Nicole Jackson

welcome to the hobby, you're gonna love it once you get that first contact. so here's my honest take - the Baofeng is tempting because yeah, 25 bucks, but the programming is genuinely a pain and the build quality is... fine. it works but just barely sometimes, and the receive audio on a lot of them is kinda muddy. that said a lot of people start there and it's not the end of the world. if you can stretch to the Yaesu FT-60 i'd really point you that direction. its a tank, the audio is clear, and it just works the way a radio should work without fighting you. dual band covers you for 2m and 70cm which is what pretty much every local repeater is going to be on. memory channels matter more later when you're traveling or going to hamfests and want to pre-load stuff, but starting out you probably wont even use half of what any radio gives you. WIRES-X is Yaesu's internet linking system - basically connects repeaters over the internet so you can talk to people far away. some local repeaters support it, some dont, just depends on what's in your area. the FT-60 doesnt do APRS though, for that you'd eventually want something like the FT2DR or yeah the TH-D74 if budget allows someday. but dont get ahead of yourself, get on a repeater first and have some fun

man i remember being exactly where you are, that 13-14 plateau is real and i think almost everyone hits it. what ended up breaking me through was stop practicing at a comfortable speed and start listening to stuff that was just slightly faster than i could handle, like uncomfortable but not incomprehensible. your brain kind of gets forced to stop sounding out each dit and dah individually and starts recognizing whole letter shapes. took me probably another 3 months of that before 20wpm started feeling normal rather than panicked. also honestly just get on the air. i know you said youd freeze up and yeah you will the first few times but everyone on CW was a beginner once and the slow QSO frequencies are genuinely patient. W1AW schedule is good too just for listening, try copying their bulletins at whatever speed and check yourself against the printed version on the arrl site. the gap between what you think you copied and whats actually there tells you a lot about where your weak spots are.

cold weather battery drain caught me off guard too my first time out. lithium cells handle the cold way better than the lipo packs, made a huge difference for me. also maybe look into the linked dipole if you havent, bit more setup but at least its not flapping all over the place in the wind like a random wire does

yeah the buddipole thing is real, i went through the same thing. ended up just leaving mine at home for anything time-sensitive and running a linked dipole cut for 40 and 20 instead. takes like 3 minutes to throw up if you know the drill and zero tuning fussiness. the buddipole is cool for experimenting but during an actual exercise when youre supposed to be demonstrating capability it just becomes a stress thing on the generator vs battery - what everyone else said. also worth checking if your 7300 firmware is current, there was a period where mine was pulling weirdly high standby current and i couldnt figure out why the battery was draining faster than expected. probably not your issue but worth knowing

the alternator whine is almost always a grounding issue in my experience, not actually a power filter problem. where are you grounding the radio chassis? if its going to the body of the truck somewhere far from the battery that can cause all kinds of noise. best thing is to run a dedicated ground wire from the radio chassis back to the battery negative, same gauge as your positive lead. i fought this same thing in my jeep for months before someone finally told me to stop messing with filters and just fix the ground. fixed it in about 20 minutes after that. also check that your coax shield is properly grounded at the antenna mount. a poorly grounded antenna can dump a lot of RF noise right into the audio path too. the NMO mounts are great but if theres paint between the mount and the metal you wont have a solid RF ground there.

im kind of in the same boat as you, been chasing DXCC for about a year now and sitting around 115 entities confirmed on lotw. one thing nobody told me early on that wouldve saved me some headache — make sure your callsign on lotw exactly matches what the other station uploaded or the confirmation wont match up. had a few that just wouldnt confirm for the longest time and that turned out to be the issue with one of them, the dx station had logged me with a slash portable suffix i didnt realize they did. also just a tip, keep an eye on the dx bulletins and stuff like dx world dot net for upcoming activations. some of those rare entities you might be missing could pop up with a dxpedition and that can jump your count fast.

haha yeah the first few are always a mess, dont worry about it. i remember my first one i forgot to bring a pen and had to log contacts in my phones notes app while simultaneously trying to hold the antenna wire off the ground with my foot. its kind of part of the charm honestly. once you do like five or six activations you get a system down and it starts feeling a lot smoother. the wire deployment thing gets way easier when you figure out what works for your specific antenna, i switched to a linked dipole and just use a fiberglass mast now instead of messing with trees every time.

