Antenna Guy

so ive been chasing DX for about a year now and just recently started taking it more seriously. got into logging with LOTW after a friend basically forced me to set it up and im really glad he did. anyway i have like 87 entities worked but only 62 confirmed on LOTW so far and im just trying to understand how the credit system works before i apply for anything. do i need 100 confirmed to apply for the basic DXCC award, or 100 worked is enough to start the process? i know some people mail QSL cards in for credit too which seems kind of old school but i guess it still counts. also how does the mixed mode thing work — if i work the same entity on SSB and FT8 does that count as one entity or two for the basic DXCC. reading the ARRL site has me going in circles a bit also completely separately, anyone working toward WAS at the same time? im in the midwest so a lot of states are easy but alaska and hawaii are always a pain. wondering if the two awards kind of feed off each other or if its just completely separate grind

yeah the actual Part 97 text is rough to read if you're not used to it, totally get that. so techs do get some HF — you get 10m phone above 28.300, which is actually pretty fun during good solar conditions. and there's also CW privileges on a few other bands like 40m and 15m and a couple others but only for morse code, no voice. the 40m phone thing you heard about might have been someone misremembering or maybe talking about General. a lot of people mix that up. the ARRL has a frequency allocation chart that's way easier to read than the FCC document, i'd just look that up, they have a pdf version floating around. main thing techs accidentally do wrong is trying to operate on 20m or 40m phone thinking they have those privileges — they don't, and technically that's operating outside your license class which is a Part 97 violation. not like the FCC is actively hunting people down but it's still worth doing it right especially when you're new and building habits

so i've been licensed for about 3 years and always just ran 100w from the shack, never really thought much about QRP because honestly it seemed like making things harder for no reason. but my buddy kept bugging me about it and i borrowed his elecraft kx2 for a weekend trip up to the mountains and... yeah okay i get it now. made contacts on 20m with 5 watts and a wire i threw up in a tree and it just felt different somehow, like more satisfying? hard to explain. the radio itself is tiny, fits in my jacket pocket basically, and the battery lasted forever. i was running it off a small lipo pack he had rigged up. now im seriously thinking about either building something or buying a dedicated QRP rig. ive been looking at the xiegu g90 but thats not really QRP i guess, and then theres the mcHF kit and some others. anyone built one of those QCX rigs from QRP labs? they look interesting but im not sure if my soldering is up to it. been a while since ive done any kit building.

Just had my first QSO last week and found that most friendly OMs will explain codes if you ask. Keep in mind that you may hear these Q-codes when you're operating any of the voice modes or when talking with other hams at club meetings or hamfests. Even experienced hams use them in casual conversation!

im kind of in the same boat so watching this thread. im at about 11wpm and feeling stuck too. one thing i heard is that doing head copy instead of writing everything down helps build speed but i find it really hard to trust myself to remember even a callsign without scribbling it down lol. maybe thats part of my problem too

yeah you've got the right idea on LoTW — eQSL doesn't count for DXCC, full stop. some awards programs like CQ magazine use it but ARRL won't touch it for DXCC credits so just make sure you're uploading to LoTW consistently after every session and you're good. the good news is once you're in the habit it takes like 2 minutes. on the mixed vs phone vs digital question — honestly just chase mixed to start. once you hit 100 confirmed on mixed you apply and then the endorsements kind of take care of themselves because you're already working stuff. a lot of people find they accidentally have enough for phone or digital endorsement by the time they hit the basic 100 anyway, especially if you're doing FT8 at all because that mode just eats through entities fast. WAS and DXCC at the same time is totally doable and honestly i'd do it. the US states arent going anywhere so you dont have to rush that, but grabbing them when you can is just smart. a lot of the 50 states show up in the same general operating time windows as your DX anyway.

Building a homebrew 8-element collinear for 146 MHz using the WB3AYW design with phasing coils. Getting SWR of 2.8:1 at resonance instead of the expected <1.5:1. Using RG-213 hardline for elements, all cut to exactly 36.5" with proper phasing coil construction per the spreadsheet. The frequency is spot-on at 146.52 MHz, but the impedance is clearly wrong. Should I focus on trimming individual elements or adjusting the spacing between elements? Also wondering if my 300Ω ladder line matching section (currently 17.25") needs adjustment. Ground plane is four 1/4λ radials at the base. Any insights on where to start troubleshooting would be helpful.

Great to see real-world testing being documented. Running an RMS gateway is rewarding work - sysops regularly save lives, help medical missions, and support emergency communications. Your portable approach could be crucial for served agencies during actual incidents. Keep up the good work!

