Jessica Miller89

so i finally got around to building one of those 40m pixie kits, the cheap ones you can get for like 3 or 4 bucks shipped. i honestly expected it to be kind of a disappointment because how much can you really do with 500mw right? but i ended up making contact with a guy in ohio from my backyard in pennsylvania on my first real attempt and i just sat there kind of stunned for a minute. the kit itself was pretty straightforward, took me maybe an hour and a half including my terrible soldering on the first few joints which i had to redo. the direct conversion receiver is noisy and the transmit frequency drifts a bit when it warms up but honestly for learning purposes its been amazing. i can actually hear whats happening on the band and understand what im doing in a way that using my regular radio never really taught me. anyway i guess im asking has anyone else gone down this rabbit hole because ive been looking at the mcHF and some of the other more serious QRP builds and i feel like i could spend the rest of my life just building radios at this point. also is there a good way to stabilize the frequency drift on something like the pixie or is it just a fundamental limitation of the design?

your stacked M2s plus the 9700 is actually a pretty solid starting point, more than you might think. the 9700 does JT65 natively which is huge. with that antenna setup you're probably looking at around 14-15 dBd of gain which puts you in range for working other moderate stations, maybe not the big guns on first try but there's a surprising number of guys running similar setups these days specifically because JT65B made EME accessible. the az/el rotor is non-negotiable, get that sorted first. sequencer too — dont skip the sequencer, i fried a preamp once being sloppy with transmit/receive switching and it was an expensive lesson. low noise preamp right at the feedline matters a lot, you want the noise figure as low as possible before any coax loss eats into it. what preamp are you running currently? if it's a KD0S or SSB Electronics that's fine but placement really matters. honestly just get on the EME2 reflector and watch the sked postings for a few weeks before you try anything. the community is genuinely helpful and once you understand the rhythm of how skeds work it gets way less intimidating. first contact is the hardest one.

yeah i did almost the exact same thing about two years ago, except i used a Uno and only had three antennas to deal with. the band data off the 7300 ACC port is pretty clean, its just a BCD output so decoding it in the arduino is like ten lines of code once you understand the pinout. icom has it documented in the manual but it took me a while to find the right page. on the relay question — dont try to switch RF with normal PCB relays, you already seem to know this but yeah, those Tohtsu CX-series ones are the way to go. the arduino just needs to trigger a small transistor to drive the coil, and you want a flyback diode on each relay coil or youll get weird resets when they switch. ask me how i know. the noise thing isnt really an issue if the RF switching is handled by the proper coax relays and the arduino is just doing low-voltage control stuff. one thing i added later that was worth it — a small 16x2 LCD so i can see at a glance which antenna is active. took maybe an hour to add and the library makes it dead simple.

so i finally finished my first qrp rig, been working on it on and off for like three months. its a 40m CW transceiver based on the speakerphone design from one of the SPRAT issues, cant remember which one now. runs about 2 watts out into a 50 ohm load which i was honestly pretty happy with for a first build. the hardest part for me was winding the toroids, i kept losing count of the turns and had to redo the main transformer twice. also had a weird oscillation issue in the rx chain that turned out to be a grounding problem, took me forever to track that down with my little DSO. but once i sorted all that out it just... worked. made my first contact with it last weekend, guy in michigan and im in ohio so not a huge distance but on 2 watts with a wire in a tree i was pretty stoked about it. anyway just wanted to share i guess, and if anyone has tips for improving efficiency on these little rigs id love to hear them. im getting maybe 60-65% efficiency which seems okay but ive seen people talk about getting higher than that

so ive been running a remote station for about two years now using a raspberry pi and a bunch of custom scripts to handle PTT, CAT control, and audio routing over the internet. it works but its honestly a pain to maintain and every time my ISP does something weird or the power flickers at the shack the whole thing falls apart and i have to SSH in and restart like six different processes. a buddy of mine at the club keeps telling me to just use RemoteHams and be done with it but i always assumed it was kind of basic compared to what i have. recently though i started looking at the SDR remote side of it and that got my attention — the idea of having a wideband SDR at the remote site feeding back over the internet while also being able to key the transmitter is actually pretty cool if the latency is manageable. my main question is whether anyone has actually compared running RemoteHams client/server against a homebuilt setup in terms of audio quality and latency on a normal residential cable connection. and does the SDR piece actually work well or is it one of those features that looks good on paper but stutters constantly in practice. also curious how the internet linking side plays into this if youre also trying to tie in an echolink node or something similar at the same remote site.

the Koch method is honestly the way to go in my opinion, stick with it and dont give up after two weeks because that is way too early to judge your progress. the whole idea is you learn two characters at full speed first, like 20wpm or whatever, and only add a new one when you can copy the existing ones at something like 90% accuracy. the temptation is to slow everything way down but that just teaches your brain to hear individual dits and dahs instead of the sound of the whole character as a unit, which will mess you up later when you try to go faster. LCWO.net is what i used and its free and works really well for the Koch progression. just do like 15 minutes a day consistently rather than an hour on weekends, the consistency matters way more than the total time. also once you know maybe 10 or 15 characters start listening to actual slow CW on the air, W1AW does code practice transmissions at different speeds and theres also a bunch of podcasts and youtube stuff. your brain needs to hear it in context not just random character drills forever

yeah what he said about the audio levels, that fixed like 80% of my issues too. one other thing though — are you connecting to the gateway via a direct P2P connection or through the Winlink network normally? because if youre trying to do peer to peer to an RMS thats not actually set up for P2P youll just get dropped. sounds dumb but i made that mistake early on. the channel selection guide in Winlink Express basically does this for you if you let it pick the gateway automatically based on propagation, i stopped manually picking gateways and just let it do its thing and my connect rate went way up.

yeah this is basically exactly what i do, N1MM for contests and Log4OM for everything else. the ADIF import between them isnt perfect, i always end up with some duplicate entries to clean up after a big contest weekend, but its manageable. Log4OM is just way nicer to live in day to day, the DX cluster integration and the cloudlog sync stuff actually works reliably for me. the WSJT-X UDP thing is almost certainly a port conflict, 2237 is the default and if something else grabbed it first it just silently fails, no error or anything which is super annoying. check what port WSJT-X is set to broadcast on and make sure Log4OM is listening on the same one, took me a while to figure that out the first time too. once its going it works pretty seamlessly, all my FT8 QSOs just show up automatically. for dupe checking during contests i wouldnt trust Log4OM, N1MM is just built for that and the callsign lookup speed alone is worth it when youre running a pileup and trying to keep rate up