Jennifer Kim

so i finally got around to building a proper dipole for 40 meters instead of just running my random wire forever. cut both legs to about 33 feet based on the 468/f formula, soldered up a SO-239 at the center with some 14 gauge stranded i had in the garage. got it up in an inverted-V config, apex at maybe 25 feet which i know isnt ideal but its what i have. thing is the SWR is reading like 1.4:1 around 7.150 but then climbs pretty fast toward the high end of the band, like 2.8:1 by 7.250 or so. low end of the band is fine, like almost flat. i was expecting it to be a bit off center but it almost feels like one leg is longer than the other even though i measured both. feeding it with about 50 feet of RG-8X into the shack. should i just trim a few inches off each leg and see where it lands, or is the coax doing something weird here? i dont have a antenna analyzer, just the built-in SWR meter on my 7300 which i know isnt the most accurate thing in the world.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair amount of HF DX but EME has always been this thing in the back of my head that i want to try before i get too old to climb towers and mess with big antennas. my current setup is basically useless for it, i have a tribander at 40ft and thats pretty much it. from what ive read you basically need a dish or a big yagi array on 2m or 23cm, a low noise preamp right at the feedpoint, and a decent amount of power. but the specifics are where i get confused. like how much is enough to actually make contacts these days with JT65 being a thing? i know back in the day you needed a huge array and a kilowatt but i thought digital modes changed the equation quite a bit. is a single long yagi on 2m with like 500w even remotely usable or am i just wasting my time thinking about it also curious what the typical rx noise figure needs to be. ive seen guys talk about 0.3-0.5dB NF being important but not sure if thats for cw/ssb or if digital gives you more headroom there

yeah the chart method is pretty much universally considered the wrong approach, youre basically training your brain to do math instead of just hearing the sound and recognizing the letter. the guy at the hamfest was right even if he wasnt helpful about it. most people these days swear by the Koch method, theres a free program called LCWO dot net that walks you through it and its honestly pretty solid. the idea is you start with just two characters at full speed like 20wpm, get comfortable with those, then add one character at a time. sounds counterintuitive to start fast but it prevents you from counting dots and dashes in your head which is the bad habit you want to avoid from day one. there's also an app called Morse Toad and another one called Ham Morse, both decent for mobile practice. i used LCWO and just did 15 minutes every single day and could copy basic qso stuff in maybe 3 or 4 months, maybe less if youre more consistent than i was. the real turning point for me was just tuning into W1AW code practice on hf, even when i could only get like every third word it helped a lot just hearing real on air stuff

So if you havent seen it yet, Icom dropped some info about the IC-7760 at Hamvention this year and honestly the ham community is kind of split on it from what ive been reading. looks like it separates the control head from the main unit which is something a lot of people have been asking for for ages. the remote head thing is actually pretty slick if it works the way they're showing in the promo material. also heard the 10 meter band has been absolutely cooking lately, like genuinely some of the best conditions ive seen in years. worked a bunch of south american stations last weekend with my barefoot IC-7300 and pretty modest wire antenna which surprised me. solar cycle 25 keeps delivering i guess. anyway curious if anyone here is planning to pick up the 7760 when it actually ships or if you're waiting to see how the first batch reviews come out. i always wait a year on new rigs personally after that whole thing with my first radio purchase but thats a story for another time

congrats on the first one, 11 contacts is a solid start especially if you were nervous. that pile waiting on frequency thing is totally normal once you start posting alerts the night before, chasers take SOTAwatch pretty seriously and some of them have you on a schedule basically. dont let it rattle you, just take your time, go QRS if you need to, they'll wait. on the 2m thing — it really is regional. out west a lot of activators bring a handheld just for local VHF chasers who can't do HF or are just nearby, and sometimes it's the only way to get your 4 contacts if propagation is being stubborn. but plenty of activators never bother with it and do just fine. i usually toss my vx-6 in the bag just in case but honestly most of my contacts are on 40 anyway. for the points question — yeah each unique summit only gives you activator points the first time you activate it, after that it still counts toward your log and you might need it for a specific summit if youre chasing a complete range or whatever, but the activator points are one-time per summit. the full rules doc has a table that explains it but the short version is: unique summits = unique points.

