James Brown39

the tension adjustment helped me too when i was learning. also just want to mention — have you tried Koch method or anything like that for the receiving side? i ask because 12-13 wpm copy is actually pretty decent for 4 months in, so youre not as far behind as you might think. plenty of guys on 40m operate around that speed and are happy to slow down if you just send QRS in your exchange. dont be too hard on yourself about the sending, everyone sounds rough at first. first time i made a CW contact i sent my callsign wrong twice and just gave up and sent dit dit and called it done haha

so ive been lurking here for a while and finally decided to stop just reading about homebrew stuff and actually build something. picked a simple direct conversion receiver for 40m as my first project, mostly following the NorCal 40A schematic but making a few changes because i didnt have all the parts on hand. the main thing im worried about is the LO. im using a colpitts oscillator with a 7.040 MHz crystal i pulled from an old board, and im getting signal out of it but when i scope it the waveform looks kind of dirty — like theres a little shoulder on the rising edge that i cant figure out. not sure if thats a problem or if direct conversion receivers are just forgiving enough that it wont matter much for basic listening. also im using a SA602 as the mixer which i know some people love and some people hate, but i had a bunch of them and the datasheet made it seem straightforward. my audio chain after that is just a basic LM386 amp stage for now, nothing fancy. anyone built something similar and run into the waveform thing? or is that just something i should stop overthinking and just see if the thing works when i button it up?

yeah what he said about LoTW is right. i'd just add that a lot of logging software like Log4OM or even WSJT-X can auto-upload to LoTW and eQSL at the same time so you dont have to think about it much after the initial setup. i personally use both just because why not, takes like two minutes to configure and then its automatic. the paper card thing is kind of up to you. i still send and recieve them and i have a whole wall of them which is pretty cool ngl. but plenty of people go 100% digital and thats totally fine. if someone sends you a card just send one back, its good etiquette. you can get a small run printed pretty cheap at places like KB8RCR's card service or a few others, you dont need anything fancy especially starting out

yeah the stock mic thing is real, the HM-219 or whatever ships with the 7300 isnt bad but the proximity effect and the way most people hold it or position it makes the low end really bloated on SSB. what youll want to do is get into the menu and play with the TX tone settings — the 7300 has a decent parametric EQ built in and if you cut somewhere around 200-300hz and maybe add a tiny bit of presence around 2-2.5khz your audio will tighten up a lot. also check your ALC meter when youre transmitting, if its pinning constantly youre overdriving the finals and that adds distortion before any EQ even matters. a lot of guys set their mic gain way too high thinking louder = better but on SSB it really isnt, you want the ALC just barely moving into the yellow on peaks, not slammed. compression is worth looking into too but id get the basic gain staging right first before adding a compressor into the chain or youll just compress a bad signal into a consistently bad signal

congrats on deciding to go for it, DXCC is a lot of fun to chase once you get the bug. to answer your questions — yes you can absolutely still use paper QSLs for credit, lotw just makes it way easier and faster. when you submit you can mix and match, whatever you have confirmed either way counts. the initial DXCC application does have a fee and then each time you apply for additional credits (like going from basic to the next level) theres another fee, its not huge but it adds up if you do it frequently. i tend to batch mine up and submit maybe once or twice a year. WAZ is separate, thats through the CQ magazine organization not ARRL. completely different process and they have their own lotw integration now which helps. WAS is ARRL like DXCC. honestly the ARRL website explains most of it pretty well if you dig around, the rules pages are kind of dense but its all there.

honest answer — it really depends on what you mean by 'covering the area.' if youre mostly doing local ragchews on repeaters then the X50 or anything similar is probably fine and a yagi is overkill. but if you get into any kind of weak signal work or even just trying to chase gridsquares from a hilltop the yagi wins every time, no contest. the difference between 0dBd omni gain and even a modest 7 element on 2m is not subtle, especially when things start getting marginal. i do portable ops sometimes with a 9 element M2 on a camera tripod and just point it by hand — its not as annoying as it sounds once you get used to it. you figure out pretty quick where the signals are coming from and most of the time youre not rotating it every two minutes. the tradeoff for that gain is absolutely worth it IMO if youre doing any kind of distance work. for pure repeater coverage though, honestly just get a longer collinear. the X50 is decent but something like a GP-9 or the diamond X300 gives you a bit more and youll probably notice it on marginal paths. just make sure your coax is halfway decent or you'll give back whatever you gained

