Linda Johnson

yeah that's classic alternator whine, the RPM thing is the dead giveaway. running direct to battery is correct but the issue is usually the audio or mic cable acting like an antenna and picking up the noise from the vehicle's electrical system. first thing i'd try is a ferrite choke on the mic cable and also on the power leads right at the radio end. you can get a pack of them pretty cheap and just clip them on, sometimes takes two or three on the power leads to really kill it. also worth checking your ground. the negative lead should go to the battery negative terminal, not to a chassis ground point — a lot of people do that and it introduces a ground loop that makes the whine way worse. if your negative is going to a body bolt somewhere that could be your whole problem right there. the FTM-500D is actually pretty sensitive to this stuff because of the way the control head cable works, i've seen a few posts about it on the Yaesu groups.

so ive been noticing 10m and 12m have been all over the place this past few weeks. some days ill get into europe no problem from here in the midwest, other days i cant even hear a peep and its just noise. been checking the solar flux index on spaceweather.com and it seems like its been jumping around a lot, went from like 145 down to around 120 and back up again in the span of maybe 10 days. not sure if thats normal for this part of the cycle or what. also had a weird morning last thursday where 17m just completely died on me mid-qso, guy in japan and i were having a solid contact and then poof, gone. k-index had spiked up to 4 or something and i didnt even notice until after. is that kind of thing pretty common during geomagnetic disturbances? im still figuring out how to read all the space weather stuff and when to actually bother getting on vs just waiting it out. on the flip side i caught a pretty decent opening on 10m two days ago, worked a handful of stations in south america and even one in ZL land which i wasnt expecting at all. so the bands arent totally dead just unpredictable i guess. anyone else seeing similar stuff?

yeah the PR-40 is a great mic but it has a LOT of low end and if you just plug it in and run with the defaults on the 7300 it will sound exactly like you described. what you want to do is pull up the TX equalizer in the menus and start rolling off everything below maybe 200-250hz pretty aggressively, like -10dB or more at 100hz, and also tighten the upper end depending on how your voice sits. there's a thing on the 7300 called the TX bandwidth filter and you want that set somewhere around 2.4kHz wide for normal SSB, not wider. the mic gain is probably the biggest thing people get wrong though. you want your ALC barely ticking, like just occasionally touching the top of the scale on voice peaks, not sitting there pegged. if the ALC is working hard all the time your audio is getting smashed before the compressor even does anything useful. back the gain off until it's just grazing the ALC line on loud syllables and then use the speech processor sparingly if you need the average power up. the compressor on the 7300 i usually keep around 3-5, anything higher and it starts sounding processed. distance from the mic matters too, closer you get the more bass buildup you get from proximity effect on a cardioid like the PR-40, so try backing off like 3-4 inches and speaking across it rather than directly into it.

the region 1 stuff doesnt apply to you if youre in the US, that's ITU region 2. The band plans you're probably reading are IARU or maybe ARRL suggested plans which are voluntary -- nobody is going to cite you for operating SSB at 7150 instead of 7200 or whatever. the actual hard rules are the FCC allocations which say what modes are allowed in what subband and those DO matter legally. for 40m as a general, your phone privileges start at 7175 kHz on the low end of what you're allowed. the 7125 number might be from an older chart or from a different license class breakdown, i'd double check the current part 97 or the ARRL page specifically. tech class has basically nothing on 40m HF except a small CW slice so most of what you're reading is aimed at generals and extras. the band edge drift thing is real but yeah modern rigs with TCXO or good temp compensation are pretty stable. the real reason people say dont park right on 7300 or wherever is that if your signal is even slightly wide or your carrier drifts you can end up out of band which is a violation. staying a few kHz inside the edge is just good practice. nothing magic about it.

PSK31 isn't dead but its definitely on life support compared to what it was like 2010-2015 or so. used to be you could fire up digipan on a saturday afternoon and work 20 stations easy. now its more like you call CQ for 10 minutes and maybe get one reply if youre lucky. the signals are still incredibly efficient for the bandwidth though, 31hz wide is ridiculous when you think about it, that's part of why it punches so far above its weight for power. on the js8 vs ft8 thing yeah i totally get what you mean about the vending machine feeling. i still use ft8 when i want to fill a band slot or chase a new one on 6m but js8call is sitting on a pi in the shack running basically all the time as kind of a background mode. its nice to just check in and see if anyones having a conversation going. rtty contests are still my favorite thing though if you want fast paced digital that feels like actual operating nothing beats a good rtty contest weekend.

yeah man this is basically my story too except it was a 746 Pro sitting in a closet. got back on last spring after maybe 4 years of nothing. the hobby just kind of pulls you back doesnt it. glad the 735 is working again those are solid rigs if you keep em up

yeah this sounds like it could be a VARA FM bandwidth setting mismatch. check what bandwidth the gateway is advertising versus what your VARA FM is set to — if the gateway is trying to negotiate down to narrow and your client isnt following that negotiation cleanly it can drop right in that proposal phase you're describing. go into VARA FM settings and try forcing it to 2300 Hz or whatever the gateway is actually using. also double check your soundcard sample rate is set to 48000 in windows, not 44100, that causes weird mid-session drops that look totally unrelated to what's actually happening. the signalink dial position honestly sounds fine for 50w, wouldnt mess with that. also worth checking if you have any other audio apps running that might be grabbing the device intermittently, ive seen that cause exactly this kind of thing where the first part of a session works then it falls apart.

