Amanda Taylor

so i finally got my first real homebrew superhet working well enough to pull in some stations and im pretty stoked about it. been working on this thing for like 3 months off and on. its a basic AM broadcast band receiver, dual conversion, first IF at 10.7 and second at 455kHz which i know is kind of overkill for broadcast but i had the parts and wanted to learn the topology properly. anyway the thing works but im getting this weird birdies issue around 1050 kHz give or take. i traced it to what i think is leakage from the first oscillator getting into the second mixer somehow but honestly im not totally sure. the shielding on my first IF strip is pretty janky, just some copper tape i wrapped around a cardboard tube because i was out of proper enclosure material at the time. also the selectivity on the second IF is not great. im using some surplus 455 kHz ceramic filters i got in a bag of parts from a swap meet years ago. two of them in cascade which should in theory give me decent skirts but it doesnt feel tight enough, stations bleed through more than id expect. anyone dealt with this before or know if matching the filter impedances matters a lot here, because i just kinda threw them in without thinking about that.

the RTL-SDR honestly isn't terrible for a rough check if you know its limitations — you can at least confirm the second harmonic is way down relative to your fundamental. that said, if you know anyone local with a real SA, even a 20 year old HP or Rigol or whatever, it's worth an afternoon trip just to see what's actually going on. the 7-element chebyshev should be more than adequate on paper for 40m harmonics but component tolerances matter, especially if you wound your own toroids and they're a bit off. what core did you use for the inductors? also 40dB carrier suppression on a diode ring with 1N4148s is actually pretty solid, ive seen kits ship worse than that. you might get another few dB if you hand-match the diodes but honestly at that level it's probably fine for casual operating.

yeah i do the same thing on 80m, thats my go-to morning band. usually catch the tail end of some of the old timers nets wrapping up around 6am and just sip my coffee listening in. sometimes i check in sometimes i dont depends how awake i am. its a good way to start the day for sure.

the jump method actually works, at least it did for me. i was stuck around 8wpm for months doing the same thing you're doing — grinding slowly and always being able to "almost" copy everything. somebody on here told me to set LCWO to 20wpm character speed with a low effective speed (like Farnsworth method) so the individual letters come fast but there's space between them. your brain learns to recognize the sound of each letter as a unit instead of counting dits and dahs. that was the thing that finally broke me loose. the other thing honestly is just getting on the air before you feel ready. i started listening to W1AW code practice broadcasts and just trying to copy what i could without stressing about the rest. after a while your brain starts filling in gaps based on context, which is basically what real CW operating is anyway. you're never going to copy 100% and thats fine, working pile-ups at 20wpm nobody copies everything. dont wait until youre "ready" because that day never really comes lol

so ive been running a mag mount on the roof of my truck for about a year now, diamond SG7900A, and honestly its been fine but i keep reading that a proper NMO through-hole install is noticeably better and i'm starting to wonder if i should just bite the bullet and drill. the truck is a 2019 F150 so not exactly a beater i dont care about, which is part of why ive been putting it off. the other thing is i travel for work and sometimes the antenna comes inside with me when i park in sketchy lots, so the mag mount has that going for it. but i also notice the SWR seems to creep up a bit when the mount shifts even slightly and i have to mess with it. and the cable routing under the door seal is kind of janky. anybody gone from mag to NMO on a newer truck and actually measured a real difference, or is this one of those things that sounds good in theory and doesnt really matter in practice if the antenna itself is decent? also curious whether anyone has done it on an F150 specifically because i've heard the roof skin is a little thinner on these and i dont want to crack anything.

yeah the self spotting thing makes such a difference, i didnt do it on my first couple activations because i felt weird advertising myself i guess and i barely scraped 4 contacts both times. once i started using sotawatch regularly the chasers just find you, theres a whole community of people just sitting by their radios waiting for spots to pop up which still kind of amazes me. i cant really compare antennas much since ive only used a vertical with a few radials but just wanted to say congrats on getting it done, the first one is always a bit chaotic

honestly the memorize everything approach worked fine for me but i do think you retain it better if you at least skim the gordon west technician book first. its pretty thin and you can get through it in a weekend. then hammer the practice tests on hamstudy for a few days and you should be fine. the question pool doesnt change that often so what youre seeing now is current. the electrical stuff trips people up sometimes, like the ohms law questions and the basic antenna formulas, but theres only a handful of them and the math isnt bad at all. i passed with like a week of casual studying so dont stress too much about the timeline.

