Emily Rodriguez

im kind of in the same boat as you honestly, just started paying more attention to this stuff this year. one thing i learned the hard way is to get on LoTW as soon as possible and upload your whole log going back as far as you can because a lot of stations upload their logs retroactively and you might already have confirmations waiting that you dont know about yet. i uploaded my log from the past two years and had like 15 confirmations show up within a week from stations i had completely forgotten i worked. also look into WAZ too (worked all zones) its another fun one to chase alongside DXCC and some of the contacts overlap so youre kind of working toward multiple things at once.

I upgraded from Tech to General last spring and the exam honestly wasn't that scary once I actually sat down with the question pool. I think people psych themselves out because the pool is big but remember you only need to answer 35 questions and you can miss up to 9 and still pass. The electrical theory section like calculating resonant frequency or impedance stuff, I just memorized the formulas and practiced them a few times, didn't try to deeply understand it all and that was fine for passing purposes. One thing I wish someone had told me — once you get your General ticket, jump on 40 meters at night sometime. The band just comes alive, stations from all over the country and sometimes further. That was kind of the moment I understood why HF guys are so obsessed with it. The Extra is worth going for eventually but don't wait on General just because Extra exists, you'll want those HF priveledges sooner rather than later trust me.

so anyway the thing that clicked for me was thinking about it less as interrupting a run and more like — the run is always going to be there or something equivalent will be there, but that JA on 15m at 0200z might literally not come back. i started timing my radio 2 excursions to the natural gaps, like when i send my callsign and exchange i have maybe 3-4 seconds while theyre copying, thats enough to hit a beacon or check a spotted freq on radio 2 without really breaking stride. doesnt work on ssb obviously but on cw with reasonable speed youve got wiggle room. also one thing nobody talks about enough is antenna interaction when youre both transmitting close in freq. i burned a whole contest before i figured out my SO2R setup was causing IMD that was wrecking my receive on radio 1 every time radio 2 keyed up. fixed it with better bandpass filters but it took me embarassingly long to diagnose because everything looked fine on paper.

i was in the exact same spot like a year ago so trust me it clicks eventually. the one thing that helped me was just jumping in on a slow night when the net wasnt super busy and honestly the net control guy was super patient with me when i fumbled my phonetics. nobody really bites on these things, the old timers have all seen new hams figure it out and most of them like helping. just dont kerchunk the repeater 47 times before you check in, that drives people nuts for some reason haha

im sort of in the same boat as you honestly so take this with a grain of salt but one thing my elmer told me was to make sure youre listening to stuff at the speed you WANT to be at, not just where you're comfortable. like if you only ever listen at 5wpm your brain just gets used to 5wpm. he had me listening to 15wpm stuff even when i could barely get 10% of it, just to get my ear used to the rhythm. seemed crazy at first but i think its working? im up to about 12wpm now copying solid copy so something is going right.

honestly i went the opposite direction, started with JS8Call first before i really got into FT8, and now i kind of go back and forth depending on what i feel like. if im just trying to fill in a new grid or work somewhere far away ill fire up FT8. if i want to actually do something i switch over to JS8Call. ran a little net on there a few months ago during some bad WX and the store and forward stuff actually worked pretty well for relaying messages around, which is cool from an emcomm angle even if it's just playing around. RTTY is still my favorite though for contests, nothing like a RTTY roundup weekend. total different vibe from the weak signal stuff

yeah the ceramic cap thing is almost certainly your problem. regular disc ceramics drift all over the place with temperature and the NE602 VFO gets warm enough to cause issues. C0G/NP0 caps are a huge difference, seriously night and day for oscillator stability. also if you're using a regular carbon comp resistor anywhere in the tank circuit swap that too, they drift thermally as well. silver mica caps are even better if you have them but C0G should sort you out. the 60hz hum — check that your audio ground and RF ground are actually meeting at one point, star grounding basically, and make sure your LM386 supply is decoupled properly. 10uf electrolytic from pin 6 to ground right at the chip if you dont already have it.

yeah the first few passes are pretty overwhelming, dont feel bad about it. the inverted transponder thing trips everyone up at first. what you want to do is set your uplink frequency and then tune your downlink to find your own signal — once you find yourself just keep adjusting the downlink for doppler and leave the uplink alone, or some people do it the other way around. either works really. the main thing is just pick one and be consistent during the pass. for AO-73 specifically the passband is pretty narrow so small tuning increments matter a lot. and honestly the arrow antenna by hand is totally doable, i did it for like a year before i built anything fancier. you just get a feel for where the bird is after a few passes even without staring at gpredict the whole time. give it maybe 5 or 6 tries before you get too frustrated, the first couple passes are basically just learning what everything sounds like

