Robert Mitchell

RST reports are an important part of Amateur Radio. They are two or three-digit codes read over the air which indicate how clear, strong and pure your signal is. Can someone break down the RST system with practical examples? I see everything from 559 to 599 but wondering when you'd actually give something lower than a 5 for readability. Also, the tone report digit is only required for a CW (Morse code) contact - so voice is just RS?

so ive been a tech for about two years now and mostly just been doing 2m stuff locally, some APRS and the occasional net. finally decided to bite the bullet and go for general so i can actually get on HF. started going through the question pool on hamStudy and honestly some of this stuff is way over my head. like the electrical theory sections are fine but then theres stuff about propagation and operating procedures that i feel like i should already know but dont really. my question is i guess... is there a specific part of the pool i should really nail down vs stuff that i can kinda get by just memorizing? i know memorizing isnt ideal but im trying to pass the test first and actually understand it later. also how long did it take most people to feel ready? ive been at it maybe a week and a half and still getting like 65% on practice tests which i know isnt good enough yet

yeah 10m has been on a real rollercoaster lately, you're not imagining it. the thing i've learned after doing this for about 20 years is that the SFI is kind of a starting point but it doesnt tell you the whole story. i usually check it in the morning along with the K index and if K is above 3 i get a little worried about the higher HF bands especially anything going over the polar paths. you can have a great SFI but if theirs geomagnetic activity messing things up then Europe from here in the midwest can go completely sideways. for real time stuff i use the DX cluster combined with just spinning the dial honestly. sometimes the cluster shows a pileup on 12m and you go there and its wide open and nobody told you. the WWV propagation bulletins at 18 past the hour are worth listening to if you're old school about it. the main thing is just get on and listen, the bands will tell you more than any number on a website will.

dont sleep on just letting WSJT-X log directly to its own ADIF and then importing periodically, thats what i do and it works fine. the only time it gets annoying is when you forget to import before a contest and then you might work dupes but honestly for FT8 that barely matters. one thing i'll throw out there — if you havent looked at the N1MM and WSJT-X integration thats actually built in now, might be worth a look. you can have them talk to each other over UDP and N1MM will log the FT8 qsos directly during a contest. i set it up for field day this year and it mostly worked, had one weird issue where it was doubling some contacts but i think that was my own fault with the port settings. point being you dont necessarily have to live with two completely seperate workflows if youre doing a contest that includes digital modes

ok so i've been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now, my neighbor is licensed and he's been showing me some stuff and it seems really cool. anyway i finally decided to just go ahead and take the technician exam but honestly i dont even know where to begin with studying. i downloaded the question pool from the arrl website i think but its just like... 400 questions? and some of them make zero sense to me. like the electrical theory stuff especially. i took one practice test on hamstuddy or whatever its called and got like a 58% which is pretty discouraging. do people actually memorize all this or is there a better way to go about it. i have about 3 weeks before theres a test session near me

Built one last summer using two Hustler 6-BTV sections mounted butt-to-butt. The vertical dipole is fed at the center by a 1:1 balun and is further isolated with a 14 turn coil of RG-8 coaxial cable wrapped around a 7 inch diameter fiberglass form. The total power loss is around 1.5 db on 10 meters, 2 db on 15 meters, 2.5 to 3 db on 20 meters compared to full-size. Still works great for DX though - just worked JA on 20m yesterday morning.

yeah same here, been noticing it too. 20m has been kinda unpredictable. i had a great run on sunday morning into JA land and then monday night couldnt even hear the beacon. i think there was some geomagnetic activity messing things up but honestly i stopped trying to fully understand propagation years ago, just kind of roll with it at this point lol

As an example of the use of the International Radiotelephony Phonetic Alphabet, a callsign such as G3YWX would be said as Golf three Yankee Whisky X-ray. In cases like these the use of the radio phonetic alphabet is particularly useful because there are no visual clues and other ways of identifying the letters when an audio channel only is used. Always use phonetics when conditions are marginal or when establishing contact with unfamiliar stations.

so ive been licensed for about 8 years now mostly doing HF stuff, some 2m ssb when conditions are good, but ive been reading about EME for a couple years and i think i want to actually try it. not sure if im being realistic though. right now i have a 10 element yagi for 2m and a decent preamp, IC-9700 as the radio. i know the big guns are running arrays of like 4x9el or bigger dishes but i see people talking about JT65 making small station EME possible and i dont know how small is too small for a first contact or if thats even a realistic goal with what i have. also the whole moon tracking thing, do i need a full az/el rotator setup? i was looking at the SPID stuff and the prices are not nothing. and is there software everyone uses or is it kind of fragmented. i keep seeing references to WXtrack and also some guys using Ham Radio Deluxe for the tracking piece but i dont know what actually works well for the EME scheduling side of things. basically just trying to figure out if this is a multi-thousand dollar rabbit hole before i can work a single station or if a modest setup can actually do something useful

general isnt as bad as people make it out to be honestly. yeah there's more theory than tech but if you just grind hamstudy.org for like 2-3 weeks doing the practice exams every day you'll be fine. i think i studied maybe 10 days before mine and passed with only a couple wrong. the question pool isnt that big and you'll start seeing the same questions repeat pretty quick. as for what you get, general opens up big chunks of 40m, 20m, 15m, 10m which is where most of the DX action is anyway. extra gets you a bit more on the edges of those bands plus 60m and a few other things but honestly general is plenty to have a ton of fun on HF. i went like 8 months on general before i even thought about upgrading and worked like 40 countries in that time so dont let anyone tell you that you need extra before you can do anything interesting

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now mostly for airband and some NOAA weather stuff and honestly its been fine for what it is but im starting to feel the limits especially when i try to do anything below about 25 MHz without the direct sampling hack which kind of works but kind of doesnt depending on the day anyway ive been going back and forth between picking up a HackRF One or an RSP1A for a while now. the HackRF is appealing because you can transmit on it which could be useful for some experiments but the receive performance on the HackRF is honestly not that impressive from what ive read, like the noise figure is pretty bad compared to the RSP1A. the SDRplay seems way better for pure receive stuff especially on HF which is most of what i want to do main use case would be HF monitoring, maybe some utility stuff, possibly decoding some weak signal digital modes with WSJT-X or fldigi piped through. not really doing any transmit experiments anytime soon so maybe the HackRF is overkill in the wrong direction if that makes sense. anyone gone through this decision or have both?