yeah 28 feet apex isnt super high for 40m so that will do it. i had almost the exact same setup a couple years ago and got similar numbers. honestly just loaded it up and worked a bunch of stations without a tuner so dont sweat it too much. if you really want to get it lower you could try fanning the ends out a bit more to open up the angle but at that height theres only so much you can do.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, just hit 120 confirmed entities on LoTW last month and been putting off figuring out the submission stuff because it seemed complicated. good to know about the mixed QSL thing, i have probably 30 or 40 paper cards sitting in a shoebox that i never did anything with one thing i did figure out is that clublog is pretty handy for tracking which entities youve worked vs confirmed, it shows you the gaps and you can sort of plan what to chase next. not sure if you already use it but its free and syncs with LoTW

yeah im planning to go, my buddy and I are splitting a tailgate table to unload some stuff. got a bunch of coax and a few handhelds that have just been sitting in a box. if you see a white pickup with a bunch of antennas stacked against the tailgate thats probably us

okay so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and i think i finally have a decent setup going but something is still off and i cant figure out if its my path settings or if the local digi is just garbage. running a TM-D710G with a mag mount on the car, 1200 baud, WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path, beacon interval at 60 seconds. i can see myself on aprs.fi when im close to town but once i get out on the highway about 20-30 miles east it just drops off completely. checked the coverage map for the area and there should be a digi up on the ridge but maybe its not working right? or is 60 second intervals too slow and my packets just arent getting through when there's QRM? also tried switching to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-2 for a bit but that just felt like i was being that guy flooding the channel with redundant packets so i switched back. anyway if anyone has run APRS in semi-rural terrain and dealt with spotty digi coverage id love to hear what you actually do.

aprs.fi has had some caching weirdness off and on, but more likely you might have two objects or stations with your callsign-SSID floating around confusing it. check if maybe the TinyTrak was ever configured with the same SSID and sent out a position with a different symbol or path — sometimes the site latches onto the older one and just kinda ignores updates that look like duplicates or come from a different path signature. also worth checking your comment field. ive seen cases where a stray character in the status text caused the packet to parse weird on aprs.fi specifically even though findU handled it fine. the parsers are a bit different under the hood. try stripping your comment field down to nothing and send a few beacons and see if it unsticks.

not dumb questions at all, everyone goes through this exact same thing when they start out. so the CTCSS tone — you need to set it as your transmit tone, meaning your radio sends it out when you key up. the repeater hears that tone and knows to open its squelch and retransmit you. some repeaters also send a tone back to you on their output so you can set your radio to only open when it hears that tone too, which helps cut down on interference from other signals, but that part is optional and not all repeaters do it. for the baofeng specifically, you want to go into the channel settings and make sure the T-CTCS is set to 100.0 Hz. there should also be a separate R-CTCS setting for receive, you can leave that off for now or set it to the same tone if the repeater sends one back. and yeah the offset on 146.820 would be -600 kHz so your radio should be transmitting on 146.220. as for joining a conversation, wait for a break between transmissions, key up briefly and just say your callsign. something like "KD9XYZ monitoring" and then wait to see if they acknowledge you. most repeater regulars are pretty welcoming, especially if they know youre new. some repeaters also have a net or round table going at certain times so check if theres a schedule posted anywhere for your local club.

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and i finally just sat down and started pulling stuff together for a proper go-kit. got a pelican case, my FT-857D, a few rolls of coax, some misc adapters, power cables, that kind of thing. threw in a cheap notebook and some pens because i kept reading that you really want paper logging capability when everything else goes sideways. my question is basically what do people always forget until they actually need it. like the obvious stuff i think i have covered but i know theres always something. i was doing a ARES activation last spring for a local marathon and somebody didnt have the right PL tone written down anywhere and spent 20 minutes trying different ones before they found it. so now i keep a laminated card with all the local repeater info in the case lid. what else falls into that category of stuff you dont think about until you really need it

im in basically the same boat lol, 4 months in and my CW is still pretty rough around the edges. one thing that actually helped me was slowing way down with the Koch method trainer and really focusing on clean release rather than clean press if that makes sense. like i was so worried about hitting the right paddle that i wasnt thinking about when i let go. anyway not sure if that helps but just throwing it out there