Elizabeth Patel

yeah I went through the exact same confusion when I started lol. one thing that helped me was just going to repeaterbook and searching my zip code — shows you all the local repeaters with their tones and everything. some repeaters are open and dont need a tone at all, others are closed or require one. and a few around here are linked to other systems so you'll sometimes hear people from like 200 miles away which is kind of wild the first time it happens. oh and don't stress too much about accidentally being annoying, everybody starts somewhere and most folks on repeaters are pretty welcoming to new people as long as you're not, like, kerchunking the repeater over and over without identifying. just say your callsign when you key up and you'll be fine

congrats on passing the exam first of all. the vanity process is actually not too complicated once you get the gist of it. basically you file through the FCC ULS and you can list up to 25 callsigns you want in order of preference. the system runs in what they call a batch processing cycle so everyone who applies during a given window gets thrown in together and if multiple people want the same call it comes down to a few tiebreaker rules, like whether youre an amateur extra vs technician, or if the previous holder was a relative of yours. there is no waiting period as far as i know, you can apply as soon as your license is in the system. and yeah its free now, they dropped the fee a while back. i'd recommend checking out ae7q.com because that site makes it way easier to look up which calls are available in your district and see when they come out of the "cooling off" period after someone lets one go. just be aware popular short calls or ones with nice letter combos get applied for by a lot of people so dont get your heart set on just one option, put in a good list

so ive been trying to get back into CW after probably a 15 year break and i picked up a used Bencher paddle a few months ago and honestly the mechanical side of it feels great, nice and smooth. but when i hook it into my radio (ic-7300) the timing just sounds off to me. like the dits and dahs kind of blend together at anything above maybe 15 wpm and it sounds mushy. im not sure if its a keyer settings issue or if i maybe have the paddle tension or spacing adjusted wrong or what. i did mess with the weight and speed settings in the radio menu but honestly i dont totally understand what the weight adjustment does vs just slowing down. ive been recording myself on audacity and playing it back and yeah it doesnt sound clean at all. anyone dealt with this before? is there like a baseline starting point for keyer settings i should try?

so i was just messing around on 10m last weekend, not really expecting much, had it on in the background while i was doing stuff around the shack and all of a sudden the band just opened up like crazy. i mean i was hearing stations from south america, europe, a couple japanese stations coming through pretty solid. this is on a mediocre vertical i threw up last fall that i honestly wasnt sure was even tuned right. ive been licensed since 2019 and i feel like ive never really experienced a proper solar cycle peak before, at least not like this. is this what people mean when they say the cycle 25 predictions are tracking ahead of schedule? i read something about that on the ARRL site but i wasnt sure if i was reading it right. feels like every time i fire up the radio on 10 or 12m lately something is happening. just wanted to see if others are noticing the same thing or if i just happened to catch a lucky weekend

I just got my general last spring and our local ARES group let me tag along as kind of an observer for their drill a few months back. I had no idea how complicated the message handling side of things was. like I knew ham radio was used for emergencies but watching people try to coordinate between sites in real time while also keeping a log and talking on the radio all at once made me realize I have a lot to learn before I'd actually be useful in something like that. did your group have any newer hams involved or was it mostly experienced operators?

the 5 element you got at the swap meet is probably fine, those old yagis are hard to kill. i'd just check the driven element and make sure the balun or matching section isnt corroded. a dirty match will eat your gain faster than anything. slap it on an analyzer if you have one and see where it resonates, if its close to 144.200 for SSB or wherever you're operating you're probably good to go. worst case its a swap meet antenna so not much lost if it turns out to be junk

good question and honestly it trips up a lot of new generals. so the short version is there are two different things going on. the FCC part title 97 is the actual legal allocation — thats what you HAVE to follow, you can get in trouble if you dont. then theres the band plan which is more like a gentlemans agreement between operators, like where phone goes, where digital modes are, where CW tends to hang out. the band plan isnt law but you'll get a lot of grief if you ignore it. for 40m as a general you can do phone starting at 7.175 up to 7.300 if i remember right, and CW/digital down lower. the band edge thing is because your radio isnt always perfectly on frequency and if youre running SSB your signal is actually a few kHz wide, so if you park right on 7.175 your lower sideband might bleed into the CW portion. most folks say give yourself at least 3 kHz from the edge just to be safe. 7.200 area gets crazy especially at night because of interference from other parts of the world so a lot of people just avoid it anyway

yeah what he said about the preamp is right, i made the mistake of running about 8 feet of LMR-400 between the antenna and the preamp on my first EME attempt and it was noticably worse than when i moved the preamp up to the mast. also the IC-9700 has a known issue with its internal preamp being a bit noisy so definitely go external mast mounted. i use a SSB Electronic unit and its been solid for a couple years now. one thing nobody mentioned - moonbounce scheduling. check out the ON4KST chat, thats where basically everyone coordinates EME skeds, you kinda need to be in there if you want to actually make contacts especially as a smaller station. the random EME calling frequency thing does work but having a sked with someone who has a big array means they can dig you out even if your signal is marginal

oh man i had the exact same whine problem when i put my TM-V71 in my jeep, drove me nuts for weeks. turned out for me it was actually the ground, i had grounded the radio to a bolt under the dash that wasn't making great contact with the chassis. once i ran a proper ground strap directly to a known good chassis point it went away almost completely. might be worth checking that before you go buying filters and stuff.

