Priya Patel

yeah 10m has been nuts, i worked a ZL station on Sunday which was unexpected to say the least. the solar cycle really has been delivering lately. as for the Icom thing i saw something on a blog that was speculating about a mid-range SDR-based rig but honestly that could mean anything. people have been saying Icom is due for something new for like 2 years now so who knows. i wouldnt hold my breath but also wouldnt be surprised if something shows up.

Join a local study group if possible - collaborating with others preparing for the same exam provides new insights. Plus you'll meet fellow hams and get a start in the community before you're even licensed!

so i finally did my first solo activation at a state forest about 45 minutes from my house, been doing POTA as a hunter for about 8 months and finally decided to just go for it and activate one myself. grabbed my FT-891, a 40m link dipole i threw together from some instructions i found online, and my little 7ah LiFePO4 battery and just drove out there saturday morning. setup took way longer than i expected, probably 30 minutes just getting the antenna up in the trees with a line and a rock, and by the time i actually got on the air i was already kind of flustered. spotted myself on POTAspots and within maybe 2 minutes i had a small pileup going which i did NOT expect at all. ended up working 23 contacts in about 40 minutes on 40m SSB before the battery started showing lower voltage than i liked so i packed up. the weird part was a few people calling me who seemed annoyed that i couldnt hear them well, i think my antenna wasnt great because i had to compromise on the angle. also one guy kept calling on my frequency when i was already working someone else which was kind of frustrating. anyway it counts as a valid activation which is cool. anyone else remember their first solo activation being kind of chaotic like this

i went through basically this exact thing last spring. had a droopy dipole for years and finally just put up a proper inverted V off my tower at 40 feet. cant say i noticed a huge difference on receive or transmit if im being honest, signals i was working before im still working. maybe marginally better signal reports but could just be band conditions who knows one thing i will say is the inverted V is way easier to deal with when a storm comes through. my old flat top was always sagging weird and one end was always lower than the other no matter what i did with the rope tensioning. the V just hangs there and does its thing

so ive been seeing a lot of chatter on a few other forums and the ARRL site about the new Icom rig that supposedly dropped at the Tokyo Ham Fair — anyone here actually gotten hands on one or at least seen it in person? from what i can tell its somewhere in the IC-705 family but theres conflicting info about whether its a straight replacement or just a companion unit with different band coverage. i honestly cant tell anymore because every post i see contradicts the last one. also separately — 10 meters has been absolutely wild this past week if you havent been on. i worked like 14 countries in an afternoon just calling CQ with 100 watts and a wire antenna, which almost never happens for me. solar flux has been up there and propagation has been doing things i havent seen in maybe 8 or 9 years. if you been sitting on the sidelines waiting to try DX now is genuinely a good time to just get on and try stuff. and one more thing — for anyone in the midwest, i think the Dayton Hamvention dates got confirmed for next year already, which feels weirdly early but whatever, at least they announced it. worth keeping on the radar if you never been, its kind of a bucket list thing for a lot of folks in this hobby.

yeah that feeling doesnt go away, ive done like 40 activations now and i still get that same thing when i make that first contact from a summit. 12 contacts is solid for a first time too, some people struggle to get the 4 needed for the activation points. what were you using for the throw line, i went through like 3 different methods before i settled on a tennis ball with some paracord and that thing works every time now

Dont overthink the bandwidth thing, 15 up is way more than enough i run a remote on a 5Mbps connection at my cabin and it works fine except when the weather is bad and the DSL gets flaky. The SDR monitoring idea is interesting though, ive thought about doing the same thing for panadapter stuff. Which version of the RemoteHams client are you on? There was a bug a while back in one of the intermediate releases where the SDR feed and the main audio path would occasionally fight over something in the virtual audio cable routing and cause exactly the dropout you're describing. Might be worth checking if you're current.