I'm gearing up for my Technician class exam and overwhelmed by all the study options out there. I need to answer 26 out of 35 questions correctly (74%) to pass. What are the most effective online practice tests and study guides that actually prepare you for the real exam? I've heard about HamStudy.org and HamRadioPrep but want to know what worked for folks who recently passed.

im in a pretty similar boat so i cant offer expert advice but i will say the Winkeyer ratio control messed with my head for weeks. i just ended up resetting everything to defaults and leaving it alone until my sending felt more natural, then i started tweaking. maybe try that? sometimes less fiddling is better when you're still building muscle memory i think

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend, went out to a state forest near me (KFF reference, took me forever to figure out how to find the right one on the database) and honestly it was way more fun than i expected. set up my KX2 with a random wire thrown over a tree branch, ran about 5 watts and managed to get 44 QSOs in like 2.5 hours which i think qualifies it? i was running 40m mostly with a few on 20m when the band seemed better in the afternoon. my questions are mostly about logging — do i need to submit to both WWFF and POTA or are they totally separate things? i know some parks overlap but this one doesnt seem to have a POTA reference so i think its just WWFF. also someone spotted me on the WWFF cluster and i started getting a lot of calls, is there a way to self-spot or do you just rely on other people to do that for you also one guy called in and said something about a hunter award and i didnt really understand what he meant, do hunters need a certain number of QSOs with a specific reference or is it more like total references worked? he seemed excited so i felt bad that i didnt know more about it

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR V3 dongle for about a year now mostly for aircraft stuff and some AM/FM scanning and honestly its been great for what it is, but im starting to get the itch to go further and actually transmit occasionally or at least have something that doesnt fall apart above 1.7 GHz been looking at the HackRF One and the SDRplay RSP1A and im kind of torn. the HackRF obviously does TX which is huge but ive read the noise floor is pretty terrible compared to dedicated receive-only stuff. the RSP1A looks way better on paper for receive sensitivity and the RSP1A has that 1kHz to 2GHz coverage which covers basically everything i care about but it tops out around 2GHz which is fine honestly main use cases would be decoding weather satellites (NOAA and maybe eventually meteor scatter stuff), poking around the 70cm repeaters in my area, maybe eventually doing some WSPR beacon monitoring on HF. not really in a hurry to transmit but part of me thinks i should just get the HackRF now so i have the option later anyone actually run both and have an opinion that isnt just a youtube video trying to get affiliate clicks

i had basically this same situation a while back and went down the rabbit hole on it. ended up putting a preamp at the antenna rather than at the radio and that helped receive a lot. wont do anything for transmit obviously but if the issue is hearing the repeater thats worth trying. mine is just a cheap SSB Electronics unit i got used, nothing fancy. also -- and i know this sounds dumb -- have you checked that the antenna is actually resonant on 70cm? i borrowed an antenna analyzer from a club buddy and my x50a was way off on 70cm SWR from what i expected. dont know if it was a bad batch or what but its worth checking if you have access to a analyzer or even a basic SWR meter with a 70cm capable bridge.

so ive been on HF for about two years now, mostly digital modes and some CW, and i finally decided to actually sit down and get comfortable with SSB phone. my signal reports are all over the place. sometimes people say i sound great, other times im getting told im muffled or tinny or just generally bad. my radio is an IC-7300 and im using a Heil PR-40 into the front mic jack. i set the mic gain by the book, ALC sitting just barely moving, compression off for now. the weird part is i recorded myself on my phone through the speaker and yeah it does sound kind of hollow? like theres a room reverb thing going on. my shack is a spare bedroom with hardwood floors and not a lot of furniture so maybe thats part of it. but also i wonder if my TX bandwidth settings are off. i havent really dug into the equalizer settings on the 7300 yet and i know that radio has a bunch of adjustments i havent touched. anyone gone through this with the 7300 specifically or just with SSB audio in general? i feel like theres a lot of tribal knowledge around getting a good SSB signal that never really gets written down anywhere obvious.

so i was just sitting down with my coffee this morning and figured id spin the dial on 10m just to see whats up, and i ended up working like 8 or 9 stations in europe inside of maybe 45 minutes which honestly i wasnt expecting at all. been a while since ive seen it that good from here in the midwest. solar flux was up around 190something according to what i checked on DXwatch, and the geomagnetic stuff looked pretty calm too which probably helped. also saw some chatter that Icom is supposedly doing something new with a mid-range HF rig announcement sometime this fall, cant remember where i read that, maybe one of the facebook groups or it might have been on eham. if anyone has more info on that id be curious. feels like there hasnt been a genuinely interesting new radio in that price bracket for a bit. anyway just wanted to share because 10m being this open always puts me in a good mood. if you havent turned it on lately, worth a listen for sure.

