Kevin Miller

so ive been on HF for about two years now mostly doing digital modes but lately ive been trying to get into actually talking to people on 40m SSB and every single time i get a signal report the audio quality complaints are all over the place. too bassy, too tinny, sounds like im in a barrel, whatever. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 which everyone said was the gold standard mic for this stuff and i still cant seem to nail it. ive been messing with the TX bandwidth settings in the menu and the mic gain and i think at some point i just made everything worse because now i dont even have a baseline to go back to. i know the 7300 has a ton of EQ options buried in the menus and i honestly havent touched most of them because it gets overwhelming fast. is there like a sensible starting point for SSB TX audio that doesnt involve just copying someones settings off youtube and hoping for the word? also not sure if this matters but im running the mic on a boom arm about 6 inches from my face and talking kind of across it not directly into it. maybe thats the issue i dunno

Just passed my Tech exam last month and I'm ready to get my first handheld! I've been lurking on the local repeater with an RTL-SDR, but it's time to actually transmit. My budget is around $200-300 for something that'll last. I've narrowed it down to a few options: Yaesu FT5DR - feature-packed with waterproofing and color touchscreenYaesu FT-60R - priced around $180 with excellent valueICOM ID-52A Plus - offers D-STAR with Bluetooth for under $700Which would you recommend for a new ham who wants to grow into the hobby? I'm interested in emergency communications and maybe exploring digital modes down the road.

so i finally passed my general last spring and been meaning to put together a proper go-kit ever since. my club does ARES stuff occasionally and theres been a couple times i showed up basically with just my HT and felt kinda useless compared to guys who had full setups ready to roll out of the car. i know the basics, radio, power, antenna, but im not sure how far to take it. like do most people actually run a full HF setup in their go-kit or is it mostly VHF/UHF for local emcomm? and whats the battery situation look like for most of you, are you doing sealed lead acid or have people moved to lithium stuff. i looked at a couple videos online but they all feel like sponsored content half the time and i cant tell whats actually useful vs just someone selling stuff. also curious how you have everything organized, like bags, pelican cases, just a rubbermaid tote? i dont want to overthink this but i also dont want to show up to an actual emergency and be fumbling around for a coax adapter for 20 minutes.

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so ive been running a 2m/70cm mobile setup in my F-150 for about 6 months now and i keep getting audio feedback or what i think is RF getting into the cab audio somehow. its not terrible but its noticeable especially when i key up on 70cm. the radio is a Yaesu FTM-400 mounted under the dash, coax runs along the firewall and up through the door seal area. the antenna right now is a mag mount NMO on the roof toward the back. i know mag mounts arent ideal but i havent wanted to drill yet. wondering if anyone has dealt with this on a pickup specifically and whether moving the antenna further back toward the cab-over-bed area would help or if this is more of a grounding issue. the truck has the composite bed liner and i wasnt sure if that matters for ground plane stuff. also my SWR on 2m is fine, reads under 1.5:1, so i dont think its the antenna itself. just something feels off about the installation and i want to clean it up before winter.

just passed mine last month so this is fresh for me. the electrical theory parts tripped me up a bit, stuff like impedance and feedline loss calculations. nothing crazy but if math isnt your thing give those sections a little extra time. the band plan questions are pretty straightforward once you memorize which parts of which bands Generals can use vs Extra. one thing nobody told me before i tested — the actual exam felt easier than the practice tests somehow, i think because i had drilled the question pool so many times. if you go through HamStudy or QRZ practice exams until you're consistently passing you'll be fine. and yeah get on HF before summer, 10m has been wild during good solar flux days

yeah i go almost every year, its worth it if you actually walk the whole tailgate section before doing anything else. the indoor vendor stuff is fine but honestly overpriced most of the time. bring cash and get there early like you said, i usually try to be in the lot by 6:30 at the latest. last year i found a almost mint condition SWR meter for 8 bucks so you never know what shows up

ok so ive been listening on 40m a lot lately and people throw around all these abbreviations and im just completely lost half the time. like QSO, QRM, QSB, QRN... i get that theyre some kind of shorthand but where did all this come from and is there like a master list somewhere? also heard someone say QRT and then the station just went silent, is that like signing off or something? sorry if this is a dumb question im only about 3 months into my technician license and still figuring everything out

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and people keep talking about chasing DX and awards and honestly i dont really understand how all of it fits together. like i know DXCC is about working 100 countries and WAS is the 50 states thing but then theres WAZ which is zones and i thought zones and countries were the same thing? they're clearly not lol anyway i worked a station in the Canary Islands last week on 20m and i was so pumped but then someone told me i need a confirmed QSL to get credit for it and i wasnt even thinking about that during the contact. does that mean i just lost that one or can i still get it confirmed somehow? i uploaded to LoTW but havent heard back. also does every award have separate confirmations or is there like one system that covers everything sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to figure out if i should be chasing all three at once or focusing on one first