MorseFree uses 13 WPM characters with 5 WPM spacing - perfect for beginners and intermediates to hear proper cadences. G4FON is popular for structured Koch method lessons, while practice oscillators help develop rhythm and timing. For contesting prep, Morse Runner is unbeatable for realistic pile-up simulation.

yeah hamstudy is what everyone uses, i passed tech and general back to back same day which i wasnt even planning to do but i had some extra time and figured why not. the test questions really do come straight from the pool so once you can pass the practice tests reliably you're probably fine. the hardest part honestly was just finding a test session near me, check the ARRL website for that. oh and bring two forms of ID i almost forgot that part

Audio compression inherently introduces harmonic distortion - 3 kHz input creates harmonics at 6, 9 kHz that cause splatter. Well-designed compressors with proper filtering can help, but gentleness is key. Most operators would benefit from spectrum analysis before adding more processing.

im pretty new to HF, just got my general back in the spring, and ive honestly been a little intimidated to try 10m because everyone told me it was hit or miss. maybe i should just jump in. whats a good time of day to check? mornings seem to be what youre saying but i wasnt sure if that was just your timezone or kind of universal.

hamstudy.org is honestly all you need, i barely touched a book. just do the practice exams over and over until youre consistently hitting like 85% or better and youll pass no problem. the real test pulls straight from that same question pool so nothing should surprise you. some of the electrical theory stuff is worth actually understanding though, like ohms law comes up enough that just memorizing which answer to pick can get confusing when they word it differently. took me maybe two weeks of casual studying, maybe 20-30 minutes a night. dont overthink it

dont sweat it too much, everyone starts somewhere and the fact that you actually showed up and got activated puts you ahead of probably half the people on the roster who just pay their dues and never come out lol. i went to my first ARES meeting about two years ago and it was six months before i felt comfortable enough to volunteer for anything real. the ICS stuff clicked for me once i took IS-700 in addition to 100, something about the way they explain the span of control in that one made it all make more sense.

so ive been trying to build a 40m dipole for about a month now and the wire keeps snapping at the insulators. using 14awg stranded house wire and some ceramic insulators i got from universal radio. the thing works great for maybe 2 weeks then snap, usually during windy weather. anyone else run into this? thinking maybe the wire is too stiff or something but 14awg should handle the tension right? running about 100 watts on it when it does work, swr stays under 1.5 across most of the band which is nice. just getting tired of climbing the tree every few weeks lol

congrats, first qso is always a little weird but you get used to it fast. what repeater are you on

I did this exact mod on my IC-7300 last year using an RTL-SDR V3 and DXE-RTR-2. The DXE RTR-2 is a high-grade relay box which can do much more than discussed here. I'm very pleased that I have chosen this option for my shack, this panadapter setup will be hard to beat. The wider spectrum view during contests is a game changer - you can spot pile-ups and clear frequencies instantly.

yeah theres no hard rule that forces you to use phonetics every single time, its more of a practical thing. on a quiet local repeater with good signals its totally fine to just say your letters, everyone can hear you clearly. but once you get into HF with all the QRM and fading and whatever else is going on, phonetics just make the difference between someone copying you on the first pass or not. the 40m thing you described is pretty much exactly the situation they're made for. as for the Adam vs Alpha thing, technically the ITU standard is the NATO alphabet so Alpha Bravo Charlie etc is what youre supposed to use in international or formal contexts. but in practice a lot of older hams especially in north america grew up using the ARRL phonetics or just whatever their local club used and they never really switched. Adam Baker Charlie David is pretty common if the guy has been licensed since like the 60s or 70s. nobody is going to get on your case for it on a casual qso, but if youre doing anything formal like emcomm or traffic nets they usually want strict NATO phonetics so everybody is on the same page

made almost the exact same move about two years ago, went from a TS-480 to the 7300. the waterfall thing is real, youll never want to go back to a blank panel after a few months. i was the same way thinking it was marketing fluff. the touchscreen i still fat-finger sometimes honestly. what helped me was just going through the menu and turning off a few of the touch-sensitive areas i wasnt using so i wasnt accidentally hitting stuff. also the multi function knob does most of what you need anyway once you get the muscle memory down. give it another month and it'll feel natural. the filter adjustment being touchy is annoying at first but i think you can adjust the sensitivity somewhere in the display settings, i forget exactly where but worth poking around. 850 for a used one in good shape is decent right now, ive seen them going for more lately which is nuts for a radio thats been out this long.

