David Rodriguez

so ive been running a fairly old TS-570 for probably 8 years now and its been solid but im starting to feel like im missing out on some of the newer stuff. been eyeing the IC-7300 for a while and honestly the price has come down enough that its not completely insane anymore. my main thing is i do a mix of SSB ragchewing and some light digital, FT8 mostly, occasional PSK31 when i can find anyone still doing it. what i keep reading is the SDR-based architecture on the 7300 makes a real difference for crowded band conditions, which around here on 40m in the evenings is definitely a thing. but i dont know if thats just marketing talk or if its actually noticeable coming from a superhet like the 570. also curious how the built in waterfall holds up for actually finding signals vs just looking pretty. anyone made a similar jump from older gear to the 7300 or something comparable like the 7610 if you had the budget not in a huge rush just trying to figure out if its worth saving up a bit more or just grab the 7300 now

yeah the inverting transponder thing takes a while to get wired into your brain honestly. what helped me was setting up the rig so i only chase doppler on the downlink and let the uplink sit. the idea being that the other station is doing the same, so you kind of find each other in the middle. it's not perfect but for a short LEO pass you dont really have time to be fussing with both VFOs at once anyway, especially if your rotator is eating your attention too. for the two radio thing — a lot of people do it. one radio dedicated to the downlink, one for uplink, and you mentally separate the doppler correction for each band. 70cm shifts a lot faster than 2m so the downlink on FO-29 needs more babysitting. there's doppler correction software like GPredict that can drive CAT-capable rigs automatically which is genuinely nice once you get it set up, though getting the CAT control talking to two radios is its own adventure depending on what you're running.

yeah the mars mod on the 7300 is genuinely one of the easier ones ive seen on a modern rig. icom kind of made it obvious they intended it to be accessible. the older 706 you had to do some more creative stuff to get full coverage and even then the PA wasnt really happy transmitting way out of band for any length of time. the 7300 seems to handle it fine from what people report, at least at normal power levels. one thing id add for anyone reading this later -- double check your local regulations before you start keying up on non-ham freqs even with the mod done, some folks get a little too enthusiastic after they get it working and forget that the mod itself doesnt grant any kind of authorization to actually use those frequencies. just saying.

congrats on the Japan contact, thats a solid one for your first year. so LOTW doesnt automatically apply for awards, you still have to log in and submit an application through the ARRL website and pay a small fee when you're ready. but yes it does track your confirmed QSOs so once that JA station uploads their log and it matches yours youll see it show as confirmed in your account. you can literally watch your credits accumulate over time which is kind of addictive honestly as for which award to chase first — most people find WAS a bit easier to start with because you can work stateside stations pretty much any time conditions are decent, and a lot of state qso parties make it pretty straightforward to knock out the harder states. DXCC is totally doable with a G5RV and 100 watts, dont let anyone tell you otherwise, it just takes patience and learning when to be on. WAZ is the CQ zones thing — the world is divided into 40 geographic zones and you need to work all 40. some zones are genuinely tough, like zone 1 up in the far north or zone 23 in central asia, those can take a while to find id say just log everything, get on LOTW, and let the credits pile up naturally. you might be surprised how fast DXCC basic (100 entities confirmed) sneaks up on you if youre on regularly

I went through this exact same thing last year. What finally clicked for me was thinking about it from the transponder's perspective — the inverting linear transponder on FO-29 means if you tune your uplink UP, your downlink goes DOWN, so overcorrecting in the wrong direction makes everything worse fast. I bricked a few contacts before i figured that out lol Also gpredict doppler correction works okay but ive had it lag a little on faster passes, so i usually have my hand on the VFO anyway. dont stress about the IC-9700 yet, i worked a bunch of stations on AO-73 with an FT-817 and a pair of handheld yagis. the two radio setup is honestly pretty standard for satellite ops.

so ive been messing around with remote station stuff for about 6 months now and im kind of at a crossroads. right now i have a basic setup using a raspberry pi and some custom scripts to control my IC-7300 over the internet, works okay but its a pain to maintain and every time my ISP does something weird it falls apart for a day or two while i figure out whats happening somebody at the club mentioned RemoteHams and i looked into it a little bit, also been reading about the SDR remote stuff they have going. the idea of not having to babysit port forwarding and dynamic DNS is appealing but im not sure if its worth essentially depending on a third party service for something i want to use for emcomm backup purposes also semi-related, anyone using internet linking like echolink or IRLP alongside a proper remote HF setup? wondering if theres any advantage to bridging those two worlds or if thats just a weird idea that doesnt make practical sense. my thinking was maybe use the VHF/UHF linking for local nets and have the HF remote for everything else but all on the same infrastructure at the remote site anyway curious what people are running, especially if youve tried RemoteHams and have opinions on the SDR client vs using something like SDR# or HDSDR through a VPN

I made almost that exact swap about two years ago, went from a 590S (not even the SG) to an IC-7610 and honestly yeah it was worth it for me but I contest more seriously than it sounds like you do. The dual receiver is not a gimmick if you do SO2R-lite stuff or just want to keep an ear on a second band while you work a pileup, I use it constantly during sweepstakes. That said if you're casual about it the 7300 is probably 90% of the radio for like half the price difference. The waterfall really does change how you operate, I know that sounds like marketing speak but finding openings on 10 and 12 meters got way easier because i actually see the band instead of just scanning. The 590SG receiver is no slouch though so dont expect a night and day difference in weak signal work, its more the interface and workflow that changes.

