Michael Johnson

yeah i just accept the split honestly. N1MM is just too good at what it does for contesting to give it up and Log4OM is too good for everyday stuff to abandon that either. what i do is wait until a week or so after the contest, export the final N1MM log as adif, clean it up real quick in a text editor if anything looks janky, and then import into Log4OM. most of the time it goes fine. occasionally it'll do something weird with the RST fields or the contest exchange gets stuffed somewhere odd but nothing that takes more than a few minutes to fix. as for WSJT-X during a contest, i dont really bother. if its a contest that has an FT8 category or explicitly allows digital modes then maybe, but for something like CQWW i just leave WSJT-X closed and work the pile ups the old fashioned way. trying to have N1MM and WSJT-X both talking to the radio at the same time during a contest sounds like a recipe for a bad time to me.

clipped waveform on a transmitter final almost always comes down to either too much drive or insufficient supply current. whats your power supply doing under load, have you actually measured the rail voltage when the key is down? a cheap wall wart will sag and that can do weird things to the output stage. i built a similar thing a while back using a 40673 MOSFET as the final and had this exact issue and it turned out my bench supply was current limiting without telling me about it.

i went with a through-hole NMO on my last two trucks and yeah its the right call if you plan on keeping the vehicle a while. one thing worth mentioning — if you go NMO, run the cable before you commit to a spot because routing it down the A-pillar on some Toyotas can be tight depending on the year. had to fish mine under the headliner which was kind of a pain but once its done its done. also slightly off topic but if youre doing trails you might want to think about antenna height vs. branches. ive snapped a whip or two on low hanging stuff and now i just use a shorter antenna off road and swap back for the highway. the MR77 is actually pretty resilient but still.

the wall around 8-10wpm is super common, almost everyone hits it. what happens is you start running out of time to think about each character individually and your brain hasnt quite switched over to recognizing whole letters as single sounds yet. the trick that worked for me was to just keep the speed up even when it feels uncomfortable — dont slow back down just because you're missing stuff. i know that sounds counterintuitive but if you keep practicing at the edge of what you can do, eventually it clicks. also the Koch method is solid but you have to actually stick to it and not jump around. i know it feels boring doing the same letters over and over but that repetition is what builds the reflex. give it more time than you think you need before adding a new character. as for sending vs receiving — yeah they do help each other but id focus on copying first since thats where most people struggle. the paddle can wait a bit, nothing wrong with the straight key for now.

so ive been running a remote station for about two years now, started with just a Raspberry Pi and some custom scripts to control my IC-7300 over the internet, which worked ok but was a constant pain to maintain. lately ive been looking at RemoteHams because a buddy of mine swears by it for his station out in the boonies where he cant be there often. the thing im trying to wrap my head around is how the SDR side of RemoteHams actually integrates with existing hardware. like if i already have a real radio at the far end do i even need the SDR component or is that kind of a separate thing they bolt on. the documentation honestly isnt super clear on this and i dont want to pay for a subscription tier that doesnt do what i think it does. also curious about the latency situation — my home QTH has decent fiber but the remote site is on a fixed wireless link, probably 15-20ms one way. for SSB phone that should be ok but im wondering if CW ops find that annoying or if theres some buffer you can tweak. anybody running this over anything worse than that? and one more thing, the internet linking aspect — does RemoteHams handle the NAT traversal on its own or do i still need to mess with port forwarding on both ends. that was my biggest headache with the DIY setup honestly.