Amanda Johnson64

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech class) and im still kinda fuzzy on the rules around what im actually allowed to do. like i understand i have HF privileges on 10 meters and some other small chunks but my elmer keeps mentioning Part 97 and i honestly dont really know where to look or what im even looking for in there. my main question i guess is about transmitting music or like, recordings of stuff over the air. my buddy said you cant do that but then someone else at the club meeting said there are exceptions? also is there a simple version of part 97 somewhere because the actual FCC document is kind of a wall of text and hard to follow for a new person

so ive been chasing VP6R for like three days now and kept getting buried in the pileup. tried everything i thought i knew and nothing was working. finally cracked it yesterday and wanted to share what actually made a difference for me in case anyone else is struggling with this stuff. first thing that actually helped was really listening to where the DX station was coming back. i was just throwing my call out whenever there was a gap like every other lid in the pile, but once i started tracking where they were actually pulling calls from — whether they were working split and moving their listening frequency up or down — that changed everything. took me probably 45 minutes of just listening before i even keyed up again. the other thing was timing. i was jumping in right at the start of the gap which i think is the worst possible time, everyone does that. started transmitting about a half second late and i swear that made a real difference, maybe just coincidence but it worked. also dropped to just sending my suffix a few times when the band sounded like the pile was thinner and that got through once too. curious what techniques other people actually use. ive read about tail-ending but im not sure i fully understand how to do it right without just causing QRM. and is there any point running more power into a pileup or does it just make things worse for everyone

yeah thats pretty much how i do it too, DXwatch for the live spots and QRZ as a quick lookup. one thing worth knowing is you can actually connect directly to a DX cluster via telnet if you want more control over filtering - i use DX4WIN and it connects straight to a cluster node so i can set filters right in the client. the browser stuff is convenient but if youre serious about chasing DXCC you might want to look at logging software that integrates cluster feeds directly, like Log4OM or even just HRD if you dont mind the price. way easier to spot something, click it, and have it auto-fill in your log for android ive used Ham Radio DX and it works well enough, does band filtering pretty cleanly. DXwatch on mobile is kind of a pain honestly, the interface wasnt really built for small screens

whats the rx performance like outside the ham bands after the mod? thats actually more interesting to me than the tx side, ive been curious if the frontend filtering is any different in those extended ranges or if its basically the same. i do a lot of utility monitoring on the side with an sdr but itd be nice to just use the 7300 for some of that.

oh man do it, seriously. your first CQ WW with an IC-7300 and a dipole is going to be more fun than you think. yeah the big gun stations are loud but there are TONS of stations calling CQ the whole weekend, you'll find plenty to work especially if you're patient. S&P is absolutely fine, most casual ops do exactly that. the exchange is dead simple — for phone you send your callsign, a signal report (everyone says 59, just do it), and your CQ zone. you're in zone 5 if you're in the northeast. just look up your zone beforehand and you're set. get N1MM+ loaded up before the weekend, it's free and once you get it configured it makes everything way easier — dupe checking alone is worth it. don't sweat the score, just try to work as many countries and zones as you can and see how it feels. i did my first one with 100 watts and a random wire and i was hooked immediately.

so i finally got my first mobile rig, picked up a used Yaesu FT-7900R and i love it so far, been running it at home on a mag mount just to play around but i want to do a proper install in my truck. its a 2019 F-150 and the roof is that aluminum composite stuff so im a little nervous about drilling anything, also the bed has a tonneau cover which makes the bed rail mount idea kind of annoying. a few guys at the club mentioned a lip mount on the trunk edge but obviously thats not really a thing on a pickup. somebody else said NMO through-hole is the gold standard but again, drilling into the roof of a relatively new truck is making me sweat a little. the mag mount i have works okay parked but at highway speeds it slides around even on the roof and i just dont trust it long term. what are you all actually running on trucks? any of the hatch or door jamb type mounts hold up okay at speed? i mostly do local 2m and 70cm stuff, maybe some APRS eventually. not trying to work the world here just want a clean solid install that doesnt look terrible.

