Gary Yamamoto

im in almost the exact same boat as you, got my ticket in january and spent way too long agonizing over this same question. ended up going with the yaesu ft-4xr and honestly pretty happy with it. audio is clear, battery lasts a long time, and the controls make sense without having to read the manual every five minutes. the 8 mile simplex thing might be hit or miss depending on terrain more than the radio tbh, you might want to ask that other guy what hes using

yeah the waterfall thing is real, that was my experience too when i moved from a 756 Pro III. you start to see the bands differently, like literally see them, and it changes what you go after. i remember the first time i watched a pileup develop on 17m in real time it was kind of wild honestly. the knob feel is a valid complaint, i've heard a few people say the same thing. theres an aftermarket weighted knob that a few guys run, think its made by a guy on qrz or something, never tried it myself but people seem happy with it. doesnt fix the plasticky feel everywhere else but the main tuning knob is what matters. for the ATU id say manage expectations a little, its a convenience matcher not a miracle worker. if your OCFD is way off on a band just keep that in mind. but for most situations yeah its totally fine.

so ive been sitting on this for a while but last weekend i finally pulled the trigger and did the mars/cap mod on my FT-857D. not a big deal electrically, its literally just moving one diode, but i was nervous about it for way longer than i should have been. the whole thing took maybe 20 minutes including the time i spent second-guessing myself with a magnifying glass. anyway the reason i bring it up is because while i had the covers off i also went ahead and did the ref oscillator mod that ive seen floating around on eham and a few other places. basically you replace the stock TCXO with a better one and the frequency stability on 2m and above gets noticeably tighter, especially before the rig warms up. i was getting maybe 200-300hz of drift in the first few minutes on 2m and now its pretty much rock solid from cold start. that actually matters to me because i run some weak signal stuff and it was annoying. the other thing i did was replace the stock electrolytic caps on the AF board while i was in there. a couple of them measured a little low on capacitance and at this point the radio is old enough that preventive stuff like that makes sense. audio sounds cleaner to me now but that could just be placebo, hard to say. if anybody else has done mods on these rigs id be curious what else is worth doing. ive seen stuff about the AGC mod but havent dug into it much yet.

yeah the doppler on linear transponders is a bit of a head scratcher at first. the short version is you want to keep your downlink signal stable — so you tune your receiver to compensate for doppler on the downlink side, and then let your uplink drift a bit or correct that separately. gpredict can talk to both radios via hamlib so in theory it adjusts both, but the tuning resolution and timing matters a lot especially near AOS and LOS when doppler rate is changing fast. what i do is lock onto my own downlink signal by ear and tune the uplink manually to compensate. sounds primitive but it actually works pretty well once you get a feel for it. the two radio approach is totally fine and a lot of people run it that way. the IC-9700 is nice but its not magic, you still have to chase the signal a bit on fast overhead passes. the real advantage is full duplex so you can hear yourself in real time, which makes tuning way easier

so i passed my general last month and ive been using my sequential call which is kind of a mouthful, nothing wrong with it but its like 6 characters and my buddy keeps telling me i should just apply for a vanity call. i looked at the FCC ULS site and honestly i dont fully understand how the whole thing works. from what i can gather there's a window period and then after that it opens up to everyone? but my buddy said something about how certain call districts have shorter calls available and i might be able to get a 1x3 or 2x3 depending on what's available in my area. i just dont want to submit something wrong and mess up my current callsign or have to wait forever. also is there a fee now? i thought i read somewhere it changed recently. any help appreciated, been lurking here for a while and you all seem to know your stuff

So ive been going back and forth on this for a while now. I have a pretty decent station at home but I travel a lot for work and I want to be able to get on HF when im in hotels and stuff. Right now I have a basic TeamViewer setup that controls the rig through Ham Radio Deluxe but its clunky and the audio latency is all over the place depending on the hotel wifi which as you can imagine is usually terrible. I was looking at RemoteHams and they have that RCForb client which a lot of people seem to use, and they also have the SDR remote stuff built in now which is interesting because I was already thinking about throwing an RTL-SDR or maybe an SDRplay in the loop as a panadapter. The idea of having that accessible remotely too is kind of appealing. The question I keep coming back to is whether the RemoteHams ecosystem is actually worth buying into versus just spending the time to build something more custom with like a Raspberry Pi running a VPN and handling the audio through something like mumble or darkice. Ive done some linux stuff before so im not totally scared of that route but I also dont want to spend three weekends debugging it when I could just be operating. Anyone gone down both paths? Also curious about the internet linking angle -- I was thinking about tying this into my DMR hotspot setup somehow but im not even sure if that makes sense or if im confusing two totally separate things.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep seeing people talk about LoTW and eQSL and paper QSL cards and im honestly a little overwhelmed by the whole thing. like do i need to be doing all of these or is one enough? i set up a LoTW account a while back but i still havent figured out how to actually upload my log to it, the certificate stuff was confusing to me. and then people in my club keep talking about QSL cards and how its a tradition and all that which i get, but it also seems expensive if youre working a lot of contacts. i made about 300 QSOs in my first few months and i cant imagine sending paper cards to all of them. do most people just do the digital stuff now and only send paper cards for special ones? or is there an etiquette thing where if someone sends you a card you have to send one back no matter what sorry if this is a dumb question, just trying to figure out what everyone actually does in practice vs what youre technically supposed to do

