Jessica Miller89

had the exact same problem when i first set mine up. turned out the igate near me was receive-only, couldnt inject back onto RF at all. you can check on aprs.fi by clicking on the igate and seeing if it says bidirectional or just receive. once i found a proper two way gate things started working a lot better for messages. beacons dont need that because they just go up and get heard, but messages need the whole path to work both ways.

ft8 took everybody lol. my dad runs 40m ssb almost every night and he says the same thing, way fewer regulars than even two years ago. the digital modes just pulled people away i think, cant really blame them when you can work dx at 3am with 10 watts and not have to say a word

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.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general class) and my elmer keeps telling me to be really careful about staying within my privileges and not accidentally keying up on a frequency im not supposed to use. i get that, but then someone at the club meeting last week said the FCC basically never actually does anything about it and its all just theoretical enforcement. like the last time someone actually got a notice of apparent liability was years ago or something. so which is it? is Part 97 enforcement actually a real thing that happens or is it kind of like a speed limit nobody really enforces? i dont want to just ignore the rules obviously but im trying to figure out how seriously to take the "youll get fined" warnings. also does it matter what band or what kind of violation we're talking about? genuinely not sure how any of this works in practice

this is kind of what im worried about with my own 7300, i want to do the TCXO but i've never really done internal radio mods before, just antenna stuff and external accessories. how difficult is the TCXO install on a scale of like... replacing a car stereo to something that requires actual electronics experience? i can solder decent enough but i dont want to brick a radio i rely on for nets

i got a uv5r when i first started and its been fine tbh. programmed it with chirp which took maybe an hour to figure out but now its easy. only thing i'd say is the stock antenna that comes with it is pretty mediocre, a nagoya na-771 is like 12 bucks on amazon and makes a noticeable difference on weaker repeaters. so even if you go the cheap route just factor in a few bucks for a better antenna and youre good

We added AllStar nodes to our system two years ago and it's been fantastic. It can take a full second for all the links between the repeaters to activate. For best results wait a second after you key up your radio before you begin speaking: this will ensure your entire transmission is relayed to all the repeaters in the system.

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 room thing is more of a factor than people admit. reflective surfaces cause comb filtering and it just makes everything sound weird and phasey, especially in the mids. a moving blanket behind you or even just a bookshelf full of books helps a lot more than buying a fancy mic. on the 7300 specifically the TX eq is actually pretty capable if you dig into it. i run a slight cut around 200-300hz to tighten up the low end and then a gentle boost somewhere around 2kHz which is right where speech intelligibility lives. and yeah pull the compression back, 4 might be fine but watch your ALC meter while youre transmitting into a dummy load, you dont want it pinned. a little ALC action is fine, a lot means youre overdriving it and that could be whats causing the muddy sound more than anything else. also worth checking if TX bandwidth in the menu matches what you think it does, theres a few settings in there that interact and its easy to have something set from a previous experiment that you forgot about

I upgraded 5 years ago and honestly use the Extra sub-bands maybe 20% of the time. The real benefit is during contests when the General portion is packed - having access to those lower frequency segments on 40 and 20 meters makes a huge difference for DX.

Not dumb questions at all, honestly this stuff trips up a lot of new hams because nobody really explains it clearly. For nets — yeah basically you wait for the net control station to ask for check-ins, then you key up and just say your callsign phonetically. Some nets have you give your name and location too, just listen to the first few people check in and copy their format. The NCS will acknowledge you and that's it, you're checked in. Some nets are just quick roll calls and some are more conversational where people take turns talking. The weekly 2m nets on the local repeaters are usually pretty relaxed and a great place to start because the pace is slower than HF. Special event stations are even easier than you're probably thinking. Just call them like any other station — they're usually running high volume so they'll be doing quick exchanges, give your callsign, signal report, maybe your state or grid depending on what they're collecting. They'll have instructions on their QRZ page or the listing you found about how to apply for the certificate afterward, usually just submitting your log entry or sometimes they do it automatically through Logbook of the World. Go have fun with it, those ops running the special events genuinely enjoy working new hams.

10 contacts is 10 contacts, activation is an activation. my first one i only got like 12 and i was out there for almost 2 hours fumbling with a buddistick that kept falling over. it gets a lot smoother once you stop second guessing the setup and just operate. 40m noise is usually just 40m being 40m honestly, i wouldnt stress it

yeah the fan mod is legit on that radio. the stock fan controller lets it get warmer than it probably should before spinning up, theres a resistor swap that lowers the temp threshold and it makes a noticeable difference especially if youre running any kind of digital modes for extended periods. i think i found the values on eham or maybe it was on the yahoo group archive before those all got nuked. something like swapping a 47k for a lower value but dont quote me on the exact number, you really want to look that up from a reliable source before poking around in there. the 857 chassis is tight and thermal management was clearly an afterthought so anything you can do to help it breathe is probably worth it. mine runs digital psk and wsjt sessions and after the fan mod it stays way more comfortable to the touch during a long session.

yeah the mental part is 100% the bottleneck, the hardware people obsess over it but honestly once you have basic interlocking sorted the gains come from operating discipline not better filters or whatever. what worked for me was actually practicing it outside of contests — just running two radios casually on a weekend, not even chasing points, just getting comfortable switching attention back and forth. sounds dumb but it genuinely trained the muscle memory. on the 15/20 bleedthrough, are you running a bandpass filter set? if youre not using something like the Array Solutions or W3NQN filters between the radios and the antennas that could easily be your problem. the microHAM interlock handles the amp keying and prevents transmitting simultaneously but it doesnt do anything about RF coupling if your antennas are close together or sharing a common feedline. whats your antenna situation look like? if both are on the same tower thats probably your culprit regardless of the radio setup.

