Robert Williams

yeah hum in a DC receiver is just kind of a rite of passage honestly. mine hummed for weeks. ended up being a ground loop between my power supply and the audio amp section, i had two separate ground paths coming back to the same point and it was acting like a loop antenna basically. single point grounding fixed most of it. also are you running it off a wall wart? some of those are just awful, switching supply noise everywhere. i switched to a 7812 regulated supply and a lot of my noise floor problems just disappeared.

I went with the fan dipole route last fall and it wasn't bad to build but I definitely had to retune my 40m legs after I added the 80m ones, they pulled it off resonance by more than I expected. Just something to watch out for. The coil option always seemed fiddly to me in a different way - getting the coil positioned right on the element and weatherproofing it so it doesn't turn into a disaster six months later. Either way you're dealing with something.

so ive been licensed about 3 months now and i mostly just listen on the repeater and sometimes check into the local tuesday night net. last week i heard two guys having a conversation on 2m and there was a pause that went on for maybe 10 seconds and i wasnt sure if they were done or just thinking or whatever so i just stayed quiet. then the one guy came back and kept going so i guess i made the right call. but it got me wondering - when IS it actually okay to break in? like if someone calls QRZ or says 'any other stations' thats obvious but what about just a regular back-and-forth where they take a breath? i dont want to be rude but i also dont want to miss chances to actually get on the air and talk to people. especially if i hear something where i think i could add something useful to the conversation. also slightly different question - in a directed net, do you always have to wait for net control to call you or can you just check in whenever theres a gap? i feel like i might have accidentally cut someone off last week and felt bad about it

yeah theres technically like 100+ official Q codes but honestly in everyday ham use you probably only need to know maybe 20 or so to get by. the ones you'll hear constantly on HF are QSL (confirmed/understood), QRZ (who is calling me), QRM (interference from other stations), QRN (static/natural interference), QSB (fading signal), QRT (shutting down/going off air), QSY (change frequency), QTH (location), QRP (low power), and QRO (high power). those right there will cover like 90 percent of what you hear on a regular basis. and yeah 73 is totally separate, that one goes way back to telegraph days and just means best regards or good wishes, same with 88 which means love and kisses and you'll mostly hear that between people who know each other well. there's also stuff like de which just means from in morse code context, so you'll see like W5XYZ de K4ABC meaning K4ABC is calling W5XYZ. once you start doing some CW it all clicks into place real fast.

so ive been sitting on doing the mars/cap mod on my ft-857d for like two years now and finally just did it last weekend. honestly wasnt as scary as i thought, just a couple jumpers on the main board. took maybe 20 minutes once i had the service manual pulled up on my laptop. what i actually wanted to talk about though is while i had the thing apart i noticed the stock fan barely spins during normal operation and the finals get pretty warm. i ended up swapping in a slightly higher CFM fan i pulled from an old PC and wired it to come on at a lower temp threshold. not elegant but seems to work. running digital modes for extended periods used to make me nervous but now it stays way cooler. anyone else messed around inside the 857 or similar rigs? curious if the fan mod is a known thing or if im just reinventing the wheel here. also did the mod affect anyones TX audio noticeably — i feel like mine might be slightly different but could just be placebo

hamstudy.org is genuinely the way to go, your friend gave you good advice. the question pool for tech is publicly available and the actual test is pulled straight from it so theres no surprises. i think a lot of people including me just grinded the practice tests for a week or two until they were consistently hitting like 85% or better and then went and took it the electrical theory stuff looks scarier than it is honestly. there are some ohms law questions but they follow a pretty predictable pattern and if you just remember E equals IR you can work out most of them. the part a lot of first timers trip on is the frequency/band stuff and operating procedures, just because theres more of it and it all starts to blur together. i'd say dont stress too much about deeply understanding every single concept right now, some of it clicks way better once youre actually using a radio. just get licensed and figure out the rest as you go

so ive been chasing T32 for like two years now and the pileup on that one was absolutely brutal, we're talking wall to wall signals for like 4 kHz up from where they were listening. I've read all the usual advice about timing and split operating and whatever but honestly most of it never really clicked until this past weekend when something finally just... worked. what changed for me was actually listening to the DX station way more carefully before even touching the mic. i spent probably 20 minutes just watching the pattern. the op was clearly favoring a pretty narrow chunk, maybe 1.5 kHz wide, and working stations in short bursts. once i figured out where the 'dead zone' was in the pile i started throwing my call there instead of on top of the big signal clusters. got him on like the 4th or 5th call which honestly felt like winning the lottery. running about 500W into a 4el yagi at 65 feet, so not a gunslinger setup but not a compromised station either. i feel like at some point throwing more power at a pileup is just adding to the noise. anyway curious if anyone else has kind of cracked the code on reading the DX op's pattern, feels like that's the real skill nobody talks about enough

