Amanda Johnson64

ok so i passed my general back in the spring and ive been really getting into DX chasing lately. worked about 40 countries so far which i know isnt a lot but im hooked. someone at my club mentioned i should be logging toward DXCC and i just assumed you needed physical QSL cards but then someone else said LoTW is fine now and i got confused because a third guy said something about needing both depending on the entity or something. so whats the actual deal? like if i work a station and they confirm on LoTW is that good enough for DXCC credit or do i still need the physical card? and what about WAS — is that totally separate or do the same confirmations count for both. also saw something about WAZ on the ARRL site and im not sure if im supposed to be chasing all three of these at once or if theres a logical order to go in. probably a dumb question but nobody at the club gave me a straight answer and i figured id just ask here

ok so the slow vs fast thing you mentioned is the Koch method vs the traditional way and honestly most people who actually learned it in the last 20 years or so swear by Koch. the idea is you learn each character at the actual speed you want to operate at eventually, like 20wpm or whatever, but you just do short sessions and add letters as you get them right. what you dont want is to learn the rhythm of letters slowly and then have to relearn them faster later, that'll drive you nuts. LCWO dot net is free and its basically built around Koch, i used it a couple years ago and got to about 15wpm before i started getting on the air. the other thing is dont try to think about the dots and dashes, just train your brain to hear the sound as the letter. when you hear dit dah just think A, not oh thats a dot and a dash. sounds obvious but a lot of beginners try to count dits and dahs and it slows everything down. also just be patient with yourself, took me probably 4 months of daily practice before i felt comfortable enough to even try a QSO and i was still pretty rough at first

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly i mostly just mess around on 2m and 70cm but ive been hearing people talk about HF and it sounds really interesting, especially the idea of actually talking to people in other states or countries without needing a repeater or anything like that my question is i guess how hard is the general exam compared to tech? i remember the tech exam wasnt too bad but some of the questions were weird. i heard general has a lot of electrical theory stuff and im not great at math. do you actually have to do a bunch of calculations or is it mostly just memorizing the question pool? also is there a good study guide or website people use, i saw some stuff online but wasnt sure what was actually useful vs just garbage also what HF bands do you even get with general vs what extra class gets, is it worth just going straight for extra or should i not get ahead of myself

so ive been chasing this for about a week now and i think i finally narrowed it down but wanted to see if anyone else has run into this. my 7300 started putting out maybe 20-25 watts max on all bands when it should be doing 100. nothing changed that i can think of, didnt drop it, didnt get wet, just one day i noticed the signal reports were terrible and checked with my wattmeter and sure enough something is very wrong. i checked the obvious stuff first — ALC looked normal on the display, the power setting is definitely at 100%, tried different antennas and feedlines to rule out a reflection issue triggering protection. thermal shutdown was my first thought but it does it even stone cold first thing in the morning before anything heats up. pulled the lid off and had a look around, nothing obviously fried that i can see, no burnt smell. im starting to wonder if one of the PA transistors is partially gone. anyone dealt with this on a 7300 specifically or have a suggestion where to start poking with a meter before i box it up and send it to the Icom service center.

yeah i remember my first Field Day feeling completely overwhelmed and that was with a whole club helping me out lol. CQ WW solo is a bit of a jump but honestly dont overthink it. just tune around, hear someone calling CQ contest, wait for a gap and give your callsign, copy their exchange and send yours back. thats really the whole thing. one thing nobody told me when i started — keep a glass of water nearby, your throat will be wrecked after a few hours of calling if youre doing phone. learned that the hard way.

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and cant quite make up my mind. currently running a 40m dipole at about 25 feet which i know isnt ideal but its what i can do with my lot. getting okay results into europe from the east coast on most evenings but nothing to write home about. a buddy of mine keeps telling me i should just put up a vertical instead and use the radial field to make up for the low height, says hell get out better with his gap titan than i do with the dipole. thing is i feel like 25 feet on 40m is only like a quarter wavelength up which puts the takeoff angle pretty high, so maybe the vertical argument actually makes sense here? but then i also read somewhere that a vertical without a decent radial system is basically a dummy load so im not sure which problem is worse — low dipole or vertical with mediocre radials. anyone actually done a direct comparison on 40 or 80 at low heights? not looking for a perfect answer just curious what people have actually experienced

i had almost this exact setup dilema last spring. ended up just putting the yagi on a small rotator on a separate mast like 4 feet away from my existing vertical and running seperate feedlines down to a switch. costs a bit but having both available is really nice. the yagi i went with was a cheap 5 element homebrew i built off WA5VJB's cheap yagi designs, maybe 6-7 dBd on 2m, nothing crazy but way better than the collinear for any kind of weak signal work. tropo ducting season you really want that directional gain trust me

yeah it counts lol welcome to the addiction. also working a european station from a summit on a random wire is honestly impressive, what time of day was that? i've been trying to get more dx contacts on my activations and im never sure when to try for europe from the eastern US

linear transponders dont pull anything in, its not FM, so yeah the doppler correction on the uplink matters. but honestly at low elevations the rate of change is slow enough that if you just set it close and nudge every 30 seconds or so youre probably fine. the transponder passband on AO-73 is what, 30kHz? so you have a little wiggle room as long as you stay in there. the real trick when youre hand-tracking solo is to just accept that you wont be perfect and work the high elevation passes when you have more time before the shift gets steep. i did the same thing with an arrow for almost two years before i built a cheap az-el rotator setup and the manual method works, its just tiring. youll get the feel for it after maybe 10-15 passes.

