Robert Moore66

congrats that's awesome, i'm still working up the nerve to do my first one lol. quick question though — when you say you spotted yourself on pota.app, how does that work exactly? like do you just add yourself before you go out or can you do it from the field? i've been reading about POTA for a while and that part still confuses me a little bit.

went through almost the exact same thing two years ago, came from an older Kenwood and kept going back and forth on the 7300 vs waiting for something better. ended up just getting the 7300 and honestly for casual operating it is absolutely the right radio. the waterfall alone changes how you operate, you start actually seeing band conditions instead of just spinning the dial hoping something is there. the 7610 dual receiver thing is great but unless you're seriously doing SO2R or heavy contest work you're not gonna use it. and for a corner of a spare bedroom doing 40m ragchews... yeah the 7300 is plenty. the DSP and noise reduction on it is genuinely good, way ahead of where the 450D was when that came out. just buy it, you'll be happy.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech) and im still confused about some of the part 97 stuff. like i know i have HF privileges on 10m and a slice of 15m i think? but what i dont get is the power limits. my buddy told me theres different limits depending on the band and mode but i cant find a straight answer reading through the actual FCC rules, the wording is really dense. also what exactly counts as a third party communication and do i need to worry about that yet or is that more of an advanced thing. i just want to make sure im not doing something that could get me in trouble before i even get started. sorry if this is a dumb question

yeah i had the same confusion when i upgraded. the arrl band plan and the actual FCC allocations are two different things btw, the arrl one is kind of a gentlemens agreement about what modes go where, the fcc one is what your license actually covers legally. so like phone for general on 40 is 7.175 to 7.300 mhz, that 7.300 is the hard legal edge. the arrl might suggest you keep ssb in a slightly different spot but thats just courtesy not law. anyway 7.290 is fine youre not doing anything wrong, some guys on 40 are just territorial its kind of a whole thing on that band lol

so ive been sitting on doing the mars/cap mod on my FT-857D for probably two years now, always talked myself out of it because i was worried about messing something up. finally just did it last weekend and honestly it was way less scary than i expected. the jumper is right there once you open the bottom panel, took maybe 20 minutes including the time i spent double checking the service manual three times like a nervous wreck. anyway the reason i actually got around to it is i wanted to experiment with some of the 60m channels and also just generally wanted more flexibility without having to think about it. transmit works fine across the extended range, power output seems consistent, no weird behavior on the bands i normally use. i did notice the fan seems to kick on a little earlier now but that might just be me paying more attention to it after poking around inside the radio. what i really want to do next is the high stability TCXO option but those seem hard to source now. anyone done the TCXO-9 upgrade recently and know if theres still a reliable place to get one? my understanding is it drops the frequency stability from like 5ppm down to 0.5ppm which would actually matter for weak signal stuff on 2m. also been reading about people doing filter swaps on the 857 for better SSB audio but im not sure if thats worth the hassle on a radio this size

I always go inside when possible - much easier to troubleshoot later and you dont have to worry about weather or road debris. Most cars have unused grommets in the firewall, sometimes near the brake booster or where other wiring harnesses go through. Just poke around with a coat hanger from both sides until you find one that goes all the way through for the accord specifically i think theres one on the passenger side but dont quote me on that, been a while since i worked on one of those

oh man i had this exact same problem when i started lol. spent like two weeks wondering why nobody ever came back to me. turned out the tone in repeaterbook was wrong and the repeater had been changed a while back but nobody updated the listing. for me the fix was just showing up to a club net and asking on the air what the current tone was — felt kinda awkward since i wasnt even sure if anyone could hear me but someone came back and helped me out also make sure you have the offset right too, not just the tone. i forgot about that for a while and was transmitting on the wrong frequency entirely which definitely didnt help

yeah same boat when i started, felt super awkward saying "Whiskey" out loud lol. one thing that helped me was just running through the whole alphabet in the car a few times until it stuck. the weird ones for me were N (November) and W (Whiskey) because my brain kept wanting to say something else i think most people on repeaters are pretty relaxed about it honestly, its more of a thing on HF or during emergency nets where clarity actually matters

the USB cable thing is almost certainly your problem with the birdies, or at least part of it. ferrite on the USB cable made a huge difference for me, i put a clamp-on about 6 inches from the radio end and another near the PC. also if youre running any kind of switching power supply near the rig that can do it too. the 7300 is sensitive to that stuff in a way the older analog rigs just werent because of the direct sampling architecture picking up everything i went through like 3 weeks of chasing noise when i first set mine up. turned out it was a cheap wall wart for my router sitting too close to the power supply. moved it to the other side of the room and half my noise floor dropped. shack layout matters so much more with these SDR-based rigs