so ive been messing with Winlink Express for a few weeks now and i finally got my Kenwood TM-V71A talking to the software through VARA FM, but i keep running into this issue where i connect to the RMS gateway just fine, it handshakes, starts the session, and then somewhere in the middle of uploading an outbound message the link just dies. Sometimes it gets maybe 40-50% through the transfer and then just stops. The gateway drops off and i get a timeout error in the session log. I'm running VARA FM with the TNC set to 9600 baud on the radio, pointed at a gateway about 12 miles away that i can hear solid S7-S8 on. Signal shouldnt be the issue but maybe i'm wrong about that. Audio levels into the soundcard look okay in the waterfall, peaks around -10 to -12 dB which i thought was fine. Not sure if its an audio clipping thing or if theres something wrong with how im handling the session setup in Express itself. The RMS sysop for that node doesnt seem super active either so i cant exactly ask them. Has anyone seen this kind of mid-transfer dropout before? Is there a known setting in VARA FM that affects how aggressive it retries or handles a weak link?

yeah the Q codes go back to like telegraph days, they were made so operators could send short codes instead of whole sentences especially when conditions were bad or you were working CW. QTH is your location, QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is static/natural noise, QSB is fading signal, QSY means change frequency, QRZ is like who is calling me. theres a ton of them. ARRL website has a full list and its worth printing it out and keeping it by the radio when youre starting out honestly. 73 is just the traditional sign off meaning best regards, again goes back to telegraph shorthand. 88 means love and kisses which you mostly only hear people say to their wife or significant other over the air. dont say 88 to random people haha

so ive been a ham for about 8 months now and finally got my general and decided i really want to get into CW properly. i picked up a cheap set of iambic paddles from a seller on ebay (not sure of the brand, some no-name thing) and ive been practicing with my K3S's built in keyer for a few weeks. the problem is my sending is just... not great. letters come out uneven and i keep accidentally triggering the wrong element, like i'll go for a dit and get a dah or vice versa. i dont know if its the paddle tension being off or if im just holding my hand wrong or what. receiving is a whole other thing. i can copy at maybe 12-13 wpm when i really focus but anything faster and the letters just blur together in my head. ive been using the lcwo.net site for practice which helps but it feels like a plateau. somebody told me to try the Farnsworth method and bump the character speed way up even if the word speed is slow, does that actually work or is it gimmicky? anyway if anyone has been through this and has advice id really appreciate it. also open to paddle recommendations if the no-name thing is really holding me back, though id prefer not to spend a ton of money right now

so i finally did my first ever SOTA activation last weekend, been chasing other peoples summits for about 8 months and kept telling myself id get out there and do one. picked a relatively easy one, W4T/SU-014 up in the smokies area, only about a mile and a half hike to the summit so figured it was a good starter packed way too much stuff. like embarrassingly too much. had my KX2, a 40/20 linked dipole on a 20ft mast, about 400ft of coax (way overkill obviously), spare batteries, snacks, rain gear, the whole deal. backpack probably weighed close to 30lbs which is dumb for that short a hike but hey, lessons learned got to the summit and the band conditions were rough. 20m was basically dead when i got there around 10am local, tried calling CQ SOTA for like 20 mins and got nothing. switched to 40m and immediately got spotted by someone who must have seen my SOTAwatch alert and things started moving. ended up with 11 contacts including 2 S2S which i was really happy about, one guy in ohio and another in maryland both also on summits the thing i wasnt ready for is how fast the weather can change up there. had blue skies when i started and by the time i was packing up it was getting dark and breezy and i could hear thunder in the distance maybe 10-15 miles out. definitely hiking down faster than i hiked up lol anyway just wanted to share, if anyones been on the fence about activating instead of just chasing, just go do it. its a completely different experience

SOTA with QRP is honestly where these little rigs shine the most, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. ive done probably 40 or 50 activations over the last few years with nothing more than 5 watts and a wire antenna and the contact rate is way better than you'd expect. the key thing people dont realize is that when youre on a summit you have a huge advantage over the chasers because of the elevation, so the low power matters a lot less than you'd think. battery wise i usually bring a small LiPo, something in the 3-4 amp hour range, and for a typical activation lasting a couple hours thats more than enough. the radio barely sips power compared to something like a 100 watt rig obviously. antenna i just throw up an endfed halfwave with a short piece of paracord and a fishing pole, takes maybe 10 minutes to get sorted once you've done it a few times. just make sure youre actually calling CQ on the summit freq and spotted on SOTAwatch before you start or youll sit there calling into the void. good luck with it, youre gonna have a blast

