Rachel Green

yeah the 15 meters thing is def wrong, that kicks in at general. i made the same mistake when i was studying lol. honestly just bookmark the ARRL privilege chart and dont rely on what people tell you verbally, even club guys get it wrong sometimes. been licensed 2 years and i still double check stuff before trying a new band.

the thing that actually made it click for me was the Koch method, specifically using a program called LCWO dot net, its free and you basically learn one character at a time but always at full speed — like 20wpm character speed — instead of slowing the dashes and dots way down. slowing it down is what messes people up because then when you try to copy real signals your brain cant recognize anything took me about four months of maybe 20-30 minutes a day to get to where i could copy 15wpm solid enough to have a slow ragchew. some guys get there faster. honestly the biggest thing is consistency, even just 15 minutes every day beats an hour on the weekend. once you get to maybe 10 characters down, go find some slow CW nets on 40m and just listen, even if you cant copy most of it your brain starts making connections you dont even notice

went through the same thing last year lol. the chart on the arrl website saved me honestly. just dont transmit below 7.175 on 40 phone and youre fine for starters, figure out the rest as you go

yeah the N1MM learning curve is real, nobody really warns you about it. the first time i opened it i closed it and went back to whatever i was using before. but honestly once you get the config file sorted and understand how the entry window works for each contest it clicks. the exchange thing — you want to go into the contest setup before you start, under File > Open Log in Database, and theres a spot for your exchange info. once thats in it autofills and you mostly just confirm it. for WSJT-X integration it works but its a little janky depending on your version. i run them both and have N1MM pulling from WSJT-X via the UDP broadcast, works okay but ive had it drop connections when WSJT-X updates and i forget to check the port settings. not a huge deal once you know to check it but yeah it can feel like a lot of moving parts. Log4OM is honestly nicer for everyday use, i keep both installed and just switch for contests.

not dumb questions at all, everyone goes through exactly this when they start out. so the CTCSS thing — basically most repeaters require you to transmit a subaudible tone along with your voice so the repeater knows to open up. without it the repeater just ignores you, which is exactly what youre experiencing. the tone is sometimes called a PL tone depending on who you talk to, same thing just different name. you need to find out what tone that specific repeater uses, usually its listed in the directory entry right next to the frequency and offset. then in your baofeng you go into the menu and set the T-CTCS to that tone value. its a little buried in the menus but once you find it youll be fine. on the conversation thing — yeah just wait for a pause and then key up and say your callsign. most repeater users are pretty used to someone jumping in between exchanges. you dont need to wait for them to fully finish the whole qso, just a natural break works. some people say just your callsign, some say their callsign and that theyre monitoring, both are fine really.

I went through this about a year ago and the one thing I'd add is don't overlook the operating procedures and regulations questions — a lot of first timers focus on the electronics and antenna theory stuff thinking thats the hard part but then get tripped up on things like what repeater courtesy tones are for or when you have to ID. Dumb stuff that seems obvious until the question is worded weird. The ARRL Tech book is fine but it goes into way more depth than you need for just passing the exam. If your goal is just to get the ticket and start operating, honestly the Gordon West study guide is a bit more stripped down and exam focused. I used both and kind of switched back and forth. Either way you'll be fine, the test really isn't that hard once you've gone through the pool a few times.

i had the same frustration honestly. spent like two weeks just getting heartbeat replies from nodes and thought the mode was basically a zombie. then i stumbled into an actual group on 40m one sunday afternoon and it clicked. its like the difference between walking into a bar at 9am versus 9pm lol. also fwiw i switched from FT8 to mostly JS8Call and some RTTY for contesting and i dont really miss the grid square grind. RTTY still has a weirdly active contest scene if you havent tried it, feels old school in a good way.

not a dumb question at all, took me forever to feel comfortable with all of it. yeah QTH is your location, you got that one right. QSL means basically confirmed or understood, like when someone says QSL that they got your message. QRM is interference from other stations, like man made noise, whereas QRN is natural static and noise. QSY means change frequency, so if someone says QSY to 14.255 they want you to move there. QRZ is asking who is calling, you hear that a lot at the end of a CQ. 73 means best regards, its one of the old numeric codes from telegraph days that stuck around. 88 is love and kisses which you mostly hear people say to their spouses on the air which is kind of sweet honestly. there used to be a whole big list of number codes but most of them died out except 73 and 88. ARRL website has a full Q code list, just google ARRL Q codes and itll come up. print it out and keep it near the radio for a while, thats what i did when i was starting out. you stop needing it after a few months of actually getting on the air regularly.