okay so ive been licensed for about four months now and i finally got brave enough to check into a local 2m net last tuesday. the net control called for check-ins and i waited until i thought there was a pause and just said my callsign. but then someone else had apparently been trying to check in at the same time and i feel like i stepped on them, or maybe they stepped on me, i honestly couldnt tell. so my question is sort of two things i guess. first, is there like a standard way to know when net control is actually ready for your check-in versus just pausing to breathe or whatever. and second, what do you do if you accidentally double with someone? do you just wait and try again or say something? i didnt want to make it worse by talking more and i ended up just kind of... not checking in at all and feeling embarrassed about the whole thing. which i know is dumb but still. the net has been running for years apparently so i assume everyone else knows what theyre doing and im the only one confused

yeah same thing happened to me on my first ragchew net, except i actually transmitted over someone mid-sentence which was way worse. the guy was pretty gracious about it but i wanted to crawl under my desk. i think with nets you just kind of have to accept theres gonna be a learning curve with the timing and the way different nets run because they're all a little different honestly.

so ive been a General for almost two years now and people keep telling me to just go ahead and get my Extra. i do want the full HF privileges obviously, those slices of 40m and 80m that i cant touch yet are kinda annoying especially during contests. but honestly the reason i havent done it yet is the theory sections of the exam scare me a little. like i passed my General without really understanding all the math and kind of just memorized enough to get through it. the Extra pool has stuff about filter design and transmission line theory and amplifier classes and i looked at a few questions and some of them just made no sense to me at all. is this something where you just memorize the pool again or do you actually need to understand whats going on to pass it? i took electronics in high school like 15 years ago so its not totally foreign but im pretty rusty. how long did it take most people to prep for this thing

congrats man, that first QSO feeling is something else. i remember mine, i fumbled my callsign twice before i got it right lol. the morning net guys are usually pretty welcoming to new hams so you picked a good spot to start. def go for the general, the HF bands open up a whole different world and once you work your first DX station youll be hooked for life

went last year and the swap meet is definitely smaller than it used to be, maybe like 60% of what it was back in the day. still worth it though if you havent been in a while, ran into a guy selling a almost mint 751a for way under market and ended up talking to him for like an hour. the vendor hall is still pretty solid. carpooling is a good call, parking is a whole thing

congrats on the first one, 4 contacts is 4 contacts and it counts, thats the important thing. the antenna thing is totally normal for first activations, ive seen experienced ops spend half their activation time fighting a wire that wont cooperate honestly the thing that made the biggest difference for me was switching to a linked dipole, you can cut it for a couple bands and the links take about 5 seconds to swap. some people like the EFHW transformers with a single wire and those work great too if your matchbox is decent. the SOTAbeams stuff is popular and reasonably light but you can also just wind your own, theres nothing magic about it one other thing -- next time post your activation on SOTAwatch before you go. even just a rough time window. the chasers watch that religiously and youll have people listening for you before you even finish setting up, makes a huge difference for getting that pile started

not dumb at all, this trips up a lot of new folks. so basically each net has its own culture and the net control will usually tell you what they want when they open the net. some ask for name and location every time, others are more casual and if you're a regular they already know who you are. the safest bet your first time is to listen to the whole preamble at the start — net control almost always explains the format right then. for a plain check-in on most voice nets you'd just say your callsign phonetically and wait. net control acknowledges you, sometimes asks if you have traffic or anything to pass, and that's usually it. if they want your name and QTH they'll ask. honestly the hardest part is just making yourself key up that first time, after that it feels completely normal. as for the special event station thing — those are a bit different. sometimes they run their own nets specifically so people can make contact with the special event callsign and log it. the net might be organized so everyone gets a turn to work the event station rather than the usual traffic net format. worth looking up the specific event details, they usually post a schedule somewhere.

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i keep reading about CW and it sounds really cool but i have no idea where to start. like do people just memorize all the dots and dashes on paper or is there some better way. i tried looking it up and theres a million different apps and websites and i dont know which ones are actually worth using vs just garbage. also is it realistic to learn enough to actually use on air in like a few months or am i setting myself up to be frustrated. i dont have any musical background if that matters

honestly i was in the same boat when i started and i just did eQSL first because it was easier and then got LoTW working a few months later. you dont have to do everything at once. i still send physical cards for DX contacts that feel special but i stopped sending them for every contact years ago, the postage adds up fast if youre doing it direct and the bureau is slow like sometimes years slow lol

Had both at the same time for a while actually. The RSP1A will blow the RTL dongle out of the water for what you're describing — the preselection filters make a huge difference when you've got strong interferers. The HackRF's receiver side is honestly not that impressive compared to the SDRplay, the noise figure is worse and it shows. Where the HackRF wins is the transmit capability and the wider tuning range going all the way up past 6 GHz, but if receive performance is your main thing the RSP1A is the better buy by a fair margin. The SDRangel crashing thing, yeah that happened to me too on Windows, switched to Linux and it's been rock solid. Worth trying if you have a spare machine or can dual boot. Also if you go SDRplay route, their own software SDRuno is decent and plays well with it but you can also use it with SDR# with the right plugin, though last i checked that plugin was getting a bit stale.

