Jennifer Smith

so ive been wanting to get my tech license for a while now and i finally sat down to actually study but honestly im kind of overwhelmed. theres so many different study guides and apps and websites and i dont really know which ones are actually worth using vs which ones are just a waste of time. a guy at work who has his general told me to just memorize the question pool and not bother understanding it but that feels wrong? like i want to actually know what im doing when i get on the air. but also i dont want to fail the test because i overthought everything and ran out of time studying the theory behind ohms law or whatever. is there like a standard thing most people do to prep for this or does everyone kind of find their own way. the exam is in about 6 weeks if that matters

yeah the finals being fine but audio being trashed actually points pretty strongly away from the PA stage, you're right to second-guess that. what you're describing — clipped buzzy audio with normal power — sounds more like something in the baseband processing path. on the 7300 i'd be looking at the main board around the audio input and modulation circuitry before assuming DSP, the DSP failures usually show up in weirder ways like the waterfall going nuts or the radio locking up. did you check if the ALC is doing anything weird? sometimes after a surge event you get a component thats partially cooked and the ALC starts oscillating or misreading which can cause exactly that clipping effect even at low mic gain. worth putting it on a dummy load and watching the ALC meter while you talk. if it's jumping all over the place before you even get loud that might be your culprit area. icom service manual for the 7300 is actually pretty accessible, the schematic isn't terrible to follow if you're comfortable with a DMM and oscilloscope.

oh man this brought back memories. yeah the second guessing thing is brutal and honestly the only thing that fixed it for me was slowing way way down. like embarrassingly slow. i was running 5 wpm for weeks and felt stupid but then one day it just clicked and i bumped up to 10 without really thinking about it. one thing that actually helped me a lot was practicing each letter in isolation until i could send it without thinking — not in words, just the letter over and over until my thumb and finger knew what to do without my brain getting involved. the brain is the enemy when youre learning CW honestly. also check your paddle tension and spacing, if the gap is too tight youll be sending accidental dits all over the place. most cheap paddles ship with the gap way too close. just a tiny adjustment can make a huge difference.

so i finally did my first summit activation last weekend, W4G/NG-012 up in north georgia, been putting it off forever because i wasnt sure if my setup was gonna cut it. ended up just throwing the KX2 in a pack with a 40m EFHW wound around a piece of pvc and hiked up saturday morning. took maybe 45 mins to get to the top and honestly the whole thing went smoother than any of my home station operating ever does which is kind of embarrassing to admit made 14 contacts in like 25 minutes, got my 4 for the activation no problem, stayed for another bit just because the band conditions were actually decent and why not. the hardest part was getting the wire up in the trees, brought a throw bag but the first toss went sideways and tangled pretty bad. eventually got it sorted. pack weight was around 18 lbs which i want to cut down before next time but for a first run it was fine anyway if youve been on the fence about trying it just go do it, the chasers are super helpful and patient, i was a little slow on logging and nobody seemed annoyed

i did something similar with an IC-7300 and a homebrew switch, band data decoding on a nano works great once you get it sorted. one thing i'd add — put some flyback diodes across your relay coils if the board doesnt already have them. the cheap ones sometimes do, sometimes dont. without them youre sending voltage spikes back into the arduino every time a relay opens and eventually that kills the IO pins. learned that the hard way on a project a while back, fried two nanos before i figured out what was happening.

yeah the doppler thing is what got me too when i first started. also just to confirm, AO-91 is FM not linear so you dont need to worry about SSB or anything like that, just straight FM. make sure the FT-818 is actually in FM mode on the downlink side. sounds obvious but i had mine in USB for way longer than i want to admit during my first few attempts lol. and yeah 145.960 up / 435.240 down is right for AO-91, those are the nominal frequencies before doppler correction

yeah the data isnt always the same — they pull from overlapping but not identical node networks. QRZ tends to aggregate a bit differently and sometimes theres a lag. DXwatch is pretty solid for realtime stuff but i usually have both open in separate tabs honestly, its just habit at this point. for filtering on DXwatch there should be a little gear or settings icon depending on which version youre looking at, and you can set it to only show certain bands. it does sometimes reset if you havent made an account and logged in, thats probably whats happening to you. once you save a filter while logged in it sticks between sessions at least on my end. with a dipole on 17 and 20 you can definitely work some good stuff when the bands are open, just keep an eye on the spot timestamps because a pileup can be over in 10 minutes sometimes and you dont want to show up for a DX station thats already gone QRT

