Michael Johnson

oh man i just got my general like two months ago and i havent tried 10m yet, mostly been hanging out on 40m because thats where my elmers told me to start. maybe i should give it a shot this weekend. whats a good freq to just listen around on first? i dont want to accidentally jump into a net or something embarrassing like that.

i went through this exact thing last spring. ended up running a temporary flat dipole using two painters poles and some paracord off the end insulators just to compare back to back. the difference on 40 to europe from the midwest was real but not dramatic, maybe stations that were 57 on the inverted V were more consistently 58-59 on the flat one. on 75m i barely noticed anything. wasnt worth the permanent hassle for my situation so im still on the inverted V. your mileage may vary and all that but thats what i found

yeah i was in the exact same boat like six months ago lol. the baofeng menu for tones is buried and the manual is basically useless. i ended up just watching a youtube video for my specific model and that cleared it up way faster than anything else. once i got the PL tone sorted out everything just clicked. also some repeaters around here are linked into like regional or even nationwide systems so you might end up talking to someone three states away which is kinda wild when you first experience it

honestly for a one day thing id just go battery and not even bother with the generator drama. lithium if you have it, AGM if you dont. the 7300 pulls maybe 2A on receive and like 20A at 100w output but youre not keyed up 100% of the time so real world is way less than worst case math. end fed slopers work fine dont overthink it. ive made plenty of DX off a wire hanging from a tree at a weird angle. sometimes the improvised setups just work and spending an hour laying out radials in a field is time you could be on the air

340 miles on 4 watts is solid, dont undersell that. i had a similar experience with my first QCX build last year, there is something about making a contact with a rig you built yourself that just feels different. i couldnt really explain it to my wife but i tried lol. one thing i do now for portable and home operation is keep a little log of what worked and what didnt, like what time of day, which part of the band, stuff like that. after a few months you start to see patterns specific to your location and setup which helps a lot more than generic propagation advice. also have you tried the QRP watering holes like 7.030 for CW? theres usually activity there and people calling there generally expect QRP stations so theyre a bit more patient about asking for repeats.

im still pretty new to chasing dx seriously but one thing that helped me a lot was actually using the dx cluster smarter, not just spotting where the frequency is but reading the comments people leave about the split. sometimes someone will say "up 5 working NA" or whatever and that saves you a ton of time just hunting around. also i got burned once calling simplex on a split operation because i didnt read carefully enough, felt like an idiot when someone came back and told me lol. still learning the etiquette side of it tbh

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general) and ive been listening to a lot of the big contest weekends but never actually participated. did kind of stumble through field day this past june with my club which was fun but chaotic and i dont think i really understood what was happening half the time honestly. anyway im looking at the calendar and theres a lot coming up — CQ WW is in october right? and then ARRL sweepstakes after that. not sure which one to try first or if i should just pick one and dive in. i also see people talking about SOTA activations a lot and wondering if thats considered a contest or more of its own thing. my setup is pretty modest, running about 100w into a dipole in the attic which i know isnt ideal but its what i have in a HOA situation. will that even be enough to make contacts during something like CQ WW or will i just be calling CQ into the void the whole time

GAS is real and it never goes away lol. i went 590 to 7610 which is maybe overkill but the dual watch on the 7610 is genuinely usefull for running a pileup and monitoring another band at the same time. the 7300 is probably the sweet spot for most people though, great radio for the price. your attic dipole situation is the real limiting factor like the other guy said, no rig upgrade fixes that.

yeah the wire storage thing is like a rite of passage honestly. i used to use those plastic winder reels and they're just terrible in the field, always kinking and catching on brush. what i do now is just wind the wire in a figure-8 around my hand and thumb, toss it in a small mesh bag. takes like 2 minutes to coil up and comes out clean almost every time. also way lighter than any reel. the EFHW itself is a great choice for summits though, hard to beat for quick deployments.

yeah the frequency offset thing is pretty common and its almost never perfectly matched to what the software says. gpredict uses the published transponder center freq but those can shift a bit over time and your rig's TCXO or whatever reference you have is probably slightly off too, even a few ppm adds up when you're dealing with doppler corrections at 145 MHz. i just use a known beacon on the downlink to calibrate before i start seriously working the pass, get your radio zeroed on that and then you have a reference point for the rest. the dual radio thing is the right approach but it takes some getting used to. honestly the hardest part for me early on was remembering to tune the uplink opposite to the downlink doppler direction when you're in inverting mode — which AO-73's linear transponder is. if you tune up on the downlink to find your signal you actually have to tune down on the uplink, catches a lot of people off guard the first few times

might be totally off base here but have you checked if the 7300s USB connection to whatever PC is at your home end is stable? i had something similar and it turned out the PC was suspending the USB port after a few minutes of what it thought was inactivity. drove me crazy for weeks before i figured it out. just a thought, probably not your issue but worth ruling out

i was in basically your exact spot about 8 months ago and ended up with the Kenwood TH-K20A on a recommendation from someone at my local club. its only 2 meters which felt limiting at first but honestly most of the active repeaters near me are 2m anyway and the audio quality is noticeably better than my friends UV-5R. just something to consider if you dont need 70cm right away. the club thing is worth mentioning too — if theres a club near you, go to a meeting before you buy, someone will probably let you try a few different radios and that hands-on time is worth more than any review online

yeah the skip thing is real and honestly even experienced guys run into this. one thing i'll add — on some of the more popular HF bands during good propagation you kind of have to accept that you might be causing interference somewhere even if you do everything right. the band's just busy. for nets specifically the procedure is pretty different anyway, net control assigns you a slot basically so there's less of the "is this frequency in use" problem. if you're nervous about jumping into freeform HF operating, starting with a structured net on 2m or even one of the regional HF nets is genuinely a good way to get comfortable with radio discipline without the chaos of just hunting for a clear freq. i did that for probably my first full year before i felt confident doing random HF QSOs.

so ive been sitting on this for a while but finally thinking about doing the mars/cap mod on my 7300 to open up the transmit range a bit. i know icom has the jumper on the board somewhere and ive seen a couple youtube videos but they all seem to be from like 2018 and im not sure if the procedure changed with the newer firmware revisions not looking to do anything sketchy with it, just want the flexibility to do some MARS nets and maybe experiment a little outside the traditional ham bands on my own property. the receiver side already covers pretty much everything which is great but the tx being locked is annoying anyone actually done this on a recent unit? the board revision on mine is like a late 2021 manufacture date i think. wondering if the jumper location is the same or if icom moved stuff around

so i've been meaning to do this for like two years and after the storms we had last month i finally got off my butt and started building a real go-kit. right now i've got my ft-857d in a pelican case with a powerwerx power panel, a 40ah lifepo4 battery, and im using a buddipole for the antenna situation. threw in some coax, a few adapters, my logging book and a couple pens. thing is i keep getting this nagging feeling i'm missing something obvious. like the kind of stuff that only comes up when you actually need it and then you're standing there feeling like an idiot. ive done a couple of ARES activations but never really had a complete kit, always borrowing stuff from other guys or running back to the car for things. anybody who's done actual deployments or even just serious field day stuff, what ended up being the thing you always forgot or wished you had? not looking for a master list off some website, more just personal experience stuff. what bit you in the rear when it mattered