so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and i just need someone to tell me im being dumb or not. currently running a 40m dipole about 25 feet up between two trees in my backyard, works okay but i keep reading about verticals and how they supposedly have a lower takeoff angle which is better for DX. my dipole at that height is probably more of a cloud warmer than anything else right. thinking about putting up a trap vertical or maybe just a plain 40m vertical with some radials but then i read you need like 32 radials to make it work right and that sounds like a massive project. property isnt huge either so laying out that many radials is gonna be a pain. just wondering what people actually run and if anyone has done a side by side comparison because most of what i find online sounds like its written by someone trying to sell me something

I went through basically the same thing last year. what finally clicked for me was slowing way way down, like embarrassingly slow, and just focusing on clean characters rather than speed. I was so focused on trying to sound like the guys on 40m that I was rushing everything and nothing was clean. I ended up getting a cheap begali knockoff paddle from ebay and a MFJ keyer just to try iambic and honestly it didnt magically fix anything. I still had to unlearn the bad habits. so yeah what the other guy said about tension is real, also make sure your straight key's contact gap and spring tension are set right because a lot of hamfest keys are way out of adjustment and that makes it so much harder than it needs to be.

the tin can thing is almost always too much high frequency or mic too close, not really an EQ problem per se. and yeah the gain/ALC thing trips up a lot of people — the 7300 especially tends to run hot on mic gain out of the box, icom sets it that way for some reason on the presence boost question, theres actually something to it for voice intelligibility, the 2-4kHz range is where a lot of consonant energy lives so boosting there can help cut through noise. but SSB passband is already pretty narrow so you dont have a ton of room to play before it starts sounding honky or harsh. i usually keep any boost pretty gentle, like 3-4dB max, and actually cut some of the low mids around 300-500Hz if the mic has a lot of chest resonance the compressor in the 7300 is decent but easy to overdo. i run mine at maybe 20-30% and that's probably enough to help on fading and varying mic distance without making it sound processed. anything past 50% and people start noticing and not in a good way. the trick is to set it and then not touch it, because you start chasing your tail pretty quick

nice work getting it done, honestly just having *something* ready puts you ahead of most people. the thing i always tell folks is dont forget the boring stuff -- spare fuses, a small roll of electrical tape, a multi-tool. i showed up to a deployment once and had everything except a way to mount the antenna and spent an hour jury rigging something with zip ties. now i keep a small bag of zip ties, velcro straps, and a little roll of paracord in the kit and i've used it every single time. also headlamp. always a headlamp. you think the net will be done before dark and then it isnt. as far as checklists go the ARRL has one somewhere on their site but i find those pretty generic. after my first real deployment i just started keeping notes on my phone about what i wished i had and built my own list from that. probably the most useful thing i ever did for my kit honestly.

yeah you've got the right idea, CTCSS is basically a continuous tone the radio sends underneath your voice and the repeater uses it to open up the squelch on the input side so it knows to retransmit you. without it most repeaters just ignore your signal entirely which is exactly what sounds like is happening to you. on the uv-5r T-CTCS is indeed the right setting for what you want to transmit, that's the tone you're sending OUT to the repeater. the R-CTCS is for what tone your radio listens for on the receive side — most people leave that off or set it to the tone the repeater sends back so you only hear traffic from that machine and not random simplex stuff bleeding through. you dont strictly have to set the receive tone, it just keeps your squelch cleaner. as for etiquette — the big ones are just listen before you key up, wait for the courtesy beep before you respond to someone (that little beep means the repeater is ready for the next transmission), and keep your overs reasonably short especially if the repeater is busy. when you first get on just say your callsign and something like "listening" and see if anyone comes back. most repeater groups are pretty welcoming to new folks, dont stress too much about it.

oh man yeah the iambic squeeze thing tripped me up for probably six months, not gonna lie. what helped me more than anything was just... putting the keyer in straight key mode for a while and forgetting the paddle existed. sounds counterintuitive but it forces you to think about the rhythm of each character instead of relying on the squeeze to bail you out. also the tension thing is huge and nobody talks about it enough. too loose and your fingers are all over the place, too tight and you fatigue real fast. i'd back off the tension screw until the paddle almost moves on its own, then tighten just a tiny bit until there's a little resistance. took me forever to land on the right spot and honestly it changed everything. give yourself more than three months too — most people i know who stuck with it say it really clicked somewhere between 6 months and a year of daily practice. 15-20 minutes a day beats an hour once a week every time.