Robert Moore66

yeah the collins filter makes a real difference, did that on mine probably 4 years ago. the 500hz is nice but i actually went with a 300hz because i do a lot of qrp cw stuff and i wanted it as tight as possible. some guys say 300 is too narrow but honestly once you're used to it you don't want to go back. for the TX audio thing you're talking about, there was a mod floating around involving changing a capacitor in the mic preamp section that supposedly opens up the high end a bit and gets rid of some of the boxy sound the 857 has stock. i want to say it was on eham or maybe the qrz forums but yeah finding it now is a pain. if you poke around k0bg's site he might have something or at least a link that still works. the stock TX audio on that radio is honestly pretty mediocre for SSB, so anything that helps is worth trying IMO.

CQ WW was my first real DX contest too and yeah it's a step up from field day for sure. honestly the best thing i can tell you is dont try to run if it's not working, there's zero shame in search and pounce your whole first time through. you'll still work a ton of stations and you'll learn where the DX is hiding on each band. 15m and 20m are probably going to be your best friends depending on propagation that weekend. for the exchange just remember it's your signal report and your CQ zone, that's it, nothing complicated. zone 4 or 5 probably depending where you are. just have it written on a sticky note next to the radio until it becomes automatic. and dont stress about rate, your first WW is really just about figuring out how the whole thing flows. log everything even the dupes because sometimes the software catches stuff you dont. good luck and have fun with it

yeah theres no hard rule that says you HAVE to use phonetics every single transmission, its more of a when-it-helps thing. on a clear local repeater where everyones coming in 59 its kind of overkill to spell out your whole call phonetically, people just say it and move on. but on HF especially when the band is noisy or youre working DX it makes a huge difference, the other station might only catch half your call and phonetics just make it way less ambiguous. X is indeed Xray by the way, one word. the full NATO set is worth just memorizing cold so you dont hesitate mid-transmission, theres a handful of ones people trip up on like November for N and Uniform for U. and honestly using the wrong word, like saying Xavier instead of Xray, most people wont care much on a casual ragchew but in contest or emergency traffic situations it can cause real confusion because not everyone will know what youre substituting. stick to the standard and it becomes muscle memory pretty quick.

4 QSOs still counts, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. i chased a guy last spring who literally had a dying radio and terrible audio and we still made it work because we both wanted the contact. thats kind of the spirit of it tbh. also the linked dipole is solid choice, ive been using one for two seasons and its served me well. some guys swear by the end fed halfwave setups for SOTA because theres less to fiddle with but honestly whatever gets you on the air fast is the right answer when your battery is dying lol

so ive been working on CW for about 8 months now and i feel like i hit a wall around 10wpm and just cant seem to push through it. started with the Koch method back when i first got licensed and got all the characters down pretty quick, was feeling good about myself at 5wpm and worked my way up to about 10 without too much trouble. but now its like my brain just freezes up when things get any faster than that. ive been using the LCWO website mostly and doing some of the code groups but honestly sometimes i wonder if im going about this the wrong way. i sit down for maybe 20-30 minutes a day and by the end im frustrated more often than not. a buddy at the club said i should try just listening to actual QSOs on the air even if i cant copy everything, just to get used to the rhythm of it. is that actually useful or is it just gonna mess me up more at this stage? my goal is eventually 20wpm for general operating, not trying to be a contest superstar or anything. just want to be comfortable having a ragchew on CW. any advice from people who got through this hump would be really appreciated

so ive been at this for about 8 months now and started from basically zero, got up to 5wpm pretty fast which felt great, then 8, then 10 and i was feeling really good about it. but somewhere around 13-14wpm i just hit this wall and its been like two months and i feel like im not really improving anymore. im doing lcwo every day pretty much, maybe 20-30 minutes, and i can copy okay at 13 but as soon as i push to 15 it just falls apart. like i'll get the first couple letters of a word and then miss the next character because im still thinking about what i just heard. i know the answer is probably just more practice but wondering if anyone else went through this same plateau and if there was something specific that actually helped them break through it. currently using farnsworth timing with character speed at 20 and word speed around 13.

