Mark Thomas

i had the same thing happen with mine and it turned out one of my solder joints at the center insulator was intermittent, like it would read fine when i checked it on the bench but once it was up in the air and the coax was pulling on it at a slightly different angle it was making a bad connection. worth checking with a multimeter before you start trimming legs. also 14 gauge stranded is fine but make sure you got good strain relief at that center point or it'll work itself loose eventually.

the 1.4 swr without a balun is probably fine for casual use but you might start noticing rf on the coax braid messing with your radio, especially if you're running any real power. common mode current is a real thing and it can cause weird interference patterns and sometimes just makes your audio sound off. a simple 1:1 choke balun wound on a toroid or even just coiling the coax a few times near the feedpoint helps a lot. some guys argue its unnecessary for a basic inverted-v and honestly for qrp it probably doesnt matter much but if you ever go higher power its worth doing right. the weatherproofing though, definitely address that sooner than later. soldered connections exposed to the elements will corrode faster than you'd think especially if you get freezing temps. i use those self-fusing silicone tape wraps plus a layer of vinyl tape over it, and then i'll sometimes put a small plastic project box over the feedpoint if i can manage it. some guys just use a pvc cap glued over it. coax seal putty is another option but its messy. your 25 feet inverted-v is actually pretty reasonable for 40, the angle of the legs affects the radiation pattern some but youre definitely getting out if you made contacts already so dont overthink it.

yeah Q65 changed everything honestly. i worked my first EME contact last year with a single 9el yagi and about 100w, would not have been possible on JT65 let alone SSB. the guy on the other end was running a big array in europe and clearly doing the heavy lifting but it still counts lol. noise figure on your preamp matters way more than people think, i fried my first one by not using a decent sequencer and keying up with the preamp still in line, dont do that. sequencer is not optional if you care about your front end

so ive been licensed about 8 years now and mostly do HF stuff, some 2m weak signal when the band opens up, but ive always been kind of obsessed with the idea of doing EME. like the concept of bouncing a signal off the moon and actually having someone hear it on the other side of the planet is just... i dont know, it scratches a brain itch that nothing else does. anyway i finally have a bit of property to work with and im starting to think about what a realistic starter setup would look like. ive been reading about single yagi EME on 2m and it seems like people do actually make contacts that way with JT65, not a ton but it happens. my question is more about the practical side — what kind of yagi are we talking, like a 9el versus something longer, and do i need a preamp right at the feedpoint or is that more of a nice-to-have situation. also the whole moon tracking thing, do people use manual elevation/azimuth or is that just going to make me want to pull my hair out i know this is a deep rabbit hole. i already have a IC-9700 which i think is a decent starting point. just trying to figure out if this is something i can do without building a full dish setup in my backyard

the chart thing almost never works for most people, you kind of have to hear the characters as sounds not think about dots and dashes at all. that whole approach is what trips beginners up. what you want is the Koch method and honestly just use the LCWO website, its free and its what a lot of people use. it starts you at full speed on just two characters and you dont move on until you can copy them reliably, then it adds one at a time. sounds slow but it actually works because your brain learns the rhythm of each letter instead of counting dots. also just be warned it takes longer than people think. like months of regular practice, not weeks. if you sit down for 15-20 minutes every day you'll get there but skipping days really sets you back. i learned back when the test was still required and even then the guys who passed were the ones who practiced a little bit every single day rather than cramming on weekends.

totally normal to be confused by this stuff at first, dont worry about it. so the CTCSS tone — on most HTs including the Baofeng you want the tone set on transmit only, not receive. the receive side is for if YOU want to squelch out signals that dont have that tone, which honestly most people dont bother with on a handheld. just make sure your TX tone is set to 100.0 and youre good there. the kerchunking thing is basically when someone keys up the repeater really quick just to test if theyre hitting it, without ever saying their callsign. the reason people get annoyed by that is technically every transmission you make is supposed to have your callsign. so if you wanna test if youre getting into the repeater just say something like '[your callsign] testing' and that covers you. its really not a big deal people just like to keep things tidy on a busy machine. also double check your offset is right — 2m repeaters are usually minus 600 kHz. if the offset is wrong youre transmitting on the output frequency and not going into the repeater at all which would explain why nobody hears you.

