Thomas White

i was in the same spot last year and kept putting it off. finally just signed up for a session to force myself to study lol. the transmission line questions tripped me up at first but once you get the SWR and reflection coefficient stuff it starts to click. passed with a few to spare. the extra band segments honestly i havent even used that much yet but it feels nice knowing i can if i want to. also full privileges means if you ever get into anything weird like some of the narrower CW allocations or experimental stuff its all open

hamstudy is honestly all you need for most people, especially if you're the kind of person who can just grind through flashcards. the way it tracks which questions you're getting wrong and keeps drilling those is pretty solid. I passed using pretty much just that site over like two weeks of casual studying maybe 20-30 minutes a night. that said I do think understanding the material helps you retain it better even if you're not strictly required to. the electrical stuff like ohms law and the basic circuit questions, once you just get the concepts down the answers kind of make sense on their own instead of just being random letters to memorize. the rules and regs section is where a lot of people just straight up memorize though because some of that is just "what frequency range is this" type stuff and theres not really a deeper why to it the ARRL book is fine but i borrowed it from my library and honestly only read like three chapters before I just went back to the website. depends on how you learn I guess

so this has been driving me nuts for about two weeks now. my 7300 started throwing high SWR warnings on every band, like 3:1 or worse, but when i slap a dummy load on the antenna port it reads flat, 1:1 no problem. transmit power looks normal, receive seems fine too. the antenna system itself checks out — ran a VNA sweep on everything from the feedpoint and nothing changed out there. at first i thought maybe the internal SWR bridge went wonky but im not sure how to even start diagnosing that without schematics. does anyone know if theres a known failure point in the SWR sensing circuit on these radios? ive seen mentions of a directional coupler section somewhere in the RF board but i cant find anything specific. the radio is about 4 years old, out of warranty obviously, and i dont really want to ship it to Icom unless i absolutely have to. happy to get in there with a scope if someone can point me in the right direction

yeah the 30 day thing used to be real but they got rid of that requirement a while back, you can apply for a vanity pretty much right after your license posts to the database. what you do is go into the ULS filing system, log in with your FCC registration number and password, and file a Form 605 — theres an option in there specifically for vanity callsign request as for how it works, you can list up to 25 calls in order of preference and the system processes all applications that come in during the same filing window together. so if two people both apply for the same call in the same batch it goes to whoever has licensing priority — like an extra class can bump a tech for the same call, and then within the same license class I believe it goes to whoever filed first, though honestly that part has tripped me up before too. if your first choice is taken your second choice gets considered and so on down the list the windows close and process on a set schedule, I think its still every couple weeks or so. you can check the AE7Q website, that guy has an amazing tool for looking up what calls are available in your district and tracking application status. made the whole thing way less confusing for me when I went through it a few years back

yeah 10m has been wild lately, you picked a good time to get into HF if you're newer to it. we're sitting pretty close to solar cycle 25 peak right now and honestly the flux has been all over the place — you'll see it jump up then drop back down within a day or two depending on what the sun is doing with active regions rotating into view. for the indices — the simple version is SFI above 150 and you start getting excited about 10 and 12m, K index you want low, like 2 or under ideally, anything above 4 and the higher bands get noisy and the aurora starts eating your signal on paths through the poles. A index is kind of a lagging average of the K so less useful for real time. i mostly just check DXmaps or the cluster and if i see spots on 10m from somewhere interesting i just go listen, that honestly tells you more than staring at numbers. those short openings are totally normal btw, especially on F2 propagation — it can be spectacular for a window and then just snap shut. glad you caught it

so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and i need someone to just tell me what to do basically. currently running a random wire out to a tree with a 9:1 unun and its fine but i want something more dedicated for 40m because thats where i spend most of my time these days. the lot isnt huge, maybe 80 feet usable in one direction and i have a chimney on the south end of the house. i was thinking a half wave dipole fed with ladder line into a tuner but my neighbor directly to the east has a two story house and im not sure how much that kills the pattern. the other option is just throwing up a quarter wave vertical with some radials and not worrying about it. i know the textbook answer is dipole wins if you have the space and the height, but my dipole would probably only get to about 25 feet at the apex which feels kinda low for 40. the vertical would let me work more directions without worrying about the pattern being squished by surrounding structures. anyway if anyone has actually compared these in a suburban backyard situation id love to hear real world impressions not just antenna modeling theory

so ive been doing SS phone and CW for about 6 years now and always ran single radio. finally built out a proper SO2R setup this past year, two K3s, a TopTen bandmaster, separate antennas for each radio with decent isolation, the whole thing. spent probably 3 weekends just getting the intermod and RFI under control enough to actually use both radios without one wiping out the other. ran my first real SO2R contest last month during a state QSO party and honestly i'm not sure the rate improvement justified the mental overhead. like yeah i was probably 15-20% higher on contacts per hour during the good runs but i kept fat-fingering the wrong radio, sending on the wrong VFO, that kind of thing. felt like i was flying the airplane AND reading the checklist at the same time. people who have been doing SO2R for a while — does it just click eventually or is there something specific about how you train yourself to manage the second radio without it eating your focus on the run frequency. i'm using N1MM and have the SO2R stuff configured but im wondering if my keyer macros and the way i have my footswitch set up is just not optimized. open to hearing how other people have their workflow set up.

