Diana Patel

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from me, K-4859 if anyone knows it, and honestly it was kind of a mess but i think it still counts? i was running my KX2 with a 40m end fed and i got there way later than planned because of traffic so i only had maybe an hour and a half before the sun started going down and i wasnt super comfortable packing up in the dark on an unfamiliar trail. anyway i made 12 contacts on 40m SSB and a few on 20m, so i cleared the 10 contact minimum no problem which was a relief. but heres what threw me off — i had a hard time finding a clear frequency. like i would call CQ POTA and either nobody answered or i got stomped on almost immediately. do people usually spot themselves on the POTA website before calling? i didnt do that and im wondering if thats why hunters werent finding me. also my logging was kind of a disaster, i was using a paper log and my handwriting in the cold is apparently terrible. overall though it was really fun and i want to do more. just want to figure out what i did wrong so the next one goes smoother.

yeah you're definitely not imagining it, 10m has been genuinely wild this cycle. i worked JA on 10m SSB last month running like 50 watts into a vertical and it wasnt even that hard to get through the pileup. for context i've been licensed since 2004 and i went through the last couple solar minimums where 10m was basically a 2 meter band without the repeaters, so this feels really good right now. the flux hitting the 180s and above is pretty significant, anything over 150 and 10m usually has something going on especially in the mornings when the F2 propagation is cooking. keep an eye on PSK Reporter too if you do any digital modes, you can actually watch the band open up in real time which is kind of addictive honestly. the path geometry to South America from North America on 10m is almost like a freeway when conditions are right, low takeoff angle and the band just carries signal forever. as for the peak prediction, yeah its all over the place depending on who you ask. NOAA has revised their numbers upward a couple times already which is a good sign. might as well enjoy it while it lasts because the downslope is usually slower but you never know exactly when it starts feeling sluggish again.

the bed rail mount things are hit or miss in my experience. i tried one of the clamp-on styles a few years back on a silverado and the vibration was just awful, loosened up constantly and i eventually gave up on it. what actually worked for me was drilling a proper NMO hole in the cab roof, did it myself with a stepped bit and one of those cheap NMO hole saw kits from amazon. yeah its a permanent hole but honestly the performance improvement was worth it and you route the coax down through the headliner and out the firewall, its pretty clean once you do it. for the SWR issue on 70cm with a lip mount, a lot of that is just the ground plane geometry being weird. not much you can do short of moving the antenna to a better spot on the vehicle.

okay so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but i keep hearing people talk and i can never seem to get anyone to respond when i call out. my radio shows im transmitting but nothing happens on the other end apparently. someone at the club meeting mentioned i probably need to program a CTCSS tone and i kind of nodded like i understood but honestly i had no idea what they were talking about. i looked it up a little bit and i think i get the basic idea — its like a subaudible tone that tells the repeater to open up? but im not sure if i need to encode it or decode it or both, and the repeater directory online listed the tone as 100.0 Hz but i dont know where to even put that in my Baofeng. also when i did finally get through once (i think i accidentally had the right settings) someone was in the middle of a conversation and i just started talking over them which was embarrassing. is there like a way to know when its okay to jump in? sorry for all the dumb questions, just trying to figure this out

I'll probably swing by if the weather isn't awful. What HF gear you selling? Always looking for a backup rig.

been running a remote ic-7610 for about two years and the built in scope stream from the radio itself is actually way better than trying to bolt an external SDR onto RemoteHams. if you have a radio with a built in panadapter and usb connectivity you can sometimes pull that scope data through a second tcp stream without the IQ overhead. dunno if the 7300 can do that the same way but worth checking the echolink backup idea is interesting but in my experince when the primary link is flaky enough to need a backup, echolink isnt gonna be much more reliable anyway, theyre both hanging off your home internet. a VPN with automatic reconnect and maybe a cellular backup modem on the shack end is probably more worth the effort

so ive had the 7300 for about three weeks now, coming from an old FT-450D that i ran for like six years. figured id share some thoughts since i spent way too much time reading threads like this before buying. the waterfall display is honestly the thing that changes how you operate more than anything else. i know everyone says that but i didnt really believe it until i started actually using it. you just see propagation differently. spotted a nice opening on 17m yesterday that i probably would have completely missed just spinning the dial on the 450. audio on receive is noticeably better to my ears, though im running it through some old Heil headphones so take that for what its worth. the built in ATU handles my random wire just fine on most bands, 160m is a bit grumpy but that might just be my antenna situation more than the radio. one thing that took some getting used to is the touchscreen, i keep accidentally changing things when im just trying to rest my hand near the radio. probably a me problem. also the fan kicks on more than i expected at 100w but its not loud, just noticeable in a quiet shack. anyway, happy with it. if anyones on the fence between this and the 7610 and running a modest station, i think the 7300 is still the right call unless you really need the second receiver.

