Michael Moore99

yeah what he said about the inverted-V impedance thing is real, i built basically the same antenna last spring and spent two weekends trimming wire before someone told me that. ended up around 50 ohm when i got the angle right on the legs, somewhere around 120 degrees between them i think. your height is also gonna affect it more than people admit, ground reflections and all that.
one random thing — what kind of center insulator did you make exactly? i tried the PVC thing and had some issues with water getting into the drilled holes and causing weird losses in damp weather. eventually just bought one of those cheap egg insulators for the ends and used a SO-239 chassis mount for the feedpoint. way less headache.

yeah it takes a while honestly. the ones you'll actually hear all the time on HF are pretty manageable once you get used to them. QRM is man-made interference, like someone else's signal stepping on yours, and QSB is when your signal is fading in and out — so fading basically. QRN is natural static, like from thunderstorms. QRP means low power operation, you'll hear that one constantly. QSY means changing frequency. QRZ is asking who's calling, you'll hear that after a CQ a lot. and yeah 73 just means best regards, its been around forever. OM is old man which sounds rude but its just how guys refer to each other, YL is young lady. dont overthink it, after a few weeks on the air the common ones just click into place.

honestly this is something i struggle with, im still pretty new to chasing DX seriously and pileups kind of intimidate me. how do you even know where to transmit when the DX just says QSX 14.195 to 14.210 or whatever — do you just pick a spot randomly at first or what. i feel like im always stepping on someone when i try to find a clear frequency in the split.

yeah the buddipole vs wire thing is real. i've had buddipoles flop over in wind at the worst possible moment during a drill and it just looks bad. for a semi-permanent field site even a simple inverted v on a 31ft jackite pole is going to outperform it and take like 10 minutes to set up. just my two cents on that part.
on the generator question i honestly dont think you need to choose, run the lifepo4 as your primary and keep the honda staged. if you size the battery bank right youll probably never touch it but it's there. the eu2200i is quiet enough that if you do need to run it it wont kill everyone around you.

so ive been a ham for about three years now and always ran 100w from the shack, figured more power was always better and never really thought about it. but my buddy kept bugging me to try a QRP setup for a hike we did last weekend and i finally caved and threw together a kit with my little ubitx and a random wire up in a tree.
honestly i was not expecting much. i mean 5 watts into a compromised antenna in the middle of nowhere seemed like a recipe for frustration. but i worked 11 stations on 40m over about two hours including a guy in georgia (im in ohio) which felt pretty decent for the effort. the whole kit including the rig, battery, key, and antenna stuff fit in a small dry bag.
anyway the question i have is about efficiency — i notice the ubitx runs pretty warm even at 5w and i'm wondering if thats normal or if there's something i should be looking at. also curious whether people bother with a tuner when doing portable or just cut the wire for the band you want and call it a day. feels like a tuner adds weight and complexity but maybe its worth it for flexibilty across bands. what do you guys do

so i've been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now and finally decided to just go for it and take the technician exam. i downloaded the question pool from the arrl website i think, or maybe it was hamstudy.org, i forget. anyway there's like 400 something questions and i dont even know where to start. a friend told me to just memorize the answers without worrying about understanding them and another person said thats a terrible idea and you should actually learn the material. im kind of leaning toward just drilling the questions because i work a lot and dont have a ton of time but i also dont want to feel completely lost once i actually get on the air. does anyone have advice on what actually worked for them? i have like 3 weeks before the exam date

so i've been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about CQ WW like its this massive deal and honestly i had no idea what i was getting into until i turned on the radio last october during the SSB weekend just to see what the bands sounded like. absolutely insane. wall to wall signals on 20 and 15, stations calling CQ contest every few seconds, pile-ups everywhere. i just listened for like an hour with my jaw on the floor.
anyway i want to actually participate this year instead of just watching. i have a pretty modest setup, just a dipole up about 25 feet and a 100 watt HF rig, nothing special. is it even worth trying to make contacts or will i just get stomped by the big gun stations running kilowatts with yagis? i also noticed there's both a SSB and CW weekend, i cant do CW at all yet so i'd be doing SSB. any advice on what to do first time around, like when to operate or how to work the exchange and stuff?
also while im at it -- is ARRL Field Day kind of similar in feel? i saw a local club is doing a setup in a park next june and they invited new hams to come participate which seems fun. wondering if these events are totally different vibes or more or less the same energy.

ive had mine for about three weeks now and honestly the remote head is even better than i expected. ran the cable through the wall into the next room and it works great, very clean setup. coming from a 7300 the jump in receive performance is noticeable especially on crowded bands, 40 meters at night is a lot more manageable. the learning curve on the menus is real though, took me a good weekend to feel comfortable with everything. totally worth it if you can swing it financially but yeah its not a casual purchase
and yes 10 meters has been crazy good, worked into europe almost every morning last week just running 50 watts. its been a long time since the band felt like this and i keep telling people at our club to just try it, half of them got licensed in the solar minimum years and have never really seen 10 open up like this

honestly the theory stuff is more learnable than it looks. i was in the same boat, general for like three years and kept putting it off. what finally got me was just working through the hamstudy site every day for maybe 20 minutes. the oscillator and filter questions start making sense once you see them enough times, and some of it you genuinely start to understand rather than just memorize, especially the impedance matching stuff which actually clicked for me when i started thinking about why my antenna tuner was doing what it was doing.
as for whether it changes how you operate, kind of yeah. i dont think i suddenly became a better operator but i started paying more attention to what was actually happening rf-wise, like why certain times of day certain bands open up the way they do, the propagation theory in the pool helped with that. the extra band segments are nice but youre right that theyre not always packed. the cw end of 20 is usually where the dx is though if you ever get into that.

path looks fine for most areas, WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is what most people run. first thing id check is whether your audio levels are set right — the TM-D710G has a separate data band setting and if the deviation is off the packets might be transmitting but just getting rejected by igates or not decoded properly. there's a setting in the menu somewhere for the packet audio level, i forget the exact menu number but it's in the TNC section.
also double check that you have the correct band selected as the TNC band. the 710 can do crossband stuff and sometimes people accidentally have the TNC bound to band A when they think its band B or whatever. had that exact problem myself when i first set mine up, drove around for an hour before i figured it out

welcome to the hobby. i had a baofeng for about six months before i upgraded, it gets the job done for local stuff. if the repeater has echolink linked to it you can actually work people pretty far out even on that little radio which is kind of fun while youre waiting to get a better HF rig sorted out