Andrew Martinez

Having trouble with my homebrew EFHW on 20m. Built a 49:1 transformer with FT240-43 core, 3 turns primary, 21 turns secondary. Wire is exactly 33 feet for 14.230 MHz. Without any counterpoise, SWR is off the charts on my RigExpert - antenna analyzer shows no resonance whatsoever. Add just 3 feet of wire as counterpoise and suddenly I get 1.2:1 SWR. I thought EFHWs didn't need counterpoises? What am I missing here? Running coax perpendicular to the wire for the first 20 feet to minimize coupling.

the math youre doing is fine, though cut a little long and trim to resonance — that formula is just a starting point and your local environment will affect the actual resonant length. always easier to trim than to add wire back on. on the balun question, honestly for a first dipole just wind yourself a simple choke balun, like 8-10 turns of the coax in a coil maybe 6 inches diameter at the feedpoint, or if you have some mix 31 ferrite toroids those work great. a proper 1:1 current balun is better long term but the coax choke will get you on the air and help keep RF off the feedline which is really what youre trying to prevent anyway. the voltage vs current balun debate gets religious real fast, dont go down that rabbit hole yet. inverted V is totally fine, probably better than a flat top at your height honestly since the lower angle of radiation on 40 can actually work in your favor. 8-10 feet on the ends isnt ideal but its workable. just make sure nothing is touching the wire and youll be fine. get it up and tune it, worst case you adjust.

I had the same problem my first time out. Ended up just holding the feedpoint in my hand and leaning against a rock with my KX2 in my lap. Not pretty but it worked. Sometimes you just gotta improvise up there

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).

yeah the single yagi EME thing is real but its almost entirely a JT65 or Q65 situation now. CW EME is still done but you basically need a serious array to hear anything that way, most of the old timers running CW have stacked yagis or dishes. for a suburban lot your best shot is probably 2 or 4 yagis on a decent az-el mount, which is still a real project but not completely out of reach. the path delay on 144 is roughly 2.5 seconds each way so you dont hear your own signal coming back in any meaningful realtime sense, and the doppler shift moves around depending on where the moon is in its orbit so you have to correct for that. the logging software handles most of it honestly, WSJT-X has the EME features built in and it will calculate the doppler offset for you if you feed it your coordinates and the time is accurate. realistically for your setup as-is, the ft-991a is fine but that 9 element yagi is going to be a tough ask even on JT65. people talk about minimum viable being around 100w and a longer yagi or small stack. the preamp situation matters a lot too, a good low noise preamp at the feedpoint makes a bigger difference than people expect. MGF1302 based stuff or a cavity preamp if you can find one. dont skimp there.

so ive been at this for about 8 months now and im kind of stuck. started learning morse back in the spring mostly just to challenge myself, got to 5wpm pretty quickly with the Koch method and JustLearnMorseCode software, felt great about it. but ever since i hit somewhere around 10-12wpm i feel like ive just been plateauing for the past couple months and i dont really know what to do differently. the problem i think is im still mentally counting dits and dahs on some letters even though i know i shouldnt be. like i hear a letter and sometimes i just know it instantly, but then other letters i catch myself going through the pattern in my head and by the time i figure it out ive missed the next two characters. its really frustrating because i can tell im so close to something clicking but its not clicking. ive been doing about 20-30 minutes a day with the LCWO site which i really like, and occasionally copying real qsos off the air but honestly most of those are still too fast for me to follow. does anyone have experience pushing through this specific wall? like not beginner to intermediate but more that intermediate plateau where the method stops mattering as much? would love to hear what actually moved the needle for you.

okay so the fast vs slow thing — the people telling you to learn it fast from the start are talking about something called the Koch method, and honestly they're not wrong. the idea is you learn each character at like 20wpm character speed even if the overall spacing is slow, so your brain learns to hear the sound as a whole thing instead of counting dits and dahs. if you count dits and dahs you will hit a wall around 10-12wpm and it becomes really hard to push through it later. been there, done that. look up LCWO dot net, its free and its basically the go-to for Koch method practice online. also the app Morse Mania is decent for mobile. the honest answer on time is it really varies, i know guys who could hold a basic ragchew in maybe 3 or 4 months of daily practice, and others who took a year. depends how consistent you are more than anything else. even 15 minutes a day beats two hours on the weekend.

Built a 40M center-fed dipole using 14 AWG THHN wire, calculated at 66.5 feet total using the 468 formula. When calculating the dipole length, 468 divided by 7.150 gives about 32.5 ft per side. Installed at 35 feet with 1:1 current balun and RG-213 feedline. Issue: SWR shows 1.5:1 at 7.150 MHz but jumps to 2.8:1 at 7.000 MHz and 3.2:1 at 7.300 MHz. Tried trimming 6 inches from each end but didn't improve band edge performance. Any thoughts on what's causing the narrow bandwidth? Should I consider different wire gauge or balun placement?

went through the same confusion when i was a tech lol. what helped me was just using the arrl's online frequency allocations page and filtering by license class. also dont sleep on 10m when the band is open, even with the tech privileges you can work a surprising amount of DX during good solar conditions. i upgraded to general pretty quick after passing tech mostly just so i didnt have to think about it anymore tbh

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?

