Priya Patel

QCX mini is such a good first kit honestly. i built one a couple years back and it was the thing that got me actually interested in homebrew. the receiver on those is surprisingly good for what it is
for SOTA i've been using mine with a linked dipole that i can switch between 40 and 20. takes maybe 5 minutes to set up if you have a decent tree or a telescoping pole. the whole thing rolls up into a stuff sack and weighs almost nothing. 3 watts into a dipole at elevation will get you a pile up if the band is cooperating, trust me. some of my best DX has been from hilltops with embarrassingly simple wire antennas
one thing worth knowing before you head out — the QCX runs warm when you're transmitting for extended periods so if it's a hot summer day just keep an eye on it. never caused me a problem but i've read about it. also bring a fully charged battery pack, that thing sips current but you still want margin for a full activation

yeah the 10-12 wpm wall is super real, almost everyone hits it. what helped me more than anything was just getting on the air with actual QSOs instead of always practicing with computer generated text. the SKCC has a whole sked page and people there are really patient with slower ops, nobody is gonna judge you for asking them to QRS. theres something about real conversations where you actually care what the other person is saying that makes your brain kick into a different gear compared to copying random letter groups.
also try listening to stuff slightly faster than you can comfortably copy, like set the trainer to 15 or even 18wpm and just let it wash over you even if you miss a lot. your ear starts to get used to the rhythm of the faster characters and eventually your processing speed catches up. took me about 8 months total to get to 20wpm solid but i wasnt super consistent about it. the guys who practice every single day seem to get there faster.

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

so ive been fighting this for about two weeks now and im starting to lose my mind a little. running a Kenwood TM-D710G into a Mobilinkd TNC3 (yeah i know the D710 has its own built in TNC but i wanted to try the bluetooth setup on my phone for a while) and i can see packets being decoded in APRSdroid on my phone, other stations are showing up fine, but my own beacons just never appear on aprs.fi or anywhere else i check. the radio is definitely transmitting, i can see the TX light and ive even heard my own packet burst on a second radio sitting next to me, so RF is going out.
i checked my SSID and callsign like five times, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area, i have three digipeaters within like 15 miles. symbol is set to a car icon. beacon rate is every 2 minutes which honestly might be too frequent but shouldnt cause it to not show up at all right?
the one thing im not 100% sure about is my audio levels from the phone to the TNC, i adjusted them a couple times but idk if they're right. could that cause it to transmit garbage that sounds like a packet but isnt actually decodable? or am i missing something dumb here

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

so i've been wanting to do this for probably two years now and i finally just did it. built a little pixie kit, yeah i know i know the pixie gets a lot of hate but as a first build it was actually really satisfying. took me a couple evenings to put together and i only had to reflow like three joints when i was done. got it working on 40m.
anyway i took it out to the park last saturday with a random wire antenna just thrown up in a tree and a 3ah lipo i had from an rc project. honestly wasnt expecting much, maybe nothing. but i worked a guy in ohio from here in pennsylvania on 2 watts and i swear i almost fell off the bench. he gave me a 559 which i'll take all day long. there's something about making a contact with something you literally built yourself that just hits different than turning on the icom and working europe.
now i'm looking at building something a bit more capable, been reading about the ubitx and also looking at some of the QCX stuff from QRP labs. curious if anyone here has done the QCX+ or the QCX mini and what they thought about the receive quality because that seems to be where the pixie really falls apart — the rx is just not great.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I took mine last spring and tbh the hardest part for me was the math questions, like the ones where you actually have to calculate resonant frequency or figure out db loss. i thought i could just memorize my way through but a few of those require you to actually punch numbers. nothing crazy hard but if you havent done that kind of thing since high school it might trip you up.
the privileges were the main reason i did it and no regrets there, being able to work the lower parts of the bands during contests makes a noticeable difference in how crowded things are