Robert Williams

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i want to upgrade to general eventually but honestly the thing that keeps pulling me toward ham radio more than anything is CW. just sounds cool, always has. watched some youtube videos of guys doing 25-30wpm and its like another language. my question is where do i even start. i downloaded like 3 different apps and they all seem to do things differently and im not sure which approach is the right one. one of them starts you off learning letters super slow like individual dits and dahs, another one just throws words at you. i tried the slow one for a week and felt like i wasnt getting anywhere. is there a method that actually works or does it just depend on the person also does it matter what speed i start at, someone told me never go below 15wpm for the character speed even if the word speed is slow but i dont really understand what that means

Display artifacts are common if you didn't fully seat the main board ribbon connections. Take it apart again and reseat everything - learned this the hard way on my first attempt.

thats so cool, im still saving up parts to build something similar. did you have much trouble with the lipo pack or were you using like a commercial one? i keep going back and forth on whether to just grab a cheap 3s pack from amazon or actually build a proper battery setup with BMS and whatnot. dont want to burn the park down lol

ok so ive been trying to get into DX chasing more seriously and a buddy of mine told me to start using the cluster networks to find activity. ive been poking around DXwatch and also the spotting stuff built into QRZ and honestly im a little confused about how they relate to each other. like are they pulling from the same network or are they totally separate things? what ive been doing is just going to DXwatch and filtering by band and then when i see something interesting i go try to work it. sometimes the spot is like 10-15 minutes old by the time i get there and the station is gone or the pileup is just impossible. is there a better way to set this up so im seeing fresher spots? also does anyone use the apps on their phone for this or is the browser version good enough im technician class right now so HF is limited but ive been studying for general and want to be ready when i pass. just trying to learn the workflow before i actually need it i guess

honestly the jump from tech to general felt bigger to me than it actually was if that makes sense. i stressed about it for months and then sat down and passed it on the first try with maybe 3 weeks of studying. HamStudy is really all you need if you're consistent with it, just do like 20-30 minutes a day and let the spaced repetition do its thing. the Gordon West book is fine but i found i was basically just reading explanations for things i already memorized from drilling so it depends on how you learn i guess. for HF after you upgrade, yeah 40 meters is a solid starting point especially in the evenings. lots of activity, you can work pretty decent distances without needing a big antenna, a dipole up even 20 feet will get you somewhere. 20m is the classic DX band but conditions have been kind of all over the place lately so just play around. the thing nobody tells you is the first few HF contacts feel completely different from talking on a repeater, it just hits different when you make a contact with someone 1500 miles away on a wire in your backyard

yeah what he said. i'll add that the physical card thing really does become its own whole thing after a while. i started sending cards through the bureau maybe two years ago thinking it was kind of old fashioned and now i genuinely look forward to getting a stack of incoming cards every few months. there's something about holding a card from like a JA station or a 5B4 that a confirmation email just doesnt replicate for me personally. the bureau system through the ARRL is really cheap if you're in the US, way cheaper than direct mailing. only downside is it takes forever, sometimes six months to a year to get cards back. direct mail is faster but you gotta include a self addressed envelope and return postage which gets expensive fast if you're doing it a lot. ft8 contacts by the way — a lot of those stations have logging software that auto uploads to LoTW so your confirmations might already be piling up without you doing anything. check your LoTW account and see what's matched already, you might be surprised

the path thing is one of those debates that never really fully settles but here's what i'd say — in a rural area WIDE2-2 can actually make sense because you need those extra hops to reach a digi at all. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is designed for areas where there are fill-in digis that respond to WIDE1-1 first, if those arent around then that first hop is kind of wasted. you can check aprs.fi and click on your callsign then look at the raw packets, it'll show you which digis actually touched the packet and in what order. that gives you a pretty good picture of whats happening. the path shows up in the path field for each individual packet so you can see exactly who digipeated it. for the messaging, i actually use it semi regularly on nets and occasionally for emcomm stuff. its not fast and yeah the interface on the 710 is annoying to type on but it gets the job done. some of the newer software clients like Xastir or even APRS-IS stuff make messaging way more usable if you have a computer tied in.

so ive been using WSJT-X for FT8 for about a year now and it just logs to its own internal log which i then have to manually import into my general log and honestly its kind of a pain. a buddy at the club uses N1MM and swears by it especially for contests but i dont really do a ton of contesting, maybe a few times a year like the state QSO party and occasionally field day. someone else told me to look at Log4OM which i had never heard of before. my question is basically which one of these actually integrates well with WSJT-X in a way where the QSOs just show up automatically without me having to do anything. i know N1MM has some kind of UDP logging thing but ive never set it up. also is N1MM even worth learning if im not a hardcore contester or is it kind of overkill for casual use. Log4OM looked pretty feature rich from the screenshots but i couldnt tell if it was actively maintained or kind of abandoned

Don't be intimidated by the numbers! I did my first CQ WW last year with just 100W and a wire antenna. Tune, call once, listen, and log. Try working stations again on another band. The pace is fast but everyone's helpful.

