Andrew Jackson

not dumb questions at all, this stuff took me years to really internalize. the short version is yeah, solar flux is basically measuring the radio energy output from the sun at 10.7cm wavelength and it correlates pretty well with how much the sun is ionizing the upper atmosphere. more ionization means the F2 layer gets dense enough to refract higher frequency signals back down instead of just letting them punch through into space. for 10 meters specifically you really need that flux to be up there, generally folks say above 120 or so before it gets interesting and when it's pushing 180+ like you saw, europe and south america become almost routine during the right hours. and yes time of day absolutely matters — the F2 layer builds up through the morning as the sun does its thing and usually peaks in the early afternoon local time, then fades after sunset. though on 10m during high flux you can get some weird long path stuff in the evenings too. for actually predicting it, i check spaceweather.com most mornings and also the NOAA space weather prediction center. some guys swear by the DX summit spotting network too because if you see a pile of 10m spots from europe early in the morning your time, conditions are probably already open. honestly the best teacher is just getting on the band and listening, you start to develop a feel for it after a while.

so anyway after about three weekends of messing around with cable routing and figuring out why my SWR was all over the place i think i finally have a decent setup going. running a Yaesu FTM-400 in my F-150, antenna is a Diamond NR770HB on a mag mount for now until i get brave enough to drill through the roof. the big thing that was killing me was the power cable. i had run it through the firewall but i was tapping into a fuse block under the hood instead of going straight to the battery, and apparently that was introducing enough noise to drive me nuts on receive. switched to direct battery connection with an inline fuse and the difference was honestly night and day. i can actually hear the repeater now without that buzzing behind everything. also the mag mount placement matters way more than i thought. had it on the rear corner of the roof at first and was getting a ton of multipath garbage on 70cm especially. moved it closer to center and things cleaned up a lot. probably still gonna drill eventually but wanted to get a feel for the radio first. anyone else run that Diamond antenna? curious how people like it long term, specifically whether the SO-239 connection at the base holds up or if it gets flaky over time.

Don't forget you also get full privileges on all frequencies authorized by the FCC for Amateur Radio - not just the HF extras. Plus it's nice having the highest license class when dealing with other hams or getting involved in emergency communications coordination.

yeah the fan thing on the 7300 at full power caught me off guard too when i first got mine. i usually run 50-60w for most contacts and it stays pretty quiet at that level, only really spins up when im doing FT8 and hammering it for a contest or something. the duty cycle on digital modes is what really makes it work hard. the scope really does change how you operate honestly. i started noticing openings on 15m that i would have just missed before because id never have bothered to check. now i just glance at it between overs and you can see a pileup forming in real time which is kinda cool. one thing worth doing if you havent already — look up the community firmware modifications, not third party stuff but just the settings people have found for flattening the rx audio response. made a noticeable difference for me on crowded 40m evenings.

dude the pen thing happens to everyone at least once, i showed up to an activation once with my whole station and realized i left my coax at home so you're not alone in the gear fail department haha i've only done a few activations myself and im still pretty new to pota but what helped me was just watching a few youtube videos of people doing activations beforehand so i knew roughly what the pile up rhythm felt like. also the POTA slack community is pretty active if you want feedback on logs or whatever

i was in basically the exact same spot about a year ago and ended up with the Yaesu FT-4XR which is even cheaper than the FT-65 and honestly has been totally fine for hitting repeaters. the build quality feels decent, nothing fancy but it does what it says. APRS isnt built in but if thats something you want later there are ways to do it with a phone app and a cable. one thing nobody told me when i started — get CHIRP set up on your computer before you try to manually program anything. manually entering repeater frequencies on these little keypads will make you question your life choices

so this has been driving me absolutely nuts for about three weeks now. my 7300 will just cut out mid transmission, not like a full shutdown, more like it drops to like 5 watts for a split second then comes back. sometimes it doesnt come back and i have to cycle power. happens more on 40m than anywhere else but ive seen it on 20 too. already checked the power supply — its a Rigrunner setup going to an Astron RS-35M, voltage holds steady at 13.8 under load, i put a meter right on the radio terminals. fan is spinning, no thermal shutdown codes that i can see. tried a different coax and different antenna just in case it was a swr spike doing something weird but same deal. the weird part is it seems worse after the radio has been on for maybe 45 minutes or so. like it runs fine for the first chunk of a session then starts acting up. makes me think thermal but i cant find anything obvious and the finals dont seem to be getting that hot. anyone dealt with anything like this before or have ideas where to start poking around?

okay so the tone thing first -- for most repeaters you just need to encode, meaning your radio transmits the tone and the repeater hears it and opens up. you usually dont need decode set unless you want to squelch out other stuff on your end. just set encode to whatever tone the repeater wants and leave decode off or set it to 0. the repeater's tone should be listed on the club website or on repeaterbook.com, seriously that site is a lifesaver. as for jumping in, those pauses are exactly when you do it. just wait for a gap, key up, say your callsign, and let go. something like "W1XYZ monitoring" or just your callsign is fine. if its a qso already in progress you can wait for one of them to say their callsign and then during that next pause say something like "W1XYZ, break" -- most people are pretty welcoming, especially on club repeaters. dont overthink it, we were all new once and most hams love talking to a new tech who's actually trying to learn.

