Jessica Williams53

so ive been running FT8 for about two years now mostly on 20m and 40m with a dipole in the attic and around 50w, and yeah it works great for getting contacts but lately i feel like its kinda... hollow? like you just exchange grid squares and signal reports and thats it, nobody actually says anything to each other
started looking at JS8Call because at least you can have a real conversation and it still has decent weak signal performance, the protocol is built on the same foundation as FT8 basically but slower and you can actually type a sentence. has anyone run both for a while and can tell me if JS8Call is actually usable for ragchewing or is it just too slow to feel natural
also curious how it compares on like actual sensitivity, i know FT8 gets down to like -24dB or whatever but does JS8Call get close to that or do you give up a lot there. running WSJT-X for FT8 right now and the waterfall setup is already there so the jump to JS8Call hopefully isnt too bad

so ive been messing around with APRS for a few months now and got my TNC-Pi talking to direwolf on a raspberry pi and everything seems to be working, im seeing packets come in on aprs.fi and i can track my car when im driving around which is cool. but now im reading about igates vs digipeaters and im starting to confuse myself.
from what i understand the igate just pushes packets to the internet (APRS-IS) and the digipeater actually retransmits RF packets so other stations can reach further. i've been running mine as RX-only igate mostly because i didnt want to cause interference or mess anything up while i was still learning. but my coverage area is kinda rural and theres a gap between two digipeaters that my path sometimes falls into and i lose tracking for like 20 minutes on a drive.
would it make sense to enable digipeating on my setup or is that something that needs more thought about paths and stuff? i dont really wanna cause QRM or be the guy who breaks everyones packets. also does anyone run a combined setup without issues or is it usually better to keep them separate

im in almost the exact same boat, got my general last year and just started getting into hf properly. i use the clublog livemap sometimes too which is kinda fun to just watch spots pop up around the world even if im not actively hunting anything. and yeah the dxsummit app is basically just the website in an app shell lol but it works ok for a quick check when im not at the radio.

so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im stuck somewhere around 10-11 wpm and it feels like a wall. i started with the Koch method using LCWO and got through all the characters pretty quick but now the speed building part is just... brutal. i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day which i know isnt a ton but its what i can fit in.
my main problem is i still have to think about some of the letters, like the less common ones Q and Z and Y, my brain just doesn't fire fast enough on those. everything else is getting better but those stragglers slow me down because i hesitate and then i lose the next character while im still processing the last one.
i guess my question is for people who made it to 20wpm — how long did it take, was there a point where it just clicked, and did you do anything different that actually worked. ive read a bunch of the usual advice but hearing real experiences would help. also wondering if i should just push the speed up and struggle through it or stay at a comfortable speed longer

so ive been following the IC-905 situation for like a year and a half now and it looks like some dealers are actually starting to get units in, at least thats what i saw on one of the facebook groups this morning. anybody here actually received one or know someone who has? im curious how the microwave bands are performing out of the box because thats the whole reason i was interested in the first place, the 10GHz module especially.
also kind of unrelated but the 6m opening last tuesday was absolutely wild if you were around for it, i was running barefoot into a cheap yagi i threw up last summer and still worked like 40 states in a few hours. band was just lit up. made me think i should actually pay attention to the propagation alerts more instead of just randomly turning the radio on and hoping something is happening.
anyway if anyone has hands-on time with the 905 or knows more about the shipping situation id love to hear it, the wait has been kind of brutal

yeah I had almost the exact same thing happen with my first 40m dipole, ends were too low and I couldnt figure out why the swr was terrible at the frequencies I actually wanted to use. ended up adding about 6 inches to each leg actually, not trimming — the ground was loading it and making it act electrically longer or shorter, I forget which way it goes honestly.
one thing worth checking is whether your coax has a choke or anything at the feedpoint. without a current choke the braid can radiate and basically becomes part of your antenna which throws everything off. I just wound about 8-10 turns of coax into a coil right at the feedpoint, nothing fancy, and it cleaned things up a lot. probably not your whole problem but worth doing anyway.

I've been monitoring my own signal with an SDR and notice my SSB transmission extends well beyond the expected 3 kHz bandwidth. An ideal SSB signal shows spectrum of about 70 Hz to 2700 Hz that's rather flat in strength throughout the passband, with no energy outside the passband.
At more than 6 kHz separation the distortion energy level should be at least -40 dB compared to the pass band signal. My signal appears to have significant energy at -30 dB up to 8 kHz from center frequency.
Running a TS-590SG with built-in processor on level 3, external Behringer compressor, and Shure SM58. This type of spectrum usage is not considerate regarding fellow contesters and could be subject to disqualification.
What's the most effective approach to identify and eliminate the source of these spurious emissions? Should I start by bypassing the external processor entirely?

Wire gauge shouldnt matter much for receive but for transmit yeah heavier is usually better especially on 80m where you're pushing some current. I use 12awg for anything 40m and below.
But honestly sounds more like your trees are the culprit - leaves falling, branches moving, moisture content changing in the wood. I have an inverted V that does the same thing every fall when the oak trees start dropping leaves. Just retune it and dont worry about it too much unless the swr gets really bad

had almost the exact same thing on my 897 a while back, different rig i know but similar architecture. turned out to be a cold solder joint on the driver board, totally invisible until i reflowed it. worth going over the board under good light with magnification if you havent already, especially around any connectors or anything that might have had mechanical stress. probably not your issue but took me two weeks of chasing more exotic faults before i found something that basic so figured id mention it.

went through almost exactly this same thing last year. what finally fixed it for me was realizing the RMS gateways i was picking were just... not that active. some of them show up in the list but they havent had a successful session in days. there's a gateway status page on the Winlink website where you can actually see recent activity and when a station last had a connection, worth checking that before you spend an hour trying to dial into something that might be offline or just in a bad location relative to you. also VARA HF vs VARA FM matters a lot -- if you're trying to hit a local gateway on VHF you need VARA FM and a different port config, they're not interchangeable. that tripped me up for a while too.

Wire gauge shouldnt matter much for receive but for transmit yeah heavier is usually better especially on 80m where you're pushing some current. I use 12awg for anything 40m and below.
But honestly sounds more like your trees are the culprit - leaves falling, branches moving, moisture content changing in the wood. I have an inverted V that does the same thing every fall when the oak trees start dropping leaves. Just retune it and dont worry about it too much unless the swr gets really bad