the short version is the FCC allocation is the legal limit of where you're allowed to be, and the band plan is more of a gentlemen's agreement about what modes go where within that. so for 40m phone as a general you're legally allowed from 7.175 up to 7.300 MHz, anything below that down to 7.025 is your CW/data subband as a general. the band edge thing is real practical advice though not a hard rule. the issue is your transmitter's carrier might be right on 7.300 but your signal has sidebands that extend a few kHz depending on your audio, so if youre doing SSB and you set the dial to 7.300 your actual transmitted signal is probably spilling above the band edge which would put you out of your allocation. most people just stay a few kHz inside to be safe. on LSB your signal extends below your dial frequency so 7.175 you'd want to be at like 7.178 minimum to keep your whole signal inside the band.

the inverting transponder thing trips everybody up at first, dont feel bad. basically if you hear yourself too high on the downlink you need to tune your uplink frequency DOWN, not up. its counterintuitive because your instinct is to chase the signal in the same direction but with an inverting transponder it works backwards. once that clicks in your head it becomes second nature. for the doppler the 847 will do split doppler correction if you set it up right in gpredict under the radio control settings, you need to tell it which VFO is uplink and which is down and it handles the compensation on both sides. if you just had it correcting one side thats probably why you were losing yourself. took me a while to figure that out too, the gpredict documentation isnt super clear about it. on the TLE thing yeah 30 seconds difference between sources is pretty common, depends on how fresh the elements are and which source they pulled from. spacetrack.org is usually the most current, i update mine every few days when im planning a session. for a low bird 30 seconds can mean the difference between having the rotators pointed at the right spot or staring at empty sky at AOS so its worth keeping them fresh.

yeah the outdated websites thing is so real lol. i went through the same thing. what finally worked for me was just asking in my local club's facebook group and someone immediately sent me like four or five active nets with current times and frequencies. sometimes the best database is just other hams honestly. also if you have echolink or are interested in DMR there are nets on those that are super easy to find because they post schedules in the linked groups and stuff. not the same as HF but a good way to get comfortable checking in before you do it on a real frequency i guess

im kind of in the same boat as you honestly, been licensed about a year and a half and the whole cluster ecosystem confused me for a while. one thing i found helpful was also looking at pskreporter if youre doing any digital modes because it shows you propagation in a visual way that the text-based clusters just cant do. not exactly the same thing but it kind of helped me understand what bands were actually open before i went hunting spots. for the 160m noise on dxwatch — yeah just filter it out, you can do that. once you get your filter settings where you want them it gets a lot more usable

went through this whole thing like six months ago. the ae7q site someone will probably mention is your best friend, i spent like an hour just browsing available calls in my district before i settled on one. the actual filing through ULS wasnt too bad once i figured out which form to use (its the 605 i think). biggest thing that tripped me up was making sure my mailing address in the system was current before i applied because i got paranoid about missing any correspondence lol. anyway mine came through no problem after the window closed, got a nice short 2x3 and im happy with it.

