Paul Wilson

dont quote me on this but i think there was a firmware update for the RRC-1258 a while back that addressed some stability stuff with the SDR integration. might be worth checking what version youre on. i ran into something vaguely similar and updated and it seemed better, though honestly i changed a couple things at the same time so i cant say for sure which one fixed it.

honestly i still mess this up sometimes and ive been licensed 3 years lol. i'll be on a ragchew with a local guy and out of habit start spelling my callsign phonetically and it just feels overly formal. but then on a contest or a pile-up if you dont use crisp NATO phonetics people just wont pull your call out. ive also noticed some DX stations get confused if you deviate from the standard ones so i just drilled myself to always use the same ones no matter what and now it's automatic

fldigi works fine with it, just use the USB audio interface built into the radio, shows up as a sound card on the computer and you set your audio in/out to that device in fldigi's settings. the only thing that tripped me up was the CI-V address for CAT control, default should be 94 hex but double check it in the radio menu because if someone changed it before you got it the software wont connect and youll spend an hour wondering whats wrong like i did. also wsjt-x works great with it if you ever want to get into FT8, that combo is probably the most common setup in the hobby right now honestly. congrats on the rig, the 7300 is hard to beat at that price point even new, used is a steal if its in good shape.

so ive had my TS-590SG for about 4 years now and honestly its been a great radio, no real complaints, but ive been looking at the IC-7300 and the 7610 and now i cant stop reading reviews at 2am like an idiot. the 590 does everything i need it to do for HF, i work mostly 40 and 20m, some 10m when the band opens up, mostly SSB with a little digital on the side using WSJT-X. the thing is i keep reading about the 7300's waterfall and how much easier it makes finding activity and honestly that sounds kind of nice. but is that actually worth like $800-900 more than what i could sell the 590 for? or am i just bored and this is classic gear acquisition syndrome talking. my antenna situation is a 40m inverted V at about 35 feet which is fine, not going to win any pile-ups with it but it works. anyone made a similar swap? did you actually notice a real difference day to day or did the excitement wear off after a week

so ive been messing around with a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about 6 months now and honestly its been great for just learning the ropes, scanning around, decoding some APRS, that kind of thing. but ive been reading more about the SDRplay RSP1C and im wondering if the jump is actually worth it for what i do. my main thing right now is HF listening, some airband out of curiosity, and ive been trying to get into weak signal modes on 2m like ft8 and maybe eventually meteor scatter. the RTL-SDR handles airband fine obviously but on HF with the upconverter its just... okay. noise floor isnt great and i feel like im missing stuff. running SDR# on windows and occasionally trying SDRangel when i feel brave. anyone gone from a v3 dongle to an RSP1C or even an RSPdx? is the difference noticeable enough that it would actually change what i can hear or is it more of a "feels better" upgrade. dont want to spend $150 if its just going to be marginally better.

i got my first EME qso last year with a 4x9el array and an old Henry amp running about 800w, so yeah its doable without a giant dish. took me a while to get the sequencer right so i wasnt blowing up the preamp every transmission but once that was sorted it worked. Q65B or Q65C depending on conditions is what everyone seems to use now on 144. honestly the hardest part for me wasnt the RF stuff it was getting the az/el rotators dialed in and the software talking to everything correctly. i use WSJT-X and a separate rotator control program and getting those to play nice took more time than the antenna build

ditch the coleman, seriously. even with filtering those things are just awful for anything RF sensitive. a honda eu2200i or the yamaha equivalent will run clean enough that you wont notice it on the bands, been using one for portable ops for about 4 years and havent had issues even running it 15 feet from the antenna base. they're not cheap but if youre doing regular exercises its worth it or see if someone in the club already has one. also 100ah lifepo4 doing 100w HF plus a laptop... you might be cutting it close depending on how hard youre driving the amp. i'd run the numbers on your actual draw before assuming it'll make it all day without a top-off charge.

