed with my firewall settings. also make sure you have the right multicast address in both programs, sometimes they get out of sync. what version of n1mm are you running?

so this has been driving me nuts for about three weeks now. the radio works fine when i first key it up, receive sounds great, sensitivity seems normal. then somewhere around the 15-20 minute mark the receive just... drops. like signals that were S7 are suddenly barely above the noise floor. transmit seems fine the whole time, SWR reads normal, put out full power, but nobody can tell anything is wrong on my end. then after maybe 5-10 minutes of being deaf it just comes back on its own. no reboot, no nothing. just starts hearing again like nothing happened. my first thought was a thermal issue somewhere, like a component that's marginal and drifts when it warms up. i pulled the top cover off and ran it with a fan blowing across the board and the problem still happened, though maybe it took a little longer. wasnt a controlled test though so hard to say for sure. radio is about 4 years old and out of warranty. i did have it outside in the car for a couple summers so maybe some heat damage at some point? anyone dealt with anything like this on the 7300 or similar rigs?

ok so i just upgraded to general a few weeks ago and im trying to figure out the 40m band but honestly the band plan stuff is confusing me more than i expected. like i know theres a difference between what the FCC says you can do and what the band plan says you should do but i cant tell which one actually matters or if ill get in trouble for ignoring the band plan part. also someone at my club said something about staying away from band edges and i dont really understand why. like if 7.125 is legal why would i not want to operate there. and whats the deal with 7.3 being the top, is that a hard stop or is there some wiggle room. sorry if this is obvious stuff just trying to figure it out before i get on the air and do something dumb