So i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house, been putting it off for months because i kept telling myself i needed better gear or whatever. Ended up just throwing the KX2 in a bag with my end fed and a little tripod mast and just went for it. Got there around 10am, took maybe 20 minutes to get set up which is longer than i wanted but the wind was being annoying. Spotted myself on the POTA app and then just started calling CQ POTA on 40m. First contact came in maybe 3 minutes later which honestly surprised me, i was half expecting to sit there forever. Ended up with 23 QSOs in about an hour and a half, mostly 40m with a few on 20m when 40 started getting crowded. Logged everything on paper and then uploaded to the POTA website that night. All good so far. My questions are kind of dumb but here goes - does it matter what time of day you go out? i went mid morning on a saturday and it seemed fine but wondering if there are better windows. Also the park i went to has two different reference numbers, like its a state park AND a national forest overlap or something, can i count both with the same contacts or do i have to do separate activations? i looked at the rules but got confused.

jump in, seriously. your 991A and that dipole will do just fine for your first time. nobody expects you to win your category in year one, the whole point is to get on and learn how it works. CQ WW SSB is one of the biggest weekends of the year and the bands will be absolutely packed so youll have no trouble finding signals to work for software i'd say grab N1MM+ before the weekend, its free and most contesters use it. takes a little getting used to but theres youtube walkthroughs that are pretty decent. the multiplier thing will click once you start logging, basically each DXCC entity and each CQ zone you work on each band counts, so working Japan on both 15 and 20 is two mults not one SOTA is its own rabbit hole and honestly kind of addicting but yeah separate thing entirely. worry about that after your first contest weekend. just get on Saturday morning, find a loud station, call them, log it. thats it. dont overthink it

this is actually what made me want to get my general after being a tech for forever. went to one of these as basically an observer to see what ARES was about and watching people actually struggle to get traffic through when conditions werent cooperating made me realize how much i didnt know. the guys who really had it together were the ones who had clearly done it enough times that they werent thinking about the radio stuff anymore, they were just thinking about the message i think i read somewhere that one of the big lessons from actual hurricane deployments is that people show up with gear they've never really tested under stress and then wonder why things fall apart. seems like your group is ahead of a lot of them just by running realistic scenarios instead of the kind of drill where everything conveniently works

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup in his backyard and it got me curious. i looked into it a bit and i guess theres different levels? technician then general then extra or something like that. anyway i dont really know where to start studying or what the test is actually like. is it multiple choice, do you need to know morse code, how hard is it really for someone with basically zero background in electronics. i took one physics class in high school like 15 years ago so thats about it lol. any advice would be great, im not even sure what im asking exactly i just want to point me in the right direction

so ive been trying to get more into DX chasing lately and everyone keeps telling me to use the cluster but honestly i find it kind of overwhelming. right now i have QRZ open in one tab and DXwatch in another and im just kind of bouncing back between them trying to figure out which spots are worth chasing. is that even how people do it or is there a better workflow? the thing that confuses me is sometimes ill see a spot on DXwatch for like a pretty rare entity but by the time i look it up on QRZ to figure out where they are and check the band conditions the spot is already 20 minutes old and presumably gone. i feel like im missing something obvious here. there has to be a smarter way to set this up. im running a modest station, nothing fancy, IC-7300 and a wire dipole up about 30 feet so i cant hear everything but i want to at least be able to react faster when something workable comes up. also does anyone actually use the QRZ logbook integration with cluster spots or is that more trouble than its worth

i just took mine like two months ago so this is fresh for me. i basically only used hamstudy and did maybe 20-30 minutes a day for about three weeks and passed no problem. i did try to understand the why behind stuff when i could but honestly for a lot of it i just memorized the answer and moved on, you learn the actual reasoning once you start operating anyway. the math really isnt bad, there's maybe like five or six types of problems and they repeat in different forms so once you get the pattern its fine. the regulations stuff was more confusing to me than the electrical stuff tbh, like all the band privileges and frequency allocations, just kept forgetting which one was which

so ive been licensed for about 8 years and done a fair bit of DX on HF but lately ive been obsessed with the idea of doing EME on 2m. i know its a rabbit hole and ive been reading everything i can but theres a gap between reading about it and actually understanding what i need to get started without just throwing money at a wall. my current 2m setup is just a pair of M2 2M5 yagis on a small az/el mount, running about 400w into them. i know thats pretty modest for EME but ive seen people claim you can work stations with JT65 and a single yagi if conditions are right and the other station is running a big array. is that actually realistic or is it one of those things people say but dont really mean also the noise floor thing confuses me a bit — i understand you want as low a noise figure as possible at the preamp but how much does that actually matter in practice if the sky noise at moonrise is already elevated. like is going from a 0.5dB NF preamp to a 0.3dB NF preamp actually going to matter or is it splitting hairs at that point any of you who've actually done EME contacts would appreciate hearing what your first contact was like and what you were running

haha yeah my first POTA activation i drove an hour to the park and realized i left my coax at home. had to just use a mag loop i had in the back seat that i barely know how to tune. still got 10 contacts somehow so it counts but yeah not my finest moment. you get better at the packing thing after a while, i basically have a dedicated activation bag now that stays packed so i dont forget stuff.