went through exactly this about two years ago. short answer is yes, the RSP1A is a meaningful step up from the v3 for HF work, the preselector filters alone make a difference because you stop getting that AM broadcast hash bleeding into everything. the dynamic range improvement is real too — i was seeing intermod products with the RTL on 40m that just went away with the RSPdx i ended up getting (slightly pricier than the 1A but similar story). that said youre right that antenna is still like 80% of the equation. i made the jump and was initially underwhelmed until i finally sorted out my feedline common mode noise situation. after a choke at the feedpoint things got dramatically better and then the receiver quality started to actually matter. if you're on a random wire thrown out the window or something the RSP1A will still be limited by that. HackRF thing — honestly the transmit side on the HackRF is kinda mediocre, low output power and the noise performance isnt great for receive compared to something purpose built for RX. if you dont need TX i wouldnt buy it just in case. the RSP1A would serve you better for what you described.

im in the same boat, just joined ARES a few months ago and my go-kit is basically a backpack with my UV-5R and some odds and ends lol. what kind of antenna are you planning on? like for the 817 on HF i mean. the wire dipole sounds good but do you have a way to get it up in the air? I keep reading about people using a slingshot to throw a line over a tree branch and that sounds either really useful or really embarrassing depending on how the throw goes

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general) and everyone keeps telling me to get on for field day and cq ww but honestly i dont really know the difference between all these events or which one is even worth trying as a newer person. like is field day actually a contest or more of a public event thing? ive heard both. and then theres SOTA which i know is different but people lump it in with contests sometimes. i did one activation last month up on a local hill with just my ft-818 and a wire antenna and made like 12 contacts which felt pretty good but i wasnt sure if i was supposed to be doing anything special logging wise for a contest period. anyway the main thing im trying to figure out is whether cq ww this fall is too advanced for a first timer or if i should just jump in and see what happens. my station is pretty modest — just a dipole in the attic and a used ic-7300 i picked up in spring. would love to hear from people who remember their first contest experience

the band edge thing is real and worth paying attention to. basically the issue is that your radio's displayed frequency is the carrier frequency but with SSB your signal actually extends several kHz above (for USB) or below (LSB) that depending on your sideband. so on 40m where everyone uses LSB, if you tune to say 7.125 your actual signal occupies maybe down to around 7.122 or so. if you tuned right to 7.125 which is already near the lower end of the general phone allocation you could theoretically have part of your signal stepping into the tech/novice or even CW portion depending on what you mean by "near" the FCC allocations are the actual legal lines, the ARRL band plan inside that is more of a gentlemens agreement kind of thing. for 40m generals get phone starting at 7.175 up to 7.300 if i remember right. 7.125 to 7.175 is still extra class territory on phone. so yeah 7.125 for SSB as a general would be a problem, you'd want to be at 7.175 and honestly id stay a few kHz above that just to be safe with the sideband thing

so ive been chasing rare DX for about 6 years now and i finally feel like i have a decent handle on breaking pileups, at least on HF. figured id write up what actually worked for me recently when there was a decent EU-side expedition on 20m and 17m, not gonna say which one but it was legitimately a top 10 DXCC entity for most people. the biggest thing that changed my game honestly was listening way longer before transmitting. like embarrassingly long. I used to just jump in with everyone else and wonder why i never got through. now i'll sit there for 10-15 minutes watching where the DX station is actually coming back, not where they say theyre listening. those two things are not always the same. expedition operators drift around their listening window and if you can figure out the pattern -- even vaguely -- you can anticipate where to park your VFO. also split discipline matters so much more than power. im running about 500w into a 3el yagi which isnt crazy by any means, and i was getting through on maybe the 4th or 5th call consistently once i started doing this. before i was running 1kw and just carpet bombing the passband like an idiot. the other thing is tail-ending, which i know some people have opinions about but done right its not really unsportsmanlike, youre just timing your call right when the DX station stops transmitting. theres a difference between timing well and just doubling on someone elses QSO. curious what other people have figured out, especially for LP or wire antenna situations because i know not everyone has a beam

