Jessica Taylor

yeah the relay spike thing is a classic headache with inductive loads. what youre seeing is back-EMF from the rotator motor kicking back through the relay contacts into your logic. a flyback diode across the coil of the relay itself helps more than a snubber in a lot of cases — make sure youre suppressing on the coil side not just the contact side. i went through something similar with a prop pitch motor setup years ago. for the SSR route it can work but honestly i just ended up using a small motor driver board, one of those L298N modules, way cleaner switching and you can do soft start which is nice for the rotator bearings. as for the rotctld stuff, i run it over USB with a virtual COM port and it works fine, never bothered with a level shifter. just set the baud rate to match in gpredict and it usually finds it. the hamlib rotator model for the arduino side, there are a few sketches floating around on github that already implement the protocol so you dont have to write it from scratch.

yeah the public node thing — you only share your station if you explicitly opt into that. its not like it just opens up to randos by default, you have to register it and set permissions. i looked into doing that for our club station but we decided against it mostly because nobody wanted to deal with the liability questions if someone did something dumb with our call sign remotely. for your use case though, 90 miles, your own equipment, sounds like it should work fine. i will say the client software on windows has been pretty solid in my experience but i tried the mac client once and that was kind of a mess, might be better now i havent checked in a while. if your main goal is contesting id probably also look at what N1MM does with remote stuff, theres some integration options there that might matter to you depending on how you log.

the fan mod is legit one of the best bang for buck things you can do on those radios. i did something similar on my 897D years ago. the thermal design on the stock units is just kind of lazy, they clearly just spec'd whatever was cheapest. for other mods worth doing — if you're doing a lot of digital modes, some people replace the electrolytic caps on the audio board, especially if the radio has some age on it. mine had a slight hum issue on TX audio that turned out to be a cap starting to go. fixed it and cleaned everything up nicely. not a sexy mod but useful if you notice any audio weirdness. also worth checking is the TX EQ settings in the menu if you havent already, not a hardware mod obviously but the default voice audio on those is pretty nasal and spending 10 minutes tweaking it makes a real difference on SSB. i know thats not really what you asked but figured i'd mention it

yeah that valley problem is real and pretty common honestly. the WIDE1-1 part of your path is specifically meant for fill-in digis so if you put one up on a hill with line of sight into the valley that should help a lot. before doing anything though i'd pull up the RF range analysis on aprsdirect.com or just look at what stations are hearing you on aprs.fi — there's a heard-by tab or something like that which shows you which digis are actually picking up your packets and from where. the other thing is your beacon rate matters. if youre only beaconing every few minutes and driving through a marginal coverage area you might just be between beacons when youre in the good spot and then back in the hole by the time it fires again. smartbeaconing helps a lot with this if your radio supports it, the D710 definitely does so worth checking if you have that configured. i run mine pretty aggressive on the cornering settings because i do a lot of twisty roads.

yeah terrain is terrain, no collinear is going to fix a ridge line. vertical gain just compresses your radiation pattern toward the horizon but if the path is blocked its blocked, you're not bending RF around a hill with a GP-9. the yagi is the right call here honestly. you could do a fixed 5el M2 or even a homebrew tape measure yagi just to test the path first before you commit to anything permanent. point it at that repeater and see what actually happens, might surprise you how much difference even a modest beam makes vs your omni. if you really want both options there's nothing stopping you from running a duplexer or a simple coax switch and keeping the X50A up there too, switch to the yagi when you want that specific repeater. bit of extra coax and a $20 switch and you've got both worlds.

