Mark Taylor

ok so i passed my general exam about 3 months ago and ive been mostly just listening on HF but i want to start transmitting more. my problem is i keep reading part 97 and it just... doesn't click for me. like i understand the basic band plan stuff but when it gets into the privileges for general vs extra i get lost. specifically i'm trying to figure out if i can use 40m phone and what portion exactly. i looked at the arrl chart and it shows a segment but then i read somewhere that general class cant use the whole thing and i just want to make sure im not gonna key up somewhere i shouldn't be. also is there anything else i should know about like rules that are easy to accidentally break that nobody really warns you about? station identification is one i've been careful about but i feel like there's stuff i'm missing

yeah the JS8Call activity thing is a real problem and its kind of a chicken and egg situation. not enough people on so others dont bother checking. what i've found is 14.078 USB on 20m has the most activity, usually late afternoon into evening eastern time at least for north america. there's also a loose group that does a morning net on 40m, 7.078 i think but dont quote me on that. the conversational angle is exactly right though. FT8 is a contact machine, i can work 80 countries in a weekend but i couldnt tell you a single thing about any of those operators. JS8Call i've actually had extended chats with a guy in scotland and swapped antenna info and everything. totally different vibe. the store and forward message thing is underrated too, kind of like a slow packet radio system which is cool in its own nerdy way. FT4 is even more robotic than FT8 if that helps put it in perspective, purely contest exchange stuff. for weak signal rag chewing JS8Call really is the best option right now just gotta find when people are actually on

so ive been at this for about 8 months now and im stuck. like really stuck. i can copy at maybe 7-8wpm on a good day if the sending is clean and the characters are ones i know well but anything faster than that and my brain just turns to mush. i started with the Koch method using the LCWO website and got through all the characters pretty quick actually, got up to about 5wpm no problem. but now it feels like ive hit a wall and i cant figure out if im practicing wrong or just not practicing enough or what. i do maybe 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes more on weekends. i try to copy QSOs off the air when i can but honestly most of what i hear is either too fast or people using abbreviations i dont recognize yet. a buddy of mine who got his extra back in like 1987 keeps telling me to just increase the character speed and leave the word spacing slow (farnsworth method i think) but i dunno if thats really doing anything for me. does it get easier at some point or is there some specific thing i just should be doing that im not?

ok so I passed my general last month and ive been trying to figure out where I can actually transmit on 40 meters. I looked up the band plan but honestly it just made me more confused. like there's the FCC allocation which shows what frequencies are legal, but then there's also the ARRL band plan which seems different? and people keep saying stuff about band edges and not operating too close to them but I dont really understand why that matters. also someone at the club told me to stay away from 7.200 and 7.125 but didnt explain why really. is that just a convention thing or is there an actual rule? im using an ic-7300 if that matters

so ive been putting together a go-kit for emcomm and general portable ops and im running into some decisions i cant quite figure out on my own. right now im mostly running HF with an IC-7300 and a buddistick which works okay but i feel like im leaving a lot on the table especially for field day type stuff or actual emergency activations. the antenna situation is manageable but the power thing is where it gets complicated. i have a 100ah lifepo4 battery that handles the radio fine for receive-heavy ops but the moment im doing any serious transmitting on 100w it drains faster than id like, especially on a multi-hour deployment. ive been looking at generators — specifically the honda eu2200i — but honestly i dont know if thats overkill or if i should just go with a bigger solar panel setup and a second battery. the weight tradeoff is real because im sometimes hauling this stuff on foot to a site. also my current antenna situation for 40m is a linked dipole thrown up in whatever tree i can find and while it works im wondering if an EFHW would be easier to deploy in a hurry. anybody done a comparison between the two in actual field conditions not just on a picnic table in their backyard

yeah the power cable thing gets almost everyone the first time. ive seen guys chase RF noise for months and it almost always comes back to either a bad ground or not going direct to battery. the alternator whine is the worst, especially in newer trucks with all the electronics they cram in there. glad you got it sorted. as for the Diamond antenna, i ran one for about two years on a chevy colorado and the base connector was totally fine, never had any issues with it getting loose or corroding. what i did do was put a little dialectric grease on the SO-239 after i first put it together just as a precaution. probably overkill but it made me feel better. only reason i stopped using it was i finally drilled the roof and went with a lip mount, which is a good middle ground if you dont want a hole all the way through the sheetmetal.

