Linda Chen

yeah i had basically the exact same issue when i first set mine up. what helped me was installing Direwolf on a pi and running my own igate — obivously thats kind of a nuclear option just to diagnose the problem but once i had it running i could actually see in the logs whether my own packets were being heard. turns out there was a digi near me that was NOT internet connected, it was just floating out there on RF only, which is apparently still a thing some people run for local mesh-type stuff i guess. also worth checking if maybe your audio drive level is off. even with a built in TNC like the D710 ive seen people have decode issues when the internal settings got bumped somehow. if your packets are malformed the digis might be rejecting them silently.

yeah the bias check is the right call first, saves you the hassle of pulling finals that might be ok. one thing i'd add is check continuity through those LPF relays because a stuck or welded relay contact can block output entirely and it looks exactly like what your describing. pretty easy to check with the board out of circuit. btw if you do end up needing the RD70HVF1s, RF Parts usually has them in stock, last time i checked they were around 20 bucks each and the 7300 has two of them. not a fun job to replace but doable if you're comfortable with SMD work and have a decent hot air station.

The overshoot occurs on key-down where the rig briefly spikes above your set power level before settling. It's usually only a few watts over and lasts microseconds. I have two of them that I use remotely (one with an amp), and haven't had a single issue with either....not one. Highly recommend that radio. The AL-811H should handle it fine - just don't run the 7300 at max power into the amp.

so ive been licensed for about 3 weeks now, tech class, and i kept putting off actually transmitting because honestly i was nervous about sounding dumb on the air. my elmer kept telling me just do it already but i kept making excuses. anyway yesterday i finally just keyed up on the local 2m repeater and said my call and some guy came back immediately and we talked for like 10 minutes about nothing, weather, what radio i was using, whatever. totally normal conversation but i was shaking the whole time lol. he gave me a signal report and everything felt so official. i dont know why i waited so long. anyone else remember their first time actually transmitting? did you freeze up or was it just me

I'm preparing for my Technician license and getting conflicting advice. Some hams tell me to just drill the question pool until I can pass the practice exams. Others say I need to understand the underlying electronics and regulations. Which approach actually works better for passing the exam and being a competent operator? I don't want to waste time, but I also don't want to be one of those "appliance operators" who doesn't understand what they're doing.

honestly the app method is totally fine and basically everyone does it. HamStudy or Ham Radio Prep are the ones most people use and the question pool is publicly available so its not really cheating, theyve already told you what the answers are. the technician exam is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass, all multiple choice, no morse code requirement hasnt been a thing for a long time now. for a total beginner i'd say just focus on tech first and dont worry about doing all three at once unless you really want to. some people do a cram weekend and pass all three back to back which is impressive but also kind of exhausting and you dont retain much. if you actually want to understand what youre doing, tech first, get on the air, then study for general when you feel ready. the arrl handbook is great but its also a lot if you dont have any background, so maybe start with the arrl technician study guide which is more manageable. and find a local club, most of them run practice exams and the elmers there will answer questions that no app can really answer for you

check your power supply voltage first before you do anything else. those 706s are really picky about voltage and if its dropping under load in ssb it might explain why fm works (less power draw). also wiggle the power connector - the molex one they used is notorious for getting loose connections. if that doesnt fix it then yeah probably needs to go to a tech but at least you ruled out the easy stuff first

did this exact thing on my silverado a few years back, went from mag mount to a proper NMO through the roof and yeah there is a difference, not night and day but noticeable. biggest thing for me wasn't even the RF performance it was just the cable situation — no more worrying about the door seal squishing the coax or the mount sliding if i brake hard. the antenna just feels more solid, less rattle on bumpy roads too. drilling the hole sounds scary but honestly its not bad, you just gotta be careful about where you place it and seal it properly. i used a step bit and took it slow, silicone under the mount flange and never had a water issue. the NMO270 is a good antenna, ive heard good things about it. i ended up with a Hustler but thats just what my local shop had. if you're already thinking about it you'll probably always wonder if you dont just do it

