James Patterson

yeah what the other guy said about audio routing is spot on. also for your VHF packet setup - dont give up on that yet because for local emcomm honestly packet on 2m is way more reliable than trying to hit an HF RMS when conditions are bad. the TM-V71A does have a built in TNC if you have the right version of the radio, might be worth checking before you go external TNC route. one thing i'll add for the HF side - when youre picking gateways in channel selection make sure youre actually on the right frequency before you kick off the session. sounds obvious but Winlink Express doesnt automatically retune your radio unless youve got CAT control set up properly. if the 991A isnt talking to the software via USB it'll just try to connect on whatever frequency you were already on, which is probably not where that RMS is listening.

dont worry about it, everyone fumbles the first few times. i checked into my first net and completely forgot to wait for the squelch tail before transmitting and ended up doubling with someone else checking in at the same time. net control just asked us both to re-send and moved on. its really not a big deal at all. the nets around here at least are super forgiving of new folks, thats kind of the whole point of them honestly.

so ive been at this for about three weeks now and finally got myself a cheap dual lever paddle off amazon to replace the straight key i was learning on. the thing is, my hand keeps tensing up after maybe 10-15 minutes of practice and my characters start falling apart. im using a MFJ keyer built into my radio (ic-7300) and i've got it set around 15 wpm because i read somewhere you're supposed to learn at a higher speed and slow it down with farnsworth spacing. i think my paddle tension might be too tight? or maybe my elbow position is wrong. i honestly don't know. i just know my wrist gets tired and then my dahs start sounding like dits and everything goes sideways. any elmer types out there who've been through this?

so ive been running a remote station for about 8 months now, started with RemoteHams because it seemed like the easiest path to get my rig accessible from the apartment while the antenna farm stays at the QTH out in the county. works fine for the most part but ive been having this nagging feeling i could do better latency wise if i just set up my own VPN and used something like flrig or maybe SDR-Console pointing at an SDR frontend out there instead. the RemoteHams client does what it says on the tin, audio routing is decent once you mess with the buffer settings, but the SDR remote side of things has been a bit flaky for me lately — like sometimes the waterfall just stops updating and i have to disconnect and reconnect, which is annoying mid-QSO. not sure if thats a server side thing or my ISP doing something weird. curious if anyone has actually compared running RemoteHams with their native SDR remote capability versus just setting up an RTL-SDR or an Airspy at the remote end and tunneling it back yourself. also wondering about the internet linking side — ive got an Allstar node at the remote site and sometimes i think about just tying all this together but it gets complicated fast when youre thinking about who has control of what and when. anyway rambling a bit here but basically asking if the DIY route is worth the headache or if RemoteHams is good enough that im just chasing ghosts

i just keep N1MM for contests and dont even bother trying to merge it with my everyday log anymore. spent way too long trying to make it all talk to each other nicely. WSJT-X to Log4OM via UDP like the other guy said works fine, do that first. but for contests i treat N1MM as totally separate and just upload the Cabrillo to the contest sponsor and separately export the ADIF to LOTW. yeah your master log might be missing some dupe info but honestly for a casual contester thats not really a problem in practice.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it since january and im hovering around 10-11wpm. one thing i started doing recently that seems to be helping is the Farnsworth method where you set the character speed high like 20wpm but put big gaps between the letters so you have time to think. the idea is your ear gets used to hearing fast characters even if the overall pace is slow. i read about it on here somewhere and figured id try it. feels weird at first but after a few weeks i think its working?? hard to tell sometimes also started copying by hand instead of typing and for some reason that made a difference too, not sure why

SDR++ with either one is the move imo, forget SDRuno for linux. just my two cents but the price difference between those two devices felt worth it when i actually sat down and compared HF reception. hackrf always felt like it was wearing earmuffs lol. the RSP1B isnt perfect but for the money its hard to beat if TX isnt on your list.

