Kenneth Davis

the QCX mini is a fantastic little kit, glad you got it going first try. i've built three of them over the years — one for each band i use most and they just work. Hans does good design work. for portable i've been using a end-fed halfwave with a 9:1 unun that i wind myself, its maybe 60 feet of wire and rolls up into almost nothing. combined with a little telescoping fiberglass mast from SOTAbeams i can be on the air in maybe 15 minutes from pulling up somewhere. the whole setup fits in a small sling bag. you hit on the thing that hooks most people into QRP which is that it changes how you think about the whole operation. propagation awareness goes way up, your CW speed tends to improve because you're relying on it more, and there's just something satisfying about the minimalism of it. my XYL actually tolerates the radio hobby more since i went mostly QRP because i'm outside more and not hogging the shack as much lol

so i just passed my tech exam last week (still waiting on the callsign to show up in the database lol) and i've been trying to figure out what handheld to get. everyone seems to have a different opinion and im going in circles reading reviews. my main thing is i want to hit the local repeaters and maybe do some APRS stuff eventually. budget is probably around $150 give or take. i keep seeing the Baofeng UV-5R mentioned everywhere and it's like $25 which seems almost too good to be true? but then people talk trash on it and say get a yaesu or kenwood instead. i just dont know if spending $150 on a radio as a complete beginner makes sense when i dont even know if this hobby is gonna stick for me. also does dual band even matter at the tech level or is 2m basically where everything happens locally? my club mostly seems to be on 2m from what i can tell at the meetings. anyway any advice would be appreciated, sorry if this is a dumb question

chirp is almost always a keying issue on simple rigs like that, the oscillator frequency shifts a tiny bit as the key goes down because the supply voltage dips or the transistor loading changes. easiest thing to try first is a bypass cap right across the oscillator supply line, like a 0.1uf ceramic right at the transistor. sometimes people also add a small buffer stage between the oscillator and the PA so the load changes dont pull the frequency around. on a pixie style design its kind of baked into the simplicity of the circuit honestly, you may not get it totally clean without some rework but you can usually get it much better than stock. congrats on the first contact with a homebrew rig by the way, that ohio contact on 500mw is actually pretty solid. 40m can do surprising things especially in the evenings.

honestly the biggest gains ive seen arent even from SO2R, its from learning when to abandon a run and go S&P vs when to sit and grind. took me probably 3-4 serious contest efforts before i really internalized that. your 80-90/hr rate is decent and there's probably 15-20 qsos per hour still sitting on the table from smarter frequency management and knowing the band openings cold before the contest even starts. that said SO2R does work and it isnt as complicated as people make it out to be. the hardest part isnt the hardware, its training your brain to actually listen to two things without losing your run frequency to some pistol who swoops in the second you QSY. i run a pretty simple setup, second radio is just an old ft-1000mp with a spare antenna, nothing fancy, and the interlock situation is manageable if you plan it out. but i wouldnt jump to it until you feel like youre really maxing out what single radio can do. theres still a ton of room to grow there for most people

so ive been working on this double sideband transmitter for the past few months, mostly based on the old Solid State Design for the Radio Amateur book with a few tweaks. using a diode ring modulator built with 1N4148s, balanced with a trimpot across the secondary of the input transformer. been getting maybe 30-35dB of carrier suppression on a good day but when i fire it up and listen on another receiver it still sounds a bit carrier-heavy, like it wants to be AM almost. the audio sounds fine honestly, my dummy load tests look reasonable on the scope, but when i try to have a qso the reports i get back are like 'sounds a little buzzy' or 'you there, you sound kinda rough'. i dont know if its the suppression thats the issue or if my audio chain has some problem, the mic preamp is just a junkbox lm741 stage which probably wasnt the best choice looking back at it now. anyone built something similar and run into this? wondering if i need to go back and rebuild the modulator with matched diodes or if theres something else i should be checking first before i tear it apart again

so ive been chasing VP6R for like three weeks now and kept getting absolutely nowhere. i run a KX3 into a hexbeam at about 30 feet which isnt exactly a gunslinger setup but its what i got. every time i called i was just getting swallowed up by the wall of noise and the DX station just kept working other people like i didnt even exist. anyway what finally made the difference for me was a few things combined. first i stopped tail-ending and started actually listening to where the DX was fishing — like noticing they kept coming back to signals a couple khz up from where everyone was parking. i shifted up there and bam, third call got through. second thing was i started using way shorter calls, like just my suffix on CW instead of full callsign every time. i know thats controversial but on a massive pileup the suffix thing genuinely seemed to help cut through. also i finally got my tx timing down better. i was apparently calling while the DX was still finishing a QSO which is amateur hour stuff, i know, but its easy to get excited and jump early. once i started actually waiting for the full exchange to finish and then waiting like half a second more before calling, hit rate went way up. anyone else have techniques that actually work beyond the usual 'just run more power' advice? curious what the split operation tricks people use are too

