Andrew Jackson

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and people keep talking about awards and chasing DX and all that and i want to get into it but honestly i dont even know where to start. like i understand the basic idea of DXCC (work 100 countries) but then someone at the club meeting mentioned WAS and WAZ and i just kind of nodded along like i knew what was going on lol i have a pretty modest setup, just a G5RV up about 25 feet and a 100w radio, conditions have been decent lately so ive been making some contacts but i havent been logging specifically with awards in mind. do i need to submit paper QSL cards for all of these or can you use LOTW for everything? and is there like a strategy people use when starting out or do you just work whatever you can and sort it all out later also somebody mentioned something about "credits" and i got confused again. are those different from the actual confirmed contacts

honestly depends on what youre doing up there. if its just hitting repeaters and chatting on fm then a good collinear is probably fine, something like a diamond x50 on a painters pole works really well and you dont have to think about aiming it. but if youre ever doing any weak signal ssb stuff or trying to make contacts over longer paths the yagi wins every time, the directivity is actually a feature not a bug once you figure out which way the interesting stations are. ive run the arrow 2m/440 yagi for satellite work and it packs down pretty small, the elements just slide out. for hilltop id probably bring both and use the collinear for fm rag chewing then switch to the yagi if things get interesting. yeah its more stuff to carry but once youre up there youre glad you have options.

doppler rate is actually worst at AOS and LOS for the lower LEO birds, counterintuitive but thats when the geometry is changing fastest relative to you. the middle of a high elevation pass is when things kinda settle down and you get a breather. so yeah the scrambling at the start is normal and you kind of just have to get ahead of it a few minutes before AOS by pre-tuning to where the downlink should be coming in. for gpredict CAT control, the thing that helped me the most was setting the poll interval lower, like 500ms or less if your radio handles it, so it's updating more frequently. some people also just manually tune the downlink and let the software handle the uplink correction only, which reduces the weirdness of both sides chasing each other. took me probably a dozen passes before it started feeling natural honestly.

so ive been thinking about getting into cw for a while now but i honestly dont even know where to start. i can barely recognize a dit from a dah when i hear it and everything i find online either assumes you already know some of it or is just a list of apps i should download but doesnt really explain like... the actual process did you guys just sit down and memorize the whole alphabet first or is there a method where you kind of learn as you go. someone at my club mentioned something called the koch method and i looked it up but it was kind of confusing to me, like do you really just start with two characters and stick with that until youre at speed before adding more. that seems like it would take forever also how long did it realistically take you to get to a point where you could actually make a contact. im not trying to be a cw contester or anything just want to be able to ragchew at maybe 10-12 wpm eventually

not dumb questions at all, this is exactly the stuff that doesnt get explained in the license manuals. for finding nets, the ARRL has a net directory on their website that you can search by band and mode, its not always perfectly up to date but its a decent starting point. also just asking around on your local repeater works surprisingly well, someone usually knows whats active in the area. for 40m evening stuff the 7290 traffic net has been around forever and theres a bunch of regional ones scattered around depending on where you are. once you find a couple you like you kind of fall into knowing about others through the people you meet there. the special event station thing is pretty straightforward, you just work them like any other contact. a lot of them will have a QRZ page or a website listed that explains if theres a certificate or award associated with it. sometimes you fill out a form online, sometimes you send a self addressed envelope the old fashioned way. worth checking before the event ends because some of them have pretty short windows and you dont want to miss it.

the doppler thing is very manageable once you get used to it, especially on something like FO-29 where the transponder passband is fairly wide and you have some wiggle room. most people i know use either Gpredict or MacDoppler and just let the software push corrections to the radio via CAT. with the 9700 you should be in pretty good shape, it plays nice with most of the common sat software. just takes a bit of setup to get the CAT connection dialed in but once it's working it's mostly hands off for doppler, then you can focus on actually finding the passband and not losing the other station mid-QSO which is the harder part honestly. the fixed yagi is going to limit you but it's not a complete dead end. you want passes that go reasonably high overhead for your direction of aim, and you'll get a usable window. guys have made contacts with fixed antennas, it just takes more patience and you're not going to work the low elevation stuff at all. if you get hooked on this you'll end up wanting az/el eventually, fair warning.

