Paul Jackson

Just received my IC-7760 and planning the optimal installation using the separate control head and RF deck design. Looking to place the RF deck in my basement near the feed-through panel to minimize coax runs, but the control head will be in my 2nd floor shack. The IC-7760 features a "Shack Style" transceiver with separate base and dual display panel connected via a standard LAN cable. Has anyone run Cat6 cable that distance (~60 feet) with the IC-7760? Concerned about latency or signal integrity issues between the control head and RF deck over that run length.

same boat as you not too long ago honestly. the part that got me was realizing the fcc rules are actually online and searchable at ecfr.gov but yeah reading the raw regulatory text is kind of brutal. what helped me was just downloading the ARRL band plan pdf and keeping it open on my phone when i was at the radio. once you mess up one time and someone on frequency politely tells you youre out of band you remember it pretty quick lol

one thing i'll add is that some of the abbreviations people use arent really official Q codes at all, like 73 and 88 those are just traditional ham shorthand that came from old telegraph days i think. 73 means best regards and 88 is love and kisses which people usually only use in certain contexts lol. and then theres stuff like OM which is old man but its used for any male ham, YL is young lady for any female ham regardless of age, XYL is for a married female ham or someones wife. honestly some of it is a little dated but its still used all the time especially on CW where people are trying to say as much as possible with as few keystrokes as they can

so ive been trying to get Winlink working for a few weeks now and i think i understand the basics but the whole gateway vs direct thing is still tripping me up. like i get that you connect to an RMS gateway and it forwards your email to the internet-side CMS servers, but i dont fully understand what happens when the RMS you're hitting isnt responding or is busy. does it just queue locally on your end or does Winlink Express handle that automatically? also im running a Vara FM setup right now on 2m through a local gateway about 12 miles away and it works most of the time but sometimes the connection just drops halfway through sending and i end up with no idea if the message actually went out or got stuck somewhere. i checked the session log and it says disconnected but the message isnt in my outbox anymore so i think it got through? this is the part that confuses me. is there a way to confirm delivery short of the other person telling you they got it? background: i got my general a while back and im doing some ARES stuff so i want to get comfortable with this before we actually need it in an emergency. running a TM-V71A into a SignaLink-ish setup, well actually a Digirig, into a laptop. works decent enough but yeah the dropped sessions thing is annoying

so ive had the 7300 for about 3 years now and honestly its still a great radio, no complaints really, but ive been eyeing the IC-7610 and im trying to figure out if the jump is actually worth it for how i operate or if im just convincing myself i need it most of what i do is casual HF, some contest operating on SSB and a bit of FT8 when the bands are dead. i do have two antennas id occasionally want to use at the same time which is the main thing pulling me toward the 7610 since it has the dual receiver setup. but is that actually useful day to day or is it more of a contest-specific thing the other part is i built out a pretty decent shack over the last year, got the station wired up nicely with a good ground system and a linear amp, so the rig feels like the one thing that hasnt been upgraded in a while. which i know is totally backwards reasoning lol. anyway has anyone made this jump and do you actually use the dual watch functionality or does it just sit there

yeah the battery thing gets everyone at least once. we did a drill back in spring where we made a rule that if your equipment didnt power up within the first five minutes of activation you were considered "unavailable" for the scenario. brutal but effective — you should have seen the scramble at the next meeting when people actually started checking their gear dates on their gel cells. the simplex coordination issue is real. we spent a whole training session just doing simplex net control practice on a dead Sunday morning and it felt kind of silly at the time but when our repeater actually went down during a windstorm last February people knew what to do. the fallback frequency thing is huge and honestly should be in writing somewhere everyone can find it without thinking, not just something the net manager knows. one thing we added to our SET debrief form is a column for "assumed vs actual" — basically where did your mental model of how things would go wrong match reality and where didn't it. turns out most of our failures were in the assumed category, stuff we thought we had covered.

