Rachel Johnson

so ive been on HF for about 8 years now and done a fair bit of VHF contesting, mostly 2m and 6m, and the EME thing has always been in the back of my mind as like the ultimate challenge. i finally started reading more seriously about it and honestly i feel like im looking at a completely different hobby at this point. im on 2m, running a single 9 element yagi right now which i know is basically nothing for EME but i figured id ask what the realistic minimum looks like these days. i keep reading about people doing it with 4 yagis and a decent preamp but then other people say youre gonna sit there hearing nothing for hours. is JT65B still the go-to mode or has that shifted, i see some mention of Q65 now and im not totally sure what the difference means practically. also the az/el rotator situation is kind of daunting. my current setup is az only and i know i need to add elevation but the mast situation at my house is gonna make that a real project. anyone done EME with like a marginal station and actually made contacts, or is it basically just the big gun guys working each other most of the time

passed my general like 6 weeks ago coming from tech same as you and honestly just use HamStudy, the app is free and it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong which is super helpful. took me maybe 2 weeks. the electrical stuff tripped me up at first but you start to see patterns in how they ask the questions. still working on the HF side myself lol so cant help much there but everyone in my club said 40m is the best band to start on for actually hearing people

congrats on getting it on the air, first scratch built receiver is a big deal. the image problem with a single conversion 455kHz IF is pretty much expected, your image is going to be 910kHz away from whatever youre tuned to and with no preselector the front end is just letting everything in. a simple LC bandpass filter ahead of the mixer will make a huge difference, doesnt have to be super tight just enough to knock down the image frequencies. some guys use a double tuned circuit for that, wound on T50-2 cores or similar, you can find designs all over the ARRL handbook or just look up W7ZOI's stuff, he has some really practical preselector designs that arent overly complicated. as for the LM386, yeah its kind of notorious for being buzzy. decoupling is usually the issue, make sure you have a cap from pin 7 to ground and also try beefing up the supply decoupling right at the chip. a 10uF in parallel with a 0.1uF right at the Vcc pin helps a lot. some people also put a zobel network on the output. it wont make it a hi-fi chip but it can calm it down considerably.

Looking at upgrading from my aging TH-D7A for better APRS functionality. The new TH-D75A adds USB-C charging/data interface and digipeating capability, plus simultaneous reception of 2 D-STAR signals compared to the D74. The FT-5DR is significantly cheaper but wondering about APRS modem performance. For serious APRS work including emergency communications, which would you choose? Both have integrated GPS and TNC but curious about real-world decode sensitivity differences.