yeah they're pulling from different aggregator sources which is why you see the delay sometimes. DXwatch pulls from a bunch of the traditional DX cluster nodes like the old telnet cluster network, and QRZ does its own thing — i think they have some overlap but they definitely aren't the same feed. honestly for real-time stuff a lot of guys just telnet directly into a cluster node like W3LPL or one of the big ones. you can do that right in HRD if you dig into the settings a bit, just point it at a node close to you geographically and you'll see spots faster than any web tool. for android, try DXspider or look for DX Toolbox, i think thats the one your buddy might have meant. there's also one called Ham Radio Today that has a cluster view built in. honestly the web-based stuff on DXwatch is fine once you figure out the filters — you can narrow it down to just the bands you care about which helps a lot with the noise.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep hearing about all these different ways to confirm contacts and honestly its kind of confusing. like i know you can mail physical QSL cards which seems cool and old school but also theres LoTW through the ARRL and then theres eQSL and apparently some people use all three? i dont really understand why you would need more than one system i did set up an account on eQSL a while back and i have like 14 confirmations sitting there but i havent done anything with LoTW yet because the whole digital certificate process looked really intimidating when i tried to read through it. is it worth the hassle to get that set up or do most people just skip it also are physical QSL cards still a thing people actually want or is that kind of dying out. i made some cards through one of those online printers and they turned out nice but i havent mailed any yet because i wasnt sure about the whole bureau system and direct mail thing

yeah the RTL dongles get totally murdered by strong FM. i put a FM notch filter inline on mine and it helped alot but its still not the same as having better hardware underneath. the Nooelec ones come with a small filter kit i think. dont have the SDRplay myself but my buddy uses one for P25 decoding with DSD+ and op25 and he seems happy with it. runs it through SDR++ piped to virtual audio cable then into DSD+, works solid from what i saw at his place. the trunking stuff can get fiddly regardless of what radio you use tbh, its more about the software setup than the hardware once you have something decent.

so I finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest about 40 minutes from my house. ive been on the air for about two years now and kept seeing people talk about it on the clusters and in the newsletter but never really looked into it properly until a buddy of mine dragged me along on one of his activations back in the spring. we used his gear that time so last weekend was my first solo run. brought my FT-891 and an end fed strung up between two trees, ran about 25 watts because honestly the battery I brought wasnt huge and I wanted to play it safe. the reference I activated was KFF-2847 or something like that — its a national wildlife refuge and its absolutely gorgeous, there were herons everywhere while I was setting up which felt appropriate given the whole flora and fauna theme lol anyway I needed 44 contacts to qualify the reference and I was a little nervous because I only had about 3 hours before I had to pack up. ended up with 67 contacts in about 2 hours on 40m mostly with a few on 20m when 40 got a bit noisy. people are SO enthusiastic about hunting WWFF references, like genuinely seemed happy to be in the log which made it really enjoyable. couple guys called back just to say thanks which you dont really get in a typical pileup honestly wondering why I waited so long. anyone else here active in WWFF? im trying to figure out how the logging and uploading to the wwff.world site works, the documentation is a bit scattered and I got confused about whether I need to upload separately or if it goes through adif or what

oh man i remember my first activation, i was so nervous i forgot to actually say the park reference on half my contacts haha. the hunters calling other callsigns thing threw me off too at first. theyre definitely just hunting multiple activators, especially on a busy weekend there could be 30+ activations going on at once and people are just spinning around the band grabbing them all. once you get comfortable youll probably start doing that too when youre not activating, its kind of addictive. also welcome to the addiction, fair warning your log of "parks i need to activate" is going to grow way faster than you can actually go to them

so ive been a General for about two years now and honestly the HF privileges have been good enough that i never really pushed myself to study for Extra. but lately ive been running into those little slices of the bands that are Extra only and it gets annoying especially on 40 meters when things get crowded and all the good DX is sitting just below where i can operate. my question i guess is how big of a jump is the Extra theory stuff really. i did fine on the General but some of those questions looked hard when i was flipping through. like the filter design stuff and the math behind impedance matching, is that stuff you actually need to understand or can you just memorize the pool like most people do for the lower licenses. i dont have an engineering background at all, im a delivery driver, so heavy math is not really my thing