so ive been putting together a go-kit type setup for our ARES group and i keep going back and forth on the power side of things. right now i've got a 100ah lithium running a 857D and it works fine for a few hours but if we're talking a 24+ hour activation that battery just isn't gonna cut it on its own, especially if other people are pulling from the same source for laptops and whatnot. been looking at the honda eu2200i vs a predator 2000 from harbor freight. i know the honda has a better rep but the price difference is pretty significant and honestly for ARES work we're not running anything that sensitive are we. the RFI from cheaper inverter gennys has been a concern someone brought up at a meeting but i've never actually tested it myself. has anyone run a predator or similar next to an HF setup and noticed noise issues or is that kind of overblown also the antenna situation — im currently using a buddipole which i actually like for VHF/UHF stuff but for HF it's kind of a pain to tune and i feel like i spend more time messing with it than actually operating. thinking about just bringing an EFHW with a 9:1 unun and throwing it up in whatever tree or structure is around. is that a reasonable approach for field work or am i giving up too much compared to a resonant antenna

i just use N1MM for everything during contest season and honestly stopped worrying about it. the learning curve felt steep at first but once you get your macro files set up for your common exchange types it becomes pretty automatic. the bandmap pulls from the telnet cluster and its fast Log4OM is where all my contacts live permanently though, so yeah i do the ADIF export/import thing after every contest. takes like two minutes

I use both but honestly LoTW is the gold standard if you care about DXCC or any ARRL awards. eQSL is nice because its super easy to upload and you get those fancy card images, but ARRL doesnt accept eQSL confirmations for awards. Most serious DXers use LoTW almost exclusively. That said, eQSL is free and really simple to get started with so maybe try that first to get your feet wet.

made that exact jump about two years ago, went from rtl with a ham-it-up upconverter to an RSP1A and yeah it was noticeable, not like night and day dramatic but definitely cleaner on crowded bands. the dynamic range improvement is real, strong broadcast stations were wiping out chunks of 40m on the rtl setup and that mostly went away. SDR# works fine with it through the SDRplay plugin but honestly i switched to SDR++ and havent looked back, the noise floor visualization alone is worth it. that said if youre mainly doing aircraft and casual shortwave the RTL with a decent upconverter isnt bad and you can always sell the dongle after. the RSP1A is just a more complete tool, less fiddling to get it working reasonably well on HF.

ha i did the same thing with my callsign for weeks. still mess it up sometimes when im tired. congrats on passing tho, what repeater are you on?

oh man I went down this rabbit hole last year lol. I ended up signing up for all three just to cover my bases — LoTW for the DXCC credits, eQSL because a few guys I worked specifically asked for it, and I finally got cards made because I worked a DXpedition to a rare entity and they only confirmed via bureau or direct mail. the card bureau through the ARRL is pretty slow btw, like we're talking months sometimes, but it's cheap if you're not in a rush. direct mailing is faster but you gotta include return postage or an IRC if it's a DX station overseas. some ops are really picky about getting a card even if LoTW matches up and I kind of get it, theres something nice about having a physical card from a contact in like Mozambique or wherever sitting in a box. anyway the short version is LoTW first, get cards eventually, eQSL if someone specifically wants it. thats kinda the order id prioritize it

dont get discouraged, 12 wpm is totally normal when youre starting out. i'd actually suggest slowing the keyer down even more and just working on clean sending rather than speed. speed comes by itself if your muscle memory is clean. i spent two months doing nothing but sending random letter groups at 8 wpm before i touched anything on the air and when i finally did it clicked pretty fast. also just as a side note — have you tried just copying code yet? like listening practice? sometimes getting your ear trained actually helps your sending too, kinda hard to explain but it just syncs something up in your brain i think

so i picked up the ARRL technician manual like two weeks ago and honestly its a little overwhelming. theres so much in there about ohms law and propagation and i dont even know what half of it is relevant to the actual test. a guy at the radio club told me to just use the question pool and memorize it but that feels like cheating somehow? like i want to actually understand the material but i also just want to pass the test and then learn more later. is the question pool method actually how most people do it or am i overthinking this also is the hamstudy.org site any good i heard someone mention it but havent checked it out yet