yeah you're basically on the right track honestly. the workflow you described is pretty much what a lot of people do when they're starting out. the thing with cluster spots is they can be anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes old by the time you see them depending on how the network is propagating the spots around, so yeah sometimes the DX is just gone when you get there. thats just part of it unfortunately. one thing that helped me a lot was using the audio alerts some of the cluster sites offer so at least your ears perk up when something interesting comes through without you having to stare at the screen constantly. DXwatch has that i think, or you can look at something like DX Summit which is another good one. some guys swear by setting up their own telnet cluster connection directly through their logging software because it tends to be a bit more real time than the web interfaces but honestly for casual DX chasing the browser tabs approach is fine. Ham Radio Deluxe does have a built in cluster client i believe so you might poke around in there, but yeah the main thing is rig control and logging. if you want a phone app specifically for spotting, look at something like HamAlert which lets you set up custom alerts for specific callsigns or entities and it'll push a notification right to your phone. that thing changed my DX game quite a bit when i found it.

ok so I passed my general a few weeks ago and im still kind of lost on the frequency thing. like I know technicians have limited HF but generals get more, but when I look at the band charts online they all look slightly different from each other and I dont know which one to actually trust specifically on 40 meters I keep seeing different numbers for where phone starts. someone at the club told me 7.175 but then I saw another chart that said 7.225 and the arrl one seems different again? and then theres something about the band edge being dangerous to operate near but I dont really get why also is there like one official document I should just be looking at or what

so ive been messing with winlink express for about three weeks now and i finally got a connection through a local RMS gateway on 2m but im still pretty confused about how the message flow actually works end to end. like i understand the basic concept, email over radio, but when i send a message it seems to just sit there for a while before it actually shows up at the destination and i cant tell if thats normal propagation delay or if i did something wrong in the setup. my setup right now is a kenwood TM-V71A running VARA FM through a signalink into a windows 10 laptop. i can see the gateway come up in the RMS list and i can connect to it, the session completes without errors, but then waiting for the message to actually deliver feels like a black box. is there a way to track where a message is in the system after its been uploaded to the CMS? also im not totally clear on when i should be using telnet vs RF sessions -- the documentation is kind of all over the place on that. any help appreciated, been lurking here for a while and everyone seems to know this stuff way better than me

so ive been trying to get Winlink going for a while now and i think i mostly understand the concept but the RMS gateway stuff is tripping me up. basically i want to be able to send and receive email over HF when im out at the cabin where there's no internet. i get that Winlink Express is the client software and that there are these gateway stations that relay your messages to the actual internet side of things, but i dont fully understand the difference between an RMS relay and just connecting direct to a Winlink CMS or whatever its called. also when i look at the map of available gateways, some of them show as "Winmor" and some show as "Vara HF" and i already bought a VARA license so i figure i should just be using that but i wasnt sure if i was missing something by ignoring the other modes. my radio is a 7300 connected via USB and the audio seems to be working okay at least in testing but i havent actually successfully sent a message yet. it connects and then just kind of hangs at the handshake stage. any ideas what im probably doing wrong here.

the rx improvement is probably real actually, some of those region-restriction mods involve components that slightly affect front end loading on adjacent freqs, not always in a bad way. depends on exactly what Yaesu was doing with that diode in circuit. i wouldnt call it a major upgrade but its not always pure placebo either. im more curious about the longevity question you raised. ive got an 857 thats been running the MARS mod for going on 5 years, uses it for emcomm activations mostly, no problems to report. but i run it pretty conservatively, rarely pushing it hard for long periods. if someones doing like contest operating at high duty cycle for extended periods thats a different story regardless of mods.

New General here - can someone explain why SFI above 90 and K index 3 or lower means good conditions? I see these numbers but still learning what they mean for actual band openings. Thanks!

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, K-4577 if anyone knows it, and overall it went really well i think. got my 10 contacts in about 35 minutes on 40m SSB with my KX2 and a random wire up in a tree. nothing fancy but it worked. my question is about logging — i was using HAMRS on my phone and it seemed fine but i noticed when i uploaded to the POTA website a couple contacts didnt match up because i guess the hunters were logging slightly different times than me. like a minute or two off. does that actually cause problems with the activation getting validated? i wasnt sure if there was some tolerance built in or if i need to be more careful next time. also is there any etiquette around calling CQ POTA vs just working a frequency and hoping hunters find you on the spotting network? i spotted myself once but wasnt sure if thats something people do regularly or if it seems weird. felt a little self-promotional lol

what kind of battery you running with it? im trying to figure out what to bring for a POTA activation next month and dont want to carry more than i have to

yeah this trips up a lot of newly upgraded generals, dont feel bad. so the short version is the FCC part 97 is the law — that's what you legally have to follow. the ARRL band plan is more like a gentlemen's agreement about what modes go where within your legal limits, nobody's going to fine you for operating SSB slightly outside the ARRL's suggested SSB segment as long as you're inside your FCC allocation. for 40m as a general you can do phone (SSB) from 7.175 to 7.300, and CW and digital modes from 7.025 up. the 7.000-7.025 chunk is extra class only for CW. as for band edges, your elmer is right to warn you — the issue is that your signal has bandwidth, so if you're on 7.300 and you're running SSB your actual transmitted signal is gonna extend a few kHz above that which puts you outside the band. most people stay a few kHz inside the edge just to be safe. some rigs will let you tune right to the edge and it's technically a violation even if you cant hear it yourself.