i had almost this exact same debate last year and ended up going with a trapped vertical. do i love it? not really. does it work? yeah well enough. the noise thing is real, 40m vertical picks up everything. my neighbor has some kind of switching power supply or something and it just wipes out half the band some evenings. but when the band is clean i've worked europe and japan from the midwest so it does what it needs to do. one thing i'll say — if you go the dipole route dont write it off completely just because its low. i had a dipole at about 20ft before and i still worked some DX with it, not a ton but it happened. low dipoles are weird, sometimes they just get out better than they should on certain paths. might be worth putting up the dipole first since its cheaper and see how you like it before committing to a vertical and digging up your whole yard for radials

ok so ive been licensed about 4 months now and still kinda confused about this. like i know the NATO phonetics, alpha bravo charlie etc, but when im on the air i never know when im supposed to use them vs just saying the letter. like if someone asks me to repeat my callsign do i always go full phonetic or is it situational. i was on a local 2m net last week and the net control asked for check ins and i just said my call letters normally and nobody said anything but then somebody else on there did full phonetics for theirs and i felt like maybe i was doing it wrong. is there like an unwritten rule about this or does it just depend on conditions

tbh if budget allows just get both eventually lol. but if i had to pick one starting from where you are id say RSPdx too. the 8 bit thing on hackrf isnt just a spec sheet complaint, you actually feel it when a strong local signal is anywhere nearby, whole display just gets messy. one thing nobody mentions enough — the SDRplay driver situation on Linux is way better than it used to be. used to be kind of a pain but last time i set it up on a Pi it was pretty smooth. matters if you ever want to run it headless for like a kiwisdr type monitoring setup or whatever.

yeah the LM386 is notorious for being hissy, thats kind of just what it does especially when you've got the gain cranked up with the cap between pins 1 and 8. a lot of guys building these things swap it out for an LM4562 or even just a TL072 based stage with a bit more thought put into the gain structure. the 602 itself adds some noise too, its not exactly a low noise figure device but for 40m its usually fine since the band has plenty of signal above the noise floor anyway. for your grounding problem, what youre describing with the rumble getting worse when you touch the enclosure sounds classic ground loop stuff or maybe your audio ground and RF ground are fighting each other. i had basically the same thing on a 80m receiver i built a few years ago and what fixed it was running a single point ground back to the power supply rather than just relying on the board traces to tie everything together. the VFO drift on PVC is real, that stuff moves a lot with temperature. if you want a quick cheap fix try winding the coil on an FT-50-61 or similar, even a small ferrite toroid will be way more stable thermally than the PVC form. or if you want to get fancy, using NP0 ceramic caps in the oscillator tank circuit helps a lot with drift compensation, the negative tempco of the coil and the positive tempco of most caps kind of cancel out if you mix the values right. its one of those things you end up tweaking by feel mostly.

RTTY is still worth keeping in your toolkit imo especially if you do any contesting — RTTY contests still get decent participation and its a mode that actually requires a little bit of skill to set up properly which filters out some of the appliance operator crowd lol. i run MMTTY through N1MM and it works fine, not as exotic as some of the newer stuff but it gets the job done. the JS8Call thing is interesting i might have to try it again. i installed it a while ago but couldnt find anyone to talk to and kind of gave up. maybe i was on the wrong band or wrong time. what freqs do you usually find activity on 40m?

yeah the terrain is probably your bigger issue tbh. a yagi will absolutely give you more gain in the direction you point it, something like a 9 element on 2m could get you 12-13 dBd which blows the x50 out of the water gain-wise, but if youre in a valley with a ridge or hill in between you and the repeater input youre kind of fighting physics. that said ive seen cases where even a modest improvement made the difference between quieting the squelch and not, so its not hopeless. the dual antenna with a switch setup is totally doable and a lot of guys do exactly that. just keep the coax runs as short and matched as you reasonably can, LMR-400 or equivalent, and a decent A/B coax switch at the radio isnt that expensive. honestly id try borrowing a yagi first before buying anything just to see if it even moves the needle for that path. your club probably has somebody with one you could throw on the roof for a weekend test.

