Kevin O'Brien

We've been running AllStar for three years now - audio quality is fantastic and the flexibility is unmatched. Linked and repeated audio is superb. Setup takes more effort than EchoLink, but the control you get is worth it. Can link multiple nodes permanently or on-demand.

yeah what he said about the ALC is spot on. i ran a PR-40 on a 7300 for two years and the mic gain sweet spot for that combo is way lower than you'd think. also one thing nobody mentions is the bass rolloff in the 7300 menu settings — theres a TX bandwidth and an TX bass/treble EQ buried in there and the defaults are not great for voice clarity on SSB. SSB really doesnt need a lot of low end, anything below like 300hz is mostly mud on the band anyway, cutting some of that actually makes you sound clearer and punches through QRM better too. takes some tweaking but its worth going through the menus properly once instead of guessing at it forever.

ok so i passed my technician exam like two months ago and ive been trying to figure out exactly what im allowed to do. i know i have HF privileges on 10m but beyond that im honestly lost. i keep reading Part 97 and it just doesnt click for me the way the question pool made it seem like it would.
my main confusion is around like... content? i know you cant broadcast music or use it for business but what counts as business exactly. like if i mention my job or something in a QSO is that a violation or is it more about like actually conducting transactions. also is there a rule about how often you have to ID because i thought it was every 10 minutes but someone at my club said something different and now im second guessing myself.
sorry if this is a dumb question, just dont want to accidentally step on someones toes or worse get in trouble with the FCC before ive even really gotten started

yeah the stock icom mics tend to be pretty bassy by default, not ideal for SSB. what you want to do is go into the menu and pull up the TX equalizer settings — on the 7300 you can shape the audio response pretty specifically. a lot of guys run a high-pass filter starting somewhere around 300hz and roll off anything above maybe 2700-2800hz. SSB bandwidth is limited anyway so youre not really losing anything by cutting the lows, youre just getting rid of mud that was never helping intelligibility to begin with.
also check your compression settings. a little bit of TX compression can really help punch through noise on HF but if you crank it too far the audio gets that nasty pumping sound and intelligibility actually gets worse. id start with compression around 3-4 on the 7300 scale and see how that sits. get a friend to give you a real signal report, not just an S-meter reading, like actually tell you how the voice sounds on the other end.

i was in the same boat not too long ago honestly. one thing that helped me was just picking one tool and sticking with it for a while instead of trying to watch three at once, its kind of overwhelming at first. i use the QRZ one mostly just because im already logged in there for logging anyway. the spots arent always instant but for casual DX hunting its fine

I was in the exact same spot like 8 months ago lol. I ended up getting the Baofeng just to save money and honestly I kind of wish id spent a bit more from the start. It works but programming it was a huge headache and the battery drains faster than I expected. My elmer eventually loaned me his old Kenwood TH-D74 to try and oh man the difference in receive quality alone was shocking. obviously that radio is way out of your budget but just saying the cheaper ones do have real tradeoffs. whatever you get just make sure you grab the Chirp software, its free and makes memory programming way less painful.

yeah the spotting thing is always a nice surprise the first time, someone with the app sees your self-spot and suddenly youve got a pileup waiting. KX2 is such a solid choice for that kind of thing too, ive been running one for POTA for about a year and a half and its never let me down. only thing i'd say is maybe look into a slightly bigger lipo eventually, the 3ah can get a little dicey if youre running higher power for a while but for QRP it's probably fine

I made the same jump about a year ago, different starting point though — was on an FT-857 before so the jump to a proper base rig felt massive. The scope alone was worth it for me honestly. I spent probably a week just watching band openings on 10 and 15 without even transmitting, just seeing what propagation was actually doing visually made a lot of things click that I'd read about but never really internalized.
One menu thing that helped me — dig into the NR settings. The noise reduction on the 7300 is actually decent when conditions are rough, not perfect but better than I expected from DSP NR in that price range. Dont crank it to max though, it starts eating consonants on SSB voices which gets fatiguing fast. I usually sit around 5-7 on the NR level and leave it there.

