Rebecca Martinez

As a newcomer to homebrew, I found separate receiver and transmitter builds helped me learn before tackling a full transceiver. Maybe start with just the receiver section first? The VFO tracking between RX and TX can be tricky.

oh man i had the exact same problem when i started, turns out i had my offset going the wrong direction lol. worth double checking that too — most 2m repeaters in north america are minus 600khz but some are plus offset and if you have it backwards the repeater definitely wont hear you even with the right tone. baofengs can be a little weird to program manually so if you havent already just try chirp, makes it way easier to see everything at once

yeah the window system trips up a lot of people. basically when a callsign becomes available theres a 18 day filing window, and anyone who applies during that window gets thrown into a pool — it doesnt matter if you filed on day 1 or day 17. if only one person applies, they get it. if multiple people apply for the same call during that same window, the FCC runs a selection process that gives preference based on license class and other factors, and then yeah it can come down to a tiebreaker which some people call a lottery but its a bit more nuanced than that. AE7Q is generally pretty reliable but there can be a small lag between when something actually clears in the FCC system and when the lookup updates. sometimes a call looks open but theres already a pending application on it that hasnt shown up yet. i'd double check directly in the ULS sequential search before getting your heart set on something. the whole thing is way less scary once you do it once. i applied for mine a few years back and it went smooth, just took a few weeks to show up in the system after approval.

Just found out that paper QSL cards can't be combined with LoTW applications for DXCC anymore - the application processes are separate. This is a significant change from the old hybrid system. For those working toward DXCC, you'll need to decide whether to go the LoTW route (lower fees, half the cost of paper applications) or stick with traditional QSL cards. I ended up with 80 paper cards and 20 LoTW confirmations for my DXCC back when hybrids were allowed. What's everyone's preferred method now? Are you going all-LoTW or staying with paper QSLs?

honestly the General exam is not that much harder than Tech, people kind of scare you about it more than they should. the electrical theory questions are the same basic stuff just a little more depth, ohms law, basic circuit stuff, nothing crazy. i studied for maybe 3 weeks using hamstudy and the ARRL General book and passed first try with a decent score. the propagation section is actually kind of interesting once you get into it. as for the bands, you get HF privileges on most of the major bands, 40m is probably where you'll spend a lot of time starting out especially for domestic contacts, 20m is great for DX when conditions are decent. 10m is fantastic when the solar cycle cooperates and right now we're heading into a pretty good part of the cycle so timing is actually not bad. just be aware you're limited to certain band segments as General, you dont get the full band like an Extra does, but there's plenty of room to operate and honestly most of the activity is in the General segments anyway so you wont feel too squeezed.

the 2x9el at 500w question is a real one and the honest answer is it depends a lot on what mode you're using. back when EME was mostly CW you'd have needed a much bigger array to do anything, but Q65 kind of changed everything. ive worked stations with 2x11el and 400w on 144 and the path was marginal but it worked. that said you're not going to be calling CQ and getting a pile, you'll be scheduling with specific stations and picking windows when the moon is high for both sides. for the rotor situation at 43N you can actually get away with a lot. the moon gets high enough that a good horizon-to-horizon az rotor plus a manual elevation tilt or even a fixed elevation setup during a narrow window is something some guys do to start. its not ideal but people have made first EME contacts that way. eventually youll want az/el, the yaesu G-5500 is the go-to for a modest array and its not brutal on the wallet. the coax run matters a lot too, dont cheap out there or your noise figure goes to hell before you even get to the antenna.

yeah so the chart thing doesnt really work, or at least it didnt for me. you dont want to be translating dots and dashes in your head because youll never get fast enough to actually have a QSO doing it that way. what actually clicked for me was learning each letter as a sound, like you just hear dah-dit and your brain goes R without thinking about it. took a while to get there but once it happens its kind of wild. Koch method is basically where you start with just 2 characters at full speed, like 20wpm character speed, and you only add a new letter once you can copy the current ones at like 90% accuracy. there's a free program called LCWO dot net that does exactly this and thats honestly where id start. some people use the Morse Trainer app on their phone too which is pretty decent for commutes or whatever. just dont do like 5 wpm from the start, that slow stuff actually builds bad habits because the characters sound different at full speed.