This is really encouraging to read. I've been licensed about eight months and I've been hunting on and off but the idea of activating honestly intimidates me a little. I think I'm worried I'll mess something up or not know the right procedure or something. Do people ever get annoyed if you're slow pulling calls? I can't always copy a full callsign on the first pass especially when there's a lot of stations calling at once.

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

im kind of in the same boat as you, been licensed about 8 months and started my kit recently. one thing my elmer told me that stuck was to actually USE the kit before you need it, like set it up in your backyard or something and pretend youre activating. i did that and realized i had no way to mount my antenna without going back inside for a tripod lol. learned a lot from that little exercise.

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 what he said about ALC is spot on. i used to think more ALC action meant more talk power but its really not how it works at all. you want the average modulation up, not the peaks slamming into limiting constantly. one thing i'll add — have someone record your audio off air if you can, like ask a buddy to do a quick recording on his end. monitoring yourself on the radio's monitor function isnt the same as what actually comes out the other side after going through the TX chain. ive been surprised more than once at how different it sounds. theres apps that let you do SDR monitoring of your own signal too if you set up a second receiver, that's probably the most useful diagnostic tool ive found for audio stuff

POTA is a bit more forgiving if you wanna get some activations under your belt before going back to summits, parks are usually flatter lol. but yeah efhw all the way, i can have mine in the air in like 5 mins now after enough practice

so ive been on 10 meters almost every evening this week and i dont even know what to say. worked stations in Brazil, Japan, and then randomly a guy in South Africa all within like a 2 hour window last Thursday. my antenna is literally just a dipole in the attic, nothing fancy at all. been watching the solar flux index and its been sitting up around 200-220 which i guess is pretty high? im still learning how all this solar stuff actually translates to band conditions. like i understand the basic idea that higher flux = better HF propagation but i dont fully get the mechanism. is this just cycle 25 doing its thing or has something specific happened recently that explains why 10 and 12 have been so good also noticed some days it just completely dies even when the flux looks decent. had a morning where SFI was like 215 and i couldnt even hear Europe when the day before at the same flux number i was working them easily. whats up with that

I went through this process about two years ago and the FCC site is genuinely terrible at explaining it clearly, so don't feel bad. One thing that helped me was using one of the third party callsign lookup tools — I forget which one exactly but there are a few that will show you the application window status and how many other people have applied for the same call. That saved me from applying for one that already had like four other applicants in the queue for it. Also just heads up the $35 fee is now a thing, wasn't always that way. Small thing but if you haven't looked into it recently just be aware.

so we have a county-level ARES exercise coming up next saturday and im trying to nail down my portable setup. ive done these before but this time theyre asking us to run for 6+ hours off grid which is longer than usual and my usual battery situation probably wont cut it. right now i have a 40ah lifepo4 that i run my ic-7300 off of and on receive its fine but when im transmitting any real duty cycle that battery gets chewed through faster than id like. been thinking about bringing my honda eu2200i but honestly i hate running a generator at a comm site because of the noise and the RF it throws off, last time i tried it with a different rig i had all kinds of hash on 40m that i couldnt track down. antenna wise im planning on the buddipole set up as a vertical for 40/80m which is what the net usually runs on during exercises. thinking about 25 feet of mast height. the site is a parking lot next to the EOC so ground conditions are going to be garbage, was going to use a bunch of radials but even that feels like a pain to set up on asphalt. anyone dealt with the generator RFI thing and actually solved it or do i just need a bigger battery bank

so ive been checking into a couple nets on sunday evenings and honestly its become kind of a ritual for me at this point. been doing the local club net on 2m for about a year and a half now and recently found a regional HF net on 40m that meets at 7:30pm local. its been a great way to just stay sharp and have some actual QSOs instead of just monitoring all the time. anyway i was wondering if anyone here knows of other nets worth checking into, doesnt have to be sunday specifically. im also curious about special event stations — i stumbled across one last week for some historical anniversary and worked them on 20m, got a really nice QSL card in the mail a few weeks later. didnt even know those were a thing until recently. is there like a calendar somewhere people use to find them? i know about the ARRL website but the listings there can be kind of hard to navigate

so ive been wanting to get my technician license for a while now and finally decided to just do it. started using hamstudy.org and its been pretty good i think but my uncle who got his license like 20 years ago keeps telling me i should buy the ARRL handbook or one of those study guides. i dunno though, the question pool is right there online and the practice tests seem pretty close to the real thing from what people say. my main worry is i dont really understand some of the electrical stuff, like the ohms law questions and the ones about antennas, i just kind of memorize the answers without really knowing why. is that fine or will that come back to bite me later. the test is in about 3 weeks at the local club.