so this has been bugging me for a couple weeks now. i can see my station showing up on aprs.fi just fine, my beacon is going out every few minutes and the position is updating correctly. but whenever i try to send a message through APRS — either to another station or just to EMAIL or SMSGTE — nothing seems to get through. the other station says they never received it and the email gateway never responds. im running a TM-D710G with a decent antenna on the roof, using 144.390 obviously. digipeater path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1. i dont think its an RF issue because my position packets are clearly getting picked up by at least two or three igates in range. but messages are a different story apparently. is there something specific about how message packets are handled differently than position beacons? i feel like im missing something obvious here. been licensed a few years but only recently started messing with APRS beyond just passive tracking.

so ive been messing around with remote station control for a while now and finally got a decent setup going with RemoteHams but im running into some weirdness when i try to tie the SDR side of things into my linking setup. basically i have an IC-7300 at the remote site, running RCForb client from home, and that part actually works pretty well most of the time. the audio latency is manageable on a decent connection. the issue is i also want to pull in an SDR feed — ive got an RTL-SDR at the site just for panadapter use — and route that through the same internet link without killing my bandwidth or making the control side laggy. someone told me i could run SDR# or SDRuno and just VNC into the box at the remote end but that seems like a lot of overhead just to see a waterfall. is there a smarter way to do this or am i overthinking it also separately i keep reading about people using EchoLink or IRLP nodes linked into their remote setups and im not totally sure how that fits in. like are people literally running both a traditional remote station AND a linked repeater node off the same hardware, same internet pipe? seems like it would get messy but maybe im wrong

had something similar a while back, turned out to be a setting in the server config related to audio device exclusive mode on windows. if the server software is releasing and re-acquiring the audio device during the handoff that would explain the delay. check whether youre using WASAPI exclusive or shared mode in the server settings. switching mine to shared mode killed the dropout almost entirely though i did notice a tiny bit more latency afterward, nothing operationally significant. also worth checking if theres a VAC or virtual audio cable in the chain because those can sometimes hold onto device handles longer than expected during transitions. what OS is the server mini PC running?

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and honestly I keep telling myself ill put together a real go-kit but never actually do it. well after the storms we had last month knocked out power for like 4 days I decided to stop procrastinating. got a Pelican 1510 case and an FT-817ND I picked up used, and I'm thinking a small lithium battery pack, some coax, and my j-pole for 2m/70cm. also grabbed a little spiral notebook and some pens because I kept forgetting you actually need something to log with when your laptop is dead lol. my question is what does everyone else keep in theirs that I might be forgetting? I feel like there's always that one thing you dont think about until you actually need it and its not there. I've seen some really elaborate setups online but I dont want to overdo it and end up with a 60 pound kit that never leaves the closet. also wondering about HF vs just sticking to VHF/UHF for local stuff. I'm only tech right now but thinking about upgrading just for the extra flexibility in an actual emergency.

the no-choke thing is almost definitely part of your problem. without a common mode choke at the feedpoint the coax shield becomes part of the antenna and it throws off your measurements and your pattern. easiest fix is just wind like 8-10 turns of the coax in a coil about 6 inches in diameter right at the feedpoint, tape it up good. or if you have a few ferrite toroids lying around slap together a quick 1:1 current balun. once i did that on mine the SWR reading on the nanovna actually settled down and i could trim properly. also 120 degrees included angle is on the wider side for an inverted-V, some guys say that pulls the resonant freq up a bit compared to a flat dipole, others say down, honestly ive seen it go both ways depending on height and ground conductivity. id fix the choke situation first before you keep trimming or youll chase your tail all day.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still feel kind of awkward with the phonetic alphabet thing. like i know the NATO ones, Alpha Bravo Charlie etc, but i never really know when im supposed to use them vs just saying the letter normally. on 2m repeaters locally everyone seems to just say their call letters straight without phonetics most of the time but then on HF i hear people being very deliberate about spelling everything out phonetically. is there like an actual rule or is it just kind of a feel thing depending on conditions? also i heard someone use "America" instead of "Alpha" the other day and that threw me off, didnt know if that was an older thing or what

yeah the door jamb thing drives me crazy when i see it, you're right to want to fix that. i did the same thing temporarily and ended up leaving it for like 8 months lol. what eventually got me moving was the coax jacket started cracking from the door pinching it. the TM-V71A is a solid radio by the way, been running mine for a few years. the cross-band repeat feature is actually really handy if you ever need it. good luck with the install

