Robert Mitchell

the book you bought, is it the ARRL one or the Gordon West study guide? both are fine but they're pretty different in how they explain things. Gordon West reads more like someone talking to you which some people prefer. i'll be honest i skipped big chunks of my book and just did practice questions and passed no problem, but i also already had some background in electronics from work so your mileage may vary. the RF safety section trips a lot of people up for some reason so dont skip that part, theres maybe 4 or 5 questions from that topic on the actual pool and they're kind of weirdly worded

i passed mine about four months ago and was in pretty much the same boat. what got me through it was just doing practice exams over and over on that hamstudy site, like i barely even read the study material i just did tests until i was consistently getting 90% or above and then went and took the real thing. the antenna and propagation questions were the ones i kept missing at first but they kind of clicked after a while. one thing i'd say is dont overthink the electricity section, theres really only a handful of formulas that actually show up and once you see them a few times theyre not bad. good luck, it really is not that hard

yeah the no-balun thing is almost certainly part of your problem. without a choke or 1:1 balun at the feedpoint the shield is radiating and the pattern gets all weird, and it also messes with your SWR reading because current is coming back down the outside of the coax. easy fix is just winding a few turns of the coax into a coil right at the feedpoint — like 6-8 turns about 6 inches diameter — that acts as a decent air core choke and costs you nothing. it wont be perfect but it'll be way better than what you got now.
also 18 feet is low but it shouldnt push you that far off resonance by itself. id try the choke first then retrim the legs. cut a little at a time, like an inch per side, check SWR, repeat. going up even a couple more feet would help a lot too if thats an option.

honest answer — for the 500-800 QSO range SO2R is probably not where your time is best spent. the big gains from SO2R come from filling dead time, and if you're not already running close to 100% efficiency on radio 1 then you're leaving more points on the table from things like not knowing when to switch from running to S&P, or not having a good feel for when a band is about to close. those are zero-cost fixes.
that said the "radio 2 just for monitoring" thing is actually underrated and I did that for a couple years before going full SO2R. just having a second receiver on 10 while you're running 15 so you notice when 10 opens — that alone has saved me mult opportunities i would have completely missed. you dont need filters or anything special for that if you're not transmitting on it, just keep the gain backed off and physically move the antenna jack if you have to. not elegant but it works.
the filter situation is real though, dont skip that when you do go SO2R for real. ran without them once during SS and my second radio was basically useless the whole time i was transmitting on radio 1.

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?

had almost the exact same thing on my old Tacoma. turned out the coax shield wasnt making great contact at the mag mount base, which was causing RF to travel back down the outside of the coax instead of staying on the shield. classic common mode current problem. what fixed it for me was adding a few ferrite chokes on the coax run close to the antenna feedpoint. mix 31 toroids work great for VHF/UHF, you can slip the coax through a couple of them and it makes a noticeable difference. also worth checking how the coax is routed — if its running parallel to the power leads for any length that can cause issues too.
the composite liner shouldnt matter much for the antenna ground plane since the mag mount is on the metal roof of the cab anyway. if you ever do decide to drill, an NMO mount through the roof with a proper ground connection will be a big improvement over the mag mount regardless.

so this has been bugging me for probably three weeks now and i cant figure it out. got my 7300 about two years ago used, ran great until recently. what happens is ill be in a qso or even just tuning around and mid-transmission the power just drops, like from 100w down to maybe 10-15w for a few seconds then comes back up. sometimes it stays low and i have to release the ptt and key back up. ALC looks weird when it happens, kinda jumps around.
at first i thought it was the coax but ive swapped that out twice now and same deal. swr on the antenna is fine, checked it with the external meter. the radio doesnt throw any errors, no PA fault or anything on screen. temps seem okay too, fan kicks on like normal. i did the recalibration thing in the service menu a while back but that was before this started happening.
anyone dealt with this before or have a clue where to start? im not opposed to cracking it open but idc want to make it worse

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually operate on 40 meters. ive been reading the band plan on the arrl website but honestly its a little confusing because it shows different things for phone vs cw and then there's the actual FCC allocations which seem different from the "recommended" stuff and i dont know which one i actually have to follow legally vs which is just courtesy.
like can i just park on 7.250 and call CQ or is that too close to the edge of the phone segment or what. also someone at my club said something about 7.300 being the upper band edge and you shouldnt go above that but i thought the allocation goes a bit higher? maybe im misremembering. anyway just trying to not step on toes or worse transmit somewhere im not supposed to as a new general