yeah the NE602 is notorious for being easy to overdrive, its got maybe -10 or -15 dBm input IP3 which sounds like enough until you've got a 50kw blowtorch AM station 2MHz away. i'd definitely yank that preamp, at least temporarily, and see if the problem goes away. direct conversion receivers on 40m are kind of a tough case because the band is crowded and you're mixing right down to audio so any low frequency garbage gets in there pretty easily. also double check your BPF insertion loss and whether the thing is even tuned right, a mis-wound toroid can shift the center freq enough that you're not actually getting the attenuation you think you are. if you have a way to inject a signal and measure, even just a rough check with an SDR dongle as a spectrum analyzer, it helps a lot to actually see where your filter is cutting. i've had builds where i was 100% sure i wound it right and the filter was way off, embarrassing but it happens.

i run the 991A and honestly dont regret it but i'll be straight with you — if i was starting over and didnt care about the vhf/uhf i'd probably just get the 7300. the all in one thing sounds great on paper but in practice i still ended up with a dedicated 2m FM rig anyway because the 991A's vhf tx power is fine but the rx feels a bit mediocre for weak signal work. so kind of defeats the purpose depending on what you want out of it

so i've been licensed about two years now and mostly just operate from home on my kenwood with a decent antenna setup, nothing fancy but it works. anyway a buddy of mine has been bugging me forever to try QRP and i finally caved and built one of those MTR kits last month, took me way longer than it should have because i kept second guessing my solder joints but i got it done. took it out to a state park saturday, just a random summit not actually doing sota or anything, threw an end-fed up in a tree and spent about 3 hours on 20m. made 7 contacts which honestly felt like more of an accomplishment than making 50 contacts from home somehow. one guy in germany heard me running like 4 watts which still kind of blows my mind. but here's the thing im confused about — i was having a hard time breaking pile-ups even small ones, and i noticed a lot of stations i could hear clearly just werent hearing me at all. is this just the reality of QRP or am i doing something wrong with how im calling? i tried tail-ending, waiting for a pause, sending my call a couple times... sometimes it worked sometimes nothing. wondering if there's a trick to it or if its just a numbers game at low power

yeah i use Log4OM for day to day and N1MM when i'm actually contesting, works pretty well keeping them separate honestly. the WSJT-X integration in Log4OM is solid once you get the UDP ports sorted, default is 2237 i think but you have to make sure WSJT-X is pointing to the same port and that nothing else is grabbing it. the firewall thing trips people up a lot, had the same issue myself when i first set it up on windows 11, had to manually add an exception for Log4OM. ADIF import was fine for me, had like 8 years of logs and it pulled them in without much drama. there were a couple dupes and some weird entries from an old portable operation but nothing that broke anything. i'd say give Log4OM another shot, its a lot nicer for browsing your log and looking up past QSOs with someone compared to N1MM which is just not really built for that kind of thing

oh man the plateau around 10-12wpm is so real, pretty much everyone hits it and its the point where a lot of people give up which is a shame. what you described about going back to counting dits and dahs is exactly the problem — your brain hasnt fully made the jump to hearing letters and words as whole sounds yet, its still in decode mode. the immersion thing your club guy mentioned actually does have some merit but its not a magic fix on its own. what really helped me break through was a combination of things — i dropped my practice speed back down to where i was comfortable, like 90% copy, and held there way longer than felt necessary. also started doing word drills instead of random letters, common words like "the" "and" "de" "rst" just repeat over and over until they feel like a single sound not a string of characters. and honestly the biggest thing for me was just getting on the air even when i felt not ready. QRS net on 40m was huge for me, real contacts feel completely different from LCWO and your brain kicks into gear in a weird way. give yourself more time, 8 months is nothing in CW world, some guys take 2-3 years to get comfortable at 20wpm.

