Frank Williams

so i finally pulled the trigger and built one of those QRP Labs QCX mini kits for 40m and honestly i wasnt expecting much but the thing actually works. got it all assembled over a weekend, smoked one resistor because i was being impatient with the iron but otherwise pretty smooth build. fired it up and immediately heard a pile-up on some DX station which was a good sign i guess. anyway i managed to work a station about 340 miles away running 4 watts and i was completely hooked. my question is more about efficiency i suppose — im using a random wire in the attic right now with a tuner and im wondering if thats killing my effectiveness. i know QRP is already uphill, the last thing i want is to waste half my power in a mediocre antenna situation. also wondering if anyone has tips on operating strategy, like when to call, when to give up, that kind of thing. i feel like with 100 watts you can just throw RF at a problem but with 4 watts you have to actually think a little

so this has been bugging me for a few weeks now. my 857 was putting out fine, like 100w on HF, then one day i noticed it just felt... weak. checked it with my wattmeter and im getting maybe 15-20w on 40m, a bit more on 20m, and almost nothing on 10m. receive seems completely normal, SWR readings look right, dummy load checks out. i did the obvious stuff already — reseated all the connectors i could get to, checked the ALC wasn't going crazy (it wasnt), tried it on a different antenna just in case. same deal. no smoke, no smell, nothing dramatic happened that i can remember. just gradually got worse i think, or maybe it was sudden and i didnt notice for a while because im mostly listening lately. my gut says one of the driver transistors or maybe a bias issue in the PA stage. pulled the service manual and the PA board has those RD70HHF1s in the final. anyone cracked one of these open for a similar symptom? wondering if its worth me poking around with a scope before i just swap the finals and hope for the best.

yeah WWFF is great, i got into it because i chase a lot of the european activators on 17m and 20m. the spots show up on the regular pota map sometimes too depending on how the activator logs it so dont stress too much about it being a ghost town. some days its super quiet and other days you get a pileup from stations youve never heard from before which is fun. good luck next weekend

yeah the vanity system is a little confusing at first but once you get the hang of it its not too bad. so the application windows are basically tiered — if you're an immediate family member of the silent key who held the call you get first crack at it during an early window, then it opens up to everyone else after that period closes. if multiple people apply for the same call in the same window then yeah it goes to random selection, which is kind of a crapshoot but thats how it works. and yes unfortunately the FCC does charge a fee now, i want to say its $35 but you should double check that on their site because it may have changed. you can apply through the FCC's website directly or use a third party service like Ham Call or AE7Q's tools to check availability and track the status of calls. AE7Q in particular is really useful for seeing exactly when a call becomes available and what window it falls into. good luck with it, hope you get the one you're after

RG-58 is definitely not your friend on 440 — the loss on that stuff at UHF is pretty significant compared to something like LMR-400 or even RG-8X. But honestly a 2.5 SWR isn't going to kill you for local repeater work, it's just not ideal. Before you go pulling new coax though I'd check the connector end at the radio really carefully. Mag mount pigtails are notoriously hit or miss from the factory and sometimes the center pin isnt making solid contact or the braid is barely hanging on inside the PL-259. I've seen brand new antennas right out of the box with garbage terminations. Also try sliding the mag mount around to a few different spots on the roof — ground plane geometry can do weird things with the UHF readings especially on a truck with all the bodylines and curves. Dead center of the roof usually works best. If neither of those fixes it then yeah I'd just re-terminate or swap the pigtail with some better coax.

so ive been trying to get Winlink going for about three weeks now and i feel like im going in circles. Running Winlink Express on a windows 10 box, got a Signalink USB hooked up to my IC-7300, and im trying to connect to a nearby RMS gateway i can see listed in the frequency list. The session just times out every time, says no response from RMS. I can hear other people making connections on the frequency — i think thats what im hearing anyway — so the gateway is clearly up. My question is whether this is a soundcard level thing or something with how im configuring the AX.25 side. I've got Winlink Express set to Vara HF but honestly i dont fully understand the difference between Vara HF and Winlink's packet modes. should i even be on Vara HF for this or should i be running packet? The IC-7300 is set to DATA mode, USB-D i think. VOX is triggering but i have no idea if the audio levels are right. PTT seems to be keying because i can see the TX light go on. also is there any way to test if my outgoing signal is actually decodable before i burn more time troubleshooting the gateway side. feel like im missing something obvious here

yeah what he said, also dont stress about sounding perfect. net controls hear nervous new hams all the time and honestly most of them are pretty patient. i remember my first check-in i said my callsign wrong like i jumbled the letters and the net control just calmly asked me to repeat and moved on. nobody made a big deal of it one thing i'd add is if you can find the net's specific format beforehand sometimes they post it on a club website or the repeater's linked group. some nets are super formal with traffic passing and some are basically just a ragchew with structure so it really depends. just listen first like you've been doing and you'll figure out the vibe pretty quick

hamstudy.org is honestly all you need for passing the exam, just do the practice tests every day and youll get there in a month no problem. the site tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those which is pretty smart. i did maybe 2 weeks of that before my tech exam and passed pretty comfortably. the memorization thing — yeah the pool is public and yeah some people just brute force memorize it, nothing wrong with that to get your foot in the door. that said i found that for the electrical formulas and stuff like ohms law it actually helps to understand whats going on because those questions have variations and if you just memorized one version you might get tripped up. the regulations stuff though, like privileges and band plans, thats pretty much just memorize and move on. dont overthink it, the tech exam really isnt that hard. the harder part is actually getting on the air and figuring stuff out once you have the license