so ive been a general for about two years now and honestly i use maybe a tiny slice of the HF bands and dont really feel like im missing out on much but people keep telling me to just go ahead and get my extra. i started looking at the question pool and some of this stuff is... a lot. like the filter theory and the laplace transforms and all the advanced antenna stuff. i did okay in college physics a long time ago but this feels like a different animal. my actual question i guess is whether the extra privileges are actually useful in practice or if its more of a prestige thing. like do you actually need those extra few khz on 40m or 80m to do anything meaningful. i mostly do some casual rag chewing and occasionally mess around with digital modes. not really a contester or anything. just wondering if people who have it actually use those parts of the bands or if they just wanted to say they have the license

this is really interesting to read as someone who just got their ticket a few months ago and hasnt done any ARES stuff yet. im kind of intimidated by the whole thing honestly but reading that even experienced operators had a two minute gap makes me feel like maybe I wouldnt be totally useless if I showed up to one of these. does your group do any kind of orientation for new people before throwing them into a drill or is it mostly just learn by doing?

the FT-891 is a solid choice for this, good call leaving the 7300 at home for deployments. i went the same route actually, mine lives in a plastic tote with a handle that i can grab in about 90 seconds. nothing fancy. one thing i dont see people talk about enough is logging and documentation when you deploy. i spent so long thinking about radio stuff that i showed up to my first real activation with no way to take decent notes, no printed ICS forms, nothing. the served agency wanted paper logs and i was scrambling. worth thinking about the non-radio parts of the kit too if you havent already.

so ive been running an old FT-450D for about 4 years now and its been fine, no complaints really but the waterfall on it is pretty garbage compared to what i keep seeing people post from their 7300s. been lurking on this for a while and i think im ready to upgrade but now that im actually about to buy one im starting to wonder if i should just stretch a little more and go for the 7610 instead. the price jump is significant though, like almost double depending on where you look. my shack isnt anything fancy, just a random wire out the back window into a 9:1 unun, running mostly 40 and 20 meters, occasional 17m when the band cooperates. i dont do contesting or anything serious, mostly ragchews and some slow CW when im not lazy about it. does the 7610 actually justify that price for someone doing what im doing or am i just getting sucked into gear acquisition syndrome again

i just passed mine like six weeks ago so its pretty fresh. the math questions are the ones that scared me the most but theres really only a handful that actually require you to punch numbers into a calculator and if you learn the formulas for like decibel conversions and the resonant frequency formula you've probably got most of them covered. the rest is more conceptual than it looks. i was definitely overthinking it before i started studying.

so ive been a tech for about two years and just upgraded to general last month, and i always told myself id eventually learn CW even though its not required anymore. well i finally started and honestly its humbling. i can copy maybe 8-10 wpm if the sending is really clean but my own sending is a mess. im using a straight key right now, an old J-38 i picked up at a hamfest, and i think part of the problem is i dont really know what good timing feels like yet. i watched some videos and everybody says to just get a keyer and paddles and use iambic mode but i dont really understand the difference between mode A and mode B or why it matters. also does it actually help to start on a straight key or is that just old school thinking at this point. my elmer says straight key builds character but hes also 78 so i dont know how much of that is just tradition talking lol anyway if anyone has thoughts on how to actually get better at sending without sounding like a dying robot on the air id appreciate it

so ive been chasing DX seriously for maybe two years now and for a long time pileups were just this wall of noise i could never get through. worked a ton of the easy stuff but anything rare, like actual DXpeditions to places most people have never heard of, i was just getting nowhere. finally cracked it a bit last month during the FT5 operation and wanted to share what actually changed for me because most of the advice i read online is kind of generic. biggest thing honestly was listening way more than transmitting. i know everyone says that but i mean really listening — figure out where theyre listening, whats their split, are they working by number, by region, are they moving up or down the band. i spent like 20 minutes just watching before i even keyed up and by the time i did i had a much better sense of where to put my signal. also stopped tail-ending completely, that was a bad habit. second thing was timing my call. not calling the instant the DX comes back with a partial call, but waiting half a beat so i'm not buried under 400 guys all hitting transmit at the same moment. feels wrong but it seems to work better. also started using more power but thats an obvious one i guess. anyway curious what techniques other people actually use, not just the textbook stuff but what genuinely works for you in a real pileup situation