same boat as you were, just started messing with CW last winter. i'll say the just for fun aspect helped me a lot honestly, like i wasnt trying to make contacts i just wanted to decode stuff i heard. hamscope and similar software can decode for you on screen while you listen and that helped me start connecting what i was hearing to actual letters. kinda like training wheels i guess the ARRL has some stuff but i found it a bit dry. there's also a guy on youtube called david coursey i think who does beginner videos that arent bad. dont expect to be decoding ragchews anytime soon though lol took me like 4 months before i could copy callsigns at all reliably

yeah 20m has been something else this week. we had a big opening Tuesday evening and i worked into eastern europe with 50 watts which doesnt happen for me very often at this point in the cycle. anyway back to the radio — the price point is pretty steep but its not totally out of line when you stack it up against what kenwood and yaesu have been doing at the top end. my old 7600 is still working fine so i cant really talk myself into upgrading but i get why people are excited. let us know if you end up pulling the trigger

so ive been running a hustler 6BTV for about two years now and i just cant seem to get it dialed in on 40m no matter what i do. radials are laid out, i've got maybe 16 of them at various lengths, SWR sits around 1.8:1 at best which i know isnt horrible but the bands feels dead compared to when i was visiting a buddy who runs a simple wire dipole in his attic of all places and he was working stations i couldnt even hear. like that really got to me. so now im thinking about throwing up a simple center-fed dipole for 40m, probably just cut it resonant and run coax down to the shack. lot in the backyard is about 80 feet wide and maybe 120 deep so i think i could manage an inverted V if not a flat top. my question is mainly about height — i keep reading conflicting stuff about whether getting it up to a half wavelength is really necessary or if something like 30-35 feet is going to be close enough to make it worth the switch. i have a 35 foot fiberglass push-up pole already so that'd be the center support. also wondering if feedpoint impedance is going to be a mess with the inverted V configuration, like do i need a 4:1 balun or is 1:1 fine. i've seen people go back and forth on this and i honestly dont know what to believe anymore.

honestly the exam looked scarier to me than it was. i spent maybe 6 weeks going through the question pool on hamStudy and by the end a lot of the theory stuff started to actually make sense rather than just being random numbers to memorize. the math isnt that bad once you get a feel for it, mostly just ohms law variations and some basic trig for the antenna stuff. as for whether the privileges matter, depends on where you operate. on CW the extra portion of 40m can be noticeably less congested during contests which is nice. and 80m extra portion gets you a bit more breathing room too. but if youre SSB only and not contesting then yeah youre probably not missing a ton. i still think its worth doing just because the theory does stick around more than you'd expect, at least the general concepts. i actually understand my antenna tuner a lot better now than i did before studying for extra.

okay so i just passed my technician exam last week (finally lol) and now im trying to figure out what handheld to get. ive been down the rabbit hole on youtube and reading forum posts for like three days and im honestly more confused than when i started. everyone seems to have a different opinion and half the stuff people recommend is either discontinued or out of my budget. my main thing is i just want something reliable for local repeaters, maybe some simplex with the guys in my club, nothing crazy. ive seen a lot of people mention the baofeng UV-5R as a cheap starter but also seen a lot of people say to avoid it? and then theres the yaesu FT-65 and the kenwood TH-D74 which seems way overkill for what i need. just looking for a solid everyday HT that wont fall apart in 6 months. budget is maybe $80-100 but i could stretch a little if it really matters. any thoughts appreciated

yeah absolutely been there. for me it was about two years where the HF rig collected dust. what got me back was stumbling into a local nets on 2m just because someone at work mentioned it, nothing fancy, but talking to actual people nearby again reminded me why i got into this. sometimes you just need a different mode or band to shake things up, i started messing around with JS8Call and that was weirdly fun for a while