I'm having issues with my FT-847 controlling Doppler correctly on linear transponders. I've been using SatPC32, but I'm finding the built-in satellite tracking option isn't properly compensating for both uplink and downlink frequency shifts during a pass. The tracking option in a radio cannot correctly compensate for Doppler, this is one reason why many QSOs drift gently across the linear transponder's available bandwidth. Has anyone found a reliable method for either manual tuning or better software control?

long shot but did you try a full factory reset? i know it sounds dumb but ive seen weird firmware glitches do strange things to output on these SDR-based rigs. probably not your issue if its consistent across bands but worth 30 seconds before digging into the hardware.

so anyway i went through this exact same confusion like two years ago lol. what helped me was just picking one to focus on first and i went with WAS because it felt more reachable. finished it in about a year and it kind of gave me the bug to go after DXCC properly after that. the nice thing is a lot of the contacts you make just naturally count toward multiple awards so you arent really wasting time working one vs the other one thing i'd say is make sure you get your LoTW account actually set up and active if you havent already because getting confirmations the old way with paper QSLs is slow and expensive and honestly most of the serious DX stations use LoTW now anyway

I'm having trouble getting my Kenwood TM-710G to decode APRS packets consistently. I can see packets coming in on the display (the PKT indicator lights up), but they either show garbled text or don't decode at all. I've set the TNC mode to PACKET, frequency to 144.390 MHz, and baud rate to 1200. The DCD lamp on the radio lights up when I hear APRS traffic, but I'm only getting about 30% decode success. Has anyone else encountered this issue with the TM-710G's built-in TNC?

the single yagi thing is real but you have to be realistic about who you can work. with JT65B on 2m and a single decent yagi, maybe 150-200w at the antenna, you can work the big stations — the guys running 4x or 8x yagi arrays with kilowatts. they have the link budget to close it even with your weak signal. what you probably wont do is work another single yagi station on the other end, the path loss just doesnt leave enough margin for that. its roughly 252 dB of free space loss on 2m EME, so yeah its not nothing. your preamp situation matters a lot more than people think. what preamp are you running? if its not a very low noise figure unit, like sub 0.5 dB ideally, thats actually where i'd spend money first before worrying about the rotor. the az/el mount is obviously needed but a good preamp right at the feedpoint makes a real difference. for the rotor you dont need anything exotic, a lot of guys use two separate rotors one for az one for el and just deal with the slightly awkward mounting. the tracking software like PstRotator handles the moon position fine. honestly just get on during a big EME contest weekend and listen first. you'll hear more than you expect if your preamp is decent and you'll get a feel for what the signals actually sound like coming off the moon.

roof center is almost always going to give you the best ground plane on a vehicle, fender mounts work but you're giving up a lot especially on UHF where the geometry actually matters. good move drilling it. on the collinear vs 5/8 question, honestly at mobile speeds and for what you're doing i'd say the pattern difference matters more than the gain numbers. a collinear like that Tram squashes the pattern down more, which sounds great on paper but if you're in hilly terrain or going through areas with a lot of vertical angle variation you can actually end up with worse performance than a simple 5/8. for flat highway commuting the collinear probably wins. for APRS specifically some guys swear by lower gain antennas because the packets are short and you want a more forgiving pattern. i'd just try both and see, an NMO swap takes five minutes.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and a buddy at my local club keeps telling me i need to try a contest before the year is out. i think CQ WW SSB is coming up end of october? i honestly dont even fully understand how the scoring works with the zones and multipliers and all that but he says just jump in and figure it out as you go. i run a pretty modest setup, IC-7300 into a G5RV up about 30 feet, nothing fancy. was wondering if anyone has tips for a first timer or if there are better contests to start with. ive heard Field Day is good for beginners but that already passed. also been seeing stuff about SOTA activations and wondering if those count toward any of the bigger contests or if thats totally separate anyway just curious what the contesting crowd thinks. dont want to embarrass myself on the air but also kind of excited to try it