I tried running both at the same time once. Just once. the short version is dont do it, at least not with WSJT-X in the mix because you basically cant have two programs both trying to receive the UDP log packets cleanly without some kind of splitter utility. there are ways to do it with something like a UDP repeater app but at that point youre adding complexity for not much gain during a contest when you want things simple. the merge after approach that the other guy mentioned is the sensible way to go. Log4OM's import is pretty decent about handling duplicate checking if you set it right. just make sure your contest log has correct timestamps and callsigns before you import or youll spend an afternoon cleaning things up

not sure about the D710 specifically but i had a similar problem with a completely different setup and it turned out i had entered my coordinates in the wrong format — like i had decimal degrees but the radio wanted degrees and decimal minutes. easy mistake to make. might be worth double checking that even if it looks right on the screen

yeah what he said about just listening to the first few check-ins is the best advice. i did my first net check-in like 3 weeks after getting my license and i just kind of blurted out my call and the NCS said thanks and moved on and that was it, total anticlimax haha. you're going to be fine. the special event thing — if you heard about it on a local repeater or club meeting someone probably has details. clubs usually announce those. also the special event stations often run for a whole weekend so even if you missed saturday there might still be sunday.

Keep an eye on 28MHz and 50MHz - these will be the first bands to show effects of Es. Also check DXmaps.com for real-time propagation data. Monitor propagation forecasts from IARU and Space Weather Prediction Center websites to know when to be on the air. The key is being ready when it happens!

i went through this same confusion like 8 months ago lol. the thing that helped me was just looking up callsigns on QRZ and noticing the patterns. also just so you know the vanity application has a bit of a waiting period and the FCC processes them in batches so if a bunch of people apply for the same call the one who applied first doesnt always get it — theres like a filing window thing. i looked into grabbing a specific call that had belonged to a silent key and it was more complicated than i expected but ultimately worked out

so i finally did my first summit activation last weekend, W4T/SU-001 up in the smokies. been putting it off for like two years because i kept overthinking the gear situation. ended up just throwing my KX2 in the pack with a 40m EFHW and a little 3ah lipo and hiked up. conditions were rough on 40 but i scraped together 5 contacts in about 20 minutes and then 20m opened up a bit and i got like 8 more. honestly the hardest part was finding a decent spot to throw the wire up in the trees, the summit was kinda exposed and rocky. but yeah it worked. im already planning the next one, theres a peak about an hour from me i want to try. anyone else notice 20m being weirdly patchy in the afternoons lately or is that just me

Check your deviation first! Most TNCs overdrive the Yaesu radios. Use the calibration mode, adjust TX audio until signal stops increasing, then back off a fraction of a turn. I bet you're overdeviating and causing distortion downstream.

yeah totally get it, when i first got my ticket i felt the same way. the Q codes come from old telegraphy days so theres a ton of them but honestly you really only need to know maybe a dozen for everyday use. QSL is basically confirming you received the other stations transmission, or it can mean sending a confirmation card which is a whole other thing. QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural noise like static from lightning. QSB means your signal is fading in and out. QSY means youre changing frequency. QTH is your location. thats probably 80% of what youll hear on a regular basis. as for 73, thats just best regards or a friendly farewell, its not really a Q code its more of an old telegraph prosign that stuck around. 88 means love and kisses which you mostly hear between operators who know each other well. RR73 in FT8 specifically means roger roger 73, so the other station got your last transmission and is signing off. the digital modes have their own little shorthand on top of the regular stuff which can be a lot at first but you get used to it pretty fast once youre actually operating

my elmer always said 20 meters will humble you. could also just be local noise depending on time of year, neighbors AC units kicking on, that kind of thing. worth checking your noise floor if you havent already.

so ive been lurking here for a while and my neighbor actually got me interested in all this after i saw his antenna setup in the backyard. anyway i decided i want to actually get licensed but im kind of overwhelmed by all the info out there. like i dont even know if i should be studying from a book or just doing practice tests online or what. someone at work told me the test isnt that hard but i dont have any background in electronics really so im a little nervous about the theory parts. is there a specific order i should learn things or do most people just grind the question pool until they know it. also how long did it usually take you guys before you felt ready to actually go sit for the exam

yeah ran into almost exactly this problem with a band decoder i built for my station last year. the CI-V polling approach works but youre right that it can get twitchy. what i ended up doing was storing the last band value and only triggering the relay change if the new value had been stable for like 3 consecutive reads — so basically a simple state machine instead of just reacting immediately to every change. its not really a delay in the bad sense, more like confirming the data before committing to the switch. knocked out all the false triggers for me. the raspberry pi idea isnt overkill necessarily but the latency can actually be worse depending on what else is running. linux isnt realtime and if something else grabs the CPU for a second your relay timing goes out the window. for pure switching logic the arduino is honestly better suited, just needs the logic cleaned up a bit.

VARA FM not recognizing audio input from Digirig, showing -97dB regardless of radio signal strength. PTT works but unreliably - radio either doesn't transmit or gets stuck. Using IC-7300 with Digirig Mobile on 2 meters. Windows sound shows Digirig device active, VU meter should read about 2 O'clock (-10 to -20 dB) with background noise. When using speaker jack output, must select 1200 baud mode, not 9600, and use VARA NARROW mode. Sound card levels set correctly in Windows. Any ideas on the audio path issue?