Kenneth Davis

our club is doing a thing in april too, just a dinner and a little show and tell but they said somone is bringing in a bunch of old boat anchors to sell so might be interesting. never been to a big hamfest yet, kind of want to go someday

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for maybe 3 months. what helped me was just putting it on in the background while i was doing other stuff around the house, not trying to copy everything just letting it wash over me. sounds dumb but i feel like my ear started picking out letters on its own after a while. also the g4fon trainer on pc has a lot of options if youre on windows, thats what my elmers group recommended to me

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been making contacts and logging everything in WSJT-X and importing to HAMRS and honestly the whole QSL confirmation thing is really confusing to me still. like i set up a LoTW account a few weeks ago and uploaded my ADIF and some confirmations came in which was cool, but i also keep hearing people talk about eQSL and i made an account there too but i dont really understand the difference or if one is better than the other for anything specific. and then there are actual physical QSL cards which i think are really cool honestly, i got one in the mail last week from a guy in Japan and it was really nice printed card, but i have no idea how to send one back to him. do i just mail it directly to his address? is there a bureau system i should be using? i tried googling it but there are like 5 different answers and im not sure what the current situation is with ARRL bureau after everything changed. basically just wondering what most people actually bother with day to day. do you do all three or just pick one? and does it matter for any awards which one you use

yeah the TX bandwidth thing catches a lot of people out, icom sets it conservatively from the factory i think. glad you sorted it. i ran a 7300 for about two years before moving to the 7610 and honestly the 7300 punches well above its price, the only real limitation i ran into was serious contesting where the dual watch stuff on the 7610 matters. for everyday HF work the 7300 is hard to beat at that price point. the touchscreen i never fully made peace with tbh. ended up programming most of my common settings into the function keys which helped a lot. worth spending an afternoon on that if you havent.

So ive been chasing summits for about 6 months now and finally decided to stop being a spectator and actually get up on one myself. Picked out W6/NC-461 for my first attempt, its only like a 2 mile hike so nothing crazy, but im still nervous about the whole thing. My main question is around logging - do i need to pre-spot myself on SOTAwatch before i go up or can i just get up there and start calling? I have cell service on most of the ridge based on previous hikes so i should be able to self-spot once im set up. Also wondering if i need to register the activation ahead of time on the website or if you just log it after the fact. Gear wise im bringing my FT-818 and a homebrew EFHW for 40 and 20m, plus a lightweight tripod to get it up. Figured id aim for SSB since thats what i know but i might try a few CW contacts if the band is cooperative. Planning to be up there around 10am local time Saturday if any chasers happen to see this. Any tips from people whove done a bunch of these would be really appreciated, especially around the 4 contact minimum thing and whether partial activations count for anything.

Hey welcome to the hobby. So the CTCSS thing — on the UV-5R you want to make sure you're setting the T-DCS (transmit tone) not the R-DCS. A lot of people accidentally set the receive tone thinking thats what opens the repeater but it's the transmit side that matters. The repeater has a tone squelch and it needs to hear YOUR tone before it'll open up and retransmit you. Easiest way to test it is to just key up and say something like "KD9whatever testing" and see if the repeater courtesy tone comes back at you after you unkey. That little beep means the repeater heard you. If you're only hearing yourself it might be you're on the input frequency instead of the output, double check your offset is set correctly for 2 meters which should be plus or minus 600khz. As for getting on a repeater — most people just say their callsign and say they're monitoring or looking for a contact. You might have to try a few times on a slow repeater before someone comes back. Some repeaters are just quiet most of the time, doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong.

yeah i caught the tail end of that opening sunday morning actually, worked a couple guys in Chile which was a first for me on 10m in a long time. the SFI has been creeping up pretty consistently the last few months so i think this is real, not just a fluke. we're heading toward solar max and if the predictions hold we could be in for some genuinely great DX conditions through next year or so. dig out your 10m antennas people haha on the IC-905 thing, i talked to my local dealer and he said he has a couple on order but couldnt give me a firm date. the price point is pretty steep for most people but for a radio that does everything up through 10GHz out of the box its kind of hard to complain if you're into microwave stuff