Welcome to HF! The actual requirements aren't as onerous as they sound, and most hams will not have difficulty meeting them - in fact, most are already in compliance with MPE levels. For your 100W HF setup, you'll likely need to do a routine evaluation since you exceed the power thresholds in §97.13(c)(1).

so ive been trying to study for the technician exam for about 3 weeks now and honestly im a little overwhelmed. i bought the ARRL handbook or whatever its called, the one specifically for tech license, and i feel like some of it makes sense but then i get to the electrical stuff and my brain just kind of turns off. like ohms law and calculating antenna lengths and all that. is there stuff i should really focus on vs stuff thats not gonna show up much? i know the question pool is public but theres like 400 questions in there and i dont really know how to approach it. somebody at my local club said just memorize the answers and dont worry about understanding it but that feels wrong to me. anyway just wondering how other people went about it

11 contacts in 3 hours on 5w and a wire in a tree is honestly not bad at all, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. i had a session last fall where i ran for 2 hours and got like 4 contacts and called it a good day lol. conditions were rough that day though. what frequency range were you hanging around on 40m? im curious if you were up in the cw end or down in phone. i have the same kit but havent taken mine out yet, been doing portable stuff with a KX2 which is kind of cheating i guess but it works.

As someone new to DXing, online DXCC submissions are easier and save time and money. No typographical errors and direct transmission to ARRL HQ makes the process much smoother. I'm going the LoTW route from the start rather than dealing with two separate systems.

congrats on the first one, the 44 QSO minimum always feels like a lot before you start but once the pileup gets going time flies. for the logging the ADIF format is what most people submit and as long as the WWFF_REF field is in there with the right reference code you should be fine. the reference format is usually like KFF-XXXX for the US or GFF- for German references etc depending on the country program. if it got accepted on the upload it almost certainly parsed correctly, the system is pretty good at catching errors before they go through. i've done maybe 30 or so activations now across a few different programs, WWFF POTA and some SOTA overlap too, and the logging side is honestly the bit that stressed me out most at first but it becomes second nature pretty fast. what reference were you at if you dont mind sharing, always curious to see what's getting activated

yeah the FT8 thing gets old fast once you realize every QSO is basically identical. i went back to PSK31 for a while and honestly still prefer it for actual conversations — you can send paragraphs, talk about your rig, whatever. the problem is finding activity, like you said. 14.070 used to be wall to wall PSK and now its pretty sparse depending on the time of day. i usually check around 10-11 UTC on 20m and can usually find a few stations but you have to be patient. JS8Call i played with for a few weeks and the relay/store-forward feature is genuinely clever but the UI drove me nuts. maybe its better now, i havent updated in like 6 months. for EMCOMM groups that have scheduled nets it probably makes more sense than me just randomly calling CQ into the void with it.

so ive been putting this off for way too long but i finally bought a spool of 14 AWG stranded copper and im going to try building a simple 40m dipole this weekend. i have a decent enough backyard to hang it inverted-V style from a tree that's maybe 35 feet up at the center, legs running down at probably 45 degrees or so, which i know isnt ideal but it's what i've got. my question is mostly about the feedpoint. ive seen people use those cheap center insulators from the usual suppliers and ive also seen guys just use a PL-259 chassis mount connector epoxied into a short piece of PVC pipe or whatever. does it actually matter that much which way you go? like is one significantly better than the other for a basic HF antenna? i feel like im overthinking this but i dont want to do it twice. also — the formula i keep seeing is 468 divided by frequency in MHz which gives total length in feet. for 40m i was thinking 7.150 as my design frequency so that comes out to around 65.5 feet total, so each leg would be about 32.75 feet. does that sound right or am i missing something. i have an MFJ-269 so i can tune from there but id like to at least start close.

congrats on getting it going, the 40m DC receiver is a rite of passage honestly. the 386 noise thing is real, there's a few tricks though — make sure you have a 10 ohm resistor and 0.047uF cap from pin 7 to ground, a lot of people skip that and it makes a noticeable difference. also bypass the supply pin hard with a big electrolytic and a small ceramic right at the chip. for a better audio stage some people swear by the LM4562 op-amp in a non-inverting config, lower noise floor and you can actually shape the response easier. i did something similar on a 80m receiver i built last winter and the audio went from tolerable to actually pleasant. an active audio filter doesnt need to be complicated either, a simple twin-T notch tuned around 700hz does wonders if SSB is your thing, kills a lot of the crud that slips through. the toroid winding anxiety is real by the way, i still count out loud and move a piece of tape along to track the turns like some kind of ritual

what wire did you use for the fan dipole? im thinking about doing something similar but i have no idea if there's a meaningful difference between regular 14 gauge house wire and like actual antenna wire. my vertical is also pretty mediocre on 80 and i dont really have room for a full size dipole but maybe a fan could fit if i angle the legs out a bit