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i know theres the tech portion and the extra portion and stuff but every chart i find online looks slightly different and some say the phone portion starts at 7.175 and some say 7.200 and i dont know which one is current. also whats the deal with band edges, my elmer keeps telling me to stay away from them but he didnt really explain why, just said it was bad practice. is it just an interference thing or is there a technical reason. sorry if this is a dumb question im still figuring all this out

i had the same confusion when i started. what clicked for me was thinking about it like — if theres any doubt at all whether they got it right, use phonetics. my callsign has a couple letters that sound similar so i basically always phonetic the whole thing when making initial contact. after that if we're chatting and the signal is solid i'll just talk normal. the america/alpha thing is def a real phenomenon lol, ive also heard people say "easy" for E instead of echo. drives me a little nuts but you get used to it

so ive been at this for almost two years now and i want to share what finally got me moving because i wasted so much time doing the wrong things early on when i first started i was doing the whole thing where you count dots and dashes and that absolutely killed me, i stayed at 5wpm for like 8 months just spinning my wheels. the characters never became automatic they were always just math problems in my head what finally clicked was switching to Koch method and forcing myself to listen at 20wpm character speed even when my overall speed was like 7 or 8. i hated it at first because i was missing so much but after about 3-4 weeks something in my brain just started to recognize the sounds as whole units instead of pieces. like the letter C stopped being dah-dit-dah-dit and started just sounding like... C. hard to explain also the thing nobody told me was that copying in your head is way different from copying onto paper or a keyboard. i practiced writing everything down for months and then i started just listening without writing and my accuracy actually went up because i wasnt panicking trying to keep up with my pencil anyway im at about 18-19wpm solid now and occasionally hitting 20 on a good day. curious if anyone else had a similar experience or if there were other methods that worked. i feel like there's so much conflicting advice out there when youre just starting

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and every time i get on HF someone is using alpha bravo charlie etc and i do try to use it but honestly sometimes i just say the letter especially if the band is clear and the other person can obviously hear me fine. my elmer told me its basically required but then i read somewhere its not actually in the rules? just curious what people actually do in practice because i feel kinda dumb when i forget and say "D as in dog" instead of Delta and then have to correct myself mid-transmission

so i've been interested in ham radio for probably a year now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. i finally decided i want to actually do this but i have no idea where to begin. like i know there's different license levels but i dont really understand which one to go for first or how hard the test actually is. i looked at some study guides online and it seemed really overwhelming with all the technical stuff. do most people just memorize the question pool or do you actually need to understand all of it? and how long does it realistically take to study before taking the test, i dont want to walk in totally unprepared

Latency is critical for VARA connections. You need to do everything you can to reduce delays. Of course you are using a 3000 with PSDR, so things are different, but the need for low latency does not change. On the IC-7300, try turning off any DSP noise reduction, set the USB audio sample rate to 48kHz, and use the shortest possible USB cable.

Yeah what KE4ABC said about LoTW. Also dont forget you can mix paper and electronic confirmations for the same award - i had maybe 60 paper QSLs and then started using LoTW for the rest and it all counted fine when i submitted. The key thing is making sure the QSO details match exactly between your log and the confirmation. Date, time, band, mode all have to line up. If youre not sure about some of those QSLs maybe post pics on here and we can help you figure out if theyre good to go

The standalone executable feature is exactly what I needed for a remote monitoring project! No more dependency hell when deploying to headless systems. This could be a game-changer for EmComm applications.

so the short answer is the FCC allocation is the law and the ARRL band plan is just a gentlemens agreement basically. you wont get fined for operating SSB at 7.150 or whatever even if the band plan suggests something else, but you might annoy people. the 3 khz from band edge thing your buddy mentioned is real advice though even on modern rigs. the issue isnt really drift so much as the fact that when youre on SSB your signal has bandwidth, so if you set your dial to say 7.300 your actual transmitted signal is spreading up from there depending on whether youre upper or lower sideband. you can clip the edge without even realizing it. most people just stay a few khz inside to be safe. for general on 40 phone youve got 7.175 to 7.300 if i remember right, just dont hug that 7.300 ceiling too close.