the path thing is almost certainly not your problem if you're already getting into digis in town — WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is pretty much the standard and anything beyond that is just network abuse honestly. what i'd look at first is whether that ridge digi is actually on the air. you can check it on aprs.fi directly, just search for the digi's callsign and see when it last heard anything or transmitted. if it hasnt shown activity in a while it might be down or somebody just hasn't maintained it. happens a lot with volunteer-maintained infrastructure out in rural areas, nobody notices for months sometimes. also 60 seconds is actually on the longer side for mobile. a lot of guys run 30 seconds or even use SmartBeaconing so the rate adapts to speed and direction changes. wont help if theres no digi to hit but its worth tweaking once you sort the infrastructure side.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (General) and finally decided to stop just watching other people do POTA activations on youtube and actually go do one myself. picked out a state park about 45 minutes from me, K-2847 i think, and im planning to head out saturday morning. my question is kind of embarrassing but here goes — do i need to pre-register the activation somewhere or just show up and operate? i saw something on the pota.app website about logging activations but it wasnt super clear to me whether thats something you do beforehand or just when you upload your log afterward. also not sure if i need to notify the park or get some kind of permit, or if people just set up at a picnic table and start operating without talking to anyone official. planning to bring my ft-891 and a end fed wire antenna, run it up a tree if i can find a good branch. probably just 40m and maybe some 20m if propagation cooperates. any tips from people who have actually done this would be really appreciated, im kind of nervous about the whole thing honestly

pretty much yeah, its situational. on a clear local repeater with good signal most people just rattle off their call without phonetics because everyone copies it fine. where phonetics really matter is on HF, especially DX contacts or when conditions are rough and letters start sounding alike — B and D and E and G and P and T can all blur together in static or under QRM. the classic example is saying "Victor" vs just "V" when someones trying to log your call through a pile-up, theres no guessing that way. the mixing thing you noticed, numbers normal and letters phonetic, yeah thats totally common and makes sense if you think about it. numbers are pretty distinct sounding already, zero one two three whatever, they dont really get confused with each other the same way letters do. so a lot of guys dont bother phonetic-ing the numbers unless conditions are really bad.

4 states in an hour at 5 watts is solid, dont sell yourself short. i tried QRP last summer and struggled at first but i think i was just picking bad times to operate. the bands were rough all of June around here. what time of day were you running and was it 40m the whole time? im curious because ive heard 20m can be really productive for QRP especially if you want to stretch the range a bit but i havent tried it myself yet with low power

i went through this last year and it took like 22 days total for mine to finally show up in the system. the waiting is the worst part lol. ae7q dot com is your friend, seriously bookmark it, it shows the application status way clearer than the ULS interface which looks like it was designed in 2003 or something

so ive been running SSB on 40m mostly and a few guys on the band have told me my audio sounds muddy or kind of boomy and i honestly dont know where to start with fixing it. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 which i figured would just sound good out of the box but apparently not. i have the TX bandwidth set to around 2.4kHz which i thought was fine for voice, and the mic gain is sitting at about 50% but the ALC is kinda bouncing around a lot when i talk — like it dips pretty hard on my voice peaks. not sure if thats the problem or if its the eq settings in the radio or what. ive messed with the bass and treble in the menu but nothing really seemed to help much. anyone run this combo and know what settings actually work?

yeah the counting dots and dashes thing is a trap, dont do it. what you want is the Koch method, basically you start with just two characters at full speed — like 20wpm — and you drill those until you can copy them reliably, then you add a third character, then a fourth and so on. the idea is your brain learns the sound as a whole unit instead of breaking it down. took me probably three months of daily practice, maybe 20-30 minutes a day, before i felt comfortable enough to actually call CQ on 40 meters. LCWO dot net is free and its pretty much the go-to for Koch training online, lot of guys use that. also just listening to QSOs on the bands helps a ton, even before you can copy everything you start picking out callsigns and common words like 73 and QTH without even thinking about it. dont rush it, thats the main thing i wish someone told me earlier

I wouldn't mess with the front end personally, icom did a pretty good job with the filtering already. If you're in a noisy location you'd probably get more bang for your buck with external filtering or maybe a different antenna setup. The 7300 is sensitive enough stock that adding more gain might just make things worse with all the rf garbage out there these days