so i've been putting together a go-kit situation for the past few months and honestly the power side of things is where i keep second guessing myself. right now i have a bioenno 30ah lifepo4 that i pair with a 100w panel when the sun cooperates but i keep running into the same problem where i'm burning through it faster than expected, especially if i'm running the ic-7300 at anywhere near full power for extended periods. the antenna situation is a bit of a mess too. i've been using a homebrew EFHW with a 49:1 unun and it tunes up fine on 40 and 20 but i've never been totally confident the feedpoint impedance is actually where it needs to be, like i wonder sometimes if im just masking a mismatch with the atu and wasting power. thinking about picking up a chameleon or something similar but those prices are hard to swallow when you know you can build something for $30 in parts. anyway the generator question is the real one i wanted to ask about. for longer activations or emcomm type stuff where i might need to run for 12+ hours, whats the minimum size generator you'd consider practical? i've been looking at the eu2200i because its quiet enough to not be a nightmare but i keep wondering if theres a better option in that range. dont want to lug around more than i have to.

I just did mine about 3 months ago so I can say from recent experience, dont overthink the electrical theory stuff if it trips you up at first. just keep doing practice tests and eventually the answers start sticking even if you dont fully understand why. I probably did 200+ practice questions total and felt really ready by test day. passed with only 2 wrong which surprised me honestly

the battleborn is fine for 8 hours if you're not running 100w the whole time, i run a similar setup with a 100ah lifepo4 and an 857D on field day type stuff. one thing i'd add is bring a decent clamp meter so you can actually watch your current draw in real time and not just guess. makes a huge difference in knowing when to throttle back the power or switch to the generator before you're in trouble. also on the antenna front — have you looked at a vertical like a Wolf River Coils setup on a drive-on mount? parking lot deployment, no trees, that would actually be pretty slick and quick to get on the air. i've seen guys set that up in under 10 minutes. just a thought.

made almost exactly that swap about two years ago, went from a 590 to the 7300 and honestly it took me a few weeks to stop second-guessing myself. the waterfall alone is worth it for how i operate — i do a lot of casual band scanning and being able to see whats happening without a separate sdr is just way more convenient. the integration is tight, it doesnt feel like an afterthought the way a dongle setup can. rx wise i think theyre pretty comparable in real world use. on paper the kenwood has some advantages in certain blocking situations but sitting in my shack working the pile-ups on 40 i cant say i noticed a meaningful difference. where the icom wins for me is just the overall feel of the thing, the interface is intuitive once you get used to it and the touchscreen actually works well unlike some radios that have screens that feel like they were bolted on as an afterthought. if your g5rv is only at 30 feet the antenna is probably limiting you more than either radio anyway, just saying.

honestly its more of a situational thing than a hard rule. on a clear local repeater with people you know, nobody really cares, your call just needs to be identifiable. but on HF especially when conditions are sketchy or youre working someone far away, phonetics genuinely help because a B and a D can sound identical in noise. NATO phonetics exist for exactly that reason — Bravo versus Delta, no confusion. i'd say get comfortable with the standard NATO set first because if you start making up your own like some guys do it just causes more confusion not less. the FCC doesnt actually require phonetics, just that your call is intelligible, so theres no rule youre breaking either way

yeah the voice discipline thing is so real. we had the same issue at ours a couple years back, people just naturally want to explain everything in long sentences when you really need short formatted traffic. what helped us was doing a short 20 minute tabletop before the actual exercise just to run through message format until it felt a bit more automatic. not perfect but it reduced the chatter noticeably during the real drill. on the simplex getting stepped on — honestly i'd recommend building two or three fallback freqs into the plan and making sure everyone has them written down physically, not just in their phone or whatever. we learned that the hard way during a winter storm actual where one of our guys couldn't pull up the backup freq because his phone battery died. paper wins every time in those situations. for after action reviews we started assigning someone specifically to take notes during the exercise itself, not just after. that way you're capturing real time confusion as it happens rather than trying to remember it all afterward. makes the debrief way more useful.

nice work getting a qso on the first real try tbh. i fumbled around for like three passes before i actually completed anything. one thing i'd add — make sure your TLEs in gpredict are fresh, like updated within the last few days fresh. i had a situation where i was pointing the wrong direction entirely because i hadn't refreshed in a couple weeks and the element set was way off. satellites drift enough that stale TLEs will have you looking in completely the wrong part of the sky especially toward the end of a pass. also re: the 817 for downlink, i used one for a while and found the AGC behavior kind of annoying when signals were fading in and out on a sat pass. might be worth digging into the AGC settings if you haven't already.

so this has been driving me nuts for a couple weeks now. picked up a used 7300 from a guy at the club swap meet, seemed fine when i tested it briefly at his table, got home and after maybe 20 minutes of actual use on 40m the output just dropped to almost nothing. like im getting maybe 2-3 watts on a good day when it should be pushing 100. the weird thing is it doesnt trip the protection or throw any error on the display. SWR looks fine on a dummy load. driver stage seems okay-ish based on what im seeing at the rf board but honestly im not super confident in my diagnosis there. i pulled the lid and nothing looks visibly burned or obviously wrong which i guess is either good or bad depending. before i go ordering finals and regretting it, has anyone seen this specific symptom on the 7300 where it just quietly loses output without actually faulting? wondering if its a bias issue or maybe the ALC is doing something weird. i have a scope i can use but i want to make sure im probing in the right spots before i poke around in there.