After almost 200 successful activations between POTA and SOTA, I've learned that you can have a successful activation with a minimal amount of gear The EFHW keeps things simple - if it's working for your needs, maybe stick with it? Less gear = more fun sometimes.

done this exact kind of exercise a few times now. honestly the generator question comes down to one thing for me — how much do you care about the people standing around you for 18 hours. eu2200i is quiet but its still a generator sitting there, and if you're near other operators or in a residential area for some reason it gets old fast. that said if you're in a park or parking lot setup nobody really cares. for 18 hours at that load i think you're looking at carrying a LOT of lifepo4 to avoid the genny. maybe 200-250ah worth to feel comfortable with headroom, and thats heavy even in the newer cells. i usually compromise and bring both — smaller 100ah battery pack as primary and the generator on standby if we go past 10-12 hours or start running higher power. works pretty well and the genny barely runs. on the antenna thing i'd take the resonant 40m dipole over the MPAS if you know thats your primary band. the chameleon is great for quick deployment and flexibility but a tuned dipole is just going to outperform it on that one band, less hassle with the tuner, and one less thing to fiddle with when something goes wrong at 2am during an exercise.

so ive been running single op for a few years now and consistently putting up what i'd call respectable but not great scores in SS phone and CW. somewhere in the 1200-1500 QSO range with a decent antenna setup, 2el on 40 at 50 feet, dipoles for the high bands, nothing crazy. im not a top 10 finisher but i care about the score. been thinking about SO2R for a while but every time i start down that rabbit hole i get overwhelmed by the station integration stuff. the band switching, the antenna relay logic, keeping audio sane between two radios — it just seems like a lot of infrastructure to build before you even get to the operating side of it. and then you still have to actually learn the operating technique which from what i understand takes a whole contest season to really internalize before you stop losing more QSOs than you gain from fumbling it. for context my primary is an IC-7300 and i picked up a used TS-590SG last year that i could press into service as the second radio. the SO2R integration with those two specifically seems tricky because neither one is particularly great at being slaved to an external controller, or at least thats my impression. anybody actually gone through this transition and can tell me honestly if there was a measurable rate improvement or if the first year is basically a wash while you figure it out

PVC works fine honestly, plenty of guys run it for years without issues. the UV thing is real though, you might want to hit it with some krylon fusion or even just wrap it in self amalgamating tape to slow down the degradation. the gray electrical conduit fittings are a bit more UV resistant than the white plumbing stuff if you ever rebuild it. the SO-239 idea is popular but yeah moisture is a legit concern if you dont seal it. i usually just put a couple wraps of coax seal around the connector body and then cover that with self-fusing tape and it holds up pretty well through midwest winters so arizona should be fine. the thing you want to avoid is water sitting in any cavity and then freezing or just slowly wicking into the coax braid over months. your RG-8X connection point is probably worth sealing regardless of what you do with the insulator, just slap some coax-seal on it and forget about it for a few years. 1.4:1 on a first build without trimming is actually pretty decent, i'd probably just leave it at that unless you're doing something where every tenth of SWR matters

i passed mine like 8 months ago and just used the ARRL study guide, think it was like 20 bucks on amazon. wasnt anything fancy but it goes through everything section by section and has practice questions at the end of each chapter. what I'd say is dont stress too much about fully understanding the electrical theory parts right away, like the ohms law stuff and the formulas. you can learn all that later when its actually relevant to whatever you end up doing. for the exam just know the forumlas enough to plug numbers in and youll be fine.