When General class licensees are not permitted to use the entire voice portion of a band, the upper frequency end is the portion generally available to them. Also remember the four key numbers: 7.25, 356, 390, 1430 - if you see these in answer choices about frequencies, that's usually correct!

so i passed my general last year and picked up CW kind of on a whim, started with the LCWO site doing Koch method and got up to about 13wpm pretty quickly but now i feel like i've completely hit a wall. like i'll sit down and copy for 20 minutes and just feel like im going backwards some days. when i first started at 5wpm everything felt slow but manageable and i could actually write down what i heard. now at 13 i'm catching most of it but then i miss one character and my brain just locks up trying to figure out what i missed and then i miss the next three characters too. its this horrible cascade effect and i dont know how to break out of it. been at this for probably 4 months now doing maybe 30-45 minutes a day. read somewhere that 20wpm is kind of the magic number where code starts to actually feel natural and you stop counting dits and dahs. is that true and how do you actually get there without losing your mind in the middle range

our club is actually renting a van lol, got 6 people going so far if you want in on that let me know. we usually do a dinner the night before too which is always fun

Hey don't stress too much about it, everybody does that at least once when they're new to nets. The tail-ending thing happens, especially when you're not used to the rhythm of a particular repeater and how much hang time it has. Some repeaters have a long courtesy beep before the squelch tail drops and if you key up before that beep you'll step on whoever just finished. Just give it an extra beat or two after you hear the beep and you'll be fine. As for the recognized-by-net-control thing, that really does depend on the net. Formal traffic nets run pretty structured where you wait to be called on, but a lot of casual weekly check-in nets are more relaxed and people just jump in conversationally once things get going. Probably worth just listening for a few more sessions and watching how the regulars handle it. Net control will usually set the tone pretty early on. And honestly most net controls are happy to have new checkins, they'd much rather have you making a small mistake than not checking in at all.

I'm scaling down a successful 6M Yagi design to work on 10M, but getting confused about element diameter corrections. When building any antenna - especially a Yagi - the diameter of the elements has an effect on how long the element should be. For example, consider two antennas that are identical except for the diameter of their elements. Given two elements that are the same length, the larger-diameter element will be electrically shorter (e.g. higher frequency) than a smaller-diameter element. This means that if an antenna designed with, say, 1/8" diameter elements is built using 1/4" diameter elements, it will be slightly high in frequency. My 6M design used 3/8" elements but I want to use 1/4" rod for 10M. How much should I compensate the element lengths?

yeah what he said about LCWO is solid. i'll add that there's also a phone app called Morse Mania that some people swear by if you want something you can do while waiting in line or whatever. i personally used a combination of that and just listening to slow CW nets on the air even when i couldn't copy everything. just having it in the background helps your ear get used to the rhythm of it i think. one thing nobody told me when i started -- the hardest part isnt learning the letters its learning to copy in your head without writing every single letter down. thats a whole separate skill. dont stress about it early on just focus on recognizing the characters first

honest answer — at your rate level, SO2R is probably going to hurt more than help for a while. the mental overhead is real. youre essentially running two pile-ups in your head at once and if your SO1R game isnt pretty automatic already, adding a second radio just introduces more ways to make mistakes and miss QSOs on both bands simultaneously. that said the actual technical setup doesnt have to be as complicated as people make it sound. the biggest thing you need to sort out before anything else is transmitter keying interlocking so you physically cannot key both radios at the same time — that will cause you problems real fast if you skip it. YCCC SO2R box or a homebrew relay setup both work, lots of guys use the cheap two-radio interlocking boards you can find on QRZ classifieds. the 7300 and 590SG are both fine radios for this, no issues there. for audio i just run each radio into a separate ear of my headphones, left ear one radio right ear the other. takes a few contests to get used to but you stop noticing after a while. N1MM+ has decent SO2R support built in, worth reading their wiki on it before you dive in hardware first. i'd say run a full contest SO1R first and focus on getting your rate smooth and consistent. once a 100/hr hour feels boring, then start messing with the second radio.

this is really interesting to read as someone whos only been licensed about eight months and just joined our local ARES group. havent done a SET yet, ours is scheduled for the fall. the part about simplex frequencies not being programmed kind of worries me because i honestly dont know if my radio has everything it should. who do i ask about that, just the EC?

so i've been lurking on this forum for about a year now and kept seeing people talk about qrp and honestly i thought it was kind of a gimmick at first, like why would you limit yourself to 5 watts when you could just run 100. but i got bit by the bug after watching some youtube videos of guys making contacts from mountain tops with a radio they built themselves, and i finally decided to just go for it. i built a youkits HB-1B clone kit from a guy on qrz — took me about 3 evenings spread over two weeks, mostly because i kept second guessing my solder joints and had to reflow a few of the smd caps. but it fired right up on the bench, which honestly shocked me. got about 4 watts out on 40m which i'm pretty happy with. took it out saturday to a park about 20 minutes from my house. just threw an end fed half wave up in a tree, brought my little kx2 paddle and a notepad, and just started calling cq. i was not expecting much but i worked 6 stations in about 2 hours, one of them was in Ontario which felt like a big deal to me. the whole setup including my little lipo battery weighed maybe 2 pounds. i dont think i can ever go back to sitting in the shack the same way again honestly. anyone else been doing sota or pota stuff with home built rigs? curious what antennas people are using for portable. i feel like the antenna makes such a huge difference at qrp levels.