had almost exactly this happen with my remote setup a while back, different hardware but same symptom where the control channel stays alive but the SDR feed just dies. turned out for me it was the router at the remote end doing some kind of connection timeout on what it saw as idle UDP traffic. even though data was flowing the router was occasionally deciding the stream was stale and dropping it. had to get into the router config and extend the UDP session timeout, some consumer routers set that absurdly low like 30 seconds. also worth checking if theres any QoS rules running that might be deprioritizing the SDR stream since its high bandwidth compared to the rig control packets. the other thing i'd look at is whether the RTL-SDR itself is behaving, those things can be weirdly sensitive to USB power and if its getting marginal voltage it can just drop out silently and the software doesnt always recover gracefully from that.

had almost the exact same thing happen on mine last year. turned out to be the PTT line on the mic connector was intermittently shorting, like the little spring contact inside the body of the connector had gotten just slightly bent. wasnt obvious at all visually, had to actually probe it with a meter while wiggling things around to catch it. you said you tried a different mic but did you try keying it without any mic attached at all and using the built-in VOX or the front panel controls? that would at least rule out anything coming in through that connector. also the drop thing is worth looking into. the 7300 has that main board that handles the baseband processing and if something got slightly cracked or a solder joint went cold it could absolutely cause weird intermittent stuff like this. icom's service centers can do a reflow but it's not cheap. before going that route id try updating to the latest firmware if you havent already, there were some PTT handling fixes in one of the updates a while back, cant remember which version off the top of my head.

yeah the activity problem is real. i check in to a JS8Call net on sunday evenings, 7.078 i think, and there's usually maybe 4 or 5 people. it's not exactly a pile-up. but the conversations you do have are actually worth having, like last week i was chatting with a guy in Montana for probably 45 minutes while i was doing other stuff around the shack. you just glance over every few minutes. the store-forward thing is underrated. i had a message waiting for me from a buddy who tried to reach me at like 2am and i saw it in the morning. that's genuinely useful. FT8 you either connect or you dont, theres no async anything. for what its worth i think JS8Call scratches a totally different itch than FT8. FT8 is basically a propagation tool with a logging addon. JS8 is actually trying to be communication. whether the activity level ever picks up is another question, but i dont think its going anywhere anytime soon either.

so we had a pretty bad storm roll through a couple weeks ago and while i had everything unplugged from the wall i apparently forgot about the coax going to the antenna. nothing direct but there was a strike close enough to shake the windows. now the 7300 receives fine, waterfall looks normal, but when i key up there's literally zero power output. the ALC is doing something, it moves a little, but the power meter doesnt budge. tried it on a dummy load, tried two different mics, same deal. no magic smoke that i noticed, nothing obviously burnt when i look inside. i'm comfortable with a soldering iron and i've replaced caps before on older gear but this is my first time poking around a modern SDR-based radio. anyone been through something like this or have a clue which direction to start chasing? i dont have a full Icom service manual yet, trying to track one down.

honestly i was confused about this too when i started. what clicked for me was thinking of phonetics as just a tool you pull out when you need it, not a rule you have to follow every time. i started paying attention to when experienced ops used them and basically they go full phonetic when theres any doubt the other station got it right. like if someones asking you to repeat your call twice you probably should have just used phonetics from the start lol. on a dead quiet repeater with your buddy down the street, you dont need to say "Whiskey Alpha Five Foxtrot" every single time, its kind of overkill

yeah the doppler thing trips up pretty much everyone starting out with linear birds. the general rule of thumb most people use is to correct the downlink and keep the uplink as fixed as you reasonably can, mainly because if you're constantly retuning the uplink you're going to be jumping around in the passband and other stations wont be able to find you. what a lot of guys do is pick a spot in the passband before the pass, note that uplink freq, and then just ride the downlink dial throughout. Gpredict can actually drive a rig directly if you set up CAT control, which makes the downlink correction basically automatic — i'd look into that because doing it by hand in real time is rough. as for pass duration, at 45N a reasonable overhead pass — like one with a high elevation, 60 degrees or better — might give you 8 to maybe 10 minutes of workable time but a lot of passes are lower elevation and you might only get 4-5 minutes of decent signal before the link budget just falls apart. AO-73 specifically tends to be a bit inconsistent depending on its power mode too, sometimes the transponder is in low power and the downlink is weaker than you'd expect.

yeah FT8 gets tedious fast if you actually want to talk to somebody. i went through the same thing. personally i went back to PSK31 for actual ragchewing on digital, its old school but people on there tend to actually be interested in a QSO not just a signal report. 14.070 still has guys on it most evenings, slower crowd but thats not a bad thing. never got super deep into JS8Call but i messed with it during a field day type thing and it seemed solid for what it is.

yeah i had basically the same experience on my first one, spent way too long messing with gear and almost missed the window. one thing that helped me a lot was switching to a random wire with a little tuner instead of a linked dipole just because theres one less thing to fiddle with when you're cold and your fingers arent working right. the kx2's built in tuner handles a lot of random wire situations pretty well anyway. also the sotawatch app has that self-spot feature which you probably already know but if you put your frequency in the alert the day before a lot of chasers will already be looking for you which takes some pressure off. good luck on the next one, what summit are you thinking?