yeah the listening part is huge and most people skip it completely. ive worked something like 340 entities at this point and the single biggest mistake i see in pileups, especially on phone, is people who just start yelling their callsign the second they find the frequency without even figuring out the split. then they're transmitting on the DX station's rx frequency and just making it worse for everybody. on SSB i find that sending just the last two letters of your callsign can work really well when the pile is massive, especially if the op is already pulling partials. on CW i tend to do exactly what you did, short calls, time them to end just before the DX would start listening, dont send your full callsign three times in a row because it just bleeds into the next cycle. and yeah figuring out the dx op's rhythm is probably 80% of it. some ops are very methodical, some are all over the place and you just have to get lucky with those ones. the other thing that helped me was upgrading from a dipole to a yagi a few years back, obviously that made a difference, but technique still matters even with a mediocre signal. ive been beaten to a QSO by guys running 100w and a wire when i had the beam pointed right at them because they timed their call better.

hamstudy.org is honestly where id start, just do the practice exams over and over until youre consistently hitting 85% or above and you'll be fine. the real exam pulls from the same pool so nothing surprises you. i studied maybe two weeks, like 20-30 minutes a day while eating lunch and passed no problem. some of the electrical theory questions you can kinda figure out with common sense if you think about it, ohms law stuff especially, but yeah a lot of people just memorize and thats totally fine for tech, the general and extra are where you really need to understand whats going on. dont stress about embarrassing yourself, the VEs have seen everything and theyre volunteers who want you to pass

yeah this is one of those things that depends so much on your specific location and ground conductivity that its kind of hard to give a definitive answer. i spent like two seasons A/B testing a low dipole against a vertical at my old place and honestly it was pretty situational — the vertical crushed it for long path DX but the dipole was noticeably quieter on receive, like 2-3 S units sometimes. one thing nobody mentions is that if your ground conductivity is poor (which it is for a lot of suburban lots) the vertical suffers more than people expect even with a solid radial field. theres a guy on the DX engineering site who did some modeling on this and the numbers were kind of sobering for vertical enthusiasts. anyway not saying dont try it, just that its not a guaranteed win over the dipole necessarily

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i mostly do 2m FM through a local repeater. when i give my callsign i usually just say the letters like november, alfa, whatever but sometimes i hear guys on there just making up their own words for letters and it sounds fine nobody corrects them or anything. like one guy always says "easy" for E instead of echo and another dude says "sugar" for S. is there actually a rule about this or is it just kind of a preference thing? i dont want to be doing it wrong but i also dont want to be the phonetic police either lol. my elmer told me to always use NATO but he also said a lot of things that turned out to be more like suggestions than actual rules

I went through this exact same thing six months ago haha. ended up with the Radioddity GD-77 because someone on reddit convinced me I needed DMR right away and honestly it was probably overkill for where I was at. the programming software gave me a headache for weeks. if i was doing it over id probably just grab a cheap baofeng to learn on and not stress about it. or the FT-4XR like Dave said. APRS is cool by the way, basically it's like GPS tracking over radio, some HTs have it built in but you can also add it later with a small TNC thing that plugs into your radio.

so i was scrolling through some videos from Hamvention last week and apparently Icom had some kind of new announcement but i cant find a solid writeup anywhere, just people talking around it in youtube comments. did anyone actually go this year or know whats going on with that? i heard something about a new HF portable rig but honestly the rumor mill on this stuff is so noisy its hard to tell whats real. also separately — has anyone noticed 10m has been absolutely bonkers lately? i worked something like 8 or 9 countries last tuesday just hanging around in the afternoon, wasnt even really trying. solar flux must be doing something right for once. feels like the band hasnt been this good since i got back into the hobby a few years ago. anyway curious if anyone has more solid info on the Icom thing.