Finally got my multiband vertical project working across 40m through 10m using quarter-wave stubs and switching relays. Running 34 feet of #14 copper wire vertically with sixteen 10-foot elevated radials at 8 feet AGL. Ground losses: Measured 2.1 ohms at antenna base with 8-foot copper ground rodRadial current distribution: Using RF ammeter shows fairly even current splitSWR below 1.5:1 on all bands with relay-switched stub tuningQuestion: Would going to thirty-two 8-foot radials vs sixteen 10-footers improve efficiency significantly? Space constraints limit me to about 320 feet total radial wire.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i get the appeal, log contacts fast, works when the band is barely there, its great for chasing DX when you cant really hold a CW or SSB qso. but theres something that bugs me about it — its not really a conversation is it. youre basically just exchanging grid squares and signal reports and thats it. felt hollow after a while. anyway someone on our local club net mentioned JS8Call and i set it up last weekend and honestly its a pretty different experience. still works on weak signals, not quite as deep in the noise as FT8 but close enough, and you can actually type back and forth like a slow keyboard QSO. reminds me more of the old PSK31 days where you could actually chat with someone. my question is whether people who use JS8Call seriously are running it on 40m mostly or somewhere else. ive been hearing activity around 7.078 but its pretty sparse compared to the zoo on the FT8 frequencies. also whats the typical power people run — ive been doing 25w and getting some responses but not a ton. wondering if im just not finding where the activity is concentrated or if JS8Call just doesnt have the user base to make it worth monitoring regularly.

the impedance stuff tripped me up too, i just kind of brute forced the formulas long enough to pass and moved on lol. been a General for like 3 months now and have been having a blast on 40m in the evenings, already worked a handful of countries which i never wouldve done on VHF one thing i will say is dont sleep on 17m if conditions are decent, i stumbled onto it kind of by accident and its way less crowded than 20m

yeah i was in the same boat when i got my tech. the HF privileges feel kind of like a teaser honestly, enough to make you want to upgrade haha. i ended up just bookmarking the ARRL frequency chart and checking it constantly for the first few months until it started to stick. one thing that helped me was actually getting on 10 meters when it was open and hearing people work DX, made me want to get my general pretty fast

yeah that counting thing will absolutely kill your speed, you gotta let that go and it honestly just takes time and repetition but there are some things that helped me personally. what worked for me was bumping the character speed way up even while keeping the overall word speed lower — so like set your characters to 20wpm or even 25wpm but use Farnsworth spacing to slow the overall pace down. that way your brain is forced to hear letters as sounds instead of patterns because they go by too fast to count. then you just slowly tighten the Farnsworth spacing over weeks. it felt weird at first but after a few weeks something genuinely did click and i stopped translating and started just hearing. also and i know people say this all the time but copying real QSOs even when you only get 40% of it is weirdly valuable. your brain fills in context and that skill is actually really important for real operating. dont worry about getting everything, just let it wash over you for a while.

yeah the region thing tripped me up too when i was studying. just ignore region 1 and 3 stuff for now unless youre planning to operate from europe or asia lol one thing i'll add -- even though the band plans are voluntary people get pretty grumpy if you set up an SSB ragchew in the middle of the CW portion so it's worth paying attention to at least the mode segments. not a rule thing just kind of a social contract i guess

ok so i've been checking into the tuesday night 2m net for a few months now and i'm still not totally sure when i'm supposed to give my callsign. like i know you have to ID every 10 minutes and at the end of a transmission but what does that mean on a net where people are going back and forth pretty fast? sometimes i hear guys just say their call at the start and then have a whole conversation without IDing again and other times the net control is pretty strict about it. also related — is it rude to just jump in with traffic if the net control hasnt specifically called for it? i did that once and got a kind of weird response from the NCS and i wasn't sure if i did something wrong or if he was just having a bad night. nobody said anything directly to me but it felt awkward. still learning all this stuff so any help is appreciated

WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is correct for your situation, dont change that. the thing i'd check first is your transmit audio level going into the TNC — on the 710 specifically this can drift or get set wrong if you've been through any menu resets. basically if the deviation is too high or too low the digipeaters will hear garbage and just drop the packet. there's a way to check it with a service monitor but most people just try nudging the internal pot and see if things improve, which honestly isnt ideal but it works. also worth checking aprs.fi and filtering to RF only — sometimes packets do make it to an igate but aprs.fi is showing you a weird cached view. and 2 minutes is actually pretty frequent, some digis in lightly loaded areas are fine with that but just double check you're not set to smart beaconing AND fixed interval at the same time, the 710 can do weird stuff if both are kind of enabled.

ive done something kinda similar for satellite work, rpi running gpredict with a hamlib rotctld daemon and then a custom arduino sketch handling the actual motor control. the direwolf to position data pipeline sounds really cool for balloon tracking though, never thought to do it that way. one thing that bit me — make sure your python script is handling the case where packets come in faster than the rotator can actually move. i had a situation where i was queueing up commands and the rotator was still trying to catch up to a position from like 30 seconds ago while the target had moved completely across the sky. added a simple check where it just takes the latest position and discards anything older than a couple seconds and that fixed it.

so ive been noticing 20m has been doing some strange things this past week or so. some days it's wall to wall EU stations in the morning and then by noon it just completely dies, and other days it never really opens up at all. checked the solar flux index and its been bouncing around between like 140 and 160 which honestly i would have expected better conditions from that. had a few moments where 10m almost seemed like it wanted to open to south america but then nothing came of it. anyway im still pretty new to trying to work DX seriously so maybe this is totally normal and i just dont have enough experience to know what to expect. is there a better resource than just watching the SFI on the NOAA page? i feel like im missing something about how to actually predict when a band is going to be usable for a specific path. like NA to JA on 15m for example.