JS8Call is definitely more of a chat thing yeah. the normal speed mode is 15 seconds per frame like FT8 but theres also slow (30s), turbo (6s), and ultra modes depending on what youre trying to do. activity is definitely less than FT8 but its not dead — 14.078 USB gets some use and theres a few nets that run it regularly. the thing i actually like about it is you can leave it running and it kind of works like a store-and-forward system, so someone can send you a message and it sits there waiting. its got a heartbeat function too so your station just kind of announces itself periodically. its a different vibe for sure, more like a slow BBS than a contact logger. if youre already set up with WSJT-X the audio routing for JS8Call should be almost identical, its built off the same codebase more or less.

ok so ive been listening on 40m a lot lately and people are throwing around all these like QSL QRM QTH and a bunch of others and i can only figure out some of them from context. is there like a standard list somewhere or do people kind of use them however they want? also i keep hearing people say 73 at the end of every conversation and someone told me thats like goodbye but i dont really get where that comes from. just trying to figure out what people are actually saying to each other lol

so i've been watching pskreporter and DXmaps obsessively for like the past three weeks waiting for 10m to do something interesting and yesterday afternoon it just kind of... exploded. started hearing spanish stations around 2pm local and within maybe 20 minutes i was working italians, a couple germans, even snagged a CT3 out of madeira which was a nice surprise. ran about 40 contacts in an hour before it faded back out. solar flux index was sitting around 178 yesterday which i guess explains it, its been hovering in the 160s most of this week but something about yesterday just clicked. the K index was nice and low too, like 1 or 2 all day. i know thats not always a guarantee of anything but it sure seems to help. anyway just wanted to share because ive been kind of frustrated with conditions lately and it was nice to finally get a reminder of why i got into HF in the first place. anyone else catch that opening? curious if it extended further than the northeast US

just did mine last spring. the transmission line stuff and the filter Q factor questions were the ones that got me the most, i had to read those sections like three times. but yeah you can definitely pass by working the question pool. i used like 90% question pool grinding and maybe 10% actually reading about the theory and i passed with only two wrong. the band privileges on 75 meters and the cw portions of 40 were the main reason i did it tbh, opens up a lot more room when the bands are crowded

oh man i was in the exact same spot not too long ago. the one that tripped me up forever was QRO vs QRP because i kept mixing them up. also QRX which means standby or wait a moment, i never heard that one explained and just thought something was wrong with my radio lol. also people say "73" and "88" sometimes, 88 is like love and kisses and you hear it said to spouses or significant others which is kind of charming honestly. and OM means old man which sounds rude but its just what guys call each other, and YL is young lady which is what they call female operators. XYL is supposedly ex-young lady meaning wife. yeah the lingo is a lot at first but it really does just click after a while of being on the air

not dumb questions at all, this stuff tripped me up too when i first got licensed. ok so the sequential call thing — yeah when you first get licensed the FCC just assigns you the next available call in your district, totally automatic, you dont have to do anything. and upgrading to extra does NOT automatically change your call, you keep whatever you have unless you specifically apply for something different. the vanity process is basically a 30-day filing window and yeah if more than one person applies for the same specific callsign during that window it does go to a random selection among the applicants. so your club buddy is right that theres a luck element. but the other guy is also right — less popular calls have fewer people going after them so your odds are just better by default. a lot of people target calls that were recently released because the previous holder went silent key, those can be competitive depending on the call. short calls in desirable districts like 1 or call area zero tend to get more applicants. for general class you can hold a 1x3 format at minimum i believe, the 1x2 and 2x1 formats are reserved for extra class. so upgrading to extra opens up a lot more options if you care about that sort of thing. ae7xx type calls and stuff like that.