stranded copper from the hardware store is totally fine btw, I've built probably a dozen antennas with it and never had a problem related to the wire itself. if anything the solid copper is slightly better electrically but the difference is minimal at HF frequencies, its basically a myth that it causes issues. one thing I didnt see you mention — what are you using at the ends to tension the wire? if the ends are sagging a lot the effective length changes and ive seen guys chase resonance for days not realizing one leg was drooping way more than the other. also your coax run going down to the shack, is any of it running parallel to the antenna elements? that can cause some weirdness with common mode current and mess with your readings. adding a few ferrite chokes or a simple 1:1 choke balun right at the feedpoint usually clears that up and makes the whole thing behave a lot more predictably.

so ive been at this CW thing for about 4 months now and im stuck. like really stuck. i started with the Koch method using the G4FON trainer and got up to knowing all the characters pretty solid around 5wpm but every time i try to push past that i just fall apart. letters start blurring together and i lose my place and then i panic and miss the next three characters trying to catch up. ive read that you're supposed to copy in your head and not write everything down but honestly that feels impossible right now. does that actually get easier or am i just wired wrong for this. my elmer keeps telling me to just listen more but i feel like im not making any real progress and its been weeks since i felt like i got better at anything. how long did it realistically take people to go from being comfortable at 5 to actually being able to hold a QSO at 15 or 20wpm? and is there a point where it just kind of clicks or is it always this grind

HamStudy.org is honestly the easiest way to start, just make an account and start doing the practice questions. the real question pool is publicly available so everything on the actual exam comes straight from it, no surprises. a lot of people pass the tech exam in like 2-3 weeks just grinding through flashcards on there. the ohms law stuff is pretty basic, like E=IR and thats mostly it for that level, dont let it scare you off. find a local club too because they usually hold exam sessions and sometimes even do free licensing classes. ARRL has a club finder on their site. the exam itself is 35 questions, multiple choice, you need a 74% to pass so 26 out of 35. its very doable even if youre not a technical person, a lot of it is just rules and operating procedures which you kind of absorb after doing enough practice tests

So I've been going down a bit of a rabbit hole this week between catching up on some DX news and stumbling across some chatter about what Icom might be putting out later this year. Someone on one of the Facebook groups was posting specs that looked pretty interesting — supposedly an updated mid-range HF transceiver but I haven't seen anything confirmed on the Icom site yet so take that with a grain of salt. Anyone else heard anything concrete or is this still just rumor mill stuff? Also completely separate but 10 meters has been absolutely going off the last few days. I haven't heard it this open in a couple years honestly. Was working some South American stations yesterday afternoon without even trying, just casually tuning around and suddenly the band was packed. If you havent been on recently and you have any kind of HF setup at all its worth checking out, even a modest antenna is pulling in stuff right now. There's also apparently a state QSO party coming up this weekend — I think it's Virginia but I'd double-check the ARRL calendar. Figured someone here might want to get on and work some multipliers if they're chasing that kind of thing.

the inverted V configuration does change things a bit from a flat dipole — the legs being angled down effectively shortens the electrical length so you usually need to add a bit back rather than trim. a lot of guys forget that part. also 14 gauge solid copper is fine but double check your connections at the center insulator because a cold solder joint or a bad crimp there will wreck your readings and yes it can absolutely shift with temperature and humidity if theres any exposed connection. the weather sensitivity you mentioned is a red flag honestly. a properly sealed feedpoint shouldnt care much about weather. i'd resolder everything with good rosin core solder, heatshrink over it or at minimum use self amalgamating tape wrapped tight, and then recheck. also make sure your feedline isnt running parallel to the antenna legs for any significant length — that can couple into the antenna and mess with the pattern and your SWR reading both.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general class) and ive always been curious about CW but honestly have no idea where to start. i tried one of those apps that plays beeps at you but i couldnt tell any of the letters apart after like 20 minutes and just gave up. is there a better way to go about this or am i just not cut out for it. i keep hearing people say learn the sound not the dots and dashes but i dont even know what that means practically speaking. like how do you actually practice, do you sit at a table with headphones or what

so i finally picked up a used FT-7900R and im trying to figure out the best way to mount an antenna on my car. its a 2019 honda civic hatchback so there's no real flat trunk lid, the roof curves pretty sharply toward the back and i dont have a truck or SUV to work with. ive been reading about lip mounts and mag mounts and honestly im going back and forth on this. the mag mount that came with a cheap baofeng i have works fine for testing but i know its not ideal for a real mobile setup. i was thinking about a NMO mount but im not sure i want to drill into the car, its still under warranty and my wife would kill me. anyone run a good hatch lip mount on a similar setup? also wondering if the feedline routing matters much for a VHF/UHF install, like does it have to be kept away from other wiring or is that more of an HF thing