so ive been chasing this issue for a couple weeks now and im pretty stumped. got an FT-897D that i picked up used maybe 8 months ago, worked fine until recently. started noticing the fan kicking on way earlier than it used to, like barely a minute into a transmission on 40m at maybe 50 watts. temps on the finals are climbing faster than they should be for that power level. pulled it apart last weekend and checked the obvious stuff — heatsink compound was basically dried out and crumbly which i replaced, cleaned out a pretty impressive amount of dust from around the PA area, checked that the fan was actually spinning freely and not just making noise. reseated everything. still doing it. output power looks about right on my wattmeter so its not like the finals are gone, but something is definitely dumping more heat than it should. SWR on the antenna is fine, been using the same dipole for years. wondering if maybe one of the driver transistors is partially cooked and making the finals work harder? or maybe a bias issue? i have a service manual but my bench skills are decent not great, i can do component level stuff but i dont want to just start shotgunning parts at it

so ive been reading about EME for probably two years now and i keep putting it off because the antenna requirements always scared me off. running about 500w on 2m right now with a pretty decent yagi setup for terrestrial stuff but i know thats nowhere near enough for moonbounce. been looking at the WSJT-X digital modes since i know JT65 is basically what everyone uses for this now and that helps a lot with the weak signal side of things but im still fuzzy on whether a single long yagi is ever going to cut it or if i absolutely need to go array. the path loss numbers are just absurd when you actually sit down and calculate them, like 250+ dB round trip is not something i was prepared for when i first looked into this. i get that the moon is a terrible reflector too, only bouncing back like 7% of what hits it or something like that. so between the path loss and the inefficiency of the moon itself you need a ton of EIRP and a really low noise figure on receive. current setup is a 17 element yagi at about 40 feet, preamp is a down east microwave unit right at the feedpoint which i think is around 0.5 dB NF, and the 500w solid state amp. is there any realistic path to making contacts with this or am i just kidding myself until i build a 4-bay array

oh man youre gonna have a blast, first activation is super memorable. few things -- yes spot yourself, absolutely spot yourself, thats how the hunters find you. go to pota.app and use the self-spotting feature or just post to the POTA facebook group if youre somewhere with signal. without a spot you might sit there calling CQ for a long time and get discouraged. on the logging, HAMRS is fine, i used it for my first dozen or so activations. dont stress about it being perfect in the field, you can clean up the log later. you have like 5 days i think to upload, definitely not same day required. just make sure youre getting callsign, band, mode and time in there. the time thing trips people up sometimes if you forget to set it to UTC before you go out. also 10 QSOs sounds easy and usually is but if conditions are rough or youre on a less popular park it can take a while, just be patient and keep calling. good luck tomorrow

11 contacts from a tree antenna at 5 watts sounds pretty great to me, i havent even tried portable yet but this is making me want to. what battery were you running and how long did it last? that's the part that always makes me nervous about going out in the field

documentation is the thing i always tell people about. like have a laminated card or something with your common frequencies, net schedules, ARES contact numbers, stuff like that. when youre tired and stressed at 2am you do not want to be digging through your phone for the repeater input. also maybe consider a small solar panel if youre doing longer deployments. 40ah will last a while but if you end up somewhere for 3 days without power it gets real old real fast. i have a 50w panel that folds up pretty small and its saved me more than once.

so ive been messing around with the 7300 for a while now trying to squeeze better transmit audio out of it because honestly out of the box it sounds a little thin to me, maybe thats just my ears but multiple people on the air told me the same thing so i started digging around first thing i did was the standard TX bandwidth tweak in the menu, bumping the high cut filter up and adjusting the bass boost a bit. that helped some but wasnt transformative. then i found this thread somewhere (cant find it now of course) about swapping the stock mic for something with a better capsule and adjusting the parametric EQ to match. been running a Heil PR-781 into it now with a custom EQ curve and honestly the difference is pretty significant. people keep commenting on the audio quality now which they definitely werent before also did the modification to expose the hidden menu items, not going to get into the legal gray area stuff but there are some TX filter adjustments buried in there that icom didnt surface in the normal menus and they make a real difference for SSB. if you know you know wondering if anyone else has gone down this rabbit hole with the 7300 or similar rigs, curious what mods have actually been worth the trouble vs the ones that were kind of meh