Emily Rodriguez

okay so i've been checking into the local tuesday night net for about three months now and i'm still not totally sure when its appropriate to just talk versus waiting for the net control to call your callsign. last week i keyed up between two stations that were apparently in the middle of an exchange and i felt awful about it. net control was really nice about it but i could tell i'd stepped on something. the thing is nobody ever really explained the flow to me when i started. i just kind of listened for a few weeks and tried to copy what other people were doing but i guess i missed something. is there like a standard way nets work or does every net do it differently? i dont want to keep being that guy who messes things up

Had similar issues with my FT-60R setup. Set RX AUDIO to maximum on the TNC, then adjust volume on the radio itself rather than the TNC potentiometer. Also make sure you're monitoring local APRS traffic for proper calibration - can't set levels without actual packets to decode.

had almost the exact same thing happen on my 7300 about a year ago. turned out to be one of the driver transistors on the PA board getting flaky — not fully dead but not biased right anymore. the 40m low power thing specifically is a known weak point with a certain batch of these from what i read on the icom reflector. if you have a scope you can probe the gate drive signal going into the finals on that band and see if its actually delivering the right drive level, if the drive looks weak coming out of the driver stage thats probably your culprit. the good news is the repair isnt crazy expensive if you can do the soldering yourself, the bad news is getting the board out of the 7300 is a little annoying but nothing terrible.

so ive been doing FM birds for a while now, SO-50 and the like, and figured it was time to try the linear transponder sats like AO-73 or FO-29. got my az/el setup running with a yaesu 5500 and an ic-9700 and i thought i understood how doppler worked but apparently i was wrong because everything sounds terrible and nobody can hear me. the issue is i know you have to correct for doppler but on a linear transponder its inverting which means if im chasing doppler on the uplink i have to go the other way on the downlink or something? ive been using gpredict to control the radio and it shifts both vfos but i feel like its not doing it right or maybe im not understanding how to configure it. like i can hear signals on the downlink that sound like theyre varying in pitch and when i transmit i can sometimes faintly hear myself come back but way off where i expect and then it drifts. also does anyone actually use sat-pc32 anymore or is gpredict basically the go-to now for linux guys

the PR-40 is a dynamic mic so it definitely does not need phantom power, that part is fine. what you probably want to look at is the TX bandwidth setting in the 7300 menu — by default i think it's set somewhere around 2.4 kHz which isn't terrible but for a good sounding mic like the PR-40 you can open that up a bit, maybe 2.8 or even 3.0 kHz if the band isnt super crowded. also check your bass roll-off setting, there's a low cut filter in there that might be chopping your fundamentals. honestly the biggest thing for me was getting a proper level set without relying on compression to make up for it. start with the ALC just barely moving on peaks, like just kissing the top of the range, then add maybe 2-3 dB of compression at most. people go way overboard with compression on SSB and it just makes everything sound harsh and unnatural. good audio on SSB is mostly about a flat clean signal going in, not squishing it to death afterward. also if you have a buddy who can give you honest on-air reports in a range of band conditions that's worth way more than any S-meter reading

i had the exact same problem when i started lol, spent like two days thinking my radio was broken. turned out i had the offset going the wrong direction on top of the tone issue. double check your offset is set to + or - correctly, the repeater directory should say which one. some areas are all minus and you just kind of assume but its worth verifying. once i fixed both things it just worked and i felt pretty dumb but whatever, we all start somewhere

so ive been banging my head against this for like three days now. running a TM-D710G in the shack connected to aprx on a raspberry pi, the radio hears plenty of traffic and i can see packets flying by in the log but my own station just doesnt show up on aprs.fi. digipeater hears me fine, i can see it rebroadcasting my packets in the log, but they never make it to the internet. the igate that should be picking me up is only about 8 miles away and i can see it on the map so its definitely up. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be totally standard. tried dropping to just WIDE1-1 and same result. ssid is -9 if that matters. starting to wonder if its a filter issue on the igate side or something with my callsign not being validated but i did the passcode thing when i set up aprx so i dunno. anyone run into this or have ideas where to look next

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and im starting to think i may have bit off more than i can chew. basically i have an old hygain rotator that still works fine mechanically but the controller is pretty much toast, one of the caps popped and i traced a couple burnt traces but at some point i just figured why not build something with an arduino instead of trying to resurrect a 40 year old controller board. my plan is to use a nano with an L298N motor driver and read the azimuth pot with the analog input, then display the heading on a little oled screen. pretty straightforward on paper. the problem im running into is the pot in the rotator is super nonlinear, like i get decent readings from maybe 90 to 270 degrees but the ends of the range are just mushy and inconsistent. not sure if thats a bad pot or if i need to do more calibration in software or what. also thinking about tying this into a raspberry pi at some point so i can drive it from hamlib or maybe wsjtx automatically during contests but thats a whole other rabbit hole. anyone gone down this road before, curious what you ran into.