I built a custom interface using an AD797 op-amp with a flat response to 4kHz and saw noticeable improvement in decode percentage. The key is maintaining phase linearity across the FT8 bandwidth - cheap op-amps introduce group delay that hurts weak signal performance.

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly i love it but im getting kind of bored with just 2m and 70cm, i want to get on HF and actually work some DX and maybe try some of the digital modes ive been reading about. a buddy at my local club told me i should just go for it and take the general exam but honestly the pool looks pretty intimidating, like there are questions in there about things i have never heard of. propagation, electrical theory, all kinds of stuff. i downloaded one of the study apps and did a practice test and got like a 62% which isnt horrible i guess but the actual exam is 74% to pass right, like 26 out of 35. im wondering how people actually prepared for it and how long it realistically takes if youre putting in maybe an hour a day. also is there anything specific that tends to trip people up that i should focus on. i dont want to just memorize answers i actually want to understand it but i also just need to pass at some point you know

yeah the 10m opening was real, i worked about a dozen stations in Spain and Italy on Friday using just a wire dipole in my attic which honestly surprised me. the SFI had been creeping up all week so i figured it was worth a shot. its been so long since 10 was consistently open that i almost forgot how fun it is up there. a lot of operators who got licensed in the last few years have basically never experienced a real cycle peak so this is probably exciting for them. on the Icom thing, i think what you saw might have been about a possible successor to the 705 or maybe a new mobile rig — there were some photos floating around that looked like they came from a Japanese trade show or something. dont hold me to that though. and yeah the question pool update is a real thing, they quietly updated the effective date i think, someone in my local club mentioned it at the last meeting.

so i got my general last spring and ive been mostly just doing some casual QSOs on 40m and a bit of 20m but a few guys at the club keep telling me i should try some of the big contests this fall. one of them mentioned CQ WW is coming up and apparently its like THE big one? i honestly dont even know what that means for someone at my level, like do i need special antennas or a big station to even bother participating or can i just jump on with my IC-7300 and a wire antenna and try to work some contacts. also someone mentioned ARRL Field Day which i think already passed this year but i want to be ready for next time. and theres some SOTA stuff happening too which sounds totally different from sitting at home in front of a radio. anyway i guess im just trying to figure out what the contest calendar looks like and which ones are worth trying as someone whos still pretty new. any advice welcome, i dont want to embarrass myself on the air

i was in the same spot maybe 8 months ago, just used hamstudy and did like 20-30 practice questions a night after work for maybe two weeks. passed with only like 3 wrong so dont stress it too much. the tech test isnt super deep on the math or anything, just learn the basic concepts and grind the practice tests until youre consistently getting above 80% and youre probably ready. the hardest part for me was finding an exam session nearby but the arrl website has a search tool for that

spare fuses. like a little assortment of them. i blew one during an actual ARES activation a couple years back and had to borrow one from another operator which was embarassing. also a short length of speaker wire and some ring terminals because you never know. and honestly a small multimeter, nothing fancy, just one of the cheap harbor freight ones. you'll use it.

I've been tracking my QSL success rates religiously since getting back into HF after a 15-year break. Here's what I've learned over 24 months and about 5,000 QSOs: Direct mail: 63% return rate (450 sent, ~285 received back so far)LoTW: 18% confirmation rateeQSL: Only 9% - surprisingly lowBureau: Still waiting on most after 2+ yearsThe lesson? Of 318 paper QSL cards received, 302 were "thank yous" - if I didn't request one, I didn't get one. For serious award chasing, you need to be proactive with your QSLing strategy.

good luck tomorrow, let us know how it goes. i did my first activation earlier this year and was way more nervous than i needed to be. the chasers are super friendly and patient, nobody expects you to be slick about it. just get your four contacts and enjoy the view honestly.

That's a solid approach! We do something similar but also pair new members with experienced "buddy hams" for their first few months. Really helps them feel connected beyond just the technical stuff.

the math on the lifepo4 is doable but tight depending on your actual duty cycle. 100ah at 12v gives you 1200wh, but youre not going to want to pull it below 20% on a lifepo4 so call it maybe 960wh usable. if your average draw across receive, transmit, laptop, misc is say 15 amps that gets you about 6 hours, which is cutting it close for 12. a 200ah pack would be a lot more comfortable. battleborn and a few of the dragonfly energy cells are solid but expensive. the cheaper SOK and chins batteries have been working fine for a lot of emcomm groups on a budget. on the antenna side we switched to a linked dipole on a single mast center feed and it honestly takes maybe 10 minutes to get up. run the legs out at a slight inverted v and youre done. feedline just drops straight down from the center insulator to the radio. no horizontal feedline runs to trip over which matters at a pavilion with people walking around.

i just use those nylon dog bone insulators from dxengineering for the ends and a small piece of HDPE cutting board for the center - drill it out, use stainless hardware, works great. some guys 3d print their own center insulators now which is kind of cool if you have access to a printer. your swr sounds reasonable though, 40m is pretty forgiving