gpredict with hamlib and the 817 — i got this working but it took an afternoon. you need the right baud rate set on the radio (4800 i think, or maybe 9600, check what your radio menu says) and then in gpredict under interfaces you set up a radio with the correct port and make sure youre running rigctld as a daemon first before gpredict tries to connect. the ordering matters for some reason. honestly though even when it works the doppler correction only updates every few seconds and for SSB it can sound a little steppy. works fine for the low passes where doppler isnt moving as fast, less great right at AOS when the rate is highest. FO-29 was the one i really noticed it on, AO-73 might be a bit more forgiving i cant remember the exact transponder bandwidth offhand.

honestly for your setup i'd say try it but go in with realistic expectations. the big rate gains from SO2R come from using the second radio to find a new mult or keep a frequency warm while you S&P on the other one, and yeah the guys with big antennas get more out of it just because they can hear more to begin with. that said even with a tribander you can still get meaningful gains on the mults side, maybe not as dramatic on raw rate. the filtering thing is real and i wont sugarcoat it. if youre transmitting on 15 with the K3 and trying to receive on 40 on the 7300 at the same time, you need some serious bandpass filtering or youre just gonna blow the front end of the second radio or at minimum hear nothing but your own signal. the 4O3A or Array Solutions stuff works but its not cheap. some guys run interlocks so only one radio txs at a time which sidesteps the worst of it but then youre not really doing full SO2R. for sweepstakes specifically i actually think SO2R helps a lot because hunting mults is such a big part of the score. run on one radio, hunt sections on the other. even with your modest station that could add maybe 20-30 mults over the weekend if youre disciplined about it. worth trying at least once before you decide its not for you.

so ive been building a direct conversion receiver for 40m, been at it for about three weeks now and finally got something that actually makes noise when i hook up an antenna. problem is theres birdies all over the place, like every 10-15 khz or so i get these tones that dont go away no matter what band im listening to. im using a NE602 as the mixer and a LM386 for audio. built it on ugly style construction on a piece of copper clad. the oscillator is a colpitts design from that EMRFD chapter on direct conversion stuff. vfo seems pretty stable once it warms up but i honestly dont know if my layout is causing the birdies or if its an IF issue or what. ive got no shielding on anything right now, just the board sitting open on my workbench. tried bypassing the power supply rails harder but didnt seem to help much. anyone dealt with this before with the 602? ive seen people mention that chip can be sensitive to layout but not sure what to actually do about it.

yeah i went two years ago i think, it was alright, not huge but the swap meet part had some decent stuff. a guy was selling a whole box of PL-259s and random adapters for like five bucks, stuff like that. the inside tables are hit or miss honestly. dont expect a big dayton-type thing but if your close enough its worth a couple hours. i think they usually have a license exam session too if thats any use to you

So i finally did my first parks on the air activation last weekend at a local state park, K-4556 i think it was. Been a ham for about 8 months now and kept reading about POTA and figured why not give it a shot since the park is literally 20 minutes from my house. I brought my FT-891 and a random wire antenna i threw together, figured id just string it up in a tree and see what happened. The whole setup took way longer than expected, like almost an hour just messing around with the feedline and getting a decent SWR on 40m. by the time i was actually ready to call CQ it was almost noon and the bands felt kind of dead to me, or at least deader than i expected. I did eventually get my 10 contacts which i know is the minimum for a valid activation, but it took probably 45 minutes of calling and waiting which felt like forever. A couple hunters were really patient with me when i fumbled around with my logging and i appreciated that. One guy even slowed way down when i couldnt copy his callsign, just a real nice experience overall despite the rough start. Anyway just wanted to share. Any tips for making the process smoother next time? Especially curious if theres a better time of day to activate or if 40m is even the right band to start on.

honestly you're overthinking it and that's totally fine, everybody does at first. when the net control opens check-ins just key up and give your callsign phonetically, nice and clear, and then just wait. net control will come back and acknowledge you and usually ask if you have any traffic or if you're just checking in for the roll call. just say 'no traffic, just checking in' or however it naturally comes out and that's literally it. some nets are a little different — some want your name and location in the initial check-in and some dont. after lurking for three weeks you probably have a decent feel for how this particular net runs. if the other people are giving names you can throw yours in too, nobody's gonna ding you for giving too much info but cutting it too short can sometimes cause confusion. the main thing is to just do it, you will fumble it slightly the first time and then it'll be completely natural the second time. net control folks are usually really patient with newcomers, they've heard it all. for finding other nets, the ARRL has a net directory on their website and there's also a site called the nets page or something like that — been a while since i looked but it was still up last i checked. also check HF if you have the privileges, there are tons of daily nets on 40m and 80m that are really active.