so i've been messing around with a simple direct conversion rx for 40m for the past few weeks and i finally got it to a point where im actually receiving stations on it, thought id share some thoughts for anyone thinking about going down this road started with the NE602 based design from the ARRL handbook, pretty standard stuff. the BFO/VFO combo using the onboard oscillator in the 602 works okay but man is it sensitive to hand capacitance, i ended up shielding the whole front end in a little tin box i cut from an altoids tin and that helped a lot more than i expected honestly audio side is just an LM386 with the gain cap on pins 1 and 8, nothing fancy. getting some hum that im still chasing down, probably a grounding issue or maybe the layout — i just used ugly construction on a piece of copper clad so the ground plane situation is a little chaotic in spots. pulls in SSB just fine though, heard a few dx stations last night which felt like a win considering this thing cost maybe 8 bucks in parts anybody else dealt with persistent 60hz hum on the LM386 stage? wondering if its worth just swapping to a TDA2822 or something

Tuesday nights our local club does a net on 2m but its pretty short, maybe 20 mins tops. after that i usually end up doing the same thing on HF. 40 or 80 depending on the noise floor at my place. 80 gets rough this time of year tho

so ive been studying code for about 4 months now and im decent at copying at around 13-15 wpm with the software but when i actually try to send with a paddle its just awful. like i know what i want to send but my hand doesnt cooperate at all. im using one of those cheap amazon paddles that came with my radio bundle and i wonder if thats part of the problem or if its just me needing more practice. the keyer in my IC-7300 has the iambic modes A and B and honestly i dont even know which one im supposed to use. ive just left it on whatever the default was. also my dit/dah ratio feels off somehow but i cant tell if thats a settings thing or just my terrible technique. anyone been through this and have advice? i really want to get on the air for CW contacts before the end of the year and right now i feel pretty hopeless about it

so ive been chasing VP6R for basically three days straight whenever i have time between work and the family stuff and i finally got them in the log last night around 0200z. figured id share what actually worked since i tried a lot of different things and most of them didnt do anything. first two days i was just doing what everyone does — calling on the DX station's frequency like an idiot (yeah i know, i know, listen to where theyre actually listening first). once i figured out their split was wandering around 5 to 10 up it got a little better but i still wasnt cutting through. my signal is nothing special, K3 running about 100w into a 3 element yagi at maybe 35 feet so not exactly a superstation. what actually seemed to help was timing. i stopped calling right when they came back from a QSO — everyone piles on in that first second. started waiting maybe half a beat, like just a fraction longer than the crowd, and suddenly i was hitting gaps that werent there before. also started tail-ending which i know some people hate but it genuinely works if you do it cleanly without stomping the previous contact. also switched from giving my full callsign every time to just the suffix when the pileup was really dense. heard the op working by suffix only so i just threw out the last two letters and boom, got a partial. built on that exchange over a couple calls and got in the log. whole thing felt almost anticlimactic after three days of trying honestly. curious what techniques other people use, especially if youre running modest power like me. also does anyone have thoughts on using a second radio to monitor the DX while transmitting on a different band? been thinking about that for a while but havent tried it yet.

oh man the rocky summit antenna problem is real, ive literaly just started tying the far end of my wire to my trekking pole and jamming the pole between some rocks. its janky but it works well enough. also a 9:1 unun can help clean up the SWR weirdness if the wire length isnt ideal. i picked up a cheap one and its made a big difference. DX on your first activation though, thats awesome. i've done maybe a dozen activations now and still get excited when i get a european in the log.

the IRF510 can be really picky about gate drive. if your 2N2222 driver isnt swinging the gate hard enough or fast enough you lose a ton of efficiency because the FET spends too much time in the linear region during switching. check what your gate waveform actually looks like, not just the voltage level but the rise and fall times. if its rounding off a lot thats where your watts are going, mostly as heat in the FET. also worth double checking your LPF, a miscounted toroid wont just hurt harmonics it can screw with your impedance match back to the drain and youll bleed power that way too. i built a similar rig a while back and was short by like half a watt just from having the inductance a bit low on one of the filter inductors. wound up measuring it with an LC meter and sure enough i was off by about 15%.