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for like two years now and its been great for getting into this stuff but im starting to feel the limits of it especially on HF, yeah i know you can do direct sampling but its just not the same. anyway im trying to decide between picking up an SDRplay RSP1B or just going full send on a HackRF One and i cant quite figure out which makes more sense for what i do. mostly i just monitor a wide range of stuff, some aircraft ADSB which the RTL handles fine already, some utility stuff on HF, maybe poking around the ham bands when im not actually transmitting. i dont need to transmit with the SDR itself so the HackRF's TX capability isnt really a selling point for me. the thing that has me leaning RSP1B is the noise floor spec but then again HackRF covers such a ridiculous frequency range. does anyone actually use the HackRF above like 2 GHz regularly or is that mostly a selling point on paper also what software are people pairing with these these days, im mostly on SDR# right now but ive been curious about SDRangel and whether its worth the learning curve

the NIL thing stings but dont read too much into it, some ops are just not patient and thats on them not you. i actually think getting on the air even when youre not ready is the fastest way to improve, way faster than just doing drills at home. QRS nets are great for this, there's a bunch of them that specifically welcome slower operators and nobody's going to judge you there. also one thing nobody told me when i started — try sending with your eyes closed sometimes. sounds weird but it forces you to really feel the rhythm instead of staring at the paddle like youre trying to will it into working correctly

yeah the dual net control thing is a really common problem, seen it happen more than once. the fix that worked for our group was making sure there's always a clearly designated primary AND a backup listed in writing before the exercise even starts, and everyone acknowledges it on the net at the very beginning. sounds obvious but it genuinely makes a difference. the simplex frequency thing is huge too. we actually laminated a small card that goes in every go-bag with our primary, secondary, and simplex fallback plus the PL tones for all our local repeaters. took maybe an afternoon to make and it's saved us a lot of fumbling around. honestly the best drills are the ones where things go wrong because thats where you find the gaps in your plan. sounds like you got a lot out of it even if it felt messy in the moment.

the one that got me for the longest time was QRP, people say it like its a whole thing, QRP operation, QRP rigs etc but technically it just means low power. and then you got stuff that isnt even really Q codes, like OM means old man which sounds rude but its just how you adress another guy on air, YL is young lady. XYL is someones wife lol. theres also a ton of CW shorthand that bleeds into SSB like UR for 'your' and ES for 'and' and stuff like that. its a whole little language honestly. dont worry you'll get it pretty fast once you start actually making contacts instead of just listening

honestly the general exam is way more approachable than it looks at first. i remember sitting down with that question pool thinking there was no way i was going to memorize all this but the thing is you really dont have to understand every single formula deeply, you just have to recognize the right answer when you see it. like for the impedance calculations and stuff, if you just drill the practice questions enough your brain kind of just learns the pattern. took me maybe 3 weeks of studying maybe 20-30 minutes a day and i passed with only a couple wrong. ham study dot org is genuinely what i used and its free and it just drills you on questions until you know them. the ARRL general book is good if you actually want to understand the why behind things which i do recommend eventually but you dont need it to pass the test. as for HF privileges once you get General you get big chunks of 40m, 20m, 17m, 15m, 12m, 10m and also 60m with some restrictions. and yes Techs do get a small slice on 10m for phone and some CW privileges on a few bands but its pretty limited. once you upgrade youll immediately see how much more room there is to operate. 20m especially is just always busy in a good way, you can find someone to talk to almost any time of day.

honestly for the exam itself a lot of people do just grind the question pool and thats fine, you can always learn the why later when youre actually on the air. hamstudy is great for that, just keep doing practice tests until youre consistently hitting 80+ and youll be fine. the propagation stuff is worth understanding at least a little because it actually helps you figure out when to get on what band, but you dont need to be able to derive the formulas or anything. the parts that get people are usually the electrical stuff like calculating power and resistance, and the license privileges section because theres a lot of specific frequencies to remember. focus some extra time there. also the band plan questions, there are a few that are weirdly specific about what modes are allowed where and those pop up pretty often from what i remember. three weeks is plenty of time if youre putting in like 20-30 minutes a day on it.

the question pool gets updated every four years so you want to make sure you're looking at the current one, i think we're still on the 2022-2026 pool right now. HamStudy.org is honestly the best free resource ive used, it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those specifically. there's also a mobile app version which is handy for studying on lunch breaks or whatever. as for whether to memorize vs understand -- honestly a little of both. some of the electrical theory stuff like ohms law you really should understand because it shows up in a few different questions phrased different ways. but some of the regulatory stuff like band privileges and part 97 rules, a lot of people just straight up memorize those. nobody expects you to derive why the tech HF privileges are what they are, you just need to know them for the test. give yourself two or three weeks of maybe 20 minutes a day on hamstudy and you'll be surprised how fast it clicks.