yeah that stray dit thing is super common when youre learning paddles and honestly it took me probably a year before it mostly went away. a big part of it is just releasing the dit paddle a tiny bit late — your thumb is still holding slight pressure when the keyer is still listening. the iambic mode A vs B thing does matter but its subtle, mode B will send one more element if you release both paddles at the same time which can actually make this worse for some people, so try switching to mode A if youre on B right now. also with cheap paddles the contact gap adjustment is really important, if the contacts are too close even a tiny finger tremor closes the circuit. theres usually a small setscrew on each paddle arm. try opening the gap up just a hair more than you think you need and see if that helps. i went through two or three budget paddles before i understood that half my bad sending was the paddle and half was me, hard to tell which is which sometimes.

so i just passed my technician exam last week and im already going down the rabbit hole of trying to pick my first handheld. theres so much out there and everyone seems to have a really strong opinion about everything which makes it harder honestly. i keep seeing the Baofeng UV-5R mentioned everywhere and people either love it or act like youre an idiot for even considering one. then someone at my local club mentioned the Yaesu FT-60R and another guy swore by the VX-6R. i dont really know what i actually need yet, i just want something i can use on local repeaters and maybe take camping. budget is probably under $150 but i could stretch a little if it makes sense. is the Baofeng really that bad or is it just radio snobs being snobs? and whats the actual difference between spending $30 and spending $150 on an HT? genuinely cant tell if the cheap ones are fine or if ill regret it in 6 months.

looks like a solid start honestly. one thing i'd add is some kind of feedline adapter collection -- like a little baggie with a PL-259 to SO-239, maybe a BNC adapter or two. you show up somewhere and need to hook into their existing antenna setup and your connectors dont match, thats a bad day. also maybe a short patch cable. I went through the same thing about a year ago when I joined our local ARES group and the biggest thing I learned was just to actually take the kit out and use it before you need it. set it up in your yard a couple times, make some contacts off battery, see how long everything lasts. you'll find the gaps real fast that way.

so i've been lurking on here for a while and finally took the plunge and built one of those 4state QRP kits, the one for 40m. took me about two weekends to put together mostly because i kept second guessing my solder joints and had to go back and redo a few of them. anyway got it all together, hooked it up to my end fed half wave out the window and figured i'd just listen for a bit before actually trying to transmit. well about 20 minutes in i heard a CQ from a station down in florida, i'm in ohio so figured why not just try, i mean worst case nobody hears me right. put out like 4 or 5 watts and the guy came back to me first call. i genuinely had to double check he was actually calling my callsign because i couldn't believe it worked that fast honestly. we had a solid 10 minute QSO, he gave me a 559 which felt pretty great for something i built on my kitchen table. anyway just wanted to share because i know this forum helped me a lot when i was trying to decide if QRP was worth getting into. it really is. the whole experience of making that contact with a rig i actually built myself was something else. now i'm already looking at the 20m version of the same kit because of course i am

honestly? the 590SG has a better roofing filter setup than the 7300, at least on paper. the DSP on the icom is great and the waterfall is addicting once you start using it, ill give it that. but for ragchewing on 40 you probably wont notice a huge difference in actual on air performance. ive used both and the kenwood just feels more solid somehow, hard to explain. if you were doing contesting id say maybe reconsider but for casual SSB work you might just be chasing the shiny thing. that said if you can sell the 590 for a decent price and only have to make up like 200-300 bucks out of pocket, its not a terrible move just for quality of life in the shack.

hamstudy.org is honestly probably all you need for the technician exam, thats what most people use these days and it works really well. it pulls from the actual question pool that the test uses so youre studying the real stuff. just keep doing practice tests until youre consistently hitting like 85% or higher and youll be fine on the actual exam. the math is pretty minimal, a couple ohms law questions but the site explains everything. i studied maybe a week doing 20 or 30 minutes a night and passed with only a couple wrong. the ARRL technician manual is good if you actually want to understand the why behind things but its not required just to pass the test. find a local club near you that does testing sessions, most of them are pretty welcoming to new people and the test is only like 15 bucks.

