Andrew Martinez

so ive been chasing DX pretty seriously for the past couple years now and the pileup thing is something i keep going back and forth on in my head. like i've read all the usual advice — listen before you transmit, work split, tail-end, whatever — but honestly in practice it feels like a lot of it comes down to timing and a little bit of luck and nobody really wants to admit that. what i've found that actually seems to help me is really locking in on the DX station's rhythm. like some ops have a very predictable pattern of where they're listening on the split, they'll work someone on 5 up, then drift to 7 up, kind of sweep around. if you can figure that out in about 10-15 QSOs of just listening you can anticipate where they're going to listen next and be sitting there already. doesnt always work but my rate goes way up when i do this vs just blasting away randomly across the split. also the power thing — i run an amp but i've noticed that being slightly louder than the pack isn't always the answer, sometimes the DX op will actually pull a weaker signal out because it stands out from the mush. had that happen on a recent one where i think ZL9 or some south pacific thing was active and i was running 500w instead of the full legal and got through way faster than the night before at full power. could be coincidence. curious what other folks have found. especially on 40m where the pileups get absolutely brutal at my location (upper midwest, lots of EU stations wiping me out on the low end).

so this has been bugging me for a couple weeks now. my 7300 is running great on pretty much every band except 20m where it seems to top out around 18-22 watts no matter what i do with the power slider. all other bands hit close to 100w no problem. ALC looks normal, RF gain is where it should be, tried different antennas and feedlines in case it was some weird reflection thing causing the radio to pull back but same result. i did a factory reset thinking maybe some setting got borked but nothing changed. the radio doesnt throw any error codes and the SWR on 20m is fine, like 1.3:1 on my dipole. temps look normal too, no thermal shutdowns or anything like that. its not the antenna side, i can run another radio on the same feedline and get normal output. started looking at the finals but before i crack anything open i wanted to see if anyone has seen this specific thing where its just one band thats affected. feels more like a driver stage or a filter issue to me but im not an RF tech so take that with a grain of salt. anyone dealt with this?

so ive been sitting on this idea for a while now and finally starting to mess around with it. basically i have 4 antennas out back — a 40m dipole, a 6m yagi, a 2m/70cm vertical and a longwire i use for 80m mostly — and im tired of going out to the shack and manually flipping the coax switches every time i want to change bands. its not even that far but in winter its a pain and i end up just not switching and running everything on one antenna which is obviously not ideal. anyway i picked up an arduino mega off amazon a few months ago and it just been sitting in a drawer. figured i might finally have a reason to use it. my rough idea is to wire up some relays to the arduino and then have it talk to the radio somehow — either via CAT control reading the band data or just a simple button panel i build myself. the raspberry pi angle is interesting too because i could run flrig or something on a pi zero and have the band switching happen automatically when i change frequencies. not sure if thats overcomplicating it though. has anyone actually done something like this or similar? im pretty comfortable soldering and ive done some basic arduino sketches before (mostly LED stuff lol) so im not starting from absolute zero but relay wiring and RF switching is new territory for me. main thing im worried about is RF getting into the arduino and causing weird behavior or just frying it.

i did this exact same thing like 8 months ago, went from tech to general. the propagation questions tripped me up more than the math honestly, like understanding why certain bands work better at different times of day and the whole ionosphere stuff. once i watched a couple youtube videos about how skywave propagation works it clicked and those questions got a lot easier. also the license privileges section is worth knowing cold because some of those questions are weirdly specific about which part of which band you can use which mode on. just spend an hour with the band plan and it starts to make more sense.

so ive been running winlink for about 6 months now mostly on 40m and noticed something weird. sometimes the closest RMS gateway to me shows up green in the channel selection but when i try to connect it just times out or gives really slow throughput. then i'll try one thats like 200 miles further away and boom connects right up and moves mail fast is this just propagation being weird or are some gateways just better than others? i mean i get that closer isnt always better with HF but seems like the winlink software should be smarter about this. anyone else notice this or am i doing something wrong with my setup