Jennifer Williams

went through this exact same thing last year. the 30 day window felt like forever honestly. i used ae7q.com to check availability and track the application status, way easier than trying to read the ULS interface which is kind of a nightmare. once you submit just check back occasionally and you'll see it move through the stages one thing i'll add — if the call you want is showing as cancelled or expired it might still be in a cooling off period before its actually available for vanity applications. i think its like 2 years after a license cancels before it opens up, though dont quote me on the exact timing, worth double checking that part

honestly for a lot that size a dipole between the house and that oak tree is probably the path of least resistance and it'll work really well. 35 feet on 40m is nothing to sneeze at, youre not going to have the super low angles a vertical can hit but for domestic and regional contacts it will smoke a ground mounted vertical with a mediocre radial field. the thing people forget about verticals is the radials — you really need a lot of them to get that low angle performance everyone talks about. like 16 minimum to start seeing good results, ideally 32 or more, and most people just dont lay that much wire. if you do go dipole just make sure you get it as high as you can, even a few extra feet matters at that frequency. and an inverted-v config off the peak of the house might actually get you a little higher than a flat top between the tree and the house depending on your roof line. worth measuring before you commit to anything.

i was in the same boat not that long ago honestly. what finally clicked for me was thinking of LoTW as the "serious" one for awards and eQSL as more of a fun/casual confirmation thing. i use both just because why not, takes like two seconds to upload to both after a session. one thing nobody told me when i started — you can use TQSL to upload your logs to LoTW and a lot of logging software can do it automatically which is nice. and yeah definitely check your certificate situation because mine wasnt working for weeks and i couldnt figure out why, turned out i had the wrong date range set on it or something like that

I had almost the exact same problem and for me it turned out the contact gap on my paddle was set way too wide so i was having to move my fingers further than necessary which meant everything fell apart when i sped up. took like 10 minutes to adjust and it made a noticeable difference. not saying thats definitely your issue but worth checking before you blame your brain lol

i literally just got my tech like two months ago so i can tell you what worked for me. i used ham study dot org almost exclusively, just did like 20 questions a day for a few weeks. the questions about electrical theory were the ones that tripped me up at first but once you see them enough times you just kind of memorize the patterns even if you dont fully get the math oh and find a local club that does testing sessions, the ARRL website has a thing to search for those. the one i went to was super low key and the volunteers were really nice, way less stressful than i expected

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and mostly just did local nets and some casual HF but this past winter i kind of fell down the rabbit hole of DX chasing and now i cant stop checking clublog every morning like some kind of addict anyway i'm trying to wrap my head around how DXCC actually works in practice. i understand the basic concept — 100 confirmed entities — but what i'm fuzzy on is the difference between what counts as a confirmed contact versus what i submit to the ARRL. like i have a bunch of QSOs in LoTW that show confirmed but i havent actually applied for the award yet. do those credits just sit there waiting or do i need to do something to activate them or whatever the right term is also someone at the club mentioned WAS and WAZ in the same breath and i wasnt totally sure if those are tracked separately or if there's some overlap. i know WAS is states and WAZ is zones but do they share the same log or is it totally different applications and fees sorry if these are obvious questions. i tried reading the ARRL award pages but honestly they're kind of dense and i learn better from people who've actually done it

I've been using a condenser mic with my 991A for contests and Gain staging becomes critical. Studio microphones often produce lower output than hand microphones, so you may need a quality microphone preamp to provide clean gain. You'll need to manage the levels carefully but the articulation improvement is worth it.

I went through this same thing like 8 months ago. my callsign showed up in ULS in about 4 days but i know some people wait longer, just depends. the vanity call process is pretty straightforward once you have your license, i ended up applying for one after about a month and got it no problem. just picked something short and easy to say phonetically, thats really all i cared about. good luck

so we have a county ARES drill coming up saturday and ive been going back and forth on whether to bring the honda eu2200i or just run off the lifepo4 battery bank i built last spring. the drill is supposed to be about 6 hours of actual operating time, mostly HF on 40 and 80 for nets plus some local 2m coordination, nothing crazy power-wise. the battery bank is 100ah at 12v with a good victron mppt hooked to a 100w panel but honestly with cloud cover forecast im not confident the panel keeps up. running the ic-7300 at like 50-60w output plus a laptop and a couple other accessories i figure im drawing maybe 15-20 amps steady which starts eating into that 100ah pretty quick if the solar isnt doing much. generator is reliable but its just more to haul and the noise is annoying at these things, the other guys always complain. thinking maybe i bring both and use the battery as primary with the generator as backup but then whats the point of the battery if i have to babysit two power sources all day. also the antenna situation is still not sorted — was going to throw up an EFHW for 40/80 but the site has some trees so maybe a vertical instead just to keep it simple. anyone done a similar setup and what did you actually end up wishing you had brought