ok so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and everyone is just casually saying things like QSL and QTH and QRM and honestly i have no idea whats going on half the time. i know QSL has something to do with confirming a contact but beyond that im lost. like is there a master list somewhere or do people just kind of pick them up over time? also some guys on 40m were saying stuff like 73 and 88 and i had to google 73 which apparently means best regards or something but what is 88 even. anyway i feel like there must be like a hundred of these things and i dont know where to start learning them all, do i actually need to memorize them or will they just become natural eventually

the ALC jumping around is your main problem right there. when the ALC is working hard it's basically compressing your audio in a way you didn't choose, and it sounds bad. back off your mic gain until the ALC barely moves on voice peaks, like just kissing the first couple segments on the meter. you'll probably feel like you're not loud enough but you actually will be, and the audio will clean up a lot. on the 7300 specifically the TX equalizer can do a lot of heavy lifting. a lot of guys boost a little in the 2-3kHz range for presence and roll off some of the low end below maybe 200Hz because that's where the boominess comes from and it doesnt really help intelligibility anyway. the PR-40 is a pretty flat mic so it's not going to fight you on this. also make sure you have the speech processor off while you're first dialing things in, that thing makes bad audio worse before it makes good audio better if that makes sense. USB vs LSB doesnt affect audio quality itself, it's just convention. 40m below 7.2 is LSB, 20m is USB, you already know the rules. that's not your issue.

same boat here not too long ago. one thing nobody told me for like six months was to actually talk across the mic not directly into it. like angle it slightly off to the side of your mouth. cuts down on the plosives and that boomy bassy sound a lot. sounds like a small thing but made a noticeable difference when i checked my own recordings. also make sure youre not sitting right next to a reflective surface — my desk was basically acting like a bass reflector and it was making everything sound worse. that probably sounds crazy but it actually mattered.

congrats on the first real one. hospital net is no joke for a first assignment, that's usually pretty important traffic. sounds like you handled it fine if nobody had to come fix anything for you haha. we do a debrief but ours is pretty informal, usually just the EC and a couple of the net control guys standing around the parking lot for 20 minutes talking through what happened. works for us but i could see how a small group might just call it a night especially after a long activation. the SET we did in october had an actual written AAR which was nice, found out our simplex coverage on the north end of the county is way worse than anyone thought.

ha yeah its a bit of a rabbit hole at first but once it clicks it makes sense. so basically LoTW is the gold standard for most ARRL awards like DXCC — those confirmations have actual weight because you have to get a certificate from the ARRL to upload to it, so theres some accountability. eQSL is more casual, some awards accept it but not the big ones typically. i personally upload to both just because why not, takes like two minutes extra in my logging software. for paper cards — you can definitely mail direct to the other op if you have their address, which you can sometimes find on QRZ. or you can go through the bureau which is basically a forwarding system run by ARRL and other organizations where you send a bunch of cards at once and they sort and distribute them. its cheaper if you work a lot of DX since international postage adds up fast. downside is bureau cards can take months or even over a year to arrive sometimes, i got one last spring that was postmarked 14 months prior. for domestic contacts a lot of people just mail direct or skip paper entirely honestly. dont stress too much about it at this point, get your LoTW uploads consistent and that'll serve you well for any awards you chase later on

okay so I just passed my general a few weeks ago and I've been looking into getting a vanity call. I had a specific 1x3 call in mind that belonged to a SK who was a family friend, but I honestly have no idea how this whole process works or what order things happen in. like do I just go to the ULS and apply right away or is there some waiting period after you get your initial sequential call? I've read a few different things online and some of it seems outdated. someone on reddit said theres a window system but another post said it was first come first served now, I really cant tell which is accurate. also does it matter that I'm a general and not extra for the call I want? the call itself is a 1x3 format. just want to make sure I'm not wasting my time applying if I'm not eligible yet.

so ive been kicking around the idea of making the drive out to dayton this may, never been before and a buddy of mine keeps telling me its worth it at least once. problem is its like 9 hours from where i am and i dont really know if ill have anyone to ride with. wondering if anyone here has been recently and if the flea market is still worth the trip or if its gotten kind of watered down over the years. also our local club is doing a swap meet next month which is way more realistic for me honestly but its pretty small, maybe 30 or 40 vendors tops

ha i went through exactly this same thing about a year ago. what actually helped me the most was slowing waaay down, like 8 or even 6 wpm, until every single character felt clean and deliberate. then creeping the speed up just one or two wpm at a time. it felt painfully slow but my fist got so much cleaner doing it that way. oh and i found that practicing sending actual words instead of random characters made a huge difference too. something about knowing what letter is coming next lets you relax your hand instead of tensing up waiting for the next motion. my sending sounded terrible when i was tense lol. anyway stick with it, first QSO in CW is genuinely one of the better moments in this hobby