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now and figured id just ask here because the reddit threads are all over the place. im trying to decide between putting up a simple wire dipole for 40m or just doing a quarter wave vertical with some radials. my lot is not huge, maybe 80ft across, and i've got two trees that could support a dipole but it'd have to be kind of low, probably 25-30ft at the apex. not ideal i know. the vertical i was thinking about is just a homebrewed thing, maybe a 33ft piece of aluminum tubing or even just wire up a fishing pole. throw down like 16-20 radials and call it a day. the thing is i work mostly dx and a few local nets and i genuinely cant figure out which way to go. everyone says verticals are good for dx because of the lower takeoff angle but then everyone also says a low dipole works just as well because it starts acting like a cloud warmer. which is actually true or does it just depend and nobody wants to say that out loud

yeah what he said about LoTW timing is real, i spent like two weeks thinking my account was broken and it turned out the guy i worked just hadnt uploaded yet. patience is kind of a requirement with that system lol one thing i'll add — if youre working a lot of digital modes like FT8 through WSJT-X it can actually auto-upload to LoTW for you if you set it up right, which is pretty nice. and a lot of FT8 operators are pretty good about keeping their logs current so confirmations come in faster than with some other modes in my experience anyway the paper cards are genuinely fun though dont write them off entirely. got one from a station in Reunion Island last year and it's just sitting on my desk because i like looking at it

so ive been going back and forth on this for like three weeks now and i cant decide. i have a decent sized backyard, maybe 80 feet of usable space east-west and i could get a full size 40m dipole up at about 30 feet which i know isnt ideal but its what the trees will support. alternatively i was thinking about putting up a vertical, probably one of those trap verticals that covers 40 through 10 or maybe just a dedicated 40m quarter wave with a good radial field. my main use is just general ragchewing and some casual contesting, nothing serious. i'm in a pretty flat suburban area, neighbors arent a problem thankfully. ive read about a hundred different opinions online and they all contradict each other so figured id just ask here. the low dipole is supposedly going to radiate more at high angles which i guess is fine for regional stuff but i do want to occasionally work some dx when conditions are good. anyone been in a similar situation and actually compared the two? not looking for a perfect answer just want to hear some real world experience before i start buying lumber and wire.

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now, got my TM-D710G set up with an external GPS puck on the dash and its been beaconing fine, i can see my position on aprs.fi updating every couple minutes when im mobile which is great. but the messaging side of things is completely broken as far as i can tell. tried sending a message to another local ham who also runs APRS and he says he never gets anything from me, and when he tries to send back i get nothing either. my SSID is -9 which should be fine for a vehicle. im running through a local igate that i can see is active and digipeating. path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. is there something specific i have to enable on the radio for messaging or is this an igate thing where some of them are receive-only and wont pass messages back RF side? i feel like im missing something obvious here and its been bugging me for a while now.

yeah the waterfall thing is real, i had basically the same experience coming from an older rig. took me a while to stop just staring at it and actually operating but once you dial in the reference level and the speed its genuinely useful not just pretty. glad you mentioned the ATU because ive heard mixed things about the internal one but my experience with it has been solid too, works fine into my trap vertical which is not exactly a forgiving load on 80m. the one thing i will say is watch the audio drive on the modulator if youre doing any digital. i had mine set a little hot coming from fldigi and it took me a while to realize i was probably splattering a bit. the ALC on that radio is a little sensitive to how you feed it. theres a dedicated digital modes level in the menu somewhere, i forget exactly where, but worth finding and setting correctly before you get on FT8.

yeah what he said. also just a heads up the ARRL band plan is more like a gentlemens agreement on top of the actual legal allocations, it suggests things like keeping certain parts of the band for certain modes or leaving space for DX windows and stuff. it doesnt have the force of law the way the Part 97 allocations do but most people follow it and you'll get grief if you dont lol. the 40m DX window around 7.175-7.200 is a good example, technically some of that is in your general allocation for certain things but its kind of informally reserved and you'll find a lot of activity there that you might not want to step on

not a dumb question at all, this stuff is actually a bit confusing at first. the short answer is yeah they're mostly pulling from the same DX Spider network but through different nodes, so there's usually some overlap but also gaps depending on which node each site connects to and how fresh their feed is. DXwatch tends to aggregate pretty broadly and i find it pretty reliable for HF stuff, QRZ's cluster is fine but feels slightly slower to me, could just be my imagination though. if you really want to get into it the nerdy way you can telnet directly into a cluster node — there's a list of them on the DX Summit site — and then you see everything as it comes in without a web middleman. you can filter by band, by continent, all kinds of stuff. some logging programs like Log4OM or DXKeeper will let you connect to a cluster feed directly and pop up alerts when something you need shows up on a band that's open, that's honestly the workflow i'd recommend once you get comfortable with it. the phone apps are decent for quick checks but yeah the prop forecasting in most of them is pretty rough, i just use VOACAP for that separately