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals, dont feel bad. the short version is the FCC allocations are the actual legal limits and the ARRL band plan is more of a gentlemans agreement about where different modes tend to hang out. you absolutely cannot transmit below 7.175 as a general on phone, thats not a suggestion thats part 97. extra class gets down to 7.125. the band edge thing is practical more than legal. if youre running SSB and your carrier is right at 7.300 your upper sideband is actually splashing above the allocation and thats a violation. most people say stay at least 3khz inside the edge to be safe, some say more depending on how wide your signal is. i usually just stay below 7.295 to be comfortable. the dead zone you're hearing in the middle of the day is pretty normal on 40, the skip is too long for locals and too short for dx so theres this weird dead region. it fills back up in the evenings when the band changes character. youll get used to it.

honestly the Extra pool gets a reputation that i think is a little overblown. yeah there's impedance matching questions and some LC circuit stuff and a few things about transmission lines that look scary at first but the question pool is published and if you spend a few weeks on hamstudy you'll start to recognize the patterns. i wont pretend i understood every single concept deeply when i took it, there were definitely a couple questions where i just memorized the answer and moved on. the parts i actually found useful to understand rather than just memorize were the filter questions and the amplifier stability stuff, because once you get the basic idea the related questions kind of answer themselves. the regulatory section is also bigger than people expect, lots of detailed part 97 stuff that general just doesnt get into. give yourself maybe 6 to 8 weeks if youre doing a little bit every day and you should be fine. the extra slices really do make a difference on a crowded band day btw, especially 20m phone.

nice one. i still havent worked them, been trying on 40m CW mostly but my antenna situation is not great right now. got the dipole at like 25ft which is fine for local stuff but when youre competing against kilowatt stations with stacked yagis its rough lol. might try 17m SSB like you did, maybe less competition there depending on the time. what time were you getting in when propagation was good to your location?

so ive had this 857 for probably 6 years now and it's been solid but the last few weeks i've noticed transmit power is way down. like showing maybe 5-8 watts on a good day when it should be doing 100 on HF. receive seems completely normal, SWR meter looks fine when i key up, no weird noises or smoke obviously, just... no power getting out. already swapped the coax thinking maybe a connector had corroded inside (we had a wet winter), no change. ran it on a dummy load same result. i did the standard menu checks, mic gain is set right, ALC looks like its barely moving when i speak which honestly might be the clue here but im not sure. i dont have a scope at home, just a basic multimeter and an antenna analyzer. anyone gone down this road with one of these rigs? im wondering if its a driver stage issue or something with the finals but i really dont want to crack it open if theres something obvious im overlooking first. its out of warranty obviously so im not worried about that, just dont want to make it worse poking around blind.

so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother studying for the extra. like i mostly do HF casual stuff, some 40m and 20m ragchewing, occasionally try to work some dx when conditions are decent. i dont really feel limited by my general privileges honestly but everyone keeps telling me i should just go for it. the thing that gets me is the theory on that exam looks pretty intense. like the math for some of the filter stuff and the impedance matching questions... i passed my general without too much trouble but i looked at some extra practice questions and some of them had me lost. is it really necessary to actually understand all that stuff or do people just memorize the pool and move on? and does having extra actually change how you operate day to day or is it mostly just the extra band segments that most people dont even use

so I've been putting this off for way too long, always figured I'd just buy a commercial antenna but after pricing out some of the decent ones I figured why not just build one. ended up cutting a 40m dipole from some 14 gauge stranded copper wire I had laying around in the garage, fed it with some RG-8X I had from an old project. center insulator is just a chunk of PVC I drilled through and sealed with some silicone. got it up in an inverted V config about 28 feet at the apex which I know isnt ideal but thats what my tallest tree will give me. SWR is sitting around 1.4:1 at 7.150 which honestly surprised me, I was expecting worse for a first build. I did trim it a few times to get there. my question is about the feedline length — ive been reading about the whole thing where certain feedline lengths can cause issues depending on the impedance and I'm not sure if my 35 feet of coax is going to cause any weirdness. also wondering if I should bother with a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint or if that's overkill for casual HF use. I have a tuner on the rig but haven't needed it yet at 7.150.

so ive been licensed about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF DX but for some reason EME has always been in the back of my mind as like the ultimate challenge. started reading up on it more seriously the last few months and honestly the more I read the more confused I get about what the minimum viable setup actually looks like. I know the old school guys were running massive antenna arrays and kilowatt amps but ive been seeing stuff about JT65 and Q65 making it more accessible now? like is a single yagi on 2m actually realistic or am I setting myself up to be disappointed. my lot isnt huge, probably could swing a 9 or 11 element yagi on an az-el mount without too much drama with the neighbors. also the moon tracking software side of it, is there one program people actually use or is it a whole rabbit hole of different tools chained together. dont want to spend a year building something and then find out Im pointed at the wrong part of sky half the time lol