Daniel Smith

so ive been chasing 3Y0 and some other rare stuff for a while now and i feel like i finally figured out what actually works in a pileup vs what i thought worked. gonna ramble a bit here so bear with me. for years i was doing the thing where you just throw your callsign out there on the DX frequency and hope for the best which obviously doesnt work and just adds to the chaos. then i started listening more to where the DX was actually coming back and plotting it out mentally — like if they work W4 then W5 then W6 there's sometimes a pattern or at least a general area they keep going back to. so i started timing my calls to the end of their transmission and throwing my call once, cleanly, then waiting to hear who they come back to before calling again. the other thing that made a huge difference honestly was working split properly. i run a K3 and there's no excuse not to use RIT or proper VFO-B split but i used to be sloppy about where i was transmitting. started picking a spot 2-3 kHz above where the pileup was thinnest rather than right on top of everyone else. on 17m last month that alone got me through to a VP6 station in maybe 15 minutes when i'd been trying for over an hour the day before just blasting on top of the crowd. anyone else have things that actually changed the game for them? curious if the partial call technique is worth trying — ive heard mixed things about it

I'm considering adding an external linear amplifier to my IC-7300 setup but I keep reading about power overshoot problems. Most Icom's have a tx power overshoot problem when feeding an amplifier. Its rarely a problem but its there. Can anyone explain exactly what this means and if there are any practical workarounds? I run 100W on 20M and 40M mostly SSB with occasional FT8. The amp I'm looking at is the AL-811H. Should I be concerned about this overshoot affecting the amp or is it something I can just ignore?

so i've had my IC-7300 for about two years now and always kind of ignored the extended receive modification because i figured it wasnt worth the hassle. well last weekend i finally got around to it and honestly i wish i had done it sooner. the mod itself is pretty straightforward if you're comfortable pulling the radio apart, just a couple of jumper pads on the main board, took me maybe 45 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself and staring at the board with a loupe. what i mainly wanted it for was listening down in the MW broadcast band and also some utility stuff around 400-500 MHz range. the sensitivity in the extended portions isnt gonna win any awards obviously since the front end filtering isnt there, but for casual monitoring its totally usable. i did notice a slight improvement in overall feel after doing a realignment but that might have been placebo, hard to say. anyway anyone else done this or any other mods to their 7300? i've been thinking about the TX unlock mod too but im a little nervous about that one from a legal standpoint depending on how it gets used. also heard some people are swapping out the stock fan for a quieter one, curious if that actually makes a difference on the heat management side or if its just for noise reduction.

yeah that plateau around 12-15wpm is totally real, pretty much everyone hits it. what helped me break through was honestly just forcing myself to listen at a speed i couldnt fully copy yet — like set the trainer to 18 or 20wpm even if you only get 60% of it. your brain eventually starts recognizing the sound of whole words instead of individual letters and thats really the key. trying to consciously decode each dit and dah is what keeps people stuck. the other thing i'd say is yes, get on the air or at least listen to real QSOs. the W1AW code practice transmissions are great for this — they broadcast at different speeds and its real text with real fading and QRM which your brain has to deal with eventually anyway. the computer stuff is too clean. took me about 8 months to get from where you are to solid 20wpm but i wasnt practicing every day either so your mileage will vary

built a 3-band fan dipole (80/40/15) a few years back and yeah the interaction thing is real but honestly not as bad as people make it sound. i had to trim each element with the others installed, not individually. started with them cut to resonance in free space then hung them all and went through each one tweaking until i got acceptable swr. took an afternoon with an antenna analyzer but ended up with under 2:1 on all three bands without a tuner. the spacing matters more at the feedpoint than at the tips, so if you can get even 15-20 degrees between them at the center you should be ok. attic is gonna add some weirdness no matter what you do honestly.

so ive been sitting on this for a while, debating whether to crack open my IC-7300 and do the transmit mod to open up the tx range a bit. finally just did it last weekend. the procedure itself took maybe 10 minutes once i found the right diode to clip, not a big deal physically but i was nervous about voiding the warranty obviously. the main reason i wanted it was for some MARS/CAP work our group does occasionally and also just wanted the flexibility when doing testing on adjacent freqs. not planning to transmit outside the ham bands obviously, just nice to have the option without the rig throwing a fit. anyway the mod works fine, rig is still performing exactly the same on the ham bands as far as i can tell — same ALC behavior, no weirdness on the spectrum display. i dont have a great way to do a proper before/after power output comparison outside the ham bands but on 10m and 40m it still hits the same numbers it always did. anyone else done this on the 7300 specifically? im curious if anyone noticed any difference in rx performance or anything unexpected after doing it. also if theres other mods people think are actually useful for this radio id be curious what people have tried.