yeah the path loss numbers are real and they are brutal, dont let that discourage you though because WSJT-X changed everything for smaller stations. before digital modes you needed a massive array just to hear anything, now guys are making contacts on 2m EME with 4 yagis and a decent preamp. the classic starting point people talk about is 4x17 or 4x21 element yagis in an H-frame, feeding them through a power splitter, and an SSB Electronics or similar LNA right at the boom. you want noise figure down around 0.3-0.5 dB if you can get it, every tenth of a dB matters on this path your single 9 ele yagi is going to be a tough road, not impossible to hear some of the big guns with it but completing contacts would be very difficult. the transmit side matters too, most serious 2m EME ops are running 500-1000w to the feed. as for scheduling, yes people use the ON4KST chat and also the EME2 logger on MMMonVHF to arrange skeds, plus there are big activity weekends like the ARRL EME contest where random contacts happen without pre-scheduling. Q65-60A is what most people run now, it works even better than JT65 for this

im in a similar boat actually, got my ticket two years ago and just crossed 87 entities confirmed on LoTW last month so getting close. one thing that helped me a lot was the DX Summit spotting network — you can filter by band and mode and just watch for new entities popping up. also the ARRL DXCC standings page shows you whats needed for a new one vs whats already in the log which is handy once you have a bigger log to work from dont stress too much about WAS and WAZ at the same time unless you really want to, some people chase all of them simultaneously and it gets kinda complicated keeping track. i started with just focusing on DXCC and ill worry about zones later

i just passed mine last month so this is pretty fresh for me. the exam is hard but not impossible, the math questions were what scared me most but theres really only a handful of formulas you need and they come up in patterns. reactance, resonance, that kind of thing. i used the gordon west book and hamstudy and took probably six weeks to feel ready. did it change anything, i mean i now have the little AE on my callsign which feels good i guess lol. practically speaking i havent done anything different yet but im planning to get into some of the lower parts of 40 phone where it gets less crowded during contests. so yeah id say go for it if youre even half curious, worst case you learn some stuff

does it do it on all bands or just certain ones? my buddy had something similar and it was only on 10m, ended up being a bad filter cap in the LPF board. not saying thats your problem but worth narrowing down. also what firmware version are you on, theres been a couple weird bugs over the years with ALC behavior on older firmware that icom quietly fixed.

had something similar on my 706 once, turned out to be a cold solder joint on one of the toroids in the filter section rather than the relay itself. might be worth just doing a full reflow on that whole board while you have it apart. also check the relay contact resistance with a meter if you can get probes on it, should be basically zero ohms when energized, anything above like half an ohm and youre losing power right there.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a local nature reserve, been meaning to do one for months and just kept putting it off. figured it would be pretty similar to a SOTA activation but honestly it was a bit different in a few ways i didnt really anticipate. the biggest thing was i wasnt sure how many contacts i actually needed to log it as valid. i thought it was 44 like SOTA but apparently for WWFF you need 44 QSOs to get the reference activated, which i knew in theory but when youre sitting there in the wind with a vertical and propagation being what it was on 40m that afternoon it felt like a lot more than i expected. ended up getting 51 which was fine but it took about 2.5 hours which is longer than any SOTA ive done. also spotting yourself on the WWFF spotter network is something i hadnt really thought through beforehand. i was using my phone to self-spot and the cell signal at that particular spot was pretty marginal so that added some stress. next time im just gonna spot through SOTAwatch or one of the other aggregators that picks up WWFF refs too. anyway the actual operating part was fun, had a nice pileup for the first 20 minutes or so then it trickled off but kept going. anyone else do a lot of these? curious how people handle the longer activations especially if youre going somewhere more remote where battery management actually matters

not to derail but have you tried a collinear instead of the jpole? im running a diamond x50 on my go-kit mast and it seems noticeably better than my old jpole on receive at least. still omnidirectional so you dont have to aim it which is nice when youre just hanging out on a summit and dont know where people are gonna call from. probably not as good as a yagi for point to point but way less hassle for general use