so ive been listening to our local ARES net on 40m for a couple months now and finally got my general ticket last week so i can actually participate. tonight is the first time im gonna try to check in and honestly im a little nervous about it. like i know its just radio but still, talking to a bunch of strangers on a net for the first time feels weird. the net control usually goes through check-ins pretty fast and i keep second-guessing myself on what exactly to say. do i just give my call and say my name and QTH or is there like a specific format this particular net uses? i tried looking it up but the club website hasnt been updated since like 2019 so not super helpful. also is it bad form to check in late, like after the net has already started? i usually get home from work right around when they open the net so timing is tight. any advice would be great, especially from people who remember their first net check-in

the BS170 is the issue imo, or at least part of it. ive built a few QRP rigs with those and they can do 1W but you kind of have to baby them and get everything tuned just right. a lot of guys swap to the IRF510 if they want more headroom but thats a bigger step up and you have to redesign the matching network. for a first transmitter build 200mW is honestly not bad, you can work people with that on 40m CW if conditions are decent, ive done transatlantic with similar power levels. dont get too hung up on the number before you actually try it on the air

so ive been doing contests for about 3 years now, mostly SS and sweepstakes phone plus some CQ WW mixed in. been running single op single radio the whole time and generally doing ok, nothing spectacular but i hold my own. a buddy of mine keeps telling me i need to get into SO2R to really push my rates up and i keep putting it off because honestly the whole setup looks like a nightmare to manage. my current station is an ic-7300 and a spare ts-590sg sitting in the corner doing basically nothing, so the hardware is kind of already there. i know i need bandpass filters at minimum and probably some kind of antenna switching logic so i dont blow up a frontend. the two radios share a tribander up on the tower and i have a 40m dipole so its not like i have amazing antenna separation to work with. the thing is i dont know if the mental overhead of juggling two radios is actually worth it at my skill level. i feel like id just be making more mistakes and losing QSOs rather than gaining them. anyone gone through this transition and have thoughts on whether it actually moved the needle for you?

So we finally got around to doing a full scale simulated disaster exercise with our county ARES group, first one in about two years since everything kind of fell apart during covid. Had maybe 14 operators show up which honestly was better than I expected. The scenario was a major ice storm knocking out power and cell infrastructure across three counties, EOC activation, shelters needing to be stood up, the whole deal. We ran it for about six hours on a Saturday. What surprised me the most was how fast things got disorganized at the EOC net control position. We had a really experienced op running it but the sheer volume of traffic from three different served agencies at once just overwhelmed the logging situation. We were using ICS-213 forms and trying to keep a manual log and it just... got messy fast. Nobody was really at fault, we just hadnt practiced that specific scenario where multiple agencies are all wanting status updates at the same time. Also discovered that two of our operators had never actually done formal traffic handling before. Like they knew the theory but when it came time to pass a formal message they fumbled pretty bad and it slowed everything down. Not throwing anyone under the bus, that's exactly why we do these things. Anyway curious if other groups have run into similar stuff and what fixes you came up with. The after action review was really useful but we walked away with a pretty long list of things to work on before the next one.

congrats man, that first contact feeling doesnt really go away even after years of doing this. well maybe a little but the first one is something else. the elmer thing is real too, most of the old timers on repeaters are genuinely happy to talk to new folks, just keep keying up and youll find your people. whats your general area if you dont mind me asking, always curious where new hams are popping up

yeah i was in the exact same spot like 4 months ago for my first one. what helped me was writing out a little cheat sheet on paper with my exchange info and the park reference number so i wasnt fumbling trying to remember it mid-pileup. also bring more water than you think you need if its warm out, i got so focused on operating i totally forgot to drink anything and felt terrible by noon lol. good luck tomorrow hope you get way more than 10