which nature reserve was it? im in the same general area i think and ive been looking at a few references nearby that dont seem to have many activations on the map yet. always good to know about parking situations before you go lol

yeah the net directory thing is frustrating, i spent like an hour trying to find something active near me when i was starting out and half the listed nets hadnt been running in years. best thing i ever did was just join my county ARES group, they have a weekly check-in net and also do the monthly traffic handling practice and you actually learn something instead of just saying your callsign and signal report and done. also if you end up getting into HF after your general, the Straight Key Century Club does a bunch of on air events if you ever get into CW but thats probably getting ahead of things. good luck on the exam

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech class) and ive just been using my buddy's old radio when i go to club meetings but i really need to get my own handheld. the problem is every time i start looking i end up down a rabbit hole for like two hours and close the tab more confused than when i started. ive been looking at the baofeng uv-5r because its cheap and everyone seems to have one, but then i keep reading that the yaesu ft-65 or even the ft-60 is worth saving up for. i mostly just want to hit the local repeaters, maybe do some simplex with the club guys on 2m and 70cm. nothing fancy. budget is honestly like 50-80 bucks but i could stretch to maybe 120 if theres a really good reason to. does the receiver quality actually matter that much for just messing around locally? i dont really understand what people mean when they say a radio has a "better front end" — is that something i'd actually notice day to day or is it one of those things that only matters in a crowded RF environment

the ALC bouncing is almost certainly your problem or at least a big part of it. when ALC is working hard it means your mic gain is too hot and the radio is basically trying to protect itself by clamping down on the signal, and that clamping is exactly what causes the muffled squashed sound. back your mic gain off until the ALC barely moves on average speech, peaks are okay but the needle shouldn't be swinging wildly on every syllable. also for the 7300 specifically there's a whole rabbit hole of menu settings for the TX audio. the TX bandwidth is worth checking, a lot of people accidentally have it set to something like 100-2900hz which is fine but narrower options like narrowing the low end too much can make you sound boxy. i run mine at about 300-2800 and it sits pretty well on most bands. the other thing worth doing is getting a friend on a nearby frequency to give you honest reports while you actually tweak things live, it's tedious but its really the only way to know for sure what you sound like on the other end

so i finally passed my technician exam after studying on and off for like two months and honestly i wasnt expecting to pass on the first try but here we are. picked up a baofeng uv-5r to start out (yeah yeah i know, everyone says get a real radio but i just wanted something cheap to see if i'd even stick with it) and yesterday i finally got brave enough to key up on the local 2m repeater. the guy who came back to me was super patient, walked me through the whole exchange and even gave me a signal report. im pretty sure my voice was shaking lol. anyway just wanted to say hi to the community, been lurking on here for a while and everyone seems really helpful. looking forward to getting on HF eventually once i figure out what antenna situation i can manage at my apartment.

okay so ive been a ham for about 8 months now and i got my technician last spring, just upgraded to general last month which im pretty stoked about. anyway when i got my tech license i just got assigned a sequential call which is fine, its KD9 something, not gonna complain. but now im reading about vanity calls and im totally confused about how it works. some guys at my club are saying you basically just apply and if nobody else wants the same call you get it, but then someone else told me theres like a filing window and it turns into a lottery if multiple people apply for the same one? i went to the FCC ULS site and honestly it made my head hurt a little trying to figure out the timeline stuff. also does upgrading to general open up more callsigns to apply for? i thought i read something about 1x3 vs 2x3 formats being tied to license class but not 100% sure on that. and do you have to wait some amount of time after getting your new license before you can apply or can you do it right away sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to figure out if its worth pursuing or if i should just stick with what i have