so i've been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just did local stuff and some contests here and there but lately ive been getting really into DX and i think i want to actually start chasing DXCC properly. i have maybe 60-something confirmed on lotw already just from random contacts i never really paid attention to, which was a nice surprise when i checked. my question is about how the credits actually get applied. like i understand you need 100 confirmed entities for the basic DXCC award but do you have to submit all at once or can you kind of build up to it and then apply? and i saw something about WAS and WAZ too — are those completely separate programs or does some of the logging overlap? i guess what im really asking is whether i should be doing anything differently in how i log contacts now if i want to go after multiple awards eventually. also someone at my club mentioned mixed mode vs phone vs cw DXCC — is that something i should worry about as a newer op or just focus on getting the basic mixed first. i run a pretty modest station, 100w and a wire antenna so cw is probably my best bet for a lot of the rarer stuff anyway but still trying to figure out the whole landscape here before i go too deep into it

i was in the exact same spot last year lol. what helped me besides hamstudy was the Gordon West technician book, its kind of old school but it actually explains the why behind the answers instead of just making you memorize stuff. some people dont care about that and just want to pass which is fine but i retained it better when i understood it. also the test itself is way less stressful than i built it up to be in my head. the VEs are just regular hams who want you to pass, they're not trying to trick you or anything. i think i only missed like 4 questions and you can miss up to 9 on the tech exam so there's more margin than it feels like

went through this like 8 months ago, same boat as you coming from tech. honestly the propagation questions were the ones i was most worried about and they ended up being fine on the actual test, a lot of it is just pattern recognition after you do enough practice rounds. the thing that actually got me was some of the operating procedures questions, like the specific stuff about what you have to say when you sign with a club callsign or whatever, i kind of glossed over that section and got bit. 3 weeks is plenty of time if youre already at 70, just dont stop doing practice tests every day

so ive been running WSJT-X for FT8 for about a year now and i finally got around to doing a few contests last fall, nothing serious just ARRL Sweepstakes and one of the state QSO parties. i was using Log4OM to pull in the WSJT-X contacts via UDP which worked fine for everyday logging but during the contest i kept feeling like i was fighting the software instead of just operating. a buddy at the club keeps telling me to just switch to N1MM for any contest stuff and use Log4OM for the day to day, which honestly makes sense on paper but then i have two logs to manage and i've already messed up merging ADIF files once before and lost about 40 contacts so that whole process makes me nervous. does anyone actually run this split setup reliably or is there a cleaner way to handle it. the WSJT-X integration with N1MM is something i havent really dug into yet and i dont know if that complicates things further or actually solves the problem

i did almost exactly this with a pi zero a while back, and honestly the arduino is the right call for something this simple. pi has too much latency from the OS getting in the way if you want fast reliable IO. for just reading BCD and keying relays an arduino nano would even be enough, the mega is plenty. one thing i'd add — put a manual override switch in parallel with each relay. there will be a day when the code does something dumb and you want to be able to switch antennas without rebooting everything mid-qso.

welcome to the rabbit hole lol. ok so the short version is you start with Technician class, thats the entry level and you dont need to know morse code at all, that requirement went away like 15 years ago. the question pool is public so you can literally study exactly what will be on the test. most people use HamStudy.org or the Gordon West book, i used hamStudy when i was studying and passed first try. the test itself is 35 questions and you need to get 26 right. for actually taking the test, you can do it in person through a VE session which are run by volunteer examiners, most ham clubs run them pretty regularly. some are doing remote sessions online too now which is handy if theres nothing near you. just search the ARRL website for sessions in your area. the fee is usually like 15 bucks. honestly the tech exam isnt that hard if you put in a couple weeks of studying, dont overthink it

ran both for a while when i was experimenting, had a dipole at 40 feet and a vertical with about 30 radials averaging maybe 20 feet. honest answer is it depends way too much on the time of day and where you're trying to work. during the day when you want NVIS-ish angles the dipole at that height just wins, no contest. but late evening into night when the skip goes long the vertical definitely had an edge into europe and the pacific. i ended up keeping both and just switching based on what i was trying to do, which i know isnt the answer you were looking for. the radial situation matters a lot more than people admit. i added more radials in batches and honestly didnt notice much after about 30-32 of them at decent length, but going from 8 to 20 was a real difference i could actually hear. 25 radials at 16 feet will work, its not optimal but you wont be hamstrung by it either.