done similar exercises a few times with our group and honestly the generator question really depends on what duty cycle you're actually running. if it's a real emcomm exercise with nets, check-ins, traffic passing, you're probably not keying up more than maybe 20-30% of the time realistically. at 100w that 7300 pulls maybe 22-23 amps transmitting but only like 2-3 amps on receive. so rough math on 8 hours with moderate traffic you're probably looking at somewhere between 40-60ah actual draw, which your battleborn should handle no problem with room to spare. that said i always bring the generator anyway. not because i need it necessarily but because murphy's law at exercises is very real and also sometimes the AO changes and suddenly you're running more gear or someone else needs to tap your power. the EU2200i is a good choice, quiet enough that it doesnt drive everyone insane. just keep it downwind and a decent distance from the antenna feed point if you can, i had RFI issues once running a cheaper generator too close to everything. for the antenna id go buddipole over the hamstick on the truck honestly. mag mount hamstick on a car roof is kind of a compromised ground plane situation and the buddipole on the tripod at least gives you some height and a tunable dipole configuration. yeah it takes a few more minutes but once you've set it up a handful of times it goes pretty fast.

hamstudy is exactly what you want, i did the same thing when i upgraded last spring. honestly the general pool isnt that much harder than tech, theres a bit more propagation stuff which is actually pretty interesting once you get into it, like understanding why 40m works great at night but 10m is dead half the time. the math isnt super intense, mostly just ohms law stuff and a little bit of decibel calculations but nothing that'll destroy you if you take a few minutes to actually understand the formulas instead of just memorizing answers. one thing i'd say though is dont just grind questions without reading anything. grab the ARRL general study guide or even just read some of the explanations on hamstudy when you get something wrong. when i passed i felt like i actually knew why i got things right, which helped a lot when i got on HF and had no idea what i was doing operating wise haha. the exam itself is 35 questions and you need like 26 to pass so its pretty forgiving.

so ive been trying to find out whats going on in my area this spring, we used to have a pretty decent swap meet run by the local club but i think they skipped last year and im not sure if its coming back. been checking the ARRL events calendar but half the stuff on there seems outdated or the links are dead anyway curious if anyones heading to Dayton this year or knows of any decent hamfests in the midwest region, i mostly go for the tailgate stuff, the inside vendor hall is fine but honestly i find better deals wandering the parking lot

ok so ive been listening on HF for a few weeks now and i keep hearing and seeing all these weird abbreviations and codes, like QSL, QRM, QRN, QTH and i have no idea what half of them mean. i know QSL is like a confirmation card thing but the rest im lost on. also people on the nets seem to just throw them around constantly in conversation not just in CW which i didnt expect. is there like a master list or something i should just memorize or do people only really use a handful of them in practice? and whats the difference between using these on voice vs morse, do they mean the same thing either way

yeah what he said about the fee is right, caught me off guard too when i applied last year. you can look up available callsigns on the AE7Q website, its pretty handy for seeing whats in the pool and what format you're eligible for. just search your call district and filter by license class. i did the vanity thing pretty much right after i got my sequential call and honestly it wasnt that complicated, just takes a few weeks to process. got a call that actually means something to me so worth it for me personally but its totally a preference thing

so ive been messing around with setting up remote access to my station for about 6 months now and honestly its been a mixed bag. started with just RCForb and a basic audio pipe over the internet which worked okay for SSB but latency was killing me on CW, like i'd key up and there'd be this 200ms lag that just ruins the rhythm completely. anyway somebody on the local club net mentioned RemoteHams and i finally got around to trying the SDR remote side of things where you're basically streaming IQ data and running the DSP on the client end. that actually helped a lot with the latency feel because the demod is happening locally. but im still not totally clear on how the TX side works through their system — do you still have a conventional rig at the remote end that you're CAT controlling or is there some hybrid thing going on also curious if anyone here has linked a remote station into like an AllStar or Echolink node at the remote site. had this half baked idea where the remote HF station could automatically link into the local repeater system when im away so club members could at least hear whats coming in on 20m or something. not sure if that makes any sense operationally or if the FCC would have opinions about it

the birdie at 7.1 is almost certainly your local oscillator leaking — if you're receiving 40m and using a 455khz IF then your LO is sitting right around 7.555 or 7.045 depending on which side of the IF you're on, and even tiny amounts of radiation from that get picked up by the front end before any selectivity can do anything about it. foil on the board helps a little but you really want a proper grounded metal enclosure for the oscillator section, not just a shield — actual tin or copper can soldered together and grounded solidly at multiple points. also worth checking if your RF gain stage (assuming you have one) is oscillating slightly, that can cause all kinds of weird birdies that move around when you touch things. poke around the front end with an insulated stick and see if the birdie shifts frequency at all, that'll tell you something. first superhet is always kind of a mess honestly, dont get discouraged — i redid mine three times before it was clean enough to actually use.