yeah what he said about NATO being the standard is right. i actually got corrected on this early on when i used "sugar" for S and the net control politely told me to use sierra lol. felt embarrassing at the time but honestly glad they said something one thing i'll add is some of the older timers on certain nets still use the old "able baker charlie" phonetics from before NATO standardized everything and it can throw you off if you arent expecting it. doesnt come up much but worth knowing it exists

i went through exactly this debate last year and ended up doing a hybrid thing where i set up the second radio just for receive monitoring during runs. wasnt doing true SO2R transmit switching or anything, just had the second rig on headphones in one ear so i could hear whats happening on 15 while im running 20. felt like cheating honestly, rate went up noticeably in the CQWW because i could flip over and grab a run frequency on 15 when conditions shifted instead of losing 10 minutes hunting around blind. full SO2R with interlock and all that, i dont know, seems like it takes a while before the technique becomes natural enough that you're not actually hurting your rate by fumbling the switch timing. might get there eventually but im not there yet

so our ARES group has a county exercise coming up in about three weeks and i've been tasked with putting together a portable station setup that needs to run for potentially 12+ hours. we've done shorter stuff before but nothing this long and the power question is where i keep going back and forth. current plan is to bring my IC-7300 as the main HF station and probably an FT-60 handheld for local VHF coordination. antenna wise i was thinking my buddipole for HF and just a jpole for 2m hung off whatever's around. the site is a county EOC parking lot so we should have some vertical clearance options. here's where im stuck - do i just haul out my honda eu2200i and call it a day, or is it worth trying to run the whole thing off a 100ah lithium battery bank with a solar panel topped up? the 7300 pulls maybe 22 amps on transmit and considerably less on receive, so the math kind of works but barely if we're doing a lot of talking. the generator is loud and i hate the idea of it running all day but it's bulletproof reliable. the battery route feels cleaner but if i miscalculate duty cycle i'm stuck. anyone done long haul field setups and found a good middle ground here? also open to antenna suggestions if the buddipole seems overkill for a parking lot exercise, maybe something simpler to set up fast

I had a similar setup and ran into RFI issues until I installed a dedicated 8-foot copper rod right outside the shack wall. Using 1/2 inch copper pipe and 1/2 inch braid is what I do on the inside. Others will probably chime in and make comments giving you some other ideas. Made a huge difference in received noise levels, especially on 40 and 80 meters.

Current Tech here operating mainly on local repeaters and some 10m SSB. Considering the General upgrade but wondering about the practical benefits. What HF privileges will I actually use? I know Generals get more bands and can run up to 1,500 watts vs. 200W for Techs, but what's the real-world difference in operating experience? Is 20m really that much better than 10m for DX work? Looking for honest feedback from folks who made the jump.

CB crystal for the LO is a bit of a gamble on 40m depending on exactly where you land, but shouldnt cause the audio quality thing by itself. id vote power supply first, switching supplies and homebrew analog stuff just dont play nice and its the cheapest thing to rule out. battery test takes 30 seconds.

so ive been keeping an eye on the IC-7760 that icom announced and honestly i dont know what to think yet. the whole remote head thing is interesting but i already have an ic-7300 that does everything i need so hard to justify. though i will say the specs look pretty wild if they hold up in the real world. also separate thing — 10m and 6m have been absolutely nuts the last couple weeks if you havent been on. caught a few ZL and JA stations on 10m SSB last tuesday around 1400 UTC with just my dipole, no amp nothing. the kind of opening where you just sit there going wait what is happening. cycle 25 really is delivering. anyone else been watching the new gear announcements or have thoughts on whether icom is just going after the flex crowd with this one? feels like the market is getting interesting again

not a dumb question at all, everyone starts somewhere. honestly the technician exam is pretty manageable if you put in a couple weeks of studying. the thing most people dont realize is the question pool is public, like they literally publish all the questions and answers that could show up on the test, so in theory you could just memorize everything. hamstudy.org is where i'd point you first, it tracks which questions you're getting wrong and focuses on those, way better than just reading a book cover to cover in my opinion. i used gordon west's book back when i did it and that was fine but the website honestly gets you test-ready faster. your 60% on a first cold practice test is pretty normal, don't read too much into that. give it two or three weeks of doing practice questions every day and you'll probably be hitting 85-90% consistently. find a local club too if you can, they usually run free license classes and the elmers there can answer the stuff that doesnt make sense from just reading.