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly im starting to get lost trying to figure out what each one actually is and whether you need all of them or if they overlap somehow. like are these all run by the ARRL? do you apply for them separately? i talked to a guy at our club last week who said he was chasing his 5BDXCC and i just nodded like i knew what that meant lol
i've been logging contacts since day one so hopefully i have some credits building up, i just never really knew what i was tracking toward. running a modest station here, IC-7300 into a G5RV in a small backyard, so nothing fancy. mostly 40m and 20m. any pointers on where to even start with this stuff would be really appreciated

haha yeah the spotting thing catches everyone the first time. what i do now is pre-spot before i even leave the parking lot if i have signal there, just set a time like 30-45 minutes out and note your planned frequency. most chasers will wait around for you especially if its a new or rare summit. also look into the SOTA Spotter app, you can set up alerts and it makes the whole thing smoother. for the antenna situation with trees not cooperating, ive started carrying a longer throw line and a small weight, total game changer on summits where the branches are being difficult. four contacts is four contacts though, activation counts and thats what matters for your first one.

honestly just build the dipole. i spent way too long in analysis paralysis when i was first setting up on HF and the answer is always just get something up and start making contacts. you can always add stuff later. an inverted-V at 35ft fed with decent coax and a 1:1 choke balun is going to work fine for what you're describing

so ive been on HF for about two years now and honestly my SSB audio has always kinda bothered me but i kept putting it off. finally had a guy on 20m tell me i sounded like i was in a tin can and that was enough to make me actually look into it.
my setup is an IC-7300 into a stock mic, the one that came in the box. i know i know, but bear with me. i've been reading about compression settings and the speech processor and honestly the manual is not super helpful on the practical side of things. like it tells you what the knobs do but not really what they should be set to for a decent signal on SSB.
i did some recordings using the monitor function and yeah it does sound pretty harsh, especially when i talk louder. is this a mic gain issue, compression issue, or is the stock mic just genuinely not good enough for decent audio? and also — what's the actual deal with upper vs lower sideband, i always just use USB on 20m because thats what everyone else seems to do but im not 100% sure i fully understand why LSB is used on 40 and 80. sorry if thats a dumb question tacked on at the end there

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 this is basically the eternal ham radio software problem lol. i gave up trying to have one program do everything a while back. N1MM is king for contesting, full stop, nothing else comes close if you actually care about your score or even just running a clean log under pressure. but its not really designed to be your everyday logbook and i dont think the developers ever intended it to be.
what i do now is just keep N1MM for contests only and accept that the post-contest ADIF merge into my main log (i use DXKeeper) is gonna take like 20 minutes of cleanup. its annoying but its predictable. the WSJT-X thing though i just let that log to its own ADIF file and import separately, never tried to get UDP going to two programs at once, sounds like a nightmare honestly. might be worth just turning off the Log4OM UDP listener when youre in contest mode so at least you know where everything is going

Looking at upgrading my mobile antenna setup and trying to decide between a 1/4 wave and 5/8 wave VHF antenna. Currently running a basic mag mount 1/4 wave on my daily driver. I do a mix of highway driving and city/suburban repeater work.
From what I've read, the longer antenna should give better DX performance but wondering if there are tradeoffs for local repeater access. Anyone have real-world experience comparing these two antenna types in mobile applications?

so we had our quarterly drill saturday and man did we screw up bad. the scenario was a tornado hit the county fairgrounds during a festival and we had to set up emergency comms for the red cross shelter. sounds simple right?
well first off half the guys showed up without their go kits charged. then when we tried to set up the 2m repeater link it kept dropping out because apparently nobody checked the backup power at the site in months. took us almost 45 minutes just to get a stable connection to the EOC.
but the real disaster was traffic handling - we had like 8 health and welfare messages come in at once and people were stepping all over each other trying to log them. total chaos. our net control guy was getting flustered and started making mistakes on the message forms.
i know its just practice but if this was real people would be screwed. anyone else have drills that went sideways like this? what did you learn from it