yeah the TCXO on those rigs is a legit upgrade, not placebo. i put one in mine maybe 8 months ago and the drift on cold startup is basically gone now. before i had to let it warm up for like 20 minutes before running any serious digital work or my decodes would be iffy in the first few minutes. that warmup thing annoyed me way more than it should have. the fan mod is worth doing if the noise bothers you, i replaced mine with a Noctua fan that someone did a write-up on eHam about, cut it to fit and ran it through a small resistor to drop the voltage a bit so it spins slower. way quieter and the rig still runs cool. only thing is you gotta be careful with the connector, the stock fan uses a specific plug and its a little tight in there. not a hard mod but definitely need to pay attention to what youre doing. one thing i keep meaning to do but havent gotten around to is the PA transistor check — theres a procedure where you can measure bias on the finals and some people say the factory setting runs a bit cold. supposedly setting it a bit higher improves IMD. havent pulled the trigger on that one yet since the rig is working well and i dont want to mess with something that isnt broken.

the timing thing is real. took me a long time to figure that out but once you start watching the rhythm of how a DX op is working the pile you can find these little windows. on CW it's even more pronounced because you can actually hear when the pile thins out a bit between his transmissions. one thing i'll add that helped me a lot is really listening to WHERE he's pulling calls from. if youre on 14.195 and he's working split up 5 to 10, pay attention to whether he's fishing on the low end of that range or the high end. a lot of guys just park on plus 5 because that's where the cluster says to go, so the high end of his listening range is sometimes less crowded. i've broken pileups just by moving up to like plus 9 when everyone's sitting on plus 5 and 6. also dont underestimate a decent antenna. power matters less than people think once you're at a reasonable level but a high yagi vs a dipole is a real difference in a pileup situation, not just for transmit but for actually copying what the dx is doing.

so ive had my 7300 for about two years now and just been running it stock which honestly is fine but i kept reading about the tcxo upgrade and the direct sampling tweaks people do and finally went down that rabbit hole last month the tcxo mod was pretty straightforward, picked up the CR-338 option unit and the frequency stability improvement is actually noticeable if you're doing any digital modes especially ft8 where being a few hz off starts to matter more than you'd think. installation wasnt bad just fiddly with that one connector near the main board the other thing i did was some minor work on the audio chain, swapped the internal speaker with something from an old bose unit i had laying around — not a proper mod really but the receive audio is way more pleasant now for long operating sessions. kind of surprised how much a better speaker matters when youre just sitting there listening for weak signals anybody else gone further with these rigs? ive seen some posts about people tweaking the rf gain staging but not sure if thats worth poking at on an sdr-based radio like this

so ive been at this for about three weeks now, finally got my tech and jumped straight into studying for general because i really want to get on HF and do some CW. been practicing with a straight key mostly but bought a cheap dual lever paddle off ebay to start learning iambic and man i did not expect this learning curve. the issue im running into is that when i slow down to like 10-12 wpm everything sounds pretty clean and my keyer (its the MFJ-564 connected to the keyer built into my IC-7300) spaces out the elements nice. but when i push it up to 15 or so it starts getting sloppy, dits run together, sometimes i get extra dahs i didnt intend. not sure if this is a paddle adjustment issue or just my technique being garbage. probably both honestly. anyone gone through this and have advice on what to actually focus on first? do i adjust the tension/spacing on the paddle or just keep drilling at the slower speed until it clicks?

yeah the wsjtx adif file thing is a known pain. the program doesnt close and reopen it cleanly every time, it kind of appends in chunks and if your watchdog fires mid-write you'll get a partial record or duplicate depending on how your parser handles it. what i ended up doing was not watching the file at all — instead i just poll it every 60 seconds and keep a local sqlite db of qso timestamps i've already pushed. anything new in the adif that isnt in my db gets uploaded, nothing gets sent twice. bit of a hack but its been running solid for like 8 months now on a pi 3b i had sitting in a drawer. the xmlrpc flrig thing is a great idea btw, i never thought to throw an oled on there but now i kind of want to. what display driver you using, the ssd1306 with luma.oled or something else?