same here, 17m has been pretty good too if you havent tried it. less traffic so you can actually hear whats going on without the chaos

so ive been trying to work FO-29 for about three weeks now and i cant seem to close a contact. i can hear the downlink fine on 435.795 USB, signals are decent when the bird is above maybe 15 degrees elevation, but when i transmit on 145.950 USB i just cant find my own signal on the downlink. i know the transponder is inverting so LSB up and USB down but ive read conflicting stuff about whether FO-29 is actually inverting or not at this point. my setup is a ft-847 with a pair of yagis on a G-5500 and im running gpredict for tracking. doppler correction is manual right now which is probably part of the problem. the az/el rotator seems to be following the pass okay but im not super confident in my antenna calibration. anyway the main thing is i cant hear myself in the passband at all even at like 10 watts. either im way off frequency or the bird just isnt hearing me, not sure which. anyone work FO-29 recently and know if the transponder is even active these days? i feel like im chasing a dead bird half the time

yeah i just started doing portable stuff with a similar setup, i have a mountain topper radio not a kit but same idea. one thing i noticed is that conditions matter SO much more at QRP levels than they ever did running 100 watts from home. like a mediocre band day at home is basically a dead band when youre at 5 watts. i had a trip planned to a summit last month and the bands were just garbage, got like 2 contacts in 2 hours which was frustrating but honestly kinda taught me a lot about actually reading propagation before i go out. anyway what frequency you been hanging out on? i might listen for you sometime

so ive been trying to get winlink working properly for a few weeks now and im pulling my hair out a bit. setup is a kenwood ts-590sg into a signalink usb, running vara HF. i can connect to the RMS gateway fine, session starts, starts pulling down the messages and then just... drops. sometimes at like 30% sometimes it'll get to 80% before it craps out. the gateway im hitting is about 400 miles away which i didnt think was too far for 40m during the evening. i checked the signalink levels and i dont think im overdriving it, the waterfall looks clean. ALC is barely moving. i set up the winlink express client fresh last week thinking maybe i had a corrupted install but same behavior. my question is basically is this a propagation thing or is there something about how RMS sessions work that im missing -- like does the gateway have a timeout that im hitting, or could it be my RF path is marginal and VARA is just giving up. any ideas appreciated.

honestly the single biggest thing i ever did for my SSB audio was just monitor myself on a second receiver. like actually listen back in real time on an SDR or a second radio while you transmit. you hear things you just cannot hear from the other side of the mic. i was convinced my audio was clean for like a year and then i finally listened back and there was this weird resonance every time i hit certain vowels, turned out i was just too close to the mic. mic technique is so underrated, people obsess over TX EQ settings and compression ratios and half the time the issue is theyre eating the mic or theyre 2 feet away and the preamp is cranked to compensate. consistent mic distance, talk across it not directly into it if youre using a dynamic, and then the EQ stuff starts to actually matter.

yeah messaging on APRS is honestly kind of frustrating when you first dig into it. the short version is that for message ACKs to work reliably both stations kind of need decent IGate coverage, because a lot of the time the message routing goes RF to IGate, through the APRS-IS network, and then back out through an IGate near the destination. if youre in a rural area with spotty IGate coverage then your messages are going out RF but maybe not getting injected into the IS, and the ACK path back to you is broken. the WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path is fine, thats pretty much what everyone uses. but if the only digi you can hit is 30 miles out and its not connected to the internet then youre basically RF only island. you can check aprs.fi and look at your station and see which IGates are hearing you, theres a little info section that shows heard-by. if you only see digis and no IGates in that list then thats your problem right there.

congrats on the first one, that feeling of getting your 4 contacts and knowing it counts never really gets old honestly. on your activation zone question — the AZ is defined as within 25 vertical meters of the summit, not horizontal distance, so as long as you were within that elevation band youre fine. the topo on the SOTA maps page will show it if you zoom in, and i usually just check it before i leave the car so i know roughly where im working. CW contacts dont count more for the activation itself, you still just need 4 QSOs with any mode on any band. the difference is some chasers prefer CW and youll often get a pileup faster if you put up a CW spot, especially on 40m. but for your log it all counts equally. and for spotting i switched to the Reflector app on android and it works pretty well with gloves, bigger buttons. some people just text a friend to post a spot for them which sounds silly but actually works great when its cold.