Jessica Miller89

so ive been at this for about 8 months now and im kind of stuck. started learning morse back in the spring mostly just to see if i could do it, and i got up to around 5wpm pretty comfortably with the Koch method and a few of the apps. felt great. then i hit this wall somewhere around 8-10wpm where i just... stopped improving. like the characters still sound like individual dits and dahs to me instead of one whole sound, if that makes sense. i know the standard advice is to just listen listen listen and not try to write everything down, but honestly i dont know if im doing that right either. been using the LCWO site and some of the RufzXP practice but my brain just freezes when the speed bumps up. i see people saying they went from nothing to 20wpm in like 6 months and i have no idea how thats possible. did anyone here actually go through this grind and come out the other side? whats the thing that finally clicked for you? im not in a hurry or anything, just want to make sure im not practicing wrong and burning time doing the same thing over and over.

The EcoFlow DELTA 2 can charge 0%-80% in 50 minutes, which might be worth considering over traditional battery banks. I've been testing one for Field Day - silent operation is amazing compared to my old Yamaha genny. Runtime calculator shows about 8 hours at your power levels.

so ive been a licensed ham for about 6 years now mostly doing HF stuff, some 2m ssb when conditions are good, but ive always been kind of fascinated by EME and i think im finally at a point where i want to actually try it instead of just reading about it. the problem is every time i dig into the requirements it feels like the goalposts keep moving on what you actually need to make a contact. from what i understand the minimum viable setup for 2m EME these days is something like a decent yagi array — ive seen people say a single long yagi can work with JT65 but then other people say you really want at least a 4x array to do anything useful. my current radio is an IC-7300 which i know is HF only so thats obviously not going to cut it, im probably looking at adding something like a 7610 or maybe just a dedicated 2m radio, the IC-9700 seems like the obvious choice but i dont know if thats overkill or underkill for this mode. also the preamp situation seems really critical, ive read that even a mediocre preamp placed at the feedpoint vs at the radio makes a huge difference because of feedline losses. has anyone here made their first EME contact recently and what did your station actually look like when you did it? not looking for the ideal endgame setup, just the realistic minimum to actually get a two way going.

After working several major DXpedition pileups with varying degrees of success, I've been thinking about the optimal split operation parameters. Current best practice suggests 15-20 kHz on SSB and 8-10 kHz on CW should be adequate but experienced operators may gradually move their listening frequency across the range—working stations first at 5 kilohertz up then 6-7-8-9, moving 500 Hz at a time. What specific techniques are you using to track DX operator listening patterns during major pileups? I'm particularly interested in real-world experiences with dual VFO monitoring where the radio switches audio from the DX station to the pileup and whether the investment in SDR waterfall displays provides significant advantage over traditional methods.

honestly the technician test is pretty manageable even without an electronics background, dont stress too much. what worked for me was using hamstudy.org every day for like 2-3 weeks, maybe 20-30 minutes at a time. it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills those specifically which is nice. the theory stuff like ohms law and basic antenna concepts you can kind of just memorize the formulas without deeply understanding them and still pass fine. i did read through the ARRL technician manual too but mostly i just used it as a reference when something in the question pool made zero sense to me. the actual exam is 35 questions and you need 26 right so theres a bit of cushion. find a local club that does testing sessions, a lot of them are pretty chill and some even do walk-ins on weekends

so i finally did my first summit activation last weekend, W4T/SU-001, and man i was not prepared for how much wind there would be up top. had my KX2 and a linked dipole and spent like 20 minutes just trying to get the thing strung up between two trees that were way too far apart. ended up just propping one end on my hiking pole and calling it good enough. got 4 QSOs before my fingers went numb and i bailed. still counts right? i think i needed like 4 minimum so i literally squeaked by. going to try again next month with better gloves and maybe a shorter antenna setup, the linked dipole was kind of a pain to deal with on a windy ridge

one thing i'll add that nobody told me when i was setting this up - make sure your audio levels are actually correct on the Signalink before you try to hit a live gateway. i spent like two weeks thinking my setup was broken and it turned out i had the TX pot cranked too high and i was just splattering all over the place. the gateway was probably seeing garbage. get the levels right with a dummy load first and watch the ALC on your radio, you want minimal ALC deflection with VARA FM especially also 22 miles on VHF should be totally doable with a vertical and 50 watts, assuming no major terrain in the way. the FT-991A is a solid radio for this

yeah manual doppler on a linear transponder is uh... a lot. i tried it for like two weeks before i finally got gpredict talking to my radio and honestly the difference is night and day. the inverting transponder makes it feel even more chaotic because your instincts are wrong until you build new ones basically. one thing that helped me before i got the software working was printing out a doppler table for the specific pass from heavens-above or gpredict beforehand and just working off that. its not perfect but at least you have a rough schedule of how much to shift and when instead of guessing in real time.

i was in the same boat when i first got my ticket lol. the ARRL band plan chart saved me, seriously just download it. also once you get comfortable maybe think about going for general, the upgrade exam isnt that bad and it opens up so much more HF. i did mine like 2 months after my tech and it was worth it

this is making me want to actually get involved with my local ARES group tbh. ive had my general for almost two years and mostly just do some HF stuff but i always figured emcomm was kind of above my skill level. sounds like even the experienced people are figuring things out as they go though which is reassuring i guess lol. do most groups welcome people who are still pretty new or do they want you to have like a certain amount of experience first?

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

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 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?

so ive been sitting on this for a while but last weekend i finally cracked open the 857D and did the mars/cap mod to open up the TX range. pretty straightforward once you find the right diodes, took maybe 20 minutes total including finding my reading glasses. the service manual PDF floating around online has the right diagram if you search for it. anyway the reason i did this wasn't really for transmitting out of band, more because i wanted to use it on some of the EMCOMM frequencies that sit just outside the normal ham allocations and needed the flexibility for testing purposes. the radio came back up fine and TX looks clean on the dummy load. SWR is behaving normally. while i had it open i also reflowed a couple solder joints near the PA section that looked a little cold — not sure if that was from factory or just age, the radio is maybe 8 years old at this point. hard to say if it made any difference but it felt like the right thing to do while i was already in there. anyone else done any other useful mods on this radio? ive seen some stuff about the cooling fan mod and im curious if its actually worth doing or if thats more of a worry-about-nothing thing. mine gets warm on digital but hasnt caused me any real problems yet