CW Lover

ok so i just got my technician license last month and ive been listening to the local 2m repeater for a few weeks now trying to figure out how everything works before i jump in. i think i understand the basics — you key up, say your callsign, wait for someone to respond. but the CTCSS stuff is really confusing me. my radio came programmed with a bunch of repeaters from a local club but some of them i can hear people talking on but when i transmit nothing happens, like the repeater doesnt open up. someone told me it might be because i dont have the right tone set but i dont really know how to check that or where to find out what tone a specific repeater uses. is there like a database or something? also completely separate question — is there etiquette around when you can just jump into a conversation thats already going? i dont want to be rude but sometimes i hear people talking and then there's a pause and i dont know if theyre done or just taking a breath. feel kinda dumb asking but nobody was born knowing this stuff i guess

the fox hunt is definitely sunday, saw it on the club Facebook page. starts at 10am at the park on Route 9. bring a yagi or a tape measure yagi if you have one, last time the fox was pretty well hidden

so ive been running FT8 for about two years now and yeah its great for working stations and building up the logbook but honestly it feels like im just clicking buttons and watching a waterfall. theres no real contact happening, just signal reports and grid squares. someone at my local club mentioned JS8Call and i finally sat down and read about it last weekend. the idea of actually being able to send short messages back and forth, or even relay through other stations, sounds way more interesting to me than another 73 into the void. but i'm reading that the weak signal performance isnt quite as good as FT8 and obviously the bandwidth and timing are different. im running a IC-7300 into a fan dipole, usually 50w, mostly 40 and 20m. anyone actually use JS8Call regularly and find it worth it or does the slower speed and slightly worse sensitivity make it annoying compared to just running FT8 also tangentially — i tried PSK31 maybe a year ago and found the software setup kind of a headache, is that just me or does everyone find the older digital modes more fiddly to get going compared to WSJT-X

i just keep a browser tab open to DXwatch honestly, been doing it for years and never felt like i needed an app. though i guess if youre moving around the shack or whatever that makes sense. one thing i would add is make sure whatever youre using lets you set a filter for your license class or at least the bands you can actually work, otherwise you end up chasing spots for bands you dont have and its frustrating lol

yeah the list of Q codes is huge but honestly in day to day operating you really only run into maybe 20 or 30 of them with any regularity. the ones you absolutely need to know starting out are QSL (i confirm / do you confirm), QRZ (who is calling me), QTH (my location is), QRM (interference from other stations), QRN (static/natural interference), QSY (change frequency), and QRT (stopping transmission / closing station). those will cover probably 80% of what you hear. on the voice vs CW thing, youre right that its a bit inconsistent in practice. technically Q codes came from CW operating and on phone you would say the plain english meaning instead, like saying my location is instead of QTH. but tons of people just say QTH and QSL out loud on SSB and nobody really cares, its just become part of the hobby language at this point. 73 and 88 are separate, theyre just traditional number codes, 73 means best regards basically and 88 is love and kisses which you only really hear between close friends. theyre not Q codes but theyve been around just as long.

73 tripped me up too when i was new lol. and yeah people throw in stuff like 88 sometimes which means love and kisses, you mostly hear that between people who know each other. theres also shorthand that isnt Q codes at all like OM (old man, just means any male ham), YL is a female ham, XYL is basically wife. its kind of its own whole culture honestly. took me probably a few months before i stopped having to look things up mid-qso

i went through the exact same thing a few months ago, passed my tech and was paralyzed trying to pick a first HT. ended up getting the Baofeng UV-5R because a friend had one and could help me program it. honestly? zero regrets for starting out. yeah its not the greatest radio ever made but i can hit the two repeaters i use no problem and the audio is clear enough. chirp makes programming it pretty easy once you get the hang of it. the one thing i'd say is dont buy the cheapest UV-5R knockoff you can find on amazon, get one from a reputable seller. i almost got a really sketchy one that turned out to be a clone of a clone or something. just go with the real thing from a known source and youll be fine to start.