Building a 43-foot multiband vertical using aluminum tubing sections and planning the ground radial system. All ground mount antennas need a good ground plane - using 36 radials around 3 to 3.5m long each. Planning to use 14AWG stranded copper wire for radials. Questions: 1) Is 32 radials overkill for a 100W station, or should I go with the full 36? 2) Found 500ft of 18ga stranded copper for $25 - would this gauge work or stick with 14ga? 3) Any tips for a homebrew radial plate connection system?

honest answer is that for 12-15 hour efforts the S/O 1 radio game is probably where most of your rate gains are going to come from before you even touch SO2R. like are you using a DVK and CW memories to minimize your turnaround time between QSOs? are you tail-ending runs properly? those things compound way more than people realize before they go chasing the two-radio setup. that said, if you already have the 590 sitting there, the mult-hunting application is genuinely useful even at casual effort levels. you keep running on radio 1 and use radio 2 to check the bandmap for mults without ever stopping your run frequency. you dont even need full SO2R technique for that, just decent isolation and a way to monitor both receivers. the antenna switching is the annoying part yeah, but a used W2IHY or even just a good 2x4 switch and some relay logic isnt that crazy to put together. the 60dB isolation thing is real though, dont underestimate it, i blew a front end on a borrowed radio years ago being dumb about that.

yeah i was in the same boat not too long ago. one thing that helped me was just checking your LoTW account at arrl.org and looking under "your QSOs" after you upload — if the log went through you'll see them listed there, they just wont show as confirmed until the other person has uploaded their log too and the dates/frequencies match up. so it can take a while depending on who you worked. also just a heads up if you worked any parks on the air or sota stations those guys are usually pretty good about uploading to LoTW quickly so those might confirm faster than random contacts.

HamStudy.org is honestly where I'd start if I were doing it over again. It's free and it uses spaced repetition to drill you on the actual question pool, so you're not just memorizing random stuff, it kind of figures out what you're weak on and keeps hitting you with those questions. The technician pool isn't huge and a lot of it is pretty logical once you get the basic concepts down. Some of the electrical theory stuff can feel weird at first but you don't need to deeply understand all of it, just enough to recognize the right answer. I'd also grab the ARRL Technician manual if you want something to read through at night, but honestly a lot of people pass just using HamStudy alone without buying anything. As for cost, the exam itself is usually ten bucks or so depending on the club running the session, some VE teams have started charging a bit more recently, and the FCC license fee used to be free but they started charging like 35 dollars through their system a couple years ago. Your neighbor who's licensed should be able to point you to a local club running a session nearby, that's probably the easiest way to find one.

the jump from tech to general is noticeable but its not like crazy hard if youve been actually doing radio stuff for a while. the electrical theory and the propagation questions tripped me up at first but honestly once you get through the pool a few times it clicks. i used ham study dot org to drill questions and that helped way more than just reading the book cover to cover as for 40m, yeah you get a good chunk of it as a general. techs get a tiny sliver up around 7.225 or so for phone i think, but as general you get phone from 7.175 up to 7.300 and cw/digital below that. 40m is great for regional stuff in the daytime and can go pretty far at night, you picked a good band to start with. just be aware it gets crowded on weekends especially during contests, which can be either annoying or fun depending on your mood

Q65 has genuinely changed things, i wont lie. ive been doing EME on 2m since about 2009 and back in the JT65 days you really did need serious antenna real estate to work anything beyond the big guns. now with Q65 the threshold has dropped noticeably. that said a single 17 element yagi is still going to be tough. you'd probably hear some of the big stations but completing a QSO is another matter. most people who run small single yagi setups say they need at least a kilowatt into a decent antenna to have any real shot. the path loss on 2m EME is brutal, something like 252 dB when the moon is at average distance, and that doesnt care how good your software is. your transverter setup is fine, the key thing is your preamp. a good low noise preamp right at the feedpoint makes a huge difference, like you want noise figure under 0.3 dB if you can get it. SSB Electronics and Down East Microwave both make stuff that works well. the other thing is moon tracking, you need az/el rotors and something like PstRotator to keep the beam on the moon because the window is short. WSJT-X is still what everyone uses, Q65 is in there now and thats what most people run for 2m EME these days.

yeah 10m has been doing that thing where it opens and closes fast, especially late afternoon my time. i worked a bunch of european stations last thursday out of nowhere, S9 signals and then nothing an hour later. the flux was sitting around 165 that day i think. what i've noticed is that the geomagnetic conditions matter almost as much as the flux index -- even with good flux numbers if the K index spikes you can forget about the higher bands. i check the NOAA space weather page in the morning now kind of like checking the weather before going outside. on the cluster question, i find it useful but like you said the spots can be stale. i mostly use it to know which bands are active and then go find stuff myself rather than trying to chase a specific spot. 15m has actually been pretty decent here in the mornings, like before noon local time there's usually something going on toward europe or africa if the conditions cooperate

yeah what he said. i will add though that in nets, especially formal traffic nets, they pretty much expect full phonetics every time for callsigns. so if you ever check into one of those be ready. but on a casual ragchew or just acknowledging someone on a repeater, doing the whole Alpha Bravo thing every single time can actually feel a bit stiff and robotic lol. just kind of read the situation