the short answer is no, JS8Call doesn't actually decode weaker signals than FT8 does. FT8 uses LDPC coding which is really well optimized for that -24dB floor and JS8Call uses a different variant of the JS8 waveform that trades some of that raw sensitivity for the ability to have longer message exchanges. so they're kind of solving different problems. FT8 is basically a contest mode whether people admit that or not, and JS8Call is more like a text messaging system that happens to work when conditions are rough. the community question is real though. JS8Call definitely thinned out after the first couple years. you'll find decent activity on 40m in the evenings, some guys running it portable or from SOTA peaks where the conversational aspect actually matters. if you just want to see how far your signal reaches, FT8 is still the answer. if you want to actually type words to a person, JS8Call is genuinely useful for that. theyre not really competitors in my opinion

yeah what he said about mic gain is huge. i spent like three months thinking my radio was broken because my audio was terrible and it turned out i had mic gain cranked to like 80% on my 7300 and the ALC was just getting destroyed the whole time. dropped it down to around 40-50 and suddenly people were complimenting my audio. also honestly the stock hm-219 mic is not great, a lot of people swap to a desk mic or even just a decent headset and it makes a noticeable difference. not saying you need to go buy stuff right away but its worth knowing thats an option down the road.

so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and everyone keeps throwing around all these Q codes and abbreviations and i can barely keep up. like i know QSL means like... acknowledgement or like confirming a contact? and QTH is your location i think. but then people say stuff like QRM and QRN and QSB and i have no idea whats going on half the time. is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just kind of pick them up over time. also sometimes i see people write 73 and 88 at the end of messages, i figured 73 is like goodbye or good luck but what is 88 exactly. just trying to get my bearings here, just passed my tech a few weeks ago so still very new to all of this

yeah the audio latency thing with RCForb drove me nuts for a while too. what eventually fixed it for me was setting QoS specifically for the UDP port range that RemoteHams uses, think its somewhere around 50000-50100 but you'd want to double check that in the server config. also worth looking at whether your ISP is doing any traffic shaping on that connection, some of the cheaper business lines will throttle UDP pretty aggressively which will make that jitter all over the place. the 800ms you're describing though, that sounds like more than just buffer settings. i'd grab wireshark on both ends and look at the actual packet timing before you spend too much time tweaking the software side. might be something as dumb as a cable modem that needs a reboot or a flaky ethernet run at the remote site. i chased what i thought was a software problem for three weeks and it turned out my cat5 run to the shack had a bad crimp on one end.

so ive been licensed for about 8 years now mostly doing HF stuff, some 2m weak signal occasionally, and ive had this itch to try moonbounce for probably the last two years. finally decided to actually look into it seriously instead of just watching videos about it. my current 2m setup is a single 9el yagi and an IC-9700 which i know is not going to cut it for EME at all, at least not for any serious attempts. ive been reading that most people run big yagi arrays or dish antennas and the math on the path loss alone is kind of staggering when you think about it, like 252 dB on 2m is just... a lot. so the question is what is actually the minimum viable setup to make a JT65 contact these days. i know the mode helps a ton compared to old school CW EME but there has to still be a floor somewhere right. ive seen people claim they worked EME with a single yagi and 100w but that seems optimistic unless they got lucky with conditions or the other station was running a monster array. anyone actually done it with modest gear or is this one of those things where you really need to invest heavily before you hear anything back

so ive been lurking around here for a while and i think i finally want to just do it and get my technician license. my neighbor is a ham and he keeps telling me to just sign up for the test but honestly i dont even know what that means like do i just show up somewhere or what ive seen people mention hamstudy and the arrl book but i genuinely have no idea how hard the actual exam is or how long i should study. im not great at electronics stuff but im not completely clueless either, i took some basic physics in high school. is there like a certain amount of time people usually spend studying before they feel ready? and do they give you a formula sheet or anything at that the test any advice would be appreciated, sorry if this is a dumb question

go friday. seriously dont even bother saturday morning thinking youll get the good stuff, its gone. i went two years ago and by like 10am saturday the decent gear was all picked through and it was mostly coax scraps and old handbooks. friday afternoon is when the serious dealers are still setting up and thats when you can sometimes haggle better too. also bring cash, a lot of vendors dont do venmo or whatever