so ive been messing around with this idea for a few weeks now and i think im finally ready to actually try building it but wanted to see if anyone here has gone down this road before. basically i have an old ham-iv rotator that still works fine mechanically but the controller is kind of shot, the meter is flaky and sometimes it just doesnt stop where it's supposed to. instead of buying a replacement controller which honestly arent cheap, i figured why not build something around an arduino and just do it properly. the plan is to use a arduino mega since i need the extra pins, read the pot position from the rotator, drive the motor through a relay board, and then either control it from the shack PC over serial or maybe eventually hook a raspberry pi in there so i could do web-based azimuth control. ive seen the yaesu GS-232 command set mentioned a lot for this kind of thing and i think making it speak that protocol would let it work with most logging software automatically. main thing im not sure about is the motor control side — the ham-iv uses a 24vac motor if i remember right and i dont want to fry anything figuring that out. anyone dealt with this specifically or have a schematic they found useful? also curious if people think the pi is overkill for just the web interface part or if its actually worth having linux running there.

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after the storms we had last month i finally got serious about it. got a pelican case, my ft-857d, a few coax adapters, some misc cables i've accumulated, and a 35ah lithium battery i grabbed off amazon. also threw in a copy of my license and some local repeater frequencies i printed out. thing is i feel like im still forgetting something obvious. my buddy who does ARES stuff said i should have a dedicated notebook and some way to charge phones but beyond that he kind of trailed off and we got distracted talking about his new antenna. anybody gone through this process and have stuff they wish theyd thought of at the start? not looking for a perfect list or anything just curious what people actually find useful when it hits the fan

yeah the tech HF thing trips up a lot of new hams because the privileges are kind of scattered across the band plan chart rather than explained in plain english in part 97 itself. basically as a tech you get 80, 40, 15, and 10 meter CW on small slices of those bands, and then 10 meters opens up more with SSB phone and also some RTTY and digital modes above 28.3 MHz or so. the 10m phone segment is 28.3 to 28.5 which isnt huge but its something. the ARRL band plan chart is honestly the fastest way to look this up, they color code it by license class and its way less confusing than reading the actual CFR text. part 97.301 is where the privileges technically live but yeah its dense. digital modes fall under the same frequency limits as the other modes for the most part, the mode restrictions are more about which segments allow which emission types rather than digital being some separate category.

honestly the question pool looks way scarier than it actually is. the tech exam is only 35 questions pulled from that pool and you need 26 right to pass, so theres actually a decent amount of wiggle room. HamStudy.org is what most people recommend and it really does work, it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those. the Gordon West study guide is pretty popular too if you want something physical to flip through, some people like having a book. dont stress too much about fully understanding the math behind everything like the ohms law stuff, though honestly if you spend like 20 minutes with it you can usually just remember the formulas. the regulatory and operating procedure questions are mostly just common sense once you read through them once or twice. give yourself a couple weeks of casual studying and youll probably be fine

im in almost the exact same situation lol, started messing with FO-29 a few months back. the doppler on the uplink vs downlink confused me for way longer than i want to admit. one thing that actually helped me was just doing a few passes where i wasnt even trying to make a contact, just listening and tracking my own signal to understand how everything drifts. feels like a waste but i learned more from those passes than any of the ones where i was frantically trying to call CQ. also gpredict with CAT is totally the way to go like the other guy said, night and day difference once you get that set up.

honestly just jump in, worst thing that happens is you make some contacts and have fun. sweepstakes is actually a good one for newer operators because it keeps you domestic so youre not dealing with crazy pile-ups from dx stations at 3am. the exchange is a little weird at first (there's like 5 or 6 pieces of info you swap) but you get used to it fast your 7300 is a great radio for contesting by the way, the bandscope alone makes it so much easier to find activity

the accidental touchscreen thing drove me crazy for the first month too. i ended up just being really deliberate about where my hand goes. you kind of develop a habit eventually but yeah its not ideal when youre in the middle of a pileup and suddenly your filter bandwidth changed. re: the tuner — totally agree, its more of a convenience feature than a real wide range tuner. i think icom rates it at like 3:1 which sounds okay on paper but in practice anything remotely weird and it gives up. im running an outboard tuner too. honestly at this point the internal one just handles my fan dipole and thats about it. the waterfall really does change how you operate though. i find myself just watching it sometimes instead of actually doing anything, which is maybe not the most productive use of time haha