Rachel Kim

the NVIS comment caught my eye — what antenna were you running for that? we've been trying to figure out a good portable NVIS option for our group and keep going back and forth on whether a simple dipole at low height is enough or if we need something fancier. our county is pretty spread out so repeater-only coverage has always been a weak point for us during actual events when infrastructure takes hits.

so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and yeah its great for getting contacts logged especially when the bands are being weird but honestly the 15 second sequence thing gets old when you just want to have an actual conversation with somebody. heard about JS8Call a while back and finally installed it last weekend and i gotta say the learning curve is steeper than i expected.
my question is really whether people actually use it regularly for like actual back and forth conversation or is it mostly just empty frequencies with the occasional beacon. i can see the appeal in theory — basically PSK31 speeds but with the weak signal performance closer to FT8, right? or am i misunderstanding how it works under the hood.
for context im running an ic-7300 into a trapped vertical, usually on 40m or 20m, and my noise floor at the home QTH is pretty rough so weak signal stuff matters a lot to me. tried PSK31 years ago and loved the conversational aspect but even with a decent signal it felt fragile compared to what FT8 does in the mud. so anyway is JS8Call actually being used or did everyone just go back to FT8 and call it a day

yeah same thing happened to me on our county ARES net haha. i asked something about ICS forms and the net control kind of just said "great question, lets take that off net" and moved on. felt awkward for a second but honestly that was the right call on his part, nets have a flow and going too deep into a topic stalls everything out. doesnt mean you did anything wrong though

65% is honestly pretty respectable for an IRF510, those things are kind of notorious for being finicky to get right and a lot of builds dont even hit that. the warmth you're describing is probably fine as long as its not throttling up over time or anything. i ran one for a whole field day afternoon and it got warm to the touch but never caused any trouble.
if you really want to chase better efficiency some people swear by the BS170 in a class E arrangement for lower power stuff, like under 1 watt, but at 3 watts the IRF510 is pretty standard and i wouldnt tear up a working board chasing a few percent. the matching network is worth double checking though, just verify your low pass filter values against the design and make sure your load is actually presenting 50 ohms at the final. a lot of efficiency loss hides in an imperfect match rather than the transistor itself. ohio from western PA on 3 watts homebrew is a solid first contact, congrats on getting it on the air.

im in basically the same boat lol been sitting at 10wpm for like two months. tried bumping up to 13 and it just felt impossible. someone on reddit suggested just copying one word at a time and not worrying about getting the whole sentence, which actually helped a little bit for me. also LCWO has this word training thing where you can do common English words and that felt less stressful than random letters. anyway no real advice just solidarity i guess, its hard

the cap swap thing — ive heard mixed results honestly. did it on mine about a year ago following the mod that was posted over on radioreference i think, and i did notice a slight difference in audio but nothing dramatic. the bigger improvement i got was just adjusting the TX EQ in the menu and tweaking the mic gain. probably got 80% of the same result without touching any hardware. that said the caps are cheap and if youre comfortable with a soldering iron its not a scary job, just cramped in there.
the TCXO though, yeah do it. the drift thing you're describing is exactly why i did mine. went with the Icom unit, dropped right in, no fuss. the third party ones i looked at were either the same price or not really designed for the slot so i didnt bother. after the install my 7300 is rock solid on FT8, no more creeping off frequency during the first QSOs of a session.

the cap swap thing — ive heard mixed results honestly. did it on mine about a year ago following the mod that was posted over on radioreference i think, and i did notice a slight difference in audio but nothing dramatic. the bigger improvement i got was just adjusting the TX EQ in the menu and tweaking the mic gain. probably got 80% of the same result without touching any hardware. that said the caps are cheap and if youre comfortable with a soldering iron its not a scary job, just cramped in there.
the TCXO though, yeah do it. the drift thing you're describing is exactly why i did mine. went with the Icom unit, dropped right in, no fuss. the third party ones i looked at were either the same price or not really designed for the slot so i didnt bother. after the install my 7300 is rock solid on FT8, no more creeping off frequency during the first QSOs of a session.

so i finally did my first SOTA activation last weekend, summit was only a 2 mile hike which i figured would be easy enough with the radio gear. brought my ft-818 and a random wire antenna, figured i'd just throw it up in a tree and get my 4 contacts no problem. well the tree situation at the top was basically nonexistent, just a bunch of scrubby little pines that were maybe 8 feet tall at best. ended up lashing the antenna to my trekking pole which kind of worked but the SWR was all over the place and i kept having to retune. managed to get 5 contacts on 20m SSB but it took way longer than expected and my fingers were freezing by the end. also didnt realize how much wind affects the audio apparently because one guy told me i sounded like i was in a hurricane. anyway got the activation credit which is the important thing i guess, already planning the next one

We're running all three systems bridged together on our club repeater - the VoIP Nodes project allows cross-connecting one IRLP node to multiple AllStarLink and EchoLink nodes. Takes more setup but gives maximum connectivity options. Members love being able to access any network they want.

We're running all three systems bridged together on our club repeater - the VoIP Nodes project allows cross-connecting one IRLP node to multiple AllStarLink and EchoLink nodes. Takes more setup but gives maximum connectivity options. Members love being able to access any network they want.