okay so i just passed my general exam last week and im trying to figure out the vanity call thing. i've been doing a ton of reading and i think i understand the basics but there's one thing that's tripping me up. right now i have a sequential call that the FCC assigned me automatically, something like KD9 something, and i want to eventually get a 1x3 or maybe a 1x2 call depending on what's available in my district. my question is basically — do i have to wait some specific amount of time before i can apply for a vanity, or can i just go ahead and file through the ULS right now? i've seen people say you have to wait until your license actually shows up in the database but i've also seen people say you can apply as soon as the CSCE is issued. getting contradictory info from like three different sources and i just want to know the actual process here. also is there a filing fee involved now? i thought there wasnt for a while but i heard they brought something back

yeah the inverting transponder thing trips everyone up at first, took me a few passes before it clicked. the way i think about it — imagine the transponder passband is a fixed window, and your signal moves within it. if you slide your uplink frequency up, you're pushing toward the top edge of the passband, which maps to the lower end on the downlink side. once that visual stuck in my head it made more sense for doppler correction manually, what a lot of guys do is just pre-tune the downlink to where it'll be at AOS, then as the pass progresses you're mostly chasing the downlink and leaving the uplink more or less alone until you really need to adjust. on a short 10 minute pass you wont have time to be fiddling with both radios constantly anyway. get the downlink locked first, everything else follows. if you can get CAT working eventually it makes life way easier but plenty of people work sats just fine without it, just takes a bit of feel for how fast the doppler shifts on a high vs low elevation pass

ran RemoteHams for probably 18 months on a Kenwood TS-590 at a site about 60 miles out. the relay server thing bugged me too at first but honestly for voice modes the latency was totally acceptable, i want to say somewhere around 150-200ms end to end on a good day, which is workable for SSB once you get used to keying a half beat early. CW was trickier, i wouldnt want to do a serious contest through it but ragchewing was fine. the SDR remote piece is a different story though — i had mixed results. it depends a lot on your bandwidth at the remote end and honestly how many other people are hammering their servers at the same time. for casual monitoring it was fine but trying to pull weak JT65 signals through it was frustrating, i ended up just keeping my WSJT-X setup on the pi anyway for digital modes. the integration with echolink type stuff i never tried directly but i know guys who run IRLP nodes alongside their RemoteHams setup, its not like officially supported or anything but its just two separate services on the same machine so no reason it wouldnt work.

so i finally got called up for my first real ARES activation last weekend, county had flooding from all the rain we've been getting and the EOC wanted radio support in case the repeater infrastructure went down or cell got congested. i've been in the group for about 8 months and done maybe 4 or 5 training nets but this was the first time it was an actual thing and not just practice. honestly i was kind of nervous going in. showed up at the EOC with my go-bag, had my VX-6R and a little slim jim hung out the window of my car, checked into the net on the assigned tactical frequency. the EC had everything pretty well organized, assigned positions, gave us all a quick briefing on what the served agency actually needed from us. ended up mostly doing welfare traffic and some coordination between a couple shelter sites that were having trouble with their phones. the thing that surprised me most was how much waiting there was. i expected it to be more intense i guess. but also when stuff DID need to happen it happened fast and you had to be ready. glad i'd done the ICS-100 and 200 before this because the terminology at the EOC was exactly that, they really do use it. anyone else remember their first activation? curious if mine was pretty typical or if i just got a relatively calm one to start with

congrats on the first activation, 23 QSOs on your first time out is actually a solid number, some people struggle to hit the 10 minimum when they're just starting out. the wire and KX2 combo works great, that's basically what a lot of activators use. for the log upload — ADIF format is what the pota site wants. if you're using HAMRS or Fast Log Entry to transcribe your paper log those will export ADIF directly. you just go to your account on the pota website, click on upload log and drop the file in. the park reference (like K-1234 or whatever your state uses) does need to be in the log, i believe it goes in the SIG_INFO field in the ADIF. the app doesnt auto fill that from the spot, you have to make sure it's in the actual log file or the upload might reject it or associate it with the wrong park. the website has a log template page that explains the fields if you dig around a bit. worth double checking your callsign matches exactly what's on your FCC license too, had a friend get a mismatch error because he had a suffix wrong.