Kevin Miller

so ive been fighting this thing for about three weeks now and im starting to lose my mind. the radio will be running fine, like ill be in a qso on 40m and maybe 20-30 minutes in the power output just drops. not to zero, but from like 100w down to maybe 15-20w and it stays there until i cycle the power off and back on. sometimes it comes back fine, sometimes it takes a few cycles. at first i thought it was heat related because it seemed to happen more in the afternoon but ive done some testing and it happened this morning too when the shack was pretty cool. ALC looks normal on the display before it drops, and the SWR on the antenna side is fine, been running that dipole for years with no issues. havent opened it up yet because its still under warranty but warranties almost up so im thinking about digging in. anyone else seen this or have a starting point for diagnosis? feels like it could be the PA board or maybe something thermal even if it isnt strictly temperature triggered

yeah same boat with my club, their site is basically abandonware at this point. i just joined their facebook group and thats where everything actually gets announced now. kind of annoying but it is what it is

so ive been getting back into CW after maybe a 15 year break and honestly its been humbling. i picked up a used Bencher paddle and hooked it up to my K3 internal keyer and at slower speeds like 15-18 wpm it sounds pretty clean but once i start pushing past 22 or so the dits start getting squished or sometimes i get extra characters showing up. not sure if its my paddle tension being off or the iambic mode or honestly maybe just my fist being rusty after all these years. been practicing with the Koch method on the computer and im up to copying about 20 wpm reasonably well but sending is just lagging behind. anyone else gone through this re-learning curve? is there something specific i should be checking on the paddle itself or the keyer settings? the dit/dah ratio feels right when i go slow but maybe its drifting at speed. i genuinely cant tell if its hardware or just me.

this is so cool, im still in the reading-about-it phase with homebrew and stuff like this makes me want to actually just start. question — where do you get the toroids and stuff for the LPF? i keep seeing people mention Kits and Parts dot com but idk if theres a better source or if it even matters much for something like this

yeah single yagi is doable on 2m EME, not gonna lie to you though it limits who you can work considerably. you're basically going to be working the big guns — stations with large arrays — because they have enough eirp to close the link on their end even if you cant quite hear them back. that said ive seen people make legitimate two-way contacts with a single M2 2M9SSB or similar and a good mast mounted preamp, something like an SSB Electronics or a Minikits unit with a really low noise figure, like sub 0.5dB ideally. the coax run matters a lot, 100 feet on 2m you're going to want LMR-400 at minimum, honestly heliax if you can swing it. any loss between the antenna and that preamp is basically murder because you're already at the ragged edge of what's detectable. i'd get the preamp as close to the feedpoint as you can, relay switched, and then you can use cheaper coax for the run back to the shack since the signal is amplified at that point. moon geometry — yeah it matters more than people think for your specific location. when the moon is at higher elevation you get less ground noise and the path loss is the same but your antenna is looking through less atmosphere. wsjt-x has a built in moon tracking display, just watch it for a few weeks and you'll get a feel for when your window is. also coordinate with the guys on the ON4KST chat, thats where basically all the 2m EME activity gets set up these days.

honestly the RTL with an upconverter will get you started but once you hear the difference on a crowded 40m band in the evening you'll understand why people move on from it. the intermod on those dongles is rough when there's strong BC stations around. i picked up an RSP1A a couple years back (before the B came out) and yeah, the dynamic range improvement on HF is real, not just spec sheet stuff. that said you're right that antennas will be your limiting factor for a long time. if you haven't dealt with a decent feedline and some kind of noise reduction setup the extra sensitivity might just mean you receive more noise more clearly, lol. SDRuno is a bit clunky but you get used to it, or just run the RSP through SDR# with the community plugin, works fine.

that plateau around 10-13wpm is so real, almost everyone hits it. what helped me more than anything was switching to Farnsworth timing early on - basically keeping the character speed high (like 18-20wpm) but putting longer gaps between the letters so you have time to process. the idea is your brain learns each character as a sound, not by counting dits and dahs. if you slow the whole thing down your brain starts counting again and that kills you later. also the good days bad days thing is completely normal, honestly it never fully goes away but it gets less dramatic. fatigue, stress, whether you had coffee, all of it affects copy more than people expect. i wouldnt worry about it too much. just keep showing up every day like you already are, thats really the main thing. it took me probably 8 months to feel solid at 20wpm but i wasnt practicing as consistently as you seem to be so you might get there faster.

so ive been at this for about 3 months now and im stuck. not completely stuck but it feels like im hitting a wall somewhere around 12-13wpm. i can copy most characters fine at 5 or even 8wpm but the second i crank it up past 12 everything just turns to mush in my head. i cant seem to get my brain to just hear the whole letter instead of counting the dits and dahs individually which i know is the wrong way to do it but old habits die hard i guess. im using lcwo.net for most of my practice and doing maybe 20-30 minutes a day when i can. someone told me to try the koch method starting at like 20wpm character speed even if the overall speed is slower, which i started doing but honestly it feels weird and uncomfortable. does that discomfort ever go away or am i doing it wrong just curious how long it took people to get from beginner speeds up to something useful like 20wpm where you can actually hold a real qso without the other guy having to slow way down for you