okay so the thing that finally made it click for me after years of half-heartedly trying was just committing to the Koch method properly using a program called LCWO, its a website actually, lcwo.net. the whole idea is you never learn letters slow and then speed them up, you start with just a couple characters at full speed from day one and add more as you get them solid. sounds counterintuitive but your brain starts hearing the rhythm as a sound instead of counting dots and dashes and thats really the whole game right there. biggest mistake i made early on was writing down dots and dashes on paper. felt like i was making progress but i was just building a habit i had to unlearn later. if you catch yourself doing that, stop. just try to hear the whole character as one sound. took me probably three or four months of maybe twenty minutes a day before i could actually follow a slow QSO and that was at like 12-13 wpm. its a slow process but it does work

i jumped in pretty early honestly maybe too early and yeah it was rough for a contest or two but i dont regret it. thing nobody told me was that your rate on radio 1 will actually drop for a while because part of your brain is always thinking about radio 2 now. you kind of have to accept that temporary regression as the cost of learning it. one thing that helped me a ton was running some of the shorter contests like the sprints or state QSO parties first instead of jumping straight into CQWW 48 hours. lower stakes, still teaches you the timing, and you dont feel as bad when you fumble a contact because you were distracted switching radios.

yeah just post the alert even if its the night before, doesnt need to be perfect. i did my first activation without one and it took me like 25 minutes to get 4 contacts which felt like forever when im standing on a windy ridge haha. second time i posted an alert and had my 4 within like 3 minutes of calling CQ. chasers are super active and friendly, dont worry about being new to it.

so i've been trying to get my winlink setup going for emergency stuff but having issues with the RMS gateways. seems like half the time when i try to connect it just sits there and times out. im using a ic-7300 with the built in sound card interface running winlink express on windows 10. packet connection works fine for other stuff but winlink is being a pain. anyone else seeing timeouts lately or am i doing something wrong with my setup?

Stick with WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 for mobile. The WIDEn-N stuff is mainly for fill-in digis and special applications. APRS uses generic callsigns for automatic operation, and WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is the established standard for mobiles across North America. Don't fix what isn't broken.

cant speak to the collins filter thing but i did the extended TX on mine years ago and honestly rarely use it lol. the TCXO though yeah i agree with whoever mentioned it. i do a lot of WSPR and before the TCXO my spots were weird and inconsistent. one thing nobody really talks about is the display brightness mod, theres a resistor you can change that makes the display way more readable in daylight without killing the backlight completely. its a tiny thing but if you do any outdoor operating you'll appreciate it. i found the procedure on some old mods page, dont remember where exactly but it's out there.

yeah the uncharged radio thing happens at basically every drill i've ever been part of, no matter how many times you remind people beforehand. we started doing a quick radio check in the parking lot before exercises even start just to catch that stuff before it becomes a problem during the scenario. the hill blocking simplex is a big one too — we had almost the exact same discovery a few years back during a windstorm exercise. what we ended up doing was pre-identifying a couple of elevated sites we could put a portable digipeater or a crossband repeater at if we ever needed to actually cover that gap. never had to do it for real thankfully but knowing the plan exists helps. the served agency coordination thing is a whole other level honestly, mostly just a lot of waiting and then suddenly everything at once, kind of like actual emergencies from what i hear.

I went two years ago and it was my first hamfest ever, got totally overwhelmed lol. ended up buying a Yaesu HT i didnt even need just because it felt like i had to buy something. if you go early like right when it opens thats when all the good junk table stuff goes.

so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and i think im just going to ask and stop second guessing myself. my lot is roughly 60 feet wide and maybe 120 deep, suburban neighborhood, HOA isnt terrible but i do need to be somewhat low profile. right now i have nothing on 40m and thats the band i most want to work in the evenings. the obvious answer everyone gives is a dipole but the problem is i dont really have a clean east-west or north-south run of 66 feet without either crossing the driveway or ending up 8 feet off the ground on one end which i know is going to kill the pattern. i was thinking about an inverted V off a 30 foot mast in the backyard, apex at maybe 28 feet and the legs going down at like 45 degrees. other option is a vertical, maybe a trap vertical or homebrew quarterwave with some radials thrown in the grass. i know the inverted V is going to radiate higher angle stuff which is fine for regional contacts and honestly thats mostly what i do, but im also not opposed to building a proper vertical if the radial situation is manageable. the ground here is pretty decent, not rocky, decent moisture. anyway what would you guys actually do with this lot, not theoretically, like if this was your yard

yeah the flux has been really active, we're climbing up toward solar maximum which is why you're seeing those wild swings. the thing about K-index is basically when it spikes above like 4 or 5, the polar regions get hammered first — aurora messes with the ionosphere and HF paths that go over the poles get absorbed or bent in weird directions. so your europe path on 20m might go long or just die completely while lower bands sometimes actually get enhancement because the absorption shifts around. its not totally backwards, its just the geometry of where the energy is hitting. for 10 meters specifically i just check DX Maps in the morning with coffee, takes two minutes and you can see if there are any spots coming in from the regions you want to work. if you see a cluster of spots from central america or caribbean into europe, thats usually a sign the band is opening up transequatorial or F2 is doing something interesting. honestly once you start watching it daily it becomes pretty intuitive.

