Andrew Jackson

i just passed mine like three months ago and im definitely not an engineer lol, work in logistics. the theory sections are dense but the way the questions are written you can honestly learn the pattern of the right answers even when the underlying math is fuzzy. not saying that's the right way to do it but it works for passing the test the 160m privileges were what pushed me to finally do it, thats where i wanted to play and generals dont get much of that band

yeah you definitely want to self-spot before you start, otherwise you're basically just yelling into the void. most people monitoring the sotawatch clusters will come find you once they see a spot pop up. i usually text my wife who's back home and she spots me on the app since i dont always have cell signal on the summit. the 4 contacts thing is all you need so congrats on the activation, first one is always a mess

congrats on the first one, 34 contacts is solid especially if conditions were anything like they were here last weekend. yeah the minimum for a valid WWFF activation is 44 QSOs which is a bit more than POTA's 10, so you'll want to go back out and top it up before you submit. the good news is contacts count from multiple visits to the same reference as long as you log them under the same KFF number, so you can combine trips. for the spotting thing, wwff.group has their own spotting page but honestly most hunters are watching pota.app too and they'll pick you up either way. for logging i use ADIF master to clean up my files before uploading, HAMRS should export a standard ADIF that the WWFF logger will accept but double check that your HASC and SIG/SIG_INFO fields are in there otherwise it might reject the upload. the submission page on wwff.group walks you through it once you create an account, bit clunky but it works.

yeah theres no hard rule that says you HAVE to use NATO phonetics every transmission, its more of a best practice especially when band conditions are rough or theres QRM. the idea is that if someone is struggling to copy your callsign, phonetics make each letter unambiguous — like you cant really confuse Foxtrot with anything else but the letter F on its own can sound like S or X when the signal is weak. the guy you heard using non-standard words was probably just an old timer with his own habits. before NATO standardized everything people used all kinds of regional phonetics and some of those old guys never switched. not wrong exactly, just potentially confusing if the other station isnt familiar with them. on something like a local 2m repeater where everyone knows each other nobody cares much, but on DX or contest work youll hear proper NATO almost exclusively because clarity matters a lot more when youre working someone in a pile up

Yeah this trips up a lot of newly upgraded generals, dont feel bad. So the short version is there are two different things going on — the FCC part 97 rules are the actual legal limits, and then the ARRL band plan is more like a gentlemans agreement on how to organize things within those legal limits. You have to follow part 97, the band plan is voluntary but most people follow it to keep things from being a mess. For 40m as a general your phone privileges start at 7.175 MHz and go up to 7.300. The CW/digital segment is 7.025 to 7.125 for generals. The reason people say stay away from the band edge is that your transmitted signal isnt a perfect needle — depending on your rig and your audio settings you might have sidebands or splatter that goes a few kHz either side of your carrier. So if youre running SSB and you tune to exactly 7.300 your actual signal could be spilling above the band edge where you have no privileges, and technically thats a violation even if your dial says youre legal. Most people say stay at least 3 kHz inside to be safe, some say 5.

I use DXwatch pretty regularly and find it pretty solid for casual DX chasing. The filtering is decent enough that I can narrow down to just the bands I care about which helps a lot when there's a pile of spots coming in. QRZ's spot page is fine but I feel like DXwatch refreshes a little faster, though that might just be in my head honestly. For mobile there's an app called DX Toolbox that some people like, and I think Ham Radio Deluxe has cluster integration if you go that route but that's more of a whole logging ecosystem. If you're just getting started with spotting networks and running a modest station like you said, just keeping a browser tab open on DXwatch is probably all you really need. Dont overthink it. Half the battle is just being there when a good spot comes through.

Focus on T1 (FCC Rules) and T2 (Operating Procedures) first - these are heavy on the exam and mostly memorization. Then tackle T5 (Electronics Math) since it builds foundation for T6/T7 circuits. Safety (T0) is straightforward but critical.

just got my general last spring so i cant really compare to how it used to be but honestly 40m evenings have been pretty active for me? maybe depends on your part of the country. im in the pnw and theres usually a handful of people around. though i did notice 15m feels basically dead most mornings when i check in

so i passed my technician exam about three weeks ago and ive been lurking here trying to figure out what to buy as my first handheld. everyone seems to have a strong opinion and honestly its making my head spin a little. i was looking at the baofeng uv-5r just because its cheap and i figured i could mess around without worrying about breaking a $300 radio, but then somebody in another thread said the audio on those is pretty bad and the spurious emissions can cause problems? i dont really know enough to evaluate that claim yet. then i started looking at the yaesu ft-65 and the wouxun kg-uv9d and now im just more confused than when i started. i mostly want to use it for local repeaters and maybe some simplex with my brother who also just got licensed. nothing fancy. does it even matter that much for just getting started or am i overthinking this

yeah the band plan thing trips up a lot of new folks. so the actual FCC allocation and the band plan that ARRL publishes are two different things — the FCC rules are the legal minimums you have to follow, and the band plan is more like what the community agreed to do to keep things organized. you're not going to get a knock on your door for transmitting phone in the wrong part of the band as long as youre within your actual licensed privileges, but people will grumble at you on the air sometimes. for tech on 10 meters, 28.300 to 28.500 MHz is where you can do SSB phone, that part is the actual FCC rule from the privileges table. below that is CW and digital territory by convention mostly. and yeah for content — part 97.113 is the one that lists prohibited transmissions. no music, no obscene language, no codes meant to obscure meaning, no transmitting for hire basically. but just chatting about your day or whatever is totally fine, thats kind of the whole point of the hobby.

so ive had my IC-756 Pro III sitting on the desk for probably 12 years now and honestly it still works fine but im starting to wonder if im missing out on anything with the newer stuff. the DSP on it has always been a little meh compared to what people talk about with the newer icom and yaesu flagships. i was looking at the 7300 just because everyone seems to love it but then part of me thinks if im gonna spend money i should just jump to the 7610 or even look at the 7700 used market. the thing is i mostly do SSB on 40 and 20, some 17m, not really a contester just casual rag chewing and the occasional DX pile when something interesting pops up on the cluster. not sure i need panadapter capability badly enough to justify the price jump but once you see it its hard to go back or so they say. does anyone actually use the dual watch on the 7610 regularly or is it mostly a nice to have that sounds good on paper also my shack is pretty basic, just the radio, an LDG tuner, and a dipole in the attic so its not like im running a competitive station or anything. just want something that sounds good on rx and doesnt make me fight it every time i sit down

so ive been running a remote station for about 8 months now using RemoteHams and for the most part its been solid but lately ive been getting these random dropouts that kill the connection right in the middle of a contact. were talking fully mid-sentence, the audio just cuts and then i have to wait for the RCForb client to time out and reconnect which takes like 30-40 seconds and by then the other station has moved on the weird thing is it doesnt seem related to band conditions or anything obvious. happens on 40m at night, happens on 20m during the day, doesnt matter. the station is running a Flex 6600 at the remote end with a pretty decent internet connection — last i checked it was pulling around 50 down and 15 up which should be more than enough for this. my end at home is also fine, ive done speedtests during the dropout and theres nothing wrong there either ive already bumped the keepalive interval in the server config and that didnt seem to help. wondering if anyone else has had this and figured out what was causing it. is this a UDP thing? i vaguely remember reading somewhere that some routers throttle UDP streams after a certain duration but i cant find the thread now