so ive been putting this off for months but finally sat down last weekend and built a simple 40m dipole out of some 14 gauge stranded wire i had sitting around. cut each leg to about 33.5 feet based on the 468/f formula, soldered it up to a SO-239 chassis connector i had in the junk box, fed it with about 50 feet of RG-8X coax. suspended it in an inverted-V config with the apex at maybe 30 feet off the ground using a fiberglass push-up mast. heres the thing though — when i sweep it with my nanovna the resonant point is sitting around 6.9 mhz and the SWR at 7.150 is like 2.8:1 which isnt terrible but i feel like it should be better. i trimmed a couple inches off each leg and it barely moved. not sure if its the wire type, the inverted-V angle, or if my center insulator / feedpoint situation is sketchy. the legs are drooping at maybe 120 degree included angle, give or take. ran the coax straight down from the feedpoint without a choke or anything. anyone else gone through this tuning pain with a first build? i feel like im missing something obvious

end fed is what i use for all my portable stuff. built mine from some speaker wire and a little matchbox i wound myself, total cost was maybe 8 bucks. throws it up in a tree and its usually good enough. the qmx is a great kit btw, i have the older qcx mini and its basically the same idea, mine has survived being dropped twice and still works fine which says something about the build quality.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i passed my general back in september and i thought i understood the band plan but honestly every time i sit down and actually try to operate i second guess myself. like on 40 meters i know there's a phone portion and a cw portion but the charts i find online all look slightly different from each other and one of them says something about 7.175 being some kind of informal boundary and another one doesnt mention that at all. also whats the deal with band edges, someone at my club told me to never operate right at the edge but didnt really explain why. is it a legal thing or just like a courtesy thing. i dont want to accidentally operate outside my privledges or cause problems for anyone

ok so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i keep hearing people on the air say stuff like QSL and QRZ and i kind of figured those out from context but then someone told me to QSY and i had no idea what they meant and just kind of sat there like an idiot. i looked up a list online but there are like hundreds of these things and i cant tell which ones people actually use vs which ones are just historical or whatever. is there like a short list of the ones that actually matter for HF and maybe 2m? also people in the nets i join use a bunch of other abbreviations that arent Q codes i think, like 73 and 88 and OM and YL and stuff. are those in the same category or totally different

did mine about 18 months ago and honestly your buddy isnt wrong that you CAN just memorize the pool, but i think you'd be doing yourself a disservice. the stuff about transmission lines and smith charts and the filter design questions, once it clicks it actually makes everything else make more sense. like i finally understood why my antenna tuner was doing what it was doing. i used the ARRL Extra Class License Manual and also Ham Radio Prep online, did maybe 45 minutes a day for about 6 weeks and passed with a pretty comfortable margin. the math isnt as scary as people make it out to be, most of it is just knowing which formula to plug numbers into. the hardest part for me was the transistor biasing stuff and some of the oscillator circuit questions, that took a few passes to get into my head. but yeah absolutely worth it, the expanded privileges feel nice and honestly i just liked having all three tickets.

i was in the same spot not that long ago, what ended up working for me was just using the morse code ninja videos on youtube combined with whatever practice i could squeeze in. there's a guy who has recordings of just random 5 letter groups at different speeds and i would just put those on in the car. honestly the hardest part for me wasn't learning the characters it was getting my brain to stop trying to write down every single thing instead of just listening. also if you have any local club near you there might be someone doing elmering on CW, my club has a slow speed net on thursday nights that helped a lot more than i expected

Honestly for a fixed path to one repeater a yagi makes a lot of sense. I did this for 2 meters years ago when I was trying to hit a machine on the other side of a ridge and the difference was not subtle. Even a modest 5 or 6 element yagi on 70cm is going to put several dB in the right direction and thats real usable difference not just numbers on paper. The omni coverage thing is a valid concern but think about how often you actually use the collinear in directions other than toward that main repeater. If the answer is not that often, maybe the yagi is just the right tool. You could always keep the collinear hooked to a handheld or secondary radio if you really want to monitor around while the yagi is on your main rig.

before you start pulling finals i'd check the PA bias voltage first, thats caught me out before on a similiar icom. there's a trimmer on the PA board and if someone's been in there messing around it could be way off. also worth checking if the ALC is actually clamping things down for some reason — sometimes a bad connection on the mic jack or something dumb like that will make the radio think its getting audio feedback and it just throttles everything. hook up a known good dummy load if you havent already and watch the ALC line on a scope while you key up. might save you a lot of disassembly if its something upstream.