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i keep getting confused about the 40m band. i know generals have phone privileges starting at 7.175 but i keep seeing people operating like way down around 7.150 or even lower and i dont know if theyre extra class or if im missing something about the band plan. also whats the deal with band edges, someone at the club told me to never operate right on the edge but didnt really explain why. is 7.175 actually safe to use or should i stay a bit above that to be safe? my rig shows the frequency but i wonder if its perfectly calibrated too

I'm kind of in the same boat as you, been at it for maybe two months now. what helped me a lot was the app Just Learn Morse Code on the computer and also there's an app called Morse Mania on android that i use when im sitting around waiting for something. the gamification thing keeps me from getting bored i guess one thing that actually surprised me was how much it helped to just listen to actual CW on the air even when i cant copy anything. like i tune around 40 meters in the evenings and just let it wash over me and slowly some of the shorter common words like CQ and 73 started jumping out at me without even thinking about it. probably not the most scientific method but it felt encouraging

yeah the yagi vs collinear thing is one of those debates that never really ends cleanly. but for a fixed 45 mile path with a repeater you know the direction of, an HB9CV or even a cheap 5 element yagi pointed that way will absolutely smoke a collinear. we're talking potentially 6-8 dB difference over something like the x50a depending on what yagi you go with, and on a marginal path that is night and day. the thing people dont think about is you dont have to rotate it if the repeater is in a fixed direction. just bolt it on, aim it once, done. i have a 7 element M2 on a fixed bracket aimed at a hilltop digi node about 38 miles out and i went from barely readable to full quieting on 5 watts. never touched it since i installed it. the collinear is still up for general use on a separate feedline. your LMR-400 run is fine, thats not your problem. its just physics — a collinear spreads its pattern around 360 degrees and squishes it down toward the horizon, a yagi concentrates everything forward. for omnidirectional work keep the x50a, add a small yagi for that one repeater path and use a coax switch. honestly its less hassle than it sounds.

the koch method is what you want, dont bother trying to memorize the patterns visually first, that stuff will actually slow you down later when you try to copy at any real speed. the idea with koch is you start with two characters at full speed, like 20wpm character speed, and you only add a new character once you can copy the current set accurately. LC Wooten wrote a good piece on this if you search around, and the app LCWO dot net is what a lot of people use, its free and browser based. honestly the biggest thing people mess up is starting too slow. if you learn letters at 5wpm they start to sound like dit counts and you have to relearn everything when you want to go faster. start the characters fast even if the words have long gaps between them, thats what farnsworth spacing is for. took me about 4 months of 20 minutes a day to get comfortable enough for a QRS contact on 40m, but i already had some background with music which probably helped with rhythm.

the band privileges thing honestly just kind of sticks after you do enough practice questions, dont stress about trying to memorize the chart directly. the pattern starts to make sense after a while, generals get the lower portions of the phone segments and extra gets the upper edges basically. just keep hammering the practice tests and itll click. hamstudy is what i used and i passed first try with like a week of studying. for the propagation stuff, 40 meters is your friend for getting started on HF, especially in the evenings. 20 is great during the day when the bands are open. if you dont have a rig yet dont worry about it, just pass the test first and then figure out the gear. you can always find a used radio on qrz classifieds or radioreference forums for not too much. a lot of people start with something like an older icom or yaesu and just run a wire antenna in the backyard and honestly that gets you on the air just fine

so i've been watching the solar flux index creep up over the past couple weeks and last night it finally felt like it mattered. i was just casually spinning the dial on 20m around 0100 UTC and out of nowhere i'm hearing JA stations like they're across town, not across the pacific. like S7-S8 on some of them which i havent seen in honestly maybe two years on this band at that hour. ended up working 4 JA's, a couple VK's, and even caught a rare one — BV9P out of taiwan which i'd been chasing for a while. all within maybe 90 minutes before the band just kind of went quiet again. checked the flux the next morning and it was sitting around 178 which isnt crazy high but combined with a pretty calm K-index it apparently was enough to do something nice. anyway just wanted to share because i know some of the newer folks here might not realize how much this stuff matters and how quickly conditions can flip. if you're not checking DXmaps or pskreporter before you sit down you might be missing windows like this without even knowing it. whats everyone elses experience been lately, feels like the cycle is really starting to pick up