yeah that sounds like classic alternator whine, super common especially in newer vehicles with all their electronics. first thing id try before buying anything is check all your ground connections — the radio chassis ground to the truck body, and make sure the body itself has a solid bond to the battery negative. sometimes thats all it takes. if that doesnt do it, a good quality noise filter on the power leads right at the radio usually knocks most of it out. the ones from West Mountain Radio or even the cheap ones off amazon actually work pretty well. ferrite chokes on the coax right at the radio can help too if youre hearing it come through the receiver. i had almost the exact same situation in my silverado a few years back and it turned out the ground strap to the engine block was the culprit — added a supplemental ground from the block to the firewall and the whine dropped like 90 percent. worth checking that first before you go buying a bunch of stuff.

Yeah this is pretty common actually. A few things worth checking — first, in Vara HF make sure your bandwidth is set something reasonable, the 2300 Hz wide mode works better than the narrow setting for marginal paths. Also check the Winlink session timeout, i think its under settings somewhere, default might be too short for a slow or noisy connection. The gateway quality thing is real. Some RMS gateways are running on aging hardware or the sysop hasn't touched it in a year. Winlink's RMS list doesn't really tell you how well maintained a node is. I usually look at the "last connection" timestamp on the Winlink map and avoid anything that shows weird gaps. Also try connecting earlier in the day, 40m in late afternoon can get pretty rough depending on where you are and that can absolutely cause Vara to lose sync mid-session even if the initial handshake looks fine. One other thing — double check your PTT delay in Vara. If there's a mismatch between when your radio actually starts transmitting and when Vara thinks it is you'll get chopped audio at the start of each frame and the gateway will just bail on the session.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep seeing people talk about CW on here and it sounds kind of cool but also completely overwhelming. i tried watching a youtube video once and just heard a bunch of beeping that meant nothing to me. is there like a method that actually works or do you just have to have some kind of natural talent for it because it honestly seems like that to me i dont even know if i want to operate CW i just kind of want to understand what im hearing when i spin across 40m and hit those signals. anyone learn it as an adult who wasnt already into it as a kid or whatever

yeah what he said about proximity effect on the PR-40 is real, i had the same problem when i switched to a large diaphragm mic. kept getting told i sounded like i was calling from inside a tunnel lol. moved the mic off to the side slightly instead of dead-on and rolled back the bass in the EQ and got way better reports almost immediately. the 7300 EQ is actually pretty decent once you figure out where it lives in the menus, took me forever to find it the first time.

i went from a 7300 to a 7610 about a year ago and i mean... it's good. the dual receive is nice when im monitoring two bands at once but if im being honest i probably use it like once a week. the real thing i noticed was the receive feels a bit cleaner on 80m late at night but whether thats worth the money difference i genuinely dont know. your 7300 is not holding you back is what im trying to say

yeah filtering on dxwatch is definitely there, you might just have to poke around a bit. if you look at the top of the page there should be band filter options, i have mine set to just show 20 and 17 meters most of the time since thats where i spend most of my time. as for using both QRZ and dxwatch simultaneously, honestly i do it sometimes. QRZ spots seem to lag just a tiny bit behind in my experience but i use it more because i already have the tab open anyway for lookups. dxwatch feels a bit more raw and fast if that makes sense. DX sherpa is pretty good actually, i wouldnt call it overkill even for casual chasing. the interface takes a little getting used to but being able to see your log against what's spotted in real time is really handy when you're trying to figure out if somethings a new one for you or not. just my two cents, you dont need it but its not just for hardcore dx'ers either

ok so ive been checking into the local 2m net for a few months now and i think i mostly know whats going on but theres still stuff that trips me up. like last week the net control was moving really fast and i wasnt sure if i needed to give my call sign every single time i transmitted or just at the start and end of my check-in. i gave it every time and felt like i was slowing things down but also i didnt want to break any rules. also whats the deal with doubling? twice now ive started to transmit and someone else was already there and we stepped on each other. do you just wait and try again or is there some way to tell when the frequency is actually clear? i always listen first but sometimes people come out of nowhere. feel like im still missing something obvious here

omg yes i thought i was going crazy with 20m. im still pretty new to HF and i kept thinking i did something wrong with my setup because one morning i worked like six stations in europe easy and then the very next day nothing. didnt realize solar activity could change things that fast honestly. still learning all this propagation stuff, its kind of fascinating but also frustrating when you just want to make contacts lol. does anyone have like a good beginner resource for understanding when to expect what band to be open? i've been using pskreporter to see whats getting out but im not totally sure how to use that info to predict anything

yeah the LM386 is a notorious hum magnet if you dont bypass it properly. pin 7 to ground with like a 10uf cap, and also check that you have a cap from pin 6 (Vs) to ground right at the chip — and i mean right at the chip, not somewhere else on the board. also DC receivers are really sensitive to any leakage from the LO getting into the audio path, so even a tiny bit of coupling through shared ground impedance shows up as hum or buzz. if you haven't tried a ground star topology for the audio section that might help more than shielding. shielding can help but usually only after you've sorted the ground stuff first.