dont overlook PSK31 either if you want actual typed conversations with decent weak signal performance. its older but theres still activity especially on 20m around 14.070 and on 40m. the waterfall hunting is kind of fun in a way FT8 really isnt. that said yeah FT8 wins on raw sensitivity by a pretty wide margin, like it can pull signals out that you literally cannot hear at all, which still kind of blows my mind after all this time using it.

so this has been sitting on my bench for about three weeks now and i keep putting it off but finally pulled the covers off today. picked it up at a hamfest for basically nothing because the guy said it had low power output and he didnt want to mess with it. i figured it would be a fun project. anyway hooked it up to my dummy load and watt meter and yeah, its doing maybe 8-10 watts on a good day across all bands. drive level seems fine, ALC is behaving more or less how i'd expect, the display and everything else works fine. RX sounds great actually, really clean. so im pretty confident the problem is somewhere in the PA stage and not upstream of that. opened it up and one of the 2SC2290 transistors looks a little sus to me, theres some discoloration on the case that i dont love the look of. havent pulled it yet to test it though. before i go yanking parts out i just wanted to see if anyone has been down this road with a 757 before, any gotchas i should know about? also wondering if its worth going with the stock transistors or if theres a better drop-in at this point since the originals are kind of a pain to source.

4 contacts is 4 contacts, activation complete, points on the board, nobody can take that away from you. honestly the first one is always a bit chaotic, you're figuring out the logistics while also trying to operate and it's a lot going on at once. the antenna thing is real, ive had days where i spent more time fighting a mast in the wind than i did actually on the air. one thing that helped me early on was alerting on SOTAwatch the night before instead of just self-spotting at the summit. the chasers are watching those alerts and some of them will literally be waiting by their radio when you show up. makes a huge difference for getting that initial pile going, especially on 40m in the afternoon when conditions can be iffy. W4T has some fun summits though, keep at it and you'll get a smooth one soon enough.

yeah what he said. i did my first CQ WW SSB last year and just treated it like a big DX day. worked like 40 countries in a few hours on 15m which was way more than id ever done in regular operating. the hardest part for me was the pileups, sometimes you call a station 10 times before they get you. just be patient and make sure your callsign is clear. good luck

congrats on the first one, and yeah that feeling of "just go do it" is really the only way to get started. 23 QSOs for your first time out is solid, some people struggle to hit 10 when they're starting out, so you did well. on the self-spotting question — you can spot yourself anytime honestly, but what most people do is get set up, make sure the antenna is tuning up okay, maybe do a quick test call, and then spot. no rule that says it has to be before your first CQ. spotting mid-session is totally fine and yeah the rate almost always jumps because the hunters on the POTA website see you pop up and come running. as for frequencies, there's no strictly reserved POTA portion of the band but there are ranges where you tend to find most activity. on 20m SSB a lot of activators hang around 14.240-14.300 roughly, just find something clear and call CQ POTA. the hunters will find you via the spot. some people also work 40m in the mornings especially if they're in the eastern US, propagation can be better for shorter hops. you definitely weren't doing it wrong, sounds like you figured it out pretty naturally.

that wall around 10-12 wpm is super real, pretty much everybody hits it. what happened for me is i was forming the characters in my head as sounds mapped to letters rather than just hearing the letter directly, and the only thing that actually fixed it was bumping up the character speed in farnsworth mode while keeping the overall pace slower. so like running characters at 18-20wpm but with longer gaps between them so you have time to process. it forces your brain to hear dit-dah as A instead of counting. the 20-30 min a day thing should be enough honestly, consistency matters more than marathon sessions. i went from about 12 to solid 20 in maybe 4 or 5 months doing similar time. the jump from 15 to 20 was actually easier than the earlier plateaus for me once the characters locked in. also just getting on the air even when youre slow helps a lot, a CWT or something like that where contacts are short, people are patient with slower ops more than you'd think