Nicole Davis

so ive been going back and forth on this for a while now and figured id just ask here because the reddit threads are all like 3 years old. i currently use WSJT-X for FT8 and it logs to its own ADIF file which i then import into Log4OM every few weeks, which is kind of a pain but whatever, it works. the problem is when contest season rolls around i feel like log4om isnt really built for that and i end up just... not logging properly or i use N1MM for the contest and then have to merge everything after and inevitably something gets duplicated or the timestamps are off and its a whole thing. someone at the club mentioned just switching to N1MM full time and letting it handle everything but i always heard N1MM is kind of overkill if youre not seriously contesting. like is it even reasonable to use it for casual ragchew logging and digital modes on a Tuesday night? i dont want to have to think about which software im in every time i sit down at the radio. does anyone actually run N1MM as their main logger day to day or is that kind of weird

Honestly, I just memorized enough to pass and figured I'd learn the rest later. That was 5 years ago and I still don't understand half of what I'm doing! Now I'm going back through the Gordon West study guides to actually learn the concepts. Save yourself the trouble and do it right the first time.

yeah band-specific PA issues are absolutely a thing on that radio. the 7300 uses separate driver and final transistor pairs that are switched in depending on the band, so a partial failure in one of the RD70HVF1s or even just a bias drift on one of them will show up exactly like what you're describing — one band goes soft while everything else looks fine. the ALC behavior you're seeing kind of confirms it, the loop is trying to compensate but there's not enough headroom left in that stage. before you pull it apart i'd check if the low power is consistent across the whole 40m band or if it's worse at one end. if it's worse at the low end near 7.0 it could also be a bad solder joint on one of the LPF switching relays rather than the PA itself. those relays take a beating over time and a cracked joint can cause exactly this. way easier fix if that's what it is. i'd poke around in there with some magnification before assuming you need a new transistor.

honest answer - it's not that bad if you already sat through the tech pool. the general pool is bigger and yeah some of the electrical theory questions are a step up, like you'll see stuff about impedance matching and some antenna theory that you might not have seen before. but its not crazy. i used hamStudy the same way you did for tech, just drilled the questions every day for maybe three weeks and passed with a few wrong answers to spare. the band privilege stuff is worth actually understanding though rather than just memorizing, because once you're on HF you'll want to know where you can actually transmit without accidentally wandering into extra-only territory. on 20m for example general gets phone starting at 14.225 and extra gets down to 14.150, so if you're just spinning the dial and land somewhere in that chunk you technically cant transmit there as a general. the ARRL band plan chart is worth printing out and staring at for a bit. once it clicks it stays with you. what part of the electrical theory is tripping you up? some of it you can kind of brute force memorize the answers without actually understanding the math and still pass, which isnt ideal but it gets you on the air which is where the real learning happens anyway

congrats on the first one, 12 QSOs is totally solid especially on a first activation. honestly some of my early ones i was just happy to hit 10 and get out of there before the rain hit lol for logging a lot of people use the HAMRS app, it's free and designed pretty much exactly for POTA. syncs up to the POTA website pretty painlessly when you get home. i used paper for my first few activations and it works fine but HAMRS makes the upload way easier. some folks use Log4OM or just a spreadsheet but HAMRS is probably the most common thing you'll see people mention for spotting yourself — you can self-spot through the POTA website or app once you're set up and on frequency. there's also the pota.app spots page that hunters watch constantly. a lot of activators will post on their local club facebook or the POTA facebook group the day before to drum up hunters too. once you self-spot you'll usually start getting a small pileup pretty quick, people are almost always listening for new spots to come in

im pretty new too so take this for what its worth but i started using pskreporter alongside those and it helped me understand propagation a lot better, like you can actually see who is hearing who in real time which kind of tells you whether a path is even open before you go chasing a spot. not sure if thats helpful for your exact question but it changed how i think about all of it

yeah timing is huge, most people completely underestimate it. the DX op is listening in a specific rhythm and if you learn that rhythm you're already ahead of 80% of the pileup. some ops have a very predictable cadence — they'll come back, work someone, send the partial call or report, then there's a brief window right before they start transmitting again where calling is basically useless because they've already got someone in mind. you want to be transmitting right as they key up to come back, not during. the split frequency thing you mentioned is real too. a lot of guys just tune to the cluster spot and start calling and that's exactly where it's most congested. i usually start at the bottom of the listed split range and work up slowly, listening after every couple calls. you can sometimes hear when the DX op is answering near you even if the band isn't cooperating perfectly. for 100w into a wire — honestly you can do it, propagation windows are your friend. try to work them when the path is at its peak, even if it means weird hours. a 3am path with 100w beats a mediocre path with a kW in my experience.