yeah i was totally lost with this stuff when i started too. the ones i kept messing up were QRP and QRO because they sound similar but one means low power and the other is high power, which matters a lot if someone asks you to QRP during a contact lol. also QTH is your location which comes up constantly, and QSY means change frequency. once i figured those out most of the basic ragchew stuff started making sense. there are way more obscure ones that almost nobody uses anymore but the common ones you can probably pick up in a week or two just from listening

so ive been messing around with this idea for a while now and finally started putting something together. basically i have 4 antennas — 40m dipole, a vertical for 20/15/10, a loop for 80m, and a random wire i use sometimes for weird stuff — and im tired of manually swapping the coax connections every time i want to change bands. been doing it for like 3 years and honestly its getting old fast. so i started wiring up an arduino uno with a 4-relay board i grabbed off amazon (the blue ones, you know the kind) and the idea is to tie it into my rig's band data output. my FT-991A puts out band data on the ACC port so in theory the arduino reads that, figures out what band im on, and switches the right relay to connect the correct antenna. sounds simple enough right the part im stuck on is the logic for reading the band data. its a voltage-coded output i think, different voltages for different bands, and im not sure if i should be using the analog inputs or if theres some cleaner way to handle it. also not sure if i need any buffering between the rig and the arduino, dont want to fry the ACC port on a $900 radio anyone done something like this? happy to share my code once i get it working, still pretty rough right now

I'm 23 and got into ham radio through POTA videos on YouTube. Most of my friends think it's pretty cool, especially the emergency communications aspect. We're out here, just maybe not hanging out on 75m phone!

just gonna say i tried learning three different times before it actually stuck lol so dont feel bad about giving up, i think most people do at least once. what finally worked for me was just listening to actual QSOs on the air even before i could copy anything, like just having 40m on in the background while i was doing other stuff. your brain starts picking up the rhythm without you even realizing it. also there's an app called Morse Mania that i liked better than some of the others, felt less like homework somehow

35 feet of RG-8X isnt killing you that badly at 2m, youre probably losing maybe 1.5 to 2dB over that run which isnt nothing but its not the whole story either. LMR-400 would get you back most of that sure but honestly id look at your connectors first. one bad PL-259 will rob you way more than the coax itself, especially if somebody soldered it in a hurry or the center pin isnt making great contact. i had a similar situation last year and it turned out the connector at the antenna end had moisture in it, looked totally fine from outside but the inside was corroded green. also the chimney mount thing is worth thinking about. 18 inches from brick isnt ideal for a vertical, the chimney can mess with the pattern depending on which direction your repeater is. might be worth temporarily sticking the antenna somewhere more in the clear just to see if your signal improves before you spend money on coax.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now, got my general last spring, and someone at my club meeting mentioned ARES and said i should look into it. i did a little reading on the ARRL site but honestly it was kind of dry and i couldnt tell what it actually looks like day to day — like what do you actually DO at a training exercise versus a real activation? my county apparently has an active ARES group but i havent reached out yet. a little nervous honestly because i feel like im still figuring out the basics and i dont want to show up and be totally useless. anyone been in a similar spot when they first got involved? is there like a minimum skill level expected or do they take you where you are?

i was in the same boat not too long ago, the whole cluster ecosystem is kind of confusing when you first look at it. one thing i started doing was just keeping DXwatch open in a tab while im on the radio and it works pretty well for 20m hunting. the color coding by band is nice once you figure out what youre looking at. one thing nobody told me that would have saved some frustration — make sure you set your home callsign in whatever tool you use because some of them will highlight spots that are "new" for you based on your log if you connect it up. QRZ does this if you sync your logbook. kinda cool when it starts flagging stuff you still need.

i tried this last CQWW and kind of half-assed it tbh, had two radios going but no real interlocking just sort of tried to be careful and it worked out ok but i was sweating the whole time. probably not the right approach for a serious effort one thing nobody really talks about is the cognitive load, like switching your brain between two QSOs at different stages is genuinely tiring in a way that just running a pile isnt. i found myself making more logging errors when i was trying to juggle both radios than when i just focused on one. maybe thats just a practice thing but worth mentioning if youre thinking about trying it mid-contest for the first time

i had almost the exact same setup in my Silverado, Diamond antenna on a lip mount and the noise was driving me crazy. turned out for me it was the coax — i had nicked the shield a little bit when routing it through the door jamb and wasnt getting a clean ground through the mount anyway. replaced the coax run completely and spent some time scraping paint off where the mount contacts the truck and the difference was night and day. the 2m being worse than 70cm thing is a little odd but i wouldnt overthink it, just start with the antenna ground and work from there