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a decent amount of HF work, some VHF contesting, got pretty comfortable with weak signal stuff on 2m. but EME has always been this thing in the back of my head that i kept saying "maybe someday" about. well im finally at a point where i have a decent yard and some money saved up and i want to actually try it. the problem is every time i start reading about it i get completely overwhelmed. like some guys seem to be doing it with a single yagi and 100 watts and other guys have these massive arrays that look like they belong at a government facility. im not trying to do this half-hearted but i also dont have room for 4x20 element yagis or whatever. whats the realistic minimum to actually make contacts these days, especially with JT65 and stuff? is 2m the best band to start on or would 70cm actually be easier given the dish options? also curious how the scheduling side works now, do people still use the EME2 reflector or has that moved somewhere else

honestly the ones that tripped me up the most early on were QRM vs QRN — i kept mixing them up. QRM is interference from other stations, like someone transmitting on your frequency or nearby, and QRN is the natural static stuff like from thunderstorms or whatever. took me embarassingly long to get those straight lol. also QSK is full break-in CW mode which you probably wont need right away but youll hear it eventually

so ive been doing contests pretty seriously for a couple years now, mostly single band stuff on 20m and 40m, and i keep reading about SO2R and how the top guys are running two radios simultaneously and racking up insane rates. i get the concept but i honestly cant wrap my head around the logistics without actually sitting down and trying it. right now my rate peaks around 120-130 on a good run hour during something like cqww phone and then just falls off a cliff when the band shifts and i have to go searching. im thinking the second radio is mostly for hunting mults while youre running on the first one? like you keep a run frequency on radio 1 and use radio 2 to work a mult real quick and come back. is that basically it or am i oversimplifying. the other thing is the antenna switching and audio routing gives me a headache just reading about it. i have two transceivers already, an ic-7300 and an older ft-1000mp that i keep around, so hardware isnt totally out of reach. is it even worth the effort for a guy doing maybe 4-5 contests a year or is this one of those things where you need to be putting in 20+ hours a weekend to justify the complexity

I'm pretty new to HF, only got my general like 4 months ago, and honestly all the solar flux stuff still kind of confuses me. like I get that higher is better but I dont really understand what the K index does to propagation — someone at my club mentioned it but the explanation went over my head a bit. is there a good resource for learning this stuff or does it just come with time on the air?

14awg stranded from an extension cord is what half my antenna farm is made of lol. people overthink the wire type way too much. solid copper is marginally better for permanent outdoor installs because of corrosion but stranded works fine especially if youre just experimenting. what were you using for strain relief at the feedpoint? thats the part that always fails on me first, the solder joints take all the tension if you dont do something about it.

omg i was so nervous my first check in too, i kept second-guessing whether my audio was even getting out on the repeater lol. the state fair special event stations are actually really fun, i worked one last summer and the operator was super friendly, they usually have a pretty big pileup so just be patient and keep trying. sometimes they're running split or working by region so listen for a bit before jumping in.

welcome to the hobby, dont get discouraged this stuff trips up a lot of new folks. so CTCSS is basically a sub-audible tone your radio transmits along with your voice — the repeater uses it to filter out interference and only opens up when it hears the right tone. you wont hear it when someone else talks, its below normal audio range. for finding the right tone, check repeaterbook.com or radioreference.com — just search your area and it'll usually list the tone right there in the entry. set it on transmit only to start, that way you'll hear everything on the repeater but it'll accept your signal. DCS is similar concept just a different encoding method, most repeaters around here use CTCSS still. as for the linking stuff — most of what you're hearing is probably IRLP or EchoLink or maybe Allstar, those all use voip over the internet to connect repeaters together. there are some fully RF linked systems but internet linking is way more common these days. some people have strong feelings about whether internet linking is "real" ham radio but honestly i think its pretty cool especially during nets that span multiple states.

yeah i caught the tail end of that opening yesterday afternoon, was kicking myself for not being at the rig earlier. worked a KP4 on SSB which i wasnt even expecting, just happened to be scanning around and there he was 59 both ways. 6 meters man, when it opens it really opens. on the icom thing i saw that same post and honestly i take those rumors with a grain of salt until they show up on the actual icom japan site. people have been saying a 7300 replacement is coming for like two years now. that said i wouldnt mind seeing something with a bigger screen and maybe better filtering options built in, the 7300 is great but its showing its age a little compared to some of the newer SDR based stuff

i cant really speak to the yagi side of things but just wanted to say the X50 is a solid antenna and you might be surprised how much you can get out of it with a better feedline if youre not already running LMR400 or similar. i upgraded from RG8X on mine and it made more difference than i expected especially on 70cm where the loss adds up fast. 40 miles to a hilltop repeater on 2m isnt that crazy for a decent collinear if the path is clear, whats your terrain like between you and the site?