the Koch method is still pretty much what most people recommend and honestly it does work but you have to commit to it daily, even just 10-15 minutes. the trick that nobody tells you upfront is to set your code speed higher than feels comfortable — like 20wpm character speed even if you're a total beginner. sounds backwards but if you learn the rhythm of each letter at speed from the start you wont have to unlearn that dit-dah counting thing later which is a real trap. LCWO.net is free and its basically built around Koch, lots of people use it. there's also the Morse Trainer app which is decent. i'd say the biggest thing is just dont skip days, consistency matters way more than how long each session is. took me maybe 3-4 months before i felt like i could actually copy simple words without wanting to throw my radio out the window, and probably another couple months after that before i made my first actual CW contact. it clicks eventually, just kind of suddenly one day.

yeah the bands have been a bit of a rollercoaster. that CME you mentioned did cause a geomagnetic disturbance a few days back, K index was up around 4-5 which basically kills the higher bands, especially at higher latitudes. the thing people dont always realize is solar flux being high is only part of the equation — you also need the K index and A index to be low and calm. flux tells you the sun is active enough to ionize the F layer, but if you've got a storm going on that same ionization gets disrupted and you end up with exactly what you were describing, brief openings then dead again. for resources i really like DXmaps.com for seeing where contacts are actually happening in real time, and space weather dot com gives you all the numbers together. once you start watching those together over a few months it starts to make a lot more intuitive sense. 15m right now when conditions settle is honestly fantastic, we're building toward solar maximum so enjoy it.

so i've been putting off building a QRP kit for probably two years now, kept telling myself i didn't have the skills or the right tools. finally just bit the bullet and ordered a Mountain Topper MTR-3B and spent about three evenings on it last week. the SMD stuff was honestly less scary than i expected once i got a decent magnifying lamp sorted out. first contact was on 40m running about 4 watts into a random wire i threw up in the backyard and i worked a station in Virginia (im in Ohio) on my first call. i know thats not a huge deal for a lot of you but i was kind of floored that it just... worked. like immediately. only issue i ran into is the audio seems a little low on the sidetone when im doing CW, not sure if thats a component issue or just how the rig is. anyone else build one of these and notice that? overall though super happy with it and already looking at antenna options for taking it out portable. been reading about end fed half waves and they seem popular for this kind of thing but open to suggestions

the IC-9700 is actually a solid starting point, better than what most people had when they first got into this. the preamp situation matters a lot more than people give it credit for — you really want a good LNA right at the feedpoint, not inside the shack. something like a SSB Electronics or a Kuhne unit with a noise figure around 0.3-0.5 dB makes a real difference. the cable run from the antenna to the radio will kill you otherwise even with good coax. single yagi EME on 2m is real but youre basically dependent on the other station being a big gun with a large array and favorable conditions. ive seen it done with a single 9 element yagi but that person was getting called by stations running 4x19 element arrays with a kilowatt. so yes the contacts happen but youre not exactly working a pile of random stations. a pair of decent cross-pol yagis, something in the 12-17 element range each, gets you into a much more workable situation where you can actually initiate contacts sometimes instead of just waiting to be heard. perigee vs apogee is roughly 2dB difference which sounds small but at these signal levels it genuinely matters. and window duration where the moon is above both horizons is the bigger scheduling constraint honestly. get on the EME2 and ping group reflectors and start watching what people post about their schedules, youll get a feel for how it actually works operationally pretty quick.

yeah honestly the three system thing is a bit of a mess but here's how i think about it — LoTW is kind of the gold standard if you're eventually going to chase DXCC or any of the ARRL awards, those confirmations only count if both stations upload to LoTW. so if that's on your radar down the road it's worth keeping up with. eQSL is more casual, a lot of people use it and it's fine but it doesnt count for the big awards. paper cards are... well they're just nice. some DX stations only do paper, and getting a card from somewhere exotic in the mail is genuinely satisfying even if you never frame it or anything most people i know do LoTW for sure, and then paper when the other station specifically requests a QSL or when its a notable contact. eQSL is kind of optional, some folks are into it some arent. you dont have to do all three for every QSO, thats for sure