so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now and finally decided to just go for it and take the technician exam. problem is i dont really know how to study for it or what resources are even worth using. i downloaded something called the question pool but its just like 400 questions and i dont know if i should just memorize all of them or actually try to understand the material first. also some of the questions about like electricity and ohms law and stuff are kind of confusing me, i havent done any of that since high school. is there like a study guide that explains the concepts or do most people just grind through the questions until they remember the answers. i feel like just memorizing without understanding is kind of cheating but also i only have a few weeks before theres a test session near me any advice would be appreciated, im totally new to all this

few things to check here. first, VARA HF has a free version that limits you to like 300 baud max throughput, which can cause sessions to time out if the gateway is expecting the full speed connection — not sure if you have the licensed version or not but worth knowing. second, 7.101 is correct for Region 2 generally but the specific RMS gateway you're trying to connect to might not be on that exact freq, some are offset slightly. you want to pull up the Winlink gateway list in the software and actually look at the frequency listed for that specific station, dont assume theyre all on the same dial freq. the path thing you're asking about — yeah you basically just connect to the RMS gateway and it handles pushing to the CMS on the backend, you dont have to configure any routing yourself on the client side. if you got a partial connection once you're probably close, could just be propagation or the gateway was busy. try a different time of day and maybe a different gateway thats geographically closer to you.

so i finally stopped procrastinating and just built a dipole from scratch Saturday. used 14awg stranded copper i had sitting in a box, cut it for 40m, about 66 feet total which i know isn't exactly resonant at the frequency i want but i was going off the 468/f formula and figured i'd trim later. the feedpoint is where im not sure i did it right. i soldered the coax braid and center conductor directly to the two halves and then wrapped the whole thing in self-amalgamating tape, and i hung a few snap-on ferrite chokes on the coax about 6 inches down from the feedpoint. my SWR is reading around 1.8:1 at 7.150 which honestly isnt terrible but i expected it to be closer to flat after reading so much about how forgiving dipoles are. is the SWR likely a common mode current thing or am i just off on the length? also the antenna is kind of in an inverted-v config because i only have one tall tree, center is at about 35 feet and the ends droop down to maybe 10 feet. wondering if that's affecting things. havent done any trimming yet, just want to understand what im dealing with before i start cutting.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for maybe three months now. i use an app called morse mania on my phone and just do like 10-15 minutes a day whenever i have a few minutes. its not fast progress but i can copy maybe 8 or 9 letters now without thinking too hard. my elmer told me the main thing is just consistency, even short sessions every day beat doing an hour once a week apparently. havent tried any actual qsos yet but thats the goal eventually

ok so I passed my general exam about 3 weeks ago and ive been trying to figure out exactly what frequencies im allowed to operate on. I read through part 97 but honestly it reads like legal mumbo jumbo and I keep getting lost trying to cross reference all the different tables and exceptions. Like I think I can operate SSB on 40 meters but then theres a whole section about phone vs data vs image and I dont know if that changes things depending on the band or time of day or what. also someone in my club mentioned something about a 200 watt limit in certain parts of 40m and I had no idea that was even a thing. Is that in part 97 somewhere or is that more of a gentlemans agreement type situation? I feel like there are rules layered on top of rules and nobody just explains it in plain english. Is there like a simplified version of all this somewhere that isnt just a blog post trying to sell me something?

so after about three weekends of messing around i finally have my FT-7900 running decently in the truck and figured id share what tripped me up in case anybody else is going down this road biggest thing was the power cable routing. i ran it directly to the battery like everyone says to do but i cheaped out on the fuse holder and the first time i went through a carwash the thing got wet and corroded inside, dropped voltage enough that the radio was doing weird things on transmit. so yeah get a proper weatherproof inline fuse holder, the cheap ones from the parts bin are not worth it also spent way too long chasing an alternator whine before i figured out it was the ground on my antenna mount. the NMO mount on the roof was grounded through the roof sheet metal and there was a painted surface under there that i didnt fully scrape back. once i got bare metal contact it went away almost completely. still a tiny bit of noise but honestly its nothing at this point the antenna is a 5/8 wave dual band whip, cant remember the brand right now, its the one that looks kind of like a thicker version of the standard rubber duck style. seems to work fine on the local repeaters and ive been hitting one thats about 40 miles out while rolling down the highway which im pretty happy with anyway if anyones got questions or been through similar stuff im happy to compare notes