so i finally got my direct conversion receiver working after about 3 weeks of fiddling with it on the bench. its based loosely on the NE602 design you see everywhere, 40 meters, nothing fancy. i wound my own toroid for the BFO and honestly that was the most frustrating part, kept getting the inductance wrong until i just sat down and counted turns more carefully. anyway its working, im hearing SSB stations pretty clearly, some noise floor issues i think are just my layout because i built it ugly style on a piece of copper clad and the ground plane situation is kind of a mess. my question is about the audio stage — im running an LM386 after the 602 and there's this persistent hiss that gets worse when i turn up the gain pin. i added the cap between pins 1 and 8 like every schematic shows but its still pretty hissy. is that just the nature of the LM386 or am i doing something wrong with the input impedance matching? i feel like the 602 output into the 386 input might not be ideal but i dont really know what im looking for here. also the image rejection is pretty bad obviously since its DC but wondering if anyone has added a simple front end filter to one of these and if its worth the effort at this stage or if i should just live with it for now

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now. I have an old Yaesu G-450A rotator that works fine mechanically but the controller unit is pretty beat up, the meter is off and one of the pots is flaky. instead of hunting down a replacement controller or sending it out i started thinking about just building something around an arduino and a couple of motor driver boards. the basic idea would be to use an arduino mega, read the azimuth pot through the ADC, drive the motor through an H-bridge (was thinking the IBT-2 module, it handles enough current), and then either run a small LCD for local display or just do everything over serial and use a python script on a raspberry pi zero to handle the actual interface and maybe tie it into hamlib or rotctld so i can control it from WSJT-X or whatever. has anyone actually done this end to end? i see a lot of half finished projects online where guys build the arduino part and then sort of trail off before integrating it with anything useful. the rotctld piece is what im least sure about, not totally clear on how to set up a virtual rotator interface that software will actually talk to properly. any gotchas i should know about before i sink a weekend into this

oh man this brings back memories. i went through the exact same wall around 5-7wpm and it felt like i'd never get past it. the thing that finally clicked for me was stopping writing altogether and just listening. like completely put the pencil down for a while. your brain starts to panic when you fall behind writing and then you miss the next character and it snowballs. just let the sounds wash over you without trying to capture every single one. the other thing and i cant stress this enough — practice at speeds faster than you think you can copy. set LCWO to like 15 or 18wpm character speed even when youre still doing 5wpm effective speed. this is the farnsworth method and it trains your ear to hear the characters as sounds not as counted dots and dashes. if you learn at slow character speed youll have to relearn everything later, trust me i made that mistake and it cost me months. 20wpm is definitely achievable, took me about 18 months of inconsistent practice but the guys who are disciplined about it get there faster. just dont give up when you plateau, those plateaus are real but they do break eventually

are you digipeating through a node that actually supports messaging or just position beacons? some of the older igates in certain areas are rx-only and wont forward messages back down from the internet to RF. so your outbound message gets to aprs-is fine but the ACK from the other station or the IS network never makes it back to you over the air. thats been a problem in my area for years, half the digis are ancient and barely maintained.

our club just posted something on the facebook page about the swap meet, looks like its back on for late april but the date wasnt confirmed yet. i think theyre waiting to hear back on the venue, same place they did it two years ago had some kind of scheduling conflict. worth checking if your club has a facebook or a reflector because thats usually where the last minute stuff gets posted as for hamvention yeah its a whole thing, i went last year for the first time and honestly the flea market is really the best part especially early morning first day. bring cash and get there when they open the gates, stuff moves fast

yeah my first one was a total mess, forgot my coax adapter and had to jury rig something with electrical tape which absolutely did not work. ended up just doing CW on a whip which honestly saved me. but thats kind of the fun of it right, you figure out what you actually need pretty fast once youre up there and cant just grab something off the shelf the battery thing is real though. i now carry a small 3ah lipo just for peace of mind and it weighs almost nothing. worth it

oh man yes the plateau is totally real and honestly kind of discouraging when youre in the middle of it. i was stuck around 13wpm for like three months. what finally clicked for me was just forcing myself to copy at 18 or 20wpm even when i missed like half of it. the brain kind of catches up eventually if you push it. the key thing someone told me that actually helped — stop trying to write down every letter. just listen and let it wash over you for a few minutes a day. sounds counterintuitive but your brain starts processing it more as sound patterns instead of individual letters and that's when the speed starts to come. also honestly just get on the air. like actually make contacts. the realness of it, knowing theres a person on the other end, does something that practice software just cant replicate. i used to call CQ on 40m around 12wpm and people were always patient with me. still are when i slip up lol

