Angela Washington

yeah did that mod years ago on mine, pretty standard stuff. the RF performance doesnt really change, its just removing the band lockout the factory puts in for type acceptance reasons. you're not touching anything in the signal chain so whatever you were getting before youll get after. the cooling thing is a real issue though, especially if youre running WSPR or FT8 for any length of time. what i ended up doing was adding a small 40mm 12v fan blowing across the finals heatsink area and it made a noticeable difference, the rig stays way cooler now even at 50w digital. theres a thread somewhere on eham about tapping into the internal fan circuit to run an external one that kicks on with the stock fan but i just wired mine to a switched 12v line off the back. not pretty but it works. the 857 is a great little rig but yaesu definitely underspecced the thermal management on it for the duty cycles we actually run these days with digital modes being so popular.

yeah what you did is basically the right approach, you kind of stumbled onto what the experienced dx chasers do on purpose. listening before transmitting sounds obvious but probably 80% of the pileup isnt doing it. the split thing is huge, so many people call on the dx frequency and wonder why they never get through, theyre literally invisible to the dx station as for figuring out where hes listening when you cant hear both sides, a few things that help. first just watch where he comes back to and try to read the partial callsigns he gives, sometimes you can figure out if hes favoring a certain part of the spread. also some ops have patterns, like they'll work up from 5 to 10 and then reset, or theyll stay at a certain offset for a while before moving. takes a bit of practice to pick up on but once you start noticing it you can anticipate it with 100w and a dipole youre not completely out of the game, the timing matters more than raw power a lot of the time. throwing your call in right as the pileup thins a tiny bit, like right after he completes a qso, can be the difference. also dont tail-end, its bad practice and most good dx ops hate it clublog and dx summit sometimes have spots with the split offset listed so check those before you even start calling

so ive been chasing 3Y0J for what feels like forever and when they finally came back on the air i spent the better part of two days just getting stomped in the pileup. eventually cracked it on 17m CW but it got me thinking about whether im actually doing this right or just getting lucky when the pile thins out at weird hours. what i've noticed is the split operation stuff is obvious, listen to where they're actually tuning and park there instead of just throwing out calls randomly. but im still not great at figuring out the right moment to transmit. feels like there's some timing intuition that experienced guys have that i just dont have yet. like knowing when to stop calling and wait vs when to keep hammering. also had a weird thing where i was running about 400w into a 4el yagi at 50ft and still getting walked over by what i assume were guys running legal limit with stacked beams or whatever. is there a point where antenna gain just matters more than technique or is it really mostly skill and timing? curious what actual techniques people use when the DXpedition is running split and the pile is massive. partial calls? full calls every time? i've seen people argue both ways.

i was exactly the same way when i started lol, sat by the radio for like two weeks before i actually keyed up. the nets on 40m are worth exploring if you havent gone there yet, some of them run almost every night and the HF propagation makes it feel like a bigger deal somehow, you're hearing people from a few states away and everyone's just casually chatting or passing traffic like its nothing. oh and if you ever want to do something fun look for special event stations around holidays or big hamfests, sometimes you get on the air with a station running a special 1x1 callsign and it goes into a logbook for some kind of award. i worked one a while back during a museum ships weekend and the op on the other end was running from an actual navy vessel which was pretty cool

so ive been a tech for about 2 years now and i finally decided to go for general. i bought the gordon west book a few weeks ago and started going through it but honestly some of this stuff is really dense and i dont know if im studying the right things or just wasting time on topics that barely show up on the exam like the electrical theory sections, how deep do i actually need to go on that? i can do the basic ohms law stuff but when it gets into reactance and impedance calculations i start glazing over. and then theres the operating procedures and band plans which seem more straightforward but there are SO many little details also kind of a separate question, once i actually pass and get HF privileges, what should i even do first? ive heard 40m is a good starting point but i dont really have an HF rig yet and i dont know if my current antenna situation would even work (apartment, 3rd floor, HOA would lose their minds if i put anything on the roof) anyway any advice on the exam prep side would be helpful, im planning to take it in maybe 6-8 weeks

i have the 7610 and honestly sometimes i wonder if the 7300 wouldnt have been fine for what i actually do lol. the dual watch on the 7610 is nice during contests but day to day its not like im using both receivers at once. the 7300 hits a sweet spot for the price imo

this was me like six months ago lol. the doppler thing with inverting transponders broke my brain for a while. what finally clicked for me was just working it live with someone on the ground who could tell me they heard me — joined a local club that does satellite nets and someone spotted my signal on a webSDR and told me to tune up and i could hear myself move down, then it just made sense. gpredict has a doppler correction mode that can output to some radios via CAT and handle the inversion for you, worth looking into if your rig supports it. IC-9700 does it natively which is kinda cheating but also amazing.