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 going back and forth on this for a few months now. my main shack is at a rural property about 90 miles from where i actually live most of the time and ive got decent internet out there, maybe 25 down 8 up on a fixed wireless link which isnt perfect but workable. right now im running a basic teamviewer situation to control the rig directly but its clunky and the latency on the audio is driving me nuts. somebody at the club mentioned RemoteHams and i looked into it a bit, seems like they have their own protocol and client software. but then i also saw people talking about using an SDR backend — like running SDR-IQ or even an airspy as the receiver side and piping that through remotehams or some other internet linking stack. im not totally clear on how that fits together honestly. has anyone actually set this up and used it day to day? not just tested it on a sunday afternoon but like actually operated through it regularly. curious how well the audio holds up under marginal internet and whether the SDR approach gives you anything real over just using a conventional rig with a remote head or something like the IC-705 over wifi. also wondering how this compares to just doing EchoLink or IRLP linking which i know is more repeater oriented but theres overlap in the infrastructure thinking at least. anyway any real world experience appreciated

honestly i just picked one and stuck with it. tried juggling multiple logging programs for about six months and it was a constant source of anxiety wondering if everything was actually synced. ended up going all in on Log4OM and just accept that the contest interface isnt as slick as N1MM. for the three or four contests i actually care about per year its fine enough, i'm not a serious contester anyway so i dont need every millisecond optimized. the WSJT-X integration in Log4OM really is pretty solid though, that part i agree with. set it up once and forget it.

dont sleep on having the generator as a backup even if you go battery primary. i know the noise is annoying and yes fuel is a pain but ive been burned twice at actual emergency activations where something unexpected extended the op time way past what we planned and a dead battery stack in hour 11 of a 14 hour activation is not a fun situation. even just having the eu2200 in the truck as a fallback charges the batts while you run off them and you never have to actually start it if things go well also on the antenna question -- efhw all day for this kind of thing. buddipole is great when you need the flexibility but setup time matters in a real deployment and the efhw on a push up pole is just faster to get in the air. we actually retired our buddipole for most field work for exactly that reason

I'm kind of in a similar boat so watching this thread. One thing I did read somewhere was to think about how long you'd actually be deployed — like an overnight shelter activation is totally different from a week-long event. That changed how I was thinking about battery capacity at least.

i passed mine like three months ago and was in the exact same boat. what helped me was watching the KB6NU no nonsense technician guide videos on youtube, cant remember exactly who made them but if you search that youll find it. way easier to absorb than reading the manual for me personally. i still read the manual for some sections but the videos made the antenna stuff click way faster than anything else did.

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

Frequency management is huge. Be ruthlessly efficient in S&P - tune quickly between signals and never get drawn into non-contest conversations. When running, if your rate drops below 60/hour, immediately start looking for a better frequency or switch to S&P mode on multiplier bands.

yeah what he said. also just to add — i made this exact mistake when i first got my general and actually had someone call me on it during a QSO. was mortifying but honestly its how you learn. i had my dial sitting right on 7.300 wondering why i wasnt getting many responses and someone finally told me my upper sideband was walking all over the edge lol. moved down to 7.295 and things got better real quick.

had almost the exact same thing on my 897 a few years back, different radio i know but the architecture is pretty similar. turned out to be a cold solder joint on the LPF switching relay for that band. the relay itself was fine but one of its legs had a hairline crack in the solder that was just barely making contact. you could wiggle the board and the power would jump around. worth getting in there with a loupe and going over the relay connections on the 40m LPF section before you go chasing finals. reflowed it with a iron and it's been solid since. if you do get in there, check the band switching transistors too while you have it open, they're cheap and easy to swap and they do fail on these sometimes.

i just did this like 3 months ago so i can tell you from recent experience — hamstudy.org is the one everyone recommends and it really does work. i also watched some youtube videos when i hit topics i didnt get, there's a few channels that walk through the whole technician pool. the actual test was way less stressful than i expected, the VEs were super friendly and the room was quiet. one thing i wish someone told me is to read each question really carefully because some of them are worded to trip you up, like they ask for the WRONG answer or the exception. took me about 3 weeks of casual studying and passed with like 32/35 so it's totally doable

i just passed my tech last month so this is pretty fresh for me. i was in the exact same spot, kept looking at it and going nope too complicated. what finally worked for me was just doing like 20-30 practice questions a day on the hamstudy app, took me maybe 2.5 weeks before i was consistently scoring above 80% and then i just booked the test. the electrical theory stuff like ohms law and the frequency calculations looked scary but there's really only a handful of formulas and once you see them enough times they stick. the test itself was way less stressful than i expected tbh

yeah 10m has been giving me surprises too, caught ZS6 off the back of my yagi last Tuesday which was completely unexpected. the flux-to-actual-propagation lag is real and from what ive read and experienced its usually somewhere between 24-48 hours before you see the ionosphere really respond to a big SFI jump. the geomagnetic storm thing though is almost immediate in terms of killing the higher bands, especially anything above 20m, though sometimes 40 and 80 actually improve during moderate disturbances which is weird but it happens. for tools i really like watching the DX cluster combined with the WWV broadcasts. if you catch the 18 minute mark on any hour WWW actually gives you the solar flux, A index, and K index reading. old school but honestly still useful. pskreporter is also great for seeing where propagation actually is in real time based on what people are decoding on FT8.

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.