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i keep seeing people throw around stuff like QSL, QRM, QTH and honestly theres like a hundred of them and i dont know where to start. i know QSL means like confirming a contact or something and QTH is your location but beyond that im totally lost. like what does QSB mean and why do people say 73 at the end of everything, is that a Q code too or something different. also sometimes i see people write things like OM or YL and i dont think those are Q codes but idk. basically just trying to get a handle on the shorthand because it feels like everyone else just knows this stuff and i missed the memo

yeah the three-way logging problem is real, i went through the same thing about a year ago. what i ended up doing was just accepting that N1MM is the contest log and nothing else — when the contest is over i export the ADIF, run it through ADIF Master to strip out any weird formatting issues, then import into Log4OM with duplicate checking set to callsign plus date within like a 30 minute window. not perfect but it catches most of the obvious ones. for WSJT-X i just have it pointed directly at Log4OM via UDP logging, so at least that piece is seamless. the key setting in WSJT-X is under File > Settings > Reporting, you want UDP server enabled and Log4OM set up to receive on the same port. once i got that going the FT8 stuff just appears in Log4OM automatically and i dont have to do anything. still does not solve the N1MM problem but at least its one less thing to manually import

If you suspect a poor connection, measure voltage at the load (such as the radio) and work your way back to the supply. Poor connections in a cable or connector cause the voltage to drop under load. I had the exact same issue and it turned out to be corroded Anderson Powerpoles.

yeah propagation has been kinda all over the place, welcome to solar cycle 25 haha. the flux numbers you're seeing are actually pretty decent for DX, anything above 150 and 10m starts getting interesting especially if the K index stays low. that's really the key thing to watch alongside the flux — the K index tells you how disturbed the geomagnetic field is, and when it spikes up to 4 or 5 that's when everything goes to garbage even if the flux looks good. there was definitely a CME impact a week or so ago that messed things up for a couple days. for tracking it i just keep a tab open on spaceweather.com and also DXmaps when im about to sit down for a session, DXmaps will actually show you real time spots so you can see if anyone's working across the pond before you even key up. your JA on 20m with a dipole at 30 feet is nothing to sneeze at btw, low dipoles work better than people think on 20 for some reason, something about the radiation angle

I had similar issues with my vertical dipole setup. The choke balun position isn't your main problem - it's the traps creating narrow bandwidth. Choosing one of the trap free antenna designs that are now available, in place of the Hustler design, could minimize the losses on the 20 and 40 meter bands.

ok so ive been running a resonant dipole at about 35 feet for 40m for the past couple years and its been decent, not great but decent. recently put up a vertical (ground mounted, radial field of about 24 radials ranging from 16 to 33 feet because thats what i had room for) just to compare and i honestly expected the vertical to get smoked at that height but its actually holding its own on a lot of dx paths, especially anything going over the horizon like europe in the morning from the midwest here. the dipole still wins close-in and i notice its clearly quieter on receive, like noticeably. but the vertical is doing something the dipole cant on the long haul stuff and now im second guessing everything i thought i knew. is this just the low angle radiation doing what its supposed to or am i reading too much into a handful of qsos? i havent done any kind of systematic comparison, just been switching back and forth and taking mental notes which i know isnt scientific at all. also the radial situation is probably not ideal, some of them are only a few inches under the sod and a couple are just laying on top of grass because i ran out of pins. does that actually matter much once theyre down a season or two or should i get them all buried properly before drawing any real conclusions

the audio drift on RemoteHams with the 7300 — yeah been there. what fixed it for me was adjusting the jitter buffer size in the client settings, there's a slider thats kind of buried in the audio config tab. i pushed mine up to around 150ms and the drifting basically stopped. you lose a tiny bit of responsiveness but for casual operating it's totally fine. 80-90ms latency is actually pretty decent, i was running on a rural connection at like 180ms for a while and it was still workable just felt a bit like talking through a satellite phone on the EchoLink/AllStar question honestly i'd think twice about that combo. AllStar with app_rpt can already do remote base linking through its own architecture and adding RemoteHams into that chain feels like you're introducing a lot of extra failure points. might be cleaner to just set up a separate remote base node on AllStar and let the club members connect that way. but if you specifically want the SDR waterfall visibility for users that changes the calculus a bit i guess

yeah what he said, the baofeng menu is a little weird about it so make sure you actually saved the setting after you changed it. i made that mistake like three times when i was starting out lol. press menu again after you select the tone value or it just reverts. also worth programming it with chirp if you havent already, way easier to see everything laid out than scrolling through menus on the radio itself

i was in the exact same situation a few months ago lol, those baofeng menus are genuinely confusing. one thing that tripped me up was i had the offset direction wrong — i had it set to + when it needed to be - and so i was transmitting on the wrong frequency entirely. worth double checking that too while you're at it. most 2m repeaters around here are minus 600 but it does vary