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now mostly because my neighbor does it and it seems really cool but also i want to be able to use a handheld radio for emergency stuff. anyway i finally decided to just go for the technician license and i bought like two different study books and now im kind of overwhelmed because theyre both different and i dont know which one is actually good or if i should just use the hamstudy website thing people mention also the question pool thing confuses me - someone said the questions are all public and you just memorize them but that seems too easy? like is the actual test literally just questions from that pool or are there trick questions or something i should know about. i feel like im probably overthinking this

I was in the exact same spot about a year ago and ended up going with the Radioddity GD-77 on a whim because someone in my club had one. turns out it also does DMR which i wasnt even thinking about at the time but now i use it all the time on a local DMR repeater so kind of lucked out there. not saying you need DMR right now but just something to keep in mind if you think you might get into digital modes later, might save you buying a second radio. the programming is a bit fiddly with chirp but nothing terrible once you get used to it

yeah the doubling thing used to get me too. on the repeater i use there's kind of an audible tail beep when someone unkeys and i learned to wait for that before transmitting. not all repeaters do that but if yours does, definitely use it. and honestly dont stress too much about slowing the net down, net control would way rather you do it right than rush and cause confusion

yeah my club is the same way honestly. half the guys still argue about whether SSB is dying every single meeting and the other half are just there for the free coffee. i think the hobby is fine though, maybe even growing a little, its just fragmented now. everybody finds their own corner of it and stays there. not necessarily a bad thing

yeah the difference on HF is pretty real honestly. i had an RTL v3 doing the same thing you're describing and picked up an RSP1B last spring. the dynamic range improvement is noticeable, like you'll actually be able to copy stuff that was just getting buried before. the direct sampling hack on the RTL is clever but its clearly a workaround, the RSP was designed to do HF from the ground up so the frontend is just cleaner that said your noise floor situation matters a lot. if you're in a suburban area with a lot of local RFI the SDR hardware stops being your limiting factor pretty quick and it becomes more about your antenna and filtering. i run a 9:1 unun into about 80 feet of random wire and the RSP1B made a bigger difference than i expected but i also did some common mode choke work at the same time so hard to fully separate those variables SDR++ is a good call, SDRuno works fine but it always felt a bit heavy to me. RSP1B support in SDR++ is solid, no complaints there.

had almost the exact same thing happen on mine a couple years back, though mine was 80m not 40. ended up being one of the RD70HVF1 finals that was marginal — not shorted, not open, just leaky enough when it got warm to pull the bias out of spec and trigger the protection circuit. the way i confirmed it was with a curve tracer but most people dont have one of those sitting around. what you can do is pull the board and measure Idq on each device individually at room temp, then hit the board with a heat gun carefully and watch if one of them changes more than the others. its not perfect but it gives you a clue which one is drifting. also worth checking the thermal paste between the finals and the heatsink while you have it open. icom doesnt always put a ton on there from the factory and if its dried out the thermal resistance goes up and the protection kicks in earlier than it should. might not be the root cause but its worth doing anyway while you have it apart.

oh man i was so nervous on my first one too. mine ended up being totally fine, had like 8 contacts in 20 minutes once i got spotted. the chasers are really patient people in my experience, they know you're dealing with wind and cold hands and whatever else is happening on a mountaintop. dont overthink it too much. just get up there and call CQ SOTA on a clear frequency and youll be surprised how fast people come back to you.

so ive been using N1MM for pretty much everything for the last few years and it works great for contests obviously, that's kind of what its built for. but outside of contest weekends its honestly kind of clunky for just sitting down and working some DX or doing a casual POTA activation. the interface feels like overkill when im not in contest mode if that makes sense. somebody at our club mentioned Log4OM and i downloaded it and poked around a little bit but i havent really committed to learning it. it does look a lot cleaner for general logging and the QSL tracking stuff seems way more fleshed out. my main concern is that i dont want to have two separate logging programs and deal with duplicate logs or ADIF import headaches every time i do a contest weekend with N1MM and then go back to Log4OM for the rest of the time. also i run WSJT-X pretty regularly for FT8 and right now its just logging straight into N1MM which works fine but i've heard Log4OM plays nice with WSJT-X too. has anyone actually run that setup and does it cause any weirdness with duped QSOs or anything. genuinely not sure if its worth the hassle of switching or if i should just deal with N1MMs quirks outside of contests

yeah the menu depth on the 7300 can be a rabbit hole for sure. one thing i changed pretty early on was the AGC settings, the defaults felt a bit aggressive to me on crowded band conditions. also worth poking around in the scope settings — there's a way to adjust the reference level and span that makes the waterfall way more useful once you dial it in for your noise floor. the built-in ATU is kinda what it is, i use it for small corrections only and rely on an outboard LDG for anything more than a minor mismatch. if youre running a resonant antenna it doesnt matter much anyway. overall though solid radio, ive had mine for a couple years and it just works reliably which counts for a lot.