This is gold! 4.1 Check The Obvious First. 4.2 Do Not Make Modifications. 4.3 The Power Supply Section. I always tell new hams to check power supply first - saves hours of chasing phantom RF problems that turn out to be voltage regulation issues.

the hum getting worse when you crank the gain on the 386 is pretty much expected, that chip picks up everything. thing i found that helped a lot was bypassing the supply rail really aggressively right at the chip — like a 100uf electrolytic and a 0.1uf ceramic both physically as close to the pins as you can get them. also if youre running it off anything wall wart related just switch to a battery for testing first just to rule that out, you might be surprised. NE602 gets a bad rap but honestly for a first receiver its totally fine, the sensitivity on 40 is more than enough for what you need. the noise figure isnt great but if youre not chasing weak signal stuff it wont matter. did you put any filtering between the 602 output and the 386 input? a simple LC lowpass helps a ton with images bleeding through into the audio range.

yeah this trips up basically everyone at first, dont worry about it. the Q codes originally came from maritime and commercial radio back before voice was common, so operators could send short codes over morse instead of spelling everything out. most of the common ones you'll hear on voice are QSL which just means acknowledged or confirmed, like when someone says QSL my signal report that just means got it, copy. QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is natural static and noise, QSB means your signal is fading in and out, QRZ is who is calling me or sometimes used at end of a transmission to mean go ahead. QSO is just a contact or conversation. there are honestly dozens of them and you wont use most of them in everyday conversation but those are the ones that come up constantly. the ARRL website has a full list, just search Q codes and youll find it. as for 73 that is best regards yeah, and 88 means love and kisses which is usually only used between close friends or couples on the air, some people have opinions about when its appropriate to use that one lol. just keep listening and youll pick it up faster than you think

so ive been doing single op single radio for a few years now and my rates are honestly plateauing. during the bigger contests like CQWW and SS i feel like im leaving a lot of points on the table especially during the slower parts of the run where the pile just kind of dies and you're sitting there waiting. a buddy of mine who does SO2R swears it changed everything for him but every time i ask him to actually explain the workflow he kind of hand-waves through it and says 'youll get it once you try it' so my actual question is — is the investment worth it before you really have a solid single-radio strategy locked down? like i can hold a run frequency, i know when to S&P vs run, i understand when to flip bands during grayline etc. but my rate discipline is still pretty inconsistent. i'm sitting here wondering if SO2R would actually force better habits or just add chaos currently running an IC-7300 as my main rig, have an old FT-450D sitting in the corner doing nothing. interlock situation is gonna be a project since i don't have separate antennas for everything yet, just a tribander and a 40m dipole. anyway curious if anyone has actually gone through this transition and what the learning curve looked like operationally not just technically

the tram 1185 is what i have and its fine, nothing special but nothing wrong with it either. if you want to geek out on this stuff look up the radiation pattern data before buying, some manufacturers publish it some dont. the elevated takeoff angle issue with stacked collinears is real but in practice unless youre doing a lot of mountainous driving or trying to hit a hilltop repeater from a valley it usually doesnt bite you. one thing i'd add — do the NMO mount properly with a good lip seal or grommet and use self-amalgamating tape over the coax entry point inside. ive seen guys do a clean install and then get water intrusion two winters later because they skipped that step.

yeah i went through this same thing a few months ago when i started getting into DX. ended up just bookmarking like three different sites and honestly i rotate between them depending on my mood lol. one thing i'll say is the cluster data is all kind of coming from the same network of nodes anyway so the spots themselves aren't that different, its more about which interface you like looking at. i did find an android app called VK logger or something similar, i forget the exact name, that shows live spots and lets you tap on a callsign to pull up QRZ info which is pretty handy when youre just casually watching from the couch. not gonna replace sitting at the rig but its nice for keeping an eye on things