ALC pegging is almost definitely your main problem. when the ALC is constantly maxed out you're basically letting the radio compress everything into distortion — it's not the same as using the built in compressor properly, it's just clipping the modulation. what you want is ALC movement on voice peaks but it shouldnt be slammed all the way up and sitting there. back off the mic gain until it's just kissing the upper range on peaks, then adjust from there. on the EQ thing, the 7300 has a TX equalizer in the menu somewhere under the audio settings, i forget the exact path but its in there. what worked for me was a slight cut around 200-250hz to get rid of that chest boom, and then a small boost around 2-3khz which is where speech intelligibility lives on SSB. you dont need to boost the highs much because the SSB filter is already rolling off the top anyway depending on your passband settings. mic placement matters more than people admit too. too close and youre getting proximity effect which is why it sounds bassy. try pulling back a few inches and talking across the mic rather than directly into it if you can. i know that sounds fussy but it actually makes a real difference.

i did my first one earlier this year and had the same logging confusion lol. took me like three tries to figure out the submission process but once you do it once its pretty straightforward. also being out in nature with the radio is genuinely addictive, ive done probably 8 or 9 activations now and every single one has been more fun than the last. what state forest was it if you dont mind me asking, im always looking for new references to hunt from home

Have you considered SatPC32? It's specifically designed for amateur satellite work and handles inverting transponder mathematics better than either Gpredict or HRD. The learning curve is steeper but the precision is worth it for serious linear satellite work.

so ive been noticing 15m has been doing some really strange things the past couple weeks. some days it opens up to europe around 1400 local and ill work a dozen stations no problem, other days its completely dead and i cant even hear a carrier. checked the solar flux and its been bouncing around a lot, yesterday it was up around 178 then dropped back to like 155 the next morning. not sure if thats normal variability or something is off with my setup. also had a weird thing happen tuesday where 10m just randomly opened to japan for maybe 40 minutes around sunset, worked 4 JA stations which was awesome but then it just slammed shut. is that a greyline thing or more of a sporadic-E type opening? im still learning how all this propagation stuff works and i cant always tell whats causing what. any of the more experienced guys have a sense of whats been going on with the solar conditions lately?

so ive been messing around with remote station control for a while now, mostly using a raspberry pi and a cheap SDR dongle just to see what i could hear from my shack when im traveling for work. got it mostly working but the latency on transmit is killing me and im not sure if thats a RemoteHams thing or just my upstream bandwidth being garbage at the home end. the setup right now is an rtl-sdr going into SDR++ on the remote machine, and then ive got RemoteHams client on my laptop here. the receive side is actually pretty decent, way better than i expected for 20m SSB. but every time i try to key up through the linked radio (an old FT-857 with a rigblaster interface) theres this noticeable delay before the PTT actually fires and by the time audio is going out im already half a syllable into whatever im saying. ive seen people mention using EchoLink or IRLP for internet linking but that feels like overkill for what i want, which is basically just operating my own station remotely without involving a repeater system at all. anyone gone down this road and found a way to tighten up the whole chain? or is this just kind of a live-with-it situation when youre running this over a standard cable connection

yeah the waterfall thing is real, took me a good month before i stopped just staring at it. still catch myself doing it on 40m when things get busy around sunset the fan on mine kicks up noticeably when you're running anything close to 100w for a while, at QRP levels it barely moves. if it really bothers you there's a mod floating around where guys have replaced the fan with a quieter Noctua but honestly i never bothered. you kind of tune it out after a while came from an FT-857D so it was a pretty big jump for me in terms of sheer receiver performance, the roofing filter situation on the 7300 is so much better for crowded band conditions, night and day on 40 when the EU stations are coming in and everyone and their brother is on SSB

the radial thing is way overstated imo, or at least people make it sound more complicated than it is. i just buried a bunch of wire in my yard over a couple weekends using one of those lawn edger tools to cut a slot and pushed the wire in. not glamorous but it works and you dont even see it after a few weeks. anyway i dont think 30 feet is that low for a dipole on 40 so youre probably not suffering as much as you think. half wavelength at 40m is like 66 feet so youre not even at a half wavelength height. at that height the dipole still has pretty decent low angle stuff, maybe not as low as a vertical with a good ground but its not like youre only shooting straight up either