congrats on that first contact, seriously 200 miles at 500mw is a solid start especially on 40m during whatever conditions youre dealing with. the warmth on the PA is pretty typical for a class C design running that hard, those little TO-92 or similar transistors dont have great thermal mass. if its just warm thats fine, if its hot enough you cant keep your finger on it for more than a second or two i'd look at whether youre biased correctly or if the final is actually seeing the right load impedance. a cobbled together dummy load can absolutely mess with your readings, even small inductance in those resistors changes things at HF. worth spending an hour building a proper one, fifty ohm non inductive is what you want and there are plenty of simple designs online using those thick film resistors. for next build honestly the QCX from QRP Labs is hard to beat, Hans does great work and you learn a ton. or if you want something more adventurous look up the BITX40, the documentation is actually really good and the community around it is huge.

so ive been licensed about 3 years now and mostly just ragchewed on 40m and did a few contests here and there but lately ive been getting really into DX and i think i want to actually chase DXCC properly. i have maybe 60-70 entities confirmed already just from casual operating but never really paid attention to lotw or qsl cards systematically. my question is kind of broad i guess — for someone who wants to go after DXCC mixed as a starting point, is it better to focus on uploading everything to lotw first and see where i actually stand, or should i just start working everything i can and worry about the paperwork later. also does WAS and WAZ make sense to chase at the same time or is that just going to scatter my focus too much. i have a pretty decent station, ic-7300 and a trapped vertical that works okay but not great. any advice from people who have been through this appreciated, im a little overwhelmed by the whole award credit system honestly

i built almost the exact same thing last year, NE602 and LM386, and had the flangy issue too. what fixed it for me was paying more attention to the local oscillator leakage. my BFO was bleeding into places it shouldnt have been and causing all kinds of weirdness. shielding the oscillator section made a noticeable difference, i just used some copper clad board scraps soldered around it. might not be your problem but worth checking before you go rebuilding the whole audio chain.

yeah what he said. also worth mentioning that 40m is kinda wild at night with the DX coming in from europe and south america so the lower part of the band gets really crowded. i spent like two weeks just listening before i ever transmitted and honestly learned a ton that way. you'll hear people yelling at each other about frequency sometimes lol, nobody actually owns a frequency but that doesnt stop some guys from acting like they do

so i was just messing around on 17m yesterday afternoon, wasnt really expecting much because the SFI has been kind of middling lately, sitting around 145 or so, and all of a sudden i start hearing Europeans coming in like gangbusters. like genuinely loud signals, not the usual watery stuff you get when the band is marginal. worked a couple of G stations, an OE, and then out of nowhere a ZL called me which i was not expecting at all given it was like 2pm local time here in the midwest. i checked pskreporter after and there was this whole propagation path lighting up across the north atlantic and then somehow looping around. i dont fully understand what caused it, was it a coronal hole or something? ive been trying to learn more about reading the solar data but honestly the difference between the K index and the Kp index still confuses me and i never know if a high K is good or bad for HF (i think bad? but then someone told me aurora can sometimes enhance certain paths?). anyway just curious if anyone else caught that opening or has a better handle on reading the forecasts. i use DXmaps and sometimes the DX cluster but i feel like i always find out about openings after they already happened.

the tree branch thing is probably fine, i have wires draped over and around trees all over my yard and they work. might shift resonance a tiny bit if the wire is actually touching the bark but as long as its not wrapped around a wet branch or something you wont notice much. some guys actually use trees as supports on purpose, not just out of laziness lol

After operating through several RemoteHamRadio network stations and various internet-linked repeater systems, I'm questioning where amateur radio ends and internet communication begins. When I'm controlling a station 2000 miles away through SDR software, am I still doing "radio"? The RF path exists, but my control link is purely internet-based. Some argue this violates the spirit of amateur radio self-reliance, while others see it as technological evolution. What's the community consensus on remote operation ethics and whether internet linking should have operational restrictions?

i had the same question when i started lol. one thing that helped me was just listening to a lot of SSB and noticing how people do it. like after a while it clicks that phonetics arent really about following a rule, theyre just more efficient when conditions are bad. also some guys use non-NATO phonetics which used to confuse me, heard someone say "America" for A and "Boston" for B on 40m and i had no idea what was going on at first. apparently thats older style and some old timers still do it that way. anyway you're probably fine, dont stress about it too much

welcome to the hobby, dont stress too much about this decision honestly. for local repeaters the Baofeng will technically work but man the build quality and receiver performance are just not in the same league as the Yaesu or Kenwood stuff. i started with a UV-5R and it did the job but i found myself upgrading within like 8 months because the thing was kind of annoying to program and the audio was muddy compared to what other people on the repeater were using if i were doing it over id probably just get the Yaesu FT-60 right away, its been around forever, its built like a tank, and the receiver is actually decent so you wont get as much interference on busy bands. for APRS down the road you might eventually want something with that built in but thats a whole other rabbit hole and honestly just getting on repeaters first and learning how everything works is the right call. the FT-60 doesnt do APRS natively but its such a solid radio for learning the basics that i still recommend it all the time