I'll just add — don't underestimate the preamp situation. I made the mistake of running coax from the shack to a preamp inside and my noise figure was terrible, couldnt figure out why i was copying so poorly until someone on the EME reflector pointed it out. went to a relay-switched preamp at the mast and it was like night and day honestly. that detail gets glossed over sometimes when people talk about power and antennas but the receive side matters just as much if not more on EME. also the moon window thing isnt as limiting as it sounds once you get used to it. you just kind of plan your operating time around it like any other propagation. some days the geometry is great, some days not so much.

dont overthink the dual logging thing, lots of people do it. ADIF import after the contest is fine. Log4OM handles it pretty cleanly in my experience. the WSJT-X thing is the part id actually be careful about though, ive had N1MM get confused with FT8 contacts during a contest that also had phone and CW segments, the serial numbers get wonky. probably fine if youre doing a purely digital contest but for something like a state QSO party where everyones on different modes it got messy for me real fast

the switching wall wart is almost certainly a big part of your problem, those things dump noise all over the place and a DC receiver is going to pick it up no matter what you do. i had the same exact situation with a 20m regen i built a few years back, drove me crazy for a week before someone told me to just try a battery and see what happened. tried a 9v battery and the hum dropped by like 80% instantly. if you can, throw a 7805 or a proper linear reg in there with some decent filtering caps before anything else. the LM386 with the gain cap is also worth looking at. the 1.2k between pins 1 and 8 trick to back off the gain a bit helps a lot with that raspy thing you're describing, though honestly if your mixer output is already overdriving the input you might need a voltage divider before the amp anyway. direct conversion receivers are real sensitive to all of this stuff because you dont have a bunch of IF filtering cleaning things up before it hits the audio chain.

also just to add — dont stress too much about the band plan stuff when you're starting out, like obviously dont intentionally go outside your allocation but the band plan stuff like where cw ends and phone begins, or where digital is supposed to live, thats all just convention. you'll see people ignoring it all the time espcially on weekends during contests when everything gets chaotic anyway

so ive been listening to a lot of QSOs on 40m and noticed some people use the standard NATO stuff like Alpha Bravo Charlie and others just kind of make up their own like they'll say something like "A for apple, B for Boston" whatever comes to mind. i got my tech last year and been slowly getting more comfortable actually transmitting but this has been bugging me. is there like a rule somewhere that says you have to use NATO or is it just the done thing because everyone knows it? i dont want to sound like an idiot on air but also dont want to be overly rigid about it if nobody actually cares

ok so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now and finally decided to just go for it and get my tech license. i downloaded a couple things but honestly im a little overwhelmed with where to start. like do i need to memorize the whole question pool or is there a smarter way to do it? i looked at the ARRL study guide at the library but it felt kinda dense for someone who doesnt have any electronics background. someone at work said there are apps that do practice questions but i dont know if thats enough or if i need to actually understand the theory. any advice from people who went through this recently would help a lot, especially if you didnt have a technical background going in

so i've been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup in his backyard and he's been talking about it forever and i finally decided i want to get licensed too. problem is i have no idea where to start. like do i need to take a class or can i just study on my own? i looked up the technician exam and it looks like there's a lot of questions about electronics and regulations and stuff, i dont really have a background in any of that. is it actually hard? also i saw something about pool questions, not sure what that means exactly. any help appreciated, kind of feeling overwhelmed just looking at this stuff

N1MM is kind of the gold standard for HF contesting, i dont think anyones really gonna argue that. the SO2R support and the way it handles dupe checking on the fly is hard to beat. that said i tried using it for regular logging once and it felt weirdly overkill, like driving a racecar to the grocery store. for the WSJT-X stuff — are you running the UDP logging on port 2333 or whatever the default is? i had dupes too and it turned out i had both the WSJT-X built-in logging AND the UDP path both active at the same time which obviously caused chaos. check your WSJT-X settings under the Reporting tab and make sure youre not doubling up the log paths. once i sorted that out it was clean.

This time I'd like to focus on just one of them: the Ham2K Portable Logger, commonly known as PoLo. PoLo is an extremely versatile logging application designed for portable amateur radio operations. Just downloaded it for my iPad and curious about real-world experiences. From the log entry screen you can easily spot yourself, and the Spotting tab allows you to review existing spots for your activation. What impressed me most is that when I spot myself using PoLo, the program posts the spot not only to the POTA spotting network, but also to the WWFF spotting page. Worth switching from HAMRS?