I had the same confusion when I started! eQSL is a free service that lets you exchange electronic QSL cards with other amateurs - it's faster and cheaper than waiting for paper cards. Start with both LoTW and eQSL accounts - many logging programs can automatically upload to both. Paper cards are nice for collecting, but for awards, electronic is the way to go.

so i finally pulled the trigger on doing the TX audio mod that's been floating around on qrz and a few other places — basically adjusting the TX bandwidth by tweaking a couple of the internal settings and also swapping out the stock electret element in my desk mic for a dynamic capsule i had lying around from an old shure. the idea was to get flatter, more broadcast-style audio and cut some of the mid-range honk that the 7300 has stock. results are... mixed i guess. on-air reports are better in the sense that people say i sound less nasal, which was the goal. but now im getting complaints that im too bassy on SSB and my ALC is behaving weirdly, like it's hitting harder than before on peaks even though my drive level hasn't changed. i think the impedance mismatch between the new capsule and the mic input might be doing something funky. either that or i messed with the TX equalizer settings in the menu and forgot to document what i changed before i started which was really dumb of me. anyone done similar mods on the 7300 or even the 7100 for that matter? curious if there's a sweet spot for the internal TX EQ settings or if i should just add an external in-line EQ between the mic and the radio. also not sure if the ALC thing is related or totally seperate issue.

I've noticed some operators, especially newer hams, jumping into conversations or calling CQ without listening first. Spending a few minutes listening ensures the frequency is clear and prevents interference with ongoing communications. This isn't just courtesy - it's essential for effective operation. When you change to a new frequency or repeater, listen for at least 30 seconds to make sure there isn't a conversation already going on. What other operating practices do you think new hams should focus on?

the low resonant point is actually pretty normal for an inverted-V versus a flat-top dipole. the legs being angled downward effectively makes the antenna act a bit longer electrically, so you'll usually need to trim some compared to what the formula gives you. 25 feet at center isnt super high either which can affect things. the 2.8 SWR at resonance is the more interesting part. if the antenna is actually resonant (low reactance) but still showing that SWR number, the feedpoint impedance might just be sitting lower than 50 ohms, which can happen with inverted-V geometry — some people see impedances in the 35-45 ohm range depending on the angle of the legs. thats not a huge deal for most rigs with internal tuners, or you could look at using 75 ohm coax as a matching section. but first I'd double check your connector isnt introducing a short or cold solder joint, ive been burned by that before on a SO-239 build where I thought the solder flowed but it really didnt make contact properly.

6 contacts is good enough to qualify so thats a win. i did my first POTA last month and had nobody answer me for like 20 minutes and started to panic, turns out i was on the wrong side of the band and could barely hear anyone. still logged 12 eventually so it worked out but yeah the first time is always a little chaotic

yeah what he said about the balun is real, i had almost the exact same problem with my first dipole and adding even a crappy air choke dropped my swr like half a point. also just double check your solder joints at the feedpoint, i once had a connection that looked fine but was actually just barely touching and gave me weird readings for like two weeks before i figured it out

not a dumb question at all, this stuff confused me for years honestly. so the short version is — LoTW is what you want if you're chasing DXCC or WAS through the ARRL, because those awards require LoTW confirmations (or physical cards sent to the ARRL but nobody really does that anymore). eQSL is a completely separate system, its not affiliated with ARRL, and while its fun and some awards accept it, the big prestigious ones dont. you can use both, theres no rule against it. paper cards are absolutely still a thing and some people love them, myself included. there are awards that still accept or even require physical QSLs, and honestly getting a nice card in the mail from some rare DX station never gets old. a lot of dx-peditions will confirm via LoTW AND send paper cards if you send them a self addressed envelope with return postage (usually via the bureau or direct). my advice: get yourself set up on LoTW first since thats the most important for awards. the process is a little annoying because you have to get a certificate from the ARRL but its worth it. then maybe sign up for eQSL too since its easy and free. and dont stop collecting paper cards, theyre the best part of the hobby in my opinion

first thing id check is whether youre actually making it into the repeater at all — a lot of repeaters will send a courtesy beep or a tail when someone keys up even if nobody is listening. if youre not hearing that when you unkey then your signal probably isnt getting in, could be the offset is wrong or the tone isnt programmed right. baofengs can be a little weird about how they store CTCSS, worth double checking that its set to transmit tone and not just squelch by tone (which would mean you hear the repeater but it wont respond to you). as for breaking in, what you did sounds totally fine honestly. during a pause between overs is exactly right. sometimes people just dont hear or are mid-thought. try saying something like your callsign and "monitoring" or even just ask if the frequency is in use before a QSO starts. most repeater groups are pretty welcoming especially to new folks.