In contests or pileups, non-standard phonetics can help you stand out - we had better response with "Whiskey Five Ugly Kisser" than "Whiskey Five Uniform Kilo" during Field Day. But for normal QSOs, NATO is the way to go. Practice them until they become automatic!

dont forget about clublog too, its not technically a qsl service but lots of dx expeditions use it and you can see if your contact made it into their log. as for the certificate thing with lotw - yeah its confusing at first but theres good tutorials on youtube that walk you through it step by step. took me like an hour to figure out but now i just forget about it and everything uploads automatically from my logger

so ive been doing the local 2m club net on monday nights for a while now and its fine but honestly gets a little repetitive, same 6 people checking in every week. started poking around for other nets to join just to hear more activity and practice my HF operating a bit more. found a couple 40m nets that run tuesday evenings around 7-8pm local but i dont always catch them because the skip is weird or im just late getting to the shack. wondering if anyone here has nets they really like and check in to regularly, doesnt matter what band really. also curious about those special event stations, i saw something about a lighthouse weekend coming up and have no idea how that works or if you just call them like any other station. still relatively new so any pointers appreciated, been licensed about 8 months now

so ive been doing POTA from my car for a few months now and figured id try an actual summit activation. picked a W6 peak thats only rated S1 so shouldnt be a death march but im still kinda nervous about the whole thing. planning to throw my KX2 in a pack with a 40m end fed and just see what happens. never operated while also being out of breath before lol anyone have tips for like... the actual setup once you get up there? do you just find a flat rock and go or is there some trick to it im missing

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly on 40m and some 20m when the band cooperates. started getting into chasing awards and suddenly everyone is talking about LoTW and eQSL and paper cards and im just... lost about what actually counts for what. right now i upload to LoTW through TQSL and i think thats working because i see confirmations showing up but honestly i set it up by following a youtube video and i dont fully understand what im doing. i signed up for eQSL too but i have no idea if my logs are actually syncing or if i need to do something manually. and then theres paper cards — i got a few in the mail from some dx stations which was super cool but do i need to send cards back to all of them? feels like a lot of postage. mainly asking because i want to eventually go for DXCC and i saw that only LoTW and physical cards via the buro or direct count for that. so does eQSL even matter? should i bother keeping up with it or is it kind of a separate thing for different awards?

30 seconds is probably your problem honestly. for mobile in a suburban or urban area thats way too frequent and youll actually get dropped by digipeaters that have rate limiting. most of the better digi configs these days will start ignoring you if you hammer them that fast, especially if youre not moving much. bump it to 60 or even 90 seconds and use the SmartBeaconing feature if your radio supports it — the D710 definitely does. that way it beacons faster when youre turning or accelerating and backs off when youre cruising a straight road. way more polite to the network and youll actually get heard more reliably. the WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path is fine, thats the right call for most of the US.

so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a setup and it looks really cool, he told me to just go get my technician license first and then figure out the rest from there. i downloaded the ARRL technician manual but honestly its a lot and i dont even know if im reading the right stuff or if there's a better way to study. like do i need to memorize all of it or is there a smarter way to go about this. also heard something about a question pool, is that the actual test questions or just practice stuff? sorry if this is a dumb question im really new to all of this

yeah the listening part is huge and most people skip it entirely. i usually spend the first 5-10 minutes just mapping out where the DX is pulling calls from before i even touch the mic. on SSB its a bit harder but on CW you can really hear the pattern develop, especially if they're doing a sweep through the split. one thing that helped me a lot was sending only my suffix in really heavy pileups. if the DX comes back with a partial and its close to mine i go full call, otherwise i just keep throwing the suffix. saves time and cuts through the noise better than blasting your whole callsign over and over. worked for me on FT5ZM a few years back, took about 40 minutes but eventually got through on 20m. tail-ending is kind of a gamble honestly. sometimes it works perfectly, sometimes you just QRM the station that actually got picked and the DX operator gets annoyed and moves up or down. ive done it both ways. i think it depends a lot on how well you can judge the timing which takes practice.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and the weak signal stuff is genuinely impressive, like i worked a station in japan last week with maybe 5 watts and a dipole that definitely isnt optimized for 17m, but at the end of the day you're basically just exchanging signal reports and grid squares and thats... it. doesnt really feel like ham radio to me sometimes, more like a slow ping utility. anyway i started messing around with JS8Call last month and its a completely different vibe. you can actually say something to another station, have a back and forth, send store-and-forward messages through relay nodes, whatever. the tradeoff is obviously the mode is way less sensitive than FT8 — JS8 at normal speed is supposedly around -16 or -17 dB S/N compared to FT8 which is what, -24 dB? so you're giving up a good chunk of that weak signal margin. my question is whether people actually use JS8Call regularly enough on the bands that you can find activity without just sitting there waiting. i check 14.078 sometimes and its pretty quiet compared to the FT8 watering holes. is there a better time of day or a net or something im missing? also running WSJT-X and JS8Call at the same time on the same radio, is that asking for trouble or do people do it routinely with a virtual audio cable setup?