Try transmitting ("Tune" in WSJT-X) and monitor your radio's power and ALC (automatic level control) display. Adjust playback level in control panel to where transmit power reaches the target value and before the ALC starts attenuating the signal. Watch that ALC meter like a hawk!

yeah that freeze moment you described is super common and honestly the whole point of doing the exercises in the first place. i remember my first real activation (not even a drill, actual flooding event) and i had practiced plenty but the moment the EC handed me a formal message to relay i blanked on the ICS-213 format for like a solid minute. not great when people are waiting. what helped me most was honestly just doing weekly nets consistently. not just checking in, but volunteering for net control whenever i could. handling traffic on the NTS nets is also really good practice because you're dealing with formal message format under a little bit of time pressure. its not the same as a disaster scenario obviously but the reps add up. the other thing i do is every few months i just go sit in my car with my go-kit and pretend i drove somewhere and need to set up from scratch. no wifi, no looking stuff up, just me and the radio. you find out real fast what you actually know versus what you think you know.

honestly the General isn't that bad if you just grind through the question pool. i was in the same boat, not a math guy at all, and the way i handled the theory questions was just memorize the answers without fully understanding them. not the most educational approach i know but it got me through. the actual operating is where you start to pick it up anyway. as for bands you get a big chunk of 40m, 20m, 15m, 10m among others, enough to keep you busy for years. 40m at night is where i'd start honestly, you can work stations all over the place even with a modest antenna. just keep doing HamStudy every day for like 2-3 weeks and you'll be fine

the arrow antenna is solid for this, good choice. one thing i didnt see you mention is are you doing full duplex or are you transmitting and then switching to receive to hear yourself? if youre not doing full duplex that makes it way harder because you literally cant hear yourself while youre transmitting to correct in real time. the 818 can do it but you need two radios or a rig that supports split operation properly for sat work, a lot of guys use like an old VX-7R or something for the uplink and a separate receiver for downlink. just something to think about if thats the issue

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and finally got my TM-D710G set up as a full digi/igate combo at my QTH. the radio is doing what i think is the right thing, i can see my own packets on the display and aprs.fi shows my station occasionally but its really inconsistent. like sometimes ill show up every 10 minutes like expected, other times i disappear for 45 min or more. the path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard for a fixed station but maybe thats wrong? im in a somewhat rural area, nearest igate i know of is maybe 30 miles out. my antenna is a comet GP-3 at about 25 feet, feeding into the TNC built into the radio. the simplex frequency is 144.390 obviously. what i cant figure out is whether this is an RF problem, a path problem, or something with direwolf on the igate side — i set up direwolf on a pi last week and pointed it at NOAM. the digi side seems to be working because i can see other stations getting relayed through me. its just my own beacon thats acting weird.

11 QSOs is a solid first activation honestly, dont stress it. the fence post thing sounds about right, i always try to keep my wire at least 10 feet from anything metal if i can help it. and yeah the curious bystanders are just part of it, ive had whole crowds gather at busy parks. one time a ranger came over and i thought i was in trouble but he just wanted to know what frequency the weather satellites use lol for 20m you might try tweaking your counterpoise situation, sometimes just moving it a few feet makes a huge difference with an EFHW. what length counterpoise you running?

I'm setting up digital modes for the first time and want to make sure I understand the new bandwidth limitations that went into effect January 2024. The FCC replaced the old baud rate limits with a 2.8 kHz bandwidth limit on many HF bands, but I'm confused about what this means practically. Can someone break down the key steps to ensure my digital operation stays within Part 97 compliance? Also, what are the best tools or methods to verify my signal bandwidth before transmitting?

ok so i just passed my general exam last week (finally) and im starting to look into getting a vanity callsign instead of the sequential one i got assigned. the one i got is fine i guess but its kind of long and i had my eye on a 1x2 format that belonged to a silent key in my area. i went down a rabbit hole on the FCC ULS website and now im more confused than when i started. from what i can tell theres like a window period after someone becomes a silent key before their call gets released into the vanity pool? i think its 2 years but someone on another site said something different. and then do you just apply through the FCC directly or is there a third party thing you use. i saw mentions of something called AE7Q and lotw being involved somehow but i cant tell if those are required or just helpful. also does it matter what class license you have for which callsigns you can apply for. like can i as a general go after a 1x2 or is that only for extras. genuinely have no idea how any of this works and the FCC instructions are written like stereo instructions from 1987.

haha yeah my first activation i forgot my log sheet AND my pen. ended up logging in the notes app on my phone which was fine but felt wrong somehow. 12 contacts is solid for a first run though, especially with a janky counterpoise situation. the KX2 tuner is pretty forgiving from what ive heard. you'll get a system down after a few of these, i just keep a bag semi-permanently packed now so i dont have to think about it each time.