yeah what he said about the notepad is real. also make sure your batteries are all fresh or topped off the night before, dont assume your HT is charged just because you used it two days ago. i made that mistake once during an AUXCOMM drill and was scrambling to find a way to charge mid-exercise which was embarrassing. one other thing, know your ICS basics even just a little bit. like understand who the served agency liaison is and what your role is in the command structure. some newer hams get confused about who they're actually reporting to during an activation. you're there to support the served agency's communications needs, not to run your own show, so just keep that mindset and you'll mesh well with the group

so ive been running a beat up old FT-450D for about three years now and its been fine but the waterfall is basically useless and i keep reading about how much better the 7300's SDR front end is for picking stuff out of the noise. found one locally for $850 with the original box and the guy says it has maybe 200 hours on it, no mods. seems like a decent deal but im not sure if thats the going rate right now or if i should try to talk him down a bit. anyway the actual question i have is more about setup stuff. my shack is in a basement room and i've got a dedicated 20 amp circuit but i'm running a cheap power strip right now not an actual power distribution setup. the 450D never gave me any grief but i've heard some people have had weird issues with the 7300 and RF getting into the USB when they use it with a computer for things like wsjt-x. is that mostly a grounding thing or is it related to the ferrites on the cable? i have a few mix 31 clamp-ons sitting around and was wondering if thats enough or if i need to look at the whole station ground situation before i swap rigs. also does anyone run one of these on a simple dipole setup and get decent results on 40 and 80 at night? i'm not expecting miracles just wondering if the receiver is noticeably better than the 450 for digging stuff out when the band gets noisy

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. i looked into it a bit and apparently you have to take a test? i guess im just not sure what the process looks like. like do i study a book or is there an app or something. i dont even know what topics are on it honestly. any advice would be great, i dont want to spend months studying if i dont have to but i also dont want to walk in and fail

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now mostly just scanning trunked systems locally and poking around HF with an upconverter i built. works fine honestly but ive been eyeing the SDRplay RSP1B because the coverage without needing the upconverter sounds appealing and the dynamic range is supposedly way better. my question is whether the jump is actually worth it for casual use or if im just falling into the upgrade trap. i mostly run SDR# on windows and occasionally fire up GQRX on a raspberry pi when im feeling adventurous. not doing anything serious like decoding weak signal digital modes or serious spectrum analysis, mostly just listening and occasionally logging aircraft with dump1090. anyone actually made this switch and noticed a real difference day to day or is the RTL-SDR v3 good enough for what im describing. i dont want to spend the money and then realize i cant tell the difference at my noise floor anyway

So ive been kind of out of the loop the past few weeks — work stuff — but came back to check the bands and wow 10 meters has been doing some crazy things. Worked a handful of South American stations last Tuesday without even really trying, just had the radio on in the background while i was doing other stuff and suddenly i heard a pile-up forming on 28.450 or so. Anyway thats not the main thing i wanted to mention. Apparently Icom is supposed to be dropping something new in the transceiver space, ive seen some chatter on a couple other forums but nothing super concrete yet. Anyone seen any actual specs or is it still just rumor territory? I remember when the IC-7300 came out and the hype was real but sometimes these things turn out to be a minor refresh and people get all wound up for nothing. Also — and this is more of a side question — did anyone catch the ARRL announcement about the upcoming HF phone sweepstakes dates? I think i saw something but i was half asleep reading it on my phone so i might have the timing wrong.

we ran a 12 hour exercise last summer entirely on a 200ah lifepo4 bank (two 100ah in parallel, similar to what you described) powering an ft-991a and a laptop running flmsg and it was totally fine, had like 40% left at the end. granted we werent running 100w much but still. one thing i'd add — if youre going to skip the generator entirely bring some way to recharge mid-exercise just in case. even a decent solar panel strapped to the roof of your go-kit vehicle can put a few amps back in during a long day. i carry a 100w panel and a victron mppt controller in the truck now just as a backstop, not really expecting to need it but its there. adds maybe 15 minutes to setup. also on the spiderbeam pole in wind — had one get a little sketchy on us when a storm front came through during a field day type event. not catastrophic but the base stake pulled and we had to guy it better. if theres any chance of afternoon thunderstorms in your area id have a plan for that. we started driving a longer stake and running three guylines about 2/3 up the pole and havent had problems since.