Great question! Make a general call for Emergency or Priority traffic first so as not to delay this material, and tell stations they can break into the net at any time using 'BREAK BREAK' followed by their call sign. I always remind the net about emergency procedures at the beginning - it sets the right tone and keeps everyone prepared.

so ive been building this 40m CW transmitter from a design i found in an old ARRL handbook, the one from like 2003 or so. crystal controlled, running a 6L6 in the final. got the thing oscillating and i can hear my signal on the receiver across the room but the output just feels low, maybe 3-4 watts when i was expecting closer to 15 based on the original design specs. ive checked the plate voltage and its sitting around 280v which should be fine, grid bias looks okay, and the pi network is tuned to a fairly sharp dip on the plate current. neutralization i honestly am not 100% sure i did right, the tube is triode-connected in some variants i read about so maybe thats not even the issue. the thing that really bugs me is the plate current at dip is only pulling like 55ma when loaded. i feel like that number should be higher. could be the tank coil, i wound it myself and im not totally confident about the number of turns i ended up with after trial and error. anyway anyone dealt with this on a similar build, would love some ideas before i start poking around with the RF probe again

so the short answer is LoTW is pretty much the standard for serious award chasing, especially DXCC. arrl runs it and they only accept LoTW or paper cards with a wet signature for DXCC credit, so eQSL doesnt count for that one. but eQSL has its own awards and a lot of people do use it, its just a different ecosystem basically. as for your low confirmation count — thats actually normal when youre starting out. LoTW only shows a confirmation when BOTH sides have uploaded the same contact. so if the other guy never uploads to LoTW or uploads months later, youll get the credit then. some dx stations upload in batches like once a year or whatever. just give it time and keep uploading your logs regularly, youll see it tick up slowly. i'd say do all three honestly — paper cards for the ones that feel special, LoTW for everything, and eQSL is basically free so why not.

yeah the spot thing is just how it works, people see the spot, work you real quick, done. i usually just toss a new spot up if i havent had a contact in like 15 min or switch to a different band and spot again. also make sure your reference number is right in the spot or some hunters wont even bother, ive seen activators put the wrong park ref and wonder why nobody calls them lol

yeah 10m has been really something this cycle, i worked a JA last tuesday afternoon and barely believed it. i'm in the northeast so JA on 10m isn't unheard of but it still feels like a treat every time. for tracking conditions ahead of time i mostly watch the solar flux on spaceweather.com and also keep an eye on the K index — if the K index is low and flux is high that's usually when things get interesting. there's also a site called prop.kc2g.com that does real time ionospheric maps, it pulls from the WSPRnet data and you can actually see where propagation is opening up. way more useful than just staring at a number. pskreporter is good too if you want to see where signals are actually getting through right now. the frustrating thing is even with all that it's still kind of an art. sometimes flux is high and the band just sits there dead and then you walk away and come back and it's going crazy. just gotta keep checking i guess

so this has been bugging me for a couple weeks now. my 7300 is suddenly only doing about 20-25w on 40m when everything else is normal. 20m, 80m, 15m all hit 100w no problem, ALC looks fine on those, but soon as i switch to 40m the power just falls off a cliff. ALC trace on the scope looks a little weird too, kind of overshooting then settling low instead of the nice flat line i get on other bands. i already ran through the basic stuff, recalibrated power output through the menu, checked my feedline and dummy load, swapped antennas just to rule that out. issue follows the radio not the antenna so its definitely internal. been reading about PA transistor failures being band-specific but i dont know enough about the 7300 architecture to know if that even makes sense for this radio. anyone dealt with this before or have a schematic handy that shows how the PA stages are split by band?