Carol White

haha i did the exact same thing with the lurking on the repeater before actually transmitting, sat there for weeks just listening. my first contact i forgot to give my callsign at the end and the other guy had to remind me, was pretty embarasing. gets easier fast though

yeah that sounds like a grounding issue to me, almost certain. on my first BITX-ish build i had almost exactly the same thing and it was because the audio ground and the RF ground were sharing a long trace back to the supply. any AC on the supply rail gets into everything when you do it that way. what i ended up doing was running a dedicated ground bus in heavy gauge wire straight back to the main filter cap, kept audio completely separate from the RF side. the muddy sound went away almost immediately after i did that. also worth checking if your mic preamp has enough rejection of RF getting back into it — sometimes the transmitter couples back into the preamp and you get this weird feedback loop that shows up exactly how you described. a small bypass cap right at the preamp output before it hits the modulator can help a lot with that.

6-meter band serves as a "canary in the coal mine" for Sporadic E - if Es clouds are refracting 6m signals, FM band openings may be imminent. I monitor both 50.125 and the FM broadcast band when chasing Es. Quick bursts are the name of the game!

Make sure you understand the commitment before applying. Many sysops support their communities as part of a local emergency network... Our sysops often remark that their work as a Winlink RMS gateway station is the most deeply rewarding thing they do in amateur radio. It's not just about setting it up - reliable 24/7 operation is expected once you're authorized.

honestly i just use them whenever i think theres any chance someone might mishear me. better to spend two extra seconds than have a busted log entry. on the repeater i usually skip them unless somethings going on with the signal but on HF i pretty much always phonetic my call at least once in the exchange

Just got my Tech license three weeks ago and received the email from the FCC about paying the $35 fee for my callsign. The fee applies to new licenses and the FCC sends you an email with a link to the payment system. Question is - do I have to pay this immediately or can I wait? Also heard something about 10 days but not sure if that's just for vanity calls. I'm happy with my assigned sequential call but want to make sure I don't lose it! Also wondering - if I want to apply for a vanity later, will I have to pay another $35 on top of this initial fee? There's now a $35 charge for amateur vanity applications but unclear if that's separate from the initial license fee.

pi zero for a web interface isnt really overcomplicating it tbh, thats basically what mine does and it took maybe a weekend to get something usable running. flask is pretty lightweight and you can have a simple bearing input form going in like 50 lines of python. the pi talks to an arduino over serial which actually handles all the real time motor control stuff because i didnt want to deal with latency issues from linux on the control loop side. that two board approach sounds redundant but it works really cleanly, pi handles the UI and logging, arduino handles the hardware. worth thinking about if you go that route

so i picked up the ARRL technician manual a few weeks ago and ive been going through it but honestly im kind of lost on where to even start. theres so much in there and some of it doesnt seem relevant to what i actually want to do which is just get on 2m and maybe HF someday. a guy at my local club told me to just memorize the question pool and not worry about understanding everything but that feels wrong? like i want to actually know what im doing out there. anyway is the ARRL book even the best way to go or is there something else people use. ive seen ham study dot com mentioned a few times but i dont know if thats enough on its own or if you still need the book

yeah what he said about lcwo is good but also just listen to a lot of actual on-air cw even before you can copy it, like tune around 40m in the evenings and just let it wash over you. sounds weird but it helps your brain get used to the rhythm of real operators which is different from perfectly timed computer generated stuff. also morse code ninja on youtube has some really good practice videos organized by word frequency which i found way more useful than random letter drills once i got past the basics

our club does a swap meet every april, nothing like hamvention obviously but we usually get 40-50 people and theres always decent stuff on the tables. if youre in the midwest midwest area check your local arrl section website they list the smaller regional ones and honestly sometimes those are better deals because the big dealers dont bother coming and its just hams selling their own junk. i got my antenna tuner at one for $15