i went through the exact same thing when i was starting out haha. honestly for just getting started i'd say dont worry too much about which cluster you're using and just pick one. i use DX Summit myself just because thats what someone showed me first and it loads fast on my tablet. the QRZ spotting page is okay too but i find it a little cluttered. one thing that helped me a lot was the DXmaps site, its not really a cluster but it shows propagation and spots on a map which kind of helped me understand why i could hear some stations and not others. might be worth a look if you havent seen it

so ive had the 7300 for about three weeks now and figured id share some impressions since i spent like two months reading threads before buying and some of them were pretty outdated coming from an old TS-570 which honestly served me well for years but the 7300 is just... a different world. the panadapter alone is worth it if youre doing any kind of band hunting or just trying to figure out whats going on across a chunk of spectrum. i caught a VP8 that i wouldve completely missed on the 570 just because i saw the signal pop up on the scope while i was doing something else the touch screen took some getting used to and i still accidentally tap the wrong thing sometimes but the receiver quality is genuinely impressive, way better than i expected in the $1000 price range. i did notice some IMD issues when i was near the broadcast band, had a couple big AM stations about 15 miles away and there was some bleed through on 40m but i played with the preamp settings and the RF gain and got it mostly under control only real gripe so far is the menu system feels a little buried for some things. like why is it so many taps to get to the NR settings. anyway still learning it but overall pretty happy with the purchase, wondering if anyone else made a similar jump from older Kenwood iron and what they noticed

im not super experienced with digging into the finals and stuff but i had something similar happen with an older rig and it turned out to be a dirty relay contact. might be worth trying if you can get to it. i used some contact cleaner on the relay and cycled it a bunch of times and it helped, not a permanent fix obviously but kind of confirmed where the problem was.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely confused me for the first couple years too. the short answer is you dont need all three but each one has its uses depending on what you want to do. LoTW is the gold standard if you ever want to go for DXCC — the ARRL basically requires it or physical cards for that award, and most serious DX stations upload to LoTW pretty regularly. eQSL is more of a casual thing, some people love it and some DXers dont bother with it at all since it doesnt count for DXCC. but there are some eQSL-specific awards if you care about that sort of thing. physical cards though, i still love them honestly. ive got a whole wall of them going back to when i was first licensed in the 80s. for mailing your own cards you dont need a manager until you start getting a lot of volume or working rare DX stations that specifically require bureau cards. for now just send direct with a self addressed envelope and a couple dollars for return postage, most ops appreciate it and youll get a nice card back. the QSL bureau through the ARRL is cheaper but slow, like months sometimes. just keep logging everything and uploading to LoTW consistently and youll be fine for awards later on

yeah 17m pileups can be brutal depending on propagation. VP6 isnt that rare but still draws a crowd. honestly the biggest thing i ever learned was just send your callsign once, clearly, and then shut up and listen. the guys who call over and over and over are the ones who never get through and also make it harder for everyone else. DX op hears a mess, moves on. split operation discipline is underrated. id say half the people in any given pileup are either on the wrong frequency or not even listening to where the DX is actually transmitting. read the cluster comments too sometimes ops post their listening range right there.

the RSP1A is still solid for that price range honestly. ive had mine for probably 3 years and it just works, SDRuno isnt the prettiest software but it gets the job done and the integration with the hardware is tight. the 1kHz to 2GHz coverage with decent sensitivity below HF is really where it shines over the rtl dongle. HackRF is a different animal, yes it transmits but the receive performance is actually not as good as the SDRplay in a lot of situations, higher noise floor and only 8 bit ADC vs the RSP1As 14 bit. so if youre purely receiving i wouldnt go HackRF just for the transmit capability you probably wont use anyway. the RSP2 adds some antenna ports and a bias tee but unless you specifically need that stuff the RSP1A is the better value. id say just grab the RSP1A, throw SDRuno on it and youll be happy, especially for HF work.

yeah 52 degrees is a solid pass, you picked a good one to start with. i had the same frustration my first few times and honestly the thing that helped me most was just getting comfortable finding my own signal before worrying about working anyone else. like spend a whole pass just doing that, dont even try to call CQ yet. once you can find yourself and hold your downlink frequency steady then working other stations gets a lot easier because you're not also fighting yourself at the same time. gpredict is good but i've heard some people have better luck with MacDoppler on mac or even just doing manual doppler with a spreadsheet someone posted over on amsat-bb, though that sounds painful to me. what are you using for the CAT connection, just the standard USB-serial thing on the 817?

congrats on the first kit build, that's always a good feeling. the QCX is a solid choice to start with, hans summers really did a good job with the documentation on those. wait till you try it portable, thats when QRP really clicks for you i think. throw it in a backpack with a lightweight antenna and a battery and go find a park or a hilltop -- the contacts you make feel completely different than sitting at the shack somehow. also 40m is great but if you havent tried 20m with it during a decent opening you're in for a treat. smaller antenna, often better DX. anyway welcome to the rabbit hole, fair warning its hard to go back to running a kilowatt once you get the QRP bug.