so ive been listening to HF a lot lately and people keep throwing around all these codes and short words and i honestly have no idea what most of them mean. like i hear QSL and QRM and stuff like that but theres so many of them and i dont know where to start. someone told me to just look them up but when i did i got this huge list and it was overwhelming. is there like a shortlist of the ones people actually use because i dont think im ever going to memorize all of them also on digital modes like FT8 i see stuff like 73 and 88 and RR73 and i kind of figured out 73 means goodbye or something but not totally sure. just trying to get a handle on whats actually common vs the stuff nobody really uses anymore

the 6 hours thing is almost certainly your problem, honestly. a lot of the local VHF RMS gateways are volunteer-run and some of them go down for days at a time without any notice. i'd try pulling up the RMS gateway list in Winlink Express itself rather than the web map, filter by distance, and look at the "last heard" column - if its been more than an hour or two for a 2m gateway id skip it and try the next closest one. also on the audio side, one thing that trips people up is the Winlink Express sound modem settings not matching the actual sample rate your soundcard is running at. go into settings, then the TNC setup, make sure youre using VARA FM or the Winlink Packet modem, and double-check the sample rate matches what windows has the device set to (usually 48000Hz). mismatched sample rates will cause all kinds of weird partial-key issues where the radio keys up but the signal is garbage on the other end. once you do get connected the session handling is automatic - it does a two-way sync, sends anything in your outbox and pulls whatever is waiting at the CMS for your callsign. you dont have to do anything special, just start the connection and let it run. the whole session usually takes less than a minute for a few messages.

so ive been lurking here for a while and finally got my general ticket last month. been saving up for a proper HF rig and i keep going back and forth between the FT-991A and the IC-7300. every time i think ive made up my mind i read another thread or watch another youtube video and flip again. the 991A is appealing because it does VHF/UHF too and i dont have a separate radio for that yet, so its kind of an all in one thing. but then everyone seems to rave about the 7300s waterfall and receiver performance. my main interest is going to be SSB and maybe some digital down the road, probably 40 and 20 meters mostly. i dont really care about satellite or anything fancy. is the receiver difference actually noticeable in day to day use or is that more of a contest station thing where it matters. budget is roughly $1000-1100 and i can stretch a little if it really makes sense to. just dont want to buy the wrong thing and regret it six months from now when i actually know what im doing.

yeah the guy you heard on 40m was probably using the old phonetic alphabet, there were a few different ones floating around before NATO standardized everything. some of the older ops still default to what they learned decades ago, its not wrong exactly, just kinda outdated. most people wont give you grief for it as for when to use them -- theres no hard rule on FM repeaters honestly, if the signal is solid and everyone can hear you fine then saying your call sign normally is totally fine. where phonetics really matter is when signals are weak or theres QRM, like on HF where conditions are always doing something weird. DX contacts especially, if youre trying to work someone in Japan and the band is marginal you absolutely want to spell out your call phonetically or theyre just gonna log something wrong stick to NATO when you can, it travels the best internationally because operators from other countries learned the same set. but dont stress too much about it on local VHF stuff

ok so i just got my technician license a few weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but nobody ever seems to hear me. i can hear other people talking just fine, comes in loud and clear on my baofeng. but when i key up and try to say something nobody responds and sometimes it sounds like my transmission just cuts the audio for a second and then goes back to the ongoing conversation. i looked up the repeater on the directory and it says it requires a 100.0 Hz tone. i went into the baofeng menus and i think i set it but honestly those menus are confusing and i might have set the wrong thing. is there a difference between CTCSS encode and decode? i think i only turned on the decode part maybe? also im not sure if my offset is correct, the repeater is listed as plus offset and i set it to plus but i dunno, feels like something is still off. also kind of a separate thing — when i did get through once (i think) i just said my callsign and asked if the repeater was in use and someone kind of curtly told me to wait for a break in the conversation. was that rude of them or did i do something wrong? still trying to figure out repeater etiquette honestly

so ive been putting this off for way too long and finally just did it last weekend. cut a half wave dipole for 40m, used some 14 gauge stranded wire i had in the garage and hung it in an inverted-v config off a 33 foot painter's pole in the backyard. ran some RG-8X down to the shack. the thing actually works, like i made contacts on it same afternoon which was honestly a surprise given how sloppy my soldering probably was at the feedpoint. but here's where im not sure what i did was right — i just twisted the wires together at the center insulator and soldered them to the SO-239 i had, no choke balun or anything. been reading that you really need a choke there to keep RF off the coax braid but honestly i didnt notice any issues. hand doesnt tingle on the mic or anything. also my SWR is sitting around 1.4:1 at the bottom of 40m which is where i mostly operate and its like 2.1 at the top end. is that reasonable for a wire dipole? i cut the legs to what the formula said, 468/f in feet, so about 32.8 feet each. the ground here is kind of dry clay which i know affects things but not sure by how much. anyway pretty happy with it overall, just want to make sure im not doing anything dumb that'll bite me later