so i've been building this 40m CW xmtr from scratch for the past couple months, loosely based on the old ARRL handbook crystal oscillator designs but with some mods i thought made sense at the time. finally got it oscillating and driving the final stage last night and it's putting out maybe 3-4 watts into a dummy load which is more than i expected honestly. problem is when i look at the output on my scope the waveform has this weird shelf or shoulder on the positive peaks. not like a clean sine at all. i thought maybe it was my IRF510 being driven too hard so i backed off the drive but it didnt really help. could also be my output filter isnt doing what i think its doing, i wound the toroid myself and im not 100% sure i counted the turns right on the secondary. the key clicks on receive sound not great either which is a separate annoyance. anyone dealt with something like this before

So I've been running a Yaesu FTM-300DR in my truck for about three months now and honestly the install has gone through like four different versions before I was happy with it. First I had it just sitting on the seat which was obviously dumb, then I tried one of those cheap console mounts from amazon which rattled like crazy every time I hit a bump on the highway. What finally worked for me was going under the seat with the main body and running the control head up to a RAM mount on the dash. Took a whole afternoon to route the cables neatly but its so much cleaner now and I dont have stuff sliding around. The separation cable that comes with the 300DR is long enough to go under the seat and back up without any issues. Audio was also a problem for a while — picked up a ton of ignition noise until I put a ferrite on the power leads close to the battery. Should have done that from the start but live and learn I guess. Anyone else do a separated head unit install in a truck, curious how others have handled the power routing. I went direct to battery with a 20A fuse close to the terminal and it seems solid.

field day totally counts as a contest in my book so youre not starting from zero. the main thing that helped me early on was just doing search and pounce instead of trying to run a frequency — way less pressure, you just tune around and call people instead of sitting on a freq and yelling CQ over and over hoping someone answers. N1MM is what most people use, there's a learning curve but once you get the basic contest template loaded it kind of guides you through the exchange. my first CQ WW i only made like 80 contacts over the whole weekend but i had a blast and learned more about propagation in those two days than in months of casual operating. just go for it

so ive been doing contests for maybe 4 years now, mostly phone but getting more into CW lately, and every time i start reading about SO2R i go back and forth on whether its actually worth setting up for someone like me who isnt going to be doing a full 48 hour effort anyway. like i usually do 12-15 hours in a contest weekend, not really gunning for a top score just trying to improve my rate and work some mults i havent had before. right now im running an IC-7300 as my main and i have an old TS-590SG sitting on the shelf doing basically nothing since i upgraded. obvious candidate for a second radio but the filtering and the antenna switching alone sounds like a project that could eat a whole weekend just to get the RF isolation sorted out. heard people talking about needing like 60-70dB of isolation between rigs or you just trash both receivers the second you transmit on either one. is there a point where you're operating enough hours that SO2R starts paying off in terms of rate, or is the real gain just in the mult hunting while you run on the other radio? curious what people actually find in practice vs what the theory says

3 weeks is honestly plenty of time, dont stress too much. the question pool loops around a lot more than it looks like at first, there are only so many ways they can ask about band privileges and FCC rules before it starts repeating itself. for the electrical theory stuff i wouldnt bother trying to deeply understand all of it right away, a lot of people just kind of pattern-match the answers after seeing the same questions enough times. hamstudy is great but also check out hamstudy.org if thats not what youre already using because it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and focuses on those. i passed with like 5 days of casual studying, maybe 30-45 minutes a day. the exam is 35 questions and you need 26 right so theres some room to just completely blank on the hard stuff

Sporadic-E season typically kicks off in late spring and continues through summer, with early season starting in late May and June. I'm seeing some brief 6m activity that looks like early Es - anyone else noticing unusual propagation on the magic band? Sporadic E is common from spring through summer, and even with very low power, global contacts are possible. Working Es with only a few watts and simple antennas is possible - most VHF DXers get their start with Es openings on 6 meters.

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup in his backyard and it got me curious. i looked it up and apparently you have to take a test? i dont really know what im doing here and googling it just gave me a bunch of stuff that assumed i already knew things i dont know like whats the difference between technician and general and all that, do i need to take them separately or can you just jump to the higher one. also is the test hard, im decent with electronics but i havent done anything like this before. any advice on where to actually start would be helpful, sorry if this is a dumb question