so I finally decided to stop being lazy and build my first real dipole from scratch instead of buying one of those end-fed things everyone seems to be using lately. cut it for 40m using the standard 468/f formula, ended up with roughly 66 feet total, split in the middle at my SO-239 connector soldered to a small piece of coax and then out to the wire elements. problem is im getting an SWR of like 2.8:1 right at 7.150 which is where I was aiming. tried trimming a few inches off each side and it barely moved. the resonant point doesnt seem to be where I expected it either, the analyzer shows lowest SWR around 6.9 MHz which is a bit low. antenna is up maybe 25 feet in an inverted-V config, center fed with about 50 feet of RG-8X down to the shack. I used 14 gauge stranded copper wire from the hardware store which I know some people say is fine and some say causes issues. feed point connections are soldered and taped with self-amalgamating tape. not sure what else to check honestly, been staring at this thing for two weekends now

okay so dont let all that overwhelm you, it sounds more complicated than it is. yes LoTW is free, you just have to request a certificate from ARRL and it takes a few days to get sorted but once its set up its pretty painless. most loggers like Log4OM or WSJT-X or whatever you're using can export an ADIF file and you just upload it. LoTW is the one that counts for DXCC and WAS so if you ever want to chase those awards its basically essential. eQSL is a separate thing run by a private company and some awards accept it, some dont. its faster and easier to get going but not as widely respected i guess you could say. i use both personally. paper cards are honestly kind of a personal thing at this point. the bureau system through ARRL is slow like sometimes takes over a year but its cheap. direct QSL is faster but you gotta send a self addressed envelope and sometimes some green stamps for DX stations. i still love getting paper cards in the mail, theres something about it that LoTW just doesnt replicate, but plenty of people go totally digital now and thats fine too. just start with LoTW and go from there id say

so ive been at this for about 8 months now and im kind of stuck in that weird middle zone where im too slow to actually have a QSO without panicking but fast enough that the 5wpm practice stuff feels too easy. currently sitting around 11-12wpm on a good day, maybe 9 if im tired or the sending is sloppy. i've tried just doing the LCWO lessons every morning which helped me get to where i am now but lately it feels like im just spinning my wheels. read somewhere that you're supposed to learn the characters at like 20wpm timing even if your overall speed is slow — the farnsworth method i think? been doing that for about three weeks and honestly not sure if its helping or not, hard to tell. what actually made the difference for you when you were trying to push through this range? did you just do more of the same stuff or change up your approach completely? any specific resources or just like a certain number of minutes per day thing that clicked? feels like ive been at 11wpm forever and its a little discouraging tbh

yeah hamstudy.org is what everybody says and its honestly just true, thats how i did it. also look up if theres a local radio club near you because a lot of them run free licensing classes and they can point you to a test session. the third license is Amateur Extra by the way, thats the top one but you dont need it for a long time if ever really

yeah the battery test is the first thing id do for the hum, same problem on my NE602 build last year drove me nuts for days and it was just the supply the whole time. also on the LO leakage thing, have you tried adding a small cap across each diode to help with balance, seen that trick in the EMRFD book somewhere. might be worth a look

so i finally finished my first scratch build, a little 40m CW transceiver based on one of the EMRFD designs. took me way longer than it should have because i kept second guessing myself and reflowing solder joints that were probably fine to begin with. anyway got it on the air last weekend from a park near my house, running about 3 watts into a linked dipole strung up between two trees. managed 4 contacts in about 2 hours which honestly i wasnt expecting much more than that for a first outing. one of them was a station in ohio, im in western PA so not exactly DX but still felt pretty good for 3w and a homebrewed rig sitting on a picnic table. my question is about efficiency i guess. the final is running warm, not hot exactly but warmer than i expected. its a single IRF510 and im getting maybe 65% efficiency which from what ive read is about normal for that FET but some people say they do better. is there something in the matching network i should be looking at or is 65% just kind of what you get with that part? also wondering if anyone has gone to a different output transistor and seen a meaningful difference in practice, not just on paper.

Yes, three transmitter stations would make you 3A. For the message handling bonus, any licensed operator can handle formal traffic but make sure you follow proper NTS format. The message must be transmitted during the Field Day period and must leave or enter the Field Day operation via amateur radio RF.