omg yes finally someone else is seeing this. i just got my general like two months ago and everyone kept telling me 10m was basically dead when i was studying and now its like... this?? worked my first ever european station last week, a G3 station in England, i was shaking a little ngl. ran maybe 25 watts from my ft-991a into a dipole in my attic and he still pulled me out. still cant quite believe it happened. definitely going to try to make it to Hamvention this year if i can swing the time off work, seems like the place to be if theres actually new gear dropping.

did both on my ND about two years ago. the jumper diagrams floating around from eham are mostly right but there's one that gets W10 and W11 mixed up depending on which revision of the service manual they copied from, so double check that before you touch anything. i used a good stereo microscope borrowed from a friend and it still took me like 45 minutes just to be sure i had the right pads. the extended RX is noticeable on MW, youll actually pull in AM broadcast pretty decently with a good antenna. dont expect miracles on the low end, the front end wasnt designed for it, but its usable. MARS mod worked fine, verified TX out of band at low power just to confirm. just make sure you re-enter your callsign in the menu after because sometimes it resets.

the echolink comparison always confuses people because its genuinely a different usecase - like linking is about connecting repeaters and VHF/UHF infrastructure together, its not really a substitute for remote HF ops, your club guy might have been thinking about it differently. unless you just want to ragchew on 2m from the apartment in which case yeah a linked repeater or even just a hotspot running dvmega or something would work fine and honestly way less headache than setting up full HF remote. for what its worth i ran RemoteHams for about a year before i just got fed up with their client software on windows. felt dated and i kept having issues with the audio codec dropping out randomly. switched to a self hosted thing and never looked back but it took me a weekend to get it all sorted out so if you dont want to mess with that the convenience of RemoteHams is real, it just has tradeoffs.

the allstar bridging idea isnt as crazy as it sounds but yeah its a bit of a project. i know one guy in our section who has an RPi running both an allstar node and a small SDR receiver and he just manually kicks off whatever he needs depending on what he wants to monitor. its not integrated in any clean way, more like two separate things sitting on the same box. the internet linking through IRLP specifically has gotten kind of flakey in my experince, nodes go offline and stay offline for months sometimes. allstar seems healthier these days for that kind of thing if your going that route.

one thing nobody told me when i started was that not every spot is accurate. sometimes someone spots a frequency wrong, or the callsign is off, or the dx station already qsy'd by the time you get there. so dont get too frustrated if you tune to a spot and hear nothing or something completely different — just part of the game. the cluster is a tool not gospel lol

im kind of in the same boat as you, just started putting mine together this winter. one thing i did not think about at all was logging. like what do i do if there's no laptop or the batteries die on it. ended up just throwing a waterproof notebook and a couple pens in a ziploc bag and taping it to the inside of the lid. probably not the most elegant solution but it works. someone at my club mentioned keeping a second small HT already programmed with all the local repeaters in the kit too, separate from the main rig. so if you need to do something quick on VHF you dont have to haul out the whole setup. that made a lot of sense to me.

congrats on your first one, that feeling when the pile hits you is pretty addictive honestly. yeah re-spotting is totally a thing and a lot of activators do it especially if you want to work another band or if the pile dies down. just spot yourself again on sotawatch and mention the frequency, youll usually get another wave of chasers. some guys also post on the SOTA reflector or even just text other activators they know to spread the word if its a harder summit that doesnt get activated much. the grid square on the database i dont think is mandatory, at least i never fill it in and my activations have all gone through fine. the important parts are the summit ref, date, band, mode and callsigns of the contacts. make sure you have at least 4 unique callsigns by the way, not 10 total -- wait actually it IS 10 points of contacts not 10 unique calls... hmm actually i might be misremembering, check the general rules document on the sota website because i dont want to steer you wrong on that one.

For CW work you really need sub-100ms latency. I switched from RemoteHams to a FlexRadio 6000 series - they were built from the ground up for remote operation with an open protocol. Audio latency dropped to about 50ms which makes CW workable. The initial investment is higher but the user experience is much better.

yeah the door seal thing is gonna chafe through the jacket eventually, seen it happen. on my Ram i ran it through the firewall using an existing grommet — there's usually one on the driver side that has maybe a heater hose or nothing going through it and you can work a small hole through it with a pick tool. takes some patience but the end result is clean and weather tight. i used some self-amalgamating tape around where it exits just to be safe. on fords specifically i've heard people go through the base of the A-pillar trim, there's often a gap behind the weatherstripping that you can fish through without drilling anything. might be worth pulling that trim back and having a look before you commit to anything permanent. either way get yourself a fish tape or even just a stiff wire to help guide it, trying to do it blind is a nightmare.