im pretty much in the same boat as you lol, sitting around 8wpm right now and the lcwo lessons feel like they've slowed way down for me too. one thing that helped me recently was just grabbing a bunch of old QST magazines and having my computer send me the text as morse while i follow along with my eyes. kind of like cheating but it helped my brain start recognizing the rhythm of whole words instead of individual letters, at least thats how it feels to me
also someone on here told me about the word "paris" being used to measure wpm and i went down a rabbit hole about that for like an hour instead of actually practicing haha

totally understand the overwhelm, i went through the same thing about two years ago. honestly for where you're at, the FT-60R is a really solid first radio — its not fancy but its built well, audio is loud and clear, and the receive is noticeably better than the cheap chinese stuff. battery lasts forever too which matters more than you'd think when you're just learning the ropes and forget to charge things.
the VX-6R is great but youre paying extra for the waterproofing and some other bells and whistles that you probably wont use right away. unless you hike in the rain a lot or something. tri-band is nice to have eventually but honestly on 2m and 70cm youll find 95% of the repeater activity anyway so dont stress about that.
for APRS from a handheld you'd either want something like the FT3DR or FT5DR which have it built in, or you can pair a regular HT with an external TNC and your phone using something like APRSdroid — thats actually how a lot of people do it. the built-in APRS radios are pricier but man they're convenient once you get into it.
if budget is a real concern the baofengs work, people use them, but plan on spending some time on the programming software to get them set up right and dont expect the receiver to ignore interference as well as the japanese radios do. anyway welcome to the hobby, youre gonna have fun with this

had basically the same thing happen to mine after i dropped it, don't ask. turned out one of the shield cans on the RF board had gotten slightly bent and was intermittently grounding something it wasnt supposed to. probably not your issue since yours sounds more consistent but worth just eyeballing everything carefully with good light before you go chasing caps. these rigs are packed in there pretty tight and stuff moves around.

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 for about a year now doing mostly airband and some weather sat stuff with WXtoImg and it works fine for what it is but ive been wanting to get into more serious HF monitoring, like shortwave broadcasts, some utility stuff, maybe WSPR decoding just to see whats bouncing around. someone at the club mentioned the RSP1A and honestly the price jump isnt that crazy but i dunno if its actually worth it or if im just gonna end up with the same frustrations i have now.
main thing i notice with the RTL-SDR on HF using the direct sampling mode is just how noisy everything feels. like i can hear stuff but its buried and i find myself cranking gain until its a mess. running SDR# on windows and ive tried SDR++ which i actually like better but same hardware limitations obviously. does the RSP1A genuinely clean things up that much or is a chunk of that just my antenna situation. running a random wire out the window which i know isnt ideal.
also curious if anyone has tried running SDRangel with either of these, i messed with it briefly and got confused by the interface but maybe im missing something

LoTW is definitely the way to go if you want credits to count efficiently — most serious DXers upload their logs there regularly and when both sides match up you get a confirmed credit automatically. cards still matter for some things, some awards require a certain number of paper QSLs or the DX station might not even be on LoTW, but for your basic DXCC Mixed you can get a long way on LoTW alone
for DXCC you're working toward 100 confirmed entities out of the 340 or so on the current list. band endorsements are separate — so if you want DXCC on 20m AND 40m you'd need 100 confirmed on each. most people start with Mixed which pulls from all bands combined
as for what to chase, honestly when you're starting out just work everything you hear that sounds new. get your log building. once you're past 100-150 you'll start feeling the gaps and that's when you get more strategic about it. check DX summit or DXwatch to see what's being spotted and just get on. the first hundred comes faster than you think if you put in the time

yeah the 857 uses separate driver transistors for different band groups and 40m shares a stage with some of the other HF bands if i remember right, but the final amp switching is done through band pass filters and a switching network so it could also be a relay or PIN diode not fully switching over. those PIN diodes are a known weak point on the yaesu HF portables especially if the radio ever saw any RF feedback or a bad SWR event.
what i'd do first before pulling the PA apart is check the voltages going into the driver stage on 40m versus a working band. if the bias looks right then you're probably looking at the filter switching. theres a service manual floating around that has the voltage charts, way more useful than the schematic alone. also worth checking if the low power follows you if you switch to 39.something vs 41.something — if it drops off sharply at the band edge that points more toward the LPF relay than the PA itself.

so ive been at this for about 3 months now, finally got my general and immediately dove into CW because honestly that was the whole reason i got into ham radio in the first place. picked up a cheap single lever paddle off ebay and hooked it to a MFJ keyer and... it sounds awful. like the dits and dahs are all clumped together or sometimes theres these huge gaps where there shouldnt be. i can send the alphabet slowly if i concentrate real hard but the moment i try to speed up even a little it just falls apart.
ive watched a ton of youtube videos and i get the concept, squeeze keying vs just using it as two separate straight keys or whatever, but my hand just doesnt cooperate. is this a technique thing or could something actually be wrong with the paddle tension or contact gap? the contacts feel pretty loose to me but i dont really have anything to compare it to. been thinking about just going back to a straight key for a while to build up the rhythm but i dont want to develop bad habits either. any thoughts from people who have been through this?