yeah the net control thing is such a common problem and I've seen it happen at real activations too, not just drills. our group made a rule that the net control assignment gets sent out by email at least 48 hours before any drill or activation and the person has to acknowledge it. sounds like overkill but it made a huge difference. the dead battery situation is basically unavoidable unless you build some kind of check-in process. we started doing a quarterly 'gear night' where people just bring their go-kits to the club meeting and we do a quick sanity check together. found all kinds of stuff — wrong cables, outdated ICS forms, one guy had a handheld with firmware from like 2015. its more social than anything but it keeps people honest about maintaining their kits. the HF fallback scenario is a great idea. we did something similar a couple years ago where we pretended all repeaters were down and had to establish direct HF links between served agencies. biggest lesson there was that a lot of guys who are solid on VHF packet get really uncomfortable operating HF phone under pressure. worth doing for sure.

the Sudden is a great starting point, built one years ago. one thing i ran into was RF getting back into the audio through the volume pot, had to add a small cap from the wiper to ground to kill it. might not be exactly your problem but worth a shot, took me forever to figure that one out and it was like a 5 cent fix.

RemoteHams has worked pretty solid for me but I'll say the client software feels like it hasnt been updated in a while, at least on windows. nothing broken but it just has that early 2010s feel to it. still does the job though. one thing nobody really talks about is watchdog timers and what happens if your control link just... dies mid-transmission. make sure youve got something at the remote end that will key down after X seconds of no keepalive, you really dont want to be that guy whos been transmitting dead carrier for 20 minutes because his connection dropped. the 7300 has some built in stuff for this but double check how RemoteHams handles it on their end too because i had a weird situation once where i thought it was covered and it wasnt quite.

so ive been working on a simple direct conversion SSB transmitter for 40m, nothing fancy, based loosely on the BITX design but with some mods because i couldnt source a few of the original parts locally and ended up substituting. the RF output looks okay on the scope but when i pipe audio in from my mic preamp the output sounds really muddy, almost like theres a low frequency oscillation riding on top of everything. ive checked the balanced modulator and the carrier null looks good, maybe 40dB down. the audio stage itself sounds clean going in. im thinking maybe its the VFO coupling or possibly something in the driver stage picking up the audio line, i ran the wiring kind of sloppy on the first build. anyone dealt with something like this on a homebrew rig where the audio path is getting into the RF chain in a weird way? i cant figure out if its feedback through the power supply rail or actual physical coupling. the whole thing is point to point on a piece of copper clad, no ground plane under the audio section which in retrospect was probably a dumb idea

went through exactly this about two years ago and the honest answer is yeah it is better but how much better depends a lot on what you're doing. for weak signal stuff and crowded bands the dynamic range improvement on the RSP1A is real, you stop getting as many intermod artifacts when there's strong broadcast stations nearby. the 12-bit ADC vs 8-bit in the rtl dongles does matter especially on HF where you've got huge signals sitting next to tiny ones that said your antenna is probably the bigger issue right now. a 30 foot random wire with a 9:1 is fine but it's not great for anything below maybe 10 mhz. if you fixed the antenna and kept the rtl you might actually get more improvement than going RSP1A with the same wire. i'd probably do antenna first then think about the SDR upgrade but if you want to just try the RSP1A the SDRuno software that comes with it is actually pretty solid now, used to be kind of a mess but they've cleaned it up