Yeah I had the same experience my first few times out. The spotting thing is huge - I didnt know about that either at first. Also check if that park actually gets much activity, some parks are just dead zones even with good propagation. Maybe try a more popular park next time to build confidence? I always check the pota database to see recent activity before I pick a spot now. Hang in there it gets better once you figure out the rhythm

honestly the HackRF is great but yeah its not a receiver first kind of device. if your main thing is listening, especially HF, the noise figure really does matter and the HackRF will dissapoint you compared to even a halfway decent dedicated receiver. i went from an RTL dongle to a HackRF thinking id get a big improvement and was kind of underwhelmed on HF. still useful for a ton of stuff but not what i wanted for shortwave. the RSPdx though is a proper step up. the 14 bit ADC versus 8 on the RTL dongle makes a real difference in dynamic range, you'll notice a lot less of that intermod garbage from strong stations. ive been running mine with SDRuno and its pretty solid. SDRuno is a bit clunky to learn but once you get the notch filters and the HDR mode dialed in for the band youre on it really does perform well below 2 MHz. if HF listening is your thing i'd go RSPdx without much hesitation

i went through basically the exact same thing last year trying to hit a linked system about 50 miles out. ended up just putting up a 7el yagi on a TV rotator which yeah i know is more complicated than a fixed mount but now i can work like 4 different repeater systems depending on where i point it so its actually been really useful. the rotator thing sounds like overkill until you have it and then you wonder why you didnt do it sooner. anyway for your situation if its just the one repeater a fixed yagi is probably fine, dont overthink it

honest answer is it really depends and anyone who tells you definitively one is always better is probably selling something. i ran both for about 8 months with an a/b switch feeding into the same radio and the vertical with a decent elevated radial system (i did 4 radials at about 10 feet up) was noticably better on low angle dx paths, like europe from the west coast on the long path kind of thing. but the dipole was quieter on receive by a pretty good margin and for regional stuff and anything under maybe 1500 miles it was competitive or better. the elevated radial thing is legit btw, you dont need the massive buried radial field if you get the feedpoint up off the ground. 4 resonant radials elevated even a few feet does a pretty good job. not quite as good as 120 buried radials theoretically but way more practical and honestly closer than you'd think from reading the theory.

the thing that finally clicked for me was the Koch method, basically you start with just 2 characters at a fairly fast speed like 15-20wpm character speed and you dont move on until you can copy them at like 90% accuracy. the idea is your brain learns the rhythm and sound of each letter as a whole chunk instead of counting dits and dahs one at a time. if you count dits and dahs you will always be slow and it never really becomes automatic. LC Wone is what a lot of people use, theres also the LCWO website which is free and does the same thing in a browser. i did about 15-20 minutes a day for a few months and went from zero to being able to ragchew slowly on the air. the big thing is consistency, 15 min every single day beats 2 hours on the weekend by a lot. your brain needs that repetition over time not just volume all at once. also dont worry about sending at first, just focus on receiving until youre comfortable. lots of people get hung up on the key too early

im pretty new to chasing but from the other side -- when i see a spot come up on the app i basically drop whatever im doing and go find the frequency lol. the alert system is huge, i have email alerts set for certain regions and when an activator posts an alert i know roughly when to listen. if you just show up and spot with no alert its kind of pot luck whether anyone catches it especially on a weekday also 4 contacts on your first time out is solid, i know some people who blanked their first few tries because of antenna issues or just bad condx. the linked dipole setup sounds like it worked well enough

A good report like 59 means that others can hear you perfectly. A bad report like 31 might mean it is time to give up and try again another day when conditions are better. Be honest with your reports - it helps the other operator know how they're getting out.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff is genuinely confusing when you first get into it. so yeah they're all separate awards from different organizations essentially. DXCC is the big one from ARRL and it's based on working 100 or more DXCC entities which arent quite the same as countries — more like geographic/political entities so some places count separately even if theyre technically the same country. you need 100 confirmed to get the basic certificate and then there are endorsements for working more. WAS is Worked All States, also ARRL, you just need all 50 US states confirmed. WAZ is Worked All Zones and thats from CQ magazine — the world is divided into 40 CQ zones and you need all 40 confirmed for that one. the LoTW thing sounds pretty normal actually. not everyone uploads to LoTW right away or at all, so your match count will go up slowly over time as other people upload their logs. some guys only upload once a year or after contests. just keep logging and keep uploading and the confirmations will trickle in. 40 entities in 8 months is honestly pretty solid if you're on HF, keep at it

honestly its not that bad. i went from tech to general in about six weeks of casual studying, maybe 30-40 minutes a night using ham study dot com and just drilling the question pool over and over. the propagation stuff clicks pretty fast once you actually start reading about it a bit, and the electrical theory questions are mostly just memorizing formulas rather than deeply understanding them, at least for the exam. as far as privileges go you get a pretty solid chunk of HF access. 40 meters is probably where most people start out and general class gets you a good portion of it, same with 20 meters which is where a lot of the DX action happens. you wont have everything extra class gets but honestly for a newcomer to HF its more than enough to keep you busy for years. i didnt bother with extra until like three years later and by then i actually understood why i wanted those last little slices of spectrum just take the test, worst case you fail and retake it, its like 15 bucks or whatever

For QRP field use, I just let it warm up 5 minutes before making contacts. Simple solution that works - most ops understand if you need to "warm up the rig" at the start of an activation. Thermal mass helps too - I potted mine in thermal compound.