yeah the SM-8 is a pretty low output mic compared to some others so people sometimes crank the gain too high trying to compensate which is kinda counterproductive. had the same issue when i first got my desk mic. one thing that helped me a lot was just recording myself with something like the Monitor function if your radio has it, or even just a cheap SDR on a dummy load so you can actually hear what youre putting out. sounds obvious but most people never do it and then they're guessing based on second hand reports

the jump is pretty manageable tbh. been a general for about 8 months and the test wasnt the hard part, figuring out what to actually do on HF after passing was way more confusing lol. like nobody tells you about all the unwritten etiquette stuff, finding a clear frequency, listening before transmitting, all that. so id say study enough to pass but also just be ready to learn a ton once you actually get on the air because its a different world from repeaters

wire type matters but not as much as people make it sound for a first build. stranded copper or copper clad is totally fine, solid copper is slightly better for permanent installs because it doesnt fatigue as fast in wind but honestly for learning purposes just use what you have. if the wire has decent conductivity youre good. 22 feet for an inverted V on 40 is a bit low but its not gonna be a boat anchor either. youll lose some low angle radiation which hurts DX but for regional contacts and nets its perfectly workable. i ran one at about 25 feet for years before i put up a proper tower and worked plenty of stuff. the angle of the legs matters too — try to keep them at least 120 degrees included angle between them if you can, shallower angles start killing your radiation resistance. on the balun question — technically you should use a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint to keep RF off the coax shield, otherwise the feedline becomes part of the antenna and does weird things to your pattern and can cause RFI in the house. that said i know guys who have run dipoles for years with no balun and they work fine. for a first build id say just get it up and see how it tunes, you can always add a choke later. winding a few turns of the coax into a coil near the feedpoint helps some too if you dont want to build or buy a balun right away

so ive been at this cw thing for about 3 months now and im stuck somewhere around 8-9wpm and it feels like a wall. i can copy at 5 no problem, like its almost too easy at that point, but the moment i push it up to 10 or 12 i start losing letters and then i panic and lose the whole word and then the whole sentence. its frustrating because i KNOW the letters, i can do them in my head fine but when theyre coming at me faster it all falls apart. been using the lcwo site mostly, doing the koch method. also tried some youtube videos where they send actual qsos. my goal is eventually getting to 20wpm because i want to get on 40m cw and actually have real contacts, not just the super slow beginner stuff (though nothing wrong with that obviously). just curious how long it realistically took other people to make that jump. like is 6 months reasonable? a year? i dont want to give up but some days it feels like im not moving at all.

yeah this happens to everyone when they're starting out, dont sweat it too much. the 'is this frequency in use' thing is genuinely what most experienced ops do, especially on HF where propagation means you might not hear both sides of a QSO. like someone could be in the middle of a contact with a station that's just not making it to your location, so from your end it sounds totally silent. as for net schedules, the ARRL has a net directory on their website and there are a few other databases floating around. also worth just sitting on 40m for a while at different times and getting a feel for what normally happens where. 7.200-7.300 is phone and you'll start to recognize the regular nets after a bit. some guys are pretty grumpy about it but honestly most people understand if you just say sorry and move on, nobody expects new hams to know everything day one

i keep meaning to try SOTA but havent pulled the trigger yet. did you use the spotting network or just call CQ cold? i always wonder how long it takes to get contacts if nobody knows youre there

i was in the exact same spot about a year ago and ended up getting the Radioddity GD-77 which is DMR capable so i could grow into digital modes if i wanted to. not sure if that matters to you but just throwing it out there. local club members ended up helping me program it which made things way easier than fighting the software alone lol

i ran mine for about a year just on a 40m inverted V and it was great honestly. 80 gets a little rough when the QRN is bad but thats more the antenna situation than the radio. the noise floor on the 7300 is low enough that you start to realize how much of your noise is actually coming in through the antenna and not the radio itself, which is kind of annoying because then you want to fix that too lol the USB grounding thing bit me too when i first set it up for FT8. ended up being a ground loop between the radio and the laptop. just get a cheap USB isolator if the ferrites dont fix it, they're like $15 and save a lot of headache.