i built almost the exact same thing last spring and had similar swr shape. mine turned out to be the feedline acting up more than the antenna itself. i added a choke balun like 5 turns of coax through a FT240-43 toroid right at the feedpoint and the curve got way more symetrical. also 30 feet apex on 40m inverted V is a little low, the angle of the legs affects the radiation angle and also the feedpoint impedance dips below 50 ohms when the legs get steep, so youre not really feeding a 50 ohm load anymore. some people use a 4:1 balun for inverted V specifically because of this but honestly at 2.8:1 most rigs and tuners wont even care, mine handles it fine.

the 7300 is what i started on when i upgraded to HF and honestly the waterfall changed how i operate completely. like you actually learn band conditions way faster because you can see whats happening instead of just spinning the dial hoping. your ts-450 is a classic but yeah once you go SDR-style display its hard to go back. cant speak to the 7610 comparison since ive never owned one but the 7300 community is huge so theres tons of help online if you run into anything weird with setup or digital modes.

I went through this last year and got my vanity on the first try which i was pretty surprised about honestly. I used a site called AE7Q which basically shows you available calls and upcoming ones — it was way more useful than trying to figure it out from the FCC website which is kind of a nightmare to navigate. definitely worth checking out before you apply so you can pick something thats actually open and not already taken or in a waiting period.

so ive been trying to figure out if its worth the drive this year, last time i went was like 2019 and it was pretty great but i dunno if the swap meet is still as good or if its mostly just vendors now. my buddy said the flea market part has shrunk a lot but he tends to exaggerate. thinking about making a weekend of it if enough people are heading that way, maybe carpool or something. also our local club is doing a thing the same weekend which is kinda annoying timing wise

the motorboating is almost definitely a power supply decoupling issue, 100uF alone isnt gonna cut it on an LM386 circuit. what you want is a combination of a bigger electrolytic AND a small ceramic right at the supply pin of the chip, like a 10uF or 47uF electrolytic plus a 0.1uF ceramic bypassed together. the LM386 is notorious for this. also check pin 7, theres a bypass cap that goes there too that a lot of people miss when they build these from scratch. the microphonics on the VFO are just part of life with a colpitts unless you do something about it. you can try potting the coil in wax or just enclosing the oscillator section in a small tin box, even an altoids tin works. definitely shield it from the rest of the circuit too because the mixer diodes can inject noise back into it. direct conversion receivers are kind of sensitive to all of this stuff, its not just you, they take some fiddling to get right.

35 feet apex is pretty decent for an inverted V on 40, im running mine at like 28 and it still does the job. dont overthink it tbh. if the swr is good and youre making contacts youre antenna is working. ive worked plenty of dx with mine including some JA and VK on 40 at the right time of day so the takeoff angle thing is real but its not a dealbreaker

okay so im finally putting a proper dual band setup in my truck, got a used Kenwood TM-V71A that i picked up at the swap meet last month and its in great shape. my question is about where to mount the antenna. ive been going back and forth on this for weeks and cant make up my mind. roof mount would obviously give me the best ground plane and radiation pattern but im a little worried about running the coax through the headliner, my truck is a 2019 F-150 and theres a lot of stuff up in there apparently. trunk lip mount seems way easier to install and i wont have to mess with the interior panels but ive heard it can mess with the pattern on the side where the trunk is? or maybe that doesnt matter as much as people say, i honestly dont know. using it mainly for local repeaters and maybe some simplex out on trail runs with the jeep club. not doing anything crazy like EME or anything where i need every last db. just want reliable comms. anyone been down this road with a similar setup?