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly doing ADSB and poking around on the local repeaters with SDR# and its been fine for what it is. but im starting to feel the limits of it, mostly the dynamic range issue when theres a strong local FM broadcast tower about 2 miles from my house. thing just gets swamped and i lose a lot of stuff in that part of the spectrum. anyway ive been looking at either the SDRplay RSP1A or maybe stretching to a HackRF One. the price difference is pretty significant, RSP1A is like $110 and the HackRF is closer to $350 for a legit one, more if you want the portapack thing. my main use case is receive only honestly — weather sat decodes, some WSPR spotting, maybe poking at trunked systems with DSD+ eventually. i dont really need to transmit anything. the SDRplay software (SDRuno) looks kinda clunky to me from youtube videos but i know some guys swear by it. anybody run both and have an opinion? also wondering if the RSP1A plays nice with SDR++ because i really dont want to give up that interface, its so much cleaner than everything else ive tried.

yeah the timing thing is huge and most people completely ignore it. the pile sounds like one continuous roar but if you actually listen there are these micro-gaps right after the DX station sends the callsign of whoever they just worked. thats your window. you have maybe half a second before the whole mob keys up again. the other thing i do, especially on CW, is watch where the DX op is tuning. sometimes they sweep up or down looking for cleaner signals and if you can anticipate that movement you can be sitting right in their path. took me a long time to realize this wasnt luck, they do have a pattern. on phone it's harder to read but on CW you can see exactly where they're listening on the panadapter and just... be there waiting quietly. power isnt always your friend either, totally agree with your experience. clean signal with good timing beats raw watts most of the time. ive seen guys running a kilowatt just absolutely burying everyone including themselves.

Gordon West has study books that have been around forever, some people swear by them. personally i think hamstudy.org is all you need for tech, save the books for general or extra where the material gets more involved. one thing i'd say is dont just memorize answers without understanding anything because even a little bit of context helps them stick. especially the band plans and what technicians can actually do vs what you think you can do, that part confuses a lot of new people. also check if there's a VE session near you through the ARRL website, some areas have them pretty frequently and some you have to wait a while so look that up sooner than later

honestly i was in the same boat not too long ago and what i ended up doing was just focusing on LoTW first since thats what most people i worked were using. got the certificate sorted, downloaded tqsl, and just started uploading my logs after each session. took a little while to get the hang of it but its pretty straightforward once you do it a few times. the paper card thing is kind of a whole separate rabbit hole lol. i ordered some basic cards from one of the online places and yeah its a nice feeling to get them in the mail and send them out. some of the older operators really appreciate getting a physical card. but if youre doing a lot of FT8 and digital modes most people just do LoTW and dont worry about paper at all. totally up to you how deep you want to go with it

so ive been licensed about two years now and mostly just been ragchewing and doing some local nets but lately i got kind of bitten by the DX bug pretty bad. started logging contacts more carefully and realized i might actually have enough entities to apply for basic DXCC if i can get the cards confirmed. my question is about the confirmation side of things — i have maybe 35 entities confirmed on lotw already and a bunch more in my log that i havent gotten any confirmation on. do i have to wait until i have all 100 confirmed before i apply or can i apply with like 80 and add more later? i read something about endorsements but im not totally clear on how that works. also is WAS worth chasing at the same time or does that kind of distract from DXCC? feels like they use different bands and modes in different ways. i did work all 50 states already i think but again confirmation is the issue. just trying to figure out where to put my energy honestly.

i've never been but my elmer keeps telling me i should go at least once just for the experience. maybe this is the year, how do you even find out about the carpool thing is that through your club's email list or what

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech) and i keep hearing people talk about nets and how great they are for actually getting on the air and talking to people. i finally found a local 2m net that meets tuesday nights and i tuned in last week just to listen. it seemed pretty straightforward but when it came time to actually check in i totally chickened out lol the net control was calling for check-ins and i just froze up. im not even sure what i was supposed to say — just my callsign? my name and location too? do i wait for a pause or just jump in whenever? i dont want to step on anyone or do it wrong and embarrass myself. also noticed they mentioned something about a special event station operating that weekend tied to the net, not sure how that works either or if that's something i'd even be able to work from here. any advice would be great, been sitting on the sidelines too long

Honestly the FT-60 is kind of the classic answer to this question and for good reason. It's built like a tank, the receiver is actually decent unlike a lot of the cheap Chinese stuff, and Yaesu has been making radios forever so you know the firmware isn't going to do something weird. I've had mine for probably 8 years and it's been dropped, rained on, sat in a hot car all summer — still works perfectly. Programming it manually takes a few minutes to figure out but once you get the hang of the menu system it's not bad, and if you use CHIRP software it's dead simple. The baofengs are fine for what they are but the receivers can be a bit deaf on weak signals and the spurious emissions thing is real — they're not part 97 compliant out of the box technically speaking. For casual repeater use most people don't care but worth knowing. If budget is really tight the UV-5R will get you on the air and that's what matters. But if you can stretch to the FT-60 I think you'll be happier long term. For APRS down the road look at the Yaesu FT3DR or similar dual band digital HTs — they have built in GPS and the whole thing just works. But that's a later purchase, get on the air first.