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep telling myself im going to get serious about morse code but every time i sit down to practice it just feels like im going nowhere. i can copy maybe 5wpm on a good day if the letters are ones i know well but anything faster and my brain just locks up completely i've been using the Koch method on lcwo.net and also messing around with the Morse Toad app on my phone. the problem isnt really the individual characters at this point, i know most of them, its more like when they come at me in sequence at even like 8wpm i just cant keep up and then i miss one letter and then i panic and miss three more and suddenly im totally lost does this get better? like is there a point where something just clicks? i really want to be able to ragchew on 40m some day but right now that feels pretty far off. any advice from people who actually made it through this would be awesome

did the same diode mod about 8 months ago, no issues. one thing i'd say is double check your solder joints on those pads because mine had one that looked fine but was actually a cold joint and i had intermittent TX issues for a week before i figured out what was going on. reflowed it and been solid since. on the TCXO thing — i actually did do that upgrade and honestly for FT8 it does make a difference, you can see it in how tight your signal looks on the waterfall compared to before. but like you said if youre just doing phone operation its probably not something youre gonna notice day to day. the ref oscillator in the stock 7300 isnt bad, its just not great if you care about that last bit of frequency accuracy. havent touched the audio filtering, my approach with that radio is just to use the built in DSP settings and call it a day. the twin PBT and the notch filter do a lot of the heavy lifting already.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and working new countries but lately i feel like im just clicking buttons and not actually doing any ham radio if that makes sense. its like a video game almost. anyway someone at our club mentioned JS8Call as a way to have real qsos on weak signal and i installed it last weekend but im a bit confused about how the timing works compared to WSJT-X. like with FT8 everything is locked to the 15 second cycles and you cant really deviate but JS8Call seems more freeform? i tried calling CQ for like 20 minutes on 14.078 and got nothing, not sure if i was doing something wrong or if the band was just dead or if nobody monitors that freq. also wondering if the SNR sensitivity on JS8Call is anywhere close to FT8. i know FT8 can decode stuff way down in the noise like -20dB or whatever and thats half the reason it works so well on marginal conditions. does JS8Call get close to that or is it more like PSK31 territory in terms of what it needs to work. been running 100w into a trapped vertical if that matters

welcome back. conditions have been pretty intresting lately with the solar stuff going on so good time to get back into it

so ive been trying to work some dx on 20m for the past few weeks and its been absolutely terrible. used to be able to hear europe pretty good in the mornings but now nothing. checked my swr and antenna and everything looks fine. is this just normal for this time of year or what? heard something about solar flux being low but dont really understand all that stuff. running a dipole at about 30ft if that matters

yeah this is really common and honestly if your first drill felt chaotic it probably means it was a good drill. the ones where everything goes smoothly usually just mean the scenario wasnt hard enough or people were cutting corners without anyone noticing. the simplex coverage thing is a real problem for a lot of groups. we had the same issue years back and what actually helped was doing a dedicated simplex mapping day where we just drove around the county with HTs and made notes about who could hear who from where. took a saturday but we ended up with a rough coverage map that we actually laminated and put in the go kits. its not perfect but it gives people a starting point when the repeater is gone. on the message format stuff -- i've found that people resist it because it feels slow and awkward and a little silly when you're standing next to someone in a parking lot. the trick is making sure everyone understands WHY the format exists, which is really about making sure the message survives getting relayed through three or four people without getting garbled. once operators get that part it tends to stick better. still takes repetition though, there's no shortcut really.

Not a dumb question at all, everyone goes through this. So QSL technically means "I confirm" or "can you confirm" depending on context, it comes from old telegraph and maritime radio days when operators needed quick shorthand. When someone says "QSL that" they mean they understood and confirm what you said, and a QSL card is just a physical confirmation that a contact happened. QTH is your location yeah, QRM is interference from other stations (man-made), QRN is natural static like from a thunderstorm, QSB is signal fading. There's a whole list of them going back to the early 1900s. The ITU formalized a bunch of them but hams kind of adopted their own favorites over the years. 73 means best regards, it's one of the oldest telegraph codes and nobody really uses most of the old numeric codes anymore but 73 stuck around. Sometimes you hear 88 which means love and kisses, usually sent to a YL which just means young lady, basically any woman on the air regardless of age. OM is old man, same deal, just means any male operator. Not ranks, just friendly informal terms that have been used forever.

so i've been on the fence about QRP for like two years now, kept telling myself i'd do it when i had more experience or whatever, but last month i just bit the bullet and built one of those Michigan Mighty Mite kits just to get my feet wet with homebrewing. honestly the build took me a weekend of fumbling around with the soldering iron and i did have to reflow a couple joints that were clearly cold but it came together. anyway took it out to the park yesterday with my end fed wire strung up in a tree, running maybe 500mw into 40m and i was just calling CQ not really expecting much and this station in Ohio came back to me. i'm in central Virginia so that's not huge DX or anything but i was genuinely shocked. we had a full QSO, he gave me a 559 which felt amazing for half a watt lol. i know some of you guys are working DX with like 5 watts but this was a first for me and i kind of get it now, why people get obsessed with this stuff. has anyone else had that moment where QRP just clicks? also wondering if the end fed is really the way to go for portable or if i should look at something else

so i heard the Tri-County fest is back this year after they cancelled it the last two times, supposed to be at the fairgrounds again. i went like 4 years ago and picked up a pretty decent MFJ tuner for almost nothing so